Look who voted against the healthcare reform bill in the House, and why!
Rep. Denny Rehberg, who joined all but one of his fellow Republicans in voting "no" Saturday on the major health-reform bill that passed the U.S. House, said the measure is an ill-advised "trillion-dollar government takeover of health care."
I wish!
Wait, there's more!
"I'm standing with Montanans in favor of sensible reforms that don't simply replace insurance bureaucracies with more expensive government bureaucracies," he said.
Rehberg said he supports a Republican alternative proposal rolled out last week that would allow Americans to buy health insurance across state lines, encourage small-business health insurance pools, increase the use of individual health savings accounts and reform medical liability to reduce the cost of medical-malpractice lawsuits.
Okay...two outright falsehoods in those statements. The House bill is definitely anything but a government takeover of healthcare; and insurance bureaucracies are not more expensive than government bureaucracies. In fact, the opposite is, of course, true.
We're in Beck-ian territory here.
As for the Republican proposal, well, I've written about this stuff before, but buying insurance across state lines will only make insurance less reliable, cover fewer conditions, and cause you more out-of-pocket medical costs; small business insurance pools and individual health accounts don't solve the problem of the uninsured; and tort reform doesn't work, doesn't lower healthcare costs, and gives medical professionals a disincentive to give good care.
In these few words, Rehberg illustrates the difficulties facing progressives and reformers who, like me, are not entirely pleased with a healthcare reform bill that preserves the broken-down insurance status quo and essentially bribes the industry to cover the uninsured. On one hand, we need to pressure Democrats into adopting real and effective policies. On the other hand, Republicans -- and Rehberg now, too, apparently -- are entering crazy land. We can't entrust governance to these people. Things were bad enough under the recent Republican hegemony -- widespread corruption, a broken economy, stagnant wages, wars, the politicization of government, illegal domestic spying, torture -- how much worse would things be under lunatic rule? |
