The same process has been occurring in the USA for some time now.

But there are thousands dying right under our noses everyday due to the very reasons you articulated. Why the silence? Because it’s basically the who-care-I-got-mine attitude . It’s not in their face . They don’t have to see it, and they can effectively ignore it.

Until it happens to someone they know, or love.

For the life of me, I can’t go there. Guess I’m just a tree-hugging, earth-loving, bleeding heart liberal . And I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else on that moral scale of helping our fellow Americans. We used to be a compassionate nation…..it’s slipping away.

I think that approach is flawed. But you shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand. Obama, with what he thought was a comfortable filibuster-proof majority in Congress, figured he could dismiss the GOP proposals out of hand.

It’s not that the approach is merely flawed. It’s that the approach is an EPIC FAIL. It does absolutely nothing to control costs, while costing the taxpayer enormous amounts of money, AND further excluding the lower middle class from affordable coverage. It would cost FAR more than a fully single-payer system would cost.

It is completely incompatible with any position that actually reduces costs—to the taxpayer and to the economy—and increases coverage. It’s sole purpose is to include the phrase “cutting taxes” in the mix, a purely demagogic approach.

If that is the best that the Republican party can come up with, then there is no bipartisan solution possible.

What’s the “special loophole and exemption” for trial lawyers?

And if you include things like state and county and city and school district healthcare coverage for their employees, along with the federal tax revenue losses due to not taxing healthcare benefits – I’m pretty sure we’ve been majority government funded healthcare for awhile.

As for the payoffs to Louisiana and Nebraska – those aren’t there in spite of the Republicans – those provisions are in the Senate bill simply because of Republican obstructionism.

If say Senators Snowe and Collins had been willing to announce they wouldn’t filibuster the healthcare bill once it was stipped of a public option, there wouldn’t have been any preferential treatment to any flyover states.

Americans are not opposed to health care reform in principle. They might even like some of the features of Obama’s original vision (they elected him POTUS, after all).

But they’re opposed to the pork-laden, politically-driven mess that Congress came up with–with all its special loopholes and exemptions for Dem favored constituencies like trial lawyers and unions, and its outright bribes to states represented by Dems facing tough fights for re-election (like Nebraska and Arkansas).

You’re also incorrect that the Repubs never proposed an alternative. Even McCain proposed an alternative in his campaign against Obama: Just give everybody big tax credits that they can use to purchase their own insurance from anywhere in the nation. And let the states set up their own high-risk pools for those with pre-existing conditions.

I think that approach is flawed. But you shouldn’t dismiss it out of hand. Obama, with what he thought was a comfortable filibuster-proof majority in Congress, figured he could dismiss the GOP proposals out of hand.

Now, thanks to Scott Brown’s victory in MA, he knows better.

That is the point at which acquiescence is worth it for the GOP.

And this is simply another way of posing the argument in favour of ending the filibuster.