Crime boss Nancy Pelosi and her enforcers managed to get their way tonight. They managed to threaten, extort, and bribe enough Congressional "representatives" to get her massive Pelosicare bill passed. That bill started the week at 1990 pages, creating at least 111 new bureaucracies and spending massive amounts of money without accomplishing any of its claimed objectives. With the "manager's amendment", it grew to somewhere between 2042 and 2790 pages in length depending on whose page count you choose to use — we don't really know how big the "manager's amendment" is because it wasn't available to the House members, even during tonight's debate, in violation of House rules that require it. (Like her fellow Queen Bee on the Senate side of the Capitol, Pelosi will break any rule and any law, and will trash any promise to get what she wants. She is truly shameless.) Even so, the bottom line for tonight is that Pelosi's extortion and bribery worked enough to get her party to pass her bill by a 220-215 margin.
To his credit, Congressman Harry Teague, who was elected from my district in New Mexico, voted NO in spite of the pressure put on him. New Mexico's other two Congressmen, Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Lujan, followed Pelosi's orders like the party hacks they have always been.
This is all particularly frustrating because the Pelosi "healthcare" bill is such a complete and utter fraud. It purports to provide universal coverage but, according to the Congressional Budget Office, leaves at least 12-15 million Americans uncovered out of the 30 million Barack Obama says are uncovered today. Its proponents claim it won't increase the deficit, but "reaches" that by such subterfuges as claiming "savings" that have already been spent seventeen times over — and by massively increasing taxes. They pretend it will reduce healthcare costs when it only reduces federal payments. They pretend it will reduce healthcare costs when it insures premiums will go up and directly increases medical device costs.
Actually, it's worse than that. The "savings" they claim are a theft of more than half a trillion dollars from Medicare. They claim they can save that much by getting rid of Medicare waste and fraud. They've used that multiple times. But there are no real savings — there are only reductions in what Medicare pays to doctors. And Medicare already doesn't pay the actual costs of the "coverage" it "provides" (at the cost of a huge amount of paperwork), which is why so many doctors limit the number of Medicare patients they will see or won't take Medicare patients at all. Taking that amount of additional money out of Medicare will insure that more doctors go bankrupt and/or leave the practice of medicine, and will make it much harder for seniors to find a doctor by making sure that fewer doctors will be willing to see Medicare patients.
Yes, Nancy Pelosi rushed her fraudulent bill through the House tonight. She had to — she had to get it through before all the Congressmen she lied to found out what was really in her bill. That's why she had to use bribery and extortion to get her way. And that's just one more reason we really need a class action lawsuit, to produce a ruling that no legislative vote can be legitimate if the legislators have had no chance to read the bill they're voting on.
Tonight Boss Pelosi has won, but the country has lost. Big time.
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