Isakson parties like it's 1994

Though I was fully aware of the response I'd receive, I nonetheless submitted a pair of letters to both Sen. Johnny Isakson and Sen. Saxby Chambliss expressing my support for a public option component as part of an overall health reform package and urging them to support said legislation. Naturally, they sent back automated responses that told they wouldn't.

Isakson's response, however, was particularly intriguing given his status as a member of the Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. He touted his vote against the bill and argued that Republicans were 'shut out of the drafting of the bill' ... though, of course, that's incredibly absurd given that Republican input was sought and desired. Rather than be constructive in their criticism, however, Isakson and his colleagues repeatedly stressed two things - the need to slow down any measure of reform and to incorporate more tax cuts into the picture.

In fact, Isakson directed me to his plan for saving health care, the Patient's Choice Act. Of course, it's the same old, tired policies trotted out by conservative leaders that does nothing to address rising costs and increasing numbers of uninsured. The cure-all solution is, laughably, a tax cut in the form or $5,700 per family, per year. While that tax cut would barely cover the annual expenses of health insurance, it does nothing to expand coverage or control rising costs (though it would end employer obligations for insurance provision).

Isakson doesn't like the proposed public option not because, like many conservatives, he doesn't think it wouldn't work ... he thinks it would work too well. Therefore, his only course of action is work to prolong the debate and hope the proposed reform is suffocated.

It's classy, isn't it?