Allahpundit
HotAir.com
3/16/2010
If you’re wondering why it’s taking them so long to show this bill to the public, wonder no longer. They’re caught in a tangle of benchmarks here: Per The One’s instructions, they need the total package to cost not much more than $900 billion over the first 10 years — according to their own bogus metric, of course — and in order to use reconciliation in the Senate, they need the “fix” to produce savings of at least $1 billion. Oh, and they need to figure out a way to do that essentially by tomorrow if they want to try to vote on this thing by Saturday.
Do note: All of those requirements are politically, not substantively, motivated, including the reconciliation process necessitated by bypassing Scott Brown’s 41st vote. We’re long, long past the point here of crafting the best possible bill to reform health care. All they’re doing now is looking for something that can pass and that can be sold, kinda sorta, as “fiscally responsible.”
A story from Congressional Quarterly reports:..
“Rank-and-file Democrats did not talk about the details, but said that the CBO scores [of the House reconciliation bill] had come up short. ‘They were less than expected’ in terms of deficit reduction, said Rep. Gene Green, D-Texas, who plans to vote for the bill.”…
…You guys know I’m all about the optimism so I’ll leave you with this: “If President (Barack) Obama and the Democrats repeat the mistake of the health insurance reform adopted here in Massachusetts on a national level, they will threaten to wipe out the American economy within four years.” Does that hold true even if we reduce premiums by three thousand percent?…
Read the entire article at HotAir.com
