Party of Woe pushes government healthcare, misses opportunity for reform

Commentary by Kay B. Day

On Thursday despite the phone that wouldn’t shut up and skill saws screaming just outside my office, I tracked the first half of the Health Care Summit. By intermission, I felt as though the world were composed of people wearing dead people’s teeth and wannabe entrepreneurs whose only barrier was the current state of American healthcare.

It is, by the way, impossible to render HR 3200 friendly to small businesses.

Listening to various Democrats justify the most expansive government takeover of a major sector of our economy in my lifetime, I realized there is a singular difference between conservatives and those who call themselves progressives. Woe. Democrats rely on it, instilling the idea of despair in order to deliver hope and thereby garner votes. The Democrats today are indisputably the Party of Woe.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is an example. “We have an anvil around our businesses because of the increasing cost of healthcare,” she said. And then she made a claim that illustrates a complete lack of comprehension of the free market. If healthcare legislation is passed, we will gain 400,000 jobs. I will believe that when I see a Democrat give us a real tax cut or alternatively, when my hound dog is capable of speaking French.

There was a rather stunning development in the summit, however. Mysteriously President Barack Obama and a few select Democrats realized the Republicans had actually put forth healthcare plans. Until the summit, they seemed largely unaware of these plans and claimed to have not seen them. As I fretted about a possible epidemic of  blindness among the ‘progressives,’ Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) appeared to get excited. He believes there are things both parties agree upon—“We are actually quite close,” he said.

By the time Rep. Rob Andrews (D-N.J.) began to talk, a woman was having a C-section.

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) talked about a tumor and this was sometime after another Democrat whose name escapes me, because the phone again demanded my attention, made confessionals about hip replacements.

Asked about reconciliation several times, Obama appeared to have a severe case of heartburn. At some point he did suggest the American people do not care about process, apparently forgetting those Tea Party folks who appear to care a whole lot about process.

The whole summit boiled down to one party whose aim is to centralize everything and another party’s aim to limit the power of the federal government currently suffering from seriously morbid obesity.

It is my opinion when welfare recipients are told food stamps will no longer buy potato chips and slim jims and when families of four making roughly $65,000 a year see increased premiums and taxes, there will be a universal case of heartburn within the United States.

Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) shared the story of a transplant patient.

The president did that thing he does, sort of flicking his finger at his nose as the talk droned on.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I wondered if we might have a grant to fund a study on the reproduction rate of czars. They seem to have a lot in common with rabbits. Would such a study save us money that could be used for healthcare?

I began to wonder if I might soon get a headache, just from thinking about all those maladies and all those taxes my family will pay because we made the mistake of achieving a modest American dream.

For that I can thank the Democrats, the de facto Party of Woe,  who managed to miss the real healthcare reform boat so completely even a tanker filled with lifeboats would do them no good.