Is anyone else as sick as I am of all these guys with gold-plated government insurance plans telling everyone else they can’t have insurance? Joe Lieberman doesn’t mind spending money for an unnecessary war in Iraq but actually helping people right here in the U.S. is just too expensive. Never mind that reform is supposed to deficit-neutral. I seriously hope that if people like Joe Lieberman, the Senate ConservaDems and the Blue Dogs prevent health insurance reform that we push really hard to strip Congress of their health insurance. Let them try to buy insurance on the open market.
Yesterday, appearing on CNN, Lieberman said comprehensive health care reform would be nice, but when it comes to coverage to the tens of millions of Americans with no insurance, he’d like to push the issue off — until some undetermined point in the future.
“[W]e’re in a recession. People are very worried about their jobs, about the economic future. They’ve watched us add to the debt of this country…. Let’s talk about how to change the way health care is delivered. Let’s talk about protecting people from not getting insurance because of preexisting illness. Let’s take off the caps on the amount of insurance coverage you can get over the years. Let’s pay for preventive services for health from the first dollar. Here’s the tough one. We morally, every one of us, would like to cover every American with health insurance. But that’s where you spend most of the $1 trillion plus, a little less that is estimated, the estimate said this health care plan will cost.
“And I’m afraid we’ve got to think about putting a lot of that off until the economy’s out of recession. There’s no reason we have to do it all now, but we do have to get started. And I think the place to start is cost health delivery reform and insurance market reforms.”
Embedded video from CNN Video