National Health Insurance by Stealth
This is Kimberley Strassel, writing in today's Wall Street Journal:
Under "stimulus," Medicaid is now on offer not to just poor Americans, but Americans who have lost their jobs. And not just Americans who have lost their jobs, but their spouses and their children. And not Americans who recently lost their jobs, but those who lost jobs, say, early last year. And not just Americans who already lost their jobs, but those who will lose their jobs up to 2011. The federal government is graciously footing the whole bill. The legislation also forbids states to apply income tests in most cases.
As Pete Stark said the other day, the liberals in Congress were able to do more for national health insurance in a few days, than conservative Republicans did for private sector medicine in eight years.
The Republicans are brain dead, Larry. At least the Democrats know what they are doing — bad as that happens to be.
I have to agree with Steve. The Republicans’ 12-year run in Congress started out primarily as a backlash against the 1993-94 Clinton health proposal. Given its origin and duration, the Republican Congress’s failure to enact a workable alternative could be viewed as “meeting the criteria for brain death.”
The end result will be Democrats calling all the shots for the next two years. Since they actually give high priority to health care, this will probably be ample time to do whatever they want. I’ll be extremely surprised if the Senate Republicans have either the clout or the fortitude to carry out a successful filibuster the way they did in 1994.