Congressional Democrats are about to give, at great political cost to themselves, the health-care industries in America a big fat gift that will further enrich them at our expense, that will eventually eliminate abortion coverage in all insurance plans, and that will force the 45-million-odd Americans who aren't on the health-insurance company rolls because they can't afford health insurance to cough up thousands of dollars they don't have to buy insurance that will be even worse and more expensive than it is today, or face the wrath of the IRS. There won't be a public option to provide the competition needed to keep them from gouging us.
More after the jump.
Why are they doing this? Apparently because they've been told, over and over again, that President Obama is doomed if they don't. The irony is that, in being forced to vote for this massive turkey, they have not only sealed their doom come November, but their loss will bring about the very 1994-style electoral doom for Obama that they're told they must prevent at all costs.
Republicans know all of this, and know it all too well. They are licking their chops and are already hurling a flurry of anti-mandate amendments at the bill, amendments they know will fail, just so they can use their opposition to insurance mandates to score points with voters in the coming campaign ads we'll be carpet-bombed with for the next six months.
Aside from a stimulus bill that was half the size it needed to be, and now a bill that gives trillions to the health and insurance industries and sticks us with the bill even as it aims another blow at Roe v. Wade, Obama and the Democrats haven't got very much done over the past year even when they had 60 seats in the Senate and 257 in the House. What happens after they get their clocks cleaned this November? They won't be able to "fix" the bill even if they wanted to -- and so long as they value the deals of May 11, 2009 more than the wishes of their constituents, they won't want to anyway. (Not that the currently-fashionable crop of corporate-owned Democrats have done much revisiting of bad bills they'd promised to "fix". See also: NAFTA and DADT.)
I wish, desperately, that I was wrong. I fear that I am not.
(Crossposted at Mercury Rising.)