Howard Fineman,
usually
a "Villager" (Blogger term for members of the press corps) in good
standing, goes off the reservation and talks about the prospects for a
good health care bill in good, sound, common-sense terms:
[T]he pursuit of [Republican Senator
Olympia] Snowe is pretty close to obsessive, which is not a
good thing either for Democrats or for the prospects of health-care
reform worthy of the name. First, Snowe's exaggerated prominence is
both the result and symbol of Obama's quixotic and ultimately
time--wasting pursuit of "bipartisanship."
The healh care bill is going well enough now that our only real concern
is that President Obama might "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory"
by taking this bipartisanship thing too seriously.
And
the
abuses of health care insurance companies continue apace:
Isn't that great?
Because women are the ones who bear the physical
burden of gestation and the responsibility that entails, they are
paying up to 50% more in premiums. When [Senator] Jon Kyl whined
about not
wanting to pay for maternity benefits, he was defending that status quo.
And a very good question about
how the Villagers
have covered the "public option" question in the health care bill:
"I
think we may have misstated the strength of the opposition to the
public option in the first place," Well, that has been obvious
for months. What Bacon doesn't address, and should, is why
the media overstated the strength of the opposition to the public
option. What could they do better the next time? Does this
indicate
they listen to the wrong "experts"?
Late-breaking update: Woo-hoo!!! Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
(D-NV)
has
included a strong public option with the preferable "opt-out"
provision as opposed to the lesser "trigger" option!!!
Reid is sending several different
versions of the total legislation to
the CBO for scoring. But crucially, he’s ONLY sending the opt-out
version of the public option to CBO, not the trigger provision or any
other compromise.
The White House
sends
along its approval.