Monday 14 December 2009

Standing up for who's principle, exactly?

So John McCain has tweeted an indignant message about how poor old
"Joe Lieberman -- standing up for his principles on health care is being viciously attacked by the liberal left...what a disgrace!"
Well color me puzzled! Which of "his principles" is Joe supposedly standing up for here? The principle that he stood for just 3 months ago was that allowing older people to buy in to Medicare would be a really good idea!
“What I was proposing was that they have an option to buy into Medicare early and again on the premise that that would be less expensive than the enormous cost. If you’re 55 or 60 and you’re without health insurance and you go in to try to buy it, because you’re older … you’re rated as a risk so you pay a lot of money.”
Watch for yourself:




Now, Joe's principles say the allowing older people to buy into Medicare is such a dangerous idea that he'd rather scupper the whole legislation, allowing millions to remain uninsured, before he'd even vote to allow for a vote on it.

If Joe Lieberman were standing up for his principles, I'd say fair play to him!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

This is the ultimate in, "I was for it before I was against it".

In fairness to the person considered a great flip-flopper, Senator Kerry was for a military funding bill that would have paid for itself through some tax increases. When the tax increases were were stripped, he changed his position on the bill because he thought that it had been amended so as to become fiscally irresponsible.

If Joe Lieberman merely disliked the funding mechanism for Medicare expansion, then I am sure that his fellow Democrats would be happy to consider his proposals to fund it differently. Lieberman has, however, presented none. In fact, it meets the standards of fiscal responsibility that Lieberman has cited in the healthcare debate: reducing the deficit, improving the solvency of Medicare.

I am afraid that the first three letters of Senator Lieberman's surname reflect the nature of the representations that he has made to the public.

I rather like the idea of the expansion of Medicare to allow large groups of people to buy into it. This would make it easier for future battles in healthcare reform to be over expanding the age of eligibility for buying into Medicare downward until it is available to everyone.