Tuesday, January 26, 2010

RIP: Health Care Reform 2009-2010.

Well, it wasn't even that much fun while it lasted...
A supermajority really isn't very super or much of a majority at all when it's led by Democrats, is it?
Republicans walked in lockstep with every disasterous decision Bush/Cheney dreamed up. Democrats couldn't even hold together to pass their signature issue. And now they can't even carry Massachusetts.
Out with a whimper instead of a bang...

With no clear path forward on major health care
legislation, Democratic leaders in Congress effectively slammed the brakes on President Obama’s top
domestic priority on Tuesday, saying that they no longer felt pressure to move
quickly on a health bill after eight months of setting deadlines and missing
them.
The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat
of Nevada, deflected questions about health care. “We’re not on health care
now,” he said. “We’ve talked a lot about it in the past.” He added, “There is no
rush,” and noted that Congress still had most of this year to work on the health
bills passed in 2009 by the Senate and the House.
Mr. Reid
said that he and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of
California, were working to map out a way to complete a health care overhaul in
coming months. “There are a number of options being discussed,” Mr. Reid said,
emphasizing “procedural aspects” of the issue.
At the same
time, two centrist Democratic senators who are up for re-election this year,
Blanche L. Lincoln of Arkansas and Evan Bayh of Indiana,
said that they would resist efforts to muscle through a health care bill using a
parliamentary tactic called budget reconciliation, which seemed to be the
simplest way to advance the measure.
The White House has said
in recent days that it would support that approach.
Some Democrats said that they did not expect any
action on health care legislation until late February at earliest, perhaps after
Congress returns from a weeklong recess. But the Democrats stand to lose
momentum, and every day closer to the November election that the issue remains
unresolved may reduce the chances of passing a far-reaching bill.
Wednesday is the State of the Union address. President Obama hoped to be able to trumpet credible health care reform in his speech.
Rewrite!
The state of the union? #@&%$!

BeltwayBlips: vote it up!
allvoices

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

During his campaign Obama had no clear vision of what the reform would be. That was Hillary's to own with a clear consise single payor platform. Obama's failure to understand that true reform has no middle ground is literally killing people. Hillary understood and articulated that its either single payor for all or failure. Hurts me to say it but I am starting to think that Hillary was probably the "right man for the job".

TBLMISBT

JohnnyRussia said...

Health care reform's selling point--it's tag line--should have been "Medicare for all." And Obama should have been preaching it from the rooftops.