Victory for Democracy
If you hadn't heard by now, Scott Brown made political history last Tuesday by winning the late Ted Kennedy's senate seat in Massachusetts. For Republicans, the victory served as a clear signal that the public had rejected Congress's and the President's liberal agenda. For Democrats the response was mixed. Some stepped up and pragmatically admitted that it was time to rethink strategy. Others stayed aboard the sinking ship, denying that a Massachusetts election was truly indicative of the nation's sentiments.
As an adamant opponent of heavy-handed government intervention into the healthcare field, the past few weeks had been dreadful for me. The Senate had begun the procedural votes furthering the bill to its seemingly inevitable passage, and the only hope for preventing my tax dollars paying for the degradation of American healthcare seemed to a long-shot lawsuit by state attorneys general over the infamous "Nebraska Compromise." More frustrating though, was the fact that our elected REPRESENTATIVES were using every seedy tactic imaginable to push through a bill that the majority of the country either didn't want or didn't understand. It just seemed un-American, anti-democratic, and whatever other pejorative term you could think of, and yet we seemed powerless to stop it. So imagine my surprise at hearing that Massachusetts, a state with only 12% registered Republicans, had elected a Republican senator who at one point had trailed by double digits.
Many of hailed this election a populist revolt against government spending that's simply become out of control, and about failure to focus on jobs and the economy. This is certainly true. In just 20 months President Obama will have accumulated as much national debt as George W. Bush did in 8 years. And to show for it? Unemployment above 10%, even after he promised it would not rise above 8%. Yet the President and Congress are striving to fork out more spending on an issue that isn't among the public's chief concerns.
Which gets me to my larger point. It seemed strange to me that a state that already had universal health care would so blatantly reject it now. Then it dawned on me: the sentiment of the majority of Massachusetts voters is probably like most of the country: they're probably happy with their current health insurance, and the prospect of the federal government taking over doesn't have a lot of appeal. Whether From your employer, buying it yourself, or even the state (as it turns out), the fact is that most people are satisfied with their health insurance. And for those who don't have it, having the government taking over insurance for everyone isn't going to solve a thing. It's basically the whole "cannon to kill a mosquito" conundrum, only that cannon is filled with taxpayer dollars. The small percentage of the public who legitimately cannot afford health insurance is merely a pretense for the liberal idea of taking over healthcare and putting the government in charge of another aspect of our lives. Luckily for all of us, the voters of Massachusetts cut the fuse just in time.
