Once the deals got made to get Lieberman and Nelson on board for the health care vote, some of my lefty colleagues took up arms against the bill, saying it was horrid and gave too much to the insurance companies. Additionally they felt sold out by the Administration because there was no public option and no appearance that the Administration really fought for it.
Leaving aside everything else, I don’t see what leverage the Prez or the Senate had to persuade Lieberman to go along with them, so he was in the catbird seat, and we’ve all seen that Joe’s a “Me first, me last, me all the time” kind of guy for whom the greatest good of the greatest number is meaningless. That being the case, he had to be appeased, and removing the Medicare buy-in and the public option was his price.
Nelson was apparently bought off with sort of “normal” horse trading activity, so that was less smelly to me.
Is the bill perfect? Nope. Is it tolerable? Well, I’ll take 30 million currently uninsured Americans getting health insurance as a result of its passage, thanks.
You know what bugs me? Lieberman and Nelson, sure. But what reaaaaally bugs me is that all this attention is getting paid to 2 or 3 Senators who are needed to break a Republican filibuster and none to the fact that it’s a Republican obstructionist filibuster at the heart of the matter.
Why are we yelling at 2 guys when there are 40 sitting on their asses doing nothing but saying “NO!” to 30 million Americans?
Somehow, other than James Fallows at the Atlantic, the press hasn’t noticed that. He makes a great case for getting rid of the filibuster here.
And then there was today’s editorial in the S.F. Chronicle which pointed out that Ben Nelson, and Mary Landrieu, and Joe Lieberman have been blocking this thing at every turn, and their states are getting serious gravy in this bill – while California, whose senators have pushed unwaveringly for health care reform for months, is stuck with the lowest Federal match for Medicaid dollars in the country. Ben Nelson’s Nebraska will now get the Medicaid expansion for free, just because he’s a sanctimonious bastard. Fallows is right – we have to lose the filibuster.