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GOP Ghosts Rise Up for Health Care

Posted by ROBERT STEIN in Health, Politics.
Oct 8th, 2009 | Comments

In time for Halloween, Republican specters are rising up to scare some sense into their Congressional heirs as they move zombielike toward a possible pyrrhic victory in the hope that poll numbers “may get worse for Democrats if they pass a health-care bill.”

That prediction is the wisdom according to Karl Rove, who engineered the party’s 2006 loss, but older and wiser Republican heads are emerging to warn against the short-term politics of being intractable on what all sides agree is a critical issue.

Former presidential candidate and Senate Leader Bob Dole tells an audience, “This is one of the most important measures members of Congress will vote on in their lifetimes. If we don’t do it this year I don’t know when we’re going to do it” as he and another GOP Senate Leader Howard Baker prepare to join Tom Daschle in a statement urging passage of a bill.

This comes after still another Republican Senate Leader and physician, Bill Frist, tells CNN that he supports Sen. Olympia Snowe’s trigger proposal for a public option in the legislation.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is among the still-active Republicans who have come out in recent days for some bipartisan sanity…

Read the rest of this entry.

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Father_Time

It's good to pass a healthcare reform bill, but none of this will effectively address cost. Cost is the problem. I don't think competition can be introduced in any meaningful manor either.

Total and complete National "single payer" healthcare will be the only answer in the end. Some things are just intimately within the purview of government. I believe healthcare is proving to be one of them. The high cost of healthcare is merely a prime example of government not providing for the welfare of the people as is stipulated within the Constitution.

Mainland Europe provides perfect examples for cost effective national healthcare systems that work just fine. The United States government will have to Nationalize medicine and force costs, and, salaries, to about European levels. I just don’t see any other way to get everybody in America proper healthcare as is the case in all other modern nations. Not doing so long ago was obviously a big mistake considering the mess we are in now.

I could care less about the insurance industry, but if health insurance sellers want to sell insurance policies to Americans then they can compete with European private insurance companies here in the U.S., with the invitation and admission of European insurance companies to do business within the United States. As it stands now, private European health insurance companies are Trade-Blocked.

Really I don’t think American based insurance companies want any competition. With this in mind I like Speaker Pelosi’s,“Windfall Tax”, idea imposed on American health insurance companies as an immediate revenue recovery initiative. It’s a good idea and if you think about it, we really should take back what the insurance industry has stolen from us. Especially now when we need it most.

tidbits

It just gets curiouser and curiouser.

Who, if any, may consider following the advice of Dole, Frist and the Arnold, other than Snowe?

DLS

The Dem desperation and worse is far from over, even if the surprisingly less-disastrous fiscal report on the Baucus bill did bring some relief and encouragement to them, and review material for non-lib-Dems.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitol-briefi...

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