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Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Suicide Watch

It's easy to see why the vampiric CEOs of private insurance companies would be giddy at the prospect of healthcare "reform" mandating universal purchase of their crappy products without any public option to provide a modicum of competition to keep them the least bit honest. But it's hard to see why anybody else in their right mind would share such enthusiasm.

You can be sure that if this flabbergasting outcome is what "reform" ends up looking like under Democratic Congressional majorities and signed by a popular Democratic President elected after a promise to get dysfunctional for-profit healthcare under control by means of strict regulation and a public option, then the Democratic Party will lose everything it has gained since 2006, will squander its generational demographic ascendancy before that even gets underway in earnest, and will certainly deserve to lose it all.

All this is so obvious I don't know whether to assume such a worst-case scenario is indeed as impossible as it looks like it surely must be… or if all this makes it, you know, inevitable.

1 comment:

jimf said...

> [I]t's hard to see why anybody else in their right mind would
> share such enthusiasm.

I was at a diner the other night, and as usual Fox was on the
overhead TVs, this time with the sound turned up.

It was a Healthcare Town Hall meeting being presided over by
John McCain (who he?).

When one of the participants -- an elderly woman -- got up
and asked McCain asked how come Obama doesn't know that taking
people's money is **against the Constitution** -- doesn't
he know about the Constitution? -- McCain replied that of
course President Obama knows about the Constitution. Then,
to the accompaniment of boos and hisses from his audience,
he reassured everybody that indeed President Obama is quite
sincere about his health care proposals, it's just that
his philosophy seems misguided to us real folks, but
we should respect him because he's still the President.

McCain also said that there was an unprecedented popular
revolt a-brewin' agin' these crazy Democrats. (Didn't
we just have one of those? It was called an **election**.)