Here's Johnny! Note to Democrats: your ass is showing.
Maybe it’s the drafty hospital Johnny making everyone a bit uncomfortable, but I’ve noticed a lot of people crawling into bed with the Republicans to block healthcare ‘reform.’ Sadly, this embarrassment of a bill will likely pass and be signed into law, and we will all be the poorer and sicker for it.
Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich are against it, mostly because it doesn’t do enough to put private insurance companies out of business immediately. About 30 Democrats in the House are against it as well because it may include some funding for abortions (an issue I care nothing about). A new Quinnipiac poll now says a majority of Americans are against it, which makes me hopeful, although our friends in the media believe this is because the bill isn’t progressive enough. Really?
Democrats meanwhile are sprinting toward the finish line, hoping to squeeze in a Senate vote on Christmas Eve. How appropriate that just as Santa is delivering presents to good boys and girls, Democrats are likewise handing out the presents to their faithful foot soldiers and their constituents.
The most egregious of these deals is “the Nebraska compromise, which permanently exempts that state from paying its Medicaid costs, which means that all of us in the rest of the country will bear this burden. We can all expect that our state taxes are going to jump up as a result of this bill, which has presented an overly rosy budget projection by pushing more of the burden of healthcare for low income and disabled people on to the states, among other tricks. Louisiana also got a deal, and I’m sure there are dozens of others that we are not likely to find out about until it is too late.
This is depressing. I keep wondering why so few people have thought to ask: how can we expand healthcare coverage for millions more people, and simultaneously reduce the costs? Why are we taking such risks when the repercussions on healthcare and our overall economy are potentially so dire? How can people be so naive to believe that this government program will somehow behave differently than any other? Where is the outrage?
Sadly, Alexis de Tocqueville may have gotten it right:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
