Blanco rant leaves us counting the days to her exit

Just about a hundred days to go now in the term of Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, and judging by the idiocy and divisive partisanship of recent remarks of hers, the day of her departure cannot come soon enough.

In mean-spirited commenting about all the Republican U.S. House members who voted against a budget-busting State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Democrat version of which brings a supposedly low-income health care program to children instead provides for universal, government-managed health care to families well into the middle class and to many young adults to age 21, Blanco made the following ignorant, asinine remarks:

“They are afraid to have an independent thought, and that worries me on an issue that’s critical,” Blanco said. No, it’s Blanco who can’t think her way out of a paper bag on this one – the SCHIP expansion would greatly expand dependency of millions of Americans on government health care, undermine private health plans, reduce choice for Medicare beneficiaries, and saddle taxpayers with a permanent new entitlement. True independent thinking on this one, instead of being hemmed in by Democrats and her liberal ideology, would have her coming out against this bad legislation. Instead, she says she is “appalled” in particular at Rep. Charles Boustany, a doctor, for voting against it – when he obviously has a far better idea about the actual merits of the program than she does.

As a reason to expand the program, Blanco said health-insurance costs are skyrocketing and fewer companies are offering health insurance to their employees. No kidding, because government continues to expand into this area to discourage the private sector, such as in the major drug expansion represented by Medicare Part D – which is precisely what the expansion that she supports does.

Bordering on dementia was her blather that the Republicans voted against it “to protect the insurance companies. Obviously people can’t afford it (health insurance) or they would have gotten it.” What this dunderhead doesn’t seem to get is it’s a bad bill, so instead she has to go casting aspersions about principled objections based on the lack of soundness of the policy. And it would help if she got a clue on why some people don’t have health insurance for their children – some because they are too poor, but others because they’d rather spend money on flashy new cell phones, cars, televisions, shoes, and clothes, or on cigarettes and on booze or, most unfortunately, on drugs and on other illicit behaviors.

The shortcomings of the federal reauthorization, which thereby provides the lion's share of money for Louisiana to fund its CHIP program, also includes discouraging private sector insuring initiatives and bypassing many modest-income families, besides including the non-poor and adults in it. Simply, this ever-expanding program if anything it will make health care provision worse for children. And Blanco truly is an ignoramus if she cannot understand this, and a genuine political hack to have the audacity then to cry out politicians opposed to this are mean people shilling for insurance companies.

So Blanco either is too stupid to understand the commonsensical and logical opposition that all the state’s Republican representatives voting against it and have against it (Rep. Bobby Jindal did not vote on the bill but, whether an error in his judgment or because he is running for governor, says he would support an override of a threatened veto), or she does know these things but is such a partisan hack that she’d sell out the best interests of children just to score points even as her political career comes to an end. Either way, it’s just one more confirmation why time needs to fly on somebody so unable to understand good policy, and demonstrates the wasted time and opportunity her other 1,360 days in office became.