Updated:And Back to the House We Go After Senate’s Pryor,Nelson,Lincoln Vote NO

David Dayen at Lake du Fire Dogs has been watching the Senate vote on the Reconciliation side car “fix” to the Health Insurance Bailout bill this morning.

http://news.firedoglake.com/20…

It passed, 56 to 43.  V.P.  Joe Biden was there, indicating that the administration didn’t quite trust the Democratic Senators to behave themselves. Senators Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and Mark Pryor of Arkansas (OPEC API IPAA, Mellon Scaife, & Koch Oil, Mutual of Omaha, & Walmart, LLC)  voted against the reconciliation bill.  

Surprise ! It has to now go back to the House again for another vote, saith the Parliamentarian      

Remember when there was talk of how the amendment process in the Senate would only need a simple 50 vote majority under the rules of reconciliation, and therefore some Senator could offer an amendment with a Public Option, and there was Sen. Bennett’s (D, CO) letter http://bennet.senate.gov/newsr…        going around with the signatures, and the People in Charge said Absolutely Not, we are taking no amendments on this because we can’t risk the Republicans delaying with their own ?  An everybody got into line?

Surprise !   They were just kidding.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

How about putting it in the year 2011 Budget, Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota ?

“I’d be unwilling to kick up dust on some new matter before we’ve resolved this one,” he told reporters.

A status quo You Can Believe In.

They say over 25 million Americans will be left out of coverage. It’s more.   They’re wrong, there’s 300 million who were planning on the Constitution covering them, and it’s still random, depending on which state you reside in.

But only the Democratic Party could try to get away with it, having drawn such courage from watching the Republicans cheer them on as they continue to thumb their noses at the core constituency who actually voted to put them in office, and had bothered to read the quaint old thing.

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update:

AHIP Already kicking sick kids to the curb

nyceve has posted this story about America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP, think Karen Ignagni the lobbyist) which wrote much of the bill incognito, saying that it intreprets the new law as not requiring insurers to cover all child applicants this year.  They would prefer to wait until 2014.

This bill is being “sold” as finally making insurance available for all children (except non legal residents) this year. Supposedly the Sec of HHS is going to issue a sternly worded clarification, or something.  But insurers can jack up rates in the meantime-

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

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update #2

Wow.  Go read Jane Hamsher.  Now.

http://fdlaction.firedoglake.c…

Self Interested Veal Pen Outfits Step Up to Kill the Public Option

Here is an excerpt from her first link about how the Democrats were actively fighting for and against Sen Bennett putting that missing Public Option back into the bill via amendment reconciliation yesterday.  (and if you aren’t familiar with Sirota, he’s been hounded by the OFA psuedo pragfrogs for quite a while.)

“He shouldn’t have made the promise if he didn’t plan to keep the promise,” said David Sirota, a progressive author and radio host who, along with about 50 of his listeners, delivered to Bennet’s office Wednesday morning a petition signed by 35,000 Americans in the last four days asking Bennet to follow through.

“These are the promises they’re campaigning on. These are the promises they are fundraising on,” Sirota said. “If we don’t ask them to fulfill those promises at the most opportune time, then things like the public option, things like anything they promise, will never be legislated into law.”

/snip

Bobby Clark of the group Progress Now also showed up at Bennet’s office Wednesday morning to deliver a letter, signed by the AFL-CIO and other Democratic unions, encouraging Bennet to stick to his guns and save his fight for the public option for another day.

AM760 David Sirota Delivers Petition to Senator Bennet for the Public Option with 35,000 signatures to ask for the amendment with the Public Option

Lady at the end “We do not want to be at the tender mercies of the insurance companies, which are not so tender, and the way things are standing with the mandate, we don’t have real options and we don’t have good price control to avoid those people.”  Sirota “if anything, does anybody think this is controversial to do this ? ….  Of course we’re going to ask him to fufill his promise.  He made the promise. Thanks for coming out”  

More Jane Hamsher (slightly paraphrased for timeline and subject clarity, and links added) :

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Families USA http://www.familiesusa.org/about/   is a Soros-funded group that has been a key player in negotiating the secret White House deals with stakeholders.

Ron Pollack, exc director of non profit “Families USA” was at the May 11 2009 meeting at the White House, where

“stakeholders” (including PhRMA, a drug lobby group) delivered their proposals “voluntarily reduce cost increases over the next ten years.

Per Sen. Harry Reid,  on May 9, 2009 , Ron Pollack is the one who negotiated the PhRMA (drug lobby group) proposal with (their lobbyist) Billy Tauzin.  (ARC note:  Yeah, that lobbyist Billy Tauzin, former Louisiana congressman, who did the secret deal with the President and recently announced he was leaving that company by June 2010.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/…    )  

Ron Pollack has chartered a non-profit group, tentatively named Enroll America, that would create a major, nationwide operation to ensure that people newly eligible for Medicaid and insurance subsidies are able to easily apply and receive those benefits.

____________ end quote  from Hamsher’s story at FDL

(ARC note:  I downloaded the latest pdf from Ron Pollack’s  “Families USA” website, from Dec 2009,  http://www.familiesusa.org/ass…    and there is nothing on it about universal coverage. It instead talks about what would happen under the Senate Bill-  31 million Americans gain coverage by 2019, but, if they do nothing, the number of uninsured rises to 54 million.    54 – 31 =  23 million left behind.  Notice how this number is getting quoted in the MSM all the time ?  23 million left uninsured?

It’s wrong. It’s assuming there are only currently 31 million un insured, when the real number is almost twice that, per the study done by the Treasury earlier this year.  We already have at least 50 million uninsured in this country, and at times we have up to 70 million, because they don’t have coverage all year, they fall in and out between jobs, or they are so underinsured that they have junk policies that don’t cover much so they don’t use it.

The pdf talks about how more adults will be eligible for Medicaid, saying that all individuals who have income below 133% of poverty will be eligible.  The govt. poverty level income for one person 2009 in the US is:

$10,830  mainland  ,   $13,350 Alaska,  $12,460 Hawaii

and for a 2 person family unit

$14,570  mainland  ,   $18,210 Alaska,   $16,760 Hawaii

133% percent of that is $14,403  per year for one person on the mainland and $19,378 for a two person family

Or, if it was the result of full time work at 2000 hours, $7.20 an hour or $9.68 an hour

The Federal minimum wage is $7.20 an hour,  and several states have it at $8 or higher, such as CA, OR, WA, VT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L…

You can see where I’m going with this observation.  There are still going to be adults working full time for wages that are at or above minimum but in no way middle class, who are not going to qualify for Medicaid, but are still not going to be able to afford to use that health care coverage, even if they do have to purchase subsidized insurance. Out of pocket co -pays and deductibles on minimum wage ?   And there are states that will be likely tinkering with who qualifies for Medicaid, to cut the rolls down.

The number of people left uninsured by the Senate Bill is going to be much greater than anyone in the administration is admitting to, at this point, unless the laws are changed further, to cover more people.  And I just want to make this clear, now, that I am not going to be the one surprised by this inconvenient truth in the future.

President Obama on the sales trail: “If you like the insurance you have now, you can keep it.”

Unsnookered blogosphere:  POTUS should have added,  “and after we made that deal with Pollack and Tauzin, we’ve designed this so that there’s still a permanent underclass who’s not going to be able to afford it. ”   )

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From the first comment, under Hamsher’s story, a nice summary~

Let me see if I have this part straight. Ron Pollack, Executive Director of the Soros funded Families USA, brokered a deal among ‘outed’ stakeholders to pass ‘health care’ legislation without a public option; in exchange for which he would receive the contract to register the millions of applicants for Medicare and subsidized care under the individual mandates contained in the bill he brokered.

If true, this is incredible

I think that’s got a typo, frequently people scramble up Medicare for seniors, and Medicaid the state programs for the poor, and Hamsher used Medicaid correctly.  

They used to say about the Vietnam war, who wants to be the last person to die for their country here ?

We need to start saying this again, for this war, who wants the to be the last person dying uninsured for their country ?