Health Wars (9/11/09)

There are many reasons why Senate Majority Chisler "Dirty Harry" Reid is entering his last year of elective office - he's corrupt, he's a left-wing extremist, he's a high-octane prick - but as much as any of those other factors, he's just really, really stupid:

The old fool thinks this speech was "a big, wet kiss to the Right."  Funny, that's not what Joe Wilson got out of it.

On the bright side, this display of partisan senility does seem to suggest that a double-end-around on Senate "reconciliation" is reaching the same plausibility level as Reid winning the next Mr. Universe competition.

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Joe Wilson was rude.  Joe Wilson was boorish.  Joe Wilson was uncivil.  And Joe Wilson was wrong, wrong, wrong about illegal aliens being covered by BarryCare.

Or so we thought - until a couple of Senate Donks realized he was right, right, right:

The controversy over Republican Representative Joe Wilson’s shouting out “You Lie!” at the President over his claim that illegal immigrants wouldn’t benefit from health-care reform apparently sparked some reconsideration of the relevant language. “We really thought we’d resolved this question of people who are here illegally, but as we reflected on the President’s speech last night we wanted to go back and drill down again,” said Senator Kent Conrad, one of the Democrats in the talks after a meeting Thursday morning. Baucus later that afternoon said the group would put in a proof of citizenship requirement to participate in the new health exchange — a move likely to inflame the left.

Oh, don't be too hard on the White House on this one, folks; I can even kinda-sorta understand their frustration.  Here The Chosen One has been spewing forth his mendatious health care "reform" rhetoric like Niagra Falls for literally MONTHS, in speeches and townhalls and interviews and pressers and joint sessions of Congress all across the country, and despite that hypercane of gibbering, his utopian dreams are fizzling faster than a Vladimir Koslov entrance pop; yet poor ol' Joe Wilson shouts two words - TWO F'ING WORDS - and he pushes BarryCare significantly rightward.  Making, I might add, the chances of cobbling together even some sort of rickety compromise that much more difficult.

Not bad for a "pimple on the ass of progress," huh?

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Could this be the "dripping tongue up the Republicans' asses" (or whatever metaphor he used) Barney Fife's evil twin was referring to?:

Well, I guess that is some measurable rhetorical distance from where he REALLY stands on tort reform, and felt entirely comfortable publicly admitting three months ago - before the AMA no less:

Here is an instance where Dr. Chicago sort of pulled a Clinton by inserting a meaningless, throwaway line that wasn't completely hostile to tort reform and, by contrast with what got him booed off the AMA stage, made him sound superficially conciliatory.

Of course, "pilot programs" are from the same policy purgatory as "blue ribbon commissions," where presidents consign opposition programs they're compelled by political circumstances to pretend to consider but which they have no intention of ever genuinely implementing.  It's doubtful in the current political atmosphere that even most RINOs would buy into such transparent sophistry:

During the markup of a bill in the Senate Health Committee, Republicans offered eleven tort amendments that varied in degree from mere pilot projects to measures to ensure more rural obstetricians. On a party line vote, Democrats killed every one. Rhode Island senator and lawyer Sheldon Whitehouse went so far as to speechify on the virtues of his tort friends. He did not, of course, mention the nearly $900,000 they have given him since 2005, including campaign contributions from national tort powerhouses like Baron & Budd and Motley Rice.

Even Senate Finance Chair Max Baucus, of bipartisan bent, has bowed to legal powers. The past two years, Mr. Baucus has teamed up with Wyoming Republican Mike Enzi to offer legislation for modest health-care tort reform in states. That Enzi-Baucus proposal had been part of the bipartisan health-care talks. When Mr. Baucus released his draft health legislation this weekend, he’d stripped out his own legal reforms. The Montanan is already in the doghouse with party liberals, and decided not to further irk leadership’s Dick Durbin ($3.6 million in lawyer contributions), the Senate’s patron saint of the trial bar.

Over in the House the discussion isn’t about tort reform, but about tort opportunities. During the House Ways & Means markup of a health bill, Texas Democrat Lloyd Doggett ($1.5 million from lawyers) introduced language to allow freelance lawyers to sue any outfit (say, McDonald’s) that might contribute to Medicare costs. Only after Blue Dogs freaked out did the idea get dropped, though the trial bar has standing orders that Democrats make another run at it in any House-Senate conference.

It says everything that Mr. Obama wouldn’t plump for reform as part of legislation. The president knows the Senate would never have passed it in any event. Yet even proposing it was too much for the White House’s legal lobby. Mr. Obama is instead directing his secretary of health and human services to move forward on test projects. That would be Kathleen Sebelius, who spent eight years as the head of the Kansas Trial Lawyers Association.

Trial lawyers are pirates in Armani suits, and fellow parasites with their Donk elected counterparts.  It's a marriage made in hell.  No wonder Dirty Harry sounded like a Desperate Housewife, even though his god and master hasn't even "cheated" on him.