STRONG WORDS FROM SEN. ANGUS KING (I-ME)

Another dastardly Republican plot is afoot to convince young people not to sign on to the Affordable Care Act but rather to pay the penalty. Sen. Angus King (I-ME) speaks strong words about the people in the groups participating in the scheme.

Tuesday begins a 6-month race to enroll as many uninsured people as possible in the Affordable Care Act’s insurance exchanges. For the markets to be effective, they need millions of customers, and for elderly participants not to vastly outnumber younger ones.

It’s in this context that well-heeled conservative groups are appealing to uninsured young people to remain uninsured — part of a backdoor effort to undermine the structural integrity of the health care law. (My emphasis

Their efforts have attracted the attention of one senator who recounts how being insured saved his life when he was a young adult, and who has since then watched others die due to lack of coverage. And he doesn’t mince words with those who’d take risks with other people’s health security.

“That’s a scandal — those people are guilty of murder in my opinion,” Sen. Angus King, a Maine Independent who caucuses with Democrats, told me in a Friday interview. “Some of those people they persuade are going to end up dying because they don’t have health insurance. For people who do that to other people in the name of some obscure political ideology is one of the grossest violations of our humanity I can think of. This absolutely drives me crazy.”

Sen. King is my hero for his plain-speaking in naming for what it is the despicable deception in the pressure groups' attempts to convince young adults they do not need health insurance.  The extreme right in the US care about nothing and no one in their determination to achieve their own political agenda whatever the cost to people other than themselves.

Even as those of us here at home watch in horror the spectacle of Republicans in their recklessness and intransigence risk the welfare of the entire country in their refusal to vote on the clean budget bill from the Senate, my friends from other countries watch with dismay and incredulity the continuing temper tantrum of the extremists Republicans in the House.

As David Kurtz from TPM says:

It can't be reiterated often enough: If John Boehner puts a temporary spending bill on the House floor, without any anti-Obamacare stunts in it, it would pass.

He can do it today and avoid a shutdown, or he can do it in a few days or weeks and end a shutdown. It's up to him.

Rep. Boehner, at least some of us are aware that the Hastert Rule is not in the US Constitution, and you can, if you so choose, bypass the rule at any time.