219 - 212

[Brentastic]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2...19212_vote.html

 

Let the decades of debate begin. What really annoys me is that you can't just rush a bill of this magnitude. Hey Pres, it's ok to take a few years and make sure to get this monumental change right.

[polksalet]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2...19212_vote.html

 

Let the decades of debate begin. What really annoys me is that you can't just rush a bill of this magnitude. Hey Pres, it's ok to take a few years and make sure to get this monumental change right.

 

I'm quitting work and taking up Mad Dog and Newports.

[CaP'N GRuNGe]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2...19212_vote.html

 

Let the decades of debate begin. What really annoys me is that you can't just rush a bill of this magnitude. Hey Pres, it's ok to take a few years and make sure to get this monumental change right.

 

To be fair, health care reform has been debated for decades already.

[I Like Soup]

The voice of the people is being pushed to the side. This will change in November.

[evil_gop_liars]

The voice of the people is being pushed to the side. This will change in November.

 

The voice of the people did speak.

[bushwacked]

The voice of the people is being pushed to the side. This will change in November.

 

Maybe, but there is nothing noble about governing by popular opinion. Sometimes it takes balls to do the right thing.

[Ursa Majoris]

What really annoys me is that you can't just rush a bill of this magnitude. Hey Pres, it's ok to take a few years and make sure to get this monumental change right.

If that's the case, nothing will ever get done because no president has "a few years". There's a one year window after a presidential election and that's it. The rest is campaigning.

[polksalet]

Maybe, but there is nothing noble about governing by popular opinion. Sometimes it takes balls to do the right thing.

 

lol

[CaP'N GRuNGe]

From Perch's favorite "NY Slimes"...

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/opinion/...;pagewanted=all

 

Editorial

Health Care Reform, at Last

Published: March 21, 2010

 

The process was wrenching, and tainted to the 11th hour by narrow political obstructionism, but the year-long struggle over health care reform came to an end on Sunday night with a triumph for countless Americans who have been victimized or neglected by their dysfunctional health care system. Barack Obama put his presidency on the line for an accomplishment of historic proportions.

 

The bill, which was approved by the Senate in December and by the House on Sunday, represents a national commitment to reform the worst elements of the current system. It will provide coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans, prevent the worst insurance company abuses, and begin to wrestle with relentlessly rising costs — while slightly reducing future deficits.

 

Amendments approved by the House and awaiting approval in the Senate would provide additional coverage and make somewhat deeper reductions in the deficit.

 

All of this was managed despite the fact that not a single Republican in the House or Senate was willing to vote for the bill. Efforts by the White House and Congressional Democrats to draft bipartisan legislation were met by demagoguery. That is not likely to end now.

 

Republican leaders, who see opportunities to gain seats in the elections, have made clear that they will continue to peddle fictions about a government takeover of the health care system and about costs too high to bear. Mr. Obama took too long to get into the fight, but came on strong in the end and will have to keep pushing back so all Americans understand the benefits of reform.

 

Most Americans — those who already have employer-based insurance — will not see much change for a while and certainly not in the seven months before the elections. They will get one important benefit quickly: for an additional fee, parents will be able to keep adult dependent children on their policy through age 26. That is good news when so many young people are struggling to find jobs during the recession.

 

The biggest difference for Americans who have employer-based insurance is the security of knowing that, starting in 2014, if they lose their job and have to buy their own policy, they cannot be denied coverage or charged high rates because of pre-existing conditions. Before then, the chronically ill could gain temporary coverage from enhanced high-risk pools and chronically ill children are guaranteed coverage.

 

The focus of the reform is on improving the dysfunctional and hugely expensive insurance markets for individuals and small businesses, and on expanding Medicaid coverage for the poor. The big expansion of coverage will start in 2014, but some reforms start quickly, like tax credits to help small businesses provide coverage.

 

Over time the reforms could bring about sweeping changes in the way medical care is delivered and paid for. They could ultimately rival Social Security and Medicare in historic importance.

 

NEAR-UNIVERSAL COVERAGE The United States is the only advanced industrial nation that does not provide or guarantee health care coverage for virtually all of its citizens. It is a moral obligation to end this indefensible neglect of hard-working Americans. The bill does not quite reach full universality, but by 2019, fully 94 to 95 percent of American citizens and legal residents below Medicare age will have coverage. The bill achieves that by requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance, providing subsidies to help the middle classes buy policies on new competitive exchanges, and expanding Medicaid coverage of the poor to include childless adults and others not currently eligible.

 

INSURANCE REFORMS The legislation would rein in many of the insurance industry’s worst practices. Insurers would no longer be able to reject applicants with “pre-existing conditions” or charge them exorbitant rates. They could not rescind policies on specious grounds after people become sick (that becomes effective immediately) or cap the amount they are willing to pay toward a beneficiary’s illnesses in any given year or over a lifetime.

 

The most important reform — forcing insurers to accept all applicants regardless of their health status — cannot be achieved unless nearly all Americans are required to have coverage, so the costs can be spread among the healthy and the sick.

 

A START AT COST CONTROL The legislation won’t quickly bend the cost curve for medical care or insurance premiums — no one has yet found a surefire way to do that — but the reform will make an important start. Some experts believe it will lay the structural framework to mount the most serious effort ever made to control medical inflation. It will create competitive insurance exchanges that should help lower premiums for individuals and small businesses by offering an array of private policies and rates comparable to large group coverage.

 

The legislation will impose an excise tax in 2018 designed to drive employers and their workers away from the highest-cost insurance policies, which typically provide generous benefits at little out-of-pocket cost to the workers. Health economists consider the excise tax a very strong cost-control measure, because if workers have to pay more of the cost themselves, they and their doctors are apt to think more carefully about whether a test or procedure is really needed. The impact of the excise tax gets increasingly strong as the years pass.

 

The legislation creates an array of pilot programs within Medicare, to test other innovative cost-reduction strategies. They include encouraging new medical groups to better coordinate care of the chronically ill, and paying doctors and medical institutions based on the quality, not quantity, of services they deliver. The reform measure will establish an independent board to push approaches that work into widespread use in Medicare and ultimately, by force of example, the private sector.

 

With so many mechanisms available to hold down medical costs, it’s hard to believe that they won’t bear fruit, if not in the next several years then in the decade thereafter.

 

•

 

Just as Social Security grew from a modest start in 1935 to become a bedrock of the nation’s retirement system, this is a start on health care reform, not the end. A lot will depend on whether future presidents and Congresses stick to the savings and deficit targets set in this legislation; on how aggressively states administer the new exchanges; on how health care professionals and institutions respond to the challenge of changing their ways; and on how the public responds to the mandate that everyone obtain insurance or pay a penalty.

 

Our hope and belief is that this reform will in the end accomplish its great objectives. Right now, the good news for all Americans is that despite all the politics and the obstructionism, the process has finally begun.

 

[CaP'N GRuNGe]

Interesting...

 

Former Bushie David Frum says today was the Waterloo...for Republicans.

 

Waterloo

March 21st, 2010 at 4:59 pm by David Frum | 105 Comments |

Share

 

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

 

It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:

 

(1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.

 

(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.

 

So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson:

 

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

 

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

 

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

 

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

 

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

 

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

 

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

 

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

 

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

 

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

 

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

[moneymakers]

Medicaid will be a war zone in two years.

 

government hospitals with military guards.

 

 

What a mess this is gonna be. What a waste of money.

 

They even conned the one decent non baby killer into voting for the big lie.

 

If not for the big lie. this thing no pass.

Edited March 22, 2010 by moneymakers

[Ursa Majoris]

Interesting...

 

Former Bushie David Frum says today was the Waterloo...for Republicans.

Good grief, someone on the right actually gets it.

[bushwacked]

Interesting...

 

Former Bushie David Frum says today was the Waterloo...for Republicans.

 

That is on the money.

[polksalet]

National socialism has never caused any problems before. I welcome Zyklon B for allergies.

[cliaz]

nail + coffin

 

The guy down the street has his flag upside down

[Jackass]

lol

 

That's why we have elected officials. Otherwise, we'd just bring up everything for a popular vote.

[Chavez]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2...19212_vote.html

 

Let the decades of debate begin. What really annoys me is that you can't just rush a bill of this magnitude. Hey Pres, it's ok to take a few years and make sure to get this monumental change right.

I have two comments:

 

- some of my uber-conservo friends are saying this is the beginning of the end for the US; they are strongly considering leaving this burgeoning den of socialism for.....Ireland. I was like "hey guys, if you dislike 'socialism' you might want to avoid Europe."

 

- I don't like the bill. Hopefully this is a FIRST step to a BETTER system; if the Dems are going to "ram healthcare down our throats" they should at least have rammed a better program. But, as an optimist, I'm hoping it's a start, not a dusting off of hands and high fives "we did it!" - no, you STARTED it. Keep working.

[cre8tiff]

Good grief, someone on the right actually gets it.

 

 

That is on the money.

 

Yup, Boner looked like he wanted to throw up. The Republican Party's obstructionist and inflammatory tactics have been weighed and measured and found wanting. Politics by fear is no longer a viable strategy.

 

[evil_gop_liars]

Interesting...

 

Former Bushie David Frum says today was the Waterloo...for Republicans.

 

[Chavez]

The Republican Party's obstructionist and inflammatory tactics have been weighed and measured and found wanting. Politics by fear is no longer a viable strategy.

 

Well, we'll see what Rush and Becks have to say about THAT.

[Chavez]

What is wrong with this bill:

 

http://static1.firedoglake.com/1/files/201...hfactshcr-2.pdf

[SEC=UGA]

Yup, Boner looked like he wanted to throw up. The Republican Party's obstructionist and inflammatory tactics have been weighed and measured and found wanting. Politics by fear is no longer a viable strategy.

 

 

 

Yeah, we've moved back to politics of bribery....

[The Irish Doggy]

INSURANCE REFORMS The legislation would rein in many of the insurance industry’s worst practices. Insurers would no longer be able to reject applicants with “pre-existing conditions” or charge them exorbitant rates. They could not rescind policies on specious grounds after people become sick (that becomes effective immediately) or cap the amount they are willing to pay toward a beneficiary’s illnesses in any given year or over a lifetime.

 

Outstanding.

[evil_gop_liars]

A look at the health care overhaul bill

 

 

 

GOP HEALTH CARE SUMMIT IDEAS: Following a bipartisan health care summit last month, Obama announced he was open to incorporating several Republican ideas into his legislation. But two of the principle ones - hiring investigators to pose as patients and search for fraud at hospitals and increasing spending for medical malpractice reform initiatives - did not make it into the legislation released Thursday. The legislation incorporates only one, an increase in payments to primary care physicians under Medicaid, an idea mentioned by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

Edited March 22, 2010 by evil_gop_liars

[gbpfan1231]

This is great news. When do my premiums go down by 3000%?