The Republican plan to abolish and replace Obamacare has now collapsed. After much huffing and puffing, Republicans pulled their replacement plan, such as it was, shook the dirt of medical-care reform from their feet, and vowed to move on to the next big issue -- tax reform. One imagines U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D.-Conn.), who made some frantically intemperate remarks in the House before the Republican replacement plane crashed and burned, was delighted.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.), move over: Mrs. DeLauro has now become the chief progressive maenad of Congress. She brought to her performance suitable demagogic props, a large sign that said “Get Old People,” the words arranged horizontally and the first letter of each word – G-O-P – in fierce bold script. C-Span captured the historic moment here. Mrs. DeLauro was not wearing her pussy hat at the time; so the members of the House were spared that indignity.
Seen from a progressive bubble, Obamacare is a crashing success. It is, in fact, a political success but a real-world wreck from within, and it has been so from the beginning. Obamacare has never been more than a program hardwired to fail that would lead, when it did fail, to universal health care, a nationwide government healthcare program palely imitating European models that would drive many insurance companies -- unable to compete with a tax-supported, progressive driven healthcare system – out of business.
Under a universal healthcare system one fourth of the economy in the United States would move from the private to the public sector, and insurance companies in Connecticut would become boutique providers serving rich people – mostly wealthy Republicans who, in DeLauro’s view, want to Get Old People (GOP). Mrs. DeLauro’s gerrymandered lair is Connecticut’s 1st District, an impregnable progressive fortress; so then, she need not fear that she will be undone politically by championing a lost cause.
And Obamacare is a lost cause. Even in her home state, insurance providers have pulled out of the program with their pants on fire; premiums have skyrocketed across the nation, and the coroner has been sent an e-mail.
The authors of the U.S. Constitution supposed that legislators would be unwilling to pass ruinous laws under which they themselves would suffer. How quaint! Barack Obama himself is now wealthy enough to buy retirement properties worth millions anywhere in the world the chooses to live, in or outside the United States; socialist Bernie Sanders owns three houses; millionaire Connecticut U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal had money enough to send his children to expensive private schools that many of Mrs. DeLauro’s constituents could never afford.
Politics has been good for Mrs. DeLauro and her millionaire husband, Stan Greenberg, both of whom own expensive property in the Washington Beltway, where they entertain similarly minded progressives in lavish splendor that might bring a blush to the cheek of the Great Gatsby.
It may strike some hearty rationalists as unseemly that two millionaire politicians who favor partial birth abortion and euthanasia – which clips life it its beginning and end – should profess such a touching concern for old people. Only on questions of life and death are Mrs. DeLauro and Mr. Blumenthal, the Senator from Planned Parenthood, excessively libertarian. Blumenthal, who never met a regulation he didn’t like, would leave Planned Parenthood – which makes most of its profits from abortion – as the only unregulated big business in America.
China still pursues a policy of forced abortion; in that totalitarian country women, liquidated as infants in the womb, are perceived as somehow less valuable than men. International Planned Parenthood has in fact been working hand in hand with the population control program in China, almost since its inception. China joined the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in 1983.
In December of last year, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers wrote a letter to President Donald Trump calling for “a full-scale investigation of International Planned Parenthood to determine the exact nature of its operations in China… Transparency is demanded by the fact that IPPF receives taxpayer dollars from the United States and other nations as well. I believe it is impossible to partner so closely with the Chinese Communist Party’s forced abortion machine without being complicit in its atrocities. This is especially the case when this year we learned that the number of abortions in China is not 13 million, but a staggering 23 million a year.”
What a pity the group did not address its petition to Mrs. DeLauro, defender of the poor and oppressed, or Mr. Blumenthal who, as the Senator from Planned Parenthood, may possibly exercise more leverage with the IPPF than does Mr. Trump and the entire Republican Party which -- as we all know, thanks to Mrs. DeLauro’s campaign bumper-sticker outburst in the House – wishes to oppress if not euthanize their grandmothers.
Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a political and cultural writer who lives in Vernon, Conn.
