ATLANTA— The fiscally reckless public option is finally dead. It’s seems liberals in the Senate are finally letting go of the miserable idea in the name of passing the health care bill. The public option and the MediCare buy-in have completely failed. That’s the good news for conservatives. The bad news is that if the Senate can come up with a compromise over federal funding of abortion, they may actually pass this bill off the Senate floor.
That would be really bad news for conservatives, and for this country. Even without the public option and without federal funding of abortions, this bill remains a gigantic train-wreck of unintended consequences waiting to happen. Over half of its funding continues to come from mysterious “cuts in MediCare” that are wholly unlikely to materialize. In fact, I’ll go on record saying they will never in our lifetimes materialize.
This bill will absolutely explode our federal deficits, bend the health care cost curve upwards, and reduce our quality of care. I think most Americans now recognize that, as the country has moved solidly against the bill by a 53 to 38 margin, based on the RealClearPolitics average polling data.
Yuck. I sit at a strange place. I am happy the public option is officially dead. But I stand worried that I have misjudged the liberals’ ability to compromise. I thought the chasm between left and right in the Democratic caucus would prove too wide to bridge. I’m starting to worry I may have been mistaken.
It remains incredibly odd to me that with an election year looming, Democrats stand poised to vote on party lines to pass an incredibly unpopular bill that impacts every last American and that will raise taxes in the short-term, while delaying benefits until the middle of the next decade. It is baffling. It is to me the very definition of ideological insanity.
The passage of the bill now hinges on a compromise over abortion. I still think that will be very difficult to reach, but I also now sense that liberals are much more willing budge on these matters than I previously realized.
But that’s just the liberals in the Senate. The liberals in the House are a different crew altogether. Healthcare reform may yet die in the reconciliation process between the House and the Senate.
We can only hope!
TennesseePaul
Stephen VanNuys
Brooklyn Daniel
The Freedom Thinker
Good news indeed and I agree although their is a glimmer of hope the Democrats want strongly to outspend Republicans by huge margins. Our economy cannot withstand this hit and the tax increases and debt increases will when they come in 2014 will be brutal.
[...] yet such things like the Health Care Spending Bill are still being discussed and Obama is apt to bring up another $500 billion in stimulus [...]
It would be folly to accept the Democrat’s proposals at face value. Should they retain their current Majority in both houses of Congress, they could easily bring back their rejected plans at a later date.
Stephen, you are correct in regarding this bill as a “gigantic train-wreck of unintended consequences waiting to happen”. There are so many disasters lurking in the 2,000-odd pages of this bill that no one has read completely. This Frankenstein-creature should be rejected in total and if Congress wants health care reform then they should submit legislation that is limited to that subject and not packed with special-interest rewards.
But that is unlikely to happen and I would guess that down the road we will be faced with screwups that make the stimulus package and cash for clunkers look like brilliant in comparison.
Right on mainenowandthen, that must be their plan if they pass this health care spending plan then they will look brilliant compared to the stimulus and cash for clunkers spending bills.
It’s a genius political calculation to recover from the stimulus and cash for clunkers plan because most of the bill doesn’t go into effect until 2014 and after. This way everybody forgets whose bill it was and nobody has to suffer the blame for it’s failures while in the short term everybody forgives them for their failures which were immediate.
Wow, I wish I was as smart as them.
Yep – this thing is a mess. But it is getting harder and harder to call what’s going to happen. It’s getting to be like Ground Hog day. At the start of every week, Obama rallies the Democrats in Congress. By around Tuesday, news reports are flowing that everyone is onboard. Somewhere that consensus starts to unravel and then by the weekend health care reform is doomed, only to start all over again the next week. What a roller coaster.
I did see where Howard Dean has moved solidly against the bill now that it has no public option or MediCare buy-in. Hopefully the liberals follow their man and put their stakes in the ground to oppose Lieberman. That is precisely the ideological divide in the Democratic caucaus that I was counting on to doom this bill in the Senate. We’ll see what happens….