Schumer the Mystical

I can't tell you if the newly-released health insurance bill draft put forth by the Senate Republicans last week is one that I would support if I were a senator or, for that matter, as an ordinary citizen out there in the hinterlands.

I can't tell you, because I really don't care.  I don't care for a number of reasons.  First, outside of how much it cuts the deficit, it doesn't affect me or my best girl at all; we are over 65 and therefore on Medicare and our insurance is already mandated.  We paid for decades, involuntarily, of course, for the health insurance that we are now receiving, although we are still paying for part of it.  Don't tell me Medicare is an "entitlement"; it is an asset that I paid thousands and thousands of dollars for in my younger days and, for that matter, since I still work I'm still paying for it.

Another reason I don't care is a bit more relevant.  The bill is not going to be law.  It will be amended before it goes for a floor vote in the Senate, then it will be torn up and redone by a conference committee of Senate and House members before going to another floor vote in both houses.  Even if it were to pass both and be signed, the likelihood of it resembling what the Senate will vote on as early as this week is pretty tiny.

So why worry about what's in it now?  I don't.

That said, a lot of Democrats were really, really interested in what was in the proposal.  They were so interested that they railed on about how the draft bill was being done in "secret" by a select few, and they were not allowed to be part of the process, blah blah blah.  The memory of how Obamacare, the law that the draft is meant to start fixing, was jammed through Congress burns inside us, but apparently has faded from the Democrats in the Senate.

Oh yeah, those same Democrats are the ones who wouldn't let any of their number participate with Republicans in the first place.  So it seems particularly hypocritical of the Democrats in the Senate to declare in February that they would not cooperate, and then complain that they didn't know what was being put into it.

So the draft comes out, finally, and within ten minutes of the release -- 150 pages or so -- good old Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is on the floor of the Senate decrying how mean-spirited the concept is, and how people will die all over the country if it becomes law.

Now, I'm a pretty decent reader, but legal-speak is pretty complex, and I can't read 150 pages of a good Ted Williams biography in ten minutes, let alone analyze the text of a proposed law and have a speech prepared and drafted to give before the Senate in that time.

Chuck Schumer had that speech written without knowing what was in the bill, or he lied about not knowing its contents and having a copy.  He's a hypocrite, or he's a liar.  You tell me.  Or, I guess, he is so mystically intuitive that he "knew" by gazing into his crystal ball what was in it.

Is this what it has come to?  They declare that they will not cooperate, then they complain that they are not asked to cooperate, but darned if their Dear Leader doesn't have a prepared speech complaining about the bill, written before he has even seen the bill, and immediately on its release, he makes a speech condemning the bill that he could not have possibly analyzed before writing it.

And I suppose it bears mentioning that ten years ago, before Obamacare, people were still dying, with or without unaffordable insurance.  This bill would not even bring us back to that.  Schumer's crying "mean" is to ignore that the current law kills you or bankrupts you; you just get to pick.  Yippee.

Laws, as they say, are like sausages -- you do not want to see either one made.  Now we know why.

Thank God my best girl and I at least have insurance.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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