Epic Like A Seven Year Old Is Helpful With Paint Fail

Ahead of Saturday's historic House health care reform bill vote, the GOP continues to be "helpful" with its own alternative bill. Now, I've given the GOP a hard time about not having a bill before, but to their credit they did finally pen some legislation and sent it up to be scored by the Congressional Budget Office.

But, as I've said before, they should have stuck with no bill whatsoever, because the CBO says the GOP alternative is a disaster.

The Republican bill, which has no chance of passage, would extend insurance coverage to about 3 million people by 2019, and would leave about 52 million people uninsured, the budget office said, meaning the proportion of non-elderly Americans with coverage would remain about the same as now, at roughly 83 percent.

The budget office has said that the Democrats’ health care proposal would extend coverage to 36 million people, meaning that 96 percent of legal residents would have health benefits. The Democrats’ bill would cost $1.1 trillion, with the costs more than covered by revenues from new taxes or cuts in government spending, particularly on Medicare.

House Republicans, including their leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, have said that they did not intend for their legislation to expand insurance coverage, because they viewed that goal as unaffordable. Instead, they said the bill was tailored narrowly to reduce costs.

According to the report by nonpartisan budget office, the Republican bill would reduce future federal deficits by $68 billion over 10 years, compared to a reduction of $104 billion by the House Democrats' legislation.

In other words, the GOP's plan manages to be more expensive and insure far fewer Americans. It's pretty much the definition of EPIC FAIL. They've been working on this plan since the early summer and this is the best they can come up with. They want to slow the process down even more because it takes time, they keep saying.

I mean honestly, I can understand a bill that covers far fewer Americans and costs less. That would make sense. But they've actually managed to come up with a bill that does far, far less and costs $38 billion more over ten years.

That's not just bad, that's actually completely incompetent. They would have been better off with no actual plan. Now Democrats can say "Well, we see why the Republicans didn't bother to put out a health care reform plan when they ran Washington."

I mean honestly, they've just made the case for not only health care reform, but specifically the House bill with the public option.

Needless to say, EPIC FAIL. Health care legislation: you're doing it wrong.