Snowe Job

How Senate Democrats Capitulated on Principles to Get a Meaningless Vote. 

In the end they didn’t even need Olympia Snowe’s vote. The Senate Finance Committee passed the Baucus Healthcare Reform Bill 14 to 9. Snowe’s “yes” vote, it turns out, was window dressing. The Democrats had enough votes to pass it without her. To court her approval and call the bill “bipartisan” the Democrats scuttled every meaningful initiative such as the public option, employer mandates, meaningful penalties for people who fail to buy insurance, and allowed for up to 17 million people to be without coverage, not to mention no cap on insurance premiums, meaning that insurance companies are now free to pass along the added costs to their customers. All that for one lone Republican vote. Jon Stewart summed it up best. “So her vote made it 14 to 9 instead of 13 to 10? They didn’t even need her vote? Well good thing they gutted the whole f*****g bill!” And you wonder why Washington is broken? 

Never has a political party with so much leverage acted so sheepishly in the midst of such a national dilemma. With millions of its citizens priced out of affordable healthcare and millions more precariously under-insured, the Senate Finance Committee acted more like a teenage boy trying to woo a teenage girl to a prom dance than a deliberative body taking on a serious challenge to our nation’s well being. 

“Will you go out to the prom with me, will ya, please? What’s that, not unless I wear that light-blue geeky suit that everybody makes fun of and throws fruit at? Well OK, but only if you let me give you a goodnight kiss. What’s that, only on the cheek? Well, OK! And we’re really not going steady, you say? OK, I can handle that.” 

And while it is true that the Baucus bill will be merged with the other Senate bill and then reconciled with the House bill, all signs, sadly, point to a final bill that will inevitably end up resembling in some manner the Baucus bill. In other words they went to all this trouble to get Snowe so that they could show the world they were serious about bipartisanship, they aren’t about to throw her back into the sea of political oblivion. When you make your bed with the devil, as the Democrats have done, you lie in it, no matter what. 

And after all the capitulation on the part of Baucus and his fellow blue dogs, the Insurance industry issued a report critical of the bill and threatened to raise premiums by 110%. While Baucus and other Democrats blasted the report and a spokesman for AARP said it was not “worth the paper it’s written on,” the simple truth is that the bill, as constructed, has no provisions within it to prevent the very hikes the industry is threatening. Nice job guys! 

The United States Senate’s new slogan should read as follows: “Abandon hope all ye who enter this chamber.” For that is exactly what happens when anything of real meaning gets debated in the Senate: hope flees the building like fish from a net. And it isn’t just the Senate where hope goes to die. Apparently the executive branch is infected with the malady as well. President Barack Obama practically drooled all over himself in adulation of the Maine Senator, calling her vote “a critical milestone.” Critical milestone for whom? The insurance cartel? New York Senator Chuck Schumer has said that if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid puts the public option in the final bill, it would take 60 votes to take it out. 

Unfortunately for Schumer that would require some semblance of testicular fortitude on the part of Reid, and that is a quality sorely missing from the majority leader. Indeed it is a quality sorely missing from a good number of Democratic senators these days. And that is why a meaningful healthcare reform bill that insures all people, eliminates pre-existing conditions, keeps insurance companies from dropping customers who have the audacity of getting too sick, prevents those same insurance companies from passing on the added costs to their customers, and reduces overall healthcare costs for the millions of people presently covered by insurance plans is looking bleaker and bleaker with each passing day. No one doubts that a bill will be signed into law; the real issue is whether it will be a good bill and whether it will ultimately make a difference in the lives of millions of Americans. 

No wonder the insurance industry is still brazenly spreading vicious lies about healthcare reform and issuing threats about massive rate hikes. Who’s going to stop them? The big bad-assed Democratic Party? Please! Not even the threat of losing its anti-trust exemption has managed to make this juggernaut’s knees quiver. They are defiant and steadfast to the last. And while they continue to earn billions in profits and the Right continues to be their public relations’ arm, the country turns to a political party that is as bereft of backbone as any political party in history. The Democrats’ failure to stand up and seize the opportunity afforded them by their huge advantage in numbers is both mind numbing and disgraceful. In spite of overwhelming support in the House for a public option, not to mention the vast majority of Americans, Senate Democrats seem hell bent on caving in to a false spirit of bipartisanship and selling out the country for a cause their opponents could care less about, and all while an industry sits by laughing at and double daring them in open defiance.