Posted by
Bert Chapman on Monday, November 23, 2009 7:35:29 PM
This past Saturday night, the U.S. Senate agreed to open debate on health care legislation. This 2,000 plus page monstrosity, as congressional Republicans have graphically pointed out by displaying it on the Senate and House floors, will increase a variety of taxes and ultimately do nothing to improvev the quality of U.S. health care. Bringing this bill to the Senate floor reflects the childlike faith of the Obama Administration and its congressional sycophants that Americans will ignore the over six decades of unhappy experience with nationalized health care in countries all over the world despite overwhelming evidence that such systems decrease the quality and availability of health care to their citizens.
So far a considerable amount of political horsetrading and logrolling is occurring as the Administration seeks to garner the support of Democrats who may be politically or, dare we hope, intellectually and morally inclined to resist the seductive siren of socialized medicine. One of these Democrats is Louisiana's Mary Landrieu, the scion of a prominent New Orleans familial political dynasty. Landrieu has already secured an additional $300 million in Medicaid funding for Louisiana in a stunning affirmation of her genetic encoding to garner federal largesse for her state regardless of whether or not its taxpayers or national taxpayers can afford such spending during a time of double digit unemployment and trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see or budget prognosticators can forecast. Arkansas' Blanche Lincoln will be another purportedly moderate Democrat the Obama Administration will try to entice with various favors. Lincoln is now chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee and we may see Arkansas receive all kinds of favors when the next quinquinnial federal farm legislation is written a couple years down the road. Perhaps features of this legislation might include giving Tyson Chicken monopolistic control of the U.S. poultry industry, additional Medicaid money for Arkansas, or no telling what other earmarks which may occur at the expense of other U.S. agricultural sectors.
Indiana Senator Richard Lugar has wisely said that our current economic problems make health care reform extremely unwise at this time. You would think Harry Reid would be intelligent enough to listen to a midwestern Rhodes Scholar. Unfortunately, Reid, Pelosi, and Obama are dead set on imposing a nationalized health care system which Americans don't want, cannot afford, and has proven to be detrimental to health care quality in many highly developed countries. Obama has convinced himself that his presidential legacy depends on enacting this legislation regardless of its abysmal quality. His stubborn messianic insistence on this legislation may well make him the 2nd consecutive Democratic President to squander significant political capital on an issue that only appeals to a collectivist cabal on the leftist fringes of the Democratic Party. The failure of this legislation can represent a seismic political defeat for mister "change you can believe in" and open up opportunities for the GOP to present sensible, pragmatic, and market-oriented health care reform that will empower individual American medical consumers and their families instead of an already titanic and ineffectual federal medical bureaucracy.