Republicans and Lieberman Trying to Keep Their Familiar Place

Every opponent of good health reform ideas are in the end only trying to secure a place for themselves and make a living and have a decent life, personally.

When Joe Lieberman (Senator of Connecticut) basically kills or puts off into the future one of the best reform ideas to date -- the Medicare buy-in for ages 55-64, which would lower overall national (public and private) health care spending, strengthen Medicare, and reduce federal deficits -- well, he's only trying to keep the life he knows.

Joe feels important, at the center of things. He loves it.

That's the life he wants.

In Connecticut are big insurers, such as health insurers like Aetna (in Hartford.)

Aetna itself is part of Senator Lieberman's constituents.

Joe wants to protect Aetna, and help it thrive.

Aetna represents a part of Connecticut jobs. Jobs in Hartford.

Joe wants to be important, and wants to preserve and strengthen Aetna's profitability.

...

Republicans....want to have a place.

If Health Care Reform is tremendously successful -- such as would follow from the recently proposed ideas of the Medicare buy-in for ages 55-64, from regulating the Medical Loss Ratio (percentage of health insurance premium income health insurers must pay out for actual health care) up to 90%....

Well, such pieces of reform would accelerate the benefits of health care reform and make good results clearer, sooner.

And having a social program designed largely by the Democrats thrive and benefit Americans in a more obvious and rapid fashion would make the Republican party seem less useful.

Less useful, less needed.

Who needs Republicans if Senators like Ron Wyden already offer the best market-based ideas?

Republicans don't want to lose more elections and become a smaller party.

They want to be important.

They want to regain that heady power they loved.

Power, importance, control.

Reform opponents are pushed to ignore the best interests of America as a whole by three strong motivations.

1. Because they want to be important and have power.
2. Because they want to have a place and make a living.
3. Because they believe in the evolving narrative, the invention, the fiction of a certain Russian emigre who renamed herself Rand. It's a powerful, self-serving world view in which only select individuals are important and produce the good things in the world, and everyone else is second class -- a lower class of people that should look up to their superiors. (More is coming about this very important fact in a later post.)

But of these motivations, the second -- just a need to have a place, to make a living -- is the one that counts, that increases the number of opponents of reform from a scattered few to an important minority that are unable to see all the sides of important issues.