In their latest attempt to turn the tide against the public plan, some Republicans have begun trying to appeal to gay Americans to join their anti-government crusade. As The Hill notes today, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn has co-authored an op-ed blasting “government-run health care” for The Advocate, the leading LGBT magazine. Together with his co-author, GOProud’s Christopher Barron, Coburn rails against the Ryan White CARE Act for forcing AIDS patients onto waiting lists to receive life-saving drugs from a government program. “These bureaucratic inefficiencies and mismanagement have literally cost lives,” Coburn and Barron write. What’s the lesson learned for the gay community? To push for health care reform that avoids “creating an inefficient and expensive government program,” the pair concludes, championing Coburn’s private-insurer-friendly Patients’ Choice Act as an alternative to the Democratic plan.
Coburn doesn’t explain, of course, how the private market or his own reforms will succeed in making expensive AIDS drugs more affordable than the current Ryan White programs, other than repeating the line that insurers shouldn’t be able to discriminate against those with pre-existing conditions. But what makes the argument even more difficult to take seriously is the fact that Coburn--one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate--has a long history of vicious attacks on gay rights, the gay community, and “the gay agenda.”
