Make Or Break Health Insurance Bill

If you think this blog is going to get used to call the Senate's pile of steaming crap something good, you need a box of rocks to improve your IQ. It reeks of stupidity and short-sightedness and corporate greed. If health insurance and more largely the health care industry is a vehicle running on four flats this thing amount to airing the tires back up, part way, and maybe patching one. At some point we're going to be back on the rims and grinding them off with the owners of air compressors refusing to let any more air get used. Yes it stinks - yes it needs to be passed.

The reason, and laugh at the we'll fix it rhetoric, is that the alternative is to leave the status quo in place until the wheels fall off and the suffering is sufficient to force the corporate hacks in Congress to do something. That would mean that somewhere approaching half the nation was dying or being bankrupted because only the rich and near rich could afford insurance. That might not be enough...really.

Even the reeking garbage that the Senate passed won't take effect immediately, it sits out there in the future. If you wait out the crash, those already screwed will suffer longer and their numbers will swell and there still is no guarantee. The mess this Congress has been capable of producing will have some palliative effect and guarantees its eventual failure but should demonstrate quite effectively what failure looks like without the long delay. Yes, the enriched groups will have more money for influence but their credence in the argument should be completely undercut.

The Senate is not going to cough up with much to fix the real problems. Some of the egregious junk like the Nelson vote buying will probably get some kind of repair but there is no real will in either the House or the Senate for methods that would affect the spiraling costs and monopolistic practices. Pass this thing because it is all you're going to get and because its built in flaws will force real correction - sometime real late in the game.

I won't bother calling my Rep because Greg Walden (R -OR 02) is as plutocratic and screw the regular guy as it gets... Yours might be a bit more amenable.