Oh please. Republicans are IRRELEVANT, you have 60 votes in the senate, overwhelming majority in the house.

The only one killing real reform is you and the finance committee.

The blame republican strategy might have worked for awhile but People arent stupid

There will be no public option. Obama wants to be the 2012 Democratic nominee. It makes no sense making moderates angry to the point of war. And that is what he will get with this reconciliation talk.

Lots of drivel here this morning!! Yuck.

This is not good. I mean, Democrats are dusting off the same playbook too. They're essentially expecting the more committed players to cave on health care reform.

Anything that's short of universal coverage will be a letdown. I don't necessarily think we need to get there with a public option. We can get there through heavily regulated private insurers, assuming that everyone has to purchase insurance and those who are purchasing insurance outside of the employer channel receive subsidies and rates that would reflect the price employees at large employers pay.

Insurers are going to fight that all the way. But, there has to be some type of mandate. If we go through all of this and only like 10,000,000 more people have health insurance, it will have been a colossal failure. There are 50,000,000 without insurance right now. We have to solve that problem. The public option is one way; the subsidized/regulated private route is another way. But, without some form of a mandate, this whole exercise will have been a failure.

About time we beat this drum. Let Grassley debate himself. Time to attack.

http://www.pufferfishblog.com/

Obama left too much ambiguity on reform?
I want to know who's idea it was, to go into the August Recess, and let AstroTurf Amerikkka have the mic (of course brought to us through the distorted lens of the Corporate Media)? Is that message control? If so, it was the absolute worst example of messaging I have ever seen.
Town-Hall meetings are fine, but nobody needed convincing out there. The People spoke in November.

The November election was ample proof of the American public's desire for healthcare. Every poll out there, for years, has shown roughly 70% approval or drastic reform of healthcare insurance, or single-payer Canadian/UK models. It was topmost in the mind of issue voters.

Bob Reich outlined in his article how fast and decisively you have to move on this kind of reform....Johnson's quote was something like you have to hound congress incessantly, every day.

SO WHY were we throwing this out to TownHall debates? Now I know Obama could not have predicted just how Out-Of-Control the TownHalls would get. But we know there are teabaggers and many astroturf groups. We know that the Corporate Media would, and did, trumpet the hell out of The Crazy and never let a single reasoned voice get on air the whole month. A much more docile and less activist Corporate Media in '94 wrought destruction.

The people who needed convincing, and their spines starched, were the Democratic Legislators. And we have seen a large faction of them break ranks and run.

This whole exercise should have been about getting them to vote FOR their constituents, not against them. And instead, we had the traveling TownHall Three Ring Circus as our prescription for getting the President over the HealthCare Hump?

Pure lunacy.

Again, the people who needed to be convinced, since Inauguration, were the Dem Legislators. We knew the Republicans would follow, or enhance, the 1994 slaying of healthcare blueprint. Only, they have much more Media help and many more tricks (internet) than in 94. And we knew not a single Republican was likely to help healthcare reform.

Convincing the people was an act of foolishness and redundancy. It was the elected Dems who needed shepherding and discipline. Instead, we ended up giving cover to their capitulation and defection with the craziest Month I have ever witnessed.