I know I’m not the only one, but I’ve sounded like a broken record all week, repeating “I can’t wrap my brain around what just happened,” over and over again. Like so many others have said, I should have known that Stupak and his gang were always going to support health care. But I found solace in statements by people much smarter than me, like Karl Rove, who thought that the emphasis on abortion was one way for Democrats to withdraw their support for the bill — either out of genuine concern for the few more conservative-leaning Dems worried about the course it would put the country on or out of self-serving concerns over their own political future.
But there I was on Sunday evening, watching the votes come in in disbelief. Since then, like so many Americans, I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what is in this bill. By now, we’re all familiar with the debate over the true cost of the bill, the double-counting, the Madoff-type accounting, as Karl Rove labelled it during his debate with David Plouffe on This Week this past Sunday. But, new facts seem to coming out about this bill daily. A good example is the surfacing of the fact that our new health care reform doesn’t cover children with preexisting conditions, despite President Obama’s assertion to the contrary yesterday. Also, if you’re worried about how states will fund a surge in the number of people dependent on Medicaid, when they already face huge deficits with decreased revenues and no relief in sight, you probably can already guess what Dems’ answer to this problem will be — more bailouts, more money, more dependence on the all-powerful federal government and a continuing erosion of states’ rights.
I’ve heard some references to conservatives’ overly inflamed rhetoric when it comes to this issue. I don’t think one can emphasize enough how far-reaching the consequences of this kind of irresponsible accounting and spending will be — and that doesn’t even begin to touch on how our health care system as we know it will be affected.
And at the end of the day, the level of power this bill allows the federal government to have over all of us is unprecedented and dangerous. This quote from a law professor sums it up better than I can.
“If Congress can require you to buy health insurance because of the ways in which your uncovered existence (affects) interstate commerce or because it can tax you in an effort to force you to do (any) old thing it wants you to, it is hard to see what — save some other constitutional restriction — it cannot require you to do — or prohibit you from doing.“
It is this sentiment that has left me with a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach all week long. More reactions to specifics in the bill to come…
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