The far left turns against the senate version of healthcare reform

  In an effort to win one senate vote– Joe Lieberman’s– in order to pass the  healthcare reform bill, the senate has alienated many on the far left. Harry Reid gave Joe Lieberman the concession that he sought by dropping both the public option and the Medicare buy-in for people 55 or older. While this has successfully won Joe Lieberman’s vote, it may have actually hurt the chances of the senate passing this bill. Those on the  far left  are now opposed to the bill.

  As we can see in this article, influential liberals are coming out in droves to oppose the senate healthcare reform bill.  Liberal talk radio icon, Ed Schultz had the following to say:

 The base is restless. They are wandering in the wilderness, Mr. President. … They want to know, where are you? … Right now, Mr. President, your base thinks you’re nothing but a sellout — a corporate sellout, out that. … The only people who like this current bill right now, Mr. President, is the insurance industry — they get a bunch of new customers

  And he is not alone, Markos Moulitsas– founder of the Daily Koz— said the following:

Time to kill this monstrosity coming out of the Senate.” And “Kos” blogged: “You pass a s——-y program now that further bankrupts our nation, and we won’t be talking about ‘fixing’ it in a few years, but whether it should even exist

  Keith Olbermann on the healthcare reform bill in its current state:

unsupportable … a hollow shell of a bill”: “This is not health, this is not care, this is certainly not reform

  Even the SEIU and the AFL-CIO  oppose the bill without the public option, but perhaps the most damning rebuke of the bill can be read in this scathing article by Howard Dean in which he takes the senate to task for watering down the healthcare reform bill and claims that if he were in the senate he would vote against it.

  As amazing as this might sound, Howard Dean is opposed to healthcare mandates.

Instead, it fines Americans if they do not sign up with an insurance company, which may take up to 30 percent of your premium dollars and spend it on CEO salaries — in the range of $20 million a year — and on return on equity for the company’s shareholders. Few Americans will see any benefit until 2014, by which time premiums are likely to have doubled. In short, the winners in this bill are insurance companies; the American taxpayer is about to be fleeced with a bailout in a situation that dwarfs even what happened at AIG.

  And he is also upset that the public option has been dropped.

progressives have argued that a public option or a Medicare buy-in would restore competition and hold the private health insurance industry accountable. Progressives understood that a public plan would give Americans real choices about what kind of system they wanted to be in and how they wanted to spend their money. Yet Washington has decided, once again, that the American people cannot be trusted to choose for themselves. Your money goes to insurers, whether or not you want it to.

  He also goes on to say something that I alluded to in a previous post, and that is the fact that the senate is now looking to pass ANY bill just so they can have the priviledge of passing something. They have reached the point where they do not even care what is in and what isn’t in the bill as long as they can get the 60 votes they need.

In Washington, when major bills near final passage, an inside-the-Beltway mentality takes hold. Any bill becomes a victory. Clear thinking is thrown out the window for political calculus. In the heat of battle, decisions are being made that set an irreversible course for how future health reform is done. The result is legislation that has been crafted to get votes, not to reform health care.

  For the second time in two days I have to admit that I agree with Howard Dean. That last statement is right on, Democrats no longer are– if they ever were in the first place– concerned about what is best for the American people. They are designing this bill in a manner that they hope will get them 60 votes and they are no longer focused on what they said the original goal was. Howard Dean realizes this, and I think that more and more Americans are realizing it also.

  The conservatives have never agreed with this bill, and the American people as a whole now look upon the bill unfavorably. But now the left is also opposed to the bill. While the reasons for the opposition from the right and the left are for different reasons altogether, it shows us that this bill is in real trouble.

  All of this has happened because Harry Reid gave away a major part of this bill in an effort to win one vote, in doing so it now seems as if this bill is further away from passage than it was before.

 Conservatives are unhappy with this bill, liberals are unhappy with this bill, moderates are unhappy with this bill, and unions are unhappy with this bill. Yet the senate is still going to try to move this bill forward just so that Barack Obama can say that he signed SOMETHING. It no longer matters what the people want, it is all about Barack Obama.