You've seen this happen whenever kids compete on the playground: one child fails in spectacular fashion, and immediately issues a plaintive cry for a "do-over." So it goes in the Pachyderm Party, where tea partyists listen to luminaries like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck drive the level of discourse down to grade-school levels.
Having failed to derail health care reforms the first time out, Republicans are offering a "second opinion" about the legislation.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), an orthopedic surgeon who coined the “second opinion” slogan, participated in a recent strategy session in the office of Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell.
“I've gone to the floor every week for the last four weeks and given a doctor’s second opinion of this health care law because at least every week something that I predicted would happen has actually happened,” Barrasso said, citing a Congressional Budget Office report estimating that the health care overhaul could cost an additional $115 billion.
Barrasso has emerged as the star of the push-back campaign at the GOP Senate website titled “A Second Opinion”, which subsequently informed readers of a New York Times story detailing flawed methodology in the Dartmouth study that found a potential $700 billion in waste that could be saved through health-care reform.
Even if the Dartmouth study failed to account for a number of variables, including regional demographics, differences in the cost of living and patient outcomes, there still exists plenty of evidence, including:
- Private ambulance services that charge at least $50 for carrying alert nursing home residents to medical appointments in vehicles that carry no medical apparatus, but are basically elderly mini-vans with gutted interiors.
- Doctors who schedule appointments simply to inform a patient of test results, even those tests which had completed results available during a previous visit. This of course allows two charges for one procedure.
- Treating patients not according to their needs, but what insurance plans will cover. In my case, occupational therapists working with me to correct another issue have decided that a pair of splints, applied daily, can help correct my left arm, which has been drawn up since birth from cerebral palsy. These splints, which are elaborate contraptions built out of steel, aluminum, plastic, foam rubber and Velcro straps, would make me the envy of the roller derby. But really, after half a century, wouldn't the amount of money used to build these devices have been better spent on airfare to Lourdes?
I was pleased to see that Sue Lowden's campaign to unseat Harry Reid has been stopped dead in its chicken tracks. I think that the medical specialty I'd least like to barter poultry for would be proctology.
I don't think I'd ever hear "finger-licking good" in quite the same way again.