What Are The Republicans For, Anyway?

Pompous John Boehner drives me absolutely nuts. He's incapable of speaking beyond Republican talking points and is an incurable fearmonger. Listening to Pompous John is like hearing fingernails dragged slowly down a blackboard (remember those?). It's beyond me how Obama manages to keep a civil tongue when talking to the man...

Sen. Lamar Alexander put forth the Republican case for health care reform:

• medical malpractice reform
• high-risk insurance pools
• a way for Americans to shop out-of-state for insurance plans
• expansion of health savings accounts

The problem is that implementing all of these will provide insurance to few if any people who don't have it (the CBO estimate is 3,000,ooo people, which isn't very many) and won't make a dent in the costs of health care.

Essentially, it's a nod to the interest groups that fund Republicans. They've long supported malpractice reform as if meaningless lawsuits were clogging the courts and making it impossible for doctors to practice. The problem is that malpractice lawsuit settlements comprise a miniscule amount of the dollars spent on health care, and that wherever it's been tried (Texas, for example), it hasn't had much of an impact other than denying a full measure of justice to some people.

Former Kansas Insurance Commissioner and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius pointed out that many states already have high-risk pools. What happens, Sebelius said, is that the pools herd the very ill into one place where the insurance rates are so high that they place a great burden on the state providing the pool.

Allowing Americans to purchase insurance out-of-state sounds great. Won't it offer great choice and competition that will push rates down? It turns out that what it will do is allow insurance providers to sell their policies from states that don't regulate insurance, meaning that they can raise rates at will while limiting coverage to their hearts content. You know that 39% rate increase requested by a California health insurance company? Let insurers sell across state lines and that will be just the beginning. Boehner claims that this legislation won't require federal regulation, that the "American people" can take care of themselves.

As for the expansion of health savings accounts, I know of no one who opposes it. I also know that we've had them for over six years and that the number of uninsured has gone up...

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) just finished lambasting tort reform with passion and eloquence. I hope someone puts it up on YouTube soon. He's now tearing into the double standard caused by politicians who would deny the same coverage they have to the uninsured...

Obama just made the key point: The Republican plan, whatever its merits, will cover 3,000,000 people. The Democratic plan will cover 30,000,000. Do we as a society, he asked, think it's important to cover all of our people as does every Western nation? If we do, then we have to pay for it...

Who is the Republican idiot blathering about Etch-A-Sketch?...

Same idiot raised the welfare specter. Obama neatly traps him by pointing that the very poor are covered through Medicaid, that it's working people who don't have health insurance. Not that poor people don't work. Jesse Jackson put it far better than I ever could:

Most poor children are neither black nor brown, they're white and they're female. Most poor people are not on welfare, they work every day. They work in fast-food restaurants, they clean hotels, they drive cabs, they do their labor in the dark, they're aides and orderlies in hospitals, they're cooks and janitors at schools, they keep other people's children, and ultimately cannot afford to take care of their own. Often they work in the football and basketball stadiums, selling the soft drinks and refreshments. But they are without health insurance. And they get sick too...

Extreme right-wing Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) claims that tort reform has worked in Texas, the state with the highest number of uninsured and home of the second-most expensive health care market in the country...

Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) makes the correct point that incremental reform will not work because by its nature it can't possibly broaden the pool of insured. At some point, he says, we have to take a big step...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) just argued for scrapping the bill and starting over. Mitch, here's the problem with that: (1) You and your crew will never agree to anything that falls outside of your narrow right-wing ideological limits; (2) I don't believe you. That's right: You and John Boehner and Eric Cantor and every other Republican are lying when you say you'll start over. You are not making the assertion in good faith. If for no other reason, that's why I'm for reconciliation...

Doctor and Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) says that the key goal is to realign purchase with payment. Now there's a campaign slogan...