Re: POLL: Nearly Two-Thirds Of Americans Want Congress To Keep Trying On Health Care
Despite what you hear from the Republican leadership in Congress claiming that Americans don’t want health care reform, there is yet another poll out today that states otherwise:
A large majority of Americans still want Congress to pass health care reform, according to early results from a Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Tuesday.
The study showed that Democrats were twice as likely to support reform compared to Republicans, but that overall 63% of the country favors continued action.
Respondents were asked, “Do you think lawmakers in Washington should keep trying to pass a comprehensive health-care reform plan, or should they give up on comprehensive health-care reform?”
Democrats responded “Yes” 88% of the time, Republicans 42% and independents 56%.
The poll also found that the public puts slightly more blame on the GOP than President Obama — though there’s plenty to go around:
Nearly six in 10 in the new poll say the Republicans aren’t doing enough to forge compromise with President Obama on important issues; more than four in 10 see Obama as doing too little to get GOP support. Among independents, 56 percent see the Republicans in Congress as too unbending and 50 percent say so of the president; 28 percent of independents say both sides are doing too little to find agreement.
The GOP claims that they have had a bipartisan agenda on health care reform from day one. Can you believe that? The Senate HELP Committee bent over backwards to include Republican amendments to the mark-up, and they still try to blame Democrats as being partisan. The version that was passed was open to amendment on the floor of the Senate and the Republicans took advantage of it. Most of the Republican amendments failed. Why? Most were attempts to kill the bill, stall the bill, humiliate Obama, and offerings that were purely right-wing talking points meant to just waste time and grandstand. In other words, the Republican Senators offered nothing substantial. Here is a couple of the Republican amendments copied here from Slate.com, who kept track:
Republican Sen. Mike Crapo’s motion to strip the bill of any provisions that will result in a tax increase for individuals earning less than $200,000 or families earning less than $250,000 (text, floor statement). The obvious point of this amendment was to embarrass President Obama for violating his promise that health care wouldn’t impose taxes on this group (which, for the most part, it won’t). Failed Dec. 15, 45-54.
What makes Crapo’s amendment so stupid is that there are no provisions in the bill that imposes tax on those who make less than $200,000 in the first place.
Republican Sen. Judd Gregg’s amendment (2942) (text, press statement) requiring Medicare savings to be used to “save Medicare.” Gregg is the author of a Dec. 1 letter to fellow Republicans offering parliamentary tips on how to obstruct health reform. So don’t waste too much attention on this. Failed Dec. 7, 43-56.
They had their chance to add constructive measures to the health care bill, but they did not attempt any serious governance. Why? It is their position to set back an criticize putting all the responsibility on the Democrats. The Dems complained that the right has not offered anything useful, true, but the Republicans don’t care. They are playing a different game. Their agenda is to gain back power, not govern.
Republican leadership gets in front of the cameras at press conferences and make wild claims that a majority of Americans don’t want this health care bill. They are not entirely wrong because the key word is “this” bill. Right-wing mouth-breathing bottom-feeders got worked up to a froth this past summer over Obama’s plan to execute their grandparents and the reason I mention this here is because the those protests were not grassroots, rather top-down driven events for the purpose of spoiling any real insurance reform. The insurance industry and Pharma pumped cash into the organization of the protests and insured the media was on hand to televise the paid hecklers at Democratic Representatives and Senatorial town hall meetings. The campaign to smear health care reform worked to a degree. Now the Republicans in charge can boast that Americans are against it.
But, according to many polls like the one that came out today, a big majority of Americans are actually FOR health care reform.
Republicans aren’t concerned about the whims of the majority. What does concern them are the cares of the right wing minority, which they keep amply supplied with reasons to be against Obama and health care reform. They care about how they can use the health care debate to propel their propaganda.
What can the Dems do to counter their strategy? They can simply do the right thing and pass health care reform anyway, preferably with the public option.
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Tough Going Getting Votes for Health Care Reform
Re: Robert Reich: It’s Time to Enact Health Care Reform With 51 Senate Votes, Robert Reich, Former Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley Posted: February 21, 2010 04:59 PM
Robert Reich is asking a pertinent question. Why, indeed, hasn’t the Senate Democratic Leadership pushed to use the reconciliation process for health reform?
The answer is, of course, that a health care reform bill has already been passed in the Senate. What we are looking at now is getting a compromise bill passed in both houses. Mr. Obama wants to mold a compromise bill that will appeal to everyone, including the progressive caucus in the House, and then (don’t laugh) garner enough Republican votes in the Senate to overcome the cloture threshold – 60 votes. Tall order.
Robert Reich has run around the Senate asking the primordial question, “Why can’t Democrats pass something with 51 votes?” He posted the responses:
I doubt that the responses were as simplistic as he has stated, but I have no argument with them other than they are silly. The one that I want to focus on is number 4:
Reich calls the Senate Democrats “spineless” if they cannot come up with 51 votes and then goes on to compare Obama to Johnson, who somehow arm wrestled the Senate and passed Medicare by glaring hard under his eyebrows. The folks on the hill told Reich that there was not 51 Democratic votes for certain compromises, and I think this is true. There are many conservative Democrats and Independents who depend on large donations from big Pharma and the insurance industry to survive their campaigns back home. There are at least 14 “conservadems” if I may quote a term from Rachel Maddow, and their votes on health care reform aren’t guaranteed. The group of conservative Dems include but are not limited to:
Evan Bayh (IN)
Tom Carper (DE)
Blanche Lincoln (AR)
Ben Nelson (NE)
Bill Nelson (FL)
Mark Udall (CO)
Claire McCaskill (MO)
Mary Landrieu (LA)
Kay Hagan (NC)
Mark Begich (AK)
Joe Lieberman (CT)
Herb Kohl (WI)
Jeanne Shaheen (NH)
Mark Warner (VA)
What Reich is not saying here is that the Democrats aren’t considering reconciliation for the public option. He asked staffers and anybody else he could find about reconciliation for health care reform, not the public option. Sadly, have to speak in terms of reconciliation to pass any health care reform, never mind the public option.
But all is not lost. There is a push going on right now among progressive Senators to gather enough votes to pass the public option through reconciliation. Senator Michael Bennet (CO) has written a letter to Harry Reid demanding that the public option be passed separately using the reconciliation process. There is a movement by MoveOn and some other groups including Credo to have us voters urge our Senators to become signatories on the letter. So far, 20 Senators have signed the letter, and that includes the support by Reid.
But here’s the even sadder sad part. They still need another 31 Senators and it is very unlikely they will get them for reasons mentioned above about the “conservadems”. The public option is dead in the Senate, and now it appears it is also dead at the White House.
It is the conservative Democrats who are holding up everything from health care reform to the newly proposed “Consumer Protection Agency”. So the answer to Reich’s question is not in the process, the reconciliation versus the supermajority, but in the attitude of certain Democratic Senators and what it takes for them to get reelected. No, Mr. Reich there is not 51 votes for reconciliation, but not because of the reasons you posted.
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