Senate Finance Committee votes against the public option
The healthcare reform debate resumed today and in a small victory the Senate Finance Committee voted to kill the public option. Ignoring the public sentiment Senators Jay Rockefeller and Chuck Schumer introduced separate amendments to the healthcare reform bill that would have added the public option to the bill. Both were rejected.
The pendulum has swung once again on this debate. Every time that we hear that the public option is dead somebody performs CPR on it and revives the debate. The American people have spoken, we told the government exactly how we felt about the public option but people like Rockefeller and Schumer seem to have forgotten that it is the people who hire them. They work for us, the represent us. We are their boss and we have told them “NO PUBLIC OPTION!”
Luckily the majority of the Senate Finance committee were smart enough to listen, even if it was only because they are afraid of losing their re-election bid, and have voted down both amendments. But this is not the end, we can all rest assured that the public option will come up again and again and again during this debate.
Because of this it is more important than ever that you keep calling your senators and your representatives to voice your opposition to the public option. The public option proponents are relentless, they know that if the people lose interest in the debate they will be able to sneak the public option into the bill. That is why we must stay vigilant.
This may have been a victory but it was only a single battle in the healthcare war.
America's Watchtower 
I was glad to hear the public option was voted down, but I will be very surprised if the final bill does not contain said public option. People like Nancy Pelosi have no intention of allowing anything less.
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They are not going to give up, they don’t care what we think. I think the bill will have some sort of public option also.
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I agree to a certain extent with Larry in that I think there is better than a 50/50 chance that the final bill will contain the “public option. Nancy will push hard for this, but Harry is up for re-election this year and at the moment he is on shakey ground, however he will need massive support from the DNC to maintain his seat in the senate so he may push hard for the option—seems that way at the moment.
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I am still cautiously holding out hope that the public option is dead, but I know that the left will never give up and that they will try to the bitter end to have it included.
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I keep thinking that the single payer scheme will not die, but “go to sleep” only to rise again later, much like the amnesty bill that just won’t die.
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Even if it is dead now it will not stay dead. That is why we need to have this whole bill killed.
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I think we need to push to kill “health care” legislation altogether.
The problem I see is that whatever the Senate comes up with will be combined with HR3200 in reconciliation. And the problem with HR3200 is that it is not a “health care plan”, it is an infrastructure to set up a commission that will be able to enact anything they want outside the checks and balances of Congress.
Anything that is not specifically forbidden in the final bill can end up the law of the land through fee schedule adjustments and rule changes at the administrative level. That was how they ended up with smokers and the overweight excluded from all except emergency care in the UK… a rule change that refused medical assistance to those who chose to live “hazardous life styles” (and apparently, the gay life style is not regarded as “hazardous”, even though promiscuity is clearly one of the most dangerous lifestyles of the 21st Century). I have a personal friend in England who has a thyroid condition who was in the midst of having her medications adjusted when the overweight were kicked off of standard care and put on “emergency-only”. She was trying to get her meds adjusted because she was still gaining weight. Suddenly, she could no longer go to have her meds adjusted because her situation was not an emergency… it was an adjustment. This woman has a KNOWN thyroid problem, and she can’t get her meds adjusted to deal with it properly. 😦
This is exactly the kind of hole Murphy creates when he invades an oversized system.
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I went off on a tangent and lost track of my line of thought.
What I’m suggesting we DO is support the creation of smaller legislation, such as a specific tort reform package, a specific support bill for medical savings accounts (with tax priviledges, etc), that sort of thing. The entire notion of a bill that’s so damned big and mumbo-jumbo NO ONE will read it is inexcusable.
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Agreed! Start with tort reform and go from there with a much smaller bill.
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