BP oil spill overshadows GOP attempts to repeal health reform

It's hardly a silver lining, but one positive effect of the BP oil spill has finally emerged: the media have become too busy to write about health reform repeal. A group of presumably disappointed GOP lawmakers recently scheduled a press conference to unveil the latest attempt to repeal President Obama's health reform package. Only a handful of reporters showed up, according to Politico. Everyone else, it seems, was trying to calculate the cubic area of vast undersea oil plumes, or shooting B-roll of petroleum coated seabirds, or giggling over the president's use of the word "****," as in he wants to know "whose **** to kick" over the oil spill in the Gulf.

Who's got the time or the attention span right now to listen to the opposition talk about scaling back health reform when the Gulf Coast is being poisoned by an oil spill so great it now seems it will take years to clean up? The damaging health effects to cleanup workers and some local residents are already great;  the feds have sent in a mobile health care clinic to treat and document the illnesses and injury resulting from the toxic sludge. No wonder reporters can't be bothered to show up to learn about proposed legislation to take back health reform.

The media are indeed fickle when it comes to the people, places and events to which they give their attention and their affection. But between the oil spill and the new "superwomen" of financial regulation reform, it looks like the fourth estate will be busy with other matters for some time to come. This is indeed bad news for the GOP - particularly the far right leaning, Tea Party types. Already they failed in their predicted, wide-scale takeover at the polls during Tuesday's primary election. Now they can't even talk about their outrage over socialist ObamaCare. Yet it's also bad for the not-so-far right leaning leadership of the GOP, who had planned to use those political sweeps at the primaries to generate momentum for their repeal of health reform.

Wait, there's more. Not only are Republicans struggling to get ink (or even cyber-ink) for their health reform repeal bill, the little air time the media are devoting to health reform these days has mostly been about the Medicare drug rebate program. That's a key savings plan for seniors that Obama and other Democrats have been talking up lately ahead of its launch later this year. The $250 rebate is the first phase of the plan to fix the so-called Medicare drug "doughnut hole," in which seniors receive a drug benefit until they reach a certain level of drug costs. Then the benefit dries up, only to return once the seniors reach other, higher level of drug cost. Health reform seeks to fill the hole.

November is still a ways off yet, and the health reform repeal picture as it appears now is not likely to be the same in five months. Hopefully, though, that still will translate into good news for Obama and health reform. Hopefully, thought, it won't be because the media are still too busy covering a massive oil spill to care about health reform.

Photo Credit: marinephotobank