It’s back. President Biden’s Build Back Better Act is back. And now it’s gone again.
It was filled with expensive bad news for all sorts of West Virginians.
D.C. media last week reported that Senator Joe Manchin might go along with Biden and Democrat leadership to bring the bill back from the dead.
Luckily today, the Senator blew that play dead.
There’s good news for almost everyone. Stopping this reconciliation nightmare of higher taxes on businesses and job creators, bigger out of pocket prices for insulin, and price controls to wreck our prescriptions.
There were even billions more Federal dollars for the climate change clown car while we pay $5 a gallon for gasoline.
Would have made things worse for everyone who pays a bill or drives to a job. Bigger government, bigger taxes, bigger prices.
But, he stopped it. For now.
Running out of time, Senate Democrats under Schumer will take one more run at Senator Manchin next month.
He’s actually been quite the dam against so many of the Biden Administration’s terrible ideas. It would be odd to have him switch sides now, again.
The initial 190-pages or so of bill text sent to budget scoring had some of the worst news on the health care side for our seniors.
It raised the caps or maximum rate of increase of your Medicare Part D insurance premium by literally 50% per year.
While West Virginia might yell loudest about the alleged climate change money bonfire that liberals wanted, the interference in Medicare and prescription drugs was what would have hit our seniors hardest.
They wanted to make unlimited the maximum co-pay charged on insulin, which was just $35. That’s the opposite of what the Trump administration did to alleviate high costs of that and so many prescriptions.
On the drug side, the bill tried to place the blame for inflation in the economy on prescription drugs. Trouble is, while inflation took prices up on the basket of all goods last year by 8.6%, prescription drugs only went up 1.9% over the same span.
The reality is that inflation for the basket of all consumer goods went up at a higher than 9-percent rate for June. Food and gasoline prices (among others) even worse.
Instead of fixing the national issues with energy and food pricing created by this administration, Team Biden wants to put on a blindfold and change the subject.
West Virginians can’t afford $5 a gallon to drive into town for their scripts and groceries, let alone pay more for that stuff once they get there.
Moving dollars around within Medicare and drug reimbursements was just another D.C. shell game, to try to get Senator Manchin to do the wrong thing on Biden’s bigger plan.
That’s the arcane process by which the Senate Democrats try to avoid the filibuster and pass bills with just 50 votes and the Vice-President.
No Senate Republican is for this, and likely none ever will be.
These are serious times, in need of serious leadership.
In this economy, any bill that absolutely raises taxes or drug and health care costs, is incredibly unserious. Screwing around with senior health care hurts every American, liberal or conservative.
The Democrats in the House of Representatives will absolutely vote for this if they get the chance again. They’ve already voted for worse. They absolutely do not care how mad the voters will be this fall.
Joe Manchin was one of the only people who could stop this. He says that we can’t spend unless inflation comes down.
Let’s hold him to it.
The message is finally through to the voters. The more money that government spends or shoves out the back of airplanes, the more everything will cost here.
It’s like 1978 out here. Everyone is, sadly, an inflation expert again in West Virginia.
Hopefully Senator Manchin keeps listening to these experts here, not the ones in D.C.
Rob Cornelius is a conservative political consultant and broadcaster in Parkersburg. Reach him at robcwv@gmail.com
