Harry Reid makes it easy for the opposition:
Opposing healthcare is akin to opposing abolition, women’s suffrage and civil rights. The GOP, predictably, is indulging in a bit of OUTRAGE!!!! over this. Meh. I don’t see this as an outrage. I see this as the dumb statement of a desperate man.
Healthcare is on the ropes right now. Susan Collins has come out against the public option. Support continues to fall in polls. People are wondering if Comcast was bribed to support the bill. And we just had a wonderful illustration of how healthcare will be run under Pelosicare:
In a roll call vote (all the better to point fingers at lady haters later, my pretties) the Senate voted 61-39 today to make mammograms untouchable and require all insurance plans to offer them without a copay, forever and ever amen. The vote helped break a couple of days of gridlock in the health care reform debate.
Welcome to the future of health care decisions in the United States. While most health care choices will remain outside the political sphere, every time a procedure or drug pops into the news—complete with sob stories featuring bald children and/or adults missing vital parts—we’ll get a cycle of senatorial speechifying followed by a vote on a bill or amendment that will circumscribe behavior of doctors, patients, or insurance companies.
Plus, we’re doomed to an eternity of quotes like this: “The insurance companies take being a woman as a pre-existing condition,” [Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)] said. “We face so many issues and hurdles. We can’t get health care.”
The debate over whether mammography should be routine for women under 50 is supposed to be a medical/scientific debate. But even the specter of Pelosicare has made it a political debate—and the debate is over. Either you support routine free mammograms or you hate women. It’s that simple.
All of this is turning the tide against the Democrats’ glorious healthcare plans. Reid’s statement today is not an insult, it’s a compliment to the effectiveness with which we’ve been fighting and the inroads we’ve made against this poorly-constructed law. He’s not even trying to talk policy; he’s reduced to vague grabs at historical heroism.
Now is not the time to get our panties in a twist because he compared us to slave-owners. Now is the time to deliver the coupe de grace.
Update: More from Bainbridge here. I neglected to point out that it was Democrats who stalled civil rights and opposed abolition.
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