HCR Open Thread

I don’t have anything much to say, as typing still hurts, due to (in part) crappy health care and crappy health insurance (workman’s comp)

But the Dems are about to do the little they can do to salvage, in their eyes, the last year of caving and cowardice in the face of Republican and Corporate Terrorism. By passing a bill that is such a bastardization of any coherent legislation that no one really knows what it’s real affect will be. Especially after whatever last minute deals are cut today. Or, to not be egotistical, if YOU understand exactly what this bill will end up doing, how it will effect our “health” system, long term, in aggregate,  you are a better person than me.

There are only two things sure. We should all mourn what could have been. And Congress is owned by the Corporations.

Particulars and minutiae aside, the real problem in this country has been laid bare by this process. The fact that the government no longer belongs to the citizens it is supposed to represent. Period.

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  1. If I didn’t live up to your particular standards of condemnatory rhetoric and disdain.

  2. … in mcjoan’s post truly dispiriting (emphasis mine):

    But what’s in it–other than extending Hyde to make sure that it also covers community health clinics (read Planned Parenthood for the purposes of Stupak) isn’t too egregious, and I agree with dday, does not go as far as codifying Hyde–it would still need to be reupped every year.

    What has discouraged me the most was not the craven Democratic capitulations, as awful as they were/are, but the attitudes of the Obamacrats and DLC’ers who not only have championed each capitulation but worked as hard as they could to justify them.  The gratuitous approval of Obama issuing an Executive Order limiting federal coverage for abortion is sickening.

    As I’ve said before, at least the Dem reps get some money and power out of this … but the Obamacrat/DLC citizens are simply adding insult to injury out of their own narrow and nasty egotistical concerns.

  3. from the other day, posted at TPM?

    here, its on youtube. Any thoughts? She’s supposedly a teabagger. Hmmph.

    • dkmich on March 21, 2010 at 19:22

    government and our political process for the pure corruption it is.  It is one thing to steal under the cover of darkness, and it is quite another to steal in plain view in broad daylight.   They are so brazen, daylight didn’t phase them a bit.  

    • TMC on March 21, 2010 at 20:15

    ddayen RT @nicopitney: Rep. Loretta Sanchez refuses to state her position, she hasn’t told Dem leaders either. “My vote will be the right vote.”

     Wonk Room reports vote still at 214, two short

  4. And people should be allowed to waiver between hope and despair as their feelings flow, without fear of personal attack. Especially our allies on the left.

    Write by your own standards, dear, not for anyone else’s.

    I have no idea what the real-time consequences will be either, I just know I don’t trust or like what I’ve seen so far of this shitty bill.

  5. I probably would have just posted the last two paragraphs.

  6. and a kind of smirking “we’ll see” attitude with regard to HCR. I imagine that the bill passes today, and we see only a small amount of change with regard to health care for the next four years. If HCR survives attempts at repeal, then we will see the real political consequences of this legislation by 2014, when the mandates kick in.

    And I do think it will be ugly for Democrats when people realize what has happened.

    RomneyCare may be OK for Massachusetts, but it will not play well in the South or the West, and maybe parts of the Mid-West.

    I don’t think that it will play well with younger people either, especially those between, say, the ages of 18-40, who earn somewhere around the median for income in the United States…the teachers, and truck drivers, and auto mechanics, and small business owners who make between $25-40K per year, and who get almost nothing in this bill but an obligation to buy crap insurance.

    The Orangemen don’t appreciate this, and neither do Democratic politicians, as both groups have relatively high incomes (six figures) and already have health insurance. Kossacks, in general, are waaaay out of touch with the working class in this country, I think that’s pretty obvious. And when this thing bites them in the ass four years from now, I’ll still be hopeless, and “I told you so,” will be on my lips, but…I doubt anyone will want to hear it.

    What to do?  

  7. wtf he’s talking like he just won an academy award.

    TPM has the EO here

    Today, the President announced that he will be issuing an executive order after the passage of the health insurance reform law that will reaffirm its consistency with longstanding restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion.

    While the legislation as written maintains current law, the executive order provides additional safeguards to ensure that the status quo is upheld and enforced, and that the health care legislation’s restrictions against the public funding of abortions cannot be circumvented.

    The President has said from the start that this health insurance reform should not be the forum to upset longstanding precedent. The health care legislation and this executive order are consistent with this principle.

  8. “Congress is owned by the Corporations” and more that Obama is the corporate shill. It was Obama that dismantled any sort of corporate reform and transformed this bill to people reform.

    I could put a huge effort into presenting a chronology that shows the use of the bully pulpit to argue republican reform against republicans. I would probably need to in order to convince anyone that Congress is the more upstanding of the two but a serious sinus headache prevents me from such an effort.  

    Briefly going back to day one, when Obama addressed the nation the bully pulpit was all about material goods, not the many Americans killed by insurance companies. Then the president plans a health care summit but the voice of single payer is banned. Letter writing campaigns before “people powered politics” was redefined to mean “Obama groupies on parade.”  We got what we wanted a seat at the table for John Conyers and he never said a word.

    It went downhill from there and the president personally dismantled the public option that he pretended he invented on the campaign trail. What everyone tried to explain as bipartisan was really a bullshit corporate servant focused on 2112 cash. The hits just kept coming like a White House bulldozer.

    What everyone tried to blame on Max Baucus was being spoon fed to him from the guy that elevated him. I did do a chronology on the claim that it was Baucus and not Obama that invented taxing the unions in stead of the rich. The public option was the same sort of deal. Mixed messages from a wavering White house staff and Obama himself getting weaker and weaker on it with each speech.

    Do you remember how popular the public option was before “Yes We Can” meant “No We Can’t?” This man had two missions first to repair all the damage caused to insurance companies by Michael Moore and second to make the people forget they ever heard of a public option. He had the bully pulpit and he was arguing for the corporations all along. Got a little jiggy with them in the end but that was too late. Did you ever hear the president explain who the Lewin group really was? Did you ever hear any Dem explain until after the public option was dead?

    On that Saturday radio show in July when Obama dropped the public option from his speeches, even though it could not have been more obvious that he was never trying, the netroots denial immediately began making up stories about how the president was working the public option behind the scenes. And he was, he was working his ass off to kill it.    

    The real tell came in the end when Congress members were arguing that we had the votes for a public option and Obama was saying “No we don’t” when he should have been pressing to get there. He’s the fucking leader of the Democratic Party and in a resolution phase when only Democrats are going to vote he was still working to keep it “bipartisan.”

    Not that the public option would have been a cure for this bullshit but it would have at least have given us a chance. And Obama did not want any chances.

    But I’m the first to admit that I have become a purity troll and proud of it. Well purity troll by DKos definition because I would have taken a whole lot of bullshit for that one carrot. Now what I’m left with is a president that I hate even more that George w. Bush and with good reason. I knew Bush was a scum bag when I voted against him.  

  9. I expect the effect to be almost immediately devastating on micro-business, including me.

    By “almost” I suppose I mean next year.  My insurance bill already went up more than 20% this year.  I expect it to go up more, next year.

  10. I am watching C-Span.  I usually avoid this.  My hone is filled with incessant  blibber blabber my TV is spewing. What kind of joke show am I watching?  Are you sure it’s channel 350 and not something else?

    What I see: I see a parade of very nice looking, very well attired, white guys approaching a podum and asking for unanimous consent to extend and revise their remarks about “this flawed healthcare bill.”  “Flawed” is their repeated adjective of choice.  Apparently nobody has a thesaurus.  If they did they’d find this (it’s just a click away):

    wrong; defective

    Synonyms: awry, bad, confused, crooked, erring, erroneous, fallacious, false, faulty, flawed, foul, glitched up, haywire, imperfect, improper, inaccurate, inappropriate, incorrect, mistaken, out of order, sick, unfair, unlawful, unsuitable, untoward

    So much for Google.

    And isn’t the same message conveyed to the electorate just by voting “no?”  Are these people actually going to submit written remarks?   Will they be thousands of pages long?  Will they all be copies of the same thing?  Will anyone actually read them (except for historians 80 years from now)?  Who will write them?

  11. GOP Abortion Response News Conference.

    Some lady (Looked like Jean Schmidt (sp?)? ) with Backman(sp?) behind her, ended her spiel with, “God Bless the United States of America, born & unborn.”

    Are we expecting, did I miss something.

    • TMC on March 21, 2010 at 23:26

    is tweeting that the bill should pass with 220 votes.

  12. they sure like to hear themselves talk.

    Don’t they have dinner plans or something?  

    • TMC on March 22, 2010 at 00:35

    Says the Hyde Amendment applies to Medicare. You here that everyone over 65, you can’t have an abortion on the government’s dime. What an ass

  13. TPM

    Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA), who coauthored the Stupak amendment (but also voted against the final reform bill that included it) also slammed the executive order compromise at the press conference.

    “The executive order puts the fate of the unborn in the hands of the most pro-abortion president in history,” he said.

    Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), the chair of the GOP pro-life caucus in the House, said that the bill Stupak and a number of other anti-choice Democrats now say they’ll support will lead to government funds being used for abortion, which is banned by the Hyde amendment, passed in 1976.

    Nevertheless, Smith called the reform package up for a vote tonight “the largest expansion of public funding for abortion, ever.”

    is this pure Orwell or what.

    • TMC on March 22, 2010 at 01:40

    aravosis Kind of like having great sex again after a really long bad relationship RT @markos: Dems doing stuff is actually kind of sexy

    • TMC on March 22, 2010 at 01:50

    Pro-Life Group Strips Stupak Of Award

    The anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List group announced tonight they will strip Rep. Bart Stupak of the “Defender of Life” award that he’s received several times. The group blasted Stupak’s role in forging a compromise with the White House on abortion language in an executive order and said he is no longer truly “pro-life.”

    The group says President Obama’s executive order was “unacceptable” and they are redoubling efforts to elect “true” pro-life candidates.

    • TMC on March 22, 2010 at 02:03

    DanteAtkins:  

    Why isn’t g-d smiting the entire Congress for working on the Sabbath? This is their job. they’re paid to do it, after all.

    • TMC on March 22, 2010 at 02:13

    DavidOAtkins:

    There’s a mass of land from Hawaii to Maine? Paul Ryan must be working with a different map than mine.

    Damn, if noting else this is exposing how really ignorant politicians are.  

  14. ddayen

    There it is, 219-212. Very close. Two more votes to come

  15. …nothing else sees to say it quite right!

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