Just from the first few sentences, you kinda suspect that the proponents of Obamacare would care to avoid having
news stories like this come out:
The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little. More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government’s largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman.
At NRO,
Jeffery H. Anderson says the Obamacare battle isn't over yet.
No, the air of inevitability that the pro-Obamacare press is presenting needs to waft away and be replace with more realistic reports like the following:
Having passed separate versions of their highly unpopular health-care overhaul
by the narrowest of margins (with a mere two votes to spare in the House and none in the Senate) — versions that were tailor-made for their respective chambers and designed to squeeze out the maximum number of votes in each — Democrats are now seeking to somehow, someway gain as many votes for a compromise version as they were able to gain for the respective tailor-made versions. Meanwhile, members are home interacting with their constituents, the clear majority of whom oppose the bills, often vehemently. Yet the Obama administration is expressing determination to move forward in spite of the long and perhaps insurmountable odds.
The question is: How much longer will individual Democratic members be willing to contemplate electoral suicide so that President Obama can imagine himself pictured in the history books next to FDR rather than Bill Clinton? And even if the Democrats can somehow squeeze their compromise legislation through both chambers in the face of strong public opposition, this question would still remain: Will the American people reward them with a return trip to Congress and the White House so that they can implement their overhaul sometime after the start of 2013?
