Thanks David.

Dear Lord, do I long for the possibility that progressives and GOPers might band together and kill this POS bill! Can you imagine the earthquake that would take place right under the WH and the Senate chamber? Although there would be almost as many (wrong) explanations as there were “no” votes, the impact would still be the same: Dem leadership would know that the true progressives like Kucinich who voted no were the ones that killed the bill. So much for Rahm’s “Liberals don’t count” comment.

we phone banked like crazy to Cardoza and Costa constituents from LA this week and last.

If I were Luis Gutierrez I wouldn’t vote for this bill. Latinos are going to get screwed in so many ways from intrusive requests for proof of citizenship to the pay-or-play employer mandate that will lead to reduced hours for many low-wage jobs. Being told that this “could be addressed in a future bill” is the ultimate fuck you.

Watch out for a couple (maybe as many as six or seven) last minute Republican votes in favor of the Senate bill. Republicans, most of all, have got to want to see Democrats saddled with passage of this bill for the next six or seven years: it’s going to be their gravy train.

So, Obama can count on the pugs to get the bill through. Lordie.

Yeah, that’s ‘we’ll fix it later’ where somehow ‘later’ never arrives.

Gibbs said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Whoever sits here at this time next week, I think will not be talking about health care as a proposal, but as the law of the land.”

Clearly the WH will wash its hands of the issue as ‘finished’ the day after that; at least they’re no longer pretending otherwise.

Somehow one defecting partisan turns legislation into a bipartisan accomplishment, Never could figure out who buys this shit but both parties in congress have made those claims when it suited them. In this case the Rep. leadership has such a stake in the Waterloo aspect of this exercise that I sincerely doubt they would allow any of their members to cross over. They win either way, so why bother.

Interesting Salon read:
The Democrats’ scam becomes more transparent

I have no doubt they’ll get the votes. It’s cave time. It’s what the Democrats do best.

If this piece o crap passes it will just be another indication that the U.S. lacks the courage to truly address the root causes of it’s problems. A nation too timid and too fearful to embrace the future.

help me out you psych majors … I gone from
- pissed off and steaming over the latest betrayal, to

- kind of numb, to

- wishing it was over, to

- laughing at the whole f’king mess.

I hope they put in the funding for 15 floating fortresses, and declare war on eastasia instead of oceania ! let’s declare … wheelchairs illegal, as long as the law is over 10,000 pages long and hires all wheelchair people at $150,000 / year to administer the law! fuck this whole stupid thing.

rmm.

6 or seven years? More like a generation. Much of it doesn’t go into effect for another 4 years at least. It will take another 2 years for people to realize it’s a complete failure on a variety of levels. Once the people realize they’ve been had by the Democrats they will be as popular as Republicans were in the South after the Civil War. All in all it’s a good thing if this destroys the Democratic Party. Maybe now there will be a real opposition party that addresses the needs of real people.

And then Mr. Bipartisan can jump up and down claiming a bipartisan triumph. It’s all kabuki and all for the cameras. The corporate media will sing the praises of the wise one and poets will pen odes to honor the chameleon. The U.S. is living in a state of tragedy and farce.

Instead of bitchin’ and moanin’, y’all should be hard at work making sure Pelosi includes a P.O. in the reconciliation bill, since the Senate Leadership has said they would pass it.

I’ve been saying this for some time. The Republicans must have 6-8 members who are retiring and therefore could “afford” to vote “yes” to push this travesty over the finish line.

I’m not trying to be difficult, but your posts don’t seem to track anywhere close to the reality on the ground. Until the past 4 days, neither Pelosi nor Reid said anything committal about their vote count. Not they have both come out and said basically it is a done deal. As cautious as they have been throughout this process, I don’t believe they would say this if they didn’t have it locked up. Likewise, Obama has said he is canceling his trip to sign this thing next weekend. He wouldn’t do this if he didn’t think the votes are locked up.

So what do you know that the three of them don’t seem to know?

I wish the bill were better / a more complete solution. But to say that it doesn’t address any of the root causes of our problems is just not honest. Two of the core problems are rescission of policies / lifetime caps and denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions. The bill absolutely does address both of these things — perhaps not to perfection, but it is a whole lot better than today’s situation.

Another root problem is that a huge percentage of health care money is being consumed in ERs by people who can’t afford to see a regular GP before it is a complete emergency. And many of those ER bills go unpaid, forcing us paying customers to pick up the tab. Again, the bill does address that. I don’t like the way the bill addresses the problem — by forcing me to buy coverage from the crooks. I would much rather have a PO. But again, this solution is far better than the status quo. The insurance companies face new restrictions on their behavior. If they continue to be abusive, we will have opportunities to tighten the screws on this by taking away the anti-trust exemption.

It is far from perfect, but well worth passing.

……Democrats need 25 of a combination of the 17 potential No-Yes flip votes and the 20 potential Yes-No flip votes. So they need 25 out of the remaining uncommitted 37.

Using the IRS to force the middle class and the poor to buy really crappy insurance from the health insurance cartel is a huge win for the GOP.

The real battle is over single payer. You do not get cost reduction without taking away the slice the health insurance cartel is stealing. From the view of the taxpayers, that is the low hanging fruit and that is why the public option was so crucial.

The current version just allows the health insurance cartel to reload their pockets with cash taken from the poor and the middle class. They will use that to pay lobbyists to buy politicians to fight single payer.

The insurance companies face new restrictions on their behavior. If they continue to be abusive, we will have opportunities to tighten the screws on this by taking away the anti-trust exemption.

Do you believe in the tooth fairy?

Read NO ONE WOULD LISTEN, by Harry Markopolos about trying to get the SEC to take down Madoff. The Obama SEC has done almost nothing to change the permissive culture that was so prevalent at the Bush SEC.

Torture? I do not see any difference between Bush and Obama.

Twin Middle East occupations, I see no difference between Obama and Bush.

Well worth passing?

Well, no – but perhaps worth passing.

I agree as to vote count. Pelosi seems to have enough votes and the question is which reps will be allowed to vote no. There are however a few folks that say she is short a handful and expects to get them on the day of the vote – we will see shortly.

Meanwhile the three vote approach could actually make this worth doing. In the 3 vote, the House passes the Senate Bill plus recon bill, The Senate passes House recon but in process a Medicare buy-in at cost is added, and the House then passes the Senate changed recon bill. But I am not expecting this as it would be a happy ending and Obama is not into making progressives happy.

Shame on me for leaving out all the damage done to choice in the proposed legislation.

I am unaware of anything Obama has done wrt anti trust in any industry.

No, I don’t think they can afford to do so (vote a conscience they don’t have), they want lobby money once ‘retired’.

The issue as I understand it now is Pelosi’s ‘taking it off the table’ in The House, isn’t it?

You must not read comments or posts here much, because your positives have been debunked completely for a year or more now on this blog.

Tell Rahm it’s time to rewrite the talking points, they are stale.

And it’s a huge inroad to the process of privatizing other government provided services.

I wanna see how the government intends to enforce the collection of premiums people can’t or won’t buy.

THAT’S gonna cause more civil issues than any amount of anarchist acts possible.

Nor I.

Other than Pelosi saying there’s no PO, we don’t really know WHAT’s on the table, or has been put to paper, thus we can’t really tell WHO’s voting for WHAT, until it’s over . . . clever lil fucks all of them, huh.

“I am unaware of anything Obama has done wrt anti trust in any industry.”

I do not expect leadership from Obama on that, any more than he led for the PO, which is to say not at all. But we are now at the 17% point on health care costs. If the number keeps going up, there comes a breaking point.

If people the people who have been running without coverage — driving up the costs for the rest of us — see these increases, they can potentially be recruited to add strength to a grass roots movement. As the grass roots pressure builds — and it will, because we know the insurance companies are just going to keep raising rates — Congress critters will look for the easiest way to grandstand on this. A repeal of the Anti-trust exemption fits that bill perfectly. It doesn’t cost any politician anything really.

I could very easily see that passing even later this year — certainly next year if the Dems retain a majority. That should be able to go under reconciliation because it will have a big direct bearing on the Federal budget.

Medicare buy-in will take some more work. The challenge on that one is to get that raised to the public consciousness as the best answer when we see the costs go to 18%, 19%, 20%, 21%.

The whole concept of a “public option” was terrible policy and terrible messaging. It never had a chance. The right play is to push optional Medicare buy-in. It is a system everybody knows. The only point that remains to be explained to the dimwits out there is that every participant would pay his fair share in premiums. This would not cost the taxpayers a penny.

My point is that this isn’t over because we all know the costs are going to keep going up. We are so close to the breaking point now, this will remain an active issue. So let’s take the real gains that this bill does provide and use that as the starting point for the next stage.

Then just kill the bill. I’m sick of all of them.

“You must not read comments or posts here much, because your positives have been debunked completely for a year or more now on this blog.”

I am well aware that there is a heavy group-think here. But calling the bill a piece of crap is not the same thing as “debunking” the supposed benefits of the bill.

Republicans, most of all, have got to want to see Democrats saddled with passage of this bill for the next six or seven years: it’s going to be their gravy train.

Exactly. This is basically a Republican bill crafted by center-right Democrats, including Barack Obama. Their corporate patrons on Wall Street love it. Watch the stocks of AHIP members go up when it passes. So, what’s not for a Republican to love, especially when the Dems will be saddled with the blame.

doublefelix, you wrote:

If people the people who have been running without coverage — driving up the costs for the rest of us — see these increases, they can potentially be recruited to add strength to a grass roots movement.

How will these people learn about it? They cannot afford newspapers or an internet connection.

I applaud your support for the Medicare buy in, but I think you are seriously underestimating the malevolence of the health insurance cartel.

I am a big tent Dem and have no intention at this time of leaving for a third party.

Health care is the central front in the war on the corpratists/oligopolies.

Then you wrote this disaster: The whole concept of a “public option” was terrible policy and terrible messaging. It never had a chance.

Jane suspected in June that single payer was doa. We have a lot of single payer experts over here who do not want a Medicare buy in, because it lacks the cost cutting we need. They want more of a V.A. for all type system. I am not a wonk and cannot comment.

None of it mattered. As Jane suspected, the Dems buried single payer.

The PO was a line in the sand. Since June Mike Stark? got Dems on camera saying they would not vote for a bill that did not at least have a robust PO. That scared the crap out of the spineless progressive caucus. They knew we could use those statements to primary them from the left if they tried to retreat.

That is why Obama and Rahm are dragging this out. They want the filing deadlines to pass for the primaries to protect the spineless progressive caucus.

Unless I missed it, you never responded above about the concerns about choice.

Your assertion that you do not expect Obama to lead on anti trust did not exactly foster support for your position, based on prior comments you made.

Thanks, I had not considered this.

“The PO was a line in the sand.”

Respectfully, I believe that was a blunder of monumental proportions. It was poorly considered and poorly argued. It was obvious from day one that the GOP would have the upper hand on that argument. No matter what the facts were, it was just too easy to argue “create a whole new government bureaucracy” and “more big government takeover of your lives”.

The only plan that has a chance of success is one that builds on the successful program that everybody knows and almost everyone likes. Every time the GOP has tried to attack Medicare, they get their noses bloodied. They come back to that fight every 2 or 3 years and that is the one fight we have been able to win consistently.

Moreover, it is crazy to be talking about some new public program when we already have one that works. All we have to do is offer Medicare to those under 55 on the basis that they must pay 100% of the actual cost in premiums so that the taxpayer doesn’t pay one nickel for this. And if you don’t like the concept of Medicare, you are welcome to keep doing business with Wellpoint, Aetna, or whomever you wish.

That becomes as close to a no-brainer as we will ever get in the health care world.

The irony here is that what I described is more or less what most people actually meant when talking about the “public option”. They just chose the worst possible words to describe that concept. It really was a horribly conceived strategy, and that is why it failed. So don’t blame others. Go to school. Learn how to win the messaging wars.

“Your assertion that you do not expect Obama to lead on anti trust did not exactly foster support for your position”

My point is simply that this has to be driven from the grass roots. Obama is not much different from any other politician. He takes the course of least resistance. He gets loads of resistance from the corporations and he perceives the resistance from the people to be less. We have to change that equation.

Respectfully, I believe that was a blunder of monumental proportions.

Were you there? Were you making phone calls? Were you recording the conversations as Jane asked?

We called Congressional offices. We told them we wanted single payer. We told them the PO was a line in the sand. Then Jane published a lot of the notes, so people knew what to expect.

So we should wait for the poor and the uneducated to buy newspapers and get a high speed internet connection?

Obama and the vichy Dems do not get a pass for caving into oligopolies. I understand the political realities, but he and Rahm are just driving the left, and labor, and the middle class out of the party. Bad strategy.

It was poorly considered and poorly argued. It was obvious from day one that the GOP would have the upper hand on that argument. No matter what the facts were, it was just too easy to argue “create a whole new government bureaucracy” and “more big government takeover of your lives”.

I hate to bust your bubble, but especially in the House, we did not need any help from the GOP. The fact that the House would not move on Single Payer should be a clue to you that history has confirmed the accuracy of the line in the sand strategy that Jane courageously took back in June.

“So we should wait for the poor and the uneducated to buy newspapers and get a high speed internet connection?”

I never said anything of the kind.

But we should get a whole lot smarter about how we frame policy. The concept of “public option ” was a sucker punch waiting to happen. It was a marketing blunder. I am not questioning anybody’s sincerity — only their marketing acumen.

Had this enthusiasm for “public option” been chnneled towards a more effective message (Medicare buy-in), I believe it would already have been successful. If not already enacted into lw, we would be well on our way to selling the idea. By harping about the “public option” you contined to feed the right wing message machine because they have successfully framed that as a big government takeover. You have already lost that battle. Move on to one we can win.