Mario Piperni dot Com

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If all goes as planned, a health care bill will be signed into law by Saturday March 20, albeit without a public option.

As soon as Thursday or Friday, the House would pass the health care bill approved by the Senate in December. The House would immediately approve a package of changes in a separate bill, using a procedure known as budget reconciliation, to avoid the threat of a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

Mr. Obama would sign the Senate health care bill, making it the law of the land. The budget reconciliation bill would go to the Senate, where Republicans intend to offer dozens of amendments and points of order in an effort to alter or stop it. Assuming they are able to fend off the Republican blocking efforts, Democrats could pass the reconciliation package with a simple majority vote, amending the health bill in a way that makes it acceptable to Democrats in the House and the Senate and to Mr. Obama. The president would then sign the reconciliation bill, completing the process.

And voila!, it’s done. While Republicans will cry out in protest that it is being done via the reconciliation process, what they neglect to point out is that health care bills have already been passed in both the House and Senate.  It is the Senate bill which the House will vote on which will be signed by the President.  Reconciliation will only come into play once the bill is signed and it will only affect the House amendments.  So the process has not been circumvented despite what Republicans claim.

As for the public option…

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on Thursday that she would not include a public option in a health care reconciliation package that the House will send to the Senate.

“We’re talking about something that is not going to be part of the legislation,” Pelosi said, noting “with sadness” that the public insurance option won’t be part of legislation. “I’m quite sad that the public option is not in there,” she said.

Fear not. They’ll take care of it in Obama’s second term.  What we do know for sure is that the entire right-wing noise machine will be blasting away all of next week propagating every lie they can imagine.  This week, the death panels nonsense resurfaced with a vengeance.  When you don’t have a decent argument to make, lying is your best friend.

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Just when you think it’s dead and buried, it makes a resurgence.

The public option letter in the Senate has more than 40 signatories now. That would seem to push it well beyond the point of viability. But with Nancy Pelosi saying that the Senate doesn’t have the votes and “it’s not in the reconciliation,” it’s not exhibiting many signs of life.

As far as I can tell, the story of the public option’s resurgence has been a mixture of smart organizing and Senate cowardice. Few senators wanted to stand against the thing. But nor did they want to bring it back into play. So a number of them signed the letter under pressure, waiting and hoping that someone else — maybe the leadership or the White House — would figure this out for them. The White House and Pelosi have attempted a version of that. They’re not coming out against the public option push; they’re just saying the votes don’t exist. And maybe they don”t. The letter has 41 senators signed on, which is still fewer than 50.

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Make what you will from the following talking point used by Republican Representative Mike Pence.  He was warning his audience of the dreadful consequences should health care reform come to pass.

“Once the American public becomes dependent on the federal government during that most vulnerable moment of illness of a loved one, a spouse, a parent, a child, a grandchild, those on the elite leadership of the left know…they’ll never let it [public healthcare] go.”

Good point, Mikey.  Much more honorable, I imagine, for a parent to watch their 5-year old daughter die because some health insurance flunky patriot deemed their child’s illness a preexisting condition than to allow the government to pass legislation which would disallow ANY health insurer from EVER canceling a policy over a preexisting condition.

Stupid elitist libruls caring about your loved ones, parents, spouses, children and grandchildren.  How dare they.  Much smarter to let your loved ones die needlessly than to cave in to elitist propaganda.

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Happy Wednesday Thursday!

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It all comes down to this.  Share the info.  Be heard.

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Colbert sums up the health care reform mess with the help of Ezra Klein.  There’s a great graphic of exactly what “ramming health care” down one’s throat looks like.

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For some Republicans, if you’re unemployed, you’re obviously a lazy do-nothing bum.  Tom DeLay was asked if people are unemployed because they want to be.  His response…

“Well, it is the truth. and people in the real world know it. And they have friends and they know it. Sure, we ought to be helping people that are unemployed find a job, but we also have budget considerations that are incredibly important, especially now that Obama is spending monies that we don’t have.”

And Republican senator Jon Kyle added this:

[Unemployment insurance "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work."

This is the same insensitive talk we hear from individuals who have lost touch with the real world and the people who struggle in that world.  Yes, of course there are individuals who are shiftless and will take advantage of any situation presented them.  But to paint the entire population of unemployed with the same broad brush strokes is ridiculous and speaks of a complete detachment from life beyond their own comfortable existence.

The majority of unemployed do want to work and provide for both their families and themselves.  Their self-esteem takes a heavy hit in the process and to hear cold and heartless politicians refer to them as content being unemployed can only be disconcerting as they try to keep their lives intact.

Unemployment benefits are not meant to be an incentive for anything. Its single purpose it to allow people and families to survive a difficult period in their lives, nothing more.  Having found success in life does not give one the right to judge other’s motives when in truth they know nothing of the lives and circumstances of the individuals involved.

What DeLay’s and Kyle’s words show us is that they view people as a mass of humanity and not as individuals with a story and circumstances unique to their lives.  In fact the DeLay/Kyle perspective is the very one being displayed every day by Republicans as they battle to stop health care reform. It is clearly evident that they don’t give a damn about anyone’s suffering. For them, preserving the corporate profit margin takes precedent over the plight of the people who elected them.  They would make Marie Antoinette proud.

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In case you haven’t been paying attention for the last year, this is EXACTLY how the health care ‘debate’ came down. Really. Sad to say, it is not an oversimplification.  The only part which is left out, is the one which shows Democrats as the self-defeating weaklings they are which allowed Republicans to steamroll over them and the public with a campaign of lies and misinformation.

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Republicans are not counting on Bart Stupak to single-handedly kill health care.  They’ve got a plan of their own.  Greg Sargent explains.

Senior Senate GOP leadership aides have settled on a new strategy that, they hope, will stall or kill the Dem health reform push: They are going to use the arcane “Byrd rule” to try to bleed the reconciliation fix to death and ensure that it never passes.

Senior GOP aides have been studying the rule book in recent days, and they think they have a game plan. Here’s how they hope it will work.

At risk of oversimplification, the Byrd rule is designed to ensure that reconciliation is used to only make budgetary fixes, not policy ones, to existing legislation. Presuming the House passes the Senate bill, the House will then pass a reconciliation fix to the bill, after which the Senate will then try to pass that fix, too.

At this point Senate GOPers will repeatedly invoke the Byrd rule to ask the parliamentarian to strip individual provisions (ones fixing this or that in the original bill) out of the fix, on the grounds that they are policy fixes. If individual provisions are stripped, it would change the Senate’s version of the overall fix.

That would force the House to vote on it again and again, stalling the process further.

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There’s a larger game plan here. By making it clear they will do their best to tie reconciliation in procedural knots, Republicans are hoping to frighten House Dems into believing reconciliation is doomed. If House Dems are persuaded that the fix later will fail, they will be less likely to pass the original Senate bill in the first place, pehaps killing it.

I’d like to think that Dems have thought this process through and were expecting Repubs to try something of the sort. To have believed anything less would have been sheer foolishness.  Whatever it is, it’s do or die time for Democrats.  With his speech on Wednesday, the President has burned all bridges, killing off any possibility of retreat.  Democrats must find a way to pass a health care bill or spend the next three years isolated, castrated and impotent.

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(Hat Tip: Balloon Juice)

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From The New Republic…

…if Obama on Wednesday was implicitly giving up on his hopes for constructive, bipartisan governing, he wasn’t giving up on his hopes for what governing would achieve. He ran for president on a promise to tackle the nation’s most challenging problems–and, since winning election, he’s gleefully defied those who warned him he was trying to do too much. On Wednesday, he made clear that he hasn’t changed his mind about that:

At stake right now is not just our ability to solve this problem, but our ability to solve any problem. The American people want to know if it’s still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future. They are waiting for us to act. They are waiting for us to lead. And as long as I hold this office, I intend to provide that leadership. I do not know how this plays politically, but I know it’s right.

That’s not just bluster. At any point in the last few months but particularly in the wake of the Massachusetts election, it would have been easy to back away from comprehensive reform–to cut a deal, be done with it, and move on.

Instead, Obama on Wednesday committed himself more fully to comprehensive reform than he has at any time since this effort started–rejecting incremental reforms explicitly, refusing Republican calls to start over, and demanding an up-or-down vote on his proposal.

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Say what you will about Obama and his plan. Both, surely, are flawed. But, particularly with this latest statement, he’s living up to those ideals.

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