Call it what you like, it still costs the same – too much

Hill dems are trying to recast health care reform with semantics and strong-arming: Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) re-dubbed the "public option" as the “consumer option” while Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) called it the "competitive option", but the only thing they're competing for is support from with their own party.

In the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) used the lure of a bill with no public option to ensnare moderate Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) only to throw it right back in after they gave their support.

Whether it be Pelosi’s "consumer option" or Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s "competitive option", both suggested new language may get them past any persistent misgivings among the public, an admission the public is not buying what they and other health care reform proponents are selling.

The democrat majority’s tone-deafness on this issue is reminiscent of 2006’s immigration reform – the American people didn’t ask for it and they certainly don’t want to be solicited by ivory tower politicians who deem to know best by outright fiat rather than grassroots swells. What is clear from the tea-parties to town hall debates is the citizens of this country aren’t trusting of what their elected officials are saying.

What happened in 2006 is repeating, though the GOP aren’t the only cool-heads prevailing in Washington, Senator Joe Lieberman, (I-CT) recently told Bob Schieffer, “Well, the truth is that nothing is better than [a public option] because I think we ought to follow, if I may, the doctor’s oath in Congress as we deal with health care reform…do no harm”.

Clearly there are fissures in the democrat party and Mr. Lieberman, a long time liberal democrat, is not alone. Fearful of the 2010 mid term elections, many blue-dog democrats side-stepped any town hall meeting in the most recent recess. And that’s directly a result of the five or six plans that have been crafted, only a few have been scored by the CBO (Congressional Budget Office), and each – by the rosiest of projections – are in excess of $1 trillion and will add not only to the deficit but to the annual budget a new bureaucracy.

And that is the true name of health care reform: bureaucracy; by any other name, causes just as much waste, fraud and abuse and the American people are tired of being abused by government agencies and its supposed deficit-neutral programs.