Obama's Last Plea For Health Care Reform...A Rush Job

Pres. Obama: "Last chance" for health reform


In a provocative argument designed to rescue his foundering health-care plan, President Barack Obama will warn Senate Democrats in a White House meeting Tuesday that this is the "last chance" to pass comprehensive reform.

Obama will contend that if it fails now, no other president will attempt it, aides said.

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer told POLITICO: "If President Obama doesn't pass health reform, it’s hard to imagine another president ever taking on this Herculean task. For those whose life's work is reforming health care, this may be the last train leaving the station."

Previewing the message, Vice President Joe Biden said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe": "If health care does not pass in this Congress ... it's going to be kicked back for a generation."

The new argument comes as the Senate races to pass the measure by Christmas, in the face of a costly setback this week. Senate Democrats say they are prepared to drop a plan to expand Medicare coverage after Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said he could not support it.

That could keep the bill alive but would infuriate the party's liberals, who feel the moderate Lieberman has thwarted them once again.

Biden said on MSNBC: ""Say it ain't so. ... Joe is a great guy. ... I think Joe's judgment is wrong on this."

Senate strategists say the current impasse will have to resolved in the next couple days in order to allow passage by year's end.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) declined to say whether the Medicare expansion would be dropped and was waiting for congressional scorekeepers to put a price tag on the plan before making a final decision.

But several senators — including Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) — said it appeared Democrats faced with the reality of needing Lieberman’s vote to get to the 60 needed for passage, would drop the Medicare expansion.

“The general consensus was, we shouldn’t make the perfect the enemy of the good,” Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) said after leaving a caucus meeting. “And if in order to get all the insurance reforms accomplished, a number of the other good things in the bill, dropping the Medicare expansion was necessary, then that’s what should be done. And it appeared that would be necessary to get the 60 votes.”

Asked if Reid explicitly dropped the Medicare plan, Bayh said, “That’s what it sounded like to me.”

For his part, Lieberman said he had not received a promise that the Medicare buy-in idea would be dropped from the bill. “Not an explicit assurance, no,” Lieberman said.

“This is a classic case where you have to bring 60 people together. There are more than me that had concerns about different parts of this bill, but I think we’re making progress,” he said. “I think we’re in the reach of a very significant accomplishment. ... It will change the lives of people forever.”

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) also said it appeared Democrats were moving toward a bill without the Medicare option. “It looks that way,” Harkin said.

Added Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), a big supporter of the public option and the Medicare idea, “Things are not moving in the right direction.”

The move came after two days of high drama over health care, with Lieberman saying he’d fight the Medicare plan and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel urging Reid to cut a deal with Lieberman on reform, according to a source close to the negotiations.

Reid has no margin for error and needs Lieberman’s support to get the 60 votes needed to pass reform. So Democrats, after a late-afternoon caucus meeting, sounded resigned to giving up on the idea of allowing Americans ages 55 to 64 to buy into the popular insurance plan for seniors — which Lieberman and other moderates worried was too much like the “public option” that they had long opposed.

But talk of dropping the Medicare expansion angered the party’s liberals, who can’t believe a senator who no longer considers himself a Democrat is in the position of effectively vetoing a key part of the health reform bill. Liberals supported the Medicare expansion as a way to cover more of the uninsured in a government plan.Already, there was talk of retaliating against Lieberman, much as some Democrats sought to strip him of his Senate Homeland Security Committee chairmanship after he campaigned for Republican Sen. John McCain for president in 2008.

“The anger toward him right now is white hot,” said one senior Democratic aide.

President Barack Obama has called the Democratic Caucus to the White House for a meeting Tuesday.

Lieberman threw health care reform into doubt Sunday when he told Reid that he would join a filibuster of the bill if it allowed older Americans to purchase coverage in Medicare. That came just days after Reid had announced “broad agreement” on a bill that included the Medicare buy-in and plans to create a national health plan with private insurers.

That plan was itself a compromise from Reid’s original bill, which included a public health insurance option with a chance for states to opt out of the plan. Reid dropped that measure because of objections from moderates, including Lieberman, who threatened to filibuster that plan too.

Earlier Monday, Reid was described as so frustrated with Lieberman that he was not ready to sacrifice a key element of the health care bill and first wanted to see the Congressional Budget Office cost analysis of the Medicare buy-in. The analysis is expected early this week.

Democrats shared the majority leader’s frustration. In interviews with POLITICO, senior Democratic aides and senators laid out a range of emotions toward Lieberman — from outrage over what they believed was Lieberman’s blatant attempt to kill the bill to surprise over Lieberman’s apparent reversal on the Medicare buy-in, which he has supported in the past.

“It was a surprise to us because we felt that he was favorably inclined toward the package that came out of the negotiations, and we were working from that premise,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

On whether punishment should be levied, Durbin said: “That has not been discussed, and it won’t be. We’re going to get this bill passed.”

Among liberal activists, the anger grew as well. Adam Green, spokesman for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said going through the budget reconciliation process is the way to make Lieberman “irrelevant. ... Taking away Lieberman’s chairmanship is the way to teach a lesson to others.”

And some of Lieberman’s moderate colleagues seemed perplexed as well.

“Sen. Lieberman, it’s my understanding, proposed a similar measure [a] few years ago,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) . “So I’m not sure why he’s having a hard time with it today.”

Lieberman comments against the Medicare plan Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” set off a series of private meetings between the Senate leadership and top White House aides, including Emanuel, who recommended that Reid cut a deal, the official close to the negotiations said.

The White House issued a statement saying it is on the same page as Reid, working with him to find the best way to move forward with reform — not pushing him to do something he doesn’t want to do.

“The White House is not pushing Sen. Reid in any direction,” Pfeiffer said in a statement. “We are working hand in hand with the Senate leadership to work through the various issues and pass health reform as soon as possible.”

Democrats had only limited options to move a bill ahead:

• Reach an agreement with Lieberman, which would mean stripping out the provisions that have kept progressives on board. This would very likely cause problems on the left — maybe even defections — unless the White House steps in to persuade senators such as Feingold and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

• Win over Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), but she has also voiced serious reservations about the Medicare expansion and has resisted Democratic pressure to speed up the bill.

• Use reconciliation, a procedural maneuver to get around a filibuster and the need for Lieberman’s vote. It remains on the table, but it’s not a viable option at the moment, the official said.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), a liberal who voted to strip Lieberman of his chairmanship after the 2008 election, when Lieberman supported Republican John McCain, said he’s not “giving up” on wooing Lieberman. “I don’t want to make threats [against] anybody; it’s not my place to make them,” he said.

But Sen. Kent Conrad, a fellow centrist, said Lieberman has “every right” to take that position, should “absolutely not” be punished and wasn’t the only one worried about the Medicare buy-in. “It’s very clear — he vocalized concerns many were having,” Conrad said.

Still, within top offices of the Senate, there was clear concern that Lieberman seemed to be moving the goal posts. Lieberman has voiced support for a Medicare buy-in in previous campaigns, as well as in September, when he told the Connecticut Post that he supported the idea of expanding the entitlement program to people age 50 and over.

Marshall Wittmann, a Lieberman spokesman, said the senator voiced support for the Medicare buy-in before the Finance Committee approved a bill with subsidies for people across the board, including those ages 55 to 64. “The buy-in is completely unnecessary because of the strong subsidies in the core legislation,” Wittmann said.

What Democrats are particularly concerned about is waiting until next year to pass a bill, fearing that a laundry list of unfinished items will continue to pile up and give opponents ammunition to paint Reid and the Democratic leadership as having had an ineffectual year.


Sources: Politico

Lieberman Refuses To Support Public Option...Boldly Disses His Critics

"If the public option plan is in there, as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote. I believe that more debt will lead us into a greater Recession."









Joe Lieberman slams Public Option; brushes off critics



Sen. Joe Lieberman’s threat to filibuster any health care bill with a Public Option could kill health reform this year — and embolden Democratic challengers who’d like to send him packing in 2012.

But Lieberman doesn’t seem worried.

“I don’t think about that stuff,” Lieberman told POLITICO this week. “I’m just — I’m being a legislator. After what I went through in 2006, there’s nothing much more that anybody [who] disagrees with me can try to do.”

Lieberman left the Democratic Party in 2006 after liberal Ned Lamont beat him in Connecticut’s Democratic Senate primary. Lieberman defeated Lamont in the general election and returned to Washington as an independent, where he continues to caucus with Democrats — even though he accuses them of engaging in a bit of bait and switch when it comes to the public option.

“It’s classic politics of our time that if you look at the campaign last year, presidential, you can’t find a mention of public option,” Lieberman said. “It was added after the election as a part of what we normally consider health insurance reform — insurance market reforms, cover people, cover people who are not covered.

“It suddenly becomes a litmus test. I thought Democrats were against litmus tests.”

Despite the strong words against some in his old party, Lieberman still entertains the idea of a reunion. Asked this week if he might run again as a Democrat in 2012, Lieberman smiled and said, “Yeah, sure.”

“I’m for health care reform,” Lieberman told POLITICO. “And, of course, this will all be over by then, and I hope we will be strongly supporting health care reform. I haven’t changed my thoughts about 2012, which is, I’m keeping all my options open.

“The wonderful thing of being an independent: You have options.”

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), No. 4 in the Senate GOP leadership, said if Lieberman wants to become a Republican, he “would be welcomed, and there would be a real effort to make him feel at home.”

But when it comes to the Democratic Party, political experts and polls suggest that Lieberman’s options may be more limited.

“My sense is that when he announced he would filibuster the public option, he was saying goodbye to the Democratic Party,” said Doug Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac University poll in Hamden, Conn. “My sense is, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

In a new Quinnipiac poll, Connecticut voters said by a 2-to-1 margin that Lieberman’s views on the issues put him closer to Republicans than to Democrats. And just 12 percent of the respondents said he should run as a Democrat if he runs again in 2012; 55 percent said he should remain an independent, while 20 percent said he should cross over completely and run as a Republican.

In an interview, Richard Blumenthal, the state attorney general, said he’s getting more encouragement from Democrats in Connecticut to consider a challenge to Lieberman in 2012. A February Quinnipiac poll found that Blumenthal would beat Lieberman by a 28-point margin.

A September Research 2000 poll found that Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell would defeat both Blumenthal and Lieberman in a potential three-way 2012 matchup; the same poll found that 68 percent of the state’s voters support the public option.

Blumenthal has long signaled an interest in the seat and may have an opening now that Lamont appears to be prepared to run for governor and Rell has announced she won’t seek a third term next year.

Blumenthal said he was first focusing on his own reelection bid in 2010 before “considering other options” for the 2012 cycle.

“I’m disappointed by his threat to filibuster and effectively kill all health reform,” said Blumenthal, adding that there have been “depths and breadths” of anger at Lieberman over his position on the public option.

Democratic strategists in the state said that Blumenthal may not be alone in sensing an opportunity against Lieberman, with some also pointing to two-term Rep. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) as a potential challenger.

George Jepsen, a former state party chairman and former state Senate majority leader, said that Lieberman may be attempting to endear himself to GOP voters, since he could potentially win in 2012 by picking off 75 percent of Republican voters, about half of the independent vote and about one-quarter of Democrats.

“He’s really burned every bridge in sight,” Jepsen said of Lieberman’s relationship with the Democratic Party.

Lieberman, the Democrats’ 2000 vice presidential nominee, campaigned for Republican John McCain in 2008 and criticized Democrat Barack Obama on foreign policy issues. Sympathetic Democrats have long insisted that Lieberman is an important ally on domestic issues. But by vowing to block a vote on the public option, he has distanced himself from the party on a key domestic policy front.

Lieberman said it’s the “wrong time” to create a government insurance program, claiming it would increase the national debt, probably raise taxes and increase premiums for insurance holders.

But Democrats said that Lieberman is employing GOP talking points in distorting the virtues of a public option, noting it’s the one entity that could control costs — by adding a major new provider to the marketplace that would force private insurers to reduce their costs. And while other centrist senators have expressed reservations about the public option, no Democrat has gone so far as to threaten a filibuster, which could only be defeated with 60 votes.

Lieberman said he won’t block efforts to begin the debate, but he will filibuster a public option to end the debate.





The Public Option in the real world


Like many other doctors, I've been looking at my panel of patients and trying to decide whether a "public option" in health reforms will help them. Unfortunately, I can't think of a single patient where it will.

As an internist, I have a varied practice, with patients ranging from rich to poor, from chronically ill to "worried well." On any given day, I see at least one quarter of cases (including Medicaid patients) without charge; one or two come in without insurance and pay me cash. Most of the time, I accept the patient's HMO or Medicare without looking closely at how much I get paid.

The biggest problem I'm having now is the shrinking network of doctors to refer my patients to for procedures or specialty evaluations. The public option won't help here — and could make things worse.

All the health-reform bills include hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare and/or Medicaid payments to hospitals and physicians; inevitably, more and more of my colleagues will decline to play ball with public insurance. And if there is a public option, the private HMOs will have to cut their reimbursements to us in order to compete — so that more doctors will drop out of private insurance, too.

My patient Jeff (not his real name) works part-time as a janitor and doesn't quite qualify for Medicaid. He has catastrophic-type insurance with a high deductible that doesn't cost him very much but covers serious illness. I see him for his high blood pressure and charge him a minimal amount.

A bit of a hypochondriac, Jeff calls me often for reassurance, which I happily give. He'd likely qualify for a public option — and be liberated to go to the emergency room for a minor complaint whenever I was unavailable, which he's reluctant to do right now. (After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, similar unnecessary visits to the ER rose.)

My patient Celine is a 50-year-old administrative assistant at a small advertising firm. She can barely afford her share (about half) of the premiums for her basic, no-frills HMO coverage. With a troubling family history of breast cancer, she's comforted by the idea that a public option would provide better, cheaper insurance than she has now. But I worry that her employer might be more inclined to "dump" insurance — and that the public-option insurance will prove unacceptable to the doctors she's used to seeing, just as Medicaid is.

After all, Celine's HMO is still useful — I can find her a gynecologist I trust to give her routine exams, an excellent gastroenterologist to perform her screening colonoscopy and a radiologist to do her yearly mammogram. "Be careful what you wish for," I tell her.

I have discussions with my patients every day about the health reforms before Congress.

A patient who's moving to Nevada doesn't understand why she can't keep the low-cost insurance she has. If insurance were portable, she says, there could be more competition. The public option might provide portability, I tell her — if you qualify, and it's available in both the states you're moving between. More important, it's unlikely to provide coverage much better than Medicaid. There are better ways to get portability — starting with reforms to let people buy insurance across state lines, the way large companies do now for their employees.

Another patient, reaching 65 and considering retirement from his accounting firm, fears that Medicare will soon lose its purchasing power, that resources will be shifted away from it to pay for the public option. "Bad time to be 65," he says.

The problem is worse than he thinks: I have to admit to him that, if I can no longer order the tests and treatments I think will help him, I might have to drop out of Medicare myself.

"I'll continue to see you for a minimal charge," I tell him. But he isn't comforted by that — focusing instead on the promise he thinks the government made to him 40 years before.



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Sources: Politico, CBS News, Fox News, NY Post, Firedoglake, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google Maps

Senators Lieberman and Graham Threaten To Block Or Filibuster Release Of Detainee Torture Photos

Politico----

The Senate and House may be on a major collision course over the possible release of those photographs of detainee interrogations.

In an incendiary joint statement, Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham are threatening to use any means possible — including a filibuster — to block the House from overturning their amendment blocking the release of detainee interrogation photos.

Some House Dems were incensed when the pair — with the backing of the White House — inserted a three-year ban on Freedom of Information Act releases of the pictures without notifying them.

After initially saying she'd back the ban, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is apparently wavering under pressure from the left wing of her party.

Word that Pelosi was on the fence prompted Graham and Lieberman to blast away, according to a snior Senate Democratic aide.

Calling the release of the so-called torture pics tantamount to a "death sentence" for some U.S. operatives working in hostile countries, Lieberman and Graham took the unusual step of vowing to attach their ban to every piece of legislation passed in the upper chamber if their amendment is removed from the war supplamental.

Their statement:

“We will employ all the legislative means available to us including opposing the supplemental war spending bill and attaching this amendment, which was unanimously adopted by the Senate, to every piece of legislation the Senate considers, to be sure the President has the authority he needs not to release these photos and any others that would jeopardize the safety and security of our troops.

“The release of the photos will serve as propaganda and recruiting tool for terrorists who seek to attack American citizens at home and abroad. We should strive to have as open a government as possible, but the behavior depicted in the photos has been prohibited and is being investigated. The photos do not depict anything that is not already known. Transparency, and in this case needless transparency, should not be paid for with the lives of American citizens, let alone the lives of our men and women in uniform fighting on our behalf in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

“Let it clearly be understood that without this legislation the photos in question are likely to be released. Such a release would be tantamount to a death sentence to some who are serving our nation in the most dangerous and difficult spots like Iraq and Afghanistan. It is this certain knowledge of these consequences of having the photos released that will cause us to vote against the supplemental and continue our push to turn our important amendment into law.”

Sources: Politico, Washington Post