What a shame. When Senator Elect Scott Brown won the Massachusetts special election, I saw it is a real political and policy opportunity for President Obama. He could jettison the current disastrous bills and retool—focusing on what is actually broken rather than trying to remake our entire health care system. Instead, he is apparently just pushing the whole mess onto the back burner for awhile. From the story:
With Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul stalled on Capitol Hill, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview that Democrats would try to act first on job creation, reducing the deficit and imposing tighter regulation on banks before returning to the health measure, the president’s top priority from last year.
If the Dems spend the Spring moving on other issues, I don’t see how Obamacare gets forced through before the November election—although, I suppose, they could try after the election. But refusing to make things even incrementally better in the interim would validate the suspicion in my mind that for the Left, it is all or nothing—takeover or leave the uninsured in their pain because, to paraphrase Rahm Emanuel, “a good crisis is too important to waste.”
