Read more at the linkRight now the fate of health care reform seems to rest in the hands of relatively conservative Democrats — mainly members of the Blue Dog Coalition, created in 1995. And you might be tempted to say that President Obama needs to give those Democrats what they want.
But he can’t — because the Blue Dogs aren’t making sense.
To grasp the problem, you need to understand the outline of the proposed reform (all of the Democratic plans on the table agree on the essentials.)
Reform, if it happens, will rest on four main pillars: regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition.
And the second article is by Harold Meyerson of the Washngton Post who titles his article
The Can't-Do Blue Dogs:
Watching the centrist Democrats in Congress create more and more reasons why health care can't be fixed, I've been struck by a disquieting thought: Suppose our collective lack of response to Hurricane Katrina wasn't exceptional but, rather, the new normal in America. Suppose we can no longer address the major challenges confronting the nation. Suppose America is now the world's leading can't-do country.
Every other nation with an advanced economy long ago secured universal health care for its citizens -- an achievement that the United States alone finds beyond the capacities of mortal man. It wasn't ever thus. Time was when Democratic Congresses enacted Social Security and Medicare over the opposition of powerful interests and Republican ideologues. In fact, our government used to actually pave roads, build bridges and allow for secure retirements by levying taxes on those who could afford to pay them.
To today's centrist Democrats, this has become a distant memory, a history lesson they cannot grasp. The notion that actual individuals might have to pay to secure the national interest appalls them. In the House, the Blue Dogs doggedly oppose proposals to fund universal coverage by taxing the wealthiest 1 percent of the nation's households. Their deference to wealth -- whether the consequence of our system of funding elections or a byproduct of the Internet generation's experience of free access to information and entertainment -- is not to be trifled with.
Meyerson goes even further in his article to address Manufacturing:
But the big picture here, of which the resistance to reforming health care is just one element, is our growing inability to meet our national challenges. Almost all of the major nations with which we trade, for instance, have quasi-mercantilist policies that lead them to champion their own higher-wage growth industries, often in manufacturing. In America alone are such policies considered anathema. In consequence, as the Alliance for American Manufacturing reports in a new book, we shuttered 40,000 factories from 2001 through 2007 -- the years, ostensibly of prosperity, between the past two downturns. The diminution of manufacturing, which employs just 11 percent of the U.S. workforce, may please Wall Street, which looks with disfavor on decent-wage domestic production, and Wal-Mart, which tripled its purchases from China (from $9 billion to $27 billion annually) during roughly the same years those American factories closed, but it poses a clear threat to the nation's economic, and even military, power.
Meyerson brings up the major problem in the United States that is the crux of our economic problems and that is our loss of manufacturing. Most economists say we have been running our country on borrowed money because of this shrinking manufacturing base since the Reagan years. We are now buying things we used to manufacture from other countries that can produce it for less money than we can and one of the main reasons is that our health care is so expensive.
Salaries have stayed stagnant because employers are having to pay more to provide health insurance and even they have passed alot of the expense on to the employee. The problems are deep and the Blue Dogs seem to want to sit back and collect the lobbyist funds and everyone else be damned.
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