A health care plan so flawed even some Democrats have doubts - KansasCity.com

A health care plan so flawed even some Democrats have doubts - KansasCity.com: "This may sound surprising, but Republicans don’t have a monopoly on opposition to health care reform. Some Democrats also have doubts — if not on the merits of the plans before Congress, then on the decision to put health care ahead of reviving the economy. Here’s what three have to say.

Start with Robert Reich, labor secretary during the Clinton administration. As Reich wrote recently on his blog, he supports “genuine health reform.” But he questions Obama’s priorities.

“While affordable health care is critically important to Americans, making a living is more urgent. Yet the administration’s efforts to date on this more basic concern have been neither particularly visible nor coherent. …

“If Obama and the Democrats lose one or both houses of Congress in the midterms, it will be because the president learned only the most superficial lesson of the Clinton years. Health-care reform is critically important. But when one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, getting the nation back to work is more so.”

Indeed. Then there’s Camille Paglia, the always-volatile loose cannon of the left, who takes it up several notches at Salon.com. She praises House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for being ruthless in pushing through the bill, but Paglia turns on a dime and blasts the bill as “rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive…

“Why can’t my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators?”

She doesn’t understand the bill’s failure to allow consumers to buy insurance across state lines, which would boost competition and hold down prices. Paglia asks: “What covert business interests is the Democratic leadership protecting by stopping consumers from shopping for policies nationwide?”"