American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics

by Dan Savage

  And just now, when I googled Santorum in a restaurant in Portland, Oregon, in early 2013, SpreadingSantorum.com was still on the first page. Not the top return, sadly, but the top return wasn’t Santorum’s official website either, or a news story about Santorum’s desperate efforts to keep himself in the news. (Hey, did you know that Ronald Reagan won eleven primaries in 1976?) What comes up first is a Wiki page titled “Campaign for ‘Santorum’ Neologism.” And here’s the first paragraph of that page:

  In May 2003, the columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage held a contest among his readers to create a definition for the word “santorum” as a response to comments by then-U.S. Senator Rick Santorum that had been criticized as anti-gay. Savage announced the winning entry, which defined “santorum” as “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.”

  Rick Santorum still has a Google problem.

  And he always will. Because Santorum’s problem ultimately isn’t Google, or me, or my readers, or Frothy Mix.

  Rick Santorum’s problem is Rick Santorum.

  1 Judge also wrote this: “In the last 30 years or so, gay people have gained wide acceptance in society…. Savage’s santorum prank sets all of that progress back.” Voters in three states, including my own, would approve same-sex marriage at the ballot box ten short months later. And Judge accuses me of living in a “state of free-floating apoplexy”?

  2 My readers’ efforts to redefine Rick Santorum’s last name weren’t even the first. Former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey remarked, shortly after meeting Santorum in 1995, “Santorum? That’s Latin for asshole.”

  3 “It’s worth noting, then, that from the very beginning sodomy and homosexuality were two categorically separate things,” Andrew Sullivan wrote in The New Republic in March 2003. “The correct definition of sodomy—then and now—is simply non-procreative sex, whether practiced by heterosexuals or homosexuals. It includes oral sex, masturbation, mutual masturbation, contraceptive sex, coitus interruptus, and anal sex—any sex in which semen does not find its way into a uterus…. As a simple empirical matter, we are all sodomites now, but only homosexuals bear the burden of the legal and social stigma.”

  15. Still Evil. Less Evil. But Still Evil.

  Peter LaBarbera, whom you met in an earlier chapter, is a right-wing evangelical Christian, the head of an anti-gay hate group, and someone I follow (and occasionally bait) on Twitter. I just can’t quit him. In addition to opposing the gay agenda, because it opens the door to man-on-manatee marriage, LaBarbera opposes the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, because it opens the door to socialism.

  No, wait: Obamacare is socialism, according to LaBarbera—and Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum and Tony Perkins and every other spokesperson for the highly politicized (and, after the last election, extremely butt-sore) conservative Christian movement in the United States. And while we Americans are fond of our socialized police forces, fire departments, interstate highways, and public universities (LaBarbera got his publicly subsidized degree in political science from the University of Michigan), conservative Christians like Peter and Michele and Rick and Tony draw the line at socialized medicine because…well, I’m not exactly sure.

  Jesus commanded his followers to clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, and care for the sick. Making health care available to all seems like a no-brainer, Jesus-wise, among the most Christian projects a president, or a nation, could possibly undertake. Speaking as someone who was raised in a Christian home and who has actually read the Gospels (and recently, at that), I have to say that such fierce opposition to Obamacare by conservative Christian activists and politicians doesn’t make sense. (It doesn’t make sense to many Christians either. I’m no fan of Pope Benedict XVI—and he’s no fan of mine—but I have to give credit where credit is due: In November of 2010, the pope weighed in on the debate, calling health care an “inalienable right,” and stating that all nations had a “moral responsibility” to “guarantee access to health care for all of their citizens, regardless of social and economic status or their ability to pay.”)

  You know what else doesn’t make sense? Opposing Obamacare on the grounds that it’s socialism.

  Obamacare is socialism? “Bitch, please,” as Vladimir Lenin once said to no one. Obamacare isn’t even the weak tea of “socialized medicine.”

  The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), which Barack Obama signed into law in March of 2010, overhauled our hugely inefficient employer-provided health insurance system but otherwise left it in place—even as fewer and fewer employers offer health insurance. The PPACA pushes millions of uninsured Americans into the arms of private insurance companies (by providing tax credits to companies that offer their employees health care coverage through private insurance companies, and by imposing fines on uninsured individuals who fail to purchase health insurance from private insurance companies); it provides subsidies to poor and low-income workers so that they can buy health insurance from private insurance companies; and much to the consternation of some corporate CEOs, it levies fines on large companies that fail to provide health insurance (yes, again from private insurance companies) for their employees. Once Obamacare is fully implemented, the government plans to make health insurance even more widely available by handing the money it collects in fines over to—can you guess?—private insurance companies.

  Obamacare bears about as much resemblance to socialism as the “Springtime for Hitler” number in The Producers bears to fascism. The PPACA rains billions of dollars on private insurance companies, privately owned hospitals, and doctors in private practice, making it possible—in theory, at least—for all Americans who aren’t old or poor enough to qualify for Medicare or Medicaid to acquire health insurance from private insurance companies. Obamacare does all of this without raising costs; it won’t technically lower overall costs, either, but it does make the costs lower than they would have been (something poetically dubbed “bending the cost curve” by policy wonks). It also won’t end private, for-profit health care in the United States. By putting an end to some of the worst abuses perpetrated by the private insurance industry (the denial of coverage based on preexisting conditions, lifetime limits on coverage, the routine practice of canceling people’s insurance policies the minute they get sick), and by extending private health insurance to millions of previously uninsured Americans, Obamacare may have extended the life of our private health insurance system indefinitely.

  Don’t get me wrong: Obamacare is good; it’s a start; it’s better than what we had—millions of Americans who didn’t have health insurance soon will—and Obamacare is now the “law of the land,” as House Speaker John Boehner said after Barack Obama’s reelection, and access to health care will only grow as more aspects of the law come into effect.

  But Obamacare is not the health care system preferred by sensible socialists.

  “The United States is the only major nation in the industrialized world that does not guarantee health care as a right to its people,” Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, the only actual socialist in Congress, said as the Affordable Care Act was making its torturous way through Congress. “Meanwhile, we spend about twice as much per capita on health care with worse results than others that spend far less. It is time that we bring about a fundamental transformation of the American health care system. It is time for us to end private, for-profit participation in delivering basic coverage. It is time for the United States to provide a Medicare-for-all single-payer health coverage program.”

  A single-payer health care system would cut out the middleman—the private insurance companies that will continue to skim billions off the top under Obamacare—and deliver care to all Americans with less overhead, less waste, and considerably less stress for individuals. Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and every other Western industrialized nation have national health care systems that are more efficient and humane
than our system and provide better health outcomes. Even Israel, which can do no wrong in the eyes of the Christian fundamentalist right, has a single-payer health care system.1

  But we don’t have to look to Europe or Israel for examples of government-run health care systems that work.

  “All, and I mean all, the evidence says that public systems like Medicare and Medicaid, which have less bureaucracy than private insurers (if you can’t believe this, you’ve never had to deal with an insurance company) and greater bargaining power, are better than the private sector at controlling costs,” writes Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning Princeton economist and columnist for The New York Times. “I know this flies in the face of free-market dogma, but it’s just a fact…. You can see it from comparisons between Medicaid and private insurance: Medicaid costs much less.”

  Medicare and Medicaid are hugely popular government programs—so popular, in fact, that millions of Americans aren’t even aware that they are government programs. An entire wing of the Internet is dedicated to photographs of senior citizens waving signs at Tea Party rallies that read KEEP GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY MEDICARE!, DON’T STEAL FROM MEDICARE TO SUPPORT SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!, and SAVE MEDICARE! SAY NO TO GOVERNMENT HEALTH CARE! How is it possible that senior citizens on Medicare don’t know that the program is a government-run, socialized medicine program for seniors? I credit thirty years of Republican antigovernment demagoguery. (Ronald Reagan at his first inaugural address in 1981: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”) If government is bad and Medicare is good, then government must not have anything to do with Medicare, right? And if socialism is bad and Medicare is good, then Medicare can’t be socialism.

  See how that works?

  You know what else is bad? Barack Obama is bad. He runs the government (bad) and he’s a socialist (bad). And if a government-running socialist is for something, well, then that thing must be very bad. Obamacare is so bad they named it after him! (I suggested, when the law first passed, that the White House should embrace the term Obamacare, which it eventually did during Obama’s reelection campaign. I’m sure I don’t deserve credit, but I’m happy to claim it.)

  “The stupid,” as the bloggers say, “it burns.” Not only isn’t Obamacare socialism, the final version of the bill didn’t include a “public option,” that is, an opt-in, government-run insurance plan for Americans who don’t want to deal with private insurance companies. An early version of Obamacare included a public option, but it was dropped to appease the insurance industry, which feared competing with a more efficiently run government health care program, as well as Republicans, who feared that Americans would opt for socialized medicine en masse. (Even worse: They might realize one day that they had!)

  For a measure of just how big a disappointment Obamacare is to progressives, just peruse the liberal blogosphere.

  “The shabby and compromised health care bill…ended poorly for not just liberals, but all Americans, [and] left me wondering what, exactly, we ‘won’ in 2008,” the anonymous blogger Cocktailhag wrote at the left-wing blog Firedoglake in 2012. Far from reforming our health care system, Obamacare “[leaves] us all to the tender mercies of larcenous and immoral insurance companies.”

  The failure to institute a single-payer system or, at the very least, the failure to include a public option (the unseemly rush to scrap the public option!)—that’s what liberals hate about Obamacare. (It should be noted, by liberals particularly, that about half of the coverage expansion under Obamacare comes through Medicaid, a single-payer program.) So what do conservatives hate about it?

  For many the most controversial aspect of Obamacare is the individual mandate, a requirement that all Americans purchase health insurance. This mandate is the engine that will drive down the cost of health insurance over time by spreading the risk around. We need healthy people paying into our private insurance system so that insurance companies—which can no longer refuse to cover people with preexisting conditions, or cancel people’s policies once they get sick, or impose lifetime limits on coverage—can actually afford to, you know, pay for people’s health care while at the same time continuing to skim billions of dollars off the top. And who came up with this idea? Why, that pack of dirty hippies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, DC.2 The Heritage Foundation is dedicated to promoting “public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, [and] individual freedom.”

  “The core drivers of the [PPACA] are market principles formulated by conservative economists,” J. D. Kleinke wrote in The New York Times. Kleinke is a resident fellow at yet another conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. “The president’s program extends the current health care system—mostly employer-based coverage, administered by commercial health insurers, with care delivered by fee-for-service doctors and hospitals—by removing the biggest obstacles to that system’s functioning like a competitive marketplace. Chief among these obstacles are market limitations imposed by the problematic nature of health insurance, which requires that younger, healthier people subsidize older, sicker ones. Because such participation is often expensive and always voluntary, millions have simply opted out, a risky bet emboldened by the 24/7 presence of the heavily subsidized emergency room down the street. The health care law forcibly repatriates these gamblers…. This explains why the health insurance industry has been quietly supporting the plan all along. It levels the playing field and expands the potential market by tens of millions of new customers.”

  If a Republican president had signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law—crafted by a conservative think tank, beta-tested by a Republican governor, backed by the health insurance industry—the GOP would be crowing about how it represented a triumph for conservative thought and governance. They would claim the PPACA as a right-wing twofer: It’s a free-market solution to our health care crisis (just look at all the money pouring into the bank accounts of private insurance companies!) and it forces Americans to take personal responsibility for their health care needs (no more moochers showing up at emergency rooms demanding “free” chemotherapy!). That’s what conservatives said after Mitt Romney signed nearly identical reforms into law in 2006, when Romney was the governor of Massachusetts. That’s what Mitt Romney said in 2006—the same Mitt Romney who pledged to repeal Obamacare on his first day as president—when he described the individual mandate in his health care bill as “essential for bringing health-care costs down for everyone, and to getting everyone the health insurance they deserve and need.”

  But it’s difficult to give a Democratic president credit for maneuvering a conservative health reform package through a Democratic-controlled Congress after you’ve accused him of being the love child of Joseph Stalin and the Antichrist. (The adopted love child of Stalin and the Antichrist, obviously, since Stalin and the Antichrist are both men, and two men can’t make a baby. Get Michele Bachmann drunk and she’ll tell you that preventing Stalin and the Antichrist from raising a love child together is one of the reasons she opposes adoptions by same-sex couples.) So what was promoted as a conservative solution to our health care crisis in 2006—the individual mandate—was redefined as a socialist assault on every American’s sacred freedom to die an early, preventable death from a treatable disease by 2012.

  The GOP turned the 2012 election into a referendum on Obamacare and socialism. If you want to see Obamacare repealed, vote Barack Obama out; if you oppose socialism, vote Mitt Romney in. A majority of Americans voted to reelect Barack Obama.

  And while some Republicans made conciliatory noises about Obamacare after the election, and while the percentage of Americans who tell pollsters they want to see Obamacare repealed dropped into the thirties for the first time, no one should expect that Obama’s victory will either shut Republicans up or prevent them from undermining Obamacare in the future. Medicare is hugely popular and Republicans have been trying to destroy it for d
ecades. (We haven’t heard the last of Paul Ryan and his vouchers.) And Republicans will continue to argue that Obamacare is socialism—Republicans will continue to lie—and they will continue to argue that it is unnecessary. They will continue to insist that our health care system didn’t need to be reformed.

  “People have access to health care in America,” George W. Bush said in 2007. “After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

  Five years later Mitt Romney would make the same claim: “We do provide care for people who don’t have insurance. If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care.”

  “No Americans have died for lack of health care coverage” will take its place beside “tax cuts raise revenue,” “Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” and “Social Security is going bankrupt” on the ever-expanding list of right-wing zombie lies that refuse to die.

  Thousands of Americans did die every year for lack of access to health insurance, pre-Obamacare. According to a study conducted by the Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, which was published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2009, an estimated 44,789 Americans were dying every year for lack of health insurance. Mitt Romney knew this in 2006, when he was the moderate governor of Massachusetts, but he had forgotten it by 2012, when he was the “severely conservative” GOP nominee for president. Mitt Romney, in another 2012 interview: “We don’t have a setting across this country where if you don’t have insurance, we just say to you, ‘Tough luck, you’re going to die when you have your heart attack.’ No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government, or by the hospital.”