ubetchaiam

For those who argued we should just pass SOMETHING, even if it was a bad bill, because they said we could fix it later, this is what you
get from a strategy of perpetual compromise, a bill that is utterly
beyond redemption. It’s time to throw HR 3962 in the medical waste
bin, and do what should have been done in the first place, build a
new national health care system on what actually DOES work, by
extending the existing economical and efficient Medicare plan to all
ages.

Kip Sullivan at Firedoglake:

Via a single story in from the Montana Missoulian*, we learn:

Still alive is an amendment from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., that allows states to ask for a waiver from the federal government to create their own universal coverage plan for their citizens.

The Wyden amendment is in the bill sponsored by Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. Senate Democratic leaders are working to meld parts of the Baucus bill with another health reform bill to create one bill that will come to the floor for debate, before the end of the year.

I saw this entry posted over at Docudharma and thought I'd share the link to it. I'll post as much as I can, but really, it's worth checking out the entire entry. It's by the user known as FreeSociety.

The total vacuum of any principled leadership from President Obama, has inevitably produced the most directionless, anti-consumer, Insurance Monopoly boondoggle fraud imaginable -- which is now masquerading before Congress as "reform".

Fact-esque has a long post up that works through the answer to that question, using the health care debacle as the case study. Read the whole thing, because I'm about to summarize it, no doubt badly:

The brilliant Democrat policy of following Republican-style divide-and-conquer tactics in the healthcare bill is having the unsurprising and perfectly predictable effect of splitting two of the party's once stalwart base groups by forcing one to pay for the other and threatening the second's coverage.