The Blue Dog health care mandate has been exposed for what it is, a tax on the middle class, by none other than the Obama administration as it defends the law in court, see below fold evidence.
Now I have come around to accept the new law, as flawed as it is (see below), so my point in this diary isn't to disparage the law but rather to explain the anger of the Democratic Party base at the Barack/Rahm Blue Dogs and to expose their attempt to sell us a shit sandwich when something better was available via reconciliation. But that wouldn't have been acceptable for Blue Dogs whose motto is "Corporations First."
I was of the wait-and-see camp and not of the anti-Obama camp but my anger has slowly been building, mostly due to being lied to and the blatant kneeling to corporate interests:
When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s "power to lay and collect taxes."
[snip]
Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul...
Compare that to:
"For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase," the president said last September, in a spirited exchange with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program "This Week."
Another shit sandwich:
When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, "I absolutely reject that notion."
Link to shit sandwich.
This one absolutely infuriates me and I want to know why emergency regulations haven't been issued:
Insurers agree that if they provide insurance for a child, they must cover pre-existing conditions. But, they say, the law does not require them to write insurance for the child and it does not guarantee the "availability of coverage" for all until 2014.
Compare that to:
Mr. Obama, speaking at a health care rally in northern Virginia on March 19, said, "Starting this year, insurance companies will be banned forever from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions."
Link to shit sandwich.
And another:
As the Obama administration begins to enact the new national health care law, the country’s biggest insurers are promoting affordable plans with reduced premiums that require participants to use a narrower selection of doctors or hospitals.
The plans, being tested in places like San Diego, New York and Chicago, are likely to appeal especially to small businesses that already provide insurance to their employees, but are concerned about the ever-spiraling cost of coverage.
You know the routine:
The tradeoff, they say, is that more Americans will be asked to pay higher prices for the privilege of choosing or keeping their own doctors if they are outside the new networks. That could come as a surprise to many who remember the repeated assurances from President Obama and other officials that consumers would retain a variety of health-care choices.
Shit sandwich.
Thank you for the good reporting New York Times (in this case at least).
Until the Democrats admit that they are addicted to corporate money and that they served up shit sandwiches to their activist base, they will suffer losses this fall.
If they can come up with a strategy to prove that they will govern for the people like FDR did during the Depression and not for their corporate donors, they have a chance of stopping a 2010 wave election and maybe even make small gains. In my humble opinion...