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Following the announcement from the White House that they were crafting their own health care bill (to memorialize the deals that they negotiated with Baucus and stakeholders), it looks like Baucus has decided he wants to write the bill after all:
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus could lay out a health care reform plan as early as Saturday, the Montana senator told his colleagues on a Friday afternoon conference call.
Baucus (D-Mont.) told the bipartisan group of Senate negotiators that has been working for months to craft a compromise that he will be releasing a plan soon, according to sources familiar with the call.
By producing a plan – one source characterized it as an “offer”– Baucus is signaling to his fellow committee members that the end game is near and they need to gauge whether they can support a bipartisan compromise.
The bill being written by the White House and Olympia Snowe accommodates Rahm Emanuel’s long-term passion for triggers. With PhRMA tapping her foot in the corner and threatening to go back to her old boyfriend John Boehner (he really does love her, he just doesn’t know how to show it) time is of the essence.
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Is that why the gang of six is so important? Because they are the chosen ones to write the bill that will keep PhRMA on the Dem side of the aisle? Any evidence of that?
Spiders weaving webs of deception.
Can’t wait to see his bill. (snark)
Hmmm, let’s count the ways that citizens are represented.
thankee jane …
RahmObama time! or ObamaRahma.
Sickening..literally
In numbers with minus signs?
PeterK @ 1
think of it as the Opening Statement to the jury
I thought that PhRMa had gotten over the love for Boehner. Something about the smell of his nicotine dip (for tanning purposes of course)
I have a response, but FDL won’t let me print hand gestures.
Don’t kid yourself: PhRMa has always had a love for dips. See also: Tauzin, Billy.
RahmObama ding dong…
So far, everything you’ve been saying Jane is coming true. We’ve got to hold those progressives in the House to their word, and unleash holy hell on them if they give in.
i am so tired of the s & m politics between the repugnants and the dims.
We’re not going to accept triggers. These dicks have had 16 years to do something about health reform and haven’t done squat! For 5 years they’ll expect us to patronize the very people who have been screwing us and even now jerking up premiums? We will not accept being forced to buy insurance from these cash whores! We’re not going to do it! As I said yesterday, Rahm and Olyimpa Snowe can kiss my ass! I didn’t vote for either of them for President. Olympia can go back to her party of losers! I’m not accepting a healthcare bill that is written by a Republican. They lost!
Is anyone else upset that Hillary Clinton is not still in the Senate? Her passionate support for universal health care would have been a good catalyst.
They lost!
Funny how they win even when they lose. And how the dems respect them way more than they respect their own selves. It’s a farkin creepshow anymore.
Not really! She simply would have been a bad reminder of what happened last time. Remember that, while the Dems may still like her, the Republicans hated her and would have looked forward to pointing out just how badly she failed last time. S
Who controls health care? I think it is those thieving, rats at Goldman Sachs. RawStory reports GS is “securitizing” life insurance policies. These are bundled and sold to investors, as were high risk mortgages. This gives them incentives to have these desperate, poor folks die as soon as possible. That is just fine for GS.
These rotten criminals could be investing in something useful say solar energy. But they are using other peoples money to make casino bets on older people dying sooner. Hey I bet Goldman Sachs has their own Death Panels that set health care policy.
GS is also buying health insurance companies and they are secretive.
Goldman Sachs also controls pharmaceutical companies and sets policies on therapies. Anything Goldman Sachs touches turns to disaster capitalism. Now they are certainly trying to control health care.
These people just don’t get it. Health Care isn’t something that effects people they don’t know (referring to our service people fighting useless wars), but their own lives. The business people see how much their premiums go up each year, when the business can’t even raise its prices for goods. Everyone knows someone that just screwed by an insurance company.
No public option or a public option with triggers equals Dems slicing their own throats. Why should people bother voting for a Dem when all you get is a coward or an undercover Repub.
I agree, she would have been another Senate lion.
Very good point. Sure could use a strong, clear voice over there.
Jane, do you have any confidence that the progressives will stand firm on the public option? What are you hearing from Sherrod Brown? Any sign yet what Trumpka is going to do or say tomorrow? Thanks for what you’re doing.
thats the whole game. Hey i havent seen any post on Van Jones being forced out by president tom..what up with that?
I thought a while back that clintons appointment was to get her out of the senate..
Rahm’nO
Ok, if we are going to have a trigger for the public option subject the “individual mandate” to that same trigger: no public option = no mandate.
Right, the mandate also needs to be
“triggered”
Why are we commenting on points that are pro or con regarding Health Care Reform or anything else this administration is doing? It seems pretty clear from all Obama and Co. have done thus far with the economy, foreign policy, and health care that Obama is a right winger. What has he done that he promised during his lofty, phoney campaign? Where has he shown that the people come before Wall Street and the military industrial complex? How has he shown the majority of the American people, his supporters, that he will fight with and for them? So, the bottom line must be: Obama doing all he can to keep PhRMA and the insurance industry in power. He is working in earnest to get their money and their votes and sending the message, loud and clear, that he has their backs.
No need to point to the NYTimes and what they missed. They know what they missed and so does Obama. He told them to throw the game because he has bet big money on the pre-determined outcome.
What we should be looking toward today is what 3rd party candidates we intend to support in 2010 and 2012. Any suggestions?
Goldman Sucks
Rahm’nbho’nbo
Triggers are just another quantum move across the Overton scale. Pawlenty was on CNN this morning dissing the public option, dissing triggers as kicking the can down the road, and ended by dissing co-ops as well.
With apologies to Barney Frank, Obama might just as well be negotiating with a dining room table.
That was my thought as well.
I am still at a loss what the insistence was with going with Olympia Snowe. There are no liberal Republicans left in the Senate of the Clifford Case or Jacob Javits kind.
If Medicare passed 68-21, and the 68 were just 11 Republicans, I don’t see where Obama needs any. Lyndon Johnson wasn’t seen hand ringing around Washington hoping to find some Republicans to play with then.
For months now, I’ve been considering that we don’t need North Dakota as a state. And maybe Maine, too.
Plus Montana. They all border Canada–maybe Canada would buy them?
Perhaps a better analogy:
Republicrats beholden to the medical mafia are the schoolyard bullies that got Obama to part with his lunch money over single payer, his jacket and shoes over the public option, and if co-ops become the “bipartisan” solution, his underwear as well.
How long before Obama is referred to as the Emperor with no clothes?
“He (Obama) told them to throw the game (real health care reform) because he has bet big money (his reelection) on the pre-determined outcome.”
Excellent concise summary of this entire health care reform debacle!
I’ve been thinking about triggers, and until now I didn’t think I’d accept them.
But I had a change of heart about triggers.
I’d accept one flipped to ON.
Period.
I tend to agree with you, and believe the WH mishandling and lack of leadership on health care is not accidental, and ought not to be written off to inexperience. The obsequious, fawning courtship of Baucus and Grassley is a case in point; the secret deal w pharma not to negotiate lower prices is another.
While a public option would bring health care benefits to many, there is a larger concern here. The creation of a viable public option would be an important first blow against corporate and lobbyist control over congress, over policy making, and over the democratic process itself. It’s not that Obama doesn’t get it; its that he’s part of it.
The ill fated adventure currently ramping up in Afghanistan is another illustration of the ways that this President shows his true colors. I have already written him that I am ready to throw away my vote in 2012.
You know, people who make out that Obama is weak, or a victim of a process he can’t control, just don’t appreciate the skill it has taken to engineer a situation in which he can seriously propose that a member of the party that has destroyed the rule of law in your nation and is now destroying any semblance of reasonable political debate, a rightwinger, far from the centrist she is painted, who does not want share any of the views of the people who elected him, as a Democrat, one should remember, should write his health bill.
Here’s the speech in 2012: we delivered health reform; we delivered (almost) universal coverage (obv. the universal mandate is going to be sold hard as providing universal coverage, as though that was in itself the holy grail of health care reform); now we are going to put Social Security on a sound footing.
Two years later, when the Republicans have “forced” the Corporate Party to compromise to a reform of SS that George Bush would have signed into law with a statement saying “yeeeehaaaah”, the same people will probably still be howling that Obama should “stand up” to those nasty Republicans.