Kill The Interloper! Rip Out Its Lifeforce!

Bill Kristol smells blood, and wants to know why the GOP and the Village haven't butchered and stuffed the corpse of Obamacare yet and presented to him as a cheery billiards room gift.

So this is not the time to let them off the ropes. This is the week to highlight every problem, every terrible provision, in the Democratic bills: from taxes and spending to government control and rationing to federal funding for abortion and government-required death-with-dignity counseling sessions for the elderly. Throw the kitchen sink at the legislation now on the table, drive a stake through its heart (I apologize for the mixed metaphors), and kill it.

Then opponents can say, of course we do want to pass sensible health reform. But to do so, we need to start over.

So the constructive part of the message would be: Start Over. We're not giving up on health reform. Far from it. But the only way to pass health reform is first to get rid of the misbegotten efforts now before Congress. The only way to pass health reform is to start over in the fall. The Obama plan wouldn't go into effect until 2013 anyway (except the tax increases, which would kick in in 2011). We have plenty of time to work next year on sensible and targeted health reform in a bipartisan way. But first we need to get rid of Obamacare. Now is the time to do so.

As the motto of my college women's soccer team went, "blood makes the grass grow." No surprise then that as I noted yesterday, Kristol is running the same playbook from 93 on Hillarycare for much the same reason: Obamacare passes, the GOP is toast for a generation.

And when Kristol mentions "sensible and targeted health reform in a bipartisan way" keep in mind what the GOP means by that:

Make everyone buy health care coverage from a private insurer, subsidize it for poor people (also help out self-employed people some too, but you'd still force 20 million people to self-insure at soul-crushing premiums), then make it high-deductible "catastrophic event" insurance that means people don't get treated unless they pay tens of thousands up front for a $100,000 plus hospital stay. It's funneling money directly to the insurance companies and still rationing people's health care by their ability to pay, and is all but worthless should you actually need it. Should you not, hey, your mandated premiums go straight to the insurance companies anyway.

They have to kill real reform to set up their plan to shovel cash and millions of new forced customers to the insurance giants. They won a partial victory sixteen years ago. Have the Republicans lowered your health care costs since then?

[UPDATE 11:29 AM] And one reason why Obama has that 20-point edge over the GOP on health care is that some Republicans have no idea what the hell the debate is even about.



How I fix health care?