Pelosi: Let Them Eat Cake

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi attacked the private health insurance industry during a news conference yesterday. "It's almost immoral what they are doing," Pelosi said to reporters. "Of course they've been immoral all along in how they have treated the people that they insure ... They are the villains in this.” This type of rhetoric is pretty normal for Speaker Pelosi, except that this blurb comes with a particularly toxic form of hypocrisy.

Speaker Pelosi, as a distinguished member of the United States House of Representatives, gets her own private health insurance from the federal government. In fact, it has often been described as gold-plated, top-of-the-line health coverage (in another life, we might call it the Cadillac of Health Insurance Plans). As an excellent example of how wonderful this coverage is, it has provided for literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in testing and treatment for Sen. Edward Kennedy.

So what Speaker Pelosi appears to imply, but stops short of actually saying is, "Let them eat cake," as Marie Antionette, Queen of France during the French Revolution, supposedly stated when told of starving French peasants. Antionette was perfectly clueless to just how absurd her proposition was seeing as bread, let alone cake, cost more than most workers earned. In that spirit, Speaker Pelosi wants the rest of us hoi polloi to starve under government-controlled health care while she and the rest of her Congressional brethren will continue to enjoy virtually limitless private health insurance.