Health reform moved back (was it ever anywhere else?) into familiar territory, behind closed doors.
With the Senate Finance Committee finally poised to complete its work, the volatile health-care debate shifts into closed-door negotiations taking place around the conference room of Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).
Has it ever been anywhere else ? Attempts to require that legislation be posted on the internet (Remember that promise?) for 72 hours have been turned back by Democrats.
“All of the queasiness about this bill is on the Democratic side, not the Republican side. . . . They ought to be able to do anything they want to. The question is: Will they?” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Friday morning, hours after the Finance Committee completed its two-week consideration of more than 500 amendments to its proposal.
The Democrats have a 60 vote majority in the Senate and a similar majority in the House.
Reid’s first days as Democratic leader came when his party held just 45 seats in 2005, and the goal was just blocking George W. Bush’s White House agenda. He unified his small caucus and scored early successes, stalling Bush’s initiative to practically privatize Social Security. Reid also fired from the hip, calling Bush a “loser” and then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan “a hack.” Those shoot-first-aim-later comments drew him wide praise among liberal activists, then clamoring for a fighter to stand up to the powerful Bush White House.
Now, with a 60-seat majority and Barack Obama in the White House, Reid seeks consensus. This has provoked a revolt among liberal activists who long for the days when Lyndon B. Johnson ruled the chamber in the 1950s with an iron fist, believing such a leader could herd Democrats into a unified bloc of 60 to pass Obama’s most critical priorities.
See, it is all about politics. The Senators, won’t read the bill they are voting on because they don’t understand it. Yes, that gives us confidence.
Then there are the lies:
In one corner of Reid’s office will be Baucus, whose legislation was deficit-neutral, in part, by lowering subsidies for lower-income workers who are to buy insurance on a new exchange. That bill has won accolades from the roughly 15 centrist Senate Democrats who represent conservative-leaning states, many of whom Reid and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) helped elect in 2006 and 2008.
The deficit neutral claim requires a lot of explanation. There is still support for single payer in the House. I fully expect it to come back in the conference report. What none of these people are willing to say is that the Baucus bill will require huge cuts in Medicare, $500 billion, or the costs will explode. Single payer will bankrupt the country. If you are a leftist, that doesn’t matter. I refer you to the previous post.
There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.
A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.
There is a lot of this in the Democrat health reform effort.
Tags: Congress, Democrats, health care
[…] Health reform back in familiar territory « A Brief History… […]
…and your plan for health care and reform? of course: tort reform will solve all things. Oh, yes. Why not have doctors rat out the bad apples in their doctoring and you will significantly cut down on bad medicine. Now tell us how you plan to change things and convince the insurance thieves to be nice.
..always a kvetch. Never a proposal.
“Never a proposal”
Do you frequently go to blogs with exhaustive discussion of health reform and post inanities ? Why don’t you read the f**kin’ site instead of spamming ?
There is a category called “Health Reform.” Try reading.