Wake Up, Washington

I'm watching the news and am utterly amazed by how tone deaf Washington is this week.

How does this health care debacle, which doesn't take effect until 2014, do anything to help the (conservative estimate) 10% of Americans who are out of work this Christmas?  Or the hundreds of thousands of Americans who will be foreclosed upon this month?   Nope - they're busy jetting off to Copenhagen, to a global warming conference that literally took place in a blizzard.  And, we're busy ramming through a health care overhaul that the American people don't want and can't afford.

Anyone with even the most basic understanding of economics has to know there is no way on earth that this can work.  It doesn't work on the demand side, because the dollars just aren't there without gigantic tax increases, cuts in Medicare, or worse.  It doesn't work on the supply side, because the managed care system (which is already about 50% paid by government dollars even today) has already created a shortage of Doctors and nurses.  How will it work when there are millions more insured patients demanding care in a system with the same number of providers?  This isn't rocket science, folks.   

Every single poll shows - at most- lukewarm support.   The latest RCP Composite Data of 9 different healthcare polls shows that 38% of Americans favor the Democrat healthcare plan, and 51% oppose it.

RCP also shows that President Obama's approval rating has now fallen below 50% for the first time.   You can easily research this on your own, (one good article is here) and see that this is very low for any president after only 1 year in office.  Obama won about 53% of the popular vote.  Hardly a mandate to dramatically increase government control over about 1/5 of the economy.

Did anyone even consider alternatives, like creating more incentives to buy insurance on the open market, with secondary insurance for things like pre-existing conditions?  Something?  Anything?  Other than this?  It doesn't seem like it, and it speaks to the true motivation here: power.  It's probably unconstitutional and definitely should be chilling to anyone who wants Uncle Sam to leave them the hell alone.

All of this leads me to believe there is a political day of reckoning coming in this country that will make the congressional upheaval of the early '90s look like amateur hour.