Posts Tagged ‘health care reform’

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Chickens Playing Chicken

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Which comes first, health care reform or reform of health care reform?

According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the House won’t pass health care reform until the Senate passes a “sidecar” bill that reforms the already passed Senate version of the bill.

Presumably, the calculus is: you can only pass health care once, you can’t come back a few weeks later and amend it, so you have to get it right the first time.

Works great, assuming there are 51 votes in the Senate for whatever amendments you want.

Kills health care reform altogether if the votes aren’t there.

Either way, the Democrats will be blamed.

For that reason, it’s astonishing that the House doesn’t simply pass the Senate version of the bill and move on.

Health care will need lots of tweaking and reforming in the next 10 years.

It’s difficult to believe that Democrats will not vote for their central campaign issue in 2008, thus demonstrating conclusively that they cannot govern.

Gorilla thinks: “Why do these chickens always insist their eggs are square? They’re merely soft and yellow!”

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The Old Dominion Of Stupidity

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

Virginia once again leads the nation on a downward spiral!

This time it’s a bill in the Virginia Senate exempting Virginians from being required to buy health insurance should the current version of health care reform ever pass.

And of course, this bill really should be called “The Insurance Company Cherry Picking Subsidy Act”.

Without a mandate, insurance companies will either offload the sick to government or charge vastly higher premiums to the healthy. It’s a surefire formula for keeping health care costs rising forever.

What’s even more ridiculous is that Democrats made this possible: 5 Democratic senators joined with all the Know Nothings to pass the bill.

Of course, the bill’s an exercise in political pandering and has no chance of being made law.

But the message is clear: Democrats are not willing to lead on health care reform and they will be punished for it in November.

Gorilla says: “Insurance companies get the cherry, the rest of us get the pits!”

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Gobbling Cobblers

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

As Krugman notes, the choice for the House of Representatives on health care reform is very simple:

1) Pass the Senate bill as is, come back and fix it later.

2) Pass nothing, forget about passing anything in the forseeable future, and be punished in November.

The Senate bill is lousy in many respects, but it’s the only bill on offer.

Now that the Republicans have a veto-enabling minority in the Senate, there’s absolutely no chance they’ll back any legislation of any kind for the rest of Obama’s term.

So, if you’re a Congressperson, you can run away and hide, wait for a diffident President to decide to lead, or hold your nose and vote for the first step towards comprehensive, universal health care.

Go to the polls, and you’ll find that most Americans support universal health care and are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to see it happen.

Are House Democrats ready to join them?

Gorilla says: “They’re all a load of cobblers, but 218 may decide to stick their neck out and gobble up a surefire vote winner!”

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Plutocrats 2, America 0

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

It’s clear now that health care reform is finished.

The Democrats don’t have the votes in the House to pass the Senate version of the bill.

Absent a firm commitment to use reconciliation, the White House has effectively signalled that it’s giving up; starting over as they now suggest means more time wasting and more defeats at the polls in 2010.

It’s a shameful performance and a failure of leadership that guarantees President Obama will serve only one term.

And now that the Supreme Court has enabled America’s plutocracy to control the campaign finance process, the middle class can look forward to another 35 years of nothing.

Gorilla sums it up: “No hope, no change, all bullshit, it’s business and politics as usual!”

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Health Care: DOA

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Well, the Democrats and their feckless cowardice now stand for?

Health care reform is dead in the water unless the House votes to accept entirely the Senate version of the bill.

And there’s no certainty that Pelosi has the votes. The Blue Dogs and other centrists may just abandon the whole thing, and the liberals are very angry that the House version of the bill is now dead.

Who’s to blame?

1) The President of the United States: As with the stimulus, he woefully underestimated both how badly the economy was doing and how uninterested the Republicans were in any kind of bipartisanship. The time to pass health care was in the first 100 days, the fact that he couldn’t get this done is a failure of leadership, nothing more and nothing less.

2) The Senate of the United States: Harry Reid is without question the worst majority leader of the past 50 years. He could have used reconciliation to get health care reform passed, which is exactly what the Republicans did with the Bush tax cuts and any other piece of legislation they really wanted. Instead, Reid turned it over to Max Baucus, who wasted 9 months trying to seduce Olympia Snowe.

3) The American people: They elect these clowns, and the clowns reflect the electorate very well. A pig ignorant society when it comes to basic economics is a society that’s easily gamed by plutocrats who know what they want and buy the Congress that will deliver the goods.

Gorilla says: “In a land of mythological denial, the one eyed middle man remains king!”

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Attorneys General And Amoral

Monday, January 4th, 2010

Gorilla’s had a brief correspondence with Virginia Attorney General Bill Mims about his decision to join with a few other Know Nothing Party AGs to sue the US government to stop health care reform legislation.

Gorilla asked:

Why are you wasting Virginia taxpayers’ money filing frivolous, partisan lawsuits against the health care reform bill? Your suit, as you know very well, is entirely without legal merit. It’s nothing but a cheap political stunt by a cowardly lame duck Attorney General. I thought the Attorney General was supposed to represent all the people of Virginia, not just those who vote Republican. You are an absolute disgrace to the Commonwealth, the legal profession, and the United States of America.

Here’s how Attorney General Mims’ office explained his decision:

Mr. Meek:

Thank you for contacting the Office of Attorney General Bill Mims. The Attorney General has requested that I respond to you on his behalf.

So that you might better understand the General’s actions, please allow me to explain that the letter sent to Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid regarding the Senate Version of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act H.R. 3590 asks only that Congress delete the Nebraska provision from the pending legislation. This legislation would place unfair burdens on the other 49 states to cover the costs of any new Medicaid recipients in Nebraska. The current proposed legislation would require every state, except Nebraska, to shoulder its fair share of the increased Medicaid costs the bill will generate and our Attorney General feels that this is placing undue burdens on the citizens of our Commonwealth to assist citizens of another state.

In closing, I hope that this information provides some clarification to you regarding General Mims’ actions on behalf of the citizens of Virginia.

Sincerely,
Jacqueline A. Kotvas
Community Relations
Office of the Attorney General

Gorilla tried to tease out the logic behind this clarification, but in the end was just chagrined:

Ms. Kotvas:

Your logic remains ridiculous, and it would be laughable if the complete amorality behind this lawsuit were not so serious.

Will the Attorney General be asking some or all of the other 49 states not to shoulder the unfair burden of covering the cost of say the US Navy in Norfolk and Newport News?

After all, it’s not Nebraska’s fault that the state lacks an ocean, so they don’t get anywhere near the kind of funding Virginia gets for naval facilities. Why should their citizens have to pay for Virginia’s good geographic fortune?

On the other hand, if this lawsuit is upheld in the courts, 45,000 Americans annually will continue to die for lack of health insurance, but we Virginians will save a few bucks on supporting those Medicaid chiselers in Nebraska.

I must suppose the unfair burden of those deaths, some of which will occur in Virginia, just isn’t very important to Attorney General Mims and his fellow Republican Attorneys General.

Presumably, this complete amorality on the part of Attorney General Mims and his colleagues is the legacy of what our country became in the years between 2001 and 2008, when the government decided that the rule of law and the Constitution wasn’t something that mattered very much, so long as elections were won and fear was stoked.

Thankfully, we no longer live in such a country, and Virginia’s citizens soon will not be burdened unfairly by Attorney General Mims.

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Nothing To See Here

Monday, December 21st, 2009

60 votes for health care reform at last!

And it’s very little, very late.

The hope is that it can be fixed down the road, but the truth is that the Democrats will likely never have the power they have now and their failure to agree without killing poor women, leaving 20 million or so uninsured, and a public option does not bode well for the future.

Gorilla says: “We’ll get there by 2025 with Medicare for all!”

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Blog On Hiatus

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Gorilla’s had a few personal issues this week, so the blog is on hiatus, will likely resume next week.

Gorilla does feel a bit vindicated by his predictions that 1) Copenhagen would go nowhere because it was more in everyone’s interests to do nothing than to do anything, 2) Health care reform would be a very minor league deal indeed, if it even passes, and 3) no one among our leaders cares to do a damn thing about 10% unemployment.

Not that these are triumphs, just reflections on how backward America has become.

Gorilla also thinks it’s even money at the moment that Obama will be the next Jimmy Carter, one and done.

“Be back soon!” says Gorilla.

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Joe Says No

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Senator Joe Lieberman’s doing his level best to kill health care reform.

He’s not in favor of Medicare at 55 and he’s not in favor of the public option.

Unless Joe or some other Senator can be bribed, what is certainly a very marginal piece of legislation will go nowhere.

Every piece of major legislation needs 60 votes to pass, and the Democrats don’t have 60 votes, they have 59 and Lieberman.

The Republicans on the other hand have totally abrogated their responsibility to provide anything other than a no vote on every major piece of legislation. Having gotten the country into this mess, they’re perfectly happy to let it get worse.

So, it appears that Washington is pretty much useless when it comes to addressing the major problems facing the country.

This isn’t very surprising, because our leaders haven’t done much more than screw around for the past 35 years, during which time Americans median income went nowhere.

Gorilla, who thought health care reform in 2009 was dead last summer, is only slightly more positive now: “They’ll pass something that’s really health care reform in 2025!”

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TGIF And Predictions

Friday, December 11th, 2009

These were the events that mattered in Gorilla’s world this week:

Health care reform: Farewell, public option, hello, Medicare buy-in! All very minor league stuff. Single payer is the way to go, and Gorilla believes that’s where we’ll be by 2025.

Nobel Peace Prize: An interesting speech from President Obama on the rationale for “just” war. War apparently is peace by other means. The difficulty with all this nuanced rhetoric is that it doesn’t match up with actual policy. The Administration is still defending the right of government officials to spy on Americans and to commit crimes with impunity. The Administration is all for nuclear non-proliferation, but conventional proliferation remains big business. Gorilla thinks that all this pragmatism is fine, but wishes there would be an occasional foray into non-opinion poll-based foreign policy.

Human Rights Day: A reminder of how little can be done to address major problems. Nobody’s going to war, justly or unjustly, for Darfur, the Congo, Guinea, or Zimbabwe. The plight of women and children in most countries remains appalling. Gorilla suggests that progress can be made, at the grassroots and at the margins, if there’s a willingness to see it through with political and economic capital.

Climate change: Copenhagen peters away like a deflated gas bag. There’s no political support anywhere in the developed world for doing anything that requires big money, big sacrifice, or big risks. We’re waiting for the Chinese and Indians to do something, they’re waiting for us, and it’s convenient for everyone that nothing much gets done. Gorilla predicts that serious climate change policy will come only when climate change is a serious threat, roughly 20 years from now.

US Economy: The figures remain dire. We need to be adding 300,000 jobs/month just to stay even with population and trendline growth; last month we lost another 11,000. Retail sales are barely above inflation. The mortgage modification program has been a total failure. The hoarding by banks goes on, while credit tightens further. There’s no real leadership coming from Washington as everyone gears up for the 2010 elections. Gorilla thinks the Democrats will get a severe and deserved kicking at the polls next November.

Iraq: The bombers are back, or rather they never went away. Despite all the surging, 7 Iraqis die violently every day. Gorilla thinks the civil war will resume in 2012.

Afghanistan and Pakistan: The denial dance goes on. President Karzai still hasn’t named a cabinet. Pakistan still hasn’t done anything about Baluchistan. America still hasn’t captured any top al-Qaeda leaders. Gorilla has moved his withdrawal timetable from late 2010 to mid 2011, and still believes we’ll be mostly out by 2015.

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