Our Peril from Pelosi

Threatening a radical departure from legislative norms that have weathered well since our founding, Dem House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's intent on taking America over the ObamaCare precipice, and her party along with her. Political suicide is the buzz and even Democrats are saying bizarre stuff like this:

Pelosi “will put a bullet in the head of anyone she needs to,” said a Democratic insider. “Rangel, any incumbent that looks like he’s going to lose. She’ll do anything it takes to keep her majority, anything.”

After the health care summit charade Peggy Noonan was more bland, but still chilling:

Her remarks were dull and witless. Nothing she said was the fruit of fresh thought. She offered cornball, off-point clichés about the kitchen table: "We don't have time to start over!" "I've seen grown men cry." It was a speech that could have been given at a Democratic Party fund-raiser, and no doubt has been. What runs her and keeps her from embarrassment is the lovely, unquestioned conviction that she is right and that's that. There are politicians whose strengths come from their limits. Her limit is that she cannot, ever, see truth on the other side. The steel of her certitude becomes her strength. It allows her to squash opponents legislatively like little bugs.

It was interesting that while Sen. Alexander spoke to the room and not the cameras, she spoke to the cameras and not the room.

Which seemed to say it all.

Well, she'll be fine, she has a safe seat in San Francisco, and the personal wealth to insulate her--maybe she'll have to pay in future for those cross-country jaunts by jet herself (though I'm sure she'll manage to keep her Cadillac health care at our expense.)

We can't afford this kind of political idiocy any more. And this time some Americans will pay with their lives.

More. WSJ. Back to the ObamaCare Future. The Massachusetts 'model' moves to price controls:

Massachusetts health care, with its abundance of academic medical centers and high-quality specialists, is the envy of the world.

This is the true target of Mr. Patrick's price controls: The goal is to engineer a cheaper system through brute force so government can pay for health care for all. What inevitably suffers is the quality of care for individual patients. Thirty states imposed hospital rate setting in the 1970s and 1980s. Except for Maryland, every one of them eventually eliminated it—including Massachusetts, in 1991—partly because it didn't control costs.

And partly because it killed people. A 1988 study in the Journal of New England Medicine found that the states with the most stringent rate-setting had mortality rates 6% to 10% higher than those that didn't.