What are you afraid of?

You need to be some oracle to understand this bill is a joke and does nothing but enrich insurance companies?

And people wonder why there are 4 sides to every argument when those with a forum fail at every level to display even an ounce of integrity!

Please find other work if this fear condition is chronic.....................

The republicans wanted to turn HCR into Obama's 'Waterloo'. And with the help of some Blue Dog Dems, who are only selfishly interested in keeping their positions of power in Washington, they might have. This bill is such a joke and will be so unpopular, especially with its mandates to buy insurance, it will promptly result in the republicans regaining power. After the voters put their trust in the democrats to 'do the right things, on behalf of the American people, by giving the D's the Executive Branch and super majorities in both the house and senate this piece of crap posing as reform is about to be passed. That is what the D's get for letting the R's craft legislation for them...unless the D's are down with the 'corporate America always comes first' agenda.

Yeah mandates on buying over priced health insurance in the marketplace and fines for not doing so is exactly the 'help' the American people envisioned when they put their trust in the D's to get America back on the right track.

The Buy in and public options are dropped but general public must buy insurance from the private insurers or pay a fine.

They should drop this provision too.

Forcing people to buy insurance would lead to frauds.

The time to kill this bill in the Senate was the moment it cleared committee. If it is killed now, the political setback would be devastating. Howard is displaying a tin ear.

Pass the bill. The conference can beat out some of the kinks. Then what is left can pass via simple majority without the threat of fillibuster.

The problem is one of obstruction. The conference can only remove or modify pieces of legislation from the existing bills. It can not add new pieces... Like thermodynamics.

The longer the vote draws out and the Dems stab each other in public, the more pieces that are removed and the less the conference has to work with.

It is ridiculous to confuse the Senate plan with the final bill. Yet this is happening... Even from supposed experts like Dean. The same thing happened with the original finance committee bill.

There appears to be a fundamental ignorance of legislative process afoot. The sooner we move to conference, the better the final result.

Howard Dean is wrong and is appealing to baser natures. There is nothing specific or concrete in his criticisms. He is warning of impending DOOM without substance. His is an argument based on ethos. I smell politics... As the face of netroots, his sternly worded commentary could help embolden Lieberman into believing he has twisted the knife enough. Ultimately, Lieberman will not vote against health care... The key is to signal to him that his liberal enemies have tapped out.

If you agree with Dr. Dean, then Nate Silver has this challenge for you:
20 Questions for Bill Killers.

How many times have actual members of Congress have been quoted saying they would not vote for a bill like this and then when it came time to put or shut up - they shut up and voted? Plenty and they were even more Left than Howard Dean. I don't buy if I were a senator crap. If he was, he would be posting here trying to sell it.

And forgive me if I'm not reading his statement correctly, but the things Dean Howard mentioned, weren't those true PRIOR to the PO/Medicare being dropped? Why not call for killing the bill then?

OK! I'VE FIGURED OUT THE ANSWER:

GIVE THE INSURANCE MAFIA WHATEVER THEY WANT SO THEY WON'T NUKE US, AND THEN MAKE EVERYONE PAY OUT OF POCKET FOR EVERY CENT OF THEIR MEDICAL CARE!

That is where we are going, and as an old friend once said to me, "If you keep going in the same direction, you will end up where you're headed."

At least get your numbers straight. Insurance company profits are only a tiny part of the premiums we pay.

That's why there's no credibility to this "movement" any more. No one even tries to resort to the facts.

In fairness to Howard Dean, it's important to acknowledge that he is NOT suggesting that the current reform effort be scrapped, and in fact insists that we should try to improve the bills rather than give up, and that the House bill rather than the Senate version is the better model. I'm not sure his suggestions re reconciliation are practical, but he would have a right to protest if anyone quotes him selectively to imply he wants to kill the legislation and start over at a later date.

Five reasons Dean is right:

1. If this bill passes, Congress and the White House will learn all the wrong lessons. They will conclude that you can always play ball with the big lobbies, knuckle under to all the major industry pressure tactics, and still pass some crappy and mediocre bill that allows you to declare victory, fool most of the people most of the time, and then wash your hands of the issue for another decade.

2. This bill does nothing serious to address the cost issue. It is going to raise health care costs on millions of middle class Americans who already have insurance, and Democrats will get the blame for it. We’ll be seeing news stories for years to come about insurance folks rolling in piles of Obama-cash as they make fortunes writing all the new policies the government is going to be forcing their way, while most of the rest of us end up no better off than before. The takeaway message will be, “Healthsource and Aetna got insurance company welfare; hospitals, drug-makers and suppliers got more patients and more business; but I got higher premiums and deductibles to foot the bill for the formerly uninsured, in the face of still-soaring costs.”

3. It is mistaken to think this bill will be a “starter home” that Congress will then get to work on fixing up and trading upward in the months and years to come. The bill will create an even stronger private health care special interest lobby than already exists, one that will get to work immediately with their government sponsored cash windfall, lobbying to shut the door forever on progressive health care.

4. The argument of the day seems to be that any time you have the option of passing something that makes things marginally better, and passing nothing at all, passing the marginal improvement bill is better. But that’s not the way legislation works. Every time a major piece of legislation is passed, a tremendous amount of political and legislative capital is expended on getting he bill done. Deals are made; secret understandings are inked with invisible blood; interests are paid off; bureaucracies are created; bargains are made with donors. You don't get more than one shot.

5. Obama made a point of setting himself up to be the “last president” to deal with health care. Once this bill passes, the national Democratic Party and its wealthy donors will pat themselves on the back, say, “Damn, I’m glad that’s over!”, and run off to some more pleasant and less politically demanding issue. Health care reform will be done and dead for a generation.

I remember a televised interview I once saw with a young ballplayer who learned his business from his Hall of Famer teammate Frank Robinson. Robinson, whose arm had grown old and sore, told the young player that he only had one good throw in his arm per game, so he saved it for a meaningful play. He didn't try to throw a guy out going first-to-third in the second inning. he waited. Democrats don't have many strong throws in their arm. We shouldn't waste one on this bill.

"...even without a public option, undertakes major cost reduction measures that I've outlined in some detail above."

I don't believe you did, Fred. Most of the provisions you described - prohibitions on cost discrimination and excluding pre-exiting conditions and the like - are actually likely to push costs up, not down. The modest cost reduction measures you then called "noble efforts". That revealing terminology in itself reveals that you, yourself recognize that they are mostly iffy and quixotic tilts at windmills.

The whole trick to this reform effort was to do something about driving costs way down, by taking on a wasteful and profit-flooded national health care complex, so that the country could then afford the health care equity that progressives seek. By failing to take on the vested interests, by failing to understand and address the inherently redistributive requirements of national health care reform, by mandating new insurance requirements that many will find onerous, and by doing a bill that jacks up the taxpayer and consumer obligation to pay for socially expanded health care, without extracting the compensatory benefits for those same taxpayers and consumers, the lame centrist liberals who run the Democratic Party have come up with an anti-middle class turkey of a bill that will become a political albatross around our necks.

("reply" isn't working for some reason -- this is in response to one of Fred's comments above)

Of course Dr. Dean wants the process to continue and to result in a better bill -- no one is questioning his devotion to the cause or his knowledge of the health care issue. If it were possible, even probable, that would happen, we'd all be right there with him! BUT this is where - I think - he's displaying a tin ear.

If the Senate doesn't come out with a bill, which could then go to conference and to a vote in both houses, then the will - the political will - to continue working on this issue is going to be gone, dead, over with ... until another Dem president someday (in the next generation)does his/her duty and picks it up again.

As best I can recall, the Clinton effort didn't result in any final, conferencned bill that was voted down in some big show. It just ..... ended. The effort became futile and people turned to more "solvable" problems. That may not be accurate - does anyone recall?

That's why passing something now - even if all it does is address the "small issues" of pre-existing condition, exclusions, etc. - is important. To date, there has never been anything that landed a glove on the ins cos (except things they agreed to) -- that's why they are fighting so hard still against a bill that per Dr. Dean is a "gift" to them. A journey begins with a single step; a fight begins with a first blow landed. If we are "too good" or "too purist" to ever accept a half-loaf or even a quarter-loaf ... then we're never going to get anywhere.

Why -- if this bill is such a gift to the powers that be -- are they still doing everything they can to get it defeated? Because they don't want it to even get to conference - they want to *continue* to send the message that this is a topic that you cannot address without devastating political loss. That's my take, anyway.

And one point regarding the mandate. A big problem now is that most of the public is either against this bill (or the very effort to make change) or lukewarm in their support of it. A mandate is going to make every single citizen a participant in the issue -- which could lead to very different results if public option or even single-payer is brought up again in a year or two years. That's the biggest, most important missing piece: lack of public pressure for progressive change.

You need to at least have a possible path to victory -- that's what Dean's advice lacks. In theory he makes good sense, but without the public or political will to sit down and try to "improve" the current version, as a practical matter it's just ...... dumb. THIS is what the ins cos really want: for the Dems and progressives to give up altogether and just go away, without landing a blow or picking up even a crumb.