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Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) says it's either the "bipartisan" Senate bill (you know, the one with no public option, and not much of anything else, and which Republicans aren't even going to be voting for anyway) or nothing:
Well, I think the real question is — if there is a bipartisan bill that comes out of the Senate, and there may well be, because the Baucus-Grassley group is working hard, you've got the Wyden-Bennett bill as you mentioned, which is bipartisan — how do you preserve the bipartisan elements of that bill when you go to conference with the House and you've got people like Speaker Pelosi who are absolutely committed to having the government take over the system? And that I think is the great, is the big hurdle here.
In other words, why would people sign onto a bill in the Senate if they know that the Speaker of the House and the President's people are going to torpedo that bill and move towards the government plan when it gets into conference? So unless the President comes out and says he's for the bipartisan bill as it leaves the Senate, and he's going to stand by that bill as it goes to conference, I don't think you're going to get a bill here.
Whenever one of these senators pops up saying something especially anti-reform or just plain stupid in the healthcare debate, or when someone like Grassley latches on to the notion that healthcare reform is going to kill your grandma, I go check out Nate Silver's chart that lists which senators get the largest percentage of corporate PAC money in relation to individual contributions. What is useful about this chart is that it doesn't just show who brings in the most corporate cash, but how dependent each senator is on that cash compared to the cash they get as donations from their own constituents.
... and whenever I look on that short list of senators most indebted to corporate PAC donations, the anti-reform senator in question is always on that list. Always. In this case, Judd Gregg is #3.
Max Baucus himself is on that list too, of course. As is Grassley. And Conrad. And Nelson. And Enzi. And so on. In fact, Max Baucus' entire bipartisan "negotiating" group -- all six of them -- are on that list.
So golly gee, that one small list of corporate PAC beneficiaries sure seems to have predictive powers, when it comes to what position someone will take in the healthcare debate, and how "concerned" they are about the potential tragedy of government competition against corporate interests.
There's no question but that the goal of those like Grassley, Nelson, Conrad and yes, Gregg is to kill reform dead, or barring that water it down so that it does not so much as strike even a glancing blow against insurance industry profits. That's why we're a hell of a lot closer to seeing a provision out of the Senate mandating that every American must buy private insurance from the companies in question than we are to any provision meant to reduce costs or encourage competition.
But it's important to remember that these people, this small handful of very "bipartisan" senators who are the single biggest roadblock to American healthcare reform, due to their insistence on bending to the needs of corporations to make a profit in the deal, just somehow are coincidentally the very same senators who are most dependent on corporate contributions. When it comes to elections, the people living in the states they represent are not their most important constituents.
Healthcare reform -- the whole concept, the very possibility of reform at all -- is being held hostage. Unfortunately for us, we don't have much hope of coming up with the ransom money. We don't have that kind of cash.
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