#HealthCareFAIL: How The Dems Botched Their Signature Legislation

And one House roll call vote and it could be passed tomorrow.

They never had a 60 vote majority. They were out and out lied to by Lieberman.

Then they were gamed by Nelson.

Now, three Dem senators are promising to block the climate bill.

Health care has to be passed as is by the House, our use reconciliation, or both.

The climate bill was reported to be heading for a compromise in the Senate, but I hate to see that mess, if it happens at all. Better to let the EPA put the screws to the coal industry and other emitters.

Losing the fantasy that the Dems can act alone in the Senate is a blessing. It makes Lieberman and Nelson totally irrelevant, for starters. Perhaps Reid will realize that, if he can't get reelected anyway, he might as well expose the filibuster for what it is: a cheap gimmick to block any legislation that the minority does not like, or that they simply want to use for political games. I hope he makes them actually filibuster, and refuses to let the Senate recess, whenever they pull this crap.

American voters are slow to catch on, but they do eventually catch on.

The WH needs to speak with one voice, and that voice should belong to the guy we elected.

Right now, Rahm says one thing Plouffe and Axelrod say the opposite and the President isn't firm on anything.

you can add another one - negotiating with themselves

Reid took reconciliation off the table at the beginning of the process

Obama said Public Option wasn't necessary

Single Payer wasn't even brought up as an option

Rule 1 in Negotiations Everything is negotiable. But if you take things off the table yourself without getting anything in return you are only seceding ground and hurting your own position.

It's not dead yet, to paraphrase Monty Python. If health care reform ultimately fails, it will be an epic failure on a far grander scale and more tragic than even the Clinton effort. There will be more than enough blame to go around, as you've documented. And there will be serious consequences as thousands of activists sit on their hands and tighten their wallets in 2010 (and maybe even in 2012).

But as long as it has a pulse, the best thing all of us can do is keep the heat on everyone -- on the Senate which deserves it more than anyone, on the House to do the responsible thing even if the Senate stabs them in the back once again, and on the White House for following up President Obama's SOTU rhetoric with real action, rather than Rahm's wimping out.

This whole process has been too painful to watch for those of us following ti closely. For the rest of the country just interested in results, this has been a nauseating spectacle. Who comes off the worst in this kabuki theater performance? Grassley, Enzi, Hatch, Lieberman, Nelson, Landrieu. Who comes off as incompetent? Baucus, Reid, Obama. And characters like Dorgan, Conrad and Snowe play the parts of unnecessary extras who did their best to doom this project. Oddly enough, Pelosi manages to come out with some dignity intact, but not much.

Obama failed first, and kept failing.

Yes, the House could have done better. Yes, the Senate could hardly have done worse. But all that pales in comparison to Obama's continued failures.

Giving up single payer in any circumstance was a mistake. But giving it up without getting anything in return was unconscionable stupidity.

If this failure* is the defining aspect of the Obama presidency, it is what he deserves.

*Even if something somehow manages to pass, the huge giveaway to big pharma and the insurance industry that this legislation contains will be a failure.

Okay, Brian

I don't deny that Max Baucus and the White House deserve a lot of blame, but House members deserve their share of the blame, too. The CPC wasted plenty of time with their self-righteousness pontificating about whether this or that form of the public option was acceptable to them. The House wasted plenty of time trying to find revenue measures when both the President (limiting the charitable and mortgage deductions) and Max Baucus (capping the employer tax exclusion) had come up with very good candidates to raise the necessary revenue -- both which were quite progressive -- long before the millionaire tax. And members who kept signing letters saying they wouldn't vote for a bill if it included this or that provision didn't help either.

That said, this blame game is a needless exercise. The question isn't why Democrats are in the predicament they are in right now. The question is where we go from here.

At this point, only the House has the power tomorrow to make it so every child can remain on his or her parents' policy until age 25 and provide significant prescription drug relief to seniors. Just yelling, "SIDECAR, SIDECAR" amounts to the same sort of pussy-footing that got Democrats into the predicament they currently are in. If the House says they want to meet the Senate halfway, then part of meeting the Senate halfway includes specifying what exactly must be included in sidecar legislation that could realistically pass the Senate in order for House members to vote for the Senate bill.

Brian's analysis is much too wonkish (focused on inside baseball). What killed HCR was Obama's decision to take single payer "off the table" because America's capitalist culturerequired for-profit insurance companies to run the show. That guarranteed a confused and complex set of proposals open to cheap and hard to understand by the public.

There are various levels of blame, and a lot of measuring of what butterfly's wings flapped in China to cause whatever tornado here.

But the fact remains that the bill is one roll-call vote away from the President's desk.

Yes, I know it's abdicating to the House of Lords; yes, I know it's not the best bill; yes, I know the House did their job and made a bunch of tough votes. But the ball is in their court. They can pass the bill or be as cravenly concerned with their own reelection as apparently certain senators are. The fact remains, unless there is a total revolution in the Senate, passing another bill is 2 extortionists and 1 Republican away from happening. Forget it. Blame them? Yes. I also know Pelosi says she doesn't have the votes. Well, we all know she is *far* more likely to get them than Reid is.

At the end of the day, the path of least resistance is to pass the Senate bill. It's good until January 3, 2011. Tick. Tick. Tick.

This may be a case of Murder on the Orient Express where everyone contributed to the killing, but the law regards shooting someone falling out of a building as murder, so, that being the case, the House is the one putting the lights out finally if it dies.

Here is a suggestion I've read about and thought about and which makes some sense. Pass what can be passed by reconciliation. Institute medicare for all which can be done w/ 51 votes.

I see it this simple and I think the MA Sen election showed this is how its going to go down, but if you aren't doing your job you aren't going to keep. I'm not a teabagger or radical, pretty sensible life-long Dem, but I feel that those representing both parties aren't worth re-electing. So, quite simply, anyone holding an office right now that is up for re-election in 2010 won't receive my vote in the primaries or in the general. What else can I do? There are no other tools at my disposal. Handwritten letters have no effect. Emails have no effect. Nothing crazy. Nothing unsensible. But, the result is that the current elected members that are a part of the system aren't succeeding in an environment where they should have scored. If they can't under these conditions, then they can't anytime. If you have a regular job, have been given the best tools to succeed, and you still fail... its time to find another line of work. I will help with that natural conclusion in the fall. I hope that is what the many other disatisfied Ds, Rs, and Is also conclude.

No doubt a lot of mistakes were made. But, also no doubt, not one of those mistakes can be rolled back - that time is passed. What we have today is a chance to stop insurance companies from refusing to cover pre-existing conditions and dropping insurance from anyone who really needs it. Those two things alone are a major accomplishment, so the Senate Bill, which includes those things should be passed.

It is utter nonsense to rant about the requirement that everyone buy insurance, while we have no public option. Those two are not even remotely related to each other. The sole reason for mandatory insurance for everyone is to share the risk widely enough so people with pre-existing conditions can get insurance. Without the mandatory coverage requirement it isn't possible to get pre-existing conditions covered. And, there is no true public option available for consideration today. The one in the House bill is a farce, a symbolic gesture only. It would cover almost no one, and even then only after 4 years.

So, there are no good reasons for not passing the Senate Bill, other than the part about making women second class citizens. That part can be fixed later, and I'm sure will be.

I say "Good job, Brian." There is nothing per se that keeps a first-world country from providing adequate health care for all -- every country other than the US has already done it. The enemy, we are told, is the complexity of doing health care. So keep it simple. Congress could have drafted a one-page act extending Medicare to every citizen and legal resident 50 or older and passed it in a week. If they wanted to get creative, they had their pick of the Finnish model, the Swiss model, even the Japanese model to build on; all produce better outcomes at lower cost.

My sense is that ongoing Congressional dysfunction that uses the complexity as an excuse will eventually lead to the emergence of countervailing power and nasty turf wars. Mozambique is a case in point, 2/3 of the national budget comes from international donors. It should be straightforward then how the money is spent...so much for infrastructure, so much for teacher salaries, so much for health programs, etc. Indeed, the donor community even drafts the national budget. There is a layer of complexity added with the donor demand for progress in fighting corruption. If anything, Mozambique is more corrupt than it was after the return of multiparty government. If the Democrats want legislative success, they need to return the the KISS rule they learned in 8th grade English class.

This article is the most sterile explanation I have ever seen on the issue.

Chuck Todd couldn't have written a more obvious script of events. Trust me, that AIN'T a compliment.

I have a more plausible explanation. Too many in Congress never wanted REAL reform. Why would they? There is waaaaay too much pharma and insurance money on the line.

And now with the latest Supreme Court ruling (yeah, I SPELLED it!), things are only gonna get worse.

And we only have ourselves to blame for believing empty suits with no track records of populism.

This article seems to have the most up-to-date info. about what Congress is going to do now:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/28/reid.pelosi.health.care/

Socialize Medicine! VA Health Care for all!

Please pay him the respect he is due by correcting the caption to the pictures to identify him as the late Sen. Kennedy rather than former Sen. Kennedy.

The key to the Republican strategy from day 1 was to muddy things up enough so that their massive PR blitz to discourage the public would give corrupt Dem legislators cover to bolt. And what did the Genius PR "progressives" do? Why they volunteered to lead the assault.

This is definitely a love/hate relationship. These guys rubbing it in Obamas' nose every chance they get aren't helping. If you expect perfection, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

Thee number one single worst decision was the one Obama stupidly made prior to any of the debate and that was to take Medicare for All off the table. Why is this the single worst decision? Because if you take your strongest negotiating position off the table in advance, the best you can end up with is a compromised compromise and that sucks. We started the debate better than halfway toward defeat and then we are surprised when the idiot Democrats were allowed to do their thing with virtually no leadership or direction from the White House? Who you trying to kid anyway? C'mon now! Don't make me laugh!

Despite all the mistakes, delay etc. this is still an historic moment. President Obama's performance this week @ the SOTU and the Republican conference shifts the momentum slightly back our way, and opens a narrow "window of opportunity" to still get something significant done. But the President's words must be followed by meaningful and immediate action: Pass the Senate bill and then fix it as best you can in reconciliation (Medicare at 50 or 55, increase Medicaid to 200% of poverty, expand community health centers, ensure meaningful competition in the exchanges to keep rates down etc). This may have to be accomplished the old fashioned "LBJ" way.

It was disappointing to hear the President's encouragement on health care in the SOTU and then immediately read that (some of) his aides are backtracking and sending mixed signals. This issue is so important, why can't the White House and the Congressional Democrats exhibit strong, united and consistent leadership and get this passed, using all the power at their disposal? This could be Harry Reid's legacy. Be bold, have courage and do the right thing for once. Millions of Americans will be helped and untold lives saved with Health Care reform. It could help keep the Democrats in power for a generation.

This is a moral issue. Many of the people in "Washington bubble" simply don't understand the insecurity, suffering and hardship being experienced by many of their fellow Americans right now on account of our dysfunctional and unfair health care system.

On this issue what is good policy is also good politics. If the Democrats enact health care reform, flawed though it is, it will improve their prospects in the fall to retain control of both houses and then hopefully come back in future sessions and keep improving it. If they fail they will be wiped out and it will be many years before meaningful reform can be enacted, while in the meantime health care costs take an ever-increasing and ultimately unsustainable share of GDP, crippling our economy all the while.

I must say that I admire Speaker Pelosi immensely. She has proceeded in good faith, stood firm and shown a true commitment to progressive values. I believe that the House passed the best and most progressive bill possible given the political realities.

We have to deal with the unfortunate situation we find ourselves in. Would that our Democrats in Washington find the courage and moral fiber to take advantge of this soon-to-expire opportunity to do something good for the American people regardless of the political consequences, much as a few brave Southern Democrats did back in the Civil Rights era.

The "progressive" analysis is crafted in blissful ignorance of the mechanics of US politics and the recent history of the interaction of Democratic Presidents and Congress. It's as if Shelby giving Clinton the finger and prospering as a Republican or Moynihan double-crossing both Clinton and Carter didn't happen. It's as if the infrastructure of the Chamber of Commerce through Club for Growth that keeps Republicans in line did not exist, as if LBJ passed civil rights without Republican votes, as if Obama had some magical powers that he was, for unknown reasons, stubbornly refusing to unleash.

James O'Keefe was trying to show how the Democrates are not answering the telephone in their offices. When you cant talk to the person responsable the voters get mad.

#epicunderstatement

"In a 24-hour news cycle, with the Internet and bloggers and cable news, sometimes a lot more can be accomplished, especially with healthcare, when it happens behind closed doors," said Drew Altman, a healthcare policy expert who heads the nonprofit Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-healthcare-strategy31-2010jan31,0,4131123.story

I maxed out on my donations to the Dems in 2008, and then faithfully contributed to them in 2009 for the VA Gubernatorial and MA Senatorial races. After the MA debacle, I've told the DNC - as well as friends on the Hill who work for Dems - that I'm cutting them off until I see some cohesion and sense of urgency. I think others should do the same. What good are these people if they can't deliver even with super majorities? I'd be better off registering as a Republican and vote in their primaries to help elect a liberal to moderate Republican who can buck his/her party leadership.

Here's a piece written in Jan 2010 “A mere seven months ago (that would be around June 2009), The New York Times/CBS poll found that 72% of Americans ‘supported a government-administered insurance plan—something like Medicare for those under 65—that would compete for customers with private insurers.’”

Now, if the Democrats can truly find the courage to vote for what the citizens actually want, then they are on their way to re-election. HurraY!

1. Decision - Ignore previous Republican crimes, misdemeanors and profligacy 
– tax cuts for the wealthy: Constituencies - Republican voters and Republican 
Senators and Representatives he hoped would become ‘bi-partisan’.
2. Decision - Support a stingy stimulus that was half of what was needed and 
included one-thirds tax breaks, increasing the deficit and further reducing the 
stimulus to one-third of what was needed: Constituencies – Wealthy investors, 
special interests.
3. Decision - Kill the only option that would have slowed the cost of health 
care & led to universal coverage – $ 753 Billions : Constituencies - Health 
insurance and pharmacy industries.
4. Decision - Accelerate the Bush bailout, $ 4.3 Trillions in bailouts, 
guarantees and purchasing assets from the private sector at well above market 
value: Constituency - Financial industry and banks.
5. Decision - Escalate a meaningless and fruitless war, $600 Billions: 
Constituencies - military and corporate mercenaries.
6. Decision - Gut real financial reform and substitute finger wagging and silly 
taxes and fees, while banking fees continue up, lending freezes and credit 
tightens - $UNK Billions: Constituencies - financial industry and the wealthy.
7. Decision - Not help people with bankruptcy and mortgages remediation – 
accelerating middle class decline: Constituencies - financial industry, banks 
and wealthy.
and
8. Decision - Fiddle around and not pass a jobs bill – accelerating middle class 
decline (Already spent to much money, cut taxes and increased the deficit – so, 
sorry, no money for the middle class and American voters): Constituencies: 
Wealthy and Republicans.

Obama’s constituencies are the health insurance and pharmacy industry, 
military-mercenary complex, the financial industry and banks, and the 
wealthy.

Obama’s policies have continued to transfer America’s wealth from middle 
class families to corporations and the wealth, just as the pseudo-reform bill would do.

Why has Obama lost the support of the voters? Based on the decisions Obama 
has made, these appear to be the reasons for the lose:

1. Republicans are better off with real Republicans, hence support Republican voters is all but gone;
2. Independents, who wanted change, see the status quo protected and 
coddled, hence Independents have retreated from support for Obama and the Dems;
3. Democrats see a so-called Democratic White House and so-called Democratic Congress working to continue and accelerate the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy, hence they have no reason to support Obama and his allies in Congress.

Obama has made decisions that have hurt most Americans, and, he is either:

1. Oblivious,
2. Doesn’t care,
3. Surrounded himself with advisors up to their eyeballs in the status quo and/or self-interested,
4. Erroneously assumed the military-mercenary, health insurance-pharmaceutical, financial-banking industries and wealthy constituencies would 
remain loyal and rescue him from troubles.

It’s easy to understand why Obama’s ratings and his ‘agenda’ have been 
broadly rejected and Democrats have lost majority support. The pseudo-reform bill is simply one more example of trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the voters. Get real O and start leading the public interest.

Bet you wont see this in the head lines, cause none are fair and balance, just a personal opinion, i really wish others would go back to reading a little.
A very productive Congress, despite what the approval ratings say

By Norman Ornstein
Sunday, January 31, 2010; B02

When President Obama urged lawmakers during his State of the Union speech to work with him on "restoring the public trust," he was hardly going out on a limb. The Congress he was addressing is one of the least popular in decades. Barely a quarter of Americans approve of the job it's doing, according to the latest Gallup/USA Today poll, while 58 percent said it was below average or one of the worst ever, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal survey last month.

It's not hard to find reasons why Americans are down on Capitol Hill, and why President Obama's approval rating has dropped below 50 percent in many polls. A year into the 111th Congress, unemployment remains at 10 percent, and many Americans are struggling to get by -- even as they've watched Congress bail out banks and coddle the same bankers now salivating over massive new bonuses. At the same time, the public has had a front-row seat to the always messy legislative process on health care and other issues, and this past year that process has been messier, more rancorous and more partisan than at any point in modern memory.

There seems to be little to endear citizens to their legislature or to the president trying to influence it. It's too bad, because even with the wrench thrown in by Republican Scott Brown's election in Massachusetts, this Democratic Congress is on a path to become one of the most productive since the Great Society 89th Congress in 1965-66, and Obama already has the most legislative success of any modern president -- and that includes Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson. The deep dysfunction of our politics may have produced public disdain, but it has also delivered record accomplishment.

The productivity began with the stimulus package, which was far more than an injection of $787 billion in government spending to jump-start the ailing economy. More than one-third of it -- $288 billion -- came in the form of tax cuts, making it one of the largest tax cuts in history, with sizable credits for energy conservation and renewable-energy production as well as home-buying and college tuition. The stimulus also promised $19 billion for the critical policy arena of health-information technology, and more than $1 billion to advance research on the effectiveness of health-care treatments.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has leveraged some of the stimulus money to encourage wide-ranging reform in school districts across the country. There were also massive investments in green technologies, clean water and a smart grid for electricity, while the $70 billion or more in energy and environmental programs was perhaps the most ambitious advancement in these areas in modern times. As a bonus, more than $7 billion was allotted to expand broadband and wireless Internet access, a step toward the goal of universal access.

Any Congress that passed all these items separately would be considered enormously productive. Instead, this Congress did it in one bill. Lawmakers then added to their record by expanding children's health insurance and providing stiff oversight of the TARP funds allocated by the previous Congress. Other accomplishments included a law to allow the FDA to regulate tobacco, the largest land conservation law in nearly two decades, a credit card holders' bill of rights and defense procurement reform.

The House, of course, did much more, including approving a historic cap-and-trade bill and sweeping financial regulatory changes. And both chambers passed their versions of a health-care overhaul. Financial regulation is working its way through the Senate, and even in this political environment it is on track for enactment in the first half of this year. It is likely that the package of job-creation programs the president showcased on Wednesday, most of which got through the House last year, will be signed into law early on as well.

Most of this has been accomplished without any support from Republicans in either the House or the Senate -- an especially striking fact, since many of the initiatives of the New Deal and the Great Society, including Social Security and Medicare, attracted significant backing from the minority Republicans.

How did it happen? Democrats, perhaps recalling the disasters of 1994, when they failed to unite behind Bill Clinton's agenda in the face of uniform GOP opposition, came together. Obama's smoother beginning and stronger bonds with congressional leaders also helped.

But even with robust majorities, Democratic leaders deserve great credit for these achievements. Democratic ideologies stretch from the left-wing views of Bernie Sanders in the Senate and Maxine Waters in the House to the conservative approach of Ben Nelson in the Senate and Bobby Bright in the House, with every variation in between. Finding 219 votes for climate-change legislation in the House was nothing short of astonishing; getting all 60 Senate Democrats to support any version of major health-care reform, an equal feat. The White House strategy -- applying pressure quietly while letting congressional leaders find ways to build coalitions -- was critical.

Certainly, the quality of this legislative output is a matter of debate. In fact, some voters, including many independents, are down on Congress precisely because they don't like the accomplishments, which to them smack of too much government intervention and excessive deficits. But I suspect the broader public regards this Congress as committing sins of omission more than commission. Before the State of the Union, the stimulus was never really sold in terms of its substantive measures; it just looked like money thrown at a problem in the usual pork-barrel way. And many Americans, hunkering down in bad times, may not accept the notion of "countercyclical" economic policies, in which the government spends more just when citizens are cutting back.

Most of the specific new policies -- such as energy conservation and protection for public lands -- enjoy solid and broad public support. But many voters discount them simply because they were passed or proposed by unpopular lawmakers. In Massachusetts, people who enthusiastically support their state's health-care system were hostile to the very similar plan passed by Congress. Why? Because it was a product of Congress.

Well before Sen.-elect Brown's Bay State upset, it was clear that a sterling legislative record in the first half of the 111th Congress did not guarantee continuing action in 2010 or beyond. And now, Democrats' success at keeping 59 senators in line means little if they cannot find someone on the other side willing to become vote No. 60. With Republicans ebullient over the Massachusetts election, the likelihood is that they will feel vindicated in their "just say no" strategy, Obama's leadership lectures notwithstanding.

If the midterm elections in November turn out to be more like 1994, when Democrats got hammered, than 1982, when Republicans suffered a less costly blow, the GOP will probably be emboldened to double down on its opposition to everything, trying to bring the Obama presidency to its knees on the way to 2012. That would mean real gridlock in the face of a serious crisis. Given the precarious coalitions in our otherwise dysfunctional politics, we could go quickly from one of the most productive Congresses in our lifetimes to the most obstructionist.

And voters would probably like that even less.

Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the co-author of "The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track."
washingtonpost.com