The BFD
No, it’s not a Roald Dahl tale gone amuck, but the way things have been going, it might as well be.
Go read Loki’s and Styborski’s posts first. I’ll wait.
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Soooo…welcome back!
You’ve seen our reactions in this virtual humid outpost to all manner of reactionaries saying health care reform spells our doom. You’ve seen how far they’re willing to go online to vilify Nancy Pelosi – if that RNC website doesn’t unintentionally open a window into the twisted psyches of the chazzers we’re dealing with, I don’t know what does…
…well, maybe this:
Fourteen states, from Florida to Washington, have gone to court in an effort to block the new health care law, arguing that the federal government has no right to force their citizens to buy something that they may not want: medical insurance.
Thirteen of the states, led by Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum, filed a joint federal lawsuit Monday in Pensacola, where they called the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act an “unprecedented encroachment on the sovereignty of states,” CNN reports. McCollum and 12 other attorneys general involved are Republicans; Buddy Caldwell of Louisiana is the lone Democrat….
…The other states involved are (Virginia,) Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Utah.
Caldwell’s being a Democrat doesn’t mean much in the scheme of things. We’re still in a redder than red (but not so red as to be communiss) state, a place that had Democratic representative and possible gubernatorial candidate Charlie Melancon voting nay on health care reform along with our local accidental congressman, Republican Joseph Cao. Caldwell is simply doing the bidding of Bobby Jindal, the man my husband now calls the smeghead.
Governor PBJ had some suggestions of his own early last year for how health care reform ought to go. The fact that he claimed the Democrats in 2009 were concocting the bill in secret just like Hillary Clinton did back in 1993 ought to get some red flags waving right there – there has been a great amount of openness from Obama and the supporters of reform on what is in the bill-now-law, a bending-over-backwards to try to include these folks who have instead, to paraphrase Abba Eban describing Yasir Arafat, taken every opportunity to miss an opportunity to turn down bipartisan gestures themselves and accuse the supporters of reform of doing the same.
The thing that really gets me up in arms about our governor, however, is that he knows just enough about health care to be dangerous. Budget cuts here are going to cause a health care crisis for a third of the population of this state that just happens to be the neediest. Cuts have already affected areas such as mental health care in my neck of the woods – something we are still very much in need of after nearly five years of nonstarting recovery hijinks.
So, it seems the priorities have been mapped out by Jindal: first the mentally ill get no help, then the elderly and infirm, then…who else? The kids? Women? Non-Christians? Godless socialist gay baby seals? Which group will the state’s health care budget decide to wield a scalpel against next?
Jindal has stated that the idea of government-run health care is a laughable prospect because of how badly FEMA performed nearly five years ago. Problem is, few of us here in Louisiana can’t laugh with him because his budget cuts are ensuring that more people here will be seeking out that government-run health care he scorns so.
And if the governor is right, then let me be the first to say that a death panel does indeed exist, and Bobby Jindal is at the helm.
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