Thursday, September 26, 2013

Is the first democratic Senator abandoning the sinking Obamacare ship?

Everyone with two brain cells to rub together knows Obamacare in it's current form is going to fail miserably. Fewer uninsured people will get coverage than planned, those with coverage will get huge rate hikes, the exchanges will collapse under price pressure because healthy young people won't sign up, everyone will wait longer at the doctor's office and the government will have their nose poked in all our healthcare decisions. Republicans are in no mood to help democrats fix their mess. Obama care was passed in a completely partisan manner and Republicans have been demonized and called horrible names for pointing out the obvious faults in the law. The only hope for Obamacare is some kind of grand bargain compromise that encompasses many items such as health care, government regulation of greenhouse gasses, excessive government spending, taxes and the Keystone Pipeline. The only person with the ability to make that happen is Barack Obama, but he lacks the leadership and ability to compromise.

It looks like Sen. Joe Manchin is coming to terms with the obvious:
U.S. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia broke ranks with fellow Democrats and said he’d support a stopgap spending plan that delays the individual mandate in President Barack Obama’s health-care law.
“There’s no way I could not vote for it,” Manchin said at a Bloomberg Government breakfast today. “It’s very reasonable and sensible.”…
Manchin, 66, said he’d be willing to delay the individual mandate as part of the budget negotiations because the Obama administration in July gave businesses an extra year to provide their workers with health insurance.
“Don’t put the mandate on the American public right now,” Manchin said. “Give them at least a year. If you know you couldn’t bring the corporate sector, you gave them a year, don’t you think it’d be fair?”

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