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(D) J. Hickenlooper*
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80%
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Governor
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(D) Joe Neguse
(D) Phil Weiser
(D) Jena Griswold
60%
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40%↓
Att. General
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(D) Alexis King
(D) Brian Mason
40%
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30%
Sec. of State
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(R) Sheri Davis
40%
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(D) Brianna Titone
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(D) Jerry DiTullio
60%
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CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(R) Jeff Hurd*
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(R) Lauren Boebert*
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90%
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(R) Jeff Crank*
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(D) Jason Crow*
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(R) Gabe Evans*
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(D) Joe Salazar
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State Senate Majority
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REPUBLICANS
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DEMOCRATS
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95%
5%
September 09, 2009 07:43 PM UTC
43 Comments
ever proposed back when his plans were defeated. At least Obama and most Dems are trying to do something positive which is more than can be said for any R since the days of Hillary care.
As I recall, they promised to come up with something better for us, then proceeded to do absolutely nothing and absolutely nothing is what they are fighting for tooth and nail right now. The price tag of reform will look cheap compared to the price of continuing the GOP tradition of maintaining the status quo.
So you have absolutely nothing to be snide and superior about. Your side has nothing.
he’s recognizing it and going for whatever he can get at this point, and therefore he is a liar. So is Bennet for that matter.
Meanwhile today Sarah Palin is still stumped by the death panel thing.
When did logical thought just completely go out the window ? We really have taken a ride to crazytown on this whole thing.
That being said, sadly I will owe LB a steak.
but declining to say he’ll veto anything without it. I agree the public option is what he promised , what we voted for and what we need. The idea of mandates and penalties without it, just gives private companies an even stronger hand than they have now.
We are now at 59 Senate votes including Blue Dogs. Do you think Obama should veto anything without the public option, even if it accomplishes concrete improvements? In any case, I don’t think it’s fair to say Obama is lying. Fairer to say he’s made serious mistakes. And has some advisers I’d like to strangle.
Still, considering the past 14 or so years with Rs in charge or with only a slight disadvantage in the legislature negated by their own President’s veto power, I don’t see what right LB or any R has to be so smug and superior over anyone in the position of cleaning up their countless tragic messes.
The Rs who promised they’d come up with something better than Hillary care are the biggest liars. They’ve never lifted a finger to keep that promise in all these years. Still aren’t. Never will.
is that Obama should veto anything with individual mandates but no public option.
If he thinks he can accomplish meaningful reform with neither a public option nor individual mandates, then I wish him the best — there’s a lot of good that can be done with regulation, I’m sure; I just doubt anything effective is going to make it through the current legislature without loopholes the size of semitrucks.
This which of course has no chance to see the light of day on the Democratic controlled Senate floor. Like sxp151 stated below, the goalposts get moved daily, sometimes in opposite directions at the same time depending on who you talk to from the White House.
If President Obama wants Americans to get on board with his plans he needs a spokesman who is a health care specialist to take the lead in this. The Surgeon General would be perfect. That is if the President had gotten around to having one by now.
seriously, I think he would’ve been a great Surgeon General.
n/t
C’mon, I know Dr. Gupta is a talking head and all, but hell, he is an asst professor of neurosurgery at Emory, still practices, former white house fellow, and is a bestselling author and columnist, and I think he’s an excellent communicator to boot.
Who the hell is Dr. Nancy ? I haven’t caught her act.
She’s a widely-published MD, a surgeon specializing in cancers of the head and neck, at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her wiki bio is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N…
She comes on at noon eastern on MSNBC.
And she supports a public option.
sorry I missed the gist of your previous post
She’d never survive the smears.
Her hubby made a bundle trading DrKoop.com when she was on the Board.
Didn’t know that when I suggested her.
And the President made a good choice when he offered him the job. He probably would gone through confirmation without much trouble had it gone that far. But you would think that having health care as his number one priority, President Obama would have had someone in the slot by now. Three months between Dr. Gupta removing himself and then nominating Dr. Regina Benjamin seems to be an indication that they didn’t have a list prepared in case of trouble.
BTW, Regina Benjamin looks like she would be another good choice, a long time family practitioner who was appointed to different committees under the last administration. She is fully qualified, and she’ll be voted in, but it shouldn’t have taken this long to get someone into the post.
If the push for health care had been coming from the Surgeon General’s office–a non-political position–from the beginning then it would have given the White House a lot more credibility than Rahm Emmanuel telling Congress to get it done in a week.
At the very least, not having his SG still is a huge strategic blunder by the Administration.
about health care reform?
This is more goalpost-moving. The Surgeon General has no political power, and no particular motivational power either.
The lizardbrains think everything Obama does is political; would they really have thought differently at all if a black woman had told them they were wrong?
Take a look at the polls. Almost 2/3 of independents (ok they may be lizardbrains to you as well) don’t feel that the plan has been has been clearly explained. And only half of Democrats feel that it has.
The point is message incoherence and the lack of one qualified voice to explain it to the citizens. Your right that conservatives won’t support a public option plan no matter what, but you’re losing the center as well. And that’s what has put the Democrats in power, not the far left.
It’s just hard to find in all the discussions of horserace stuff. Of course I’m not calling independents lizardbrains, but I think most independents are not well-informed about political issues. And don’t really want to be. But when you ask them why they feel one way or another (or don’t feel any way at all), they’ll say it’s because someone else didn’t explain it to them well enough.
Maybe I just see it that way because that’s how it is with students (“it’s not that I didn’t try to read the book, it’s just that you didn’t explain it in exactly the right way”) that makes me see it like that.
It’s just way too easy to say, “If President Obama really cared about Americans health, why don’t we have a Surgeon General?”
but the people who find it easiest to ask are the people who care the least about the answer. Because they just hate Obama, for reasons that (due to the sensitivity of some around here) I will not label racist.
That’s the best you can come up with? Like I said, they promised to bring us something better than Hillary care and spent the intervening years sitting on their hands. This is the sop they finally came with so when they were (rightly) accused of having no plan they coud say “do too, so there”, geekster
And I gave it to you. Sorry that I pointed out the falsehood that you have been spewing out on this.
The majority of people who have health care either on their own or through their employer are satisfied with what they have, and they don’t trust that what the Democrats are offering will be better, or even as good. The message has been less than coherent and it shows in the polling.
If you put out a plan to expand Medicare/Medicaid to help those without coverage, I would be behind it. But since the plan seems to be to help the (maybe) 46 million while screwing up what works for the other 260 million, I will oppose it.
…that allow people to continue to be gouged by the insurance companies with a little less pain.
Good plan there. It’s a huge government subsidy for insurance companies.
And a budget buster.
You’re right. It will be DOA. Because it’s a lousy excuse for a plan. It does nothing but reward the insurance companies for price-gouging.
Republicans doing nothing about healthcare all the years they were in power and finally coming up with a hasty sham “plan” after being razzed over and over about not having one. There was never any Republican plan when Bush was in the White House and Rs controlled both houses in congress. Oh wait .
Wait. They did suggest health savings accounts as the answer as if uncovered and undercovered people have extra thousands laying around to put away. So I guess I’m caught spewing lies. Rs do have plans if you count joke plans and sham plans. The real plan is just say no.
One of the reasons Medicare has funding issues is because it’s already sucking in some of the least insurable. Extending the system to allow private insurers to slough off more expensive policies into the public bosom is something that any fiscal conservative, small government type should be ashamed of even considering.
First one anyone has actually presented here from the GOP side of the aisle, I believe.
It’s also, on quick overview, mostly useless. It has nothing for regulation, nothing to increase competition (except to extend the subsidized Medicare Advantage private insurance sell-out to veterans and others…), and it still proposes to pay out monies in subsidies and grants for those who can’t afford health care.
Considering it’s sitting in the Finance Committee, which is rapidly working its way into oblivion on the health care issue, I have to agree with you – it won’t see the light of day. Which is probably for the best, considering how pointless it is.
Since when is a veto threat the only thing we’re supposed to take seriously?
This reminds me of the inane debate over whether Obama should have vetoed the stimulus bill if he couldn’t get seven or twelve or pi Republicans to vote for it.
We need to wait and see what he says in the speech. Jared Polis made a great point in his support of, but refusal to insist on, the public option. A good enough bill should not be vetoed.
What will be interesting is how hard he pushes the public option in the speech tonight.
Very true David, very true. I think the bluff has been called on the veto of legislation with no public option. Its’ been too damn long without any meaningful reform, and we need whatever we can salvage out of this whole circus. You know, the half a loaf thing.
What really interests me is if there is a trigger for a public option in the final bill, and if so, what are the terms of that trigger. The devil is DEFINITELY in the details on that one because the only damn thing health insurers are good at is finding loopholes.
Anyone who has an idea on how the trigger may be structured ? Please add any of your thoughts.
force companies to do things like end rescission, provide affordable coverage, stop dropping sick people etc for fear of setting it off, it could serve as an incentive.
Also the set point for the trigger must be strict and clear enough that it would actually trigger a public plan if the private insurers didn’t meet demands and meet them fast.
But a wishy-washy trigger with plenty of second and third chances for companies to show they’re trying won’t be anywhere near enough. It’s got to be a strictly defined threshold with a short time table for compliance and a short time table for producing a public plan in the absence of absolute, timely compliance.
Without significant regulation, any plan without a strong competitive option (public option or very well-defined national co-op) is almost certainly doomed to failure. Triggers equal loopholes, and if the insurance companies are willing to spend what they have on killing health care reform entirely, then they’re also willing to spend money on lawyers to find a way out of a trigger.
My ifs were pretty big ifs. Obama’s speech did include promises of pretty solid regulation, not in regard to the trigger issue but in regard to preexisting conditions, rescission, cost caps etc.
Obama just isn’t the veto-threatening type, at least not publicly. He’d always rather negotiate and convince than threaten. I wouldn’t take the fact that he isn’t threatening to veto to mean that we won’t see the public option.
…we already knew it. A public option CANNOT pass the Senate. And I believe the Congressional Progressive Caucus largely wont vote for a bill without a public option. Therefore, the one and only option for passing what Democrats refer to as “real” health care reform is the politically suicidal “nuclear option.”
Good luck with that…
Yeah, I remember when Republicans lost Senate elections right after using reconciliation to cut taxes for rich people.
I also remember when Republicans lost the Senate for using reconciliation to pass welfare reform.
And oh what a Senate-losing uproar there was over threatening reconcilation for ANWR drilling.
Clearly using reconcilation to pass health care reform would doom the Democrats. Thanks for your advice, Brer Republican.
…1/6 of the nation’s economy are exactly the same thing.
Btw…if it WEREN’T politically suicidal, why would they be taking so long to do it “the right way?”
They could just be “comparable.” Then you could “compare” them. Perhaps to draw “conclusions.” Like an “analogy.” To point out “hypocrisy.”
And what was welfare reform? Does that fit more in the “cutting taxes” or “overhauling the nation’s economy” region? Because the Republicans thought it was the latter, at the time.
As for why they take so long, it’s, um, 1/6 of the nation’s economy. You don’t just pull an all-nighter and fix health care. People are actually debating things.
I understand that you need to take time to figure it out, but the way Democrats have been talking about the bills for months is that what they put together IS what we need. Not that it’s still being worked out, but that they figured it out. The only part being “worked out” is figuring how many votes they can get in each chamber.
Also…Democrats didn’t spend much time “debating things” when they passed the largest spending package in United States history the same day the final bill came out. They spent more money in that bill than Bush did between Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 through today.
Welfare reform was needed by any means necessary, and health care reform is not needed if it might inconvenience someone? That sounds like a politically popular position.
Yeah, right. He’s been locked in a room for a month with five others who are just as clueless as he is.
There is a path through reconciliation to do this with a simple majority. It’s also possible that a conference bill would not be filibustered. On the other hand, there is currently no means of getting health care reform out of the House without a public option – the Progressive Caucus has enough committed votes to kill any legislation without a strong public option at this point.
So, between a weak bill having an almost certain failure in the House, and a strong bill having at least one path to success in the Senate, guess which one is the obvious road to health care reform?
…which is that there will not be a bill passed. I would be surprised, but not too surprised, if it was forced through with reconciliation.
But reconciliation was wrong when the Republicans did it, and would be wrong if the Democrats did it.
P.S. Baucus knows because he’s a Democratic senator and has spent all that time with the other five “clueless” people you refer to, who also happen to include the people who were kind-of, sort-of on the fence about the bill, who will not vote for it with a public option.
You mean passed by a majority in the Senate? Sounds like the way the government has operated for most of its history, until a bunch of Republicans decided to defy the will of the American people and overturn hundreds of years of American tradition. Why do they hate this country?
And it’s becoming crystal clear that neither was Grassley. Snowe might have been but sounds like she’s been dragged away from it by her party.
Conrad isn’t willing to move one iota from his per-state co-op plan. No-one seems to know what Jeff Bingaman is doing in the group, which makes him the sole person “on the fence” of the lot.
The simple fact: no real health care reform will pass the Senate if the GOP decides to filibuster at this point, without reconciliation. And no half-assed plan will pass the House unless Progressives are willing to settle for a useless turd of a bill. If Obama’s willing to drive this to completion, the tread marks are going to be on certain reluctant Senators, and they’re probably going to look a lot like the word ‘reconciliation’. He’s got a simple majority, and that’s all he needs if he’s willing to bully Reid into going that route.