Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Back to Opinion

The Health Care Bullies

The disgrace that is America’s health care system, with its millions of uninsured, runaway costs and arbitrary, profit-driven decision-making, has finally met its match in the disgrace that is America’s health care debate. Since Congress adjourned for its summer recess, and lawmakers dispersed to hear from voters, Americans have witnessed scene after scene of public forums reduced to screaming and shoving matches.

Thousands of Americans have turned out this August to meet their representatives and discuss the pros and cons of reform. Determined opponents of reform have turned out to prevent those discussions from happening. Too often, they have succeeded. Decent citizens nationwide have been denied their rights by mobs of bullies.

In some cases, the bullies are organized by conservatives and corporate lobbyists. In other cases, the outbursts represent genuine rage among ordinary Americans fearful of reform. Even they, however, are driven largely by manufactured fears, products of absurd falsehoods cynically disseminated by those same lobbyists.

As public indignation grows over the bullying, conservatives have begun wrapping themselves in the First Amendment, claiming their rights to free speech are being threatened. The truth is the opposite: The tactics of the mob are subverting the First Amendment rights of Americans who want to assemble and speak openly.

It’s a sign of our debased discourse that the two sides have taken to calling each other Nazis, the ultimate mark of illegitimacy. This happens to be a topic on which this newspaper can claim some authority. And we protest: Using Hitler as a debating tool is almost always out of bounds. Unless you mean that your opponent intends to exterminate an entire class of people, the accusation is itself an offense.

But the guilt isn’t evenly distributed. Anti-reform bullies invent imaginary crimes and call them Nazi-like. Critics of the mobs complain of tactics that were, in fact, a calling card of fascists in their march to power. No one has described this better than commentator Bill O’Reilly of Fox News.

“This is exactly what the Nazis did — they disrupted rallies, they came in and shouted people down,” O’Reilly said. He was speaking in 2005 about Connecticut students shouting down a right-wing lecturer. His words are still true.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.