The legislative route for the public option is pretty clear. We can still pass a public option despite yesterday’s Senate Finance Committee vote. All we have to do is make sure that the bill that get the floor vote has a public option. If it does, then we just have to convince our Democratic turncoats to [...]
Sunday, September 6, 2009
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Over at FDL today, Lee Fisher and Jennifer Brunner both vigorously supported the public option. Good. This comment, though, from Brunner, intrigued me. It makes me nervous when I talked to a Blue Dog Congressman who said that it seems like a public option might just work, and then commented on recent poll results that show [...]
Monday, August 24, 2009
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When I was driving around to bingo games and spaghetti dinners with Tim Ryan in the cold winter months of 2002, we had a lot of conversations about how exerting leadership makes real change. Without leadership, your constituents will default to inertia that keeps your district in the past. For example, we talked a lot about [...]
Thursday, August 20, 2009
One of the positive developments of this summer’s town hall hysteria is that progressives in the House have gotten themselves some backbone on the public option. And interestingly, this move has been extremely lucrative for congressional Democrats willing to make the public option a line in the sand. The ActBlue page, where donors can reward Democrats who [...]
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
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I’ve written previously that I would jump at the chance to buy into Medicare. Most people under 65 would, too. It’s really a no brainer. No one I know who is on Medicare would give it up if they had a gun to their head. They are utterly, completely satisfied with it. Which is why I [...]
Monday, August 17, 2009
This whole public option thing, among other stuff, is really getting me down. Hard to blog when you’re depressed. My last post reflects that I’m not really thinking all that clearly about this, as some have noticed in the comments. So I need to take a little breather here, and get my thoughts together. More [...]
Monday, August 17, 2009
So this week’s media driven story looks like the death of the public option for health care reform. I find it fascinating that the response to a bunch of hysterical raving from the hard right about death panels, Stalin, and swastika logos is to gut the number one aspect of reform that makes me interested [...]
Monday, August 10, 2009
I heard on the weekend shows that the White House is on the way to settling on a plan to get behind by the end of the month. That’s good. I’m also hearing the public option is receding in likelihood. That’s bad. I agree with Howard Dean, if there isn’t a public option in this [...]
Thursday, June 11, 2009
I don’t write much about health care, because I’m not that into the subject as a policy matter. And having lived without health insurance for most of my life, as a kid, and as an adult, I’ve kinda checked out of the matter intellectually. I don’t normally comment on stuff I’m not intellectually engaged with. And [...]
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
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