The Senate vote on Healthcare is over so let the backpedaling begin. Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska took to the air in his home state on Wednesday to try to defend his vote for the Healthcare reform bill. Even though he does not face reelection until 2012, his poll numbers are abysmal and show him losing by a 61 to 30 margin if the election were held today against an opponent who has not even said they are running. The poll also shows Nelson with a 55% generally unfavorable rating and the Democratic healthcare plan he voted for fairs even worse with 64% disapproving of the plan nationwide.
Unfortunately for Nelson, he made his stand on principals over his opposition to the use of public funds for abortion; that is he stood on principals until Harry Reid found out how much money it would take to buy his vote. At least when Mary Landrieu of Louisiana prostituted herself to Harry Reid, her original opposition to the bill was fiscal. Ben can buy all the air time they will give him but no one, particularly Nebraskans, will ever trust a man that can place his ethics up for sale.
When Nelson had stood his ground against the bill and said he would not vote for it unless there were iron-clad protections against the use of public funds for abortion, he had an enormous amount of support back home and many more around the nation lauded his firm stance on a moral issue. After he sold his vote along with his moral objection to abortion, his numbers plummeted. He couldn’t have possibly believed that this back room deal would have remained a secret after similar deals had been made public so why would he take the bait?
Not that I will defend Nelson’s decision for one moment; after all principals are only principals if you stand by them, but there is more to this story than meets the eye. An unnamed member of the White House called Ben Nelson’s office and threatened to have Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base placed on the base closure list if he didn’t play ball. While Nelson says that he knows of no such threat, credible sources say that the threat was indeed made. Nelson was probably faced with the limited options of either voting for the bill and receiving a cash benefit of reduced Medicaid liabilities for his State or voting against the bill and having major military installations in Nebraska shut down as well as being ostracized within the Democratic Party; never being able to advance another piece of legislation in the Senate again.
Even though Nelson will have to pay the price with his constituents for folding on his convictions, we should not forget the corrupt machine that threatened him to accept the bribe that bought his vote or else. The “horse trading”, as the Washington wonks like to call it, has been brought under extreme criticism of late for the shameless way it has been used to secure the votes of Congressmen that were not even given an opportunity to read the current version being crafted by Harry Reid and the White House. The argument that this is how business in Washington has always been done is only drawing heavier fire as many more demand the President keep his campaign promise that the days of “business as usual” would be over under his administration. He promised that as President, he would not sign any legislation that was laced with pork barrel spending. Well he has already signed a number of bills saturated with pork and every indication we have is that he intends to go right on signing them as long as he gets what he wants.
What the White House and the Democratic leadership fails to grasp is that Americans are not only unwilling to accept “business as usual” from their elected “agent of change” but that they are particularly disgusted with the heavy handed tactics that this administration has used to advance its agenda. What we have witnessed in the past few months of the healthcare debate is what we would have expected if America had lost its mind in the 1930’s and drafted Al Capone as President. The administration and the Democratic leadership have been caught telling outright lies about the insane costs and negative effects of the healthcare bill. Their only strategy is to silence their opposition by any means necessary and to continue to tell the same lies hoping that if people hear them often enough, they will begin to believe them. Did I say Al Capone? Maybe I should have said Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joe Goebbels.
I would almost bet that Ben Nelson is not airing his ads explaining his vote and boasting about the benefits of the healthcare bill to boost his own sagging poll numbers but rather it is probably part of the deal he cut with Harry Reid. It seems to me that Reid would have demanded that since Nelson voiced such serious concerns about the bill that he must now publically support the bill to counter that. I guess they haven’t seen one of the more recent polls that place America’s trust in Congress lower than that of used car salesmen. They can take out all the ads they want but it will not improve the poll numbers in support of healthcare reform because an overwhelming number of Americans no longer trust the messengers.
With Congressional approval flat at 25% and a staggering 69% saying that they overwhelmingly disapprove of the job Congress is doing, there doesn’t appear to be a lot that Congress has done to impress anyone. In fact, the healthcare bill has an awful lot to do with those numbers as the 64% of Americans that oppose the reform legislation racing through the Congress are angry at being ignored by the people that were elected to represent them. Congress had an opportunity to not only improve their standing with the American public but of the public perception of the Healthcare bill itself and they blew it. The forced votes and closed door meetings only reinforced the idea that the bill contains little that is not detrimental to the quality or cost of care for the average American or it would have been debated and amended in the kind of public process Obama promised us.
Let’s face it; they spent nearly two months arguing over how many Americans were actually uninsured. First it was forty-seven million but then we found out that figure included millions of illegal immigrants. Once the illegal immigrants were excluded because of a public outcry, it dropped to thirty million. Even then, there were a large number of people that had access to healthcare insurance that simply decided not to obtain insurance. Some because they were young and did not see the need for it and others because they made the choice to spend that money in other areas of their lives that were more important to them at that moment. To this day, the reported number of uninsured Americans fluctuates wildly between fifteen and fifty million which only adds to the uncertainty Americans have regarding the total cost of this monstrosity.
The proponents of healthcare reform said that all must be covered arguing that the uninsured simply use the emergency room system for care and then disappear, leaving the bills unpaid. They claimed that providing coverage for those people would drive the overall cost of care down for everyone. Really? That is like trying to say that it would be cheaper to buy an entire wardrobe for someone because once in a while they may shoplift a shirt or two. I’m just not sure how to make those numbers work? A $15 dollar shirt and maybe you can add another $3 to the cost for loss prevention weighed against an annual government expenditure of $500 to $1000 for a whole wardrobe paid for by the taxpayer. Hmmm…..I still don’t see where this strategy lowers cost for the people that actually buy their own clothes. It would seem to me that the tax liability for the average American would far outweigh the price increase the store would charge to absorb the loss of that $18 shirt.
I know healthcare is far more complex than that and I am not saying that the theft of healthcare services is not a major problem; I concede that it is. I just don’t think we are looking in the right places to find those creepy thieves. Overall, the largest thief of health services is perpetrated by the Federal government. The Federal government routinely short-pays doctors and hospitals to the point where it is increasingly difficult to find a doctor that will even accept Medicare or Medicaid patients. Sure there are some uninsured that seek services in a hospital emergency room and skip out on a bill of a few thousand dollars but turn that into the systematic looting of health services by cutting the reimbursement rates government is willing to pay for the care of millions and that represents a catastrophic loss that this bill only promises to exacerbate.
Go ahead Ben, air your ads and make your case. No one believes this bill will do any of what the President has promised it will do and Nebraskans will not believe that you affected any meaningful change to the bill that suddenly made it better for your State or for the nation as a whole. The only thing we know for certain is that you sold your vote to Harry Reid along with the few remaining scraps of your integrity that were left after spending two terms in the Senate Brothel
Paul.
Unfortunately for Nelson, he made his stand on principals over his opposition to the use of public funds for abortion; that is he stood on principals until Harry Reid found out how much money it would take to buy his vote. At least when Mary Landrieu of Louisiana prostituted herself to Harry Reid, her original opposition to the bill was fiscal. Ben can buy all the air time they will give him but no one, particularly Nebraskans, will ever trust a man that can place his ethics up for sale.
When Nelson had stood his ground against the bill and said he would not vote for it unless there were iron-clad protections against the use of public funds for abortion, he had an enormous amount of support back home and many more around the nation lauded his firm stance on a moral issue. After he sold his vote along with his moral objection to abortion, his numbers plummeted. He couldn’t have possibly believed that this back room deal would have remained a secret after similar deals had been made public so why would he take the bait?
Not that I will defend Nelson’s decision for one moment; after all principals are only principals if you stand by them, but there is more to this story than meets the eye. An unnamed member of the White House called Ben Nelson’s office and threatened to have Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base placed on the base closure list if he didn’t play ball. While Nelson says that he knows of no such threat, credible sources say that the threat was indeed made. Nelson was probably faced with the limited options of either voting for the bill and receiving a cash benefit of reduced Medicaid liabilities for his State or voting against the bill and having major military installations in Nebraska shut down as well as being ostracized within the Democratic Party; never being able to advance another piece of legislation in the Senate again.
Even though Nelson will have to pay the price with his constituents for folding on his convictions, we should not forget the corrupt machine that threatened him to accept the bribe that bought his vote or else. The “horse trading”, as the Washington wonks like to call it, has been brought under extreme criticism of late for the shameless way it has been used to secure the votes of Congressmen that were not even given an opportunity to read the current version being crafted by Harry Reid and the White House. The argument that this is how business in Washington has always been done is only drawing heavier fire as many more demand the President keep his campaign promise that the days of “business as usual” would be over under his administration. He promised that as President, he would not sign any legislation that was laced with pork barrel spending. Well he has already signed a number of bills saturated with pork and every indication we have is that he intends to go right on signing them as long as he gets what he wants.
What the White House and the Democratic leadership fails to grasp is that Americans are not only unwilling to accept “business as usual” from their elected “agent of change” but that they are particularly disgusted with the heavy handed tactics that this administration has used to advance its agenda. What we have witnessed in the past few months of the healthcare debate is what we would have expected if America had lost its mind in the 1930’s and drafted Al Capone as President. The administration and the Democratic leadership have been caught telling outright lies about the insane costs and negative effects of the healthcare bill. Their only strategy is to silence their opposition by any means necessary and to continue to tell the same lies hoping that if people hear them often enough, they will begin to believe them. Did I say Al Capone? Maybe I should have said Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joe Goebbels.
I would almost bet that Ben Nelson is not airing his ads explaining his vote and boasting about the benefits of the healthcare bill to boost his own sagging poll numbers but rather it is probably part of the deal he cut with Harry Reid. It seems to me that Reid would have demanded that since Nelson voiced such serious concerns about the bill that he must now publically support the bill to counter that. I guess they haven’t seen one of the more recent polls that place America’s trust in Congress lower than that of used car salesmen. They can take out all the ads they want but it will not improve the poll numbers in support of healthcare reform because an overwhelming number of Americans no longer trust the messengers.
With Congressional approval flat at 25% and a staggering 69% saying that they overwhelmingly disapprove of the job Congress is doing, there doesn’t appear to be a lot that Congress has done to impress anyone. In fact, the healthcare bill has an awful lot to do with those numbers as the 64% of Americans that oppose the reform legislation racing through the Congress are angry at being ignored by the people that were elected to represent them. Congress had an opportunity to not only improve their standing with the American public but of the public perception of the Healthcare bill itself and they blew it. The forced votes and closed door meetings only reinforced the idea that the bill contains little that is not detrimental to the quality or cost of care for the average American or it would have been debated and amended in the kind of public process Obama promised us.
Let’s face it; they spent nearly two months arguing over how many Americans were actually uninsured. First it was forty-seven million but then we found out that figure included millions of illegal immigrants. Once the illegal immigrants were excluded because of a public outcry, it dropped to thirty million. Even then, there were a large number of people that had access to healthcare insurance that simply decided not to obtain insurance. Some because they were young and did not see the need for it and others because they made the choice to spend that money in other areas of their lives that were more important to them at that moment. To this day, the reported number of uninsured Americans fluctuates wildly between fifteen and fifty million which only adds to the uncertainty Americans have regarding the total cost of this monstrosity.
The proponents of healthcare reform said that all must be covered arguing that the uninsured simply use the emergency room system for care and then disappear, leaving the bills unpaid. They claimed that providing coverage for those people would drive the overall cost of care down for everyone. Really? That is like trying to say that it would be cheaper to buy an entire wardrobe for someone because once in a while they may shoplift a shirt or two. I’m just not sure how to make those numbers work? A $15 dollar shirt and maybe you can add another $3 to the cost for loss prevention weighed against an annual government expenditure of $500 to $1000 for a whole wardrobe paid for by the taxpayer. Hmmm…..I still don’t see where this strategy lowers cost for the people that actually buy their own clothes. It would seem to me that the tax liability for the average American would far outweigh the price increase the store would charge to absorb the loss of that $18 shirt.
I know healthcare is far more complex than that and I am not saying that the theft of healthcare services is not a major problem; I concede that it is. I just don’t think we are looking in the right places to find those creepy thieves. Overall, the largest thief of health services is perpetrated by the Federal government. The Federal government routinely short-pays doctors and hospitals to the point where it is increasingly difficult to find a doctor that will even accept Medicare or Medicaid patients. Sure there are some uninsured that seek services in a hospital emergency room and skip out on a bill of a few thousand dollars but turn that into the systematic looting of health services by cutting the reimbursement rates government is willing to pay for the care of millions and that represents a catastrophic loss that this bill only promises to exacerbate.
Go ahead Ben, air your ads and make your case. No one believes this bill will do any of what the President has promised it will do and Nebraskans will not believe that you affected any meaningful change to the bill that suddenly made it better for your State or for the nation as a whole. The only thing we know for certain is that you sold your vote to Harry Reid along with the few remaining scraps of your integrity that were left after spending two terms in the Senate Brothel
Paul.
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