Mickey Kaus is reporting that a Brown victory in the Massachusetts Senate race may not necessarily kill the healthcare bill. If the house passes the current Senate bill as-is, there will be no need for a conference. A tricky move indeed but we’ll have to wait and see the outcome of the election for the Democrats to make their choice.
Tag healthcare
Who Wins In Healthcare Reform?
Pending some major catastrophe a la Mr. Karl Rove circa 2006 (Wait, nevermind…), the Senate healthcare reform bill will pass in the Senate in the the next few days. Some liberals are for it, some liberals are skeptical but, when passed, they will have an achieved something that has eluded our government for over sixty years. From a political standpoint, this bill is very unique. It’s gigantic–$871 Billion–and will be passed along party lines. As Megan McCardle points out, this has never happened before. So which party wins more political cache?
On one hand, there are the Republicans who have said no since the summer, refusing to do anything but obstruct. On the other, are the Democrats who have chosen to go the road alone and ended up with a bill that few are happy with. In the short term, it will be easy to frame this bill in the midterm elections as a massive expansion of government with little foreseeable benefits. Democrats will surely lose some seats for this. Luckily, it seems unlikely that Republicans will get a supermajority in the Senate.
In the long run, this legislation will probably just make people angry and entrenched. The changes won’t fully go into effect for a few years and I imagine this will be a campaign platform for a few years after that. In short, it’s messy. Nobody wins outright, but I guess that’s politics.
Liberals (Hopefully) Banding Together To Pass Healthcare Reform
After last night’s news that the Medicare buy-in had been dropped, it is understandable that progressive activists woke up with a pretty fat hangover. All is not lost though, super-intelllectual liberal bloggers Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein looked back on how far we have come in healthcare policy. It is nice, right now, to see that Democrats are looking to unify themselves to achieve an historic victory.
The nay-sayers are not gone though. The new (albeit short) rhetorical battle will be between policy wonks (who think the bill should be passed) and activists (who think there can still be more work). More political, less wonky bloggers want nothing to do with this bill, but my guess is that they will eventually get on board. When it comes down to it, the numbers are showing that more people will be covered. More coverage will lead to more votes, even if the changes don’t kick in for another few election cycles.
Who Will Kill Healthcare Reform?
If anybody does, I can guarantee it will be the Democrats. With the Medicare buy-in gone, the liberal bloggers and probably liberal senators want no part of it. Without any sort of government option to force costs to go down, liberals see this bill as merely a give away to insurance companies. This is, of course, a problem for the Democratic party right now. When Republicans ran the show, there was none of this disunity business. If you didn’t vote with the Republican caucus, you weren’t a Republican, simple enough. The Democratic party is considerably more fractured though. In fact, rather than having their own unified ideology, Democrats have sort of been just the not-Republican party.
Enter the liberal Internet. Sites like DailyKos and MoveOn mobilize thousands of supporters for exactly what they want. Their message is pointed and far-left. They can’t afford to neglect the moderates though. So they are stuck in a tight spot. It’s difficult to be inclusive of the spectrum of the Democratic party when the viewpoints are so varied. This normally isn’t a problem, but when you are trying to rework an entire industry, the faults are exposed and Republicans simply exploit these.
Long story short: The only losers in this situation, politically speaking, are the Democrats. If they emerge from this over half-year discussion with nothing, they will absolutely be to blame. The Republicans had their attempt at killing reform over the summer, people realized it was mostly hot air. Now it’s the Democrats’ chance to kill it–at their own peril.
Lieberman Flip Flops, Tries To Murder Senate Health Care Bill
Smooth one Senator Lieberman. They’re on to you though, a lot of them…
- Matthew Yglesias: Lieberman Hearts Medicare Buy-In
- Think Progress: Lieberman Last Week: ‘I Don’t Know How Anybody Can Decide Until You See The Actual Language’
- Andrew Sullivan: Lieberman sticks the shiv in
- The Atlantic Politics Channel: Why Lieberman Hates The Health Care Bill
- Ezra Klein: Joe Lieberman: Let’s not make a deal!
- Firedoglake: Video Surfaces Of Lieberman Supporting Medicare Buy-In Just Three Months Ago
- Talking Points Memo: How To Deal With Joe
- Crooks and Liars: This Is What It Comes Down To: Lieberman Is A Spiteful Little Toad Who Will Kill Health-Care Reform.
Conservatives have opinions too:
- The Corner: McCain Defends Lieberman
- R. S. McCain: The Left vs. Lieberman: ‘By Any Means Necessary’
- Hot Air: Lieberman: No cloture on Reid package
Also, Hot Air is reporting that Lieberman won and the Medicare buy-in that Sen. Lieberman opposed has been dropped.
Do You Think They Will Have Read The Bill By Then?
Top Congressional Democrats said today that a healthcare bill is unlikely in 2009. Now nobody can say that a bill was rushed because the better part of a year is plenty of time for any reasonable person to read 1000+ (times the number of bills) pages.
Health Care Reform Activism
Though I may disagree with their message, Billionaires for Wealthcare made a pretty ballsy (and hilarious) demonstration at an AHIP conference. From digby.
Republicans and Compromise
Now that Baucus’ healthcare bill has passed out of committee, it seems that Republican’s are beginning to realize that obstructionism isn’t going to work. The Democrats, of course, do not need to compromise for their bill to pass, but creating a fully bipartisan bill would be good politics for both parties.
From the beginning, Republicans have been clamoring for medical malpractice reform since the beginning of this battle, and the Congressional Budget Office has said that it will save $11 billion annually. If this is true, then why aren’t the Democrats even acknowledging this as a viable possibility? First, trial lawyers (who have a vested stake in not having tort reform) are major Democratic donors. On a website launched by the American Association for Justice, the lawyer lobby appeals to the morality of the average person in an attempt to turn the public off of the idea of tort reform. The fact that the same organization is deeply in debt does not help their case, however. No matter, the Democrats are still beholden to the hands that fed them into office, and, unless anything radically changes, it will likely stay that way.
On the other hand, maybe this is just obstructionism in disguise. Maybe Enzi has craftily changed his rhetoric after realizing that he is waging an uphill battle. In the middle of August, Moe Lane posted something on RedState that has stuck with me for the past two months:
The Democrats can pass something whenever they like: they have the votes, after all. We’re not going to pretend that they need our help. We’re certainly not going to pretend that they want our input, either. All they want is the ability to share the blame.
This is the feeling that I get from the Republicans, even now.
PricewaterhouseCoopers Admits Their Report Is Flawed
While I was reading yesterday, apparently insurance companies released a report telling people that their insurance premiums were going to rise under the Senate Finance Committee’s healthcare bill. Democrats were quick to jump on the report as an example of insurance companies lobbying to stop reform. Now the news comes out that the report didn’t look at the entire bill and, in particular, left out the entire section on cost savings. Sneaky move, but will it change the outcome of today’s Finance Committee vote?
The McCaughey Problem
Betsy McCaughey is practically an institution in the healthcare debate. She (almost) single-handedly killed Bill Clinton’s reform plans with her New Republic article in 1994, and has remained a player in the 2009 healthcare fight. The media obsession with her has resurged this week due to a moderated debate with Congressman Anthony Weiner and another article in The New Republic. Moderator Ben Smith doesn’t think that McCaughey will be much of a problem anymore:
In either case, she’s nowhere near the player she was in 1994 — in part perhaps because she’s seen as a partisan, not an honest broker, and that’s due in no small part to the relentless, effective assault from the left, a refighting of the last war that ensures they won’t lose that battle, at least.
Meanwhile, former TNR editor Andrew Sullivan is forced to defend his editorial decisions fifteen years after the fact:
I do not think it’s professional to air the specifics of internal battles after the fact, and I take full responsibility for being the editor of the magazine that published the piece. I accepted an award for it. I stood behind it.
Update: Over at The Atlantic’s Politics Channel, Sullivan colleague Matthew Cooper responds.
Open Tabs
- Betsey MacCaughey killed HillaryCare in 1994 and helped invent the death panel lie of 2009. The New Republic rips her a new one.
- Has a spanking ban made Sweden’s children better? From my dad.
- The New Yorker profiles Larry Summers and his team.
- The New York Times’ Well Blog discusses running barefoot.
What’s Really Going On In The Healthcare Fight
This morning I woke up to one of the best accounts of what is going on in the current healthcare fight in Congress by NPR:
The work to assemble that coalition began years ago, even before Obama was elected. When consumer groups met with their erstwhile opponents — drugmakers and health insurers — they hired outside mediators to guide their discussions. The result was general agreement on the basic underpinnings of a health care overhaul: Everyone would have to be covered, a boon for insurance companies, and insurers would have to cover everyone — regardless of his or her health, a success for consumer groups.
To sum up: the liberals are mad because they are being sold out to corporations, the conservatives are mad because the liberals are selling out to corporations.
No GOP Filibuster
That is what Talking Points Memo is thinking Michael Steele said.