Legislators try to pull states out of health care reform

Remember when Tommy Thompson tried to make Wisconsin its own country? The incompetent Republican governor of the '90s decreed that poor families in Wisconsin would no longer be allowed to get federal welfare.

Thompson's legacy of trying to make constituents poor and barefoot lives on in the upside-down world of the rightist brain trust.

Right-wing lawmakers in several states are now mulling legislation to pull their states out of the Obama administration's health care reform - even though such reforms haven't even passed yet.

Under these bills, folks in these states wouldn't even be covered under a national health program.

I'm also reminded of all these right-wing governors trying to bar stimulus money from being used to benefit the people of their states.

Believe it or not, Arizona lawmakers have actually passed a bill to allow a voter initiative to pull the state out of national health care reforms. The initiative though has no chance in hell of passing. Nobody other than the few who are wealthy enough to buy decent private health care are going to vote for it.

I get the feeling that a vast majority of voters are going to say this: "You don't get to decide for me that I can't benefit from a federal program." Not like I expect right-wing legislators to give a shit about people.

Right-wing Arizona State Rep. Nancy Barto, who sponsored the initiative, said, "Our health care freedoms are very much at risk by health care reforms proposed in Washington, D.C." Freedom from what? If anything, health care reform would give us more freedom than what we have now.

Under the current greed-driven system, about the only freedom we have now is to wait a month to see a doctor when we get sick and pay hundreds of dollars just to be glanced at for 3 minutes and get an expensive prescription that doesn't even work.

If Arizona and other states are pulling out of health care reform, then can the states pull out of the 1996 welfare "reform" too? What about that same year's Telecommunications Act? Or all this "preemption" bullshit Bush kept trotting out?

In Wisconsin, right-wing State Rep. Leah Vukmir cried that national health reform is a "federal power grab that flies in the face of the Tenth Amendment." Then what do you call the welfare "reform" law and Bush's "preemption"? Obama's proposals wouldn't force the states to surrender any powers to the federal government. But "preemption", welfare "reform", and the telcom law all did. Under these Republican policies, the states become little more than federally governed provinces.

Countless Americans who worked for media firms were left jobless and hopeless after 1996 just so the 104th Reich could appease corporate broadcasters with a bailout they didn't need. But heaven forfend any of the states restore the station ownership caps that existed before then. The Republicans sure didn't stick up for states' rights then.