The Urban Institute is helping push the trigger. It is a Trojan Horse to kill the public option. Mikulski offers the first amendment to the Senate bill to reduce cost-saving for preventive screening for several female health issues. Here is the liveblog for the first day of Senate debate. The CBO has a new report [...]

The CBO is out with a new report projecting the effect of the Senate health care reform bill on premiums for individual below 65. The report is a mixed bag of some small negatives and some small positives. The general conclusion is reform would do basically nothing to reduce or increase premiums for most Americans. [...]

The Senate officially begins debate on health care reform today at 3 pm. The floor debate will be live on C-Span 2. 6:56 – The Senate adjourns until tomorrow. 6:50 – There has been no speaker on the senate floor for the past roughly 20 min. -I most leave temporary- You can keep watching the [...]

With debate officially beginning at 3 pm today in the Senate, Ezra Klein makes a good point about the relatively static state in which health care reform has been: If you had tuned in six months ago for 10 minutes, you would have had all the information necessary to predict exactly where we’d be today. Democrats [...]

Those advocating that everyone should stop working to pass (B), a bill with a public option, need to take responsibility for the fact that if that happens, the default at the moment is (A) a bill without a public option. It is not (C), nothing. It would be helpful to know why they think (A) is better than (B), because we’re not dealing in fantasy here, and that is the inevitable outcome in the scenario they are advancing.

Now this is how you frame an issue! Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana says we should stop reforming health care so we can concentrate on killing Afghans. This is how monstrous the right wing mindset has become: killing is a higher priority than healing. We can borrow to wage war but we cannot borrow to [...]

The Senate bill would give more small businesses access to the new exchanges quicker than the House bill. In the Senate bill, any business with 100 or fewer employees could use the new exchange. Starting in year four (2017), individual states could choose to allow larger businesses to also use the exchange. Conversely, the House [...]

The “opt-out” didn’t actually achieve its objective of picking up a single Senate vote. But it was a wholly successful effort, using a chorus of well-timed liberal voices with ties to think tanks and other veal pen outfits, to further weaken an already weak public option. And it looks like we’re ready for the sequel, “The Return of Trigger,” starring the Urban Institute and other featured players.

Let’s see who steps in to whistle that tune on the “liberal” side this time.

The Urban Institute has been searving some extra good veal lately. They have a new report out endorsing the idea of a super-hard trigger for a robust Medicare-style public option. While it is theoretically possible to design a “useful” triggered public option, it is also theoretically possible to sway Republican senators to votes for a [...]

Reid’s excuses are running out of gas, and Nevada has noticed. There’s a good piece in the Las Vegas Sun by Lisa Mascaro in the Sunday paper