Angst — but not outrage — over the health care “reform” bill’s start date

Several lefty commentators are noticing — and, as commentators do, commenting on — the fact that the health care “reform” bill, currently limping through the Senate like a Skeksis on his way to dinner, doesn’t take effect until 2014. Five years from now.

For example, Ezra Klein:

There’s a lot of talk over whether the health-care bill should begin before 2014, and whether the long delay will give the GOP sufficient time to foment a backlash. On the one hand, the bill should certainly begin before 2014. The delay is a budget trick, an attempt to lower the 10-year cost of the bill at the expense of the very people we’re trying to help. As for the backlash, I don’t buy it.

…Nothing happens in 2010. Or in 2011. Or in 2012. In 2014, when the bill really begins, the insurance situations of 18 million people change. A full 16 million of those people are uninsured. Aside from the small sliver of people who will pay a surtax on the final few dollars of uncommonly expensive insurance plans, the country simply will not notice this legislation.

“The country” won’t notice the legislation, Ezra? Nobody?

Just last week, it was this same Ezra Klein who slandered Joe Lieberman over Lieberman’s then-opposition to the health care “reform” bill, saying:

…he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.

People are dying, you see. They’re dying from a lack of insurance. From acute noninsurancitis. If we don’t pass this “reform” bill now, more people — hundreds of thousands of people — will die!

But, oh, sure, that’s fine. It doesn’t have to start until 2014. No biggie. Nobody’ll notice…well, except the people who die because they don’t have health insurance. And their families. And possibly the media. And maybe the politicians who can use those deaths to score political points.

Republican backlash. That’s the big problem.

And one more thing: Klein wrote:

In 2014, when the bill really begins, the insurance situations of 18 million people change. A full 16 million of those people are uninsured.

Uh-huh. And what about the other…what is it? Thirty million others who don’t have health insurance? Or is it only 14 million?

Kinda depends on who you ask.

What about those people, Ezra? Why aren’t you upset that they might die because they don’t have any health insurance?

This couldn’t just all be about winning, could it?

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