John Dingell says he is going to try to persuade Stupak to drop his efforts to sink healthcare with his anti-choice efforts. The Congress is a place where we represent our people and where we serve our conscience. I strongly disagree with Bart, I think he’s wrong. But he was my friend. He is my [...]

In a conference call focused closely on the possibility of moving health care through reconciliation, Arlen Specter invoked Justice Jackson’s comment to justify his support for putting health care through the reconciliation process. He said Jackson’s comment–that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact”–would be considered applicable to stale-mated government. He later said he’d like [...]

The Sunlight Foundation has a superb report of the way in which Bill Tauzin, whom Obama attacked during his campaign for his slimy deal-making, pushed through a deal with the Obama White House that limited savings from the pharmaceutical companies in the health care bill to $80 billion. The report: Traces Tauzin’s history as a [...]

When Max Baucus delayed finalizing the Senate Finance Committee’s healthcare bill last August in the name of getting bipartisan support from Olympia Snowe or Chuck Grassley, Republicans and teabaggers spent the month talking about death panels. Allowing the delay in the false hope of bipartisan support was, among a string of poor decisions, probably the [...]

I just got off a conference call with Speaker Pelosi. While she had a lot of optimistic things to say about the passage of a Senate plus sidecar bill, the big piece of news is that the House will pass (meaning, I presume she has the votes) a bill eliminating the anti-trust exemption for insurers [...]

Congress has not yet seen fit to give Americans health care. But there’s a new health care battle heating up right in the middle of the jobs bills that will be the next focus of Congress. The jobs bill the House passed in December extended subsidies to help laid off workers pay for COBRA that [...]

Is Rahm planning on using Rove’s tactics to get a crappy health insurance reform passed using the urgency of the upcoming election?

Thus far today, Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, and Blache Lincoln have come out against passing health care reform through sidecar reconciliation. Of course that means they’re defending all the corrupt aspects of the Senate bill that proved to be so unpopular in MA, starting with the Cornhusker Kickback (and including the Louisiana Purchase that similarly [...]

I’m not Raul Grijalva or Jerry Nadler, but I thought I’d try to respond to TPM reader MD’s “sob story” (as MD called it) because the story illustrates the issues at stake in health care reform. Here’s the story. Like everyone I have a sob-story to tell about health care. After telling it to countless [...]

From the start, let me say I support sidecar reconciliation going forward–the passage of the Senate health care bill, tied to the simultaneous passage through reconciliation of some fairly substantive changes (eliminating most of the excise tax, inclusion of a public option, possibly with Medicare buy-in, elimination of the antitrust exemption, and drug reimportation) that [...]