Sunday Roundup: The Final Senate Hurdle Comes Into View
* Yesterday’s Senate vote, while historic, was to some degree a foregone conclusion. It was unlikely that any lone Democrat would block debate on a health care bill, particularly when there’s broad consensus among Dems that failure to act on health care would be catastrophic in political and policy terms, fritter away a chance to build an enduring majority, and deal a severe blow to Obama’s presidency.
The significance of yesterday’s vote: It brings the final hurdle for getting the bill through the Senate into plain view and starkly reveals how difficult it will be to surmount. A handful of Senators, most notably Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu, and Joe Lieberman, insist the public option in the bill now is a dealbreaker, meaning they’ll likely join a filibuster of the final bill if it approximates its current form.
So the grueling miracle-work of assembling 60 votes — amid a flurry of debate and amendments — will have to be pulled off once again. But this time the circumstances will be even more difficult. Moderate Dems no longer have cover. They no longer can support moving the bill forward merely to improve it. Support for moving to a final majority vote, in practical terms, is inescapably support for the final bill, a point Republicans will amplify in the weeks ahead.
So the big questions are: What will a final public option compromise that this handful of Senators can support look like? Does such a compromise exist? How far can the public option be watered down without losing Senate and House liberals? The public option aside, what do these Senators want? Can any lone Republican be won over at the last minute?
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* A similar reality check from Steve Benen: “that there was any drama at all surrounding last night’s vote underscores the silliness of the process — there was a lengthy, overwrought debate yesterday about whether to have an even longer, more overwrought debate in December.”
* Good sketch from Dana Milbank dramatizing how yesterday’s debate threw the Senate’s typical pathology and narcissism into sharper relief than usual.
* Ryan Grim collected more good color from the Senate floor.
* Both of The Times’s marquee Sunday political columnists devote full columns to Sarah Palin.
* And the national media keeps obsessing over her Facebook page.
* Obama’s big challenge: Explaining that the Afghanistan war has clear, identifiable goals that are achievable and worth the cost. Judging by the skepticism and confusion in this Minnesota town, he’s got his work cut out for him big-time.
* Glenn Greenwald: Why isn’t the press reporting on Lieberman’s public option falsehoods?
* And here’s Andrew Sullivan on why the Cheney clan is waging a death struggle against transfering Gitmo detainees to U.S. soil:
What Cheney fears, I suspect, is that Gitmo will be shut down, that history will record it as the lowest point in US human rights ever, that the Cheney family will be tarred as the brand that destroyed America’s moral standing, and that Dick Cheney will become one of the darkest figures in modern American history.
What else is happening?
This blog’s homepage is here. RSS feed here. Twitter feed here. Email me here.
Greg, FYI as of 9:36 this link was not on the home page, but I clicked through where you linked at the end of Saturday round-up.
The GOP Congress has indeed become the best Congress money can buy! Healthcare cries out for Change and Reform and their only answer is No!
Saturday night’s Senate Vote Just to have a debate on Healthcare, was a small victory for the “agents of change” (democrats) and reflects very poorly on the state and mindset of the Party of No & Fear that they stood solid and refused to even allow a debate on this issue to move forward — thereby belying the title of being the greatest deliberative body on earth!
It is also noteworthy, that the Party of No & Fear, also fought against Social Security Reform and Medicare, and true to form or color, they are fighting against healthcare reform today!
In this Age of Aquarius the age of Brotherhood, humanity must be taught that “As money has in the past ministered to personal and family need, so in the future it must minister to group and world need. The time has now come when money must be re-valued and its usefulness channelled into new directions. The voice of the people must prevail, but it must be a people educated in the true values, in the significance of a right culture, and in the need for right human relations. It is therefore essentially a question of right education and correct training in world citizenship – a thing that has not yet been undertaken.” [Money, The Medium of Loving Distribution, A Compilation from the books of Alice A Bailey ]
Thank God for the Agents of Change whose intentions are to uplift people and to serve the people…., because in all reality we really do need Change for Science teaches us that to be static and to do nothing, is to die!
Watching Mitch McConnell drives me nuts. The arrogant prick is a non stop lying steaming pile. He’s the equivalent of a male Sarah Palin when it comes to being a lying talking point machines.
thx Kathleen. I’m seeing it on the homepage but not consistently…btw, how has comments been for people?
Corporate Dem Blanche Lincoln is playing Republicon games by simultaneously trying to deep six the public option while apparently forgetting that she was before a public option before she was against it:
“Blanche Lincoln’s Website Still Says She Supports The Public Option.”
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/11/21/lincoln-site-public/
Comments are fine for me.
There really are no Sunday progressive talk shows are there?
Not surprised News.
From Sherrod Brown this morning. I think the Administration gets it, let’s hope they do it.
“I was with Secretary Geithner at the Treasury Department this week [for] a small business summit: Senator [Mark] Warner and I with a bunch of small business people, Karen Mills — the administrator of SBA — and Secretary Geithner. And I took him aside and said we need more focus on manufacturing, we need an industrial policy. Manufacturing creates middle class jobs and there has not been a manufacturing policy in this country for forever, really. Former presidents haven’t had it. President Obama is moving in that direction. I think they’ve turned a corner. I think particularly next year, the focus is all about creating jobs. And I think we will begin to see changes.”
Comments are slow again. Have a nice Sunday all.
Forgot about this one. More video from the Arkansas Free Clinic. Great, simple comment at the end from one of the volunteer doctors regarding Lincoln.
http://thepoliticalcarnival.blogspot.com/2009/11/video-1500-uninsured-arkansans-line-up.html
“Rarely is so much made about so little.”
Robert Reich on This Week moments ago in regards to Sarah Palin’s book.
That should be a headline somewhere. Its so true.
OK. Comments no longer showing up.
OK back now. lol
Comments are playing ‘hide and seek’.
I just want to thank you one more time for your patience with our tech troubles. I’m told they’re working on them. Should be wrapped up soon.
Greg, I actually think that there is one Republican that may vote for cloture in the end. And it isn’t Snowe. I know it was supposedly his 30th wedding anniversary or something to that effect, but I’m not altogether certain Voinovich’s absence from the vote last night isn’t a sign of better things to come- could he be having enough reservations about his party’s stance on the issue to be considering breaking ranks, but didn’t want to play his hand yet? I mean, there had been murmurs months ago about his attainability, and some surprisingly ambiguous statements from him about the issue.
George Voinovich is the Republican to watch.
Apparently it is too much to ask blue dogs to vote *with their party* on one of the most important pieces of legislation in 40 years. The last truly progressive administration was Johnson’s. This one could be the next but while the average American is less interested in partisan politics (many self-described indies), the national parties are still amazingly lock step. Jeebus-not a *single* GOP vote in the upper and 1 in the lower house? Medicare did better than this.
Well, I should qualify all of this by stating that we are still deep in the posturing phase: I’ll write off the aforementioned Dogs and GOP on the final tallys…
IIRC
Republican Cao broke with his party and voted for the healthcare legislation in the House. He was the solitary exception.
Republican Voinovich is retiring and it’s rumored that that has given his conscience independence from the lock-step of the Repulicorporate machine.
“holyhandgrenaid’s” observation that Voinovich might ‘do the right thing’ and vote with the left for healthcare is an interesting possibility.
Remember how easy it was for the Senate to pass the Military Commissions Act? And I think the Protect Americans Act was passed all in one August weekend. No agonizing. No pompous pontificating. Just voting overwhelming Yea for removing the fundamental right of habeas corpus, for approving the President of the United States of America to conduct a program of human torture as he saw fit, and of spying on American citizens without a warrant.
But try to pass something that confers an actual benefit to Americans, and apparently it cannot be done. I predict this health care bill will be as bad or worse than the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, which accrued vast benefits to the credit card companies while bleeding our citizens dry.
Maybe Glenn Beck will move to China and wait there for his 100 year plan to sprout roots. We can only hope.
Beck:
“We need to start thinking like the Chinese. I’m developing a 100 year plan for America. A 100 year plan. We will plant this idea and it will sprout roots.”
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/11/22/beck-100-year-plan/
Comments are still quirky but after a couple of page reloads they appear.
Anyone catch our buddy Joe on Meet the Press. Of course he was doing his trash talk on the PO but he also said something interesting about a troop increase in Afghanistan. We shouldn’t increase without paying for it, wonder how many Repubs would agree with that. Of course he didn’t suggest how, tax increase?
Why isn’t the press reporting on Lieberman’s public option falsehoods?
Because obsessing over Palin’s Facebook page is easier, and will probably draw a larger audience.
Dick Cheney will become one of the darkest figures in modern American history.
He already is.
I’m not sure I’d say Maureen Dowd has a full column on Sarah Palin. It’s more like she has a column saying Barack Obama needs a personality transplant to make him more like Palin. (It must be tough being a columnist; maybe we should take up a collection.)
Bernie, if you’re out there this morning, your link to the CNN Matalin article is useful for keeping us up to date on how much Matalin is staying on message about the terrible victimizing of Palin and her family–and the other “victim moms” the Republicans are set on courting.
I love how the GOP has all of the sudden become the party of victimhood with Bailin’ leading the way.
“Glenn Greenwald: Why isn’t the press reporting on Lieberman’s public option falsehoods?”
When has the majority of the press, without prompting, reported on any of the falsehoods about healthcare, or ANY recent political issue for that matter?
The same press that trumpeted Sarah Palin’s “death panels” for at least few days, until there was significant Democratic pushback that prompted them to actually fact-check her claims, is going to take the initiative to fact-check Lieberman?
The same press that was so deep in the Washington ether and out of touch that it was reporting that healthcare was “on the ropes” just a month or two before legislation passed the House is going to fact-check Lieberman?
Most of the press has been an enormous let-down in its often sensationalized, scurrilous and flat wrong reporting on healthcare.
Why would anyone think that will suddenly change?
I missed Liebermann on Afgahn war tax, but I have heard that meme mentioned by other lawmakers. It’s a great idea!
Mental patient Glenn Beck’s “100 Year Plan” will be presented on the DC Mall in late August 2010 (just weeks before the 2010 midterms) as the Teabaggers’ 2010 version of Newtered Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract on America.”
The details from Think Progress: http://thinkprogress.org/2009/11/22/beck-100-year-plan/
Man your battle stations and prepare for relentless hand-to-hand political COMBAT next year against these certifiably insane doody heads. The amoral Teabagger scumbags are out for blood, figuratively and possibly literally. I mean it.
@ABC – Yes, I noted the “cruel to mothers” meme from Matalin. Hard to imagine it will gain much traction outside of the base (Bachmann and Liz Cheney will be symbolic representatives too, of course, but not Nancy Pelosi). But it is clearly a meme they are trying to cultivate. And once again, a primary target here is “the liberal media”.
Re Sullivan’s hypothesis on the Cheney clan…
Reading these peoples’ motives and rationales is no easy thing. They clearly hold values and political ideas which don’t correspond to what most of us deem either moral or democratic or traditional Americanism. Instigating, justifying and legalizing torture is but one example, if perhaps the most clear.
But the reality is that the Cheney family does not live their lives even remotely like the rest of us. Cheney himself has lived his adult life at the most powerful intersections between industry, the military and DC policy-making. There’s little in his past or in his present which suggests allegiance to anything other than power, wealth and dominance. Here’s just one example of Cheney’s “American values”:
“In 2001 The Wall Street Journal reported that a subsidiary of Halliburton Energy Services called Halliburton Products and Services Ltd. (HPS) opened an office in Tehran. The company, HPS, operated on the ninth floor of a new north Tehran tower block. Although HPS was incorporated in the Cayman Islands in 1975 and is “non-American”, it shares both the logo and name of Halliburton Energy Services and, according to Dow Jones Newswires offers services from Halliburton units world-wide through its Tehran office. Such behavior, undertaken while Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, may have violated the Trading with the Enemy Act. A Halliburton spokesman, responding to inquiries from Dow Jones, said “This is not breaking any laws. This is a foreign subsidiary and no US person is involved in this. No US person is facilitating any transaction. We are not performing directly in that country.” Later Dave Lesar would book his own flights to the Teheran office through the UK arm of KBR. No legal action has been taken against the company or its officials.[23]
In April 2002, KBR was awarded a $7 million contract to construct steel holding cells at Camp X-Ray.[24]” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliburton
Cheney is the modern personification of that militarist/capitalist individual who is driven, from whatever set of personal characteristics, to dominate others through violence and the acquistion of overwhelming personal and oligarchical power, wieled mercilessly and hierarchically. The people down below are workers or consumers or cannon fodder or a threat when they are informed and when they are organized.
The Cheney family are not merely trying to protect their reputation or even just trying to stave off potential judicial consequences for what their patriarch has done. They are fighting for continued dominance of the immensely powerful elite which they head.
“What Cheney fears, I suspect, is…that [he] will become one of the darkest figures in modern American history.”
I’ve got news for you big Dick: you have already achieved that distiction.
Steve Benen quotes from the Palin/O’Reilly interview:
“O’REILLY: Do you believe that you are smart enough, incisive enough, intellectual enough to handle the most powerful job in the world?
PALIN: I believe that I am because I have common sense and I have — I believe the values that are reflective of so many other American values. And I believe that what Americans are seeking is not the elitism, the kind of a spineless — a spinelessness that perhaps is made up for that with some kind of elite Ivy League education and a fat resume that’s based on anything but hard work and private sector, free enterprise principles. Americans are — could be seeking something like that in positive change in their leadership. I’m not saying that that has to be me.”
And Steve adds, quite appropriately:
“Ladies and gentlemen, the one national political figure that can make George W. Bush look like Socrates.”
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
Shouldn’t you be attacking David Broderlike all the other statists? I mean where does he get off? Doesn’t he know white people can’t have legitimate opinions on the government takeover of healthcare? He’s worse than those racist teabaggers.
Medicare, for all its flaws, wasn’t the total fuckjob for taxpayers that these Democratic bills are. Why do you idiots think Comrade Obama’s poll numbers keep going down? Because he isn’t ramming this thing through fast enough? I would say “pull your heads out” but I hope you all suffocate in there.
http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/11/a_milestone_in_the_health_care_journey.php
“When I reached Jonathan Gruber on Thursday, he was working his way, page by laborious page, through the mammoth health care bill Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had unveiled just a few hours earlier. Gruber is a leading health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulted by politicians in both parties. He was one of almost two dozen top economists who sent President Obama a letter earlier this month insisting that reform won’t succeed unless it “bends the curve” in the long-term growth of health care costs. And, on that front, Gruber likes what he sees in the Reid proposal. Actually he likes it a lot.
“I’m sort of a known skeptic on this stuff,” Gruber told me. “My summary is it’s really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can’t think of a thing to try that they didn’t try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here….I can’t think of anything I’d do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn’t have done better than they are doing.”…
Obama approval ratings far more closely track the economy than the health care reform debate.
As Obama himself said in his inaugural address, it will get worse before it gets better.
“The arrogant prick is a non stop lying steaming pile. He’s the equivalent of a male Sarah Palin when it comes to being a lying talking point machines.”
Why are you people writing about Obama in this way?
And SNL finally decided it was OK to actually criticize the “president” for the terrible “job” he has done instead of attacking him because he isn’t far enough to the left. I suspect we will see CNN try and fact-check this one as well.
Best Line of the skit:
Translator: How exactly is extending health care coverage to 30 million people going to SAVE you money?
Obama: Uh, I don’t know.
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/clips/china-cold-open/1178451/
SNL couldn’t hold off any longer. I guess that is what happens when your approval rating is in the toilet.
The Obama Record: Record unemployment, record deficits, no legislative accomplishments.
JL: The Obama Record on Election Night 2012: 55 percent of the vote and 350 EVs. Talk to you then.
“Medicare, for all its flaws, wasn’t the total fuckjob for taxpayers that these Democratic bills are.”
“Just to be clear, the Medicare drug benefit was a pure giveaway with a gross cost greater than either the House or Senate health reform bills how being considered. Together the new bills would cost roughly $900 billion over the next 10 years, while Medicare Part D will cost $1 trillion.
Moreover, there is a critical distinction–the drug benefit had no dedicated financing, no offsets and no revenue-raisers; 100% of the cost simply added to the federal budget deficit, whereas the health reform measures now being debated will be paid for with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, adding nothing to the deficit over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.”
file:///Users/AG/Desktop/republican-budget-hypocrisy-health-care-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html
Edit: here is the link
http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/19/republican-budget-hypocrisy-health-care-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html
I just read an article in the Atlantic: Manufactured failure: press coverage of Obama in Asia Maybe the WH press doesn’t get it! Does it take a macho man to get his point across…maybe not perhaps subtlety rules.
It’s pretty good and I recommend you all give it a read:
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/11/about_press_coverage_of_obama.php
Part 2: http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/11/manufactured_failure_2_the_pre.php
Part 3: http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/11/manufactured_failure_3_inside.php
It would be very nice to have a discussion…a positive uplifting article!
Nice link, Andy.
Bernie, yeah I read it when you first posted it the other day and I thought it was a worthy read. I think the more everyone knows about HCR the better.
The following numbers need to rip our eyes open. We need far fewer thinktanks and far more empathytanks where people can learn to look at our Union through the lens of the beloved community.
A trigger is an evil delay. 1952 Americans have needlessly died just since the House passed its version of the Health Bill. If these Americans had had health coverage they would have lived. No flags at half-mast for these folks, nor consoling speeches for their ruined families, nor tears.
A Pearl Harbor every 20 days. 4000 dead by Christmas. 17,000 by Easter. 28,000 dead by the 4th of July.
We need a real Public Option which anyone can choose. Every single day we wait for a “trigger” is ten Fort Hoods.
…..
I use the Harvard Study figure of 45,000 needlessly dead a year. (People just like the dead in age, weight, gender, disease, amount of smoking etc *with* health coverage lived. http://tinyurl.com/l7cy8u ) 365,000 needlessly dead since 9-11.
Without guns, flames, or billowing smoke, no one counts the casualties in this slo-motion, silent carnage of Americans overseen by the bloodsucking Medical Industrial Complex. Upon my sacred honor, I ask you to grok the shamefull scope of this evil catastrophe.
[For that handful of you hip to 'grok,' what we need are groktanks rather than thinktanks.]
I don’t think it matters whether Gitmo is closed, or not, Dick Cheney will be remembered as the architect of the whole terror reign of the Bush years, and of the human rights violation that Gitmo is/was.
When Greg talks about filibustering the final bill, is that the one that comes after there has been reconciliation between the House and Senate bills? What filibuster did this recent vote cancel?
Texas Aggie
Greg is referring to the current Senate bill which goes to the floor for debate after Thanksgiving. After lots of debate and amendments there will be a procedural vote to move the bill from debate to a final vote and it’s expected that republicans will try to filibuster that so 60 votes will be needed again. If that bill passes then it goes to conference committee to get reconciled with the house bill.
44,789 Americans die each year because of lack of health care.
THAT’S MORE DEATHS THAN FROM A 9/11 ATTACK EVERY MONTH.
Right wingers chose corporate-profits over American lives.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Health+Insurance+and+Mortality+in+U.S.+Adults+American+Journal+of+Public+Health
44,789 Americans die each year because of lack of health care.
THAT’S MORE DEATHS THAN FROM A 9/11 ATTACK EVERY MONTH.
Right wingers chose corporate-profits over American lives.
The left is yet again peddling phony statistics. Your claims of 45,000 dying each year from “lack of insurance” are a fraud.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWJjM2JkNzc3YWU5N2MxOTUzNGViNTA1Nzc3NjgyYjQ=
Follow the links. The “Harvard” study is in fact a junk science “study” by a single-payer advocacy group. These claims have no scientific basis or credibility at all.
Stop the lies.
Because Ramesh Ponnuru, editor of the National Review, conservative as they come, is the leading authority on insurance issues. Not a great link qb.
LOL, right winger “quarterback” decides to put “Harvard” in “scare quotes”.
Look, I understand that a majority of right wingers want to discredit peer reviewed science, but trying to do so by pointing to an opinion piece on the discredited right wing website National Review is beyond parody.
It’s like comparing the Journal of the American Medical Association to Mad Magazine.
If the fellow had checked his own link with any care he’d find the admission of nearly two decades of research findings which support the one NRO doesn’t like (such a surprise). And if he thought about it, he’d figure out that where you hold causality as being indeterminable, you also have to allow that such causality may be so (which Kronick’s paper itself notes, though the NRO doesn’t).
Stop the stupid.
All, Monday morning roundup posted:
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/afghanistan/the-morning-plum-17/
New Reefer didn’t follow the links, after providing no source at all for his phony stats. No surprise. Liberals don’t care about the facts, just propoganda. You can’t substantively respond to the debunking of your phony statistics.
I think Reefer’s new name will be 5 O’Clock Charlie, in honor of that goofy pilot who showed up daily to drop an errant bomb and be laughed at.
If the fellow had actually considered the referenced sources, he’d realize that there is no “two decades” of supporting data but only flawed assumptions leading to confirmation of the “researchers” predetermined and desired result. And if he’d thought about it, he might realize that to allow of a possibility unsupported by data is to prove nothing.
Indeed, stop the stupid.
I wonder if there is an appropriate number of deaths due to insurance denials, recission, expense or other factors that the right would find acceptable. 20,000 or 10,000 per year, then maybe they would be able to claim, see it’s not so bad.
re: “citation”
The recent scientific study that calculated that 44,789 Americans die each year because of lack of health care was titled: “Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults” from the scientific journal American Journal of Public Health.
Apparently the Google link above confused right winger “quarterback”.
The study “Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults” updated and refined an earlier study from the Institute Of Medicine which estimated that at least 18,314 Americans die each year from lack of health care insurance.
The IOM study was mentioned in 2002:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/healthcare/2002-05-22-insurance-deaths.htm
I wonder how many people will die between the time we start to pay the tax on the HCR and the time it kicks in. Yeah you folks on the left have all the answers Spend my money and bash the right wing. Why even bring up the GOP the Dems have all the power. So show the world how caring and giving and insightful all of you are. Show us how it’s done so we can vote your guys out our guys in and tie the DEAR LEADER’S hands.
Indeed, Reefer, I read all that. I also read the “updated” study itself and confirmed for myself that it is junk science that “updated” junk science. I’m not an epidemiologist, but I am pretty familiar with epidemiolical studies from years of professional work with experts in the field and analysis of such studies.
If you think that everything that gets published in peer-reviewed public health journals, or by Harvard affiliated doctors or scientists is sound, you really don’t know much. Read it for yourself, if you are able to understand it. It is one shoddy piece of work.
That’s a great point, Unfortunate.
The left always makes the assumption that government is the answer. If people are dying, government insurance is needed.
But we could more plausibly argue that X thousand people are dying every year because misguided and excessive regulation is preventing them from getting affordable care and insurance. Cut my unreasonable taxes, and I can better care for those around me.
Awesome plan, cut taxes and de-regulate then depend upon the kindness of strangers.
No, not strangers, although the kindness of strangers is historically much more reliable than the “kindness” of government redistribution other people’s money.
I know, liberals don’t grasp the concept of civil society and its institutions like family, at least not when they are intent on taxing and regulating other people, which is all the time.
Someone who’s brain is so defective it assesses Sarah Palin as the real deal is not worth reading.
(whose)
Also someone who routinely makes you look foolish is embarrassing to read.
And btw it is liberals like you who oppose reforms to open up the insurance market to competition. So, if insurance is critical, people are dying because of YOUR policies. You are killing people by the thousands. Every day.
So right winger “quarterback”, who falsely claimed he was a lawyer, supports the sadism of torture, and thinks Republican Palin is a great mind, now wants to be taken seriously as an amateur epidemiologist?
Any chance he’s a corporate-medical-insurance bureaucrat whose job it is to rescind (that is: ration) American’s health care?
Why does the right wing hate Americans so much they want to take health care away from them?
You are a pathetic idiot. Sorry you are too stupid to read and understand things for yourself.
Also someone who routinely makes you look foolish is embarrassing to read.
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When regressives use Orwellian language to demand “reforms to open up the insurance market to competition”, what they are demanding is allowing predatory-insurance-corporations to push around the weakest State to minimize or eliminate sensible regulations that they can then use as a staging ground to undercut more ethical insurance companies in other states.
Predatory-insurance-companies deny women who have been raped or abused medical insurance.
Some states don’t allow predatory-insurance-companies to deny medical insurance to rape victims or abuse victims.
Right wingers like “quarterback” want to allow predatory-insurance-corporations in State X to ignore the sensible regulations of State Y.
“quarterback” isn’t about “competition”, he’s about protecting predators.
Doofuses like New Reefer imagine that allowing people to buy the kinds of insurance plans they want rather than the insurance that big-governement bureaucrats force on them somehow makes them victims of imaginary monsters called “predatory” insurance companies.
Totalitarian stooges like Reefer believe that people aren’t smart enough to choose between the kind of insurance plan they want and the kind they don’t want. They believe that left-wing whackos in Massachusetts aren’t smart enough to buy the insurance that covers abortion rather than the insurance that doesn’t, so government bureaucrats and left-wing political hacks have to decide for them.
Reefer isn’t about protecting people from imaginary “predators” but about dictating and controlling their lives to suit his leftist ideology.
Corporate sellouts like “quarterback” would leave Americans prey to predatory-corporations that have no checks or balances.
RESCISSIONS HAPPEN. “Rescission” is the corporate word used when corporations ration health care. Americans die because of corporate rationing of health care.
You think you’ve got health insurance? How often have you used it? What kind of hoops do you have to jump through to get things paid?
People that never use their corporate-medical-insurance might be happy with what they don’t know, but those that have to use their insurance regularly have problems.
And if you use it too much corporations will find an excuse to ration (”rescind”) your healthcare. It’s what an unregulated profit seeking corporation is designed to do.
An “Unregulated” business is a Predatory business.
And right wing frauds like “quarterback” are trying to sucker Americans into allowing unregulated predators to prey on them at their sickest.
The only thing standing between American citizens and predators like “quarterback” is the American government.
That’s why predators like “quarterback” hates the American government: The American government (in other words: the Rule Of Law) is the only thing that stands in the way of predators preying on the sickest amongst US.