Yesterday, I answered Nate Silver’s “20 Questions for Bill Killers.” He responded to my answers, but only to a straw man, crib notes version of my answers. The problem is that I thought many of Silver’s questions required extremely detailed answers. Fortunately, over the past few days and weeks, I have written several articles carefully [...]

I was on MSNBC with Dylan Ratigan this morning. I was still laughing about David Axelrod’s contention earlier on Morning Joe that the insurance companies hated this bill and that’s what they were fighting against it so hard.

Seriously? They were fighting tooth and nail to get the public option out of the bill so all of the money would flow directly to them, and when it came out, they declared victory.

A few on the left are trying to defend the individual mandate, but the individual mandate is only defensible as long as the government, in exchange, guaranties everyone access to quality, affordable health insurance. The Senate bill completely fails at this, and drafters were even forced to admit as much by including a “hardship” exemption. [...]

White House finally gets tough on health care opponents–unfortunately, that opponent is Howard Dean. Gibbs’s calls Dean “irrational.” The White House is irritated with Dean, but not Lieberman.  Coburn demanded Senate clerks read Bernie Sanders’s entire single payer amendment, so Sanders’s was forced to pull it. The idea that you cannot get a good bill with reconciliation is [...]

If Obama does not feel a need to listen to progressive on the issue of health care reform at this moment, I don’t see how that will change between now and 2014. If anything, when people are not looking the lobbyists will go to work slowly crippling all the new regulations this bill will add. As long as we have this 60 vote myth controlling everything in Congress, all the power is with Joe Lieberman.

Michael F. Cannon over at the CATO institute is making a lot of hay about the CBO memo on the minimum medical loss ratio. In the memo where the CBO said it would magically declare any private insurance market with a mandatory MLR of 90%, instead 85%, a government program for budgetary reasons. Cannon has [...]

Remember that time when Robert Gibbs called Joe Lieberman “irrational?”

Neither do I.

Jay Rockefeller vows to kick that football.

No wonder Obama is thanking Lieberman for his fine work, and Howard Dean is an “irritant.“

Bernie Sanders is not buying the myth that reconciliation would not work for real health care reform. “If I had my druthers, I think reconciliation is an absolutely appropriate way to go,” he said. “I think what people who oppose that will tell you is that you can’t have the kind of comprehensive legislation that [...]