So President Obama is ready to cave because "we're on the precipice" of giving the HMOs and PhRMA everything they desired in their wildest wet dreams... And Senate leaders think progressives "won't defect"?
Too late... We already are!
“The problem that a lot of us face is that we feel like all the compromises have been going in one direction,” he said. [Rep. Anthony] Weiner [D-NY] cited three examples: the tougher anti-abortion language added to the House bill; the Senate’s proposed tax on high-priced insurance policies, which the White House has endorsed; and the most recent decision to eliminate the public option.
Mr. Weiner noted that dozens of House Democrats had signed letters taking the opposing position on those provisions and that the House approved its bill by a narrow vote of 220 to 215.
“You don’t have 30 votes to deal with here,” Mr. Weiner said. “So there are a lot of people who have staked out pretty hard positions that they are going to have to go back on. Now, I have been careful not to draw lines in the sand. I think this is going to be a very difficult collection of compromises to get people to swallow.”
Oh, yes we are...
Senator Roland W. Burris, Democrat of Illinois, has vowed that he will not vote for a health care bill that does not include a government-run insurance plan, or public option.
And on Monday, after Democrats indicated that they were prepared to meet the demands of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and strip the last vestige of a public option from their bill, Mr. Burris went to the Senate floor to warn that he had not committed to vote for the legislation.
Mr. Burris, however, did calibrate his language: “I am committed to voting for a bill that achieves the goals of a public option: competition, cost savings and accountability,” he said. “I will not be able to vote for lesser legislation that ignores those fundamentals.”
He added: “My colleagues may have forged a compromise bill that can achieve the 60 votes that will be needed for it to pass. But until this bill addresses cost, competition and accountability in a meaningful way, it will not win mine.”
With a dramatic flourish, Mr. Burris said: “As Mohandas Gandhi once famously said, ‘All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender.’”
Yeah, we really are...
“This is essentially the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate. Honestly the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill, go back to the House, start the reconciliation process, where you only need 51 votes and it would be a much simpler bill.”
Progressives are FINALLY showing some spine, even if Democratic leaders in DC aren't. President Obama is playing with fire right now in asking us to lie down and let "Holy Joe" Loserman and his HMO buddies gang rape the American people with the "Force Everyone at Gunpoint to Buy Overpriced HMOs Act".
Seriously, Harry Reid needs to rethink this. He needs to question if this bill with no real public option immediately available is worth it. He needs to ask if this bill will actually help working Nevada families in need of real health care solutions.
Honestly, I myself will be taking a closer look at the next link of bloody sausage that gets thrown out of "the legislation factory" to see if it's even worth supporting. I hope Harry Reid does the same, and reconsiders a new strategy to get a better bill out of this horrid mess.
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