Monday, February 1, 2010

Collins: Cover 30,000,000 For Free

That's the upshot of the position Sen. Collins lays out in a deceptive, innumerate op-Ed today complaining about the absence of cost controls in the Senate health care bill.

Nowhere in the article does she explain how to cover 30 million Americans without increasing the aggregate total spent on health care in the country. (Maybe because it's impossible?)

Instead, she spends the piece pointing to supposed flaws in the legislation.

Collins' proposed fix? She outlines 6.2 billion per year--$62 billion over ten years--in additional health care cost controls. That amounts to roughly .3% of all health care spending in the US.

That's three pennies out of every $10.

Anyone who thinks the Obama administration and congressional Democrats wouldn't make a deal with Collins to bridge that gap hasn't been paying attention.

Of course, Collins isn't interested in such a deal. That's been clear for months.

What we have here, instead, is more bait-and-switch: The junior senator paints a complicated picture to the folks at home and then ditches the nuance once the plane lands in DC, reclaiming her position as a cog in the GOP nonsense machine.

It's a farce and a tragedy. But also a pretty neat trick, and one the Collins team has sort of perfected it at this point.

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