Kill the bill. Even the cast of Moonbats is winding up massive opposition and outrage.

What started as a trickle of leftward opposition to a health-care reform bill stripped of a public option has grown into a torrent, as the liberal punditry is alive today with a single common theme: in the absence of public competition for private insurers, a federal requirement that Americans purchase health insurance is unacceptable.

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Update 12:59 P.M.: President of the mammoth Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Andy Stern (a frequent White House visitor) has written a letter to members urging Congress and the White House to deliver real and meangingful reform. The letter is diplomatically-worded, but it does criticize the Reid bill for not making care sufficiently affordable, burdening the middle class with taxes on insurance benefits, and eliminating the public option—“the best way we saw possible to hold insurance companies accountable.”

Updated 12:10 P.M.:

—Jon Walker at FireDogLake says that keeping the individual mandate in the bill without the option of a government-run insurance is akin to “sell[ing] the middle class into corporate servitude” and that progressives “should fight with any means available” to stop it. Walker calls the mandate a “private tax that would use the IRS to steal huge amounts of money from the pockets of hard working middle class Americans, and force them to hand it over to poorly regulated, massive, for-profit health insurance corporations in exchange for near-worthless junk insurance.” (Elsewhere, Walker answers 20 Questions posed by Nate Silver on why the new Reid bill is unacceptable to progressives.)

—Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos calls it “unconscionable to force people to buy a product from a private insurer that enjoys sanctioned monopoly status....Without any mechanisms to control costs, this is yet another bailout for yet another reviled industry. Subsidies? Insurance companies are free to raise their rates to absorb that cash. More money for subsidies? More rate increases, as well as more national debt.”

—In an e-mail to supporters, Howard Dean followed up on his call for Senate Democrats to kill the Reid bill, saying the individual mandate “doesn't actually “cover” 30 million more Americans - instead it makes them criminals if they don't buy insurance from the same companies that got us into this mess.”

—EmptyWheel calls the bill “neo-fuedalism” and condemns the “nonchalance with which we’re about to fundamentally shift the relationships of governance....We don’t mandate tithing corporations in this country–at least not yet.”

—Keith Olbermann of MSNBC weighed in last night with a “special comment”: “[T]his bill costs you the left —and anybody who now has to pony up 17 percent of his family’s income to buy this equivalent of Medical Mobster Protection Money. Some speaking for you, Sir, have called the public option a fetish. They may be right. But to stay with this uncomfortable language, this bill is less fetish, more bondage.” Olbermann concluded: “The mandate in this bill … must be stripped out...It is above all else immoral and a betrayal of the people who elected you….Pass this at your peril, senators, and sign at yours, Mr. President.”

For once, they are partly right. Because they want to kill it, not because they'd probably prefer to start over with a State monopoly.

Between the deficit, the denial of the impacts of Climategate destroying the climate narrative, and attempting to foist this 'reform' which is nothing but a power grab on an unwilling public from all sides no less, this administration has cratered into a circus in less than 12 months.

This is what you get when you elect someone who is an affirmative action Chicago thug with no experience and less sense.

Pass this at your peril, senators, and sign at yours, Mr. President

Is Olberführer threatening the president ?

Just asking....

If all we end up with from health care reform is a boost to private insurers in the form of a mandatory insurance requirement, I say kill the bill and let the country go broke from medicare entitlements by 2050.

...or they could reform medicare too, so it doesn't waste all its vast resources and can become sustainable again.

It started out as what ? A program that ran in the hundreds of millions annually ? And it's increased in cost a thousandfold since then ? I see no reason it couldn't be effective at 10% of its present cost if not for all the waste.

What strikes me is the Democrats apparently continuing to refuse to consider the proposal to end the bans on buying health insurance across state borders. This seems to me to be such a good idea that even the Democrats would include it in their bill.

If I am mistaken, and the Dems have responded to this idea, please let me know. I'd love to hear what they say about it.

Or do they refuse to even consider it, maybe because it would motivate the states to reduce the draconian regulation they have placed on the health insurance industry? Or are they themselves in the poickets of the insurance companies, which is what they accuse opponents of their reform of being?

Why would that interest them ? What does it do to transfer power to the federal government, or to line their pockets ? What does it do to buy them votes or make people dependent upon them ?

Can you see why they will never back such an idea ?

I've been away from the news, TV and pretty much all media for a while. I did however, almost fall out when I heard Dean on Rush the other day That's the first time the man has made ANY sense in his entire life. In my best Dean scream............
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAAAAAAAAAAAAWWW WWWWWWW!!!!

I don't think those democrates are going to purgatory. There's no such thing. Hopefully, if there is a hell, they'll go there. But sometimes, I get to thinking hell is what we are in right NOW

Originally Posted by SaulOhio

What strikes me is the Democrats apparently continuing to refuse to consider the proposal to end the bans on buying health insurance across state borders. This seems to me to be such a good idea that even the Democrats would include it in their bill.

Never happen. This would end each state's ability to hamstring it's own insurers with mandates. The goal is more control, not less.

The only time actual reform, not involving handing more power to the people already screwing it up, is going to take place is when the dems are in a small enough minority to have the few sane-ish bluedogs back the R's in reforming health care as it should be done.

tort reform
drop state mandates
allow free market pricing
and more

More trouble from the left..

Update: 2:48 P.M.: More union trouble for the Reid bill, as AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka just released a statement more forceful than Stern's. Trumka calls the Senate bill “inadequate” and “too kind to the insurance industry.”

“[T]he Senate bill will not check costs in the short term, and its financing asks working people and the country to pay the price, even as benefits are cut,” he said.

The letter ends by calling the House bill is the “model for genuine health care reform.”



Update: 2:37 P.M.: More on SEIU President Andy Stern, who in a letter to members called on Congress to improve the Reid bill before passage, but now seems to a want a swift Senate vote so that differences can be ironed out in conference.

Stern told The Hill's Jeffrey Young that “it's time for the senators to have a vote. Let the chips fall where they may.”

He told Congress Daily's Anna Edney that “it’s time for the Senate to move this bill on to conference where the real work needs to get done.”

Update: 1:22 P.M.: Just got to Dana Milbank's column, which puts the health-care revolt in the context of broader dissatisfaction on Obama's left flank—something Milbank problematically calls Obama's own “tea parties.”

Update 12:59 P.M.: President of the mammoth Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Andy Stern (a frequent White House visitor) has written a letter to members urging Congress and the White House to deliver real and meangingful reform. The letter is diplomatically-worded, but it does criticize the Reid bill for not making care sufficiently affordable, burdening the middle class with taxes on insurance benefits, and eliminating the public option—“the best way we saw possible to hold insurance companies accountable.”