Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Insurance Industry) wants to split health reform into two parts

Sen. Ben Nelson must be getting quite an earful from the health industry interests who have given him more than $2 million in campaign contributions.

Nelson is suggesting the mother of all delaying tactics on health reform. The former insurance industry executive says congress should split reform into two parts, addressing cost this year and waiting until some unspecified "later date" to actually make healthcare available to more Americans.

Such a scenario would give 2010 voters an opportunity to weigh in on "what's been done and what remains to be done," Nelson said during an interview a day after he hosted two health care meetings in western Nebraska.

[...]

We need to get started by controlling costs and need more time to figure out how to pay for extended coverage," he said during an interview as he flew out of Scottsbluff for Omaha.

That extra time would allow additional economic recovery that could make it easier to provide coverage for millions of uninsured Americans, he said.

"Change, not health care reform, was the issue" in the 2008 presidential election, Nelson said.

But health care reform could be a defining issue in the 2010 congressional elections, he said, giving voters an opportunity to help shape the outcome.

"Public debate can occur in the context of an election," he said.
This is absurd. Status quo defenders like Nelson are clearly flailing. They are so desperate to defend their big contributors, while pretending to care about the American people, that they have stopped even trying to make sense.

If Ben Nelson really does not remember the role that health reform played in the 2008 elections, he is mentally unfit to hold public office.

The voters already spoke on the issue of real health reform. They voted for it. The only reason to ask them to wait for reform is to give Nelson's health industry patrons more time to kill it.

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