In a Friday piece on NewMajority, David Frum asks the question that has been burning in the back of every liberal's mind: what if the teabaggers are able to quash health care reform?
We’ll have entrenched and perpetuated some of the most irrational features of a hugely costly and under-performing system, at the expense of entrepreneurs and risk-takers, exactly the people the Republican party exists to champion.
Well, duh.
Actually, I have to take exception to "exactly the people the Republican party exists to champion" seeing as how the insurance and pharmaceutical industries are the constituents of the Republican party. Having had to close my small business earlier this summer - in part because I couldn't afford to provide health care - I can say with certainty that I didn't feel "championed," unless that's the new euphemism for scheize videos involving proles like me.
Oooh! Let's go to the responses!
Sinz54 is convinced that we're the devil:
ottovbvs sez: "He’ll almost certainly have to pass it under reconciliation "
Then it will be a political loser. And all that brave Obama talk about "post-partisanship" and "changing the tone in Washington" will have been revealed to be a smokescreen for naked power plays (which, BTW, is exactly what TMPCafe and DailyKOS always said it was for).
The only reason why SS and Medicare proved durable, was that both passed with a substantial number of GOP votes. Moderate and liberal Republicans had bought into those programs.
Whereas ObamaCare is medical welfare for the poor–the wet dream of liberals for decades.
If ObamaCare hasn’t appealed to me, with my individual insurance policy and my chronic illness, it’s sure not going to appeal to the 70% of the nation who are satisfied with their group coverage (cf. RasmussenReports). Ramming this thru Congress over the objections of just about everybody outside Blue areas will be a political disaster for the Blue Dog Dems–nearly every one of them will lose in the next election. They won in Red States by pretending to not be puppets of Pelosi. Now they will lose.
Spartacus refutes some anecdotal evidence:
Lastly, there is the issue of what comes next for your sister-in-law. I don’t know if her insurance is offered through her employer or if it’s an individual policy, but in either case she faces the continuous risk of losing coverage. If that were to happen, depending on the state in which she lives, she almost certainly would not be able to obtain any other coverage except through an employer because of her pre-existing conditions. Well, with medical costs skyrocketing, more and more employers are dropping coverage for their employees so that chances of finding replacement coverage are constantly diminishing.
I think I want to have this Spartacus guy's babies:
David is not intentionally witholding a third option. There simply is no possible way of addressing the primary goals of healthcare reform without offending the basic tenets of modern conservatism.
Most people, irrespective of their ideology, agree that healthcare reform ought to (1) reduce the number of uninsured, (2) make insurance less costly for those who are already insured, and (3) reduce the amount of money spent on healthcare services that produce no actual benefit. There simply is no possible way to achieve these goals without (a) increasing the amount of regulations imposed on businesses (including insurance companies), (b) providing some kind of government subsidy for people who can’t afford insurance, and (c) creating some kind of competitor in the market who is large enough to put downward pressure on the prices of healthcare services. Each of these measures offends conservative/GOP opposition to regulation, government spending and government involvement in the marketplace.
Conservatives and the GOP controlled Congress and the White House for 6 out of the last 8 years. They would have gladly proposed a plan to solve the healthcare problems I described above IF they could have done so without offending their core ideology. It’s simply not possible and NO CONSERVATIVE on this blog or anywhere else has offered any ideas that come close to plausibly solving the problem.
For conservatives and the GOP, it’s simply a matter of preferring ideology over practical solutions.
I'm going to stop there because a BL (no tomato!) sandwich has just been handed to me and I must make with the consumption.