I confess that I slept through Calgary Cruz's rendition of Green Eggs and Ham (darn), but when I woke up this morning and found that his 'non-filibuster' had continued overnight, I put on C-Span to take a look.
There was Marco Rubio lecturing us about the shining paragon of capitalism and small government - Mexico - and contrasting it to the horror of Venezuela's socialist big government. Sure, he told us, Mexico has 'some challenges', but it has a burgeoning middle class, it is going to reform its petroleum industry to be more like ours (huh?), and we should look to Mexico to learn how to be more 'capitalist' and 'free-market' and wonderful.
While those claims are extremely arguable (at the very least) I was most struck by Rubio's glaring omission of the fact that Mexico has universal healthcare. After all, the purpose of this 'non-filibuster' is to rail against Obamacare, our country's somewhat feeble first step towards our own universal healthcare.
Sorry, Marco, your argument falls on its face.
Shortly after that, Rubio yielded the floor back to Cruz, who launched into a diatribe against Cuba, lambasting it (correctly) for its failed economic policies, then trying to lump Cuba's universal healthcare into those policies. So I did a little research....
per capita spending on healthcare (2009)
Cuba $478
USA $7960
Life expectancy (2011)
Cuba 78
USA 79
I will stipulate that this is not an in-depth analysis, and that if I'm sick I'd rather be here in the USA (with my Cadillac health insurance, of course), but as a first-order comparison it is pretty telling. Great bang for the buck on that extra $7,500, isn't it?
Shortly after that, I reached my 'crap limit' (when Sen. Pat Roberts started lobbing softball questions at Cruz) and re-entered the real world by changing channels.
I am impressed with Cruz's passion for denying 30,000,000 people affordable healthcare. If he wasn't a total asshole and a complete hypocrite he might be a decent guy..... well, probably not!
Cheers.