Health Wars (9/24/09)

As a followup to yesterday's update on Senator Carper spilling already-spilt beans, Tevi Troy gives us an inside peek at the epitome of a clusterbleep:

[T]he White House struck the deal early in the summer. Shortly afterwards, Henry Waxman declared that he was not bound by any such deal, and neither was the White House. PhRMA CEO Billy Tauzin then pressed the White House on the issue, asking, quite reasonably, “Who is ever going to go into a deal with the White House again if they don’t keep their word?” The White House responded by having Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina say that the White House would stick by its commitment. This angered Senate Democrats, who called in Messina and White House adviser David Axelrod for a meeting. Senators Sherrod Brown and Dick Durbin reported that Axelrod said that the White House was not bound by the deal, but Durbin’s staff denied this. Brown, for his part, insulted Tauzin by saying that “Billy Tauzin has not always been all that straight with the truth.”

The latest development in this saga, according to the Washington Times, is that the Finance Committee is considering an amendment by Bill Nelson that “would effectively invalidate the highly touted deal between the White House and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, in which the group pledged $80 billion over ten years to help cover seniors' drug costs.” According to the Times, “Many lawmakers in the House and Senate have scoffed at the deal, arguing they don't have to live up to a White House handshake with a major industry group.” All of the Committee Democrats except for Senator Carper will support the Nelson amendment. Carper argued “that regardless of the content of the deal, they couldn't undo it.”

My God, this is convoluted. I mean, all the Donk players in this intramural kerfuffle are shadier than a black hole. You can't convince me that everybody on their side except Obama is pure, malevolently idealistic as the wind-driven acid snow. My guess is congressional Dems are peeved that their lord and master didn't cut them in for a piece of the shakedown.

On the other hand, perhaps the Li'l President never meant to keep the deal with Big Pharma but merely made it in order to keep them out of active opposition to BarryCare, and was counting on his congressional myrmidons to carry out the double-cross for him so he'd be out of the line of backdraft.

Whereas Senator Carper is merely an ethical-by-comparison accessory and otherwise generally clueless.

It's definitely a "It's come down to this" moment when the best image a Democrat can project is being the 21st century Forrest Gump.

~ ~ ~

As World War II history buffs and Tom Cruise fans are well aware, in 1944 elements in the German army saw the Western invasion of France and the Red Army rolling into Poland in the east and realized that their country's defeat was inevitable. A cabal of these officers attempted to assassinate Adolph Hitler in July of that year because they knew the Fuehrer (1) would never surrender and (2) the Allies would never accept any surrender offer as long as Hitler remained alive. Unfortunately the bomb they planted in Hitler's East Prussian headquarters failed to kill him, and he lived on to bring about Germany's utter eradication.

Take out the war and assassination plot (okay, okay, and the Nazi) elements, and you have a fairly close approximation about the gotterdammerung toward which Fue...um, Speaker "Crazy Nancy" Pelosi is taking her party's majority on BarryCare:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday shot down a healthcare compromise that has been viewed as the best chance for getting a bipartisan bill through the Senate.

Pelosi (D-CA) rejected the idea of a “trigger” for a public option. That means that the government-run health care plan would be a fallback option, enacted only if other reforms didn’t make healthcare more accessible. …

“I don’t even want to talk about a trigger,” Pelosi said at her weekly press conference. She said the “attitude” of her fellow Democrats is that “a trigger is an excuse for not doing anything.”

There's an old saying that asks "What do you choose when all other options have been eliminated? You choose the one that's left." Somehow I don't think the author of that axiom intended for it to be a pun. And in this case it doesn't really fit because it's Granny Rictus McBotox who's eliminating the other options.

Another option she has torpedoed is anything other than Medicare reimbursement rates for the public option, which is another thumb in the eye of Blue Dogs who were trying to get more lucrative rates in order to buy off physicians and hospitals. Given how dug in against each other both sides of this Donk civil war are as it is, Pelosi might as well be waving a red banner in front of a rabid bull.

And that doesn't even get to how this makes any House version of BarryCare dead-on-arrival in the Senate, or the fact that the Baucus version that was supposed to be the compromise towards which House BDs were trying to push HR 3200 is itself "blue-shifting" in the same direction towards which the Shrieker has plotted a return course, OR the fact that with each lurch leftward any flickering possibility that Senate Donks might have had to get sixty votes to invoke reconcilation and a ram-down of full-blown BarryCare on a majority vote gets doused with a bucket brigade of water, fire-retardant foam, and halon all in one.

Not for the first time does it occur to me that getting Nancy Pelosi on a couch would be a psychiatrist's dream. It's like she just can't bear to live with the humiliation of settling for half (or more) of a loaf, so she's going for it ALL, dammit, and if she doesn't get it she'll pray to her god in the White House to "rain hellfire" down on her enemies and - she's doubtless convinced herself - capture an even MORE lopsided majority in 2010.

And when she's no longer Speaker after next November, what then? Will her face dissolve off her skull like Walter Donovan, or will her head just explode?