After all, single payer would only save $350 billion dollars a year! And where do we read about this? Our famously free press? Not. Our tribunes of the people on the "progressive" access blogs? You're joking. No, we hear it from a local PA blog with a union connection:
Word from the Physicians for a National Health Program is that the flood of calls has forced Pelosi to allow 20 minutes of debate and a vote on the floor for the Weiner amendment this Friday. This amendment will substitute most of the language of HR 676 for the current bill and establish a Medicare for All system of healthcare.
Swanson agrees, calling it kabuki.
Swanson's argument is that the HR676 debate is a cover for stripping the Kucinich amendment. I don't think it's either/or. Pelosi and the rest of 'em were bound and determined to bail out the insurance companies and deep six single payer, and they would would have found some other way to strip the Kucinich amendment. I'd rather at least have the full bill on the floor, with a debate.
NOTE Background from Kay Tillow. And hat tip Beowulf for the PA and Swanson links.
UPDATE Via The Hill, yesterday, but only showed up in Google today:
Leaders are also working out whether they can honor a commitment to Weiner for an up-or-down vote on a “single-payer” plan when Pelosi has indicated she doesn’t want to allow amendments beyond a GOP substitute.
[House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.)] indicated that Weiner may get a chance to offer a standalone single-payer bill before the healthcare vote, possibly on Friday.
"Work out whether they can honor"... That says it all, doens't it?
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Counting.
I hear Grayson says over 40,000 die without insurance each year.
This whole health care things really depends on about 20 assholes. No more. Just 20 assholes. 40,000 dead annually vs 20 assholes.
Isn't there something wrong with this picture?
Self exile
importance of a CBO score
One way or another (to quote George W. Bush), this sucker is going down. It doesn't matter if Obamacare gets through Congress or not. Across the street, the Supreme Court sits ready to strike down the individual mandate as an unconstitutional direct tax (in contrast, Medicare payroll taxes are allowed under the 16th Amendment's "power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived"). Naturally, the White House and many liberal law professors disagree with this conclusion, but it will be up to the conservative Roberts Court to decide this.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...
Whether HR 3962 dies in the Senate or in the Supreme Court, the Democrats are going to need a Plan B and fast. The CBO hasn't released a fiscal scoring of a single payer plan since 1993. So as important as getting a recorded vote, its even more important for Weiner or Sanders to get a CBO score publicly released.
Even if (as is likely) a single payer plan is a fiscally unbalanced, once the CBO lays out its analysis, the PNHP eggheads can study its financial assumptions and plug the revenue holes for a revised HR 676. And then when the inevitable Scalia opinion comes down eviscerating HR3962, progressives will be ready with, umm, the constitutional option.
:o)
extremely important
The CBO hasn't released a fiscal scoring of a single payer plan since 1993. So as important as getting a recorded vote, its even more important for Weiner or Sanders to get a CBO score publicly released.
this is what makes sanders' and weiner's efforts more valuable than the kucinich amendment.
we can go back and press for legislation next year, or in the next congress, to allow states to try single payer on their own, but without an updated cbo score to work with, there's no good way to tell tell people how much single payer will cost [or save] us compared to the present abominations on offer.
with more concrete numbers in hand on the costs and savings, it will be much easier to get the public fired up in support of single payer.
as bob somerby keeps reminding us, nobody is telling the people just how much looting is going on, how much money is being taken out of our pockets.
Now why didn't I think of the Supreme Court?
The entire conservative contingent is going to have a problem with the mandates, on both their narrow reading of the Constitution and their conservative desire to scuttle even the appearance of health care reform. All someone needs to do is bring a case before them about the constitutionality of individual mandates, and that blows a hole in the very idea of Obamacare.
Nothing is true; everything is permitted.