Posted by
The Proud Ex-Democrat on Sunday, October 11, 2009 10:16:48 AM
OK folk's, it's crunch time. The United States Senate is likely to vote this week on some version of health care reform. What will exactly be in the bill is not known, but a few things are.
As I wrote in this previous post, It looks like the Democrats are going to try and push this bill through without giving us a chance to read it, comment on it, or really do anything to make our voices heard on the subject. Just like with the stimulus bill, they're going to try and ram it through in the dark of night.
My post talks about a group of Senators who have written Majority Leader Harry Reid and asked him to have the bill up on the Internet for at least 72 hours before a vote. Hugh Hewitt makes the very important point here that the letter is a bit disingenuous, since under Senate rules, pretty much all of these senators would need to vote to cut off debate to reach the required 60 votes. Any one, or certainly two, of them voting against cloture can stop the process, and they should.
There are many things to be concerned about in the bills being considered. Just a few of these are:
--Massive cuts in Medicare without thoughtful reform to clean up the huge levels of fraud in the system.
--A public option that would likely lead to many of us irreversibly losing our private health insurance plans.
--A lack of meaningful malpractice insurance reform.
--A lack of provisions to increase patient choice and restore the doctor/patient relationship to the center of health care where it belongs.
Everyone who's been paying attention realizes that the health care system of the US needs serious reform, but we are tinkering with one-seventh of our economy. Congress needs to slow down and give this the thoughtfulness and care it deserves.
So it's time to get in the game. In this post, Hugh gives the names, phone numbers and email addresses of the key group of Senators. Shoot them an email and tell them we want this done carefully and out in the open. That we want to read the bill and while they're at it they should read it too. And that since 85% of Americans like their health care, we don't want the whole system up-ended to fix a problem with the other 15%.