The Health Care Bill at Present--number crunch

[Beel]

The linked article was written by Marcy Wheeler, one of the best analytic minds I've run into on the web.  Note that she's writing from a liberal site!

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/12/27/affordable-health-care/

[RJLeeb]

I liked this comment on the article:



I can’t understand why anyone in the House would vote for this. They’ve got mandates but no public option, which means (as atrios so aptly put it) they’re going to be forcing people to buy #$%* insurance. They’re even calling it a “mandate”, which is just gift-wrapping it for the GOP. They love to campaign against “unfunded mandates”, which is exactly what this is.

You might as well just call it “massive librul tax increase by the Democrat party”. It’s pretty easy to see how this is all going to play out: The GOP is going to call this “the biggest tax hike in history”, and the Dems are going to be left sputtering silly things like, “That’s not really fair” and “Well, technically, it isn’t a TAX…”. And that’s just in 2010. By 2012 and 2014, the Dems are going to be getting blamed for every insurance horror story. And frankly, if they vote for this, they’ll deserve it.

What's really wonderful is that Obama has hitched his wagon to this train wreck.  He'll tout this as his greatest achievement.

Government almost always makes a hash out of things.  The quicker the majority of people rediscover this basic fact, the better off our country will be.

[Beel]

Government will certainly make a hash of things when half the government, namely the party out of power but possessing plenty of senate seats and plenty more money and media power, works full tilt to making any sort of serious reform in the health care delivery system impossible, because such a success would help the Democrats politically in the next election cycle.  Yessirreee.  Probably it'll work too. 

What's your deeper argument, then?  Abandon our representative democracy?  It's obvious that putting the general welfare in the hands of industry leads to disaster--it just did.  What if Republicans made some serious efforts to work with the Democratic Party to govern?  That's how it used to work, at least a good bit of the time. 

Starting with the self-fulfilling myth that government always "makes a hash of things" isn't much of a beginning. 

[djkelly]

Government will certainly make a hash of things when half the government, namely the party out of power but possessing plenty of senate seats 

Considering the Democrats have the magic 60 in their caucus, if they had a decent proposal they should be able to pass reasonable legislation no matter what the Republicans try.  Of course trying to ram through garbage is another matter.

Maybe Republicans are finally waking up and realizing the American people are catching onto the usual political gimmicks and demanding real fiscal responsibility before it's too late.  They realize the country can't keep using an overdrawn credit card any more than they can.

There's no way to amend this train wreck of legislation and turn it into anything resembling a fiscally responsible package.  The Democrats certainly haven't considered the relatively mild proposals the Republicans have put forward let alone the measures that would actually help.

The Democrats are going to be stuck with the rap for this one all on their own.

[Beel]

DJ, the Republican Party as a party made the decision at the get-go of the Obama administration to fight everything.  The handful of Senators who disagreed are being marginalized.  Indeed, one of the senior Republicans, Specter, actually left the party because of this, and two other senior Republicans, Graham and Christ, are having primary battles.  The decision is entirely political, with almost no consideration of the country or it's citizens.  Except of course that for Republicans, "citizen" pretty much equals "corporation."  And of course, for a number of Democrats, the exact same thing is true.  So we have the bill we have. 

It's pretty hard to accept your blatant disengenuousness in citing the "60 vote majority," when one of those votes is Lieberman.  We can all see the same lay of the land.  We have the Senate we have, and Reid knows and knew it, and made the deals he made.  It's even possible that after a year or two the health care reform bill will turn out to be a winner.  Gingrich, meanwhile, suggests that all Republicans run in 2010 and 2012 on a platform of absolute repeal of the bill.  The strategy of the minority party holds. 

One does wonder if the Insurance Industry is going to stay on board with a repeal the health care bill plan if it means turning back off the spigot of money that Congress has opened for the industry.  This is where the rubber meets the road--and we can watch and see.  If Limbaugh changes his tune it will mean his corporate sponsors have changed theirs. 

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