Posted by
Bill Crawford on Tuesday, December 22, 2009 12:23:56 PM
The new world is almost upon us. Don't kid yourself, folks, the Democrats have the numbers, and they all know that they have a rough year coming. They think that their only hope of averting a Hurricane Katrina election is to stand on their new, great health care accomplishment.
In light of that, the recalcitrants in the House and the Senate took their bribes like men and will actually be surprised next spring when their retribution will hit them in the primaries AND the election cycle. The Senate/ House reconciliation process will not be the circus that some are predicting. Read the tea leaves, folks: it was harder to get it through the Senate because of the 60 vote cloture rules, so the House will swallow the Senate version almost whole. They need this package to be signed before the state of the union speech in late January.
I say, let it ride. It's easy for me to say that, I am in a position of total powerlessness. When the ridiculous parade of town hall meetings passed and the Democrats proceeded as if they never happened (it was all contrived "astroturf"), I knew it was all about whatever numbers the Democrats could put together.
They pass it off as deficit neutral. They start charging taxes for it next year, but hold off most of it's benefits until 2014, which helps the projected numbers for the first ten years. Wait, it gets better: the projections call for Congress to cut Medicare by almost $500B in the next ten years. What are the chances they will actually follow through with that?
Medicare and Medicaid are already paying 70-80% of normal fee for services. That, folks, is not 70% of what the doctors think they should. It is 70% of what Medicare thinks they should be paying. It is a fraction of a fraction, already! Congress is promising to cut back from that.
Who makes up the difference, so doctors and hospitals continue to treat seniors? All workers with health insurance. We are subsidizing the government, and now the govrnment wants to expand this lunacy to the entire health care sector of the economy.
This is where the Democrats are mistaken. Their worst nightmare in 2010 comes if they actually pass this thing. They are so focused on this that they don't see the downside. This is what happens when you are led by a Congresswoman from San Francisco, or a President who was in national office for fifteen months when he decided to run for the White House.
There will be hell to pay if this passes. The same groundswell that the Democrats are passing off as fringe lunatics and the media is doing their best to ignore will bite them in the butt next year.
Both groups make the same mistake: they look at the uprising as a Republican obstruction, when it really is a more generic, anti-government thing. They are both so myopic at this point that they may never make the distinction.