Health Care In Bizarroworld
by digby
Now this is funny:
BRIT HUME: What I would say about this is, think how different this would be now had the president and the Democrats in Congress been willing to incorporate some Republican ideas; a serious attempt at tort reform for example. He would have gotten I think not only much of what, he, the president wanted, Republicans would have gotten some of they wanted. A bunch of them would have voted for it. This notion that it’s a partisan bill would be gone and the whole picture would look different right now from the way it does. I actually in my life have never seen anything like this. I’ve never seen a bill with this much consequence rammed through by one party alone. And it raised questions about the legitimacy of the measure from the start and those questions persist today. And that is why, even with the polls that you and Juan cited and there are others that show something quite different, the thing remains up in the air and I think Bill is right in thinking that it will be a burden to this presidency.
Right. A Rube-Goldberg health care industry wet dream that was far more conservative than anything Dick Nixon or Ronald Reagan ever proposed contained no Republican ideas? That’s ridiculous. The whole thing was based on Republican ideas. The liberal idea was Medicare for all, always has been. And Joe Lieberman and Ben nelson made sure there wasn’t anything even close to that included in the package.
And needless to say, even if the Democrats had outlawed all malpractice lawsuits and eliminated medicare in favor of a useless voucher scheme, they wouldn’t have voted for it. They called it ‘Obama’s Waterloo” remember?
Brit Hume knows all this, of course. He’s just spinning for his team.
transcript courtesy of Heather at Crooks and Liars