Lynn Woolsey turns on the Senate health care bill

Rep. Lynn Woolsey is a liberal among liberals, a Leftist who calls affluent Marin County her home (and Marin voters have sent her back to D.C. over and over again, with about 70% of the vote).  She’s not a very bright woman, but I give her credit for focusing unerringly on what’s wrong with the Senate health care bill:

Rep. Lynn Woolsey said Friday she would not vote for the Senate version of the Democrat’s health care reform bill without substantial changes, even though that is the only clear path toward passage of the legislation.

“The House bill was compromise enough for the people I represent,” said Woolsey, D-Petaluma. “The Senate bill would go beyond that to the point where we would just hand the insurance companies the gift of 40 million new customers with little or no controls on premiums and no competition from a public option.”

She’s even figured out that Paul Krugman, one of the people I credit with inadvertently helping me see how dysfunctional liberalism is, gets it completely wrong when he says to the Dems “Damn the torpedoes.  Full speed ahead!”  Reconciliation just won’t work because, even though it will turn the health care system economically over to the government, it still won’t fix those vexing liberal problems of how to make every citizen pay for every other citizen’s abortion (something even principled pro-choicers admit is wrong) or how to ensure that every illegal alien gets full medical coverage:

She said, for example, the Senate bill fails to prohibit insurance companies from rejecting customers due to pre-existing health conditions or to ban annual and lifetime caps on coverage.

“Even in reconciliation, we can’t fix that because reconciliation covers only budget issues,” Woolsey said.

The reconciliation process Woolsey referred to is a tactic that would allow Democrats to modify parts of the health care reform bill with just a 51-vote majority in the Senate. Under such an approach, Democrats in the House would first pass the Senate version of the health care bill, then pass a reconciliation bill containing the changes. Republicans have used this so-called “nuclear option” in the past to enact tax cuts.

But changes contained in a reconciliation bill may only deal with taxes and spending to bring the legislation in line with the budget. It would be difficult if not impossible to use reconciliation to address issues such as abortion funding and health care for immigrants.

Woolsey wants to follow Obama’s new suggestion of passing bite-size pieces of reform. The question now, is whether the American people will understand that insurance companies can’t stay in business if people are allowed to hold off on paying for insurance until they actually get sick. It’s really not insurance anymore, with the companies taking actuarial risks. In that case, it’s simply companies getting no benefit whatsoever to pay for our health care. It may be a good deal for the public, but that’s only until the insurance companies go out of business. Of course, then the government steps in and, voila — single payer health care. So I guess this is the start towards a backdoor government takeover.

As many have said, when it comes to liberals and their goals, it never ends.