Democrats and Republicans: Ranking Parties

The House passed a bill today to prevent funding of the health insurance exchanges, the part of the 2009 Health Care reform bill that would enable states to establish insurance exchanges that offer health care coverage to individuals and small businesses. This provides an opportunity to assay the intelligence exhibited by our legislative liabilities. As with most analytic procedures you only need a small sample to determine the quantity and quality of substance in the specimen. This is significant because we would not want to risk extracting any more from the Congressional population than absolutely necessary to avoid depleting whatever amount of valuable resource might exist at all, given its extreme scarcity in that environment.

So rather than pose the question crudely as: Which party is more stupid than the other? Let’s approach the topic in a civil manner and ask: Is there a level of intelligence distinguishing between the Democrats and Republicans?

The Democrats shoehorned the 2010 Health Care reform bill through Congress last year, much to the chagrin of the Republican minority. Within the reform bill was a provision to have insurance exchanges set up by states to provide access to affordable health care insurance. Under the reform act most tax-payers would receive a government subsidy. The Republicans viewed this as just another government take-over of health care. Their position was that it was impractical and unaffordable.

In a major Republican proposal by Paul Ryan, chairman House Budget Committee, which most Republicans tout as a significant forward looking proposal claim that it will provide for affordable national health care. Under this plan most individuals would receive a government premium subsidy to assist paying the insurance companies for an approved health care plan.

One can see instantly the obvious and clear radical distinctions between these two approaches.

My problem is that neither does anything productive to address the real problem with affordable health care. Neither plan is substantively different than the other, other than who is paying whom campaign contributions, and who is appointing the “death-panels”. Ryan reformulated an approach that changes how insurance companies will get their piece of the pie, but he also came close to envisioning a new approach that would actually help America’s health care system, reduce government spending, and present a bill that would be capable of garnering bi-partisan support. Unfortunately, close does not assay as there.

So how do the two parties measure out on distinguishable levels of intelligence? Fortunately for all of us, neither party is completely devoid of intelligence. This of course was a foregone conclusion since I cannot prove the absence of any intelligence. But neither does either party show enough intelligence to be evaluated as having any value and thus non-differentiating.

The inability of Congress to serve the American people is almost inconceivable.