As of right now, 7:20 pm, Bart Stupak is speaking in a colloquy with Henry Waxman. This is a procedural move intended to include in the record the terms on which Stupak and his gang have agreed to vote in favor of healthcare reform.
Tag Archives: healthcare
Good coverage of the healthcare vote process
Check out the Countdown to Reform Wire from TPM.
Healthcare reform is going to pass (updated)
I don’t want to jinx this, but now it seems obvious that healthcare reform will pass. What does it mean? It means more than 30 million Americans who are currently uninsured will have healthcare insurance. It means that insurance companies will not be able to decline coverage due to pre-existing conditions. It means that the United States joins the other industrial nations in bringing the uninsured into the healthcare system.
The Republicans are furious. But David Frum, himself a conservative and opposed to the reform, blames one group above all others: the Repblicans.
A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.
At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.
Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.
This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.
Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.
Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.
…
We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.
Update: Here is Frum on video:
And the President has announced he will speak to the country tonight after the votes are all taken, expected around 8:45 pm.
Healthcare quote of the day
When I’m drafting right to life language, I don’t call up the nuns.
– “Democratic” Congressman Bart Stupak, taking on Catholics nuns who have come out in large numbers in favor of healthcare insurance reform. Who does his listen to? Why “leading bishops, Focus on the Family, and The National Right to Life Committee,” of course.
More from Maureen Dowd:
We might have to bang Bart’s head into a blackboard a few times before he realizes that in a moral tug-of-war between the sisters and the bishops, you have to go with the gals.
The nuns are giving the Democrats cover. As Bob Casey, an abortion opponent who helped negotiate the abortion language in the Senate bill, observed, quoting Scripture: “They care for ‘the least, the last and the lost.’ And they know health care.”
On Friday, Tim Ryan, an antiabortion Democrat from Ohio, took to the House floor to say he had been influenced by the nuns to vote for the bill.
“You say this is pro-abortion,” he said to Republicans, and yet “you have 59,000 Catholic nuns from across the country endorsing this bill, 600 Catholic hospitals, 1,400 Catholic nursing homes endorsing this bill.”
Dick of the week: Bart Stupak
I can’t say it better than Wonkette.
The good news: Stupak is likely to have a primary challenger.
Tea party class act
Such human compassion. Really makes you think about what kind of hatred is motivating these people.
Father does not know best
That is, the if the fathers are bishops. It turns out that Catholic nuns (at least 59,000 of them) are urging passage of the Obama healthcare reform bill, noting that providing healthcare to mothers is the truly pro-life position. This is contrary to the Catholic Bishops.
More from CNN:
The letter argues that the legislation “will make crucial investments in community health centers that largely serve poor women and children.”
“And despite false claims to the contrary, the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions,” the letter reads. “It will uphold longstanding conscience protections and it will make historic new investments – $250 million – in support of pregnant women. This is the REAL pro-life stance, and we as Catholics are all for it.”
You can read the full statement here. Excerpt:
Congress must act. We are asking every member of our community to contact their congressional representatives this week. In this Lenten time, we have launched nationwide prayer vigils for health care reform. We are praying for those who currently lack health care. We are praying for the nearly 45,000 who will lose their lives this year if Congress fails to act. We are also praying for you and your fellow Members of Congress as you complete your work in the coming days. For us, this health care reform is a faith mandate for life and dignity of all of our people.
Political quote of the day
As you know, the vast majority of bills developed through reconciliation were passed by Republican Congresses and signed into law by Republican Presidents – including President Bush’s massive, budget-busting tax breaks for multi-millionaires. Given this history, one might conclude that Republicans believe a majority vote is sufficient to increase the deficit and benefit the super-rich, but not to reduce the deficit and benefit the middle class. Alternatively, perhaps Republicans believe a majority vote is appropriate only when Republicans are in the majority. Either way, we disagree.
– Sen. Harry Reid, in a letter to Sen. Mitch McConnell, regarding the claims by Republicans that reconciliation is somehow anathema.
Political quote of the day
As it now stands, if it’s any more watered down, Obamacare will be homeopathic.
Political quote of the day
My first five years of life we spent in Skagway, Alaska, right there by Whitehorse. Believe it or not — this was in the ’60s — we used to hustle on over the border for health care that we would receive in Whitehorse. I remember my brother, he burned his ankle in some little kid accident thing and my parents had to put him on a train and rush him over to Whitehorse and I think, isn’t that kind of ironic now. Zooming over the border, getting health care from Canada.
– Sarah Palin, supposedly opposed to government healthcare, speaking to Canadians. Ironic? That is not the word I would choose to describe it. It seemed to work pretty well for her then, huh?
Political quote of the day
This meeting capped off a debate that began with a similar summit nearly one year ago. Since then, every idea has been put on the table. Every argument has been made. Everything there is to say about health care has been said and just about everyone has said it. So now is the time to make a decision about how to finally reform health care so that it works, not just for the insurance companies, but for America’s families and businesses.
* * *
[N]o matter which approach you favor, I believe the United States Congress owes the American people a final vote on health care reform. We have debated this issue thoroughly, not just for a year, but for decades. Reform has already passed the House with a majority. It has already passed the Senate with a supermajority of sixty votes. And now it deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote that was cast on welfare reform, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, COBRA health coverage for the unemployed, and both Bush tax cuts — all of which had to pass Congress with nothing more than a simple majority.
I have therefore asked leaders in both of Houses of Congress to finish their work and schedule a vote in the next few weeks. From now until then, I will do everything in my power to make the case for reform. And I urge every American who wants this reform to make their voice heard as well — every family, every business owner, every patient, every doctor, every nurse.
–President Obama, today, finally speaking with passion about the need for healthcare insurance reform now.
Harkin: Reconciliation is a go
I hate to jinx things, but today seems to have been a sort of breakthrough on healthcare insurance reform. Senator Tom Harkin is stating that reconciliation is a go. It actually, finally, mercifully may happen, folks.
Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!
Oh, and when you the GOP whining about the “nuclear option,” review this list of bills that passed using reconciliation:
The 1995 Balanced Budget Act was passed in reconciliation. The final vote was 52 to 47. The 2001 Bush Tax Cut was passed in reconciliation. The final vote was 58 to 33. The 2003 Bush Tax Cut was passed in reconciliation. The final vote was 50 to 50, with Dick Cheney casting the tie-breaking vote. The 2005 Deficit Reduction Act was also passed in reconciliation with a 50 to 50 vote and a Cheney intervention. The 2006 Tax Relief Extensions Act was passed in reconciliation. The final vote was 54 to 44. This is as you’d expect: If bills had overwhelming bipartisan majorities, they wouldn’t need to go through reconciliation.
As it happens, Republicans controlled the Senate during each and every one of these bills.
Healthcare summit live
Via NBC news:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
GOP: wholly-owned subsidiary of insurance companies? (updated)
The GOP does support the retention of an anti-trust exemption for the healthcare insurance companies. The free market seems very important to the GOP, an article of faith, and government intrusion in the market to protect a free market without collusion is bad. Except when it isn’t.
Update: Matt Taibbi has more.
The insurance antitrust exemption has been an outrage for over fifty years. The original bill formalizing the industry’s exemption from the Sherman Antitrust Act, the McCarran-Ferguson Act, was dreamed up by two Hollywood villains. Nevada Senator Pat McCarran was the inspiration for the “Senator Pat Geary” character in Godfather Part II (”Senator… my final offer is this: nothing” — that guy), while Homer Ferguson was the inspiration for the Lloyd Bridges character in Tucker who whored himself out for the auto makers to get Tucker’s new car struck from the market. These two gigantic assholes teamed up to help the insurance industry avoid the albatross of competitive pricing.
Political quote of the day
This isn’t about betrayal, or a slap in the face, or an insult. It isn’t about strategies to keep seats, or grand theories of justice. Democrats in Congress have the chance to cast a single vote that will make the lives of tens of millions of Americans less wrenching, our demises less brutal. That’s what this is about.
– MD, an anonymous reader of TPM, making explicit the real world effect of a failure by the Democrats in the House to approve the Senate healthcare reform bill and seek improvements later. Where is the courage on the left to vote for real reform even at the cost of each members re-election?