Tom Coburn says Health Care Bill is Corruption, not Compromise

Senators Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe are big sticky thorns in the side of the TulsaWorld. This week, both senators blasted Obama's health care bill in strong statements that surely had World editors holding their noses as the paper went to print.

Tom Coburn

Coburn's message got right to the heart of the legislation:

"This vote is indeed historic," Coburn said in a prepared statement. "This Congress will be remembered for its arrogance, corruption and stupidity."

In the year of 2009, a Congress ignored the coming economic storm and impending bankruptcy of our entitlement programs and embarked on an ideological crusade to bring our nation as close to single-payer, government-run health care as possible.

If this bill becomes law, future operations will rue this day and I will do everything in my power to work toward its repeal. This bill will ration care, cut Medicare, increase premiums, fund abortion and bury our children in debt."

"Arrogance, corruption and stupidity..." All that and more. Well-said Senator Coburn.

Senator Inhofe, in the beginning, believed any version of health care coming out of the Harry Reid Senate would be dead-on-arrival. This Senate old-timer underestimated his colleagues' lack of ethics, he didn't see the big "buy off" coming toward the already ethics-challenged Senate body, he didn't realize how deeply Democrats had fallen into the abyss of slime politics.

Inhofe knows it now, and the following has been his position from the beginning of viewing the legislation:

"I am adamantly opposed to this $2.5 trillion government run health care system with its half a trillion dollar increase in taxes on Americans and nearly half a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare to help pay for it," Inhofe said in a statement released on his Web site. "I am also opposed to the public financing of abortion this bill allows.

"At a time when Senators and staff should be spending time with family celebrating the joys of Christmas, the Democrats are so committed to the idea of socialized medicine that they will stop at nothing to get it -- even though the majority of Americans do not want it. To make matters worse, special deals were cut for certain states in order to buy votes."

I encourage Senator Inhofe to adopt the words of Coburn - "corruption," and "stupidity," and if he believes them, say them. We need even stronger language out of Inhofe, and we know him to be more than capable of painting a visual with just a few words.

I appreciate both of these Senators who have fought hard to kill this legislation. Neither of these senators shoot from the hip. They know the legislation well and they do their homework. We need more like them.

Between now and the mid-term elections we will do well to focus on the word "corruption," and those who specifically voted to corrupt our legislative process. The message is to make payback hell for Harry Reid.