Dems in impasse—America saved from National Health?

This is getting good. Last week, as referenced at VFR, the influential, rather socialist-leaning senator from North Dakota, Kent Conrad, said that the public option was dead. Then over the weekend Obama himself indicated that the public option was dead. Which while cheering me at the disarray in the Dem ranks, also roused a fear in me that without the public option the Dems would be able to pass the bill. But now the left wing of the House Dems are saying to the White House, don’t you dare drop the public option! This is great news, the best news yet. The dropping of the public option plank meant that the Dems realized they couldn’t pass the bill with the public option; But now the left are saying that they will refuse to pass the bill without the public option. Which means there’s no way that any bill can pass.

Also, notice Rep. Weiner from Brooklyn saying that Obama threw the Congressional Dems under a bus.

The story is by Jake Tapper at ABC:

“We Have a Tire Track On Our Chest”: President Obama Faces Possible Rebellion of House Democrats

August 17, 2009 8:24 PM

The president’s liberal allies on health care reform have a message for the president: Don’t think you can drop the public option without a fight.

“If the president thinks we’re gonna get the votes without the public option, he’s got another think coming,” Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-NY, told ABC News. “That won’t pass the House.”

Over the weekend, the President seemed to change his tone on whether a final health care reform bill had to include a public option—something that just two months ago, he indicated was a deal-breaker.

“Any plan I sign must include an insurance exchange…including a public option to increase competition and keep insurance companies honest,” President Obama said on June 23.

But over the weekend, Obama seemed to downplay the importance of the inclusion of the plan in health care reform legislation.

“The public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it,” he said in Grand Junction, Colo.

Weiner said while the White House may be able to pick up one or two senators by forgoing the public option, it will lose 100 Democratic votes in the House

“I think that we have a majority of the votes in the house and Senate for a public plan,” Weiner said. “It won’t be easy but I think they’re there. But they’re certainly not gonna be there if every time we turn around there’s another White House official walking away from it.”

Weiner indicated that some in the president’s own party feel betrayed after supporting him on health care reform and then taking lumps from constituents.

“Some of us who have gotten roughed up pretty good at town hall meetings and stuck in there because we believe in this, now kind of feel like we have a tire track on our chest where the bus that rolled over us is,” Weiner said.

A government-run public health insurance option has long been a centerpiece of President Obama’s plans for health care reform. Two months ago Obama indicated that it would be in the final health care legislation he signs into law.

- end of initial entry -

James N. writes:

Is “public option” dead?

It doesn’t matter whether it’s dead or not.

Just like with cap and trade, they’ve revealed their agenda—total control.

You cannot trust the people who wrote these two bills to legislate AT ALL, because what they don’t put in legislation,. they will turf to their soulmates in the bureaucracy through vague wording and secret communications.

NO BILL SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO PASS.

You have to ask yourself—how did they come up with 1,300 pages in a week?

This bill has been written over the past 40 years. The House leadership didn’t write a bill—they had a coming out party.

EVERY SINGLE BAD THING in the bill is nauseatingly familiar to anybody in the medical field, because these people have been yammering about all of these things for more than a generation.

And every time we “compromise,” they get to recruit a new battalion of destructive Leninists, whose cover is running some innocuous sounding “program” but whose actual function is to make the job of doctors, nurses, and hospitals harder and harder, and the patients’ experience worse and worse, with the goal of making everyone cry out “ENOUGH! THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN! WE NEED YOU TO FIX IT!”

Lenin’s maxim, “The worse, the better,” describes the agenda of every federal and state bureaucrat currently administering any public health program. They don’t CARE that the programs don’t work and cost too much. That’s their FUNCTION—to screw things up, more, and more, the worse (for us) the better (for them).

Defeating the “public option” by replacing it with “co-ops” run by the same Leninists, to the same purpose of destroying what we have, is no victory.

Every GOP counterproposal (and even a lot of “conservatives” are saying, “You have to have an alternative”) will just employ and empower the same Leninist termites. Only the name of the office they work in will be different.

LA replies:

“This bill has been written over the past 40 years. The House leadership didn’t write a bill—they had a coming out party.”

Great line.

“They don’t CARE that the programs don’t work and cost too much. That’s their FUNCTION—to screw things up, more, and more, the worse (for us) the better (for them).”

I again refer to a glimpse I had in the early ’90s in NYC. I was walking in my neighborhood, and thinking of the disorder, the homeless types everywhere, and I said to a friend, “This is not a failure of their program; this is the way they WANT things to be.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 18, 2009 12:02 PM | Send