Since I became interested in politics, I found two skills that have served me well to figure out what's really going on. The first skill is obvious: Follow the money. The second skill comes naturally from the first: Learn to translate from Bulls**t to English.
That means that when you follow the money, you get enough clues from that financial Rosetta Stone to translate from the GOP's native tongue to English. Let's translate from "Obamacare is socialist!" Translation: "Obamacare removes the power that keeps poor and working class people in bondage! It threatens the rich!"
When the GOP says "We want to repeal and replace," they're really saying "We want to repeal and replace with nothing."
When you ask the Republicans how they would deal with the 30 million people that would remain uninsured if they couldn't go to the exchanges and get subsidies to help them afford health care, their answer, translated to English is "We want them uninsured and dying. It scares the crap out of everyone else and keeps them digging ditches and flipping burgers for minimum wage!"
When you ask "What about my family? They need expensive care, how am I supposed to provide it?" Their real answer: "Shut up and get back to work, or your granny with cancer gets it!"
The money trail's pretty obvious. It's not just from the insurance companies and medical providers to the GOP war-chests. It's also characters like the Koch brothers, and Sheldon Adelson. It comes from the big corporations like Walmart, from Boeing, from defense contractors, and fast food magnates. It comes from the banksters on Wall Street, who want to go gambling with the money going to Medicare and Medicaid.
Why? They want cheap labor. One way to keep labor cheap is to make it impossible to switch jobs, and that can be done by health-insurance job-lock. Keep insurance impossibly expensive, make it so people who don't like their jobs have nowhere else to go, and you can shave away at their wages, and their benefits, and they have no choice but to suck it up. Trillions of dollars are vacuumed out of the pockets of the American people that way.
Now that we've followed the money, isn't translation easy?
Let's try a few sentences:
"Obamacare is Hurricane Katrina."
Translation: "Obamacare is Hurricane Katrina, FOR THE RICH! It gives money, options
and hope to the peasants, and that may make them uppity!"
"Obama's apology over the web site is a phony apology."
Translation: "Obama didn't apologize to US, for threatening our economic interest in keeping the peons enslaved!"
"Americans aren't able to keep their insurance plans!"
Translation: "Americans aren't going to want to keep the plans that WE want to give to them, that are outrageously expensive, are equivalent to a 20% off coupon for a $100,000 hospital stay, from an insurance company that will drop you the instant you actually try to make a claim. We're afraid they'll opt for real insurance!"
"The web site glitches are a fiasco!"
Translation: "The web site glitches are a fiasco, and we're determined to keep it that way! Don't look to us to do what's right for the American people. We want you enslaved!"
See, now you too are fluent in the language of oligarchic tapeworms that are in the gut of the American body politic, feasting on the wealth of the middle class.