Where I live we have a Senate election to look forward to in November, but the attack ads started months ago. Why? The incumbent voted for Obamacare.

The attack ads are not the work of her opponent but of one of those faceless thuggee groups with anodyne names like “Americans for Goodness” or “Patriots for Prosperity.” They pose as paladins of the people but are actually fronts for billionaires or vested interests.

One of the ads has been ubiquitous, appearing more often than ads for erectile dysfunction nostrums, thanks to the Koch Brothers who have spent $1.4 million to make sure it will blight your days and haunt your dreams.

A sad-eyed blonde, more in sorrow than in anger, says she hates political ads but this isn’t about politics. Oh no, it’s about imperiled sick people who are losing their insurance. People who can’t see their doctor. This may not be killing them, but it is clearly killing her. She is about to weep. Maybe her insurance doesn’t cover Prozac.

It’s slickly done and a close cousin to those lachrymose ads that show you puppies or kitties about to be gassed or third world orphans doomed to unspeakable suffering if you don’t send in your $10 a month. In this case, however, the distraught blonde doesn’t want your money. She doesn’t even tell you to vote against the incumbent. The weaselly overlords whose mouthpiece she is could lose their tax exempt status by practicing such overt advocacy. But the point is made. You know who is to blame for all woes emanating from the health care industry, and it isn’t the health care industry.

This is pretty rich. God knows Obamacare is a Rube Goldberg device like almost anything designed by a committee composed of lobbyists and legislators in unholy alliance and required to pass through a polarized Congress. But such a critique seems to let a lot of doctors, hospitals, insurers and pharmaceutical titans off pretty easy.

Don’t insurers habitually connive to keep poor risks off their rolls and kick off any who slip through the net? Don’t they charge the most the traffic will bear for the least they can get away with providing. Don’t they regularly fail patients when they need help the most? Isn’t the cancelling of millions of policies business as usual?  Insurance horror stories long predate Obamacare and were one of the reasons people once thought such a reform was needed

There’s a least a case to be made that the failures of the law are in part due to its having been created by legislators who were too cozy with every part of the heath care equation other than the patients, who were unwilling to decouple insurance from employment, who flinched from coming down hard  on gouging providers, Medicare fraudsters, and ruthless pharma.  Maybe instead of health care reform we need a return to progressive era trust busting.

But the people behind the weepy attack ads certainly aren’t advocating any such reform or any reform at all. They are the same folks who have opposed Medicare since it was a gleam in Harry Truman’s eye. Ditto Medicaid and any health model that isn’t just another venue for the Darwinian struggle between the fittest and Sorry, Charlie.

To this mindset, the rich are entitled to the platinum plans only they can afford, the poor deserve their ills,  and the middling folk deserve to be at the mercy of minimally regulated insurers, hospital corporations and pharmaceutical companies so their stock can rise unimpeded to the sky. They don’t call it the health care industry for nothing.