Republicans Failed By Design to Challenge Health Care Reforms

Thanks to a year or more of empty theatrics (call it No Theatre) against any health care reforms, the Republicans in the U.S. and their leaders continue to steer into a wilderness of their own making.

And consider too, before you read further, that I have not been a total supporter of the legislation just adopted by Congress and signed today by the President. I've always considered that the underlying problem in the nation is that receiving medical care is operated as a for-profit business, when it should simply be available to those who are in need of it. That puts me somewhere far outside the realms of current political thought -- which does not mean my ideas are wrong, they are just unpopular.

And the real cost to the Republican leadership is they offered nothing - absolute zero - to solving the problems any and all Americans face in accessing good health care. Instead, loud and angry voices simply shouted "NOOOOOOOOO!!", refused to find common ground, refused to create solutions, refused to respect truthfulness and instead embraced Fear of the unknown as policy. Republican leader John Boehner bemoaned in his final speech against the actions taken by the Democrats as proof the U.S. Congress is a "broken and failed system".

Sir, you are one of the ones who broke the system, a reality shown in recent polling numbers about Congress, which reveals Americans hold Republicans in lower regard than Democrats in a historically-low approval rating of Congress in general.

Still in the mode of No Theatre, GOP leader Rush Limbaugh said Monday:

"They won because they held Congress and the presidency, and therein lies the lesson: We need to defeat these bastards. We need to wipe them out. We need to chase them out of town. But we need to do more than that. We need to elect conservatives.

"So, yeah, preexisting conditions are going to be covered, but who's going to pay for this? Insurance premiums are going to skyrocket in the next couple of years until they are out of business and the government steps in to take over with the...public option. Which is just waiting a couple of months, couple of days, couple years down the tracks. It's just waiting to happen, because this bill mandates the destruction of the private health insurance business."


Funny, I thought a business which lost the ability to compete effectively was simply a loss for a business model and not the End of The World.

Conservative writer David Frum has called the Republican policy failure a "Waterloo" moment, inviting comparisons to the failure of would-be emperor Napoleon:

"We would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing... We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat." Republican legislators who wanted to cut a deal, he notes, were trapped and pinned down by "conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio."

In an effort to show some sympathy for the failed strategy of denial and exploitation of the Great Fearful Unknown from Republicans, I offer the following song from the 1960s as the new official theme song of the Republican party: