health care – Page 11

I’m gobsmacked. So is Sen. McCain. Heck, so is Sen. Durbin.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) Avoiding boggling gets harder and harder every day:

Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin admitted Friday that he is “in the dark” about the national health care bill currently under construction by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. In an exchange on the Senate floor, Republican Sen. John McCain asked Durbin, “Should we not at least be informed as to what the proposal is that the Senate Majority Leader is going to propose to the entire Senate?” Durbin’s answer: “I would say to the senator from Arizona that I am in the dark almost as much as he is, and I am in the leadership.” Durbin explained that during a Democratic caucus, Reid and the small group of senators involved in crafting the bill turned to their fellow Democrats and “basically stood and said, ‘We are sorry, we can’t tell you in detail what was involved.'”

Transcript here.

I can say nothing else except that while this is not enough to persuade me to show some sympathy to Dick Durbin (whom I despise for his attacks on minority students), this is still no way to run a railroad. Or a Congress.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Ah, the Maryland MVA.

We’re trying to get a stolen license plate on the commuter car replaced; only they’ve held up my wife all morning over the fact that they’re listing the family car as uninsured. Despite the fact that they issued us license plates for said car when it was purchased six months ago, which they wouldn’t have been able to actually do if the car was uninsured. God knows that they came up with every other possible reason for not giving us plates. And now she has to go stand in line again.

But hey: the government will be absolutely stellar with managing your next kidney transplant for you.

Nelson prolife amendment tabled: Nelson (D, NE) caving to follow.

Put not your trust in Democrats.

They tabled the amendment that Senator Nelson offered for the health care rationing bill – the one that would have aligned it with the Stupak amendment for the House version – on a largely party-line vote (54/45, with Byrd not voting). Senator Nelson, despite vowing to filibuster*, is even now revising and extending his remarks:

A few reporters waiting outside the door asked him how it would effect his decision on whether to support the final effort.

“I want to continue to work on this,” he said, not ruling out his support, at least “not at this point in time. I want to continue to work on the project we’re working on… This makes it harder right now [to support the bill]. We’ll have to see if they can make it easier.”

(H/t: Hot Air) The NRLC has already announced that they will now oppose cloture of the health care rationing bill. Mind you, they also promised to score the vote on Nelson-Hatch, and it got tabled anyway. Nelson’s not up for re-election until 2012 anyway, and the man will be 71 by then; he might decide to just retire. So don’t rely on him keeping his word. The Senate is full of Democrats who talk big about their conservative principles, right up to the moment where they have to fight for them.

Moe Lane

Continue reading Nelson prolife amendment tabled: Nelson (D, NE) caving to follow.

How to have fun in Congress.

House version (Via Instapundit):

Congressmen John Carter[*] (R-TX) and Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) yesterday introduced the Geithner Penalty Waiver Act, requiring that the IRS assess the same penalty against U.S. taxpayers that came forward in the UBS tax fraud investigation as paid by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for failing to pay taxes on his IMF income — zero.

Pretty self-explanatory, isn’t it? I like Rep. Carter. And not just because of his name.

Senate version (Via Don Surber):

In their first shot at the measure this week, Republicans decided to try to strike at the heart of how Democrats plan to pay for the $848 billion measure by attempting to eliminate the proposal’s almost $440 billion in Medicare cuts.

But instead of offering a conventional amendment, they decided to use an esoteric procedural tactic that would send the bill back to committee with instructions to eliminate the cuts. If successful, the GOP’s gambit would force Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to use time-consuming procedures and hold another filibuster-killing vote on whether to restart debate on the bill.

That takes it off the floor, requires another committee vote, delays the bill, and ticks off Senate Democrats. The ‘delays the bill’ part is probably the most important thing, here: health care rationing just isn’t popular these days.

Moe Lane

PS: Arcane procedural tactics are fun, but they’re no substitute for a Congressional majority. Reverse the Vote.

Crossposted to RedState.

Yes. That Lamont primary challenge worked out so well.

Erick Erickson over at RedState covered this already:

Lieberman Digs In on Public Option
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, speaking in that trademark sonorous baritone, utters a simple statement that translates into real trouble for Democratic leaders: “I’m going to be stubborn on this.”

Stubborn, he means, in opposing any health-care overhaul that includes a “public option,” or government-run health-insurance plan, as the current bill does. His opposition is strong enough that Mr. Lieberman says he won’t vote to let a bill come to a final vote if a public option is included.

…but I cannot resist asking: does anybody over on the Other Side sometimes, ah, regret, aiming at a king – and missing? I ask because this is the second time that Lieberman has been the grit in the gears for progressives: the last time was during the pre-Surge period, of course. His mere presence in the 110th Congress meant that Harry Reid couldn’t shut down the war before we could implement the standard American victory strategy*. And now he seems happy to do it for government-option health care. There’s obviously sound reasons for it – he goes into them – but, really, there’s a certain amount of blood-soaked revenge going on here.

I’ll spare you the lie about how I’m not enjoying this. I am. Even though I know that we’re still on track to get a no-public-option, no-abortion-funding monstrosity of a health care bill; honestly at this point there’s a certain fascination to seeing how much excrement that Congressional Democrats can dump on the sandwich and still be able to get its base to eat it.

Moe Lane

*Systematically flail about until we come across a working solution, then throw our essentially infinite logistics behind said solution and descend upon the enemy like an asteroid from orbit. It’s not the most elegant strategy out there, but it works.

Crossposted to RedState.

Actually, Reid/Pelosi don’t need 60/218 Democrats to pass health care reform.

They only need twenty Democratic Senators, and forty-one Democratic Members of Congress. I think that we’ve demonstrated that the GOP can take care of the rest.

The terms? Bless your heart, why would either of them care? They can just send over that nice Rep. Dan Boren of Oklahoma to do the negotiations; we’ll send him back with a bill that they can browbeat enough of their caucuses to vote for. Then they can have a nice press conference where they pat themselves on the back for being bipartisan, the President can keep telling himself that he’s relevant, and we stop the Democrats from doing something stupid with their current Congressional majority. Everybody wins.

Well, everybody who matters.

Moe Lane

PS: No, we’ve heard the Democrats’ ideas already; we’re seeing us going in a different directions. Just their votes will be fine.

PPS: Of course they won’t do this. But they could.

More on the Democratic party’s War on Breasts.

Via Instapundit, HHS Secretary Sebelius is trying to do some damage control on the recent ‘suggestion’ that women stop getting routine mammograms before they’re 50:

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, meanwhile, told women to ignore the new advisory recommendations for now.

“The U.S. Preventive Task Force is an outside independent panel of doctors and scientists who make recommendations. They do not set federal policy and they don’t determine what services are covered by the federal government,” said Sebelius in a written statement.

“Our policies remain unchanged,” she said of the federal government. ” Indeed, I would be very surprised if any private insurance company changed its mammography coverage decisions as a result of this action.”

A statement that is very comforting… until you remember that the Democratic party’s goal is to establish governmental control over the health care insurance industry. Who here thinks that an insurance company already grimly aware that they exist on governmental sufferance might feel the need to ‘change its mammography coverage decisions’ to reflect current state medical policy? Particularly if there are consequences for not being in compliance with all the laws, regulations, rulings, and opinions that bureaucracies generate more or less automatically. And if the government doesn’t like the idea that people are going to instinctively assume that said bureaucracy is willing to ‘encourage’ ostensibly-private entities to follow bureaucratic dictates, then perhaps the government might like to consider reining in its bureaucrats. As publicly as it can manage.

I’ll end by noting that this is all an inevitable by-product of the health care rationing bill; it is, in fact, why I call it that. More people covered, better service, lower costs: in the best-case scenario, pick any two. In the scenario that we’re going to get, if this passes? We’ll get the first one, and the current ruling party will muck up the second while flagrantly ignoring the third. That’s because the first one is easy, and can be done by lazy people. The other two require work to accomplish.

Moe Lane

PS: Ed Morrissey reports that there are no oncologists on the task force that made the ‘recommendations.’ I really, really hope that this isn’t actually true.

Crossposted to RedState.

‘…Mr. Axelrod’s not a legislator; he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.’

That was Rep. Stupak’s (DEMOCRAT) blunt response to David Axelrod’s assertion that the pro-life language currently in the health care rationing bill would be ‘adjusted.’ Stupak’s having none of it:

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) pledged on Tuesday morning to defeat healthcare reform legislation if his abortion amendment is taken out, saying 10 to 20 anti-abortion-rights Democrats would vote against a bill with weaker language.

“They’re not going to take it out,” Stupak said on “Fox and Friends,” referring to Senate Democrats. “If they do, healthcare will not move forward.”

See Hot Air for the video. Stupak claims to have more than enough votes to shut down any final version that removes his amendment, which is both false and true. It’s false because the closeness of the original vote reflected a lot of horse-trading on the individual Member of Congress level; theoretically, the Speaker of the House could simply pressure the Democrats who got to vote ‘no’ last time to vote ‘yes’ this time. It’s true because one of the reasons that they were able to get a final vote was because while the Stupak amendment was scored by NRLC, the final bill was not. Strip out Stupak, and a vote for health care rationing becomes a vote for federal funding of abortions. The NRLC pretty much cannot not score that appropriately.

I close with this observation: this situation for the Democrats is pretty much entirely due to the decision by House Republicans to oppose the health care rationing bill en masse. They’re doing that because the Congressional Democratic leadership decided to shut out everybody except themselves and various outside lobbyists when it came time to put this monstrosity of a bill together. And because the President didn’t intervene when it became clear that the process was disrupting his narrative, we’re now at the point where the Democratic party has to decide which side of the abortion debate is safer to infuriate.

But don’t feel bad for them: after all, they didn’t learn a blessed thing from their mistakes over the ‘stimulus’ and cap-and-trade.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

The Mythical Moderate Democratic Politician.

I have one quibble with this analysis by Dick Morris (via Kausfiles):

Don’t assume that the 38 Democrats who voted against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) extremist version of healthcare reform wouldn’t have supported it if their votes had been needed. The days before the final passage on Saturday were not filled with stirring appeals to get Democrats to back the bill so much as an auction to decide whom to let off the hook.

Knowing that the bill will likely be political suicide for any red-state Democratic congressman, particularly if he or she is a freshman, the House leadership had to negotiate with its members to assure that the 38 defectors were the ones who needed the political cover the most. That there would be 38 Democrats who would oppose the bill was pre-ordained. Who they would be was the subject of negotiations right up to the wire.

…and that’s there was another consideration involved besides political cover: seniority. As most nakedly seen by the Democrats’ decision to throw Bob Owens of NY-23 to the wolves by requiring him to break his campaign promises before 24 hours had passed since his swearing-in. Other than that, it’s pretty spot-on – which means, in other words, that I already had the same opinion as him that there’s effectively no such thing as a moderate Democratic politician anymore. Amazing how often ‘smart’ seems to get treated as being semantically identical to ‘agrees with me,’ doesn’t it?

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

CMS: Democratic bill would raise health care costs.

By almost 300 billion.

CMS: House health bill will hike costs $289B

The House-approved healthcare overhaul would raise the costs of healthcare by $289 billion over the next 10 years, according to an analysis by the chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

This would be infuriating, if I had taken seriously in the first place the notion that an interventionist, intrusive government program was capable of saving the taxpayer money.

Moe Lane

PS: For extra points, watch as the Democrats suddenly decide that CMS must be ignored. As opposed to, say, 2004.

Crossposted to RedState.