GOP pays lip service to health care
Old Bill Shakespeare just had a way with words, didn’t he?
He must’ve been a pretty good fortune teller too.
He gazed into the future, and 395 years after his death, his prediction, that Republicans would be “signifying nothing” despite all of their “sound and fury” about the repeal of health care reform, have come true.
Republicans have been trumpeting that they’d “repeal and replace” the health care law so loudly, I think some of them really thought they could do it. They can’t.
They did the best they could, though. They fashioned something called “H.R.2 – Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act,” that was supposed to make good on their campaign promises and hand President Obama a Tea Party-backed defeat.
Long before a lukewarm and repetitive debate in the U.S. House that sounded eerily similar to the one they engaged in before Health Care Reform was signed into law last year – repeal of it was doomed to failure.
It passed the House along party lines. So what?
Sen. Majority Leader, Harry Reid (D-Nev.), has already promised to allow the repeal bill to collect dust on a shelf (he won’t schedule a vote for it), and Obama has promised to veto it, if it happened to pass the Senate.
All while the American public is growing increasingly aware of the positive benefits of health care reform.
An Associated Press-GFK poll released last week shows that only 1 in 4 Americans have an interest in repealing the law. Last November, 47 percent of Americans were against the law. That number, according to that poll, has dropped to 41 percent.
Now who’s not listening to the American public? Now who is ignoring the fact that businesses across the country are really benefitting from tax credits because of health care reform?
There are over a hundred million people with pre-existing medical conditions, who won’t face discrimination in getting health care. There are hundreds of thousands of young adults who’ll now be included on their parent’s policies. And people won’t get thrown off their health care coverage because of their illnesses.
Americans have started to see through the Republican generated fog of non-existent “death panels,” government-funded abortions and a wholesale government takeover of health care.
During the floor debate in the House, Rob Andrews (D-NJ) asked a pointed question that symbolizes the Republican’s adherence to principle (and the wishes of the Tea Party) over the interests of the people they’ve been sworn to represent.
Andrews asked any Republican if the repeal legislation says anything about preventing senior citizens from having to payback the $250 rebate they got for prescription drug assistance under health care reform. He waited. He looked around the chamber for an answer. He got none.
The “sound and fury” had been replaced by an embarrassing silence, because the repeal bill is only a few sentences long.
There’s no way of knowing (and speaking about) the unintended consequences of removing benefits that are already in place. It’s clear the repeal legislation was, as it was proposed, a gimmick, because those Republicans who wrote and endorsed it knew it would produce more heat than light.
And it hasn’t even given off much heat, either.
Barack Obama, who’d been reeling from the widespread Democratic losses of November, has regained his Mojo. That’s thanks to his numerous successes during a productive lame-duck legislative session and his nearly universally praised speech at the Tucson memorial service two weeks ago. His job approval numbers have bounced back.
So those Republicans, who’d ridden into Washington with hopes of rolling over Obama and his fellow Democrats, are now content trying to push legislation they know will never become law.
Oh, they’ve made a public show of reading the U.S. Constitution aloud. They’ve tweaked a few legislative rules. They’re talking a good game, but with none of the energetic pre-election bluster they had last fall.
Their “sound and the fury” has become the silence and the futility.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net
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