The Left's crazy, partisan reaction to John McCain's sanity

Good news this morning: the Senate has killed the latest misbegotten bill to make our nation's health care crisis worse by replacing Obamacare with something even more inadequate. But over at the hyper-partisan left-wing "Huffington Post," Howard Fineman nonetheless manages to find a reason to find fault with John McCain's eloquent plea for bipartisan sanity in the midst of the Republican urge to deprive millions of Americans of affordable healthcare for sterile ideological reasons.

Fineman starts out by praising both the speech and McCain's willingness to deal with people such as, well, Fineman himself.But like a true hyper-partisan, Fineman then goes on to knock McCain for having voted to allow the measure to be debated in the first place. Given the similar and equally odd response of The Atlantic, another dependable organ of the ideologically purist left, this seems to be the standard way Democratic partisans are going to treat McCain's behavior. That response ignores the fact that voting to allow debate on the bill was the only way to make it possible to amend and fix the measure, and assumes with the partisan, doctrinaire assurance that only a true ideologue can have that the ACA as it exists is the best of all possible worlds, and that its flaws- like the number of working Americans it leaves uninsured because they make too much to qualify for government help but too little to be able to pay for health care without it- are either inconsequential or certain to be replaced by worse ones in any bill which might conceivably be passed.

Except it's unsustainable. We can't pay for it. It's inefficient; private insurance companies are opting out at an alarming rate. And again, it fails to do the very thing it set out to do: to make affordable health insurance available to all Americans.

Now, it may well be that the present Congress will be unable to improve on the ACA. There is both an ideological bias and a partisan imperative pushing the Republicans in charge of both houses to do something inhumane when it comes to health care, and the crazy thing about the situation is that it is almost certain to come back and bite the Republicans if they do. Their own middle and lower-middle class voters are going to be among those any bill this Congress is likely to pass is going to hurt. The Trump movement, as I've observed before, contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. No movement gathered around the personality of a demagogue and lacking any kind of philosophical consistency or even coherence is going to be able to avoid finally alienating its own supporters.

But in order to fix the glaring holes in Obamacare, it's necessary to try. That the article trashes Sen. McCain for doing that- and only that- is merely further evidence of the irrational partisanship which has hamstrung the government when it comes to doing the very thing McCain and a handful of others have striven bravely, patriotically, and wisely to do in the face of all the partisan wheel-spinning: work together with those in the opposite party to compromise and actually get something done to fix the problems the ideological crazies on both sides love to rave about and divide us over.