David Herszenhorn and Robert Pear write in the New York Times:
President Obama will put forward comprehensive health care legislation intended to bridge differences between Senate and House Democrats ahead of a summit meeting with Republicans next week, senior administration officials and Congressional aides said Thursday.
Democratic officials said the president’s proposal was being written so that it could be attached to a budget bill as a way of averting a Republican filibuster in the Senate. The procedure, known as budget reconciliation, would let Democrats advance the bill with a simple majority rather than a 60-vote supermajority.
We don’t know details. The plan is supposed to be posted on the Web on Monday. Congressional Republicans are still whining about how nobody listens to them, and maybe they’ll skip the health care summit because the Dems already have their minds made up about what they will pass, although it’s not clear congressional Dems have any more idea what the White House is coming up with than anyone else.
More Stuff to Read:
Paul Krugman, “California Death Spiral.”
Ezra Klein, “Selling insurance across state lines: A terrible, no good, very bad health-care idea”
Matt Yglesias, “Breaking: Michelle Obama Reads Books.”
Maha, the Yglesias link takes me to the Ezra article, just like the Ezra link does. Is it me?
If the Republicans really want to serve their constituents, they should attend the meeting and bring their best ideas. The Democrats will only look worse if they dismiss the ideas of the Republicans after having invited them into the discussion. With Republican involvement, there is a chance that some of the backroom deals that were made with specific self-important Democratic and independent senators can be dropped.
What Krugman doesn’t write about is what the endgame may be for the conservatives and corporations.
Let the death spiral circle around, throwing victims to their deaths willly-nilly. Let the private insurance endgame be so expensive, that a vast majority of people, not being able to afford it, will be willing to sacrifice healthcare to eat, or have shelter over their heads, or get to work. This makes the rates go ever higher, driving ever larger numbers of people away.
Then, as people need care, they will be willing to settle for Medicaid and give away any and every assett just to keep their child, or themselves, alive – thus, continuing to raise the rate on the rest of us, but provide cheap assett pick-ups for rich investors.
At that point, conservatives will say that it’s Medicaid that’s keeping rates high, and then work to kill it and Medicaire.
The result will be a survivor of the wealthiest and healthiest.
This will finally prove that, despite their protestations, conservatives truly DO believe in Natural Selection. As long as only the wealthy and healthy survive. Why?
Because, I don’t think any Galapagos finches or turtles had any greenbacks, and I sure as Hell know they didn’t have any socialized health care!
Let the entitled live,let the rest die, and let God sort them all out!
Maha, the Yglesias link takes me to the Ezra article, just like the Ezra link does. Is it me?
Did you expect a difference?
Google “journo-List”…
Did you expect a difference?
Please don’t comment here unless you can say something intelligent. No one is interested in watching you drool.
The Matt Yglesias link is fixed. The Yglesias article is, in fact, entirely different from the Klein article.
Wellescent – WHAT frickin GOP idea???? I’m not opposed to any idea because of the source but did you read the Ezra article? I saw Bonehead last week pushing that idea (selling health ins across state lines) as central to ‘free market’ solutions and the moderator suggested that to prevent the race to the bottom, that would require regulation which Boner denied. No fedearal regulation! The other ‘idea’ is tort reform, which would have a negligable effect on premiums, as rated by the CBO, but it would make insurace companies who insure doctors for malpractice more profitable.
If you refuse to allow a bait-and-switch – where health care ‘reform’ is a windfall for the insurance industry (medical & malpractice) and focus on the problem – bending the cost curve – drasticly improving access – curbing the abuses of the insurance companies – raising the quality of health care across the board – there are literally NO GOP PROPOSALS. NONE. ZERO. ZIP. NADA.
What killed reform a month ago was not that the bill was bad (though it was flawed) or expensive. The blatent extortion by some senators – which was accepted as BUSINESS AS USUAL flipped the voters out. For a hope of resurrection, the process has to be open, the nescessity of reform has to be explained. Compassion aside, if we don’t get health care costs under coontrol, we can’t sustain the growing cost of entitlement programs. The bubble will burst.
The GOP wants to eliminate those entitlement programs – so they are trying to put out the fire with kerosine and claim they are helping in a bipartisan way. I think we can keep our commitments on Social Security and Medicare. Health Care Reform is essential to that goal – if bipartisanship is now an impediment to that goal – screw bipartisanship.
I’m assuming that this is the same Fletch who’s been commenting recently on Steve M.’s site.
maha, don’t ban him, please. He’s pure conservative, teabag, comedy gold. OK, after awhile, you can ban him But let’s have us some fun, first! 🙂