Now the final phase begins, where we see what House liberals can achieve within the confines of a broken system that gives a handful of senators from sparsely populated states a disproportionate power to shape legislation:

Democrats are already outlining a strategy to achieve a final compromise that can satisfy the more liberal House without upsetting the painstakingly assembled coalition of 60 Senate Democrats and independents.

Central to those talks, House leaders said, will be the search for an acceptable substitute for a government-run insurance plan that those without medical coverage could purchase, a provision the House designed to compete with private insurers and force them to rein in costs. While the Senate has decisively rejected the "public option," House leaders say they will demand other concessions to ensure that Americans can afford the insurance they will be required to buy if the bill becomes law.

[...] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has signaled approval for the Senate's solution: the creation of at least two nationwide insurance plans run by private companies but overseen by the Office of Personnel Management, the same federal agency that handles health insurance for members of Congress. In a conference call Wednesday, Pelosi also assured rank-and-file Democrats that they would not be asked to rubber-stamp the Senate bill and began soliciting ideas to improve it.

Among the options under discussion: pressing the Senate to increase the federal subsidies that would be offered to low- and middle-income people who do not have access to affordable coverage through an employer; having a single national marketplace for people buying insurance, rather than 50 state-based exchanges, as the Senate prefers; and moving up the launch date of those marketplaces and subsidies to 2013, one year earlier than under the Senate bill.

We're one step closer to passing this historic healthcare bill. A year ago, I would have put the odds of this passing the Senate right up there with... well, with the odds of the Vatican praising "The Simpsons."

Now it's on to the House, where hopefully the Democratic liberals will try to undo the conservative damage that's been done:

The Senate passed a landmark health-care bill Thursday morning that would provide coverage to more than 30 million people and begin a far-reaching overhaul of Medicare and the private insurance market.

Vice President Biden presided over the 60-39, party line vote, which brings Democrats closer than ever to realizing their 70-year-old goal of universal health coverage.

For the first time, most Americans would be required to obtain health insurance, either through their employer or via new, government-regulated exchanges. Those who can't afford insurance plans would receive federal subsidies. And Medicaid would be vastly expanded to reach millions of low-income children and adults.

Difficult issues must be still resolved in final negotiations with the House, which has passed more liberal health-care reform legislation, and those talks could stretch through January and perhaps into February, Democratic leaders said. But Democrats are increasingly confident that President Obama would sign a bill into law in early 2010.

"Health care reform is not a matter of 'if,' " White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday. "Health care reform now is a matter of 'when.' "

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared after Wednesday's vote that: "We stand on the doorstep of history." But he declined to speculate about negotiations with the House.

"I'm not going to talk about conference. I'm talking about passing this bill," he told reporters late Wednesday. For at least a few days after Christmas, Reid said, he would rest back home in Nevada. "I am going to just sit back and watch my rabbits eat my cactus," he said.

Republicans fought the Senate bill with every parliamentary weapon they could muster, raising a series of motions on that failed along party lines. The rhetoric grew more harsh as time ran short.

The last preliminary vote came Wednesday, when all 60 members of the Senate Democratic caucus voted down the final possibility for a Republican filibuster of the $871 billion package.

The Senate got past the second filibuster on the compelling video game that is health-care reform, with one level left. While the final vote is theoretically scheduled for Christmas Eve, I saw Sen. Claire McCaskill on my teevee this morning saying that Republicans are trying to drag it out so that members won't be able to spend Christmas with their families.

Now, Claire, while I'm sympathetic to a point (yes, the Republicans are obstructionist scum), if this legislation is really a historic achievement (albeit one that will force many Americans to stretch their finances to the limit to comply), I don't especially care that your holiday schedule is mildly inconvenienced.

But that's just me!

The Senate cleared the second of three key procedural hurdles on President Obama's health-care legislation early Tuesday with another party-line vote, continuing the effort to pass the bill before Christmas.

All 60 members of the Democratic caucus supported the measure to finalize amendments to the health-care package, while 39 Republicans opposed it.

A third procedural vote is expected Wednesday, with final passage of the bill likely to come late Thursday -- Christmas Eve.

Although they lack any obvious way to torpedo the bill at this point, Republicans remain bitterly opposed to the legislation and have shown little indication that they are ready to relent in their increasingly negative standoff with Democrats.

On Monday, hours after a crucial 1 a.m. vote to end a Republican filibuster, the American Medical Association officially endorsed the legislation, while Democratic leaders defended the dealmaking that has brought the $871 billion package to the brink of passage.

Lacking the votes to block the bill, Republicans heaped scorn on the many concessions made to wavering Democrats in the quest to advance the package. GOP critics warned that support for the effort could mean the demise in 2010 of vulnerable incumbents, including Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.).

I am so tired of living in a country where a group of religious extremists get to hold our rights hostage, but apparently that's not changing anytime soon:

An aide to Rep. Bart Stupak (D. Mich.) coordinated opposition to a Senate compromise on the place of abortion in health care legislation this morning with the Republican Senate leadership, the Conference Catholic Bishops, and other anti-abortion groups, according to a chain of frantic emails obtained this morning by POLITICO.

The emails show that Stupak -- who has so far remained silent on language accepted by Senator Ben Nelson (D. Neb.) and faces intense pressure from the White House to accept it -- is already working behind the scenes to oppose the compromise.

They also demonstrate a previously unseen degree of coordination between Stupak and the office of Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

Stupak is the leader of a group of pro-life Democrats who say they’ll back the sweeping legislation if it uses government money to pay for abortion, while McConnell is firmly committed to killing the legislation. The fact that the two have made common cause against the Senates health care compromise will likely further infuriate Stupak’s Democratic colleagues in the House, and demonstrates his willingness to stop any bill that doesn’t pass his test.

“Guys - when will we see your letters of opposition to the managers amendment?? We need them ASAP!” wrote Erika Smith, a Stupak aide, at 9:23 this morning, less than an hour after the amendment had become available.

The email’s recipients included key staffers for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, National Right to Life, the Family Research Council, as well as Autumn Fredericks Christensen, aide to a top pro-life Republican Joe Pitts, and Lanier Swann, a McConnell aide.

Just got off another blogger conference call, this time with Howard Dean, former CIGNA exec Wendell Potter, and Mike Lux.

Dean announced the results of a DFA poll that is "really quite stunning," he said. (You can read the results here.) The Senate cloture vote is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve, he said.

Democracy for America's "No Option, No Mandate" campaign to contact Harry Reid clocked 7000 calls in four hours, too, he said.

Dr. Dean opened the call by saying "this bill has always been a giveaway to the insurance industry, but we were willing to compromise" to get the public option.

He recapped all the compromises we made: "We wanted single payer, but that was taken off the table early on. That was a mistake. We had to get to the place where we had health insurance for all Americans." But now, he said, there's no public option, and no Medicare option.

"You're forced to pay money to an insurance company or get fined $750 by your government, while 27% of your money goes to CEOs who are flying around in these private jets," he said.

He talked about the compromises made for pre-existing conditions, the most disturbing one the ability to charge you 300% more, merely for being older. "It's guaranteed issue, but if you’re making $65,000 a year for a family of four and you’re paying $20,000 for insurance, how is that reform?"

He said the real bad stuff in the Senate bill was
"hidden in the weeds, so you can’t find it."

Dr. Dean brushed aside the "Get a bill, any bill" mentality in Washington. "Any legislation passed will have a huge impact on American healthcare. If they can’t fix it, it shouldn’t pass."

Wendell Potter, former CIGNA executive and reform activist, said the insurance industry got "every single thing they wanted" in the Senate bill.

"There's no individual mandate, no public option. There's also three words, 'benefit design flexibility' in Senate bill – that means the freedom to design plans that will pass more and more of us into ranks of the underinsured - and charge up to 22% of income if someone gets sick," he said.

In Massachusetts, they have a 2 to 1 premium ratio, "and they're already having trouble finding affordable, adequate insurance. The industry wants to shift even more costs to individuals and families, having the government pay them half a trillion dollars. The Senate bill meets every one of their requirements," Potter said.

"They will continue to shift the cost burden to consumers and get around not using preexisting conditions by charging for certain factors like high cholesterol."

Dr. Dean pointed out the House bill "is the compromise, we didn’t think it was right to take the option of an employer-based system away if people liked it."

In Vermont, he said, you can't be charged more than double the lowest premium.

Dean listed some more of the insurance company wish list the Senate was so eager to fill. "Getting rid of the anti-trust provision. This contributes to the predatory effect of the insurance companies – they're essentially unregulated. We need to get the provision in, get them regulated.

Wendell Potter talked about something you often hear pushed from the Republican side: "Just let us sell across state lines and let the market decide." As he points out, insurers would go to the states with least regulation.

Paul Hogarth from Daily Kos asked them to address criticism that if the bill is killed, "there's no reform and we’re worse off, the momentum is gone."

"I don’t know that we’ll be worse off," Dr. Dean said. "We ought to strip down this bill and get rid of the mandate. It should have been done by reconciliation."

Continue reading »

The deal is cut. Women's right to legal abortion? Subject to state legislative lottery! Buh-bye!

The bill will go to conference committee, but it's unlikely that the House will change that much, because Ben's holding their constitutional rights and duties at gunpoint:

Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.), the final Democratic holdout on health care, announced to his caucus Saturday morning that he would support the Senate reform bill, clearing the way for final passage by Christmas.

"We're there," said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), as he headed into a special meeting to outline the deal.

Democratic leaders spent days trying to hammer out a deal with Nelson, and worked late Friday night with him on abortion coverage language that had proved the major stumbling block. Nelson also secured other favors for his home state.

Under the new abortion provisions, states can opt out of allowing plans to cover abortion in insurance exchanges the bill would set up to serve individuals who don't have employer coverage. Plus, enrollees in plans that do cover abortion procedures would pay for the coverage with separate checks - one for abortion, one for rest of health-care services.

Nelson secured full federal funding for his state to expand Medicaid coverage to all individuals below 133 percent of the federal poverty level. Other states must pay a small portion of the additional cost. He won concessions for qualifying nonprofit insurers and for Medigap providers from a new insurance tax. He also was able to roll back cuts to health savings accounts.

"I know this is hard for some of my colleagues to accept and I appreciate their right to disagree," Nelson told reporters at the Capitol, of the many changes made at his behest. "But I would not have voted for this bill without these provisions."

I think Marcy Wheeler makes the single most compelling argument here about the precedent of a private health insurance mandate:

And for those who promise we’ll go back and fix this later, once we achieve universal health care, understand what will have happened in the meantime. The idea, of course, is to establish some means to get people single payer coverage (before Lieberman, this would have been through a public option or Medicare buy-in) and, over time, expand it.

In fact, this bill will move toward single payer, too–though not the kind we want. For the large number of people who live in a place where there is limited competition, this bill will require them to get health care through the oligopoly or monopoly provider. It’ll work great for the provider: they will be able to dictate rates. But the Senate bill allows these blossoming single payer providers to keep up to 25% of the benefit in profits and marketing costs, and pass little of that benefit onto citizens. If we make private corporations our single payer, how are we going to convince them to cede control when we ask them to let the government be the single payer?

The reason this matters, though, is the power it gives the health care corporations. We can’t ditch Halliburton or Blackwater because they have become the sole primary contractor providing precisely the services they do. And so, like it or not, we’re dependent on them. And if we were to try to exercise oversight over them, we’d ultimately face the reality that we have no leverage over them, so we’d have to accept whatever they chose to provide. This bill gives the health care industry the leverage we’ve already given Halliburton and Blackwater.

It’s the 9.8% tithe that bothers me the most. But for those who think we can fix it, consider this, too. If the Senate bill passes, in its current form, it will mean that the health care industry was able to dictate–through their Senators Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson–what they wanted the US Congress to do. They will have succeeded in dictating the precise terms of legislation.

Now, that’s not the first time that has happened. It certainly happened on telecom immunity. It certainly has happened, repeatedly, on Defense contracting (see also Randy Cunningham). But none of these egregious instances of corporations dictating legislation included a tithe–the requirement that citizens pay corporations to provide their service, rather than allowing the government to contract the service.

This is a fundamentally different relationship we’re talking about–one that gives corporations vast new powers. And the fact that–with one temper tantrum from Joe Lieberman–the corporations were able to dictate the terms of this new relationship deeply troubles me.

When this passes, it will become clear that Congress is no longer the sovereign of this nation. Rather, the corporations dictating the laws will be.

I understand the temptation to offer 30 million people health care. What I don’t understand is the nonchalance with which we’re about to fundamentally shift the relationships of governance in doing so.

We’ve seen our Constitution and means of government under attack in the last 8 years. This does so in a different–but every bit as significant way. We don’t mandate tithing corporations in this country–at least not yet. And it troubles me that so many Democrats are rushing to do so, without considering the logical consequences.

UPDATE: Dems broke the filibuster at 2 a.m. EST.

You know, I'm beginning to wonder if the refusal to operate in good faith isn't a form of official malfeasance. Because voters should impeach these senators for simply refusing to do their jobs - like voting for this bill, which funds their unemployment benefits:

Senate Republicans said Thursday that they would try to filibuster a massive Pentagon bill that funds the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an unusual move that several acknowledged was an effort to delay President Obama's health-care legislation.

Late into the night, Democrats emerged from a huddle confident that they would muster the 60 votes needed to thwart the GOP effort at blocking the military spending bill. An antiwar liberal said he would set aside his reservations and support choking off the filibuster to keep the chamber on a timeline of holding a final health-care vote before Christmas. The vote on the defense spending bill was to occur after 1 a.m. Friday, too late for this edition.

The maneuvering came as Democrats were still trying to round up a 60th vote on the health-care legislation. Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.), the last holdout in the Democratic caucus and the focus of an intense lobbying campaign by White House officials, rejected an abortion compromise aimed at bringing him on board. Nelson has said he would not support the package unless it explicitly bars the use of federal money for abortion services.

If Nelson's support can be secured over the weekend, Democrats are hopeful that they will be able to begin clearing the parliamentary hurdles that would allow final passage of their version of the legislation by Christmas Eve. That would meet their self-imposed deadline to pass the measure and begin negotiating with House Democrats to craft a final version to send to the president.

Republicans have said their goal is to block the bill and force Senate Democrats to go home and face their constituents, hoping for some supporters of the measure to return after New Year's too fearful to back the legislation.

If the filibuster on the $626 billion defense bill succeeded, Democrats would have to scramble to find a way to fund the military operations, because a stopgap funding measure will expire at midnight Friday. Such an effort might have disrupted the very tight timeline on health care.

Republicans have provided the backbone of support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and many have praised Obama's troop increase in Afghanistan, so the plan to oppose defense spending Friday morning put them in an unusual position. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) cited the thousands of earmarks in the bill in explaining his opposition, and others cited factors not related to health care.

But Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) was blunt in explaining his support of a filibuster. "I don't want health care," said Brownback, a member of the Appropriations Committee, which crafted the Pentagon funding bill.

[...] Democrats were furious. They believed they had a deal with Sen. Thad Cochran (Miss.), the top Republican on the Appropriations Committee, but by Thursday night Cochran was saying he was unsure how he would vote.

UPDATE: Dan Pfeiffer at the White House blog makes the following acute observation:

The depth of the hypocrisy involved is stunning. Back in 2007, when Congress was debating how to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible close, many of these same folks launched blistering accusations about Democrats' commitment to our troops. Here are just a few of the things they said:

"Playing politics with the critical funding that our troops need now is political theater of the worst kind." – Sen. John Cornyn, [Press Release, 4/26/07]

"We have plenty of time and plenty of opportunity to have political debates... but it’s just unconscionable to me to tie the hands of the very troops that we all say we support." – Sen. John Cornyn, [Transcript, Senate Republican News Briefing, 4/10/07]

"Every day we don’t fund our troops is a day their ability to fight this war is weakened." – Sen. Mitch McConnell, [Press Release, 3/31/07]

"No way to treat the troops, and it is entirely inconsistent with [Senators’] expressions of support for the troops." – Sen. Mitch McConnell, [Congressional Record, 10/4/07]

"I don't understand this attitude of, ‘We can play with; we can risk the lives of these troops by waiting until the last possible minute to get the funding to them." – Sen. Jon Kyl, [FOX News Transcript, 4/10/07]

"Our obligation to those troops must transcend politics." – Sen. Jon Kyl, [Press Release, 11/8/07]

Now though, as we debate not foreign policy but health care, the Department of Defense funding can wait? Incredible.

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Information always has a soothing effect on me, and I'm feeling much calmer after tonight's White House conference call. Obama advisor David Axelrod and White House Health Reform Director Nancy-Ann DeParle took the time to answer our questions.

I started by asking about the recent maneuver to block imported drugs. I said it was "shameless," not only because Candidate Obama ran on the issue of allowing Americans to buy cheaper drugs from Canada, but because the FDA already does site inspections in those same plants they were calling unsafe. (Basically, in order to sell any drugs in America, your manufacturing facility must meet the same standards as an American plant.)

I was pleasantly surprised to hear that they would be submitting an HHS bill in the near future - they'd "just this week" gotten funding to address any safety concerns, but more importantly, to start putting an infrastructure in place to import drugs.

My other question (as a former reporter who frequently covered insurance corruption) was about using state insurance commissioners to enforce new insurance regulations.

I said that in many states, insurance commissioners were pretty much owned by the local insurance companies, and I was skeptical as to whether making them the enforcers would actually work.

DeParle said HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius, a former state insurance commissioner, was not one of "those" commissioners, and she would be overseeing state departments. Sebelius already met with state insurance commissioners, she said, and having found a wide discrepancy in authority from state to state, got language inserted in the bill that would give them additional powers. (DeParle noted that the West Virginia commissioner didn't even have the authority to see if insurance companies were solvent.)

DeParle said this was the widest expansion of insurance regulation in 20 years.

David Axelrod also chimed in, noting these changes were part of the reason why the insurance industry has opposed the bills so stringently. If this was a giveaway, he said, they wouldn’t be lobbying so hard to defeat the bill.

I have to give it to Axelrod on this: Without even a little exaggeration, I'd say that standardizing state oversight is probably the insurance industry's worst nightmare. They've always taken advantage of a hodgepodge of weak state regulations, sprinkling generous political contributions along the way to buy off state legislators. So this bill is really what you want from federal regulation: Overriding weak state laws that trample consumers.

Continue reading »

Can we please have new Senate leadership now? The White House and Harry Reid have made one bad decision after another. We can't do anything about Obama, but why do we have to put up with an incompetent Senate Majority Leader?

Four days before the Senate jettisoned the idea of expanding Medicare to younger Americans, a dozen Senate Democrats, including some of the chamber's most liberal members, dispatched a stern letter warning that the proposal would make it harder for elderly patients in parts of the country to find care.

The letter, sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), attests to the effectiveness of a ferocious campaign by influential hospital and physician lobbyists to defeat the idea. And it underscores the difficulty of forging policy and political deals in the warp-speed, supercharged environment in which Congress is trying to reshape the nation's health-care system.

The proposal to allow people ages 55 to 64 to buy insurance through Medicare -- one of the most significant ideas to emerge from the Senate's side of the debate -- appeared and vanished in a mere six days.

Sources on and off Capitol Hill say the quick life and death of the Medicare buy-in reflects the complex politics and a brutal reality at this stage of the Senate's deliberations, in which there is little time to refine proposals that do not immediately attract the 60 votes needed for health-care legislation to pass.

The broad contours of the proposal emerged early last week from 10 liberal and moderate senators whom Reid had assigned to negotiate a bill. The group reached for the Medicare buy-in as a compromise between members who favored a new government-sponsored insurance alternative for Americans of all ages, and those who were wary of more public coverage. The buy-in, they reasoned, would create access to public insurance for people in late middle age -- a group for whom medical problems become more common and insurance is particularly expensive.

But in the following days, the proposal met resistance among Senate moderates as well as some liberals. Meanwhile, Reid made a strategic decision, ordering the negotiators to keep the details of their proposal secret until congressional budget analysts examined the impact it might have on consumers and the federal budget. That strategy, however, meant that the proposal did not attract much support from outside constituencies that have, in the past, favored letting younger people buy into Medicare.

"We were immobilized due to lack of information," said John Rother, executive vice president for policy and strategy at AARP, a lobbying group for people age 50 and older, which has endorsed buy-in proposals in the past. "We couldn't support something that we didn't know what it was."

Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders became the first to introduce a universal health care bill on the floor of the Senate. (see above video) While he eventually withdrew the bill after Republican delaying tactics, my hat is off to the Independent Senator from Vermont. He has always stood up for the people of his state and the country and he has big brass ones!

Now, Bernie has said that he will not vote for the current bill. More from The Hill:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said late Wednesday that he cannot support the Democrats' healthcare reform legislation in its current form.

Asked by Fox Business Network's Neil Cavuto asked Sanders if he could support the compromise bill. The senator replied "I’m struggling with this. As of this point I am not voting for the bill. And here’s why."

Sanders, who favors a single-payer healthcare system, said that he has informed the White House and Democratic leadership of his position.

"As of this moment. I am going to do my best to make this bill a better bill, a bill that I can vote for but I’ve indicated both to the White House and the Democratic leadership that my vote is not secure at this point," he said.

Sanders words come as Democratic leaders are now facing heat from the left over several compromises made in order to attract centrist votes. Read on...

Hooray for Bernie! Any notion that killing the public option or the Medicare buy in provision is a "centrist" idea is ridiculous -- it is a far right position, and one that lies well outside the mainstream of America and the Democratic Party platform. Holy Joe Lieberman has been shoving his mug in front of every camera he can find to gloat about how much power he wields in this debate, so I am thrilled to see Sanders step up to the plate and make it known that not everybody on Capitol Hill is going to roll over for the insurance lobby.

After the Future: Shaping Reality or Accepting it

Where’s the Outrage?: Dr. Thompson examines conservative healthcare solutions

Figleaf's Real Adult Sex: Copyblogger author practicing what she preaches about compelling post titles: "Why James Chartrand Wears Woman's Underpants" (Not Work Safe, though the post is OK)

Pufferfish: Corporate Bimbo

Sensen No Sen: The troubling math of Gitmo "suicides"

MN Progressive Project: Finalist for 2009 "Lie of the Year"

So it comes down to this: Joe "I Don't Know How Anybody Can Decide Until You See The Actual Language" Lieberman got his widdle feelings hurt, and so Joe will do anything to get back at the mean liberals who hurt his feelings - even if it means hundreds of thousands of people have to die without health care.

Doesn't that make him a sociopath? And doesn't that make the Democrats co-conspirators?

The Huffington Post and Roll Call are both reporting that Joe Lieberman notified Harry Reid that he will filibuster health-care reform if the final bill includes an expansion of Medicare. Previously, Lieberman had been cool to the idea, saying he wanted to make sure it wouldn't increase the deficit or harm Medicare's solvency. That comforted some observers, as the CBO is expected to say it will do neither. Someone must have given Lieberman a heads-up on that, as he's decided to make his move in advance of the CBO score, the better to make sure the facts of the policy couldn't impede his opposition to it.

To put this in context, Lieberman was originally invited to participate in the process that led to the Medicare buy-in. His opposition would have killed it before liberals invested in the idea. Instead, he skipped the meetings and is forcing liberals to give up yet another compromise. Each time he does that, he increases the chances of the bill's failure that much more. And it's hard to imagine there's a policy rationale here, as he decided against even bothering to wait for the CBO's analysis before moving against this idea. At this point, Lieberman is just torturing liberals. That is to say, he's willing to directly cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.

[...] The final path would be to try the reconciliation, the parliamentary procedure that would allow Democrats to pass chunks of health care reform by a simple up or down vote. There are a host of hurdles that come with going down this route, including questions over what, exactly, could be passed. And at this point both the White House and Reid's office seem hesitant to use the procedural tool, even after Lieberman's latest round of opposition.

Reid could also try and find another compromise, but it's not clear there are many of those left. And at this point, the underlying dynamic seems to be that Lieberman will destroy any compromise the left likes. That, in fact, seems to be the compromise: Lieberman will pass the bill if he can hurt liberals while doing so. From Lieberman's perspective, the compromise is killing the compromise.

Chris Bowers points out the Democrats have put Holy Joe in this position:

Nothing Lieberman is doing would be possible without the ongoing support of the majority of the Democratic caucus. If Democratic Senators wanted to punish Lieberman for his consistent transgressions against the party, they could. If Democrats wanted to use reconciliation, and just circumvent him altogether, they could do that, too. But they are not going to do either.

As such, Lieberman is simply taking the power that is being handed to him by the rest of the caucus. Since he knows that Senate Democrats won't ever punish him, and won't ever circumvent him, he now has free reign to dictate whatever legislation he wants, get tons of face time with the White House and Senate leadership, regularly be the top story on news outlets around the country, receive millions in campaign contributions, and appease his Republican base (at this point, most of Lieberman's supporters are Republicans). It is a great deal for Lieberman, and it would not be possible without the ongoing consent of the majority of the Democratic Senate caucus.

Since we have already defeated Lieberman in a Democratic primary, there is clearly nothing more as progressive activists to threaten Lieberman. What we need to start doing is taking action against the Democrats who enable Lieberman and his ilk. If other Senate Democrats are not going to do anything about Lieberman taking control of the entire caucus, then really, what is the difference between those other Senators and Joe Lieberman?

Never though I would echo George W. Bush, but we have reached the point where it is time to stop differentiating between problematic Senators like Joseph Lieberman and the other Senate Democrats who enable them.

Time to make noise! They allowed a cap to go through to get a lower CBO score, but how do we know what we'll get instead? Let your congress critter know they don't have their priorities straight. If you get cancer, you shouldn't have to lose your house to pay for it.

WASHINGTON — A loophole in the Senate health care bill would let insurers place annual dollar limits on medical care for people struggling with costly illnesses such as cancer, prompting a rebuke from patient advocates.

The legislation that originally passed the Senate health committee last summer would have banned such limits, but a tweak to that provision weakened it in the bill now moving toward a Senate vote.

As currently written, the Senate Democratic health care bill would permit insurance companies to place annual limits on the dollar value of medical care, as long as those limits are not "unreasonable." The bill does not define what level of limits would be allowable, delegating that task to administration officials.

Adding to the puzzle, the new language was quietly tucked away in a clause in the bill still captioned "No lifetime or annual limits."

As Marcy points out, this is another cute deal:

So what Ezra’s sources really mean is that the Senate bill–partly because it has traded off other means to keep premiums down–has had to eliminate a key promise of health care reform: that families experiencing a catastrophic health care event wouldn’t lose coverage at the time they needed it the most. What Ezra’s sources really mean is that, because they chose not to pursue other strategies which would have made it unecessary to eliminate the cap, they have instead been forced to eliminate the caps to keep the bill competitive with the House bill.

Don’t let Harry Reid fool you. The problem is not that health care “premiums would go through the roof” without caps. The problem is that Harry Reid has deliberately chosen not to use other means to prevent health care premiums from going through the roof, means that wouldn’t mean families bear the brunt of the problem.