This is literally and completely insane. If Ben Nelson gets his way on this, you really can’t even call the bill “reform” anymore. Nelson responded with his own letter to Heineman. “In your letter you note that the current Senate bill is not in Nebraska’s best interest. I agree. That is why I continue to [...]

New poll by Research 2000 for DFA and the PCCC shows that people hate the mandate.

I’m not a fan of the proposed excise tax on health insurance policies for a variety of reasons. First, like the actuaries at the CMS, I believe the excise tax’s ability to “bend the cost curve” on national health expenditures is almost nonexistent. I share their belief that it holds down “premiums,” but not really [...]

The White House and Harry Reid are preparing to give Ben Nelson anything he wants in exchange for his vote. It appears that this anything could be a gutting of the single best remaining piece of reform, Medicaid expansion: Earlier Thursday, in an interview with a Nebraska radio station, Nelson said even if the abortion [...]

That’s pretty powerful. The President of the United States calling you out for disloyalty in front of your peers.

For the “fix it later” crowd, I suggest the best way to make sure it is fixed later is to hold the individual mandate hostage until the day we get a public option. A clip of Obama making a strong case against an individual mandate last year. For those who argue the Netherlands has a [...]

One of the better-sounding arguments for passing the Senate bill is that “we can fix it later.” While this does sound appealing at first glance, I just don’t see “fixing it later” happening in the next decade or two. Democrats currently have huge majorities in both Houses and the presidency. I can’t imagine there being [...]

Ben Nelson has rejected Harry Reid’s latest compromise on the abortion language: Nelson told KLIN radio in Lincoln, Nebraska, Thursday that an attempt at compromise doesn’t get to the fundamental issue of barring federal funding for abortions. Nelson says without further changes the compromise isn’t sufficient. It sounds like Nelson is trying to go for [...]

Jonathan Cohn is trying to defend the individual mandate in this bill by claiming the Netherlands also has an individual mandate. The problem is the health care system produced by the Senate bill would be nothing at all like the health system in the Netherlands. I have long maintained the progressives should accept an individual [...]

I took the time to transcribe the exchange between Mary Landrieu and Howard Dean last night on Hardball because I wanted to be absolutely sure of what Landrieu says and place it in context. It’s a patent absurdity to claim, as she does, that the President didn’t campaign on a public option. It was in [...]