Rick Raw: Health Care Bill Doomed by Defections–Bill Loses Its 60 Votes to Pass

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net

The Health Care Bill is in deep dung. The voluminous 2,000 page compendium of bureaucratic gibberish was met with nasty opposition by most of the Senate body.

The Swine on the Hill scoffed at its 2 trillion cost, the abortion issue, and the dreaded "public option." Now the bill has lost its 60 votes to pass it without Republican support. Conservative Democrats are defecting, saying the bill should be shelved until late next year.

Fear of voter reprisals at the ballot box is driving the lawmakers to address the abysmal job market and high unemployment as their most important priorities, as well as the contentious war in Afghanistan. Perhaps, Republican Leader Mitch McConnell was right when he suggested that health care reform should be accompished in incremental steps, rather than one big bloated bill. Well, it made sense to me.

Who knows what hellish beasts are lurking in the 2,000 pages of the bill. Taking $500 billion from Medicare to help cover the bill’s $2 trillion cost is enough for me to declare the bill a Trojan horse in last week’s Rick Raw.

The measures to pay for this bill are vague and unrealistic. We just can’t afford to add another $2 trillion to the rapidly increasing national debt. The clock’s lower digits are spinning so fast it’s a blur. I posted the National Debt Clock as a reminder of how deep we are sinking in the red.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. is still fighting for the passage of the bill, which is sinking faster than Jay Leno’s ratings. Reid is prepared to go down with the ship. He has no clear channel to steer the legislation through Congress to President Obama’s desk. Losing the 60 votes is the death-knell of the bill for the time being.

Don’t get me wrong, I agree that we desperately need health care reform, but this bill stinks like rotten pork. It would create a massive new bureaucracy like the IRS, which would cost hundreds of millions of dollars just to administrate each year, and that’s on top of the initial cost of the bill.

Worse still, the bulbous bill will not lower health care costs. In fact, most experts who have actually read this tome say that health care costs would go up if the bill is passed. My health insurance has already gone up substantially. How would I benefit from so called reform when I’d have to spend more money on health care? It hurts so good!

The main bugaboos are the divisive abortion funding and the public option, which would certainly have to change to get the bill passed. Moderate Democrats say they can’t support the bill without these specific major changes. Senator Reid’s position is weakening with fewer Senators backing his Health Care Bill agenda.

The bill is hopelessly bogged down in committee debate and more amendments are expected. The immediate future of this Albatross is dismal and will require many more months of trimming–maybe a year of fixing.

I say scrap the bill now and explore Mitch McConnell’s plan of a step by step approach. The $2 trillion we’ve spent on bailouts and stimulus packages boggles my mind. Then we have the Afghan War which is draining the Treasury of billions of dollars every month.

Indeed, I used to think a million dollars was a lot of money and a trillion dollars was beyond my brain’s capability to grasp exactly how much dinero that is. Now, the Swine on the Hill are throwing out the term "trillions of dollars" like it was nothing. Hell, at this rate, our country is on the brink of being owned by foreign interests that become our slave masters to debt.