Surreal

I have to admit that I haven't been following the health care debate much at all. I think that the whole welfare state will meet up with reality in the near future. For example, California's continuing budget crisis is impossible to solve without cuts to handouts. In this environment, we're enacting more entitlement legislation. Whatever.

Having registered that note of indifference, there are some strikingly surreal things afoot. First, Nebraska won't have to pay their portion of the bill.

Nebraskans will get new Medicaid mandates covered by the federal government, most other states will sink under the weight of new unfunded mandates.

Second, hidden in this monstrosity are gems like this.

The health reform Christmas gifts for Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska are well known. But somewhere out there is another good little legislator who got funding for a hospital in their state.

But which senator? Which hospital? It is a health care whodunit.

Somewhere out there in the United States is a “Health Care Facility” “at a public research university in the United States that contains a State’s sole public academic medical and dental school.”

We know this because in the bill Democrats released Saturday morning is a $100,000,000 check for that hospital (presumably there is only one).

After over a year of listening to the big financial companies get pilloried for being, well, big financial companies, we now have a bill which will funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into them while doctors get screwed.

I’m a primary care doctor in YOUR state (Nebraska), and you sold me out. I didn’t slog through 4 years of college and 4 years of medical school and 3 years of residency just to have you hand my career and my patient/doctor relationships over to government lifers ...

Thank you, Ben, for forcing doctors like me to earn less than the repairmen who fix our appliances. Case in point: We recently had our dishwasher fixed. The repairman who came to our house charged $65 just to come and ‘diagnose’ the problem, then charged another $180 to ‘fix’ the problem. You and your fellow lawmakers have fixed MY going rate (Medicare) at $35 per-visit. Thank you for securing such a ‘lucrative’ rate for me! Thank you so much for making me–someone with 8 years of education!–make less than a mechanic or appliance repair technichian.

But those little tidbits are not what make it surreal. This image is what pushes it over the top.

President Obama and Premier Wen Jiabao of China at Copenhagen.
I uploaded a big version, so it's worth a click to get the full effect.
The money being blown both here and as burnt offerings to the Cult of Global Warming is borrowed. It's borrowed from entities who do not play surreal games with finances. That image tells so very many stories, some of which were noted by commenters at Ann Althouse's blog. Here are my two favorites.

From Quilly Mammoth:

In the car biz we would observe salesmen's posture to get an idea how the deal was going. If we saw this we would send in a floor manager. Obama is trying very hard to sell a position that Wen is not buying. He's no longer looking at the customer but is immersed in his pitch.

From Bruce:

Looking at the large version, it seems Wen is indignant and disgusted, but also having some sort of revelation, as if he's seeing something new (it's not good). And of course he's carefully trying to hide all this by portraying himself as in control.

I view this as a highly trained, very talented public official looking down at an undisciplined commoner who's making a long list of obvious mistakes and probably unintended insults. Eegads, he thinks: China talks about being run by ordinary people, but that place really is.

The surreal nature of all of this is that the decisions being made by the progressives are based on a fantasy view of the world while the money they borrow is being lent by very, very pragmatic entities. It's like watching adult con men take money from naive trust-fund kids who don't even know they're being taken. Meanwhile, we're jumping up and down, unsuccessfully trying to warn them.

Very surreal. Very much like a dream.