While Republicans Delay, 3 Deaths Per Republican Senator Per Day
by sarabeth at 8:06 am on October 19th, 2009 in Health CareHere, according to Roll Call, is the Republican healthcare reform strategy:
Senate Republicans, acknowledging they lack the votes to block a health care reform bill outright, have implemented a comprehensive political strategy to delay, define and derail.
With Democratic leaders and White House officials holed up in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) office negotiating a final bill, Republicans are demanding a deceleration of the process and moving to define whatever plan that emerges as a combination of Medicare cuts, tax increases, higher insurance premiums and rising overall costs.
[...]
Senate Democrats are rejecting Republicans’ demands to slow things down, charging that the GOP isn’t interested in working with the majority to craft a bipartisan health care bill. Rather, Reid said repeatedly last week, the Republicans’ primary goal is to sink reform in order to undercut President Barack Obama.
Sinking reform in order to undercut President Obama is not their primary goal, it seems to me, it’s their only goal. And to hell with what happens to Americans in the process.
One of the things that does happen while Republicans fiddle delay, define and derail is that an American dies roughly every 12 minutes for lack of health insurance:
Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.
“We’re losing more Americans every day because of inaction … than drunk driving and homicide combined,” Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.
Overall, researchers said American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage.
So while Republicans delay, 5 Americans die for lack of health insurance every hour. That’s 120 a day. The main engine of obstruction is the Senate. Even if you divide the moral culpability for these deaths among all 40 Republican Senators, each of them has three deaths a day to answer for.
In effect, every Republican Senator, three times a day, stops whatever he’s doing, and turns to an American citizen and goes: “Die, you sorry-ass loser!”
What was it, again, that Alan Grayson said?
James Nuziard wrote:
I didn’t read this until after the passage of the healthcare bill, but your article accused Republicans of delaying. Tell me, what it is that Republicans were even able to do to delay. You guys had a veto-proof majority in the Senate and a majority in the House. How did Republicans delay?
Posted 23 Mar 2010 at 12:09 pm ¶
sarabeth wrote:
Oh dear, did I do something wrong by accusing Republicans of embracing the strategy that they themselves announced they were embracing? “Delay, define and derail” wasn’t my phrase or Roll Call’s. It was the Republicans’ own gleeful description of what they wanted to do.
Republicans said they wanted to delay the healthcare bill. It seems perfectly legitimate to point out what that delay costs the American public.
As for how the Republicans could delay anything when Democrats “had a veto-proof majority in the Senate and a majority in the House” (perhaps you mean filibuster-proof?), for starters they delayed by dragging out debate in the Senate using every single delaying procedural trick ever invented. By filibustering every single filibusterable motion, by insisting on the full thirty hours of debate before every single cloture vote.
There was also the interminable charade of pretending to negotiate with Max Baucus for months over the summer.
Republicans have never tried to deny that they delayed the healthcare bill as much as they possibly could. It’s totally disingenuous for you to pretend that the poor lambs couldn’t possibly have caused any delay.
Posted 23 Mar 2010 at 4:54 pm ¶