An American Lion

From Hero to Goat in a year…

Since the Republican Party is, essentially, bankrupt of ideas and unable to properly oppose bad legislation because, frankly, there are no knowledgeable leaders running things in the U.S. Congress, I’ll have to resort to, once again, quoting Jane Hamsher at something or other called Fire Dog Lake:

It is encouraging that Senator Reid respected the will of the American people and included a public option in the merged Senate bill. However, the addition of a state opt-out provision threatens to leave millions of Americans at the mercy of private insurance monopolies, with the federal government acting as enforcers for a product with no competition to keep prices down.

The President set an arbitrary $900 billion 10-year price tag for the final bill. In order to comply with this, the Senate bill delays the ban on excluding people from coverage for pre-existing conditions until 2014. According to a study by the Harvard Medical School, nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, and it is estimated that medical costs contribute to 62% of all bankruptcies. This is a callous decision that has an enormous cost in human lives and untold suffering.

Yet in the midst of quibbling about $90 billion a year for health care, the President just signed a one year $680 billion defense spending bill, which does not include the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This represents a serious problem with the priorities of those in government.

But while people struggling with crippling health care costs and pre-existing conditions may have to wait until 2014 for relief, states can begin opting out immediately. That means for the next four years, health care will become a partisan football at the state level, easily gamed by the same insurance company lobbyist dollars that flooded on to Capitol Hill this year. And just as 42 members of the House did the bidding of PhRMA and inserted language into the Congressional Record in support of their endless monopolies on biologic “drugs of the future,” the Senate bill followed suit and included the Anna Eshoo-written language which prevents generic versions of vital lifesaving drugs from ever coming to market.

Wait a minute, you say. This is a liberal blogger criticizing the liberal Congress? This is 2009, and the Democrat Party controls the White House and both houses of Congress. Liberals are in the ascendancy. Liberals just won a 2008 election going away in a walk. Liberals were handed a massive mandate for change and reform. What they should be doing right now is proudly championing something that will bury the Republican Party for a generation. What they should have produced was something akin to Social Security that no sane politician could ever attack or criticize.

And that’s the best they can do? This is the end result of so much hand-wringing and screaming?

Good luck in 2010. Your base will abandon you and your temporary “cool” won’t carry you for much longer.