Looking through the manager’s amendment, one of the best pieces of pure good news is the extra money going to community health care centers and the National Health Service Corps fund. Community health care centers provide the vital service of getting individual cost effective primary care. If your goal is to increase access to “health [...]

The manager’s amendment would eliminate the state regulation gutting “nationwide” plans and replace them with “multi-state plans” in a new OPM exchange. This is a positive change I was hoping would be made. If you are going to allow insurance companies to sell their plans on a national basis you need a national regulator to [...]

Harry Reid’s manager’s amendment is out, and once again the legislation was written to get the best looking CBO score and not the best possible policy for the American people. Jay Rockefeller wanted a minimum medical loss ratio (MLR) of 90% for all health insurance. His crazy idea was that if we are giving hundreds [...]

And this relates to “giving all Americans a meaningful choice” how, exactly? Okay, not at all, it’s just a shot at Howard Dean.

Ben Nelson has a list of demands, including gutting Medicaid expansion and making states to opt-in into reform. Polling shows the individual mandate is extremely unpopular. MoveOn says “no” to the Senate bill. Dayen looked into the extremely important issue of whether the regulations are enforceable. Regulations without a policing force is meaningless. The tax [...]

Here’s a roundup of commentary I’ve seen the past few days on the state-based progressive bloggers regarding the Senate health care bill (aka, “LieberCare”) and related topics. Enjoy! *Not surprisingly, Minnesota Progressive Project loves the “Senate smackdown” of Joe Lieberman (I-”Insurance Industry”) by Al Franken (D-MN). They ask, “Can you imagine what this exchange would [...]

I have long maintained that progressives should accept an individual mandate only as part of a broad social contract with the government. The government must promise to ensure that every American has access to at least one quality, affordable, cost-effective health insurance plan, and only then can it demand Americans buy health insurance. The Senate [...]

Ezra Klein has done the discussion on health reform a big disservice by making false claims about what could, in fact, start a race to the bottom in the insurance market. He writes: What it doesn’t allow is for insurers to simply sell their wares in any state. Aetna could not, for instance, decide that [...]

Rahm Emanuel has managed to convince enough of the people that any inadequacies in this bill will be forgotten if the Dems can claim a “w” and pass any piece of shit health care bill. And that if Congress just spends 2010 naming post offices, any objections that Americans might have to paying 8% of their incomes to private corporations who will use the IRS as their collection agencies will just disappear.

It’s scary to think that people this obscenely stupid are running the country. All the while, the painfully obvious left/right transpartisan consensus that is coalescing against DC insiders of both parties appears to be taking everyone by surprise.

Ezra Klein has a new, strange, and incorrect defense of the individual mandate in the Senate bill: I think some on the left would say that they just want to remove the individual mandate. But if they do that, then the healthy will leave the plan, and the average premiums will be the average premiums [...]