The Senate bill, that is:
In a blow to the bill grinding through the Senate, Howard Dean bluntly called for the bill to be killed in a pre-recorded interview set to air later this afternoon, denouncing it as “the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate,†the reporter who conducted the interview tells me.
Dean said the removal of the Medicare buy-in made the bill not worth supporting, and urged Dem leaders to start over with the process of reconciliation in the interview, which is set to air at 5:50 PM today on Vermont Public Radio, political reporter Bob Kinzel confirms to me.
Apparently, it isn’t just Markos Moulitsas who’s saying that the bill isn’t worth passing. So, Nate, is Howard Dean crazy?
And Burris is next I hear . . ..
Timing is the problem. Sooner or later, Congress is going to want to recess, and going back to the basics on the bill would require weeks more of fresh negotiations, with little guarantee of support.
Frankly, the line at Fire Dog Lake and some of the other progressive blogs is persuasive. The healthcare plan is all cost and unpopular mandates. I see bipartisanship forming.
I love it, no matter how you slice, using Nate’s graph, health care costs are not impacted on bit. And apparently Nate and other progressives believe in a big room full of money in the government somewhere and that he wont have to pay that subsidy.
“We’ve told everybody they get to have health insurance, in fact they must have health insurance, but they won’t be able to afford it.” — Lynn Woolsey (D-Cal)
Dean was on MSNBC a short while ago, saying something like ‘this is too expensive, it isn’t reform of health care, it isn’t even reform of health care insurance.’