Democrats disagree on whether they have an agreement

NY Times:

White House officials and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continued to say on Sunday that progress was being made on legislation to overhaul the health-care system, but fiscally conservative Democrats remained less optimistic while Republicans remained steadfast in their opposition to it.

Ms. Pelosi, speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” declared: “When I take this bill to the floor, it will win. We will move forward, it will happen.”

But Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the chairman of the budget committee, said it was not possible or desirable to have a bill that carried only Democratic votes.

“Look, there are not the votes for Democrats to do this just on our side of the aisle,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“The only thing bipartisan about the measures so far is the opposition to them,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

...
Pelosi must mean she will either modify the bill or provide funding for Democrat opponents so they can vote for it. That is how she got the catastrophic energy bill through and how she and Waxman plan to do the health care bill. It probably depends on the integrity and steadfastness of the Blue Dogs. If they crater this time they will be in serious political difficulty with voters who were told they were fiscal conservatives.

Meanwhile The Hill reports:

Following a blow from the Congressional Budget Office, Democratic leaders in Congress likely will make the case this week that the healthcare reform plan has multiple benefits and cost savings that cannot be scored by independent congressional accountants.

Democrats are going to seek to convince skeptics that the healthcare overhaul has other provisions, such as prevention and wellness measures, that will provide benefits and save money, a House leadership aide told The Hill on Sunday.

...
This is what politicians call spin. When the facts become inconvenient you try to construct a different rationale for doing what you wanted to do anyway. It will probably only work for the true believers. The rest of us will see it for the politics of fraud it represents. They have lost a central tenant of their rationale for this bill. Do they really think we will forget their previous arguments for its passage?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more