From
Yglesias:
Can’t liberals be just as stiff-necked as Lieberman? Sure, they could. But liberals members do have an incentive to compromise—the tens of thousands of people who die every year for lack of health insurance. The leverage that Lieberman and other “centrists” have obtained on this issue (and on climate change) stems from a demonstrated willingness to embrace sociopathic indifference to the human cost of their actions.
Why is it that liberals keep having to concede on health care, watering down valuable reforms and cost-saving measures in the bill? Why is it that "compromise" isn't to some political center but rather a fraction of a hair to the left of business-friendly, anti-consumer conservatism? Because of f*cksticks like Lieberman who will filibuster the bill to death rather than allow it to come to a vote and then voting against it. The grown-up party realizes that failure in reforming the broken health care system
literally is not an option, and so has to cater to these few Senators' every whim and fancy, as well
as literally bribe them for their vote. As I've said before:
We're already bankrupting the system because of the issue of how the system is right now. The government already pays 46% of all health care expenses in the US. The private insurers pay about 37%. The rest is out-of-pocket.
The entitlements problem will continue to grow with our top-heavy population chart (more old people than young). But if we can reign in health care costs by overhauling the system then we can possibly prevent total fiscal collapse. This is a problem that Republicans kicked down the road every single time they held office and could do something about it. Everyone knows our entitlements are literally headed for failure and something must be done about it. No Republican has had the courage to face the issue since Newt Gingrich's proposal for drastic cuts in Medicare in 1995.
Let's assume the House bill passes the Senate just like it is (it won't). Paying $1.2 trillion over 10 years works out to approximately two-thirds the cost of the Bush tax cuts, half of the long-term cost of the Iraq War (including long-term health care for vets, not just the annual supplementals to the budget), and about 15% of our defense budget. That's right, we pay about $1 trillion dollars or more *every year* in defense spending, a *huge* part of that right now for two wars, the rest of which largely ends up as pork and wasteful spending and research for technologies that are completely useless (think missile defense, "Star Wars"...). Meanwhile, over 45,000 people die annually in the US from lack of access to basic medical care, ten times the casualties on 9/11. A new Harvard study estimates even higher numbers, that every 12 minutes someone dies from lack of adequate care, meaning every three weeks more people die from lack of health care than from 9/11.
Now, the GOP just can't be persuaded by these facts and reasoning, not by the specter of massive insolvency, nor by
the moral burden of being the only industrialized country in the world that allows its citizens to die and go bankrupt because they get sick. What bothers me the worst is that they're quite willing to see reform completely die, that Liebeman and a few other Democrats are willing to help kill it via the filibuster, and Paul Krugman was right in characterizing them as "
the party of Beavis and Butthead." It's no coincidence that these few people willing to kill the bill all receive large payouts (campaign contributions) from insrance executives. Meanwhile the "responsible" Senators have to basically give up every important change in the bill and turn it into a gift to the insurance industry to satisfy the tyranny of these four (or five)
because failure is not an option.
