The re-election of President Barack Obama has created a crisis of reality for many wingnuts, professional and otherwise. One of the many who are being persecuted by reality is Betsy McCaughey, who has been writing and waging war against expanded healthcare coverage for Americans for more than two decades. You might think that Obama’s re-election would give such people pause. You’d be wrong. Rather, she has decided that now is an appropriate time to pen a new healthcare hate screed called Beating Obamacare (sorry no linky).

In a way I feel bad for these warriors of the new Lost Cause. They’ve been giving it their all for so long now. But their dream of restricting the benefits of medical science to the Deserving was delt a severe blow by the passing of the Affordable Care Act, followed by the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Act, and finally, by Obama’s re-election last year. These healthcare truthers had so much going for them; seemingly unlimited cash resources; a mostly compliant media; and a wide array of institutions and think tanks always ready to put forward another “study” showing how bad expanding healthcare would be for Regular Americans. Alas, because of ACORN and false birth certificates, the defenders of economic privilege have been outmaneuvered on all fronts.

But the faithful warriors against healthcare have not given up. There’s still hope that maybe somehow, they will be able to prevent at least some Americans from having the same access to healthcare that those on wingnut welfare enjoy.

Thus, the need for McCaughey’s new “book”. She tells us in the book’s subtitle that the ACA must and can be “survived”. Surely that’s a critical concern for all of us. How do we survive such a thing as the elimination of the pre-existing condition restriction? And healthcare exchanges. These sound awfully menacing, don’t they? And new insurance rules to allow young adults to remain on their families insurance policies until age 26. You know who else required healthcare coverage through age 26, don’t you? And finally, there’s the truly sinister specter of expanded Medicaid coverage. I mean, how do we survive that?

So while, as even wingnut Arizona Governor Jan Brewer nods towards the direction of reality by stating her state will accept more Medicaid money from the federal government as part of the ACA, true Patriotic Americans of the anti-healthcare army haven’t given up the fight. However, if all else fails, there’s that walled-in compound they’re planning to build in Idaho. I’m sure they won’t allow healthcare in there.