This video could be one of the most infuriating segments on Morning Joe ever.
Joe's rant at the top is basically another reading of the same rant he's been rattling off since the Fall. You remember the one: the health insurance industry loves this bill -- the stock market for example. Of course Nate Silver and others totally debunked any relationship between the stock price of insurance companies and the healthcare reform bill's success/failure.
But the way he's approaching this -- seemingly from the left -- is concern trolling at best. It's entirely disingenuous. His argument is basically that this is a huge giveaway to the private insurance industry without restriction or regulation. I mean, he even went off about there being no public option. Uh-huh. Joe Scarborough is seriously a fan of the public option. Right. Yup.
The fact of the matter is that Joe's solution to the healthcare crisis has always been the boilerplate GOP position. In other words, nothing. Correction: practically nothing. He's said it a million times: Allow insurance companies to sell across state lines, and, you know, tort reform. So he means to tell us that this reform legislation is excellent for the insurance companies -- which makes it a bad bill. Yet his solution is to further de-regulate insurance companies?! And tort reform, which analysts suggest will only reduce costs by one or two percentage points?!
Then there's Peggy Noonan. Find me a serious economist who will agree that the solution to the economic crisis and the "Great Recession" should have been reducing the deficit. I can't find one. Furthermore, the healthcare reform bill reduces the deficit by $1.4 trillion over 20 years!
I'm glad Howard Dean could sit there with a grin and listen to such a steaming heap of horseshit being repeated on national television, because I'm with Congressman Weiner -- I would've erupted into a tirade to end all tirades.
Speaking of which, no, Peggy, not everyone has mastered your insufferable passive aggressive hackery. Heaven forbid a Democrat raise his voice.