Unhealthy agendas

Today's Courier-Journal spells out the Republican health-care strategy:

Some Republicans do not try to mask their partisan agenda. Sen. Jim DeMint,R-S.C., said recently that defeat of health care reform would be President Obama's "Waterloo" and that Republicans must not lose this opportunity to cripple him. That is their notion of service to the country?

Other Republican leaders are more circumspect but fuel opposition to reform with misleading and alarmist arguments. Unfortunately, the Senate minority leader, Kentucky's Mitch McConnell, falls into that category. He told National Public Radio on Monday, for example, that "government bureaucrats shouldn't be able... to determine what treatments Americans can or cannot get. That's a decision we currently leave between a patient and his or her doctor. And that's where it should remain."

Who is he trying to kid? Sen. McConnell knows full well that insurance companies (which fund Republican campaigns lavishly) routinely make decisions about the treatments that patients will be able to receive — if patients are lucky enough even to be insured. He is defending a system that doesn't exist, and he's doing it simply to defeat the President.