Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) tells TPMDC that time is of the essence in salvaging health care reform.
Among the more painful realities to face after Tuesday night’s election was how utterly unprepared Democrats were for the effects that a Scott Brown win would have on health care reform.
Just now, in an interview with TPMDC, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) conceded that Democrats still have no plan for how to advance reform in the aftermath of the Massachusetts results.
In this post, Matt Yglesias gets at what’s so wrong about pulling the plug now on reform and why a lot of people on the Hill aren’t able to quite see this. Needing to make that complicated machine work people up there think about all the different bills, different iterations of bills, how there was never one “Obamacare”, all the back and forth between House and Senate. But it’s hard when you’re living in that world to fully grasp that hardly anyone outside of DC has any idea what you’re even talking about when you get into all that stuff. Or cares. It’s just there was Obamacare. They worked on it all year. It got really messy. It was basically done. And then they just stopped. Read Matt’s piece.
Brian Beutler interviewed Sen. Sherrod Brown today to get his read on the state of health care reform negotiations and whether or not there’s any plan …
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is engaged with House progressives, trying to tease out a solution to the health care reform impasse–but he says that at the highest levels of the Senate and the White House, there’s still no plan, and he doubts whether President Obama will insert himself forcefully into the process.
Read the rest here.
I don’t go much for emotional appeals, but we received an email from TPM Reader MD this week that I haven’t been able to shake:
Hey TPM, long time reader — going back to the Trent Lott-Strom Thurmond days — first-time writer.
Like everyone I have a sob-story to tell about health care. After telling it to countless liberals who oppose the Senate’s health-care reform bill, I still haven’t heard a good answer from them about why they can’t support the Senate bill. They usually stop talking, or try to change the subject.
This is only half a rhetorical question. Because I think we all know that the use of the filibuster has expanded and evolved greatly over the last twenty years — mainly but by no means only on the part of Republicans. But back in 1994 — even though health care never even came out of committee let alone a floor vote — I don’t remember it really being raised as a possibility that health care would need to surmount a filibuster. But am I misremembering?
From The State …
Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer has compared giving people government assistance to “feeding stray animals.”
Bauer, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor, made his remarks during a town hall meeting in Fountain Inn that included state lawmakers and about 115 residents.
“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better,” Bauer said.
In South Carolina, 58 percent of students participate in the free and reduced-price lunch program.
I got a lot of good answers and commentary on my question yesterday about whether or how much the possibility of a filibuster against Health Care Reform was floated in 1994. The one below goes over some key details as well as provides some broader perspective. The key is that when Health Care even got down to the legislative phase in 1994 it was clear that the Democrats couldn’t even muster 50 votes for a bill, despite having a 56 seat majority (but not for long). So even though a filibuster was pretty clearly in reserve, it was sort of beside the point since the Dems couldn’t even manage a simple majority. It’s this reality that stands out so memorably in my mind when I consider what the Dems should do now with a bill passed out of the senate in the House’s hands.
From our reader …
If you want to use any of this, you can quote me, but not by name.
I covered health care during the Clinton years as well. The difference is that the bill never was in a position to get through the Senate. After about 10-12 days of
work in the Senate (deep into August), it became apparent very fast that the bill wasn’t going anywhere.