Hey, did you know that we don’t really have a healthcare crisis? Boy howdy, is Jane gonna be pissed about all that time she wasted!

Limbaugh. . . repeatedly insisted that there’s no health care crisis because anyone can get treated in an emergency room. He said cavalierly, “And they make arrangements with the hospital to pay it off over time and if they don’t, the car repossessers head out and take the car, what have you.” Limbaugh also said, “Health care’s got to be priced the same way a hotel room is, or a car is. You want to stay at the Ritz? You pay for it. You want to stay at a Motel 6? You pay for it. . . .”

See, it’s just like Dubya and Ginny Foxx said, you can get whatever healthcare you need in the emergency room. Problem solved!

Of course, the people who say there’s no crisis are either multimillionaires, or covered by Congress’s gold-plated healthcare plan. For people like Rush, there’s no healthcare crisis in much the same way that there’s no recession:

But during all this growth I haven’t lost any audience. I’ve never had financially a down year. There’s supposedly a recession, but we’ve got – what is this May? Back in February we already had 102% of 2008 overbooked for 2009. [applause] So I always believed that if we’re going to have a recession, just don’t participate. [laughter]

And just as we can all choose to not participate in the recession, we can all choose to have health insurance by simply giving up luxuries like cars and telephones.

But even this callous denialism is not as repulsive as Jim DeMint saying that "if we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." Former Republican congressman Vin Weber (starting around the 11-minute mark) admits that America needs healthcare reform, but argues that from a purely political perspective, Republicans are better off killing it than passing it.

That’s the Republican calculation in a nutshell: Most of them know there’s a crisis, and they just don’t care. It doesn’t matter what’s best for the country, only what’s best for themselves, their wealthy friends, and their corporate donors. It doesn’t matter if 20,000 people die every year, just so long as the victims’ families are pissed off enough to start voting Republican.

The lesson the Republicans took from the 2006 and 2008 elections was that catastrophic failure leads to landslide victories for the opposition party. And lucky for them, catastrophic failure is the one thing they’re good at.