Health Wars (10/19/09)

The ObamaHouse now says that the Li'l President will accept a BarryCare bill without a public option.  Which is precisely what the ObamaHouse said six weeks ago prior to the Li'l President's "last ditch/hail mary/all on one final roll of the dice" speech to Congress, in which he....demanded a public option in the BarryCare bill.

Would it be....provocative of me to make mention of the eight-thousand pound elephant in this birdcage?  Maybe, just maybe, nobody on Capitol Hill or anywhere else gives a frog's fat leg what the Li'l President has to say about health care anymore.  Might that not be why congressional Donks felt free to double-cross private health insurers on the secret deal the ObamaHouse made with them?  After all, he outsourced the whole project to Crazy Nancy and Dirty Harry in the first place.  They promply wrapped it around the nearest telephone pole while he wiled away his time smearing his arrogant, overbearing, and stunningly incompetent rhetorical feces all around the country to the point where just about everybody outside the Kool-Aid swillers is sick to death of his grinning rictus and is more stoutly opposed to BarryCare than ever.  The aforementioned congressional address was supposed to be a magical "game-changer," but just put his overexposure on speed instead.  Having exercised no executive leadership up to now (because he doesn't have the foggiest idea of what executive leadership is, much less the know-how or testicles to wield it), he is more or less helpless as to how to pull this malodorous legislative hulk out of its metaphorical ditch, and somehow drag the quarreling, hopelessly divided ducks into some semblance of a unified row that can actually clear the cloture hurtle and get something, ANYTHING passed.  And, again, why would any of them listen to his entreaties?  He's made himself a bystander, a spectator to the crown-nugget domestic initiative that bears his own name.  The "executive equivalent of voting present," indeed.

Meanwhile, for all you eeyores out there - and you know who you are - who still guzzle the Propel of BarryCare's inevitability (in some form), I will do you the courtesy of freely acknowledging that that worst case outcome is entirely plausible, while pointing out yet again why I, in the absence of considerably more compelling evidence, still consider it unlikely:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s attempt to fast-track changes to the Medicare sustainable growth rate (SGR) formula, off-budget and (ostensibly) separate from ObamaCare, was set for a cloture vote today, but has been delayed following objections from both the GOP and moderate Dems. Republicans want the Democrats to pay for the $248 billion (and maybe twice as much) price tag for the doctors’ fix....

[I]n the bigger picture, Reid’s backpedal on the SGR fix may say something about his inability to force his Democratic and Independent colleagues into a fiscally irresponsible vote on healthcare, even when that vote would make one of the nation’s most powerful lobbies very happy. Reid ought to be doing better on the undercard before moving on to the main event.

Maybe all these conflicting, cross-purposed, squabbling Donk factions will suddenly and dramatically all coalesce into glorious concensus like Seven of Nine's Omega Molecule and jam down outright single-payer, and the public's angry, vehement opposition will melt away into unanimous, grateful adulation, and all three hundred million of us will sing hosannahs and dance around like nuts and slice ourselves open and gush the holy bodily fluids before the Obamathrone, and sickness and death will wither away and we won't even NEED health care anymore, and every tear will be gently wiped from every eye, and we'll all live happily ever after.

Or maybe BarryCare is a decapitated chicken whose body is running around and wings still flapping madly until it finally realizes it's deader than Ted Kennedy and falls over.

It could still be the hosannahs.  But I keep seeing the plucka-plucka-pluckas.