Take a moment to read this story. Virtually all the top health care policy experts on the progressive side have gotten together to ask the House to just pass the friggin’ Senate bill and then follow-up with an amending bill which can go through reconciliation in the Senate.
It’s sort of a perennial issue in progressive policy reform, balancing what works in policy terms with what make sense politically. And so often the two calculations don’t dictate the same course. What makes this situation so bizarre, however, such a watershed in some ways, is that each calculus points to the same conclusion. Everybody can see it. But a lot of members of Congress want to drop this bill and pretend that they’re going to pass a bunch of smaller bills later in the year.
