And as if on cue, Harry Reid combines in one half-minute both rhetorical tropes recently called out by SWNID:
Senator, you've got this one backwards and inside out. Present Republicans haven't said, "Slow down." They've said, "Do something else entirely, and soon."
The previous Republican President advocated the kinds of reforms that would begin to correct the market distortions that exacerbate healthcare inflation and provide greater insurance coverage. But the Democratic majority in Congress wanted nothing of it, declaring that Bush wanted to "dismantle" our "employer-based healthcare system" (surely one of the greatest debasements in the usage of the term "system" that one can imagine).
Also, Mr. Reid, this issue of extending health insurance, serious as it is, hardly bears comparison to the slavery problem. But if you want to make the comparison, we invite you to bring it on.
You see, soon-to-be ex-Senator, the party that on the present healthcare issue most resembles those who opposed an end to slavery is, well, the party that opposed an end to slavery, namely, the Democrats. Your bill is most like the awful compromises that sought to placate stubborn Southerners with ever more elaborate jerry-rigging to effect passage through Congress, not to address real problems with real sense. Rather than go back to the beginning and say that slavery was wrong, Ds sought to preserve it with elaborately reasoned, complex formulae, all of which fell apart because they didn't get at the root of the problem, that slavery was allowed to continue at all.
The root of America's problem today is preferential tax treatment for employer-provided health insurance, compounded by the government's massive over-intervention in the marketplace. It takes 2k pages of legislation for Dems to "reform" what needs simply to be removed, and would have been had Republicans been heeded in the last presidential term.
Our analogy beats yours, soon-to-be-lobbyist Reid.
So there.
No comments:
Post a Comment