Health Wars (10/29/09)

Today was supposed to be the latest grand unveiling of the latest version of House BarryCare.  You know, the second or third edition of the healthcare-eradicating government takeover of American medicine that Crazy Nancy was so "excited" about just a week ago.

Looks like that excitement was only intended to be a hand-picked peep show:

The "excitement" was over the effective "Baucusization" of the House bill.  Further review reveals all the same phony elements as in the Senate version Dirty Harry Reid is riding "heroically" to the bottom.  Same cost-shifting to the states as unfunded mandates; same "soak the rich" surtax; same barrage of fees on medical devices from pacemakers to artificial hips (of which my father has two, BTW); same slapping of the new taxes and fees immediately, three years in advance of when "benefits," and massive deficits along with them, would start - IOW, the so-called "deficit reduction" measures.  And the very self-same "doctor fix" shell game that already went down in flames in the Senate two weeks ago:

A permanent doc fix will be carved out of the reform bill and introduced separately today without pay-fors. That’s not going to make docs happy because even if the doc fix bill passes the House, the Senate has already killed a similar proposal. Drug makers are also getting shellacked. They’re looking at between $125 billion and $150 billion in cuts – almost twice the $80 billion they agreed to under the White House deal.

It's as if Granny Rictus McBotox hasn't been paying a lick of attention to what's been going on on the other side of the Capitol for the past month.  Either that or she has been and decided that her caucus must jump out on point and show its Senate counterparts how it's done, no matter how many seats it costs them next fall, in the hopes that a bottom-scraping jam-down like with cripple & tax back in July will raise the bar enough to get something past cloture and into a conference committee, where the next version of BarryCare can be cooked up behind closed doors again.

But how many Blue Dogs, their asses already in a sling with their constituents, will be ready to commit political hari-kari by voting first for this "freight train of Big Government" when the likelihood of the effort dying in the Senate grows by the day?:

I'll say what I've been saying: Maybe Reid and Pelosi can conjure up some breakthrough superscam to get this disaster in the making by, through, and around all these self-created obstacles, to say nothing of the clear majority will of the American people.  Or maybe they'll finally just have the Capitol Police arrest Republican members of both chambers and hold them in custody long enough to take their final votes, quickly meld them in conference, and ram through the merged version.  But short of diabolical cunning that neither of these nitwits comes close to manifesting, or authoritarian thuggery so blatant even they couldn't get away with it, and with the downpayment on the hurricane of electoral blowback coming a year from now imminent, I just don't see how sheer willfulness alone is going to get this clusterbleep to the finish line.