Featured Posts
  • Joe Arpaio – Vile and Rotten

    Joe Arpaio - Vile and Rotten

    Why is this guy still in business? Sheriff Joe Arpaio's volunteer investigation into documents pertaining to President Barack Obama's place of birth and citizenship now includes the services of a taxpayer-funded ...

    Read More

  • Romney The Liar

    Romney The Liar

    The lies roll off the man's lips like music off Yo-Yo Ma's cello. Both are virtuosos - one a cellist, the other a liar. A partial list. Bush had nothing to do ...

    Read More

  • Late Night Political Humor

    Late Night Political Humor

    Happy Friday. The best from Political Humor‘s collection of the week’s late night political humor. "Barack Obama supports same-sex marriage. Mitt Romney doesn't even support same-sex car pools." –David Letterman "The head of ...

    Read More

  • Another Unexceptional Republican Claims Obama Is Not An American

    Another Unexceptional Republican Claims Obama Is Not An American

    Republican Rep. Mike Coffman at a Saturday afternoon fundraiser in Colorado. I don't know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. I don't know that. But I ...

    Read More

  • Idiot Quote of the Day: The “Gayer” Obama

    Idiot Quote of the Day: The Gayer Obama

    Rand Paul: Call me cynical, but I didn’t think his [Obama's] views on marriage could get any gayer. We won't call Rand cynical. Ignorant, bigoted asshole is more fitting. An adult using ...

    Read More

  • Late Night Political Humor

    Late Night Political Humor

    Happy Friday. The best from Political Humor‘s collection of the week’s late night political humor. "President Obama came out with approval of same-sex marriage. He said that over the years, he has ...

    Read More

  • What The Hell Is The Problem With Gay Republicans?

    What The Hell Is The Problem With Gay Republicans?

    I've never understood Log Cabin Republicans - gay conservatives who give their support to a homophobic political party that derides their sexuality and refuses to grant them equal rights under ...

    Read More

  • Obama – Same-Sex Marriage and Doing The Right Thing

    Obama - Same-Sex Marriage and Doing The Right Thing

    Finally. “I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own ...

    Read More

  • Another Day, Another Vote – Indiana, NC and Wisconsin

    Another Day, Another Vote - Indiana, NC and Wisconsin

    Election roundup: Indiana. As polls forecast, the Tea Party's efforts to cleanse the GOP of any impure conservatives has Dick Lugar out and teabagger Richard Mourdock in. Mourdock is the new Republican ...

    Read More

  • ‘Romney – The Man Who Saved The Auto Industry’ and Other Fairy Tales

    'Romney - The Man Who Saved The Auto Industry' and Other Fairy Tales

    There are lies...and then there are lies. My own view, by the way, was that the auto companies needed to go through bankruptcy before government help. And frankly, that’s finally what ...

    Read More

  • A Madman and Fox News

    A Madman and Fox News

    From the papers captured last year at Osama bin Laden's Pakistani hideout comes this. Like any public figures, bin Laden and his advisers were mindful of the media. Adam Gadahn, one ...

    Read More

  • Late Night Political Humor

    Late Night Political Humor

    The best from Political Humor‘s collection of the week’s late night political humor. Happy Friday. "Today Mitt Romney visited a firehouse here in New York City. Of course, he was disappointed ...

    Read More

  • New GOP Logo

    New GOP Logo

    ___ Follow MarioPiperniDotCom on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. .

    Read More

  • Can Obama Be Swift-Boated?

    Can Obama Be Swift-Boated?

    It happened to Kerry. Can it happen to Obama? Nope says Margaret Carlson. Obama’s belief system -- in that hopey-changey business and the post-partisanship thing -- has been altered by reality. ...

    Read More

  • Quote of the Day: The Gay Republican

    Quote of the Day: The Gay Republican

    Sullivan: What do Republicans call a gay man with neoconservative passion, a committed relationship and personal courage? A faggot. Exactly right, but then could one expect anything different from a political party that ...

    Read More

  • Christian Pastor: Fixing Gay Is Like Squashing a Cockroach

    Christian Pastor: Fixing Gay Is Like Squashing a Cockroach

    And they claim that atheists are immoral? The ugly side of religion shows its face once again. The words below were spoken at a Sunday sermon by Sean Harris, a pastor ...

    Read More

  • GM Alive, bin Laden Dead

    GM Alive, bin Laden Dead

    It's been fun watching conservatives and Romney twist themselves into pretzels trying to undo Mitt's past words on GM and bin Laden. Romney, April 2007: It’s not worth moving heaven and earth ...

    Read More

  • Republicans Are The Problem

    Republicans Are The Problem

      In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, a couple of scholars from liberal and conservative think tanks, discuss the state of American politics. We have been studying Washington politics and ...

    Read More

  • Marco Rubio – Just Another Weasel

    Marco Rubio - Just Another Weasel

    Romney's VP-in-waiting, Marco Rubio, is perfecting the conservative sleaze play. He has proposed his version of the Dream Act in which people who entered the country illegally as children will be ...

    Read More

  • Obama’s Move Forward

    Obama's Move Forward

    Beyond the rhetoric, the political BS, the lies - that is, the concerted effort by the right-wing noise machine to distort and misinform at every opportunity - is the very ...

    Read More

As Good As It Gets…For Now

Health Care Reform  http://mariopiperni.com/

.

Andrew Sullivan puts the Senate health care bill in perspective.

I keep waiting for this obvious fact to sink in. What Obama has done is force the existing system to insure 30 million more people at a modest cost, and to include a swathe of (still-insufficient) varieties and strategies of cost-control. This is huge – the biggest first year achievement of any president since Reagan. If you consider that he did this while also managing the steepest down-turn in decades, revamping America’s image in the world, preventing a banking implosion, and prosecuting two unresolved wars in the face of almost deranged opposition, it’s pretty damn impressive.

Yes, it is pretty damn impressive.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the hyperbole concerning what the health care bill doesn’t contain that we lose sight of the remarkable fact that it is the greatest advance in health care reform in the last 60 years.  And maybe, just maybe, the Senate bill IS the best that could have been achieved under the current conditions. A public option and a Medicare buy-in would have been wonderful but just not ‘t doable at this time.

The Dems calling for the bill to be scrapped are not thinking this thing through.

___

To receive email notifications of new posts from MarioPiperniDotCom, click on Subscribe.

Comments

  1. Frances says:

    I agree about the Democrats who are calling for the bill to be killed. This is what I replied to Jane Hamsher from FireDogLake when I got her email petition:

    “Hi, I think I would like to see how the House and Senate bills are reconciled before I make a decision.”

  2. laurieD says:

    Why would any Democrat want the bill killed? There is no reason to believe starting over would result in a better bill. Conservatives would love nothing more than see the bill killed and to drag out the healtcare debate into the November elections. That would be disastrous.

  3. doubleaseven says:

    Mario are you kidding or just being sarcastic? You must be for you can not be a jackass like Andrew Sullivan.

    Here is a note that might shed some light on Sullivan’s bloody (he is a Brit, no?) ignorance or cunning.
    _______________________________________________________________

    The disingenuous or false statements made by Team Obama and collaborating members of Congress, to transform the critique of the Bill into praise and gratitude by the public, are sickening and demoralizing. Their credibility can not be raised by constant repetition by increasing number of protagonists. Unfortunately many hosts who were challenging the falsehoods head on are doing so less and less, perhaps because they are getting tired and increasingly resigned to inevitability of a flawed bill. However this technique can not work because it will be very hard to create a collusion involving millions of progressives and independents. It is too bad that many defenders want to be trusted because of their eons of experience in the Washington scene, which has not even helped them develop enough intellectual honesty to recognize this basic concept. Some of the most egregious half truths going unchallenged are:

    1) Subsidies and exchanges etc start in 8014, thus all this sobbing about 45k dying is at best crocodile tears. If true ED we should not be talking any other topic at all. Do you not want to see how can we stop these deaths immediately?

    2) Insure 31M (not 47M) by 2019, not exactly a crash program, is it? Why do they not point out that tax payer money will be squandered on high bone crushing premiums (and more than proportionately higher subsidies) which are projected to grow 111% by Ins Industry’s own estimates.

    3) No clear description of what new alternatives, which provide the same cost lowering and competition as the Public Option, have been created and which were not present in Obama Campaign’s Health Care plans.

    4)Ban the insurance denial based on pre-existing conditions. Bu the differential of older people with pre-existing conditions can be upto 300% in the Senate Bill and 200% in the House Bill. The same number is 20% in Vermont state regulation. At this number people higher than 400% poverty level will not find it affordable. For those eligible for subsidies, tax payer will be hit for obscenely high amounts.