Kucinich Caves

Robert Sterling

This is beyond disappointing. Disappointing because here is what Kucinich said about the bill last week:

“This bill represents a giveaway to the insurance industry. $70 billion dollars a year, and no guarantees of any control over premiums, forcing people to buy private insurance, five consecutive years of double-digit premium increases. I told the president twice in two different meetings that I couldn’t support the bill if it didn’t have a robust public option and at least if it didn’t have something that was going to protect consumers from these rampant premium increases."

Here is what he said about it last year:

“There’s nothing liberal about giving insurance companies carte blanche to charge anything they want for health care. We lost the initiative the minute that our party jumped into bed with the insurance companies. And so on they were looking at increasing taxes as a way of subsidizing insurance companies. It’s just madness.”


But now all that criticism is gone, and now Obama's cowardly sellout (and it's time to stop ignoring what has been plainly proven, the most grotesque flaws in this bill are due to Obama's involvement, not his lack of involvement) is the officially sanctioned position of the left, despite this being an extremely right-wing bill.

I only wish Dennis Kucinich had done something slightly less offensive, like impregnate another woman while his wife is suffering from cancer.


Here are my three major problems with Obamacare (and I will always refer to this plan as Obamacare, because I don't want this sniveling betrayer to ever feign that the glaring flaws in this plan aren't by his own administration's design):

INDIVIDUAL MANDATE: Forcing people to buy health insurance isn't the answer to people being unable to buy insurance.

NO PUBLIC OPTION: It is clear at this point that the simplest and most effective way to provide quality healthcare is to open Medicare to anyone who wants to buy in. Perhaps theoretically another way could be developed, but in practice any bill will be perverted and compromised by industry money.

MASSIVE CUTS IN MEDICARE & MEDICAID: How does this bill manage to reduce the deficit? By cutting the dollars in healthcare given to the elderly and the poor.

So let's examine this again. Obamacare forces people to buy insurance they can't afford, doesn't allow them any new option to the despised private health insurance system, and cuts the money it gives to Medicare and Medicaid. And this is considered a left-wing bill?

All I can say is the Democrats will suffer greatly over this bill in the short term and long term if it passes. Short term because the public correctly dislikes this bill, although much of this opposition is of a confused nature due to the dishonest presentation in the establishment media. Still, confused as the opposition may be, the public correctly smells a rat here. In the long term, it is even worse thanks to the individual mandate. I am going to make a prediction here, and mark my words, it will be proven right. When the individual mandate goes into effect, thanks to a lack of price controls in a deregulated oligopoly market, the result will be similar to the electricity deregulation in California ten years ago, where insurance companies will engage in elaborate price-fixing schemes to gouge the public and rip them off even more. This bill is a political disaster...