Health Wars (9/29/09)

Y'know, it may be that Barack Obama squandered his natural talents on politics.  If he'd pursued a career in medicine, he'd have made a heckuva proctologist:

One of President Barack Obama’s health care “horror stories” is about a woman who, he says, lost her health insurance on the verge of breast cancer surgery because she didn’t disclose a case of acne to the insurer. That’s not what happened.

Robin Lynn Beaton, 59, of Waxahachie, Texas, indeed had her insurance suspended and then terminated when she needed it the most. Hers is a cautionary tale about how an insurance company can act in a seemingly arbitrary manner to revoke coverage for lifesaving treatment.

But not for the reasons Obama cites.

She “was about to get a double mastectomy when her insurance company canceled her policy because she forgot to declare a case of acne,” he said in one telling.

Beaton did not lose her insurance because she failed to own up to a skin problem in her past. She lost it because, when enrolling in the plan, she had not reported a previous heart condition and did not list her weight accurately.

Would somebody explain to me why his anecdote would have been mitigated to any persuasive degree by simply telling the truth about this woman's story?  It's not like the heart condition and her breast cancer were related, after all, and her congressman (Joe Barton - a Republican, as it happens) did bludgeon her insurance carrier with the pandering threat of national vilification if they didn't reinstate her coverage.  It still would have had most of its intended oomph, and there'd even have been a chance to tip the hat in a gesture of bipartisanship to boot.

Instead, the Li'l President lies.  Badly.  Again.

C'mon, Barry, acne?  Who'd you think was going to buy that crap?  This is why Hopenchange has necrotized into Nope & Cringe.  If pretty much everything you say is not true, what reason do people who aren't your Borgified cultists have to pay attention to a word you say?

It's like the old axiom goes: What you are speaks so loudly, there's not a big enough diaper on the planet to catch it all.

~  ~  ~

While Dr. Chicago mumbles to himself, Senate Obamunists prepare their caucus's public option kamikaze run:

Two members of the Senate Finance Committee plan to put their Democratic colleagues on the spot on Tuesday by offering amendments on whether to give uninsured Americans the opportunity to join a government insurance program.

While health care reform legislation in the House and an alternate plan in the Senate have included a so-called “public option,” the Finance Committee’s version, which Republicans haven’t rejected completely, has not included a government-sponsored provision.

Senators Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Chuck Schumer of New York planned to offer the amendments last week before the action was delayed.

The likely effect?  Chaos:

Schumer and Rockefeller threaten to pull the string on an elaborate work-around by Baucus to gain the most amount of support possible for health-care reform, and it will unravel the effort.  Not only will all Republicans oppose any bill that includes a public option, but a number of Democrats will also flee.  Red-state Democrats such as Ben Nelson (NE), Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor (AR), and even Kent Conrad (ND) have already expressed deep misgivings about that approach and favor a different mechanism.

Remember when BaucusCare was the "centrist" bill?  So "centrist" and such a "compromise" that first Chuck Grassley, then Mike Enzi, and finally even Olympia Snowe walked away, taking the last bipartisan fig leaves with them?  And then Baucus was dragged leftward with more mandates and more taxes and more subsidies that inflated his BarryCare incarnation's costs, the original limiting of which was its raison d'etere?  And now Chucky and Rocky prepare to place the finishing touches on BaucusCare's assimilation, in the process guaranteeing that no cloture vote or reconciliation attempt will come close to the sixty votes needed to ram through any version of BarryCare.

I'm telling ya, folks, this isn't about passing a bill now, it's about laying the groundwork for running the biggest, meanest, most despicable scorched earth Democrat congressional campaign yet portraying the GOP as the "party of American genocide" for having "denied Americans health care."

To which the only rational response is: Bring...it....on.

And pass the popcorn, 'cause this is gonna be more fun than a barrel of Obama camp fire stories.