Health Care Politics Thread

Not entirely, what Gingrich and others did in the past was self-executing rules that allowed stuff to go through without all the normal votes. I see little significant difference.

I vindicate myself.

dteowner said:

Sorry, Thrasher. I've already addressed those situations in post 1048. Mags fell into the same trap as you did. No vindication for you, pal.

Click to expand...

You don't spose I can just take that laying down, I hope.

I don't know who's fallen into what trap, but you're tying your definition to the process being known " also as the Gingrich Rule or Gephardt rule" as stated in a source (the washington examiner) which looks a bit biased judging from the various headlines and tone. No one else I've heard has called it by either one of those names. My sources, the House rules pdf and the roll call article, refer to it as the self-executing rule only, and the examples I gave are of the exact same type of process as the Slaughter thing suggests.
I'll try to research a bit more to prove more indisputably that Gingrich and other repubs used it many times for many things, dte, but for now I'll rest on that wilsoncenter example of the anti-lobbying legislation I cited. (Because I do have a life...somewhere...)

dteowner said:

Unfortunately, the sidecar markup is the only legislation up for passage (well, technically, not passage under the Slaughter Scam). The Senate bill may or may not have a few common threads with Pelosi's final product, which also applies to the Obama wish list. Will Pelosi-ov wait a week once her drones are done cooking up the bill that isn't a bill? Yeah, not a chance, which means Barack's "transparency" shtick takes yet another hit—rendering "Change We Need" as nothing but empty "Same Ol Same Ol".

Click to expand...

Disregarding the compulsory jeering, I'll allow that it's possible the markup legislation won't be up a full week because of all the hustle going on, though last I heard it would be the markup this week and the Senate vote(final) next week so it could be. Full jeers allowed til then.

I will say that you're missing the general jist of what's happening, though, if you think the markup is gong to result in a significantly different bill than the underlying Senate Bill. All the legal language is in that that encompasses how the reform will work. The sidecar can only address budget related items in order to pass the Senate with 51 votes using reconciliation. What's mainly in there is supposed to be the removal of all the big deals like the Cornhusker thing, and some changes in the taxation methods perhaps. It physically can't make a whole new evil communist Pelosi bill that wipes out the Senate bill.

More evidence that this approach is not new.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100316/ap_on_bi_ge/us_health_care_overhaul

While Republicans also used the tactic when they controlled the House, they are indignant that Democrats would employ it on legislation of such significance.

Click to expand...

Once more, with feeling…

Self-executing rules have been around for decades. The technique is popularly known as the Gephardt Rule, after democrat Dick Gephardt. It was formally defined as an acceptable process limited strictly to budget-related issues, primarily raising the debt ceiling. The Slaughter Scam takes an acceptable budget procedure and applies it to the non-budget issue of health insurance reform. Never been done before, by any party at any time, because it's not what the procedure was designed for. You will note that Pelosi has her drones very carefully going over the changes in her little sidecar to manufacture some budgetary rationale to include it. She has stated exactly that with her own mouth. No spin, no doubting sources, straight from the horseface. Why would she do such a thing? Because she knows that this scam is a VERY shaky bastardization of the rules (by even the most generous evaluation) and that anything that can't somehow be linked to budget with some sort of vague bullshit will immediately invalidate the whole scam.

You should have stuck to self-validation, me thinks. This really is very simple, people. Everything above can be found across the numerous non-partisan references I've put up. I don't understand why I have to keep going over it and over it.

Well, frankly, the process argument is getting in the way of the substance argument here because I actually agree that it's completely stupid to use 'deem & pass' for something like this. It's just…stupid. Everyone is going to know whether you voted for the bill or not, and not voting for it and passing it by not voting for it is the dumbest way to say "I didn't vote for the bad bits but my vote got the bill passed" that I ever heard. Everyone knows this vote will be used against the people who do it by repub opponents, so quit trying to pretend you're not doing something you're damn well doing.
Of course, I still have to refute your arguments. I put it in spoilers because it's dull as ditchwater once you rinse out the pitchforks.

As the fiscal conservative in the house, it's your call whether raising the debt ceiling is less major than passing insurance reform legislation, and I don't mean that snidely—I don't have the skinny on it as a tax and spender.

IMO, what we ought to be discussing is why this is a bad idea, not that something that's been done a lot is unconstitutional because the other party is using it for something different—raising the debt ceiling or reforming the healthcare system, the reason it's used at all is because our politicians are cowards and don't want their actual risky or unpopular votes to be used against them so they find ways of disguising it that oughtn't to fool a head of cabbage.

(Oh, and tying things to the budget argument in the sidecar isn't about pretending to use the Gephardt Rule on them, it's because the full name for reconciliation is actually 'budget reconciliation,' and the up or down vote has to be specifically tied to something with a budgetary impact. That's why they couldn't alter the abortion language using the sidecar.)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100317/ap_on_bi_ge/us_health_overhaul_fact_check

OK, how about, "It's a bad idea because Barack isn't telling the truth about it."

I can definitely pass that one without any argument or arcane procedural hair-splitting. . The stem-winding rhetoric the prez has pulled out in campaign mode the last few weeks does not match the content of the bill in any way. The best you can say about this bill is that it begins the process of addressing healthcare reform. Barely. I could talk about what I hate about it for hours--it would be different than what you hate about it--but that's because it's bad enough to displease impartially.

Right now, despite all the talk about helping people and as I mentioned was going to happen, waving the banner of saving the middle class in everyone's faces so they don't look any further, all that's really going on is a desperate push to save the dems' political bacon and the efficacy of the administration for the next 3 years on the dem side, and a frantic effort to keep that from happening on the repub side. It's all become a huge sell-out and a political quagmire.

There are so many problems with this bill that it's harder to find what's right than what's wrong. And I definitely agree, as I said a few dozen posts back, that in no way can it ever do what Barack and Co are saying it can.

I agree that the bill is somewhat dubious on saving costs. There are some measures in there, but I am still doubtful. But at least it removes things like pre-existing condition clauses and other barriers for folks who can't get or afford health care.

It's the way the mandates are handled that I hate most.

Well this is the system we've got. It was designed to make changes more difficult and ugly than any other democracy than I am aware of. That plus obstructionism is a recipe for angst.

CBO scores are finally out on the bill as marked up up for reconciliation, and will probably push the vote count over the top. Vote is scheduled for Sunday atm. The good news, everything's (supposedly) paid for, the bad news, no one's saying how yet.(Taxes, mayhap?)
http://www.rollcall.com/news/44347-1.html

And this is the kind of publicity/support against the bill neither the Tea Party nor the Republicans ought to really want:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/18/tea-party-protesters-bera_n_504183.html

That CBO report has me very confused. It looks like the balance is Medicare cuts paying for broader coverage, but that runs counter to the dems' propaganda. They've repeated many times that repubs are wrong with the Medicare cut accusation. I also don't get how Pelosi-ov leaps from $940B in cost to $1.2T in savings.

I don't suppose the $20B Pelosi-ov ripped out of the Senate bill (which she's very proud of, apparently) matches the bribes her party put in to buy off Nelson, Landrieu and ilk?

I also get a real bad itch when I see today's graft paid with tomorrow's thrift. The games Pelosi-ov is playing between the 1st and 2nd decade (3rd paragraph from the bottom) worry me, because somehow "tomorrow's thrift" never actually happens.

Not sniping here. I'm genuinely confused by these numbers.

You can read the CBO pdf here( so no 'not on the internets' jeers for this one ), which is mostly tons of tables.
.http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/113xx/doc11355/hr4872.pdf
Also—72 hours notice—the full text of the reconciliation bill is online here:
http://rules.house.gov/bills_details.aspx?NewsID=4606
And here's a simple nonpartisan breakdown comparison of the original House bill, original Senate bill,and the markup at opencongress. Don't know if any of that helps.

I"ll try to explain a little of what I understand about it, (with the proviso that I could indeed be wrong or misled…because, you know, politics…)

1. Medicare: as I've talked about (at tedious length) before— yes, there are medicare program cuts(to providers)— but they are not Medicare benefit cuts(to recipients.) The cuts are supposedly in the duplication and exaggeration of services and payments. (I say 'supposedly,' of course as a matter of routine, since coming from a political party that may just be 90% PR and 10% fact. ) But that's what they're saying. I'm assuming cutting the yearly rise in costs of Medicare by 1.4 points is what's the primary driver to the deficit reduction claims.

2) Comrade Pelosi-ov(gifted with amazing powers in thought control over the Senate writing of the whole bill, and personally singlehandedly scribing the markup) taking out the $20 billion by removing the bribes:
Could possibly be true, but removing the freebies was mostly what the markup was about, unfortunately(read"mags wanted public option"). Still, it's not a bad thing to remove them whatever the political motive, by any means. And I get the impression the 20 bil saved over and above the non-marked-up bill is *everything* done in the markup, including below:

3) Taxes(not really your question, but mine):
There have to be some increases and additions in here. Have to be. The original plan was to tax the insurance plans of people who want the highest and most complete level of coverage and are willing to pay extra( the so-called 'Cadillac' plans) Maybe you can find out more at your despicable rightie sources on that one.

Here's from some firedoglake liveblogging of Fearless Leader Pelosi's news conference:

Questions:
Q: Over $900B. How paid for (that was Lil’ Luke Russert)? Pelosi: We’ll put the complete report on the website. Biggest covering of cost comes from cutting waste, fraud and abuse, largely in Medicare. Remainder comes from a number of things. Our members did not like excise tax. Higher end of that is in the plan, rest will be covered by a Medicare fee on unearned income. [for fee read tax, yes]No cuts in Medicare benefits or increases in premiums. Medicare solvent for 9 more years.

Click to expand...

Anyway, I'm sure more info will be flooding the media waves soon.

magerette said:

And this is the kind of publicity/support against the bill neither the Tea Party nor the Republicans ought to really want:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/18/tea-party-protesters-bera_n_504183.html

Click to expand...

I hope people take note of this. I really shows that these people only care about themselves and not the country. Funny thing, I bet some of these psychos are probably anti-choice too...

By the way, don't you think it's kinda funny that David Beckham chose to fly from the USA to Finland to have his achilles tendon operated on, given our shabby Socialist public health care stuff, and the world's best health care (for those who can afford it, certainly including Beckham) over there? Hmm...

[ http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/8571270.stm ]

It's a terrible comment on the communist world government takeover of healthcare when even elite jocks are such socialists they scorn treatment in the world class (#37 is still world class, right?) American system.

Needless to say, the stuff is all over the papers here. The surgeon has been pretty laid-back about it. He didn't even bother canceling any of his other appointments, or taking X-rays; a routine op is a routine op, no matter what the foot is attached to. The BBC article had a video interview of him. Some of y'all might find it amusing.

(Apparently, Becks's invoice was a measly ten large, including the extra costs of having to put up his wife and bodyguards in the hospital.)

Had he blown out a shoulder or a knee, he would have gone to Dr. James Andrews in Alabama like every other premier athlete in the world. So what? I'm arrogant, but I won't go so far as to claim the best surgeon for every single injury in the world resides in the US. I kinda doubt Beckham was attracted to Finland for the cost savings...

http://dailycaller.com/2010/03/18/d...pt-to-bar-them-from-using-slaughter-solution/

Dems had a chance to come clean on the Slaughter Scam. A few tried. Not enough.

Republicans brought the measure to the floor mostly to score political points, but the showmanship extended to both sides, with Democratic lawmakers blasting the “Slaughter solution” to reporters and then voting against the GOP measure that would have gotten rid of it.

Rep. Stephen Lynch, Massachusetts Democrat, called the “Slaughter solution” an attempt to “obfuscate” but then voted against bringing the measure banning it to the floor.

Click to expand...