Time to get jerked around more on health care

It's clear what the main purpose of health care reform is: to jerk so many people around emotionally at such breakneck speeds for the purposes of our elected betters' entertainment. There doesn't seem to be any other explanation. It surely isn't "passing the best bill", as that option went off the table months ago.

If you remember where we last were in the health care debate, Scott Brown had just won in Massachusetts, giving Republicans their 41-59 majority. This of course caused Democrats to inexplicably start concocting new ways to fuck over people and make sure they get defeated in the 2010 elections as they all suddenly decided that finishing the work on the bill that both the House and Senate had already passed was a bad idea. The best solution forward, the House passes the Senate bill while the Senate passes the conference committee agreed upon changes through reconciliation, was jettisoned by House members for some undiscernable reason.

But because it is a new week, the House has a new opinion, and all is well in health care reform again.

But for the first time since last Tuesday's special election in Massachusetts, it's clear that they're coalescing around the most widely discussed option: moving ahead with the Senate bill once it's clear that it will be changed through the filibuster-proof reconciliation process. Before they can move ahead, they need the Senate to make some real headway on their end of the bargain--and they're not getting the signs they need.

"I thought we could get the votes in the House to pass the [Senate] bill if fixes to the Senate bill can be done," House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) told reporters today.

"That would be a good option as far as I'm concerned," said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), leader of the House progressives' health care task force. "I could support it. Reconciliation. Majority rule."

Finally. How about it Senate? Just pass the ideas you had already agreed to support in the conference committee through reconciliation and we can bang out this bill and have it signed by next week?

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, deflected questions about health care. “We’re not on health care now,” Mr. Reid said. “We’ve talked a lot about it in the past.”

He added, “There is no rush,” and noted that Congress still had most of this year to work on the health bills passed in 2009 by the Senate and the House.

Great job, Harry. Make sure to also thank Landrieu, Bayh, Lincoln, Lieberman, Pryor, Begich, Nelson, and McCaskill, who have all come out a bitched to various degrees about using reconciliation to vote for something they would have voted for had Martha Coakley been elected. But the beauty of reconciliation is that those 8 assholes, plus one more asshole can be jettisoned and the reconciliation bill can still be passed. So of course there's movement on making sure health care is passed, right?

No, most of the Senate is content to sit around and go "rush, what rush" and dick around supporting the easy and obvious thing to do to get health care reform passed. I'm sure that'll change next week... at which point the House will invariably have a problem. And on and on and on until somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million people have their heads explode from the inanity of their elected betters, thus solving the uninsured crisis.

So just a word of thanks to Congress. You may be slow on action and bad at legislating, but you are experts at dicking around, blame shifting, kicking back, and fucking around. Here's to the next seven dramatic shifts in the health reform battle. Seven dramatic reversals, that's all I can deal with before I'm out.