Up-Chuck Grassley is an insidious little prick. As his name implies, he is a low lying creature slithering through the blades.
If this is who Iowa chose to represent them and this is how Iowa feels about health care reform, perhaps it's time to cut back on the bacon.
Iowa's Corn industry loves overeaters. They crave morbid obesity. It keeps the money flowing into their state.
Iowa grows corn. They make syrup out of that corn and pump it into the food supply as a sugar substitute. It is in Iowa Corn's interest to block anything that might eventually reduce consumption of corn syrup or corn for that matter. Iowa Corn and Chuck Grassley are Coca-Cola, corn whiskey and the red meat industry's best friend. Add health insurance to that list.
You see, unfortunately, too much of our country is invested in products that kill us and our environment prematurely - tobacco, corn syrup, beef, pork, liquor, etc.
So any legislation that make our bodies or our planet healthier is bad for Iowa corn farmers.
(You say corn ethanol. I say eight track tapes. Corn Ethanol is a boondoggle. It only contributes to the further industrialization and monoculturalization of our food supply. Ethanol is Monsanto's best friend.)
So, healthcare reform and Iowa Corn. Well, if our healthcare costs are being taken care of by the government(which is us, as in, you and me us) well then we find out pretty fast how to cut costs.
Once we consolidate the actual costs in the same way we consolidate our credit cards, we can start looking around at what's driving up healthcare costs and we can find that corn syrup is junk and if we can't get rid of it we ought to at least stop subsidizing it and blocking sugar from competing with it. We can start taxing Soda pop where 80% of corn syrup goes. Health care reform is not in Iowa's corporate interest.
As long as our healthcare payment system is shredded into as many pieces as a Collateralized Debt Obligation(CDO), the effects from garbage spewed forth from corn refiners, tobacco modifiers and downer cow producers can be obscured from the headlines. And that's good for Iowa.