Here’s a question for Firedoglake’s North Dakota activists about this Senate race. Do you think Ed Schultz should run to be your next Senator? Please take a few minutes to fill out our survey.

Politico is reporting the Nancy Pelosi’s “fix” to the excise tax is to just raise the limit. Pelosi has repeatedly expressed her frustrations about the inclusion of the Cadillac tax in the Senate bill and has sparred with Obama about the issue during face-to-face meetings. Her hope now, House aides say, is to get the [...]

A lot of the focus about how to fund health care reform has directed at the two largest taxes in the House and Senate bill. The House bill contains a so-called millionaire’s tax (raises $460 billion) while the Senate bill contains an excise tax on employer-provided health insurance benefits (raises $149 billion). While a lot [...]

It’s going to be awfully difficult for some of these Democrats to explain why they want a seat in Congress in the first place if all they’re doing is supporting the decree by the Senate that the House is now irrelevant. But even if they get past that, they’ll have to justify voting for a mandate that forces people to pay almost as much to private insurance companies as they do in federal taxes, and allows Aetna to use the IRS as their collection agency — unpopular with Democrats, Republicans and Independents.

The Senate bill suffers from the 101 exchanges problem. It would technically produce two exchanges per state (one for the individual market, and one for the small business market) and one ill-defined national OPM exchange within all the other exchanges. The bill would also allow states to set up multiple regional subsidiary exchanges within a [...]

The many ways the Senate bill is worse than the House bill. House leaders held a press conference today about the health care negotiations. Dayen sees some options for progressives to get positive changes. Health inflation growth at only twice the rate of GDP!!! I look at the other options for achieving near-universal coverage without [...]

During the campaign, Barack Obama made many promises. Some promises he made only a few times, and only to specific groups, and some he made at almost every campaign stop. Some of his promises were big, but many of them were relatively small. I don’t buy in to, but I can understand, the common Washington [...]

Looking around the world, there seems to be three main ways to get near universal coverage. There is the single payer model, the employer mandate model, and the individual responsibility model. Countries can use only one of the models, or a strange combination of all three. A direct individual mandate to buy insurance from private [...]

When Mike Stark spoke to Bishop earlier this year, he asked him if he’d pledge to vote against any bill that doesn’t have a public option. Bishop replied, “I am not going to take a pledge because I want to see how the final legislation comes out.” Mike pointed out that the right-to-lifers had pledged to vote against any bill over the abortion language, but that public option supporters like Bishop didn’t seem to feel that strongly.

Bishop voted for the House bill on the first vote. If he votes for the Senate bill, he’ll kowtow to those like Stupak and Nelson who did draw a line in the sand over abortion, piss off the tea party activists and abandon his own principles on the public option. Hard to know who the constituency is for that.

Bishop has taken $287K from the health care sector, and $72K from pro-choice advocate groups and $1 million from unions.

Bishops office is (631) 696-6500. Ask him if he’s really planning on voting for a mandate that will force people to pay almost as much to private insurance companies as they do in federal taxes, with the IRS acting as a collection agency — and no public plan as an alternative.

No public plan? No mandate.

Let us know what you hear from Bishop’s office on the reporting form in the war room. You can now see call reports people are submitting after their calls for all House offices as they appear, which is pretty interesting.

This document, prepared by the House Tri-Committee staff, outlines the topline differences between the House and Senate bills that need to be resolved. (It is very much worth a read if you are interested.) In almost every case where the two bills differ, it is because the Senate bill is dramatically worse. Some of the [...]