Nonsense Health Care Headlines

A website called Market Watch is running an article titled, "Grassley may have pulled the plug on health care bill."

This is my idea of a highly misleading headline, and it makes me wonder if this isn't an instance of the media working on the side of those who badly want to scuttle health care reform once again, lest it decrease the highly unwarranted huge profits that are being made by business interests from the plight of the ill and the uninsured, since Market Watch appears to be a business site. The tactic here is to run misleading headlines that will appear in Google News and elsewhere, suggesting that health care reform is on the ropes, with the writers depending on lazy readers not bothering to read the articles and especially not using their reasoning powers to test the truth of the headline.

Despite its noncomittal tone, this headline definitely implies that Senator C. Grassley of Iowa, a Republican, has the power to deep-six the health care bill all by himself, and everything depends only on his mood of the moment. But how can that be? C. Grassley is just one of just 40 Republicans in the Senate, as compared to 60 Democratic Senators and a Demoicratic Vice-Prez, and that means that C. Grassley isn't even head of one of the committees that will be considering the bill. He used to be but not now.

This somewhat muddled article suggests that Grassley nevertheless has pull because he is a moderate and therefore is one of the Democrats' best hopes for a "bipartisan" bill, which, translated, means a bill in line with Republican desires. But unless he has changed radically in recent years, which is impossible, C. Grassley is just as ascerbic, short-sighted, and generally grating on the nerves as any other Republican senator. He could even be the epitome of the type.

During some town hall meetings, which the media was pleased to report proceeded peacefully (I think we can bet that those reports were light on mentioning the absence of the teabaggers, as they are being used elsewhere as shock troops railing against Democrats in their meetings), C. Grassley specifically attacked a section of the bill that would provide for counseling in the case of terminal illnesses, which the anti-reform fanatics have been pleased to portray as forcing euthanasia to be performed on the terminally ill and the elderly, when the provisions call for no such thing.

You have to plow through a morass of quite a bit of the article before you find that, despite the fact that the objections so loudly and bitterly applied to that provision are completely untrue and are instead only a gigantic insult to the intelligence, Grassley mainly only said that he would drop it from the bill.

He would, that is, if he was still a committee chairman, but those bad old days are over, at least for a while, and it's deeply sad to see the Market Watch writer and others pretending that they're not.

At its very end, the article conceded, regretfully, that Grassley's input actually has the potential to matter not one fig, as that 60-senator figure gives the Democrats a supposedly veto-proof edge.

So the prospects are still good for improvements in American health care, despite the smoke screens that proponents of the present miserable status quo are still throwing up at every opportunity and with absolutely no regard for truth or even ordinary common sense.