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Health Reform Update: Compromising the Compromise of the Compromised Compromise
With Health Reform At Stake, Senators Scramble To Reach Public Option Compromise
WASHINGTON - Key Democrats in the Senate, accompanied by party leadership, are bearing down on a solution to the public option problem that has dogged the caucus for months now. They're holding a constant series of meetings, bringing liberals and conservatives together to reach a compromise--seemingly modeled on a trigger--that can garner 60 votes. And interestingly, one key public option supporter seems pleased.
Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) "There's sort of a new initiative on the public option, which is highly useful, without saying anything more about it," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV).
"There's going to be a group of people representing various points of
view who are going to just closet themselves and try and resolve this
so we can have something on the floor that can pass," he said.
"It's been taking place, it's ongoing, several different rooms, several different groups," said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin.
Included in the meeting, according to Durbin, are the well-known public option skeptics, and, on the other side of the party, Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
"I'm doing my best to do what I can do," Sanders said.
"It's one of the two, i think, really critical issues remaining, with the issue of abortion," Durbin said.
"There are a number of us that are for a strong public option. There's those that aren't," Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) told me. "Somewhere we'll meet in the middle.
"We are all in direct conversations about this," said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA). "Now it's come to a head."
"It's an informal, but aggressive...individual and small group discussions with a variety of different senators with different viewpoints to try to find a place of principled compromise," Landrieu said.
According to Landrieu, the focus right now is on a version of a proposal, first proposed by Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), and modified by Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), to attach the public option to a trigger.
"What I could support is something like a competitive community option...which would be triggered," Landrieu said. "Various moderates have slightly different versions of that."
"That's where the discussion is right now," Landrieu added. "There has to be a decision soon."
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32 Comments so far
Show Alland in the lobby of the capitol, a young, hardworking boy, standing next to his box of well-used polishes and rags, smiles up at each passing senator, and asks:
shit shine, sir?
Love it! Dickens would be proud.
Dicken's would be smiling like ....!
rockefeller is bragging about this piece of shit
bill? this will be worse by the time its finally
is enacted then what is currently passing for
health care!
You are absolutely...telling the truth!!
Exactly what is it that our Congress doesn't get about Medicare for all? They have to be deaf, blind and dumb not to understand that the vast majority of Americans want and deserve the same medical benefits that Congress receives which is publically funded health care. Well, maybe not blind and deaf but sure as heck dumb.
...or sure as heck corrupt to the core and doing the business of corporate America, not the business of the people.
To call these people like Landrieu moderates is ridiculous. They take enormous amounts of money from health insurance companies and will ensure that America will continue to have the most vicious attitude towards its citizens health in the industrialized world. When these people pass this bill it will be a piece of garbage.
"We are all in direct conversations about this," said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA). "Now it's come to a head."
But isn't it interesting to see what the folks like Mary Landrieu who don't mind people knowing how cheaply they can be bought have to say?
It is ridiculous to expect a government totally owned and beholden to corporate interests including the insurance industry to come up with any realistic national health plan. Predictably, what is emerging is a joke, a hoax, and a slap in the face to the American people many of which will remain uninsured for the foreseeable future and without access to medical care.
We're in the home stretch of the Compromise Mud Slide, folks, and after another ten or twelve generations of compromise, the No Insurer Left Behind legislation will pass triumphantly!
And except for a few disgruntled and impossible-to-please purists*, the rest of us will vow to put our shoulders to the grindstone in support of actual HEALTH CARE legislation-- after we party like there's no tomorrow!
*Actually, I'm one of them.
· Yr Obd't Servant
The picture is perfect. Reminds me of GWB's Oval Office skit. The Obama Party has about as much of a chance of helping the American people have affordable healthcare as he did in finding WMD.
Yep! Though I think GWB would have a better chance on second thought.
"There are a number of us that are for a strong public option. There's those that aren't," Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) told me. "Somewhere we'll meet in the middle."
Meeting in the middle? Is that what the whores in Congress call selling out their constituents to the corporations these days?
These spineless worms make me retch!
The worst of it is, when they get right down to it, they don't actually "meet" in the middle.
They just sort of "reach" in the middle.
That's where the spineless worms and retching comes in.
· Yr Obd't Servant
Reid: "What are those lobbyists in the balcony waving at us, Dick?"
Durbin: "Dunno, Hap, but they've sure got a lot of zeros on them ... let's go up and say howdy."
A congressional trigger is placed into a bill so that citizens think that they will actually get something at a later date and the congress critter can go home and say see I got what you wanted.
There is yet to be a trigger in a bill that has been pulled.
Smoke and mirrors.Please someone take these critters out back and put them out of our misery.
I think we all know whose finger is on that trigger ...
... and who's got a loaded weapon aimed at their collective heads.
Look! Up there in the sky! It's a bird..... it's a plane.....
OMG! It's Super-Mormon!!
I'm glad I wasn't born into a ruling class household. I feel guilty enough about having been born at all.
I have enough conscience to at least regret the shit of which I am a part.
I remember that picture of the earth from Saturn, snapped by mariner III. If that tiny dot and its dominate species is the best this universe can do then shit on it, if not, fuck you very much for leaving the last of us to destroy ourselves after getting nothing but misery, pain, and disgust with our inescapable one million year old predicament.
If us human animals evolved, then all those perfections were for nothing.
For most feel they deserve more and with a guilt-free conscience take
all they can take.
Where can I find that photo of earth taken by mariner III from saturn?
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=7314
I'm still amazed at how the Democrat supporters can be so thrilled with this legislation. Nancy Pelosi crying after passing the bill, Move-on.org organizing a thank you drive to Congress, and Huffington Post exclaiming that the passing of the bill is as historic as passing some monumental legislation in the past.
The problem with this bill is it enshrines into law further profit taking by the insurance industry and forces Americans to pay them or otherwise break the law, and allows the insurance companies to raise rates without limit. Since Obama and the Democrats took the single payer public option off the table before negotiations got started, this bill was never a compromise between the left and right. It turned out to be a bill that was paid for by insurance lobbyists that actually in the end will help insurance companies make more money, while at the same time, making it look like something is being done by Congress to address the health crisis we are in. If nothing got passed, we could at least go back to the drawing board because we are now farther from the single payer public option now than before we started the "reform".
O woe is me... O woe is me...
What the heck is a "competitive community option?"
Let's trade two aircraft carriers and the Senate for Universal Singlepayer Healthcare.
Throw in the White House and that cute little puppy too.
FEMA ovens are being considered in place of health care.
DISASTER MEDICINE ----- GOLDEN PRIZE OF CAPITALISM
In 1976 I read a book on nutrition which claimed that if we all went to a low fat
diet, most illness in America would be cured and our medical industry would
go bankrupt. What with the average American diet being 50% fat.
So my family of five stopped eating processed foods, and in over 30 years
I have not spent a penny on doctor bills or health insurance.
Now it seems to me, with our butcher medical industry never having the
slightest oversight or regulation by government, that our capitalist
Congress is not about to reform the most profitable industry ever
conceived by the deceitful mind of man.
The health industry has done it again. Congrats. Everyone will be forced to pay the insurance companies, and almost everyone will thus be covered. We will get a 'reformed' health care system and wonder why our ass holes are smarting. Obama can strut his stuff and pontificate eruditely, and Congressmen can brag to their constituents about how wonderful the Democratic Party is. No one has to worry about the cost to our budget (double that of other first world countries and Cuba) not to mention the cost to the average American smuck.