If Kucinich and Dent Both Voted Against HR3962, It Must Be for the Same Reasons.

I read one of the most ridiculous political comparisons that I've ever read in my life yesterday. It came from none other than Lehigh-Valley-blogger-and-Charlie-Dent-enthusiast, Bernie O'Hare. Bernie posted about how, since Charlie Dent and Dennis Kucinich both voted 'nay' on this past Saturday night's health care reform House vote, the two representatives "may disagree on the solution, but they see eye-to-eye on the problem."

Sweet freaking Christ. Really? Charlie Dent and Dennis Kucinich. And before you ask, no, I do not believe that Bernie O'Hare has any history of brain damage and does not currently struggle with any mind-altering drugs. O'Hare is actually suggesting that these two voted against HR3962 for even slightly similar reasons.

Kucinich lays out why he voted against the House's health care bill here. He states his reasoning for opposition based on the fact that we are simply in the wrong system -- one that is nearly impossible to build on. He states one main, simple fact for his disapproval: health care cannot be for-profit. Therefore, trying to amend a for-profit health care system will simply be a handout for insurance companies. Kucinich's entire reasoning for voting down HR3962 is because the bill does not go far enough with regards to reforming our health care industry.

And if we want to get personal for a minute, I personally agree with 100% of what Kucinich wrote about. The health care bill is, in essence, somewhat of a handout to insurance companies. However, I believe it is a fundamental step in the right direction (which I will lay out the reasoning for in an upcoming post) even if it's not perfect. Kucinich is an idealist and was voting based on purity, which I completely respect, but I simply do not believe that now's the time for purity. If we all constantly sat on our hands whining about "how great it could've been," we'd never get anything done. Finally, I also believe that Kucinich (and many other Democrats) were in constant contact with Nancy Pelosi and would have voted 'yea' if their vote were necessary to move the process forward, but since Pelosi could sure up the 218 votes she needed without them, they were allowed to vote 'nay,' to save them from voting on a (somewhat) liberal bill that would undoubtedly get more conservative as it moved along.

Charlie Dent, on the other hand, lays out his reasoning for voting against the Democratic health care reform legislation here. His main reasoning for voting against the bill is because he feels that covering everybody and providing a public option would increase costs, diminish Americans' control over their own health care decisions, reduce seniors' Medicare benefits, force low-income families to pay more for their children to receive less coverage, place far too many jobs in jeopardy, and slow our nation's economic growth.

Don't you see the likeness in their arguments against the bill, yet? Come on, man. Think outside the box! If one congressperson is voting against health care reform because there's too much government and the other is voting against it because there's not enough, they're basically in 100% agreement, right? Bernie O'Hare gets it. I don't understand why you don't get it.



Look at each one of the points:

(1) Kucinich would have likely voted for the bill if the public option was at a Medicare + 5% reimbursement rates, rather than the weaker negotiated rates that the bill ended up having. However, the more robust the public option became, the more in favor Kucinich would have been and the stronger Dent would have been opposed to it. (2) Dent also feels that putting more health care responsibility in the hands of our government would reduce choices for constituents far greater than the for-profit companies that are in control of our system now has. But Kucinich argues that we should give 100% control of our health care system to the government. Once again, Kucinich voted against the bill due to not enough government involvement and Dent voted against the bill due to too much government involvement. (3) Dent also touts that he didn't vote for the House bill because it will cut patient-care out of Medicare Advantage -- which it does not, of course; it cuts waste, fraud, and abuse from Medicare and removes the unwarranted profits that drug and insurance companies yield due to how the Medicare Part D was set up by the Bush administration. Kucinich is adamantly opposed to drug and insurance companies reaping profit off of America's seniors -- which is probably the reason he voted against Bush's Medicare Advantage program in 2003. (4) Since Kucinich is a single-payer advocate and wants to see the entire for-profit insurance market completely done away with, I would say that he's not too concerned about the "job-loss" that Dent feels would result from HR3962.

Another point of Bernie's is that if Charlie were actually in the pockets of insurance companies, he would have voted for the legislation proposed by the House Democrats, not against it. While I do not disagree that HR3962 is unfortunately more of an insurance handout than I would like, we should still look at the facts: as of August 2009, the health insurance lobby spent $173 million to defeat the public option, along with other affordability measures in the House legislation -- and that number has likely severely increased since the major strides of health care reform coming further-and-further along in a process that nobody's been able to get through since LBJ in 1965. I will give Bernie the benefit of the doubt here, because he's obviously not accusing of Dennis Kucinich of being in bed with the insurance industry, stating, "few would accuse Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich of pandering to the health insurance industry" -- which he certainly does not. And while we obviously agree on that point, I would like to hope that it has obviously been broken down that Kucinich and Dent could not have voted against this legislation for more different reasoning. If you want to stick on contributions, let's look at some more numbers: Kucinich has received $242,790 from the health industry over his career in congress (spanning almost 13 years [along with two Presidential bids]). Bernie's BFF, Charlie Dent, however, has received $291,556 from the health industry over his congressional career (spanning almost five years). Taking this a step further would state that, per year, Kucinich receives approximately $18,676 from the health insurance industry, while Charlie Dent receives about $58,311 per year from the same place. $39,635 extra per year seems like a pretty big difference to me. So who's reasoning for voting against health care reform is more in line with big insurance?

My final point would simply be the fact that Kucinich also voted 'nay' on Boehner's sorry excuse for a health care alternative, while Dent voted 'yea.' The Republican alternative to health care reform in the House is complete deregulation of the health insurance industry, while also managing to barely cover anybody new (about 3 million people -- barely keeping up with population growth) and only reducing the deficit by $68 billion while the Democratic plan reduces the deficit by $104 billion (CBO estimates). The fact that Dent would vote in favor of Boehner's bill and Kucinich would not simply provides more proof to the fact that they do not agree on the problems with HR3962 and they certainly don't agree on the solutions.

Do we have to keep going with this? The fact is that the only thing Dent and Kucinich agreed on was voting 'nay' on the passage of the bill. However, they did it for extremely different reasons. At the least, this comparison by O'Hare is laughable -- and in actuality, it's completely absurd.