So, what do you think Harry Reid will decide to do? Do you think it’s even his decision? Or is just going to do whatever the White House tells him to do? Are we still looking at a two-step, where the Senate passes something slightly better than Finance’s bill and then the Conference Committee with the House makes it slightly better again? Or are they going to pass whatever Olympia Snowe insists is her bottom line?
Make your predictions.
there are four other bills. why is no one in the media or the blogs not talking about the other four?
They are dead. This is the one that the White House is backing.
With all due respect dear…
I call bullshit.
The media seems intent on this bill because it’s what they’ve been demanding all along. Don’t confuse them with what the White House has not been able to say they really wanted all this time. But now that the final Committee bill is passed, you might just hear the WH weigh in for once. They want something more like the Kennedy bill. But if they weighed in earlier, this bill would have failed and the whole effort would have been sent to the great scrap-heap of history, just like Clinton’s bill did.
Just wait and watch. Good things can finally happen now that Baucus and Co. have little to say about it.
Sorry, Obama himself praised that bill saying it had all the elements he wanted.
Snow is going to screw it all up.
If it gets played out like the stimulus bill, I’ll probably throw up in my mouth. In that instance, the Senate bill is nearly identical to the Finance bill with a few little nips and tucks and maybe a co-op trigger plan. The House passes a strong bill with a public option. The conversative Senators who voted for the Senate plan (Conrad, Snowe, Nelson, etc,) play ooga-booga “I’m not gonna vote for the bill if you change one thing in it” and the Obama team ends up pressuring pissed-off liberals into voting for a weak half-ass bill that won’t get the job done.
But considering this is Obama’s biggest priority and he has always sounded like a big public plan proponent, and considering that he put in that Oct. 15th reconciliation date for just this reason, I really hope they play some hardball with the Conservacrats. Pass a so-so bill out of the Senate, hopefully with public option opt-out plan or something like it. Then merge it with the House bill and give it a real robust public option tied to Medicare. Then DARE those motherfucking Democrats to filibuster the highest priority of the new President and the party. See who really wants to be in the doghouse forever. Let them know that reelection money and support is on the line, and that any goodies they want for their state in other bills might also be in peril. This is where you cash in all those chits you’ve built up.
If Ben Nelson and Kent Conrad or Lieberman decide to filibuster it anyway, thus spitting on Ted Kennedy’s legacy, go right to reconciliation and pass it that way. Go ahead and do it right, with tax increases on the rich to pay for the damn thing. Big time subsidies. Allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. It will be instantly popular, because Congress finally got something done that helps the people and not the powerful.
I can’t predict which way it will go because Obama really holds things close to the vest. I know how Rahm would want it to go, but hopefully the libs in the Senate (Bernie Sanders?) and House make it clear that they will vote against a weak plan with no public option.
One problem: If the liberals vote against it, the press (and the White House) will scream that Liberals killed Universal Health Care out of spite because it didn’t have “Government Takeover of Health Care”.
Might as well have fought for Medicare for All.
Fox News and Rush Limbaugh might say that, but no one in the WH would be caught dead saying something so ridiculous.
What would happen is that Obama and Reid would realize that to get something passed, they need to put in a strong public option — exactly the thing that Obama has been championing for months. They would resort to reconciliation or twist enough arms to overcome cloture. News stories would be talking about how in a bid to get the votes of Snowe and Ben Nelson, the WH forgot about the 70 House liberals and the 10 Senate liberals who actually want real health care reform.
Obama is going to get a health care bill this year. The Progressive Caucus is a hell of a lot bigger than the Snowe caucus, so hopefully they act like it.
I’ll concede that Rahm wouldn’t say “Government Takeover of Health Care”, but he definitely would blame it on Liberals and never on Blue Dogs. I’m convinced he would rather blame Liberals than Republicans. I base this on his performance running the DCCC, wherein he preferred letting Republicans win to letting Liberal Democrats have open primaries.
The DCCC always opposes open primaries when they recruit what they perceive to be a winning candidate, regardless of who heads it up. That lets them focus their resources on races where they are less certain of the outcome. Not saying that this is a good thing, it’s just how they roll.
There are 25 Senators who signed a letter to Reid strongly asserting that a public option be in the bill. There is Lieberman’s coy comments today on Imus, and we know that he will go off the reservation. There is Conrad’s pointed comment about a public option (or is that just about Medicare rates).
And then there is the House action, which is now talking about a windfall profits tax on insurance companies and requirements for premium rates in the exchange. Some of the House stuff being added might be for bargaining.
The key will be whether Reid does the “we don’t have the votes” routine or forces a roll-call cloture vote on a bill with a public option.
And it depends on how heavy the White House involves itself in the details.
And it depends on lots of little details that can make the difference between a good reform bill or one that leaves a lot of loopholes.
I think that the media spotlight will shift back to the House while the negotiations are going on in the Senate.
of Obama’s presidency have been squandered getting Olympia Snowe to vote for a shitty health care bill which she says she might well vote AGAINST in the future.
Yeah, we’ve been way too hard on Obama.
he’s already gotten further than Hillary Clinton got when this ball was in her court.
does this have to do with Hillary Clinton?
he better MAN THE FUCK UP
because,
THE THOUGHT…
THE THOUGHT..
that he’d let those traitorous mofos ‘silently filibuster’ with the GOP..
HELLLL NO
make them stand up like the SELLOUTS THAT THE ARE AND PUT A VOTE ON RECORD.
Sometime in the past couple of hours I read something about the WH running enthusiastically with AHIP’s screw-up and saying it proves the need for a strong public option (PO). Can’t remember which site it was cuz I’ve been to quite a few. So I expect that Senate will have at least some weak representation of PO, while the House will report out something more substantial.
Meanwhile as polls and such keep improving for PO because we’re feeling more hopeful and enthusiastic, more and more Blue Dogs (like Harman and some other Rep today speaking up for PO) will start swinging our way.
We’re not out of the woods yet, but closer than we’ve been in a century, so let’s have less backbiting and more positive speaking up for what we want.
A bill with a disappointing but not worthless public option with opt-out language passes the Senate.
In conference the public option is beefed up but not a lot. Opt-out stays in.
Left blogistan howls that this is a sell out (with some cause), and implementation turns out to be where the real challenge lies. In the process of getting the new system up and running the industry players get in on the ground floor and make the most important provisions almost entirely non-functional.
In 2016 the R’s run on an “incompetent gov’t” platform (mixed with the usual war and bigotry, of course). The activist base of the left is demoralized and a third partier takes 4% of the vote.
No matter how it plays out, one way or another in the end the money will have its way. This is America; it always does.
All of this isn’t to say that it won’t have been worth it. Even with corporate neutering, the public option will help many millions of people.
In a decade we’ll revisit it and make some improvements, assuming that peak oil and climate change haven’t overwhelmed our spending capacity…
Who really cares what they did in the Finance committee? All the matters is when they all go to conference between the House and the Senate.
Unless the Dems choose to do the hard right over the easy wrong? I expect it will look, in the end, like a mix between the Help committee bill and some of the less flushable crap in the House bills.
If they do actually choose to do the hard right – just the plain old best thing to do for the people at this point? Then they will tack left and it will look more like the original Hacker proposal that they were all selling in the campaigns.
The only thing we can be pretty darn certain of until it comes out of conference? We are not getting the best answer to the majority of problems needing to be addressed in healthcare reform: Single Payer.
and the White House bears at least equal responsibility with Reid for the next stage.
If they let Snowe dictate the process going forward then the bill will be terrible. I give her credit for not wanting to place a huge financial burden on people, but her opposition to a public option and to adequate subsidies means many people would be left with no coverage, or with expensive but inadequate coverage. The bill would also contain nothing to bring costs down.
However, a threat from only two or three liberal senators would be enough to keep Snowe from dictating the process. I am more concerned about the moderates in the caucus eviscerating the bill, as they did with the stimulus. Snowe could not have done that alone. Conrad, Nelson (NE), Lincoln and Lieberman could be at least as problematic as Snowe, and we should be pressuring them as much as we can.
I think the senate bill will contain some type of public option. The best-case scenario for the Senate would be the PO from the HELP bill, possibly watered down with an opt-out provision. If we can get that far in the next round then I’d be happy, and hope for better out of conference with the House.
That’s not the only thing that matters, though. The HELP, Finance and House bills have different minimum levels of coverage, and the Finance and House bills have different revenue sources. There are lots and lots of battles going forward, and I’m a little concerned that progressives may be so focussed on the public option that some of the equally important measures will be watered down without fanfare.
Booman, how much freedom does Reid have when he merges these bills? Wyden sounds like he’s pushing for a modified version of his amendment – can Reid still include it? Can he include something like the handcuffed Carper “public option” that wasn’t in either bill?
With the support of Baucus and Dodd, Reid can include anything he wants. He needs them to give the nod to modifications not considered in either bill.
Thanks, Booman.
So basically, we are relying on Dodd not to have a Carperesque mess or a trigger or some other useless Potemkin PO inserted into the bill for the optics of it.
I’m not sure that gives me great confidence. How good is Dodd?
Honestly, Dodd is fine. But unless the WH takes his side, he’s badly outnumbered.