I mentioned earlier in the week how the public option fight changed the progressive movement. You had a popular, compromise measure that the public supported, where advocates did everything right, getting their pledges and using allies to make demands, and none of it mattered. It bred cynicism for future fights. Underneath all that was a [...]

Jonathan Bernstein wonders whether liberals have “forgotten about the public option.” I think the point here is that liberals have forgotten about politicians expressing nominal support for the public option. It’s still very early, but the first hints are a lot less promising than I would have expected for public option supporters. I checked the [...]

If people want to say that Mitt Romney “likes to fire people,” I’m not going to stop them. Lord knows that liberals have put up with egregious misstatements of fact and lines ripped out of context for years, if not decades. In fact, Romney did it just a couple months ago. So blowback’s a bitch. [...]

The news that Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Paul Ryan have joined forces on a premium support/Medicare hybrid has gone over like a lead balloon in the Democratic caucus, as well as the White House. First off, Democrats in the House showed little interest in the plan, which would allow private companies on a regulated [...]

So Mitt Romney released a fiscal plan. I hope his idea to eliminate Title X family planning funding, going much further than even many House Republicans, gets more attention. And there are some other far-right proposals in there as well, like raising the retirement age and capping spending at 20% of GDP and block-granting Medicaid. [...]

The Obama Administration did not notify Congressional supporters of the CLASS Act, a voluntary public long-term care insurance program passed with the Affordable Care Act, before pulling the plug on the idea. Advocates were left blindsided by the official announcement, though the Administration had recently released the chief actuary and shut down the offices doing [...]

As I wrote yesterday, the President’s deficit reduction plan includes a non-trivial swath of Medicare and Medicaid cuts, including some cuts for public health and prevention, as well as means testing and higher co-pays for certain services. We’re told that most of the cuts are to providers. In fact, the largest portion of cuts comes [...]

I think Anthony Weiner is missing a step in this fiendish plan to enact the public option. It’s not that he thinks the mandate is unconstitutional, but that the court has become so partisan, that its conservative justices will rule against President Obama in a 5-4 decision. He wasn’t glum about it, though — if [...]

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a largely meaningless salon today about the constitutionality of the individual mandate. There are a bit over three hundred million people in America, and the only one who matters on this score is Anthony Kennedy. And he wasn’t at the hearing. So I’m not sure what it accomplished. However, while [...]

With talk of repealing health care in the air, I thought it would be a good time to look at a couple New England states going in the opposite direction: Vermont and Connecticut. Both of them are in the midst of designing or recommending alternatives to the private health care market, which could go all [...]

What struck me in the CNN polling on the health care law was how much it matched previous polling on the subject. Like before, only a minority of Americans support the new law. Like before, a quarter of those opposed think that the law wasn’t liberal enough. As you may know, a bill that makes [...]