Your Daily Dose of Health Care Reform Stupidty

So much for a quiet Labor Day weekend. There's still more health care reform stupidity than I can shake a stick at. And I have an enormous fucking stick.

Let us get on with it, then.

The next time you hear politicians whining about how we can't afford health care reform, ask them why we were easily able to afford huge cuts to the estate tax. And if Cons want to whine that tax cuts are important, ask them why health care isn't. The response should be illuminating.

But we can't say that Cons don't have ideas on how to reform health care. No, siree. They have Ideas - like more teevee ads. That's right, ladies and gentlemen: the sum total of the problem with health insurance in this country is that Blue Cross doesn't advertise as much as Geico. So health care reform should address that important issue. "Then just a few tweaks with some expensive high risk pools and federal deregulation et voila, everyone gets to own their own unaffordable, low coverage health insurance policy without either the government or their employer standing between the patient and his insurance company bureaucrat." So simple a caveman could do it, right?

Let's play the "Lying or Stupid?" game. Our next contestant is Rep. Mike Pence, who doesn't seem to understand how his government-run health care works - not to mention he's terminally confused on health insurance exchanges. Is he lying or stupid? You be the judge! Hoosiers - I think it's time to vote this fucktard off the island.

And Rep. Posey deserves highlighting as an Extra Special Asshole:

This past Wednesday, ThinkProgress attended a health care town hall forum held by Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) in Melbourne, FL. During the event, Posey expressed his opposition to a public option. On the day of the town hall, the lead editorial in the local newspaper — The Florida Today — noted that Posey receives excellent health care as a member of Congress:

Keep in mind Posey received free health care premiums courtesy of taxpayers during his many years in the Florida Legislature. And that taxpayers pay up to 70 percent of Congress members’ premiums. In the real world, more Americans are losing health care and dying for lack of it every day.

During the question-and-answer session, an attendee ask Posey, “Why should taxpayers pay for your insurance when you clearly make enough money to pay for it on your own?” After reading the question aloud, Posey quipped, “One of the perks of the job I guess!”

Sadly for Posey, jobs can disappear in a flash. He should talk to his uninsured-because-they're-unemployed constituents about that.

A burning question is raised by the DNC's new advert: did the Cons really vote to abolish Medicare? The answer is hell, yes they did. "In April, 137 Republicans voted in support of a GOP alternative budget. It didn't generate a lot of attention, but the plan, drafted by the House Budget Committee's Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) called for 'replacing the traditional Medicare program with subsidies to help retirees enroll in private health care plans.'" The next time you hear someone screaming about politicians keeping their government hands off Medicare, remind them whose government hands were all over their Medicare trying to rid the country of it.

Turning now to Dems, I'd like to call the White House's attention to an inconvenient detail: the public option is part-and-parcel of the Democratic Party's platform. They might care to review that document, as it's part of what voters used when deciding which party to hand the torch to.

And for those pundits who believe that Progressives have no choice but to kow-tow to the Blue Dogs, it's important to remember one thing: if Blue Dogs kill health care reform by booting out the public option, it won't be the Progressives suffering the consequences.

The next time you hear about all the anti-reform rallies and sentiment, remind yourselves that it seems like everyone's against health care reform simply because the media has decided that pro-reform rallies of over 3,000 people are not newsworthy (h/t).

But at least MSNBC thinks women in wheelchairs make for great teevee:

The wheelchair-bound woman who was shouted down by that crowd of teabaggers at a New Jersey town-hall meeting on health-care reform hosted by Rep. Frank Pallone was on MSNBC yesterday with David Shuster and Alex Witt, and she provided a deeply disturbing portrait of what is transpiring at these gatherings.

The woman, Marianne Hoynes, described how the forum was invaded by organized teabaggers from New York, "so this wasn't even their town-hall meeting."

Hoynes: There was a large group of people who showed up that night for the purpose of making sure that questions couldn't be asked, and we couldn't hear information. I don't know how to describe it any other way.

... You know, you could tell that they were very organized. They came in groups, they had signs ready, which -- outside they were chanting, but as time went on, and certainly by the time we got into that room, which held about 500 people, they got more and more verbally violent -- I don't know how else to describe it.

They began by just screaming and yelling at Congressman Pallone that he should have been aborted, and that his mother should have had an abortion, that he was a domestic terrorist.

Note to next pro-reform rally: make sure you have a hefty contingent of paraplegics, and ensure your rally is attacked by mad Teabaggers. Then, maybe, you'll get some sympathetic air time.

Oh, and be prepared to ask pro-lifers when they suddenly started supporting abortion.