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  1. stumbler

    stumbler Porn Star

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    I know, I thought about that after I posted it that no one in Congress has had that kind of nerve but even on the wishful thinking in it would be a great turn around.

    Me too. I still think the public option insurance program is something that would really work.

    This is about the only way it can work. There is no competition between health insurance companies and adverse selection will always be a factor.

    Just going ahead and paying for health care through taxes would be our best option, I think. But it may be another generation or so before the truth of that can be seen.

    But what we've got now is at least something as opposed to nothing.

    PS President Obama is out still selling the health care reforms again and seems to be gaining momentum.
     
  2. Kimiko

    Kimiko Porn Star

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    I agree....how could they be opposed to that? Plus, if the government is as inefficient as they keep saying it is, how could a government option even begin to take away business from those wonderful for-profit health-insurance companies? They would have nothing to fear....
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Mar 25, 2010
  3. Foeofthelance

    Foeofthelance Porn Star

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    Because its not a real choice. "Either sign up with an insurance company who helped us write the bill, or we tax you and sign you up for our service. Oh, and if you decide to go buy something thats actually worth the value, we're going to tax that, too. And while we're at it, this doesn't apply to us. OH! Before we forget, we reserve the right to change this agreement when it suits us."

    Gee, wonder why this might annoy people?

    What bothers me is all of you, you Kimiko, Stumbler, King, and so on, celebrating a bill that forces people to sign up with the companies that you've been railing against for more than 30 pages. Why? Because they called this "reform"? Its the same damned political scheming that;s been going on for years, has yet to deliver on any of its promises which it can only doubtfully even attempt, sets a bad example of granting the government ridiculous power, and doesn't solve the problems it set out to solve, namely the premiums required by the insurance companies! Forcing people to buy a product is not how you keep the price down! The question isn't why are we opposed, but why aren't you?
     
  4. King Nothing

    King Nothing Porn Star

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    I've spoken out against the private mandate repeatedly (including in the post quote from the post you quote).
     
  5. Kimiko

    Kimiko Porn Star

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    I've said many times that this isn't the bill I would have hoped for. I'm opposed to an insurance mandate IN THE ABSENCE OF the public option, because I want people to have that choice if they're going to be forced to purchase insurance.

    So the question is, why were YOU opposed to THAT?

    The fact is, I celebrate passage of this bill because Republicans made it Obama's Waterloo, and refused to cooperate. Because YOU decided that you were going to bring down Obama's presidency at all costs, regardless of whether or not anyone might benefit from health care reform. And he packed it in your collective asses, to use a crude phrase. :)

    And I also celebrate it because it accomplishes some very good things. I wish it could have been better, and I hope it will be improved upon over time. It's a start.
     
  6. stumbler

    stumbler Porn Star

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    Oh hold 'er there Foe. You don't get to make up arguments for me. Right off the top of my head two things I'm celebrating is insurance companies not being able to abuse the power and profit they've got to screen anyone for pre existing conditions or dropping them entirely. And while I would prefer a full fledged public option insurance program, I'm damn sure willing to try the exchange idea. It also addresses several other concerns not the least of which is our current health care system and the way we pay for it is mathematically unsustainable.

    I'm damn sure willing to try something else besides what we've already been subjected to for the past 100 years.

    And you God Damned right I believe health care is a right. And so do you if you'd stop all this conservative propaganda for a minute and actually think about it. We already recognize health care as a right because we damn sure don't deny it to anyone. But that puts us in an emergency situation that makes prices sky rocket instead of health care management and access which can actually cut costs.

    But don't go accusing me of being a hypocrite because I at least support the changes we did get and can only blame the republicans and religiously blinded democrats for getting less than I hoped for in health care reform.
     
  7. King Nothing

    King Nothing Porn Star

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    I think the mandate is a step in the wrong direction. I believe it gives too much power to the corporations that are inhibiting health care reform now and will make it harder down the road to enact more progress. I believe that the mandate counteracts a lot of the good that comes with the rest of the package.

    That being said, the rest of the package is wonderful for America and is exactly what we need.
     
  8. Foeofthelance

    Foeofthelance Porn Star

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    I'm not arguing that health care isn't a right. I'm not trying to say that reform is a bad idea, since it isn't, and I never have. What pisses me off is that we've been handed a clunker and you guys act like its gold.
     
  9. stumbler

    stumbler Porn Star

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    I've been waffling on this during the entire debate. I wanted to see President Obama and the Democrats just really run with it and make real reforms. But then I have to wonder, no matter how much I wanted that, was it a political possibility.

    I decided at one point President Obama might have been smarter than I gave him credit for. From setting a deadline that was sure to be missed, to the allowing the issue to reach a stalemate in congress, and the length of time before he personally stepped out.

    But especially beginning with his State of the Union Address, while they might have made some rookie mistakes in a couple places, I think they got the best they could have for right now, simply because people fear change so much they can only take so much at one time.

    In all looking back and around I'm feeling pretty good about it and I think it may have really turned things around for Obama and the democrats. And of course if that's true it just goes to prove they were wrong and should have just gone for it.

    Love this politics American style, don't you?:)
     
  10. stumbler

    stumbler Porn Star

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    Bullshit Foe. I think this is a poor excuse for what's really needed and that we're going to be working on this for he next decade. We have to. The problem is not solved. But this is the fucking best we could have got out of the fucking system we got.
     
  11. King Nothing

    King Nothing Porn Star

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    You know, I consider myself pretty well-informed and educated as to American politics. However - I'll tell ya what. I've learned more about obscure Senate and House rules in the last 3 months than I learned in 5 years of college! :p
     
  12. stumbler

    stumbler Porn Star

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    I was aware of Reconciliation and some of the house stuff from back in the Contract On America fiasco, but I also became aware of stuff I'd never heard of. I'll bet they usually keep that "Deeming" bullshit hidden under some bench until the vote themselves a pay raise or something.

    I was also lost over the President signing the bill into law even though it still had to go back to the Senate. WTF was that?
     
  13. King Nothing

    King Nothing Porn Star

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    That's Reconciliation. I was already pretty familiar with Reconciliation specifically because the Bush tax cuts were passed while I was in college. I was a little surprised that it wasn't common knowledge until I realized, "Oh yeah. My neighbors are dumb."

    I'm upset that Bobby Byrd, the "staunch constitutionalist" of all people, cooked up Reconciliation. It seems to fly in the spirit of the Constitution where the House is supposed to have the power of the purse. They sign the budget into law first to keep the government running.

    In the early 70s, when all the Dixiecrats jumped ship and became Republicans, the Democratic majority in the House became very ideologically liberal almost overnight. They hated the filibuster coming out of the 50s and 60s that had been used to hurt so many people, so there was a strong movement in the House to pass a budget that the Senate wouldn't accept to force the government to shut down and highlight the idiocy of the filibuster to the American people. The Senate's answer was Reconciliation. Essentially, the Senate said to the House, "Pass something we can accept and we'll fix it without the filibuster."

    It was a shitty compromise by wimpy House moderates that continues to haunt any attempts at reasonable progress in this country, and more often than not, in practice has fueled growing income inequality by being a vehicle to protect tax cuts for the rich.
     
  14. Deleted User kekw

    Deleted User kekw Porn Star Banned!

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    I agree. The bill is crap as it is.
     
  15. deidre79

    deidre79 Supertzar

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    Still praising Obamacare? pathetic. Tell me...why did we pass this bill if Obama is still trying to sell it?... :)




    Updated March 25, 2010
    Congressional Staffers Complain About Double Standard in Health Care Law

    By Jana Winter
    - FOXNews.com

    Select congressional leadership staffers -- some of whom wrote the health insurance act -- are not governed by new rules governing millions of Americans and the rest of their colleagues on how they buy insurance -- and the special exemption has the Hill hopping mad.

    Come 2014, all 100 U.S. senators, all 435 representatives in the House and every one of their personal aides will have to go to the newly formed state exchanges for health insurance -- just like everyone else in the country who isn't covered by their employer.
    But select congressional leadership staffers -- some of whom wrote the health insurance act -- won't. And neither will White House staffers and Cabinet members -- nor the president himself. They will be allowed to keep their current plans, which are offered to all other federal employees.

    And now many congressional aides who like their current health insurance policies and will be forced to switch are asking: Why?

    They want to know: If an exchange is good enough for them, why isn't it good enough for the people who wrote the plan? Why isn't it good enough for the president and his Cabinet?

    Mass e-mails have been circulating among congressional aides on both sides of the aisle as they voice their objections to what they are calling a double standard in the health care law President Obama signed on Tuesday.

    "If it's such a good bill, why did the people who wrote the bill exempt themselves from it?" asked a Republican aide who requested anonymity. "With this administration it's always, 'Do as I say, not as I do,' just like paying your taxes!"

    "If we're forced on the exchange, then everyone should be," a Democratic staffer said.

    "If this health care bill is so great, then why are Obama's staff exempt?" a GOP aide scoffed. "If we have to give up our health care, then so should every federal employee."

    Members of Congress and their staffers currently select their health insurance plan from the pool of health care policy options that are available to all federal employees. But under the new law, unlike other federal employees, they will be required to purchase their insurance from the state-run exchanges when that part of the law goes into effect in 2014.

    But the provision appears to exclude leadership and committee staff, giving the appearance that those who wrote the bill wrote themselves out of this requirement.

    The White House is also exempt from moving from the current federal employee plan to state-run exchanges, although the White House said Wednesday that Obama will participate in the exchanges if he is still president in 2014.

    It remains unclear why the law was written this way. Efforts to understand the reasoning behind the carving out of leadership staff from this part of the new law were unsuccessful. Phone and e-mail requests for comment from the committees involved in the drafting of the Senate bill were either directed elsewhere or not returned.

    A Congressional Research Service report stated that the definition of the law as it stands now would likely be interpreted as applying only to congressional members' personal staff, and exempting both leadership and committee staff.

    The definition of "congressional staff," according to the CRS report, could be interpreted narrowly to refer only to staff members directly affiliated with a member's individual or personal office. As an example, that would mean that staffers who work with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's constituents out of her California office would be classified as "congressional staffers" and have to switch over to the exchanges -- but the staffers who work in association with her role as speaker of the House would be allowed to keep their current policies.

    It is still unclear if congressional offices will get subsidies to pay for their employees or if staffers with income below the pay threshold will get subsidies to buy insurance for themselves. Calls to about a dozen different offices yielded the same response: No one seems to know yet exactly how to interpret the law.

    A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid acknowledged that some committee staffers are exempt, but said leadership staff will have to buy into the exchanges like other Capitol Hill employees.
    But Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he believes the current wording means that committee and leadership staff in Congress, as well as the president, vice president, the Cabinet and White House staff, will continue to access the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program, while all other congressional staffers will have to find their insurance policies on the exchange.

    A Democratic aide said he thought it would be difficult enough under the new law to figure out how to navigate his insurance, but he wouldn't mind as much if everyone else had to do the same.
    "It appears that some of my colleagues will not have to make these changes, which is annoying to say the least," he said.
    "The president continues to say if you like the health care coverage you have, you can keep it, and it's simply not true," said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner. "This is just one example of the bad consequences of this law."
    "Large parts of this bill were thrown together hastily and behind closed doors, I'm afraid this is not going to be the only surprise going forward," he said.

    Grassley and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., are heading the charge to introduce legislation that would require all federal employees to have the same health care requirements and options. Both made efforts to close this loophole last year, but the Senate rejected Grassley's amendment in December.

    "If this amendment isn't passed, then President Obama will not live under the Obama health care reforms, and neither will the congressional staff who were most responsible for helping to write the overhaul," Grassley said in a statement to FoxNews.com on Wednesday. "That sends a message to the people at the grassroots that the health reforms are good enough for you, but not for us."

    But a spokesman for Reid said Coburn's objection to the law was disingenuous, charging that Coburn himself had created the "two-tiered" status.

    "In his rush to make political statements instead of policy achievements, Senator Coburn clearly wasn't paying attention to what he was doing," Jim Manley said.

    "The amendment that created this committee and personal office distinction was authored by Senator Coburn. It's WORD for WORD what Coburn proposed in Committee.

    "If he wonders why committee staff aren't in the exchange, perhaps he should ask himself," Manley said. "Senator Coburn's newest complaints on health reform are too little, too late."

    But Coburn said Reid's spokesman has it all wrong.

    "This special deal for unelected staff underscores everything the public detests about the arrogance of power in Washington," he said. "I tried to fix this inequity along with Senators Grassley, Burr and Vitter, but Majority Leader Reid obstructed our effort."
     
  16. deidre79

    deidre79 Supertzar

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    Updated March 24, 2010
    The Democrats' Hypocrisy Is Staggering

    By John Lott
    - FOXNews.com


    Our public servants must to be governed by the same rules that the rest of us mere mortals have to obey.

    With legislation encompassing almost 3,000 pages, it will take time to find out exactly what the mandates in the newly passed health care law mean for America. After all, it wasn’t until the end of last week that the reconciliation bill was even made public. But here's something we already have uncovered. And it's shocking. -- In addition to all the special favors doled out to various congressional districts, it turns out that the congressional staff who wrote the health care bill put in special favors for themselves, too.

    While everyone else in the United States -- from the top corporate executives to the grocery store checkout clerk -- will be forced to buy their insurance through heavily regulated state-run exchanges, the health care bill excludes one group: the leadership and committee staff. Yes, that’s right. The very people who wrote up this bill are refusing to be included themselves. Given the narrow definition of “congressional staff” on page 158 of the health care bill, the Congressional Research Service memo believes that courts will not require “professional committee staff, joint committee staff, some shared staff, as well as potentially those staff employed by leadership offices” to go through the exchanges. President Obama and his family are also exempt from the law.

    Insurance plans will only be allowed in these exchanges if they meet rules governing benefit packages, quality standards and measures of uniformity of enrollment procedures. And it doesn't stop there they must also meet the rules about provider networks, the right kind of rating system, outreach, reinsurance and risk adjustment, and a variety of other federally determined processes. If these regulations are so wonderful, Americans have a simple question: what is it that Democrats know about the state-run insurance exchanges that make them want to avoid them?

    The answer seems obvious. These regulations will raise costs, not lower them as the president promised, and lower the quality of medicine that policyholders receive.

    Jim Manley, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's spokesman tried to put the best spin on this by telling Politico that they didn’t want language that would have required “people like legislative counsel, Architect of the Capitol, etc.” to be included in the exchanges. Though he made it sound like this was a matter of technical language, there remains the fundamental question of why anyone, especially somebody putting together and advocating this very bill, should be exempt in the first place. These public servants must to be governed by the same rules that the rest of us mere mortals have to obey.

    Democrats have no obvious explanation about why this provision was quietly inserted into the health care bill. Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) warned that he and other Republican Senators tried to fix the problem of staff being excluded from the rules. “I tried to fix this inequity along with senators Grassley, Burr and Vitter, but Majority Leader [Harry] Reid obstructed our effort,” Senator Coburn said.

    Obviously, the Democratic leadership knew full well that the bill they passed on Sunday with such fanfare is going to make things worse for the vast majority of those who are already insured. There is no other reason why the staff that wrote this bill would exempt themselves. The anger over the Democrats’ hypocrisy should be deafening.
     
  17. deidre79

    deidre79 Supertzar

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  18. Kimiko

    Kimiko Porn Star

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    Most of you know that while I ultimately supported passage of the health care reform legislation, I felt strongly that it didn't go far enough. It's ironic to me that conservatives persist in trying to portray this bill as "radical reform" and a "government takeover", when it's actually a very conservative bill by any measure. I would have preferred, and still would prefer, a single-payer, government-sponsored program of universal health care. Some people call it Medicare For All.

    Here's a pretty good articulation of why I feel that way.

    Viewpoints: Health bill will only entrench power of the insurance industry

    Special to The Bee

    Published Friday, Mar. 26, 2010

    To those led to believe that, as President Barack Obama claimed, the passage of the health care bill is "comparable to the passage of Medicare and Social Security" and that "every American will be guaranteed high quality, affordable health care coverage" as a result of it, my advice is to hold off on uncorking the champagne.

    For one, Social Security and Medicare were public programs that from their inception offered immediate benefits to millions of ordinary Americans, who for the first time could rely on old-age pensions and access health care services that until then had been completely out of reach.

    By contrast, this "historic bill," instead of eliminating the root of our health care woes, further enriches and entrenches a profit-driven health insurance industry that makes money when it succeeds in not paying medical bills.

    How so? It forces millions of Americans to buy the insurance industry's shoddy products or pay a fine, even as it offers eligible ones subsidies – courtesy of taxpayers – to purchase those products.

    Sound familiar? It should. The bill consolidates the transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street of the last decades, only second to the recent, similar transfer implemented under the dubious claim that otherwise the economy would disintegrate.

    I'm the vice president of the California branch of Physicians for a National Health Program, a group that advocates for a publicly financed, privately delivered national health program.

    Some of us have been called party spoilers by continuing to criticize Obama's health reform plan. Yet here are some facts about the bill that supporters of reform need to consider:

    • Millions of middle-income people will be mandated to buy commercial health care policies costing up to 9.5 percent of their income. Yet those policies will cover as little as 60 percent of "covered services," leaving them vulnerable to financial ruin if they become seriously ill. So yes, over 30 million Americans will be "covered" by this bill, but by an umbrella full of holes under pouring rain.

    • People with employer-based coverage will be locked into their plans' "preferred providers' networks." So yes, workers will "keep their plans if they like them" (assuming they can afford the ever-increasing prices and don't lose their jobs, or their employers don't drop their plans), yet will have to keep them even if they don't like them.

    • Insurers will be handed at least $447 billion in taxpayer money to subsidize the purchase of these policies, which will further empower the insurance industry and its ability to block future reform.

    • Health care costs will continue to skyrocket because the bill will do nothing to reduce the $400 billion wasted every year pushing paper to market thousands of plans and separate people according to eligibility criteria, services covered, etc.

    • The much-vaunted insurance regulations – e.g. ending denials on the basis of pre-existing conditions – are riddled with loopholes. For instance, older people can be charged up to three times more than their younger counterparts, and large companies with a predominantly female work force can be charged higher gender-based rates at least until 2017. Policies can still be canceled in case of "fraud or intentional misrepresentation," the No. 1 excuse insurers use to cancel policies today.

    • About 23 million people will remain uninsured nine years out, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That translates into about 23,000 unnecessary deaths annually.

    Did it need to be like this? Not at all. All the good provisions in the bill, such as funding community health centers, could have been adopted as stand-alone measures.

    Instead, Congress and the Obama administration have chosen to burden ordinary people with a "uniquely American" individual obligation to buy flawed private products.

    Social health insurance in the form of single-payer health care will sooner or later have to be adopted, not because it is politically feasible, but because it is inevitable.

    As Harvard professor William Tsiao (the brain behind Taiwan's single-payer system) argued, you can have universal coverage, lower costs, and improve the quality of care, but you need a single-payer system to achieve that.
     
  19. RandyKnight

    RandyKnight Have Gun, Will Travel

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    Thanks for posting...This is why I did not like the bill......
     
  20. deidre79

    deidre79 Supertzar

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    Not one response? or defense from liberals of my three posts above? too much. Then Jeckle not Heckle posts the usual pandering and that is why you disagree with the bill? I have been laughing all morning at the leftist deities here and the minions who worship them...oh great leader! oh great leader! please save us all... :) *not_secure_link*www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_l8KK3gGxQ



    March 5, 2010
    Why the Health Care Bill is a Failure

    By Charles Krauthammer

    WASHINGTON -- So the yearlong production, set to close after Massachusetts' devastatingly negative Jan. 19 review, saw the curtain raised one last time. Obamacare lives.
    After 34 speeches, three sharp electoral rebukes (Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts) and a seven-hour seminar, the president announced Wednesday his determination to make one last push to pass his health care reform


    The final act was carefully choreographed. The rollout began a week earlier with a couple of shows of bipartisanship: a Feb. 25 Blair House "summit" with Republicans, followed five days later with a few concessions tossed the Republicans' way.

    Show is the operative noun. Among the few Republican suggestions President Obama pretended to incorporate was tort reform. What did he suggest to address the plague of defensive medicine that a Massachusetts Medical Society study showed leads to about 25 percent of doctor referrals, tests and procedures being done for no medical reason? A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of Obama's health care bill.

    As for the Blair House seminar, its theatrical quality was obvious even before it began. The Democrats had already decided to go for a purely partisan bill. Obama signaled precisely that intent at the end of the summit show -- then dramatically spelled it out just six days later in his 35th health care speech: He is going for the party-line vote.

    Unfortunately for Democrats, that seven-hour televised exercise had the unintended consequence of showing the Republicans to be not only highly informed on the subject, but also, as even Obama was forced to admit, possessed of principled objections -- contradicting the ubiquitous Democratic/media meme that Republican opposition was nothing but nihilistic partisanship.

    Republicans did so well, in fact, that in his summation, Obama was reduced to suggesting that his health care reform was indeed popular because when you ask people about individual items (for example, eliminating exclusions for pre-existing conditions or capping individual out-of-pocket payments) they are in favor.

    Yet mystifyingly they oppose the whole package. How can that be?
    Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning. Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home delivered. Provision 3: A dozen red roses every Tuesday. You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.

    However (life is a vale of howevers) suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed -- say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak was to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?
    Perhaps something like 3-1 against, which is what the latest CNN poll shows is the citizenry's feeling about the current Democratic health care bills.

    Late last year, Democrats were marveling at how close they were to historic health care reform, noting how much agreement had been achieved among so many factions. The only remaining detail was how to pay for it.

    Well, yes. That has generally been the problem with democratic governance: cost. The disagreeable absence of a free lunch.
    Which is what drove even strong Obama supporter Warren Buffett to go public with his judgment that the current Senate bill, while better than nothing, is a failure because the country desperately needs to bend the cost curve down and the bill doesn't do it. Buffett's advice would be to start over and get it right with a bill that says "we're just going to focus on costs and we're not going to dream up 2,000 pages of other things."
    Obama has chosen differently, however. The time for debate is over, declared the nation's seminar leader in chief. The man who vowed to undo Washington's wicked ways has directed the Congress to ram Obamacare through, by one vote if necessary, under the parliamentary device of "budget reconciliation." The man who ran as a post-partisan is determined to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy despite the absence of support from a single Republican in either house, the first time anything of this size and scope has been enacted by pure party-line vote.
    Surprised? You can only be disillusioned if you were once illusioned.


    really? :rolleyes: