Democrats are preparing a campaign to sell the American people on their health care reform bill after it passes. To put it simply, this is going to be a painfully difficult job. Lacking allied voices and faced with unflinching GOP opposition, the burden on the White House and congressional Democrats to sell a completed health [...]

President Obama can’t afford to let insurance companies win in the health care fight for reasons related to the pure crass politics of power. Like it or not (and I strongly do not like it), Obama’s health care strategy was to cut secret sweetheart deals with all the industry players in exchange for their active [...]

Perhaps the most consequential decision in the health care negotiations between the House and Senate may have been made yesterday without much fanfare. The decision was to drop the House’s employer mandate and go with the Senate’s much weaker “free rider” provision. This decision will result in 5 million fewer uninsured individuals gaining coverage because [...]

DEFAZIO: I think the Senate bill is a disaster. I mean, anybody who’s watching this noticed that insurance industry stocks has gone up since the Senate bill passed, because It gives them a lot of new customers and no meaningful controls. They took out my language stripping the industry of the anti-trust immunity. They established meaningless, spineless weak state exchanges instead of a national exchange.

The White House is placing a giant collective bet on Gruber’s “assumptions” to justify key portions of the Senate bill, which they allowed people to believe was independent verification. Now that we know that Gruber’s work was not that of an independent analyst but rather work performed as a contractor to the White House and paid for by taxpayers, it should be made publicly available so others can judge its merits.

A new CBS poll shows that, for many, reform does not nearly go far enough.  It looks like the national exchange and the anti-trust exemption might be in the final bill, but the employer mandate and surtax on millionaires might be out. There might be a smaller excise tax, and a new Medicare tax on investments. [...]

Today, HCAN had a conference call to push for a federal regulator structure in health care reform with a national exchange. The idea is that only the federal government has the power, resources, and desire to enforce the new insurance regulations. The Senate bill leaves enforcement up to state insurance commissioners, which, for the most [...]

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) today sent a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius in reference to Jonathan Gruber’s failure to disclose his financial relationship with the Obama administration when he was testifying before the Senate Finance Committee. It appears that, at the time, Sen. Grassley was unaware Gruber had been given [...]

The New York Times is reporting that Obama is looking at taxing large banks to get back some of the billions of dollars the federal government lost to the bailout: President Obama will try to recoup for taxpayers as much as $120 billion of the money spent to bail out the financial system, most likely [...]

A new CBS News poll finds that a significant plurality of Americans do not feel reform has gone far enough. It also shows that overall support for Obama’s handling of health care reform has dropped to an all-time low of just 36%. The most interesting questions in the poll were about whether people think reform [...]