Chris Matthews brought on Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston to discuss what kind of problems Republicans are going to have after voting for Paul Ryan's budget plan that voucherizes Medicare after their recent loss in New York's 26th congressional district.
Kingston claimed that the Republicans really want to negotiate with the Democrats and that the only problem is that they have refused to put a plan of their own on the table to deal with the rising costs of Medicare. What Kinston neglects to say here is that Democrats have been more than willing to negotiate with Republicans and sadly already passed what amounts to Bob Dole or Mitt Romney's health care plans and the ones who are drawing a line in the sand are Republicans with their absolute refusal to put any type of tax increases on the table or to even start to regulate their friends in the insurance industry.
Kingston and his fellow Republicans in Congress are hoping that the Democrats throw them a lifeline so they don't have the issue to beat them upside the head with in the upcoming election. I don't know what kind of "grand bargain" Biden and his group are working on, but my fears are they're going to do exactly that. They'd be better off to just leave them flailing in the wind on this one until the upcoming election.
What I really get tired of while watching these discussions on television is they never get to just what's really running up our health care costs. What it's going to take for the public to finally get fed up with all of this and demand loudly that we either have a single-payer health care plan for everyone or that these insurance industries are regulated in the same way that they are in some countries in Europe, I don't know.
I'm tired of hearing that we're broke when our politicians refuse to roll back those Bush tax cuts that are driving up our deficit. I'm tired of this starve the beast nonsense where they're going to leave us with nothing but rich and poor because we don't care about taking care of the most vulnerable in society. I'm tired of these politicians who are looking out for their corporate donors pretending that they have a care in the world for their constituents that actually live in their districts. I'm tired of them pretending that government has no role in society when we know that there are a lot of things government does more efficiently than the private sector, like providing health insurance where there is no profit model. And I'm tired of no one advocating for a single-payer model to fix the problems with our health care costs being allowed on the air to counter the likes of Kingston.
