The Health Care Debate.

I was going to write about the frustration of the health care debate but what's the point? The USA will never reform health care to any decent satisfaction; the public option is a thing of the past and the latest proposal of extending Medicare to younger people is also going the way of all flesh; younger people by the way would have been 55 and up.

Joe Lieberman, who is an independent senator from Connecticut, a state which has a lot of the health insurance companies, has decided he isn't going to support it; this is after he said in recorded interviews a few weeks ago that he would.

The public option would be support from the government for people who couldn't afford health insurance; the Republicans and the blue dog democrats didn't like this as they said it would affect the insurance companies and their profits – this would be news to anybody from Britain where people in their droves buy health insurance from private companies like BUPA either individually or through the companies they work for.

I mean you don't think The Queen and the Royal Family, the Lords and Ladies Dancing, the ladies in waiting, the Princes and Princesses and that crowd actually use 'the health' do you?

They wouldn't be seen dead in a public hospital (got to be a joke there) and prefer to go to the private sector where the Emirs, Sultans and Sheiks of the world go and pay many thousands of pounds per day for their treatment; in fact probably thousands per hour.

So I don't think – and what do I know? - that the public option would have affected the insurance companies one little bit; I mean the post office, which is the cheapest way of getting mail delivered, doesn't stop people using FED-EX and the other private mail companies does it?

So let's go back to Lieberman; he was the man who stood for Vice President of the USA on Al Gore's ticket in the year 2000; to all intents and purposes he could or should have served a term as the Veep and didn't but now he finds himself with the power to make or break the democrats health care bill – so how did that happen?

At the last election he lost the Democratic nomination in his state and stood as an independent against the person who they replaced him with and because of his name value he won; he said he would support the democrats in the senate giving them the sixty senators they needed for a super majority.

A super majority means that the Republicans wouldn't be able to use the filibuster to stymie any of the Democratic sponsored bills.

I seem to remember George W. Bush using phrases like 'it should be an up or down vote' on the things he wanted passed; an up or down vote means bills could pass on a simple majority without the filibuster; Leiberman's vote is needed in this case as the senate needs a two thirds majority to get the bill through and the two thirds majority stops the Republians using the filibuster; a bit like the penalty clock in basketball.

A filibuster, by the way, is when a senator gets up and speaks for hours to prevent the vote being taken – a bit like Jimmy Stewart in 'Mr Smith Goes to Washington' - well I never particularly liked Jimmy Stewart, Disney and all that crap and I don't particularly like Joseph Lieberman.

But what do I know?