SUTIBLE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

So we now have health care reform legislation that provides for many good things in the effort to make health care accessible and a right for every American. The corporate sock puppets of the Republican Party continue to rail against it and have made destroying the reform an article of faith. Because blind, lock-step opposition to any program proposed by Democrats, especially President Obama, is the litmus test that every Republican must pass, those Republicans bent on keeping their positions (vide David Frum and the American Enterprise Institute) or advancing scramble to find ways to ingratiate themselves with the looniest, neo-fascist mob members (e.g. The Tea Party Movement) while simultaneously supplicating themselves to their corporate oligarch masters.

In my home state of Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna wants to be governor some day. He is a Republican who has rather good moderate, centrist credentials. Those are exactly the kind of credentials that will keep him from ever winning a Republican primary while Fox News is marshaling the Tea Party zombies. So McKenna has joined a gaggle of Republican Attorneys General who are suing to declare a key provision of the health care reform bill unconstitutional. The Provision they have chosen to attack is the mandate that individuals must buy private medical insurance.

First off, let me state that I think that McKenna is not just positioning himself to be acceptable to the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of the Republican Party. I think he's positioning himself as one of the adults in the case and trying to form a plausible legal argument while the neo-fascists from other states blather about nonsense on which even Antonin Scalia and his ventriloquist's dummy, Clarence Thomas, will be unable to hang a favorable decision.

After listening to a rather detailed interview with McKenna I suspect that he may be able to fashion a winning argument, one, at least, that will get a 5 to 4 decision striking down the mandate to purchase private medical insurance. In the time that it will take to get this suit to a Supreme Court decision many things will happen not least of which may be a new Justice on the bench. Some of the events intervening include the multiple provisions of the law that directly affect the lives of a majority of citizens, provisions such as students remaining on their parents' health insurance plans, a halt to recensions of health insurance coverage for the ill and a prohibition on denials of medical insurance for preexisting conditions, first for children. As those provisions take effect more and more people will come to like and depend on the reform law. Therefore, when and if the Attorneys General and Sonny Purdue's special hit man get a decision in their favor, the reform bill unravels and health care unravels.

Yet the reform will then have a constituency, a big constituency. Despite the false claims that the neo-fascists are not attacking the positive provisions of the bill, they will have done it in...not. Rob McKenna and the whole neo-fascist crew he's courting have gambled their entire future on destroying health care reform. They learned nothing whatever from running headlong into an epic defeat in Congress. Worse, even if they had the capacity to learn, their constituents, both the oligarchs and the mindless rabble, will not let them act on that learning.

The economy is improving. Better yet, the perception that the economy is improving grows stronger daily. As the economy improves President Obama and the Democrats gain strength because they gain the argument that the Republicans destroyed the economy and the Democrats saved it. If that perception continues into November and the Republicans keep goose-stepping rightward, the Democrats may retain their legislative majorities or even increase them.

So we get to the 112th Congress in January, 2011. The Democrats retain majorities in both houses of Congress perhaps even sending Scott Brown back to his pickup truck in Massachusetts and the health care reforms now have a clear majority of Americans pleased with the outcome. McKenna and the other ultra-rightist Attorneys General remove the only provision that guarantees insurance coverage to all Americans. The result might very well be the longed for and much more sensible "single-payer option" probably achieved through a universalization and broad expansion of Medicare. Thus McKenna and the loony ultra-right may achieve for us of the left what we could not achieve without their mindless opposition.

Should my preferred outcome manifest itself, look for Rob McKenna to claim credit. We already know that Republicans are more craven than your average politician in leaping, as if they were playing jump-rope, from one side of an issue to the other. I expect that Rob McKenna will try to salvage his political career in Washington by claiming that he knew it all along, that he guided the law suit specifically so that the courts would force Congress to enact the single-payer option.

A lot of speculative events would have to combine to bring about the result I've outlined but in the interim we have already had the insurance companies working hard to make our arguments for us. You see, one of the primary arguments for a government run, single-payer health plan was that it created competition for the insurance companies and forced better behavior on those insurers. Of course, the neo-fascist defenders of "free market" economics suddenly argued that in this one case competition would destroy rather than improve the market. Right-wing fanatics have never had a problem with being on both sides of an issue at once. Still, the brazenness of the insurance companies hasn't been on more transparent display than when, less than a week following signing of the health care reform legislation, they decided that they had found a semantic, quasi-legal way to circumvent the provision that they must cover children - in case you did not catch that: CHILDREN - with pre-existing medical conditions. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sibelius, quickly issued a directive that the evasion that the insurers proposed using was not only incorrect but would result in vigorous opposition from DHHS. Yet the insurers in this announcement clarified the impression that they will not accept reform quietly and are working overtime to find ways to circumvent the reforms. So much for the arguments from the American Enterprise Institute and insurance trade groups that they need no oversight or competition to enforce their providing high quality medical insurance coverage.

So cautiously I look forward to insurance executives' greed, right-wing fanaticism, and mindless opposition to any Democratic proposals creating the atmosphere in which government run health care with not only be inevitable but popular and enacted into law.

Speaking Volumes

During the summer of 2009 we were beset by a collection of charlatans, dupes and dunces shouting, "Read the bill," at town hall meetings held to discuss health care reform. The charlatans knew, the dupes didn't know and the dunces were to stupid to care that there was no one bill to read.

Now we have the Congressional Republicans introducing a 200 page health care reform bill and touting it as a work of exceptional brilliance when contrasted with the majority Democrats' bill that is some 1900 and more pages long. This is the same mentality that equates reading the Cliff's Notes of War and Peace with reading the entire novel. It is great for the dunces whose attention spans are shorter than the life of most subatomic particles. But there's an adage that, I think, applies here: you get what you pay for.

So why would a bill hovering in the range of 2000 pages be so large and another bill purporting to do the same thing be one-tenth that size?

First, let's consider that health care and related industries represents somewhere between 30 and 35 per cent of the American economy. The Republicans will tell you that in ominous tones as if that much of the nation's economy were about to be murdered. So, let me ask you, would you like about a third of the nation's economy considered carefully and in detail or would something that is, by contrast, scribbled on the back of an envelope be equally good?

Second, there is the long, arduous effort that Democrats have made to consider and include Republican ideas where they have been offered in a cooperative spirit. Not just this year but over the last thirty years Democrats have made sincere efforts to overcome objections by Republicans even when, as now, the objections are simply hysterical and obstructionist. Currying favor with senators like Olympia Snow of Maine has added bulk to a health care overhaul.

Third, the stated goals of health care reform are to extend coverage to all Americans, improve health in the population as a whole and control the run-away inflation of health care costs while not reducing the coverage enjoyed by anyone who currently has health insurance. Achieving those goals requires some careful consideration of the effects of reform on private insurance plans, on Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans and Indian Health Services, military medical care, private for profit and non-profit medical facilities, health care cooperatives, HMOs, the Federal prison system and 50 states and additional territories and their state and state licensed health care systems and providers. The dunces, dupes and charlatans may clamour for something that their tiny minds and blinkered visions can encompass, but I for one think it's a very good idea that there be a great volume of paper in a bill that has attempted to consider all the implications of reform on these systems.

The point is that a 200 page bill is not a serious consideration of health care reform. It cannot possibly be such. Yet to the dunces, that segment of the population that the great H. L. Mencken aptly called the "booboisie", are ready to surrender themselves to something that is a sham simple version of health care reform in the same way that they surrendered themselves to a sham common man and genuine simpleton in George W. Bush. They take the absurd position that something one-tenth the size must be better than the larger version.

Even these booboisie could figure out that a box containing 20 ounces of corn flakes is a better deal than one containing 2 ounces if both are priced the same but when it comes to a bill in Congress they clamour for the short weight that short changes them.

But that's not the only issue with volumes currently in the news.

Sarah Palin has uh...written a...book. Her biography is a hot item on Amazon despite its being weeks from actual release. There may actually be some fun in reading whatever the ghostwriter recruited by Palin's handlers has put together but for it to be a best seller even before publication raises my eyebrows and probably ought to raise yours.

Let me pull out an incident from my long memory to contrast a little here.

Back in 1988 and 1989 there was a scandal involving House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas. It seems that Speaker Wright had actually written a slim book. Not many people were clamouring for copies for some friends of Wright's bought some copies in bulk. Those friends freely admitted that they were attempting to help Wright finance his campaigns for his seat in the House of Representatives. They were using the book purchases as a subterfuge meant to evade campaign finance limits. This scandal caused Wright to resign his seat in May, 1989.

Given the paucity of ideas rattling around in the space between Sarah Palin's ears, perhaps someone ought to look into the sales of her book. Perhaps some of the neo-fascist plutocrats that regularly hire amiable dunces as political fronts for their rapacity are buying cases of the Palin book for kindling in their ski lodges or hunting camps. Their bulk purchases could be seen as political contributions except for one thing. Governor Palin isn't governor any longer, is she?

Everyone was puzzled by the dramatic resignation of Palin as Alaska governor last summer. Puzzled, that is, unless they were just a little bit cynical and were thinking like trailer trash. You see, Sarah Palin is not now running for anything. She can rake in all the cash she wants without violating anything but reason and decency before she declares herself a candidate for something like president of these here United States of America. Had she remained governor of Alaska to the end of her term she would have been that much poorer and have had about a year and a half less to suck at the teat of embarassingly large private neo-fascist fortunes.

In the one case we have the dumbing down of complex issues seen as a positive thing by the boboisie that the forms the Republicans base and in the other we have the very personification of that dumbed down booboisie pretending to be a bestselling author...with a little help from her neo-fascist friends. It's an apotheosis of ignorance that speaks volumes about the Republicans and their base, you betcha.