Quote of the Day
Posted on September 30th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »
This one goes out to Standing Eagle:
A key Senate panel twice beat back efforts Tuesday to create a government-run insurance plan, dealing a crippling blow to the hopes of liberals seeking to expand the federal role in health coverage as a cornerstone of reform.
—today’s Washington Post.
8 Responses
9/30/2009 9:02 am
Worth republishing SE’s posts from just yesterday-just to remind us that even he’s a hack sometimes:
“The public option is NOT off the table. At ALL.
Keep up.”
“Most of the elements of that link are actually pretty darn bullish on the prospect of the public option, especially compared to the many death knells for it that have sounded over the last month.
I’m putting it at 80% likely, including a 35% likelihood that the Senate actually passes it. There are two other ways to get it, though, in case jackasses like Conrad and Nelson go along with a Republic filibuster — budget reconciliation (the PO could save tons of money) and conference committee.
Mark my words — this president knows what he’s doing.”
SE
9/30/2009 10:11 am
No one expected the public option to be in the Finance Committee bill. You guys are just WRONG.
There are five versions of the bill now passed out of committee. Four of them have the public option. Here are the possibilities.
1) Harry Reid may well decide to bring a bill with the PO in it to the floor. This would be logical, and if he doesn’t there will be hell to pay for him personally.
If that doesn’t happen,
2) Amendments from Schumer, Rockefeller at all will come to the floor to add the PO to the Senate bill.
If they fail,
3) Supplemental bills can be passed UNDER THE BUDGET RECONCILIATION PROCESS, requiring only fifty votes, to create a public option.
OR — and this is most likely —
4) A Senate bill without a public option will go into a conference committee along with the House bill, which will definitely have a public option, and there we get down, as LBJ used to say, to the nut-cutting. Obama and Emanuel are ready for this fight, and the key will be who is on the conference committee and how the barrels get rolled. As I said, the smart money now is that there WILL, as Tom Harkin said yesterday, be a public option in the bill on the President’s desk by Thanksgiving.
You guys are just wrong. Read up some more. This is the beginning of the non-committee process, and the key will have been just getting the damn thing out of the Finance Committee where it has been languishing.
Do your homework before you mock.
Standing Eagle
9/30/2009 10:13 am
It would have been a friggin miracle to get a PO added in the Finance Committee, and I would have told you that yesterday if you’d asked me. Kent Conrad and Baucus are bought and paid for, and Baucus is an incredibly dim bulb to boot.
9/30/2009 10:19 am
Also from the Post — and for some reason the link you gave, Richard, doesn’t go to a news story but to some kind of video cover page.
“Despite the setback for advocates of a public option, debate over such a plan is certain to continue. Sens. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) and Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who offered the amendments that were voted down Tuesday, have vowed to keep the issue at the forefront as the debate unfolds. And Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) could include a government plan when he combines the Finance Committee’s bill with Senate health committee legislation, approved in July, that includes a public option.
Aides said Tuesday that Reid has not decided how to proceed. If he doesn’t include a public option, backers of a government plan will seek to amend the bill when it advances to the Senate floor, or during final negotiations with the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) remains a staunch advocate.
Supporters vowed to press on, expressing confidence that backing will grow as lawmakers consider the implications of relying on private insurers to bring about the far-reaching reform that many in Congress envision. Controlling the costs of health care is one of the primary goals of the push for change, and many Democrats believe that only the government has the clout to drive down premiums while ridding the system of costly inefficiencies.
“The public option is on the march,” Rockefeller said, moments before his amendment was roundly defeated. Schumer pledged, “We are going to keep at this and at this and at this until we succeed, because we believe in it so strongly.”
“
9/30/2009 10:20 am
for “at all” in first comment above of course read “et al.”
I get agitated when called a hack.
9/30/2009 1:57 pm
>ri-keet! ri-keet!>
Where did all the haters go?
9/30/2009 2:18 pm
You’ve silenced them all, SE, or at least me. I hadn’t done my homework and was looking for an easy putdown. How do you have time for this anyway? You’re a teacher of literature and a scholar and you follow the minutiae of healthcare reform at the same time? What are your thoughts on the McCrystal report and proper use of NATO forces in Afghanistan?
9/30/2009 2:49 pm
This reform bill, unless it fails, is easily the most significant piece of legislation since Medicare. And some of the Republicans are right: the public option is a Trojan Horse, a benevolent one. If all goes well the private insurance industry will gradually dwindle until it’s just a luxury good, and by 2030 almost everything will be single-payer. This won’t mean health care is government-run; just health insurance. Medicare for all, eventually!
I’m an incrementalist and so is Obama. This is the beginning of his economic and human-welfare legacy.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint. This is why all the hubbub in August was, once, again, ADD politicians and media nitwits playing checkers while Obama plays chess.
He still could lose; don’t get me wrong. But he knows how to work the levers of Congress, and is patient patient patient.
If you care about domestic policy, this is the issue to care about. On foreign policy — yes, I’m worried about Afghanistan, but basically the job is undoing Bush Administration damage. In the end the problems we face in Afghanistan are the same problems Afghanistan has always faced, and we should help the best we can. What we broke there wasn’t worth all that much, and the issue is the same as it always was — helping build civil society. I’d like to see bin Laden caught but am not afraid of terrorists. The only foreign-policy issue that I care about in non-moral terms is loose nukes.
It’s possible that by caring very much about the unwinding of the Bush legacy in discourse and politics, I’m overcompensating for the highly ahistorical nature of my work on literature. My book takes historicism as a great (and worthy) antagonist; but I chose my field well before Bush v. Gore.
Also, literature teachers and writers (though I’m not currently writing much of anything) work in bursts.
SE