Nebraska's landscape
Thanks to Senators Lieberman and Nelson, we might end up with a bill lacking the public option and making abortion coverage even more difficult. The deal: no expansion of medicare to people 55 years old (the Senate version of the public option), every state pays for Nebraska’s medicaid and the two fellows vote for a bill subsidizing the health care industry.
Nelson’s demeanor was perhaps not foreseeable. Lieberman’s however, completely. Joe the Spoiler has been the knight of every wrong causes. Everybody remembers his pointless, self-righteous sermon at Clinton after the breaking of the Lewinsky scandal that prompted the impeachment’s madness, his relentless support for the war in Iraq, and now his flip-flopping on heath care reforms. There is only one way with such sanctimonious egos: a prestigious and innocuous position far, very far from the action: US ambassador to Switzerland or Luxembourg for instance.
I was forgetting: Lieberman brags about his efforts in favor of child support enforcement laws that led to the infamous 1996 Welfare Reform Act, whereby non-custodial parents picked up the tab for “the end of welfare as we knew it.” I fear that with no competition in the health insurance market and mandatory health insurance, as premiums go up, the bulk of the bill will ultimately be passed to parents and most of all, to non-custodial ones.
