Posted by James Sensenbrenner, Jr on July 31, 2009, 10:43 am, in reply to "Re: Health Care: Some scary line-by-line items in the House bill."
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More Rushing = A Prescription for Disaster
In President Obama’s recent “health care” press conference remarks, he said Washington needed deadlines, or nothing gets done. To a certain extent, I agree.
However, when setting demands and expectations, it’s also important to be reasonable and realistic. For a man who briefly served as a U.S. Senator, and complained about the former President moving legislation too quickly, this President should have a better grasp on the natural give-and-take between the White House and the Capitol.
While I understand the sense of urgency, with so many varying opinions on health care, President Obama cannot expect to rush through and cure the system in just a matter of weeks.
Consider the outcomes from some of the other times the President has rushed… The President rushed the vetting process of his cabinet appointees and was embarrassed on several occasions. The President rushed to announce the closing of Gitmo, but still has no solution for relocating these prisoners six months later. And he rushed the economic stimulus plan that gave AIG employees millions of dollars in bonuses, while Americans across the country were losing their jobs.
The only thing this President hasn’t tried to rush is the selection of the family dog!
But with nearly 1 in 5 dollars of the GDP being spent on health care, the economy struggling, and health care reform potentially costing DOUBLE what the stimulus package did – with Americans feeling more of a direct impact, we need to really do our homework. We need to evaluate the long term ramifications, as well as our ability to pay for any new spending.
The majority of America is in agreement. In a July 24 Gallup Poll, six out of ten Americans think health care legislation can wait until next year, if we even need legislation at all.
There are a lot of complexities to health care. Everyone agrees that health care should be more affordable and more accessible. However, everyone also has an opinion on how to do this and how to pay for it. Some prefer putting a band-aid on the health care problem, some prefer surgery and others prefer a complete transplant. This makes writing and passing legislation very difficult.
In my opinion, before we create a new, costly, health entitlement program that if passed, would be virtually impossible to undo, there is a lot of government waste that should be rooted out of current programs.
Health care reform requires us to think about the big, long term picture, not the short term achievement of a campaign promise.
Although the President wanted a quick vote – well knowing that the longer people had to scrutinize the legislation, the less likely they would support it – it’s a good thing we will not be voting on health care before the August recess. Now, Members and their constituents have the needed time to really understand the issue and give it a good, healthy check-up before they’re given a dose of some really bad tasting medicine.
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