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There’s a new talking point in favor of the Finance Committee bill from Snowe today, too: “We don’t go outside the health care system to finance this.” I suppose that is in opposition to the House bills with income surtaxes on millionaires.
Instead of Democratic Senators like Ron Wyden, Jay Rockefeller and Tom Harkin who have spent their careers working on the American health care
system, Harry Reid has invited Olympia Snowe, who represents the state ranked 40th in population, to the inner sanctum for the hallowed merge between bills written by the Finance Committee and the HELP Committee.
Question for Senator Reid: Does Olympia Snowe get a full vote in your meetings, along with Chris Dodd and Max Baucus? Why have you agreed to elevate to power Empress Snowe instead of requiring Democratic caucus members not to block cloture and allow a bill containing a strong public option to come to vote?
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I seriously could not care less what Olympia frikin snowe is for or against. I wish someone with a brain would relize she is the adminstrations cover for totally screwing the American people on healthcare.
Democratic majority and we get a Republican plan from the Senate Finance Committee. Why do we bother to vote Democratic?
OK, ALL YOU loyal DEMS:
IF our Washingtonian Dems make buying Insurance the law without including a strong public option, do you think:
1. The Dems will lose 40 seats (majority) in the House in 2010?
My guess is, ABSOLUTELY, YES!
2. Pres. Obama will lose his reelection bid in 2012?
My guess is, ABSOLUTELY, YES!
But, all is not bleak, all these fine Democrats can commiserate at Country Clubs across the land.
Oh, If I had a hammer …. Hey, is that where the Texas termiter got his moniker?
I think plenty of people with brains realize this. The problem is that there is a very short supply of people with both brains and legislative power and a willingness to use them to push things in the direction we’d like.
You don’t put together a committee to merge these healthcare bills consisting of Reid, Dodd, Baucus and Snowe and expect it to come up with a strong public option, do you?
Even the much discussed reconciliation gambit is pretty poorly served by that committee, it’s not like they are going to come up with something that is an easy fit with a House bill.
When will Schumer et al revolt and elect a new (real) leader?
Harry Reid is a whore.
I begin to suspect Obama is too.
She may think she is on the right side of history on this, but she is not unless she supports a public option. If we don’t have a public option in the end–this is nothing except a giveaway to the insurance cos.
I think someone should ask Olympia Snowe how her parents would have qualified for the health care plans she’s suggesting. They were hard working immigrants(running a restaurant on State Street, just down from the Capitol in Augusta). How would they have been able to survive initially after her father immigrated? For the years after they bought their restaurant? Years during which they would not have had much to spend, but would have been considered “equity rich”. She should sit down and work out how her plan would have hit her parents at each step of their lives. From immigration to both of her parents deaths (breast cancer for Mom, and about two years later, her father with heart disease).
I suspect they clearly would have been destroyed by the system of fines and high premiums for mandatory insurance that she would impose. They likely would have forced into bankruptcy, so they could be impoverished, then her Mom might have been covered for her breast cancer, once it had been diagnosed. But Dad would have again faced the fines. Oh, and they weren’t exactly “kids”. They were Middle-Aged…so massivly high premiums.
Her Mom had cancer, we know today that she likely would have been dropped…perhaps for an “ommission” on her application. Hard for immigrants to fulfill the criteria of completeness on these complex documents. Two major catastrophic illnesses reaching their peack in two years resulting in their deaths.
Then a few years later her adoptive uncle, a barber, dies as well.
Maybe she should go out, find people who live comparable lives, running same size restaurants and barber shops, and do their budgets. First under the current system. Then under “her preferred system”. Then under a strong “public option”. And finally under a “Medicare-For-All” option.
Only when she looks at these, and thinks hard about “I’d throw my own parents into poverty”, should she decide!
And then I read that Olympia Snowe has a big favorability rating in the polls. Plus Collins? When did Maine get so conservative? I live on the other side of the country so I guess I was mistaken in thinking Maine was fairly progressive.