It seems lately that every time I hear more about the congressional health-care push, I find myself remembering Cool Hand Luke. I’m talking about the scene where the warden tells the assembled prisoners that the relationship between himself and Luke is marred by “a failure to communicate.” He feels that, despite his, that is, the warden’s best efforts, he has not been able to communicate important information to Luke. Information that is for Luke’s own good, if he would just take it to heart.
Please excuse me if this seems insensitive, heaven knows I wouldn’t want to hurt the feelings of anyone in the majority party in congress, but I tend to think of them as the warden in the movie.
They have decided we would all be better off with their plan, or plans, and they wish we would all just take our medicine, so to speak. This, despite the often-repeated poll results that say 60 percent of Americans don’t want what they’re pushing. It makes me wonder whom they’re doing it for.
Certainly, it’s not for themselves, directly at least. Whatever health care-plan they pass apparently won’t apply to them. They also seem to understand that their support for the legislation could very well cost them their seat in congress. Still, the speaker of the house has said last week she is determined to get a bill passed, no matter what the obstacles. Why are they so dang hard headed about it?
One thing I have heard is that they believe, much as Luke’s warden did, that we just need to “get our heads right,” and when we really understand what they’re trying to do, we’ll be glad they did it.
If that’s true, I think it’s important to point out that it’s much more likely that we’re against what they’re pushing because we know exactly what they’re trying to do and we don’t want it to happen. Just because we disagree doesn’t mean we don’t understand.
Despite the tea parties and the emails and phone calls and the election of underdog conservative candidates and the failure of similar proposals every time they’ve been presented in the past – just ask Hillary Clinton – the majority party and their minions just won’t let it go.
There are so many things they could do that actually would make health care and health-care insurance more affordable. They could start by figuring out a way to clean up the mess of fraud and waste in Medicare and Medicaid, even if it was just to dream up some new math like they used to calculate the “jobs saved” and “jobs created” by the trillion-dollar stimulus boondoggle. Maybe while they were doing that, they wouldn’t have time to dream up any new 2,000-page bills for us to try to decipher.
The only real hope we have is that, as November gets closer, the majority-party incumbents seeking re-election will come face-to-face with the reality of their impending departure from capitol hill and the prospect of finding employment in the economy created by the president they’ve supported.
If that doesn’t scare them into paying attention to their constituents, nothing will. -RB