Matt Yglesias brought my attention to some important but unsurprising recent data, Americans Are Making a Big Mistake About Healthcare. That mistake is that, overwhelmingly, they don’t think that the government subsidizes their healthcare. Overall, roughly 15% of Americans admit to getting their healthcare subsidized. I’ll get to why that is wrong in a moment, but first I want to point out the one thing in the poll that did shock me: only 7% of Americans over the age of 65 thought that they had their healthcare subsidized. How do you spell “Medicare”? D-E-L-U-S-I-O-N.

I suspect that this is due to the fact that people think they have “earned” their Social Security and Medicare. This is not true. You could just as easily say that everything that ever comes from the government has been earned because the people pay taxes and the government provides benefits to those who qualify. Of course, this is not what seniors mean they claim to have earned their Medicare. Almost to a person, the amount of money paid in isn’t even close to the amount paid out.

But these seniors who are convinced that the government ain’t given them free medical care are the ones most likely to vote for conservative candidates who want to cut welfare. So this Medicare delusion is serious business. But of course, it isn’t limited to this. There are all kinds of ways that the government gives out welfare. And the government does it in such a way that the richer you are, the less likely you are to see it as welfare. I discussed this a couple of years ago in an article, Hidden Welfare for the Rich. My favorite example is the mortgage interest deduction, which almost no one thinks of as welfare, but which clearly is. (Read the article!)

Yglesias explained in his article why it is that almost everyone has their healthcare subsidized. It is for pretty much the same reason that the mortgage interest deduction is welfare. Before Obamacare, you generally got your insurance from one of two places: government (Medicare, Medicare, VA) or employer. Clearly, getting it from the government is getting subsidized healthcare. But getting it from an employer is also getting subsidized healthcare. Your insurance is part of your compensation. But you don’t have to pay taxes on it. Thus: a subsidy! What Obamacare does in the healthcare exchanges is to provide people who don’t get their insurance through an employer the same benefit the government has long been giving to people who do get their insurance through an employer.

Ouch! Suddenly all those people complaining about freeloaders just sound like a bunch of privileged jackasses who have no idea that they too are freeloaders. That reminds me of something…

In the late 1970s, someone thought it was a good idea to turn The Paper Chase into a television series. (Actually, it isn’t a bad idea; but I don’t think it was well executed — at least during the first season.) In one episode, Hart was tutoring an African American woman. And he had a real attitude about it because, you know, Affirmative Action. So Kingsfield had him do a paper or something that caused Hart to have to read the Affirmative Action clause of Harvard, and Hart learned that he too might have been helped by the program because of growing up on a farm. And Hart improved his attitude in the way that only an hour long television drama can.

Unfortunately, all those Fox News watching freeloaders are never going to have their “road to Damascus” moment. They will remain convinced that welfare is just something that those people get. The good conservatives deserve everything that they get. This continues to be a huge problem in this country. The modern world is unbelievably complicated. We are all interconnected. But we have set up systems that allow the rich to pretend that they have done it all themselves and forces the poor to think that they are dependent — and that they are alone in their dependence. This is a delusion that we can ill afford.

Remember the good ol’ days when Orrin Hatch was considered a right wing loon? That was fun. Now, of course, he’s one of the more reasonable Republicans in Congress. Well, he and Lamar Alexander and John Barrasso took to The Washington Post on Sunday to trumpet the news, We Have a Plan for Fixing Healthcare. And contrary to the repeated claims of Jonathan Chait, these three establishment Republicans are cheering on the Supreme Court in King v Burwell. If the Supreme Court finds that “the administration acted illegally” and “[m]illions of Americans may lose these subsidies,” well never fear: “Republicans have a plan to protect Americans harmed by the administration’s actions”!

I hit back on the idea that Republicans were coming around to see that this case was toxic, It Is Still Best That King v Burwell Fail. This recent OpEd by the three amigos shows that the Republican Party thinks that in this case, as in all others, they can finesse their way through any problems that arise. Basically, they are just pushing Ben Sasse’s idea that Congress would pass a temporary funding bill until they replaced Obamacare with something that doesn’t turn the nation into North Korea. And they have a plan!

Just kidding! As Ezra Klein reported, Republicans Say They Have a Plan if the Supreme Court Rules Against Obamacare. They Don’t. But before I talk about that, let’s suppose that they did. This Congress is going to pass a temporary funding bill?! They can’t even manage to pass a bill to embarrass the president. Are we really supposed to believe that they could manage to get half of the Republican majority in the House to sign onto extending Obamacare? You’d have better luck getting them to pass a resolution that Satan is their lord and master. And I don’t use that comparison lightly, given that most of those Republicans think that Obama and “his” law are Satanic.

So what is this cunning plan? First, as mentioned, they will extend the existing subsidies for some length of time — Sasse mentioned 18 months, so let’s figure that, because the three elephants of the apocalypse didn’t tell us. Then, they will replace it with a new plan. Are you ready for it? Because this is it in its entirety:

The rest of the article is just the usual boilerplate about “Obamacare’s costly mandates and rules.” And there is this exciting news, “We have had many discussions with our Senate and House Republican colleagues on this issue, and there is a great deal of consensus on how to proceed.” There is apparently so much consensus that this is why they only mention one thing that Obamacare already allows! And that shows what the real point of the article is. It is meant to signal to the Supreme Court that it is okay to gut Obamacare with this silly lawsuit.

Remember, this isn’t Ted Cruz and Louie Gohmert writing this OpEd. This is a trio of establishment figures. This is the Republican Party giving its okay to the conservative hacks on Supreme Court to screw over 11.5 million people (it’s only 6 million if you only look at those directly effected). I still think that the lawsuit will be defeated. In which case, The Washington Post has given the Republicans an opportunity to claim that they too want to help working Americans, even though they clearly could not care less.

Digby wrote an interesting article over at Slate yesterday, Attack of Radical “Moderates”: How Tea Party and Liberals Are Both Being Swindled. It focuses on an Ezra Klein article from last year that somehow I missed, No One’s Less Moderate Than Moderates. And this, in turn, involves some recent research by a couple of political scientists who demonstrated something that really should have been obvious: statistical techniques were grouping together as “moderate” people who actually had extreme views on both the left and the right.

I’ve been saying this for years. Digby calls the views incoherent, but I don’t think that’s generally true. In my experience, people are fairly conservative in their social beliefs and fairly liberal in their economic beliefs. There is nothing inconsistent about being virulently anti-immigrant and being in favor of taxing the rich more. And if you think about it, criticizing this viewpoint is kind of offensive. Rich business owners are pro-immigrant and anti-tax. In both cases, the people with those views think that these beliefs are in their best interests. (Working class people are probably wrong to be anti-immigrant, but the economics of the matter is certainly not obvious.)

But what neither Digby nor Klein talk about is what I see as the major disconnect: why is it that most people are of the social conservative and economic liberal type, while the standard “moderate” in the media is a social liberal and economic conservative? If you’ve been reading me these past many years, you know my answer: it is that the media we get is not a function of what consumers want; it is a function of the interests of upper class journalists.

Way back in 2012, I wrote, Serious Centrist Saletan’s Selfishness. (I like alliteration too much sometimes.) My point was that William Saletan’s “centrism” (he actually self identifies as a “liberal Republican”) is just a function of what is best for the greater good… of William Saletan:

Of course, as Klein quoted one of the researchers as saying, “When we say moderate what we really mean is what corporations want.” It’s more or less the same thing. For example, no one I know thinks that Thomas Friedman is anything but a joke. However, in the upper-middle and upper classes he has a reputation as a sage. And this is why his next book — “The World Is Shaped Like a Taxi Driver In Dubai”? — will have a media campaign with only slightly fewer resources than the invasion of Normandy.

Think about it this way: people don’t demand this or that person become a columnist. In the pre-web days, newspapers couldn’t even know who was popular with readers. (Although they could tell who was popular with other columnists and the elite!) Now it’s different. But not that much different. When Forbes listed the Top Liberal Pundits, many of the people on the list were not liberals: Andrew Sullivan, Maureen Dowd, Christopher Hitchens, Chris Matthews, Fareed Zakaria, Jon Stewart, Thomas Friedman, Fred Hiatt, Arianna Huffington. Some of these people are conservative — the rest of “moderates” — usually of Saletan mold. This is what Sullivan had to say about being on the list:

The “top” liberal was Paul Krugman and I rather wonder if Krugman would have developed his following and influence in a pre-web world. As I recall, he was brought to The New York Times to write about international economics. It was only because George W Bush was such a terrible president that Krugman turned to domestic matters. But even with all that, I really wonder how long he would have lasted under Fred Hiatt.

The main takeaway here is simple: “moderate” in the media environment is nothing more than code for “what is believed by the elites.” That’s not to say that there aren’t actual moderates. Jon Stewart is certainly one of those. The fact that he is generally seen as “liberal” is an indictment of our political system. But it is clear that we should be very careful in using the “moderate” label — especially as it applies to the American voter. Because very few of them are actually moderate. What they are is populist. And given that what they want is exactly the opposite of what the elites want, it is no wonder that reporting on them glosses over this important distinction.