Michael Ryan thinks "Washington should start over" on health care

Re: "Ship of state appears rudderless," from the October 13th editorial of the Augusta Chronicle editorial page.

It's taken democrats nearly a year to get a health care reform plan passed in just one Senate committee. And Mr. Ryan thinks "Washington should start over." I've got news for him-- Washington already started over, when the democrats won the election in 2008. So basically, Mr. Ryan thinks "Washington should start over," because he doesn't like the health care reform plan.

I wonder what his response would've been, if when President George W. Bush rammed his initial tax cuts through Congress, a liberal pundit suggested that Washington should start over.

He probably would've considered it laughable.

The excuse Mr. Ryan uses to suggest we need to start from scratch on the health care reform plan is the completely faux propaganda concocted by the PricewaterhouseCoopers report--an insurance company misinformation group. Mr. Ryan admits that "an insurance industry report must be taken with a grain of salt." But he thinks it may have merit anyway. Why? Because he's obviously on the side of businesses profiting, while millions suffer in sickness and bankruptcy. In other words he's in favor of sick people dying quickly, as are all business-crook, conservatives.

His editorial includes the fantasy that government should get out of the way and let the free market solve our health care problems. "Let folks buy insurance across state lines," is their idiotic solution. But it's the free market that has caused the current health care mess. Letting people buy insurance across state lines would reduce competition, not increase it, because big insurance company monopolies would dominate the market, collude, and wipe out smaller insurance companies.

It's obvious, Mr. Ryan thinks we should start over, because he wants no insurance reform. If there's no insurance reform, it will make President Obama look like a failure, and Mr. Ryan, along with all other conservatives, want the president to fail.

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That Mr. Ryan would allow Star Parker's column on his editorial page proves he has no integrity.

In her column "Consumers need protection all right--but from their government," she espouses support for the legalized loan shark industry, the payday loan companies which are criminal business enterprises.

I address her column in my article at www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/09oct/news014.html

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I found the original source for Mr. Ryan's plagarized idea that Obama should "politely decline," the Nobel Prize. It's Doug Heye, a blogger for USA Today who on October 9th, a day before Mr. Ryan's column came out, wrote that President Obama should "politely decline," the award. Of course, all the conservative pundits, including Glen Beck and Michelle Malkin jumped on this silly idea.

In today's Chronicle editorial page Cal Thomas too expresses his jealousy that Obama won the award, while his hero, Ronald Reagan didn't. Mr. Thomas subscribes to the myth that it was Reagan who liberated Europe from the "totalitarian hand of Soviet communism."

I think Gorbachev had a lot more to do with that than Reagan. He's the one who actually tore down that wall.