Soon we'll find out if the Senate is really going to buck President Obama on the deal he cut with Big Pharma. I wonder how serious this is:
North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan, a member of Democratic leadership, isn't a party to that bargain. "Senator Dorgan intends to offer an amendment to the health reform bill and his expectation is that it will be one of the first amendments considered," his spokesman Justin Kitsch told HuffPost in an e-mail. "Prescription drug importation is an immediate way to put downward pressure on health care costs. It has bipartisan support, and has been endorsed by groups such as the National Federation of Independent Businesses and AARP."
U.S. patients pay far more than the rest of the world for prescription drugs. The Canadian government keeps prices down by using its purchasing power to negotiate for lower rates. Dorgan wants American consumers in on the deal.
A bill to allow re-importation -- S. 1232 - has 30 cosponsors, several Republicans among them, including Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, John Thune (S.D.) and David Vitter (La.).
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill would result in $50 billion in direct savings over the next decade, with $10.6 billion of that being savings to the federal government.
[...] The amendment threatens to blow up the deal Baucus and the White House cut with the drug makers. According to the deal, re-importation would not be part of comprehensive health care reform. And if the measure does save $50 billion, that will come from Big Pharma revenue and take it above the $80 billion in cuts it agreed to over ten years. It puts Congress on a collision course with its trade association, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).
Not to just keep flogging a dead horse endlessly, but it does strike me as worth noting that when you read a puff piece in The New York Times about the Gang of Six bipartisan dealmakers in the Senate that vast power is being wielded by people who, in a democratic system of government, would have almost no power. We’re talking, after all, about Max Baucus of Montana, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Susan Collins of Maine, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Collectively those six states contain about 2.74 percent of the population, less than New Jersey, or about one fifth the population of California. The six largest states, by contrast, contain about 40 percent of Americans...read on
And Max Baucus was leaking out costs today to the media from the Holy CBO that he says gets their bill to cost under the magic 1 trillion mark. Of course the Holy Grail doesn't have all the figures yet, Max says, but he's trying to sell it to the media that way. If the plan doesn't cost anything then it won't do anything. Being obsessed by the Holy CBO has been a huge big mistake. Just to remind you, Max Baucus was instrumental in getting Bush's tax cuts passed back in 2001.
Baucus started his career as a relatively low-profile congressman from conservative Montana but, in recent years, has shown a willingness to stray from the Democratic lines, at times sparking intense fights with the congressional Democratic leadership. He supported President Bush’s trillion-dollar tax cut that mainly benefitted the wealthy in 2001, fought to add a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare (in language pushed by the Bush administration) and sought billions in aid for drought-plagued farmers in his home state.
Former President Bill Clinton, himself a victim of an errant Congressional Budget Office score or two, implied today that the agency wasn't connected enough to the real world to know whether programs would save money or not. Speaking a few days after the CBO estimated that the White House's latest "gamechanger," an independent Medicare Advisory Commission to set prices, would save little money over 10 years, Clinton urged policy-makers -- and here he means Democrats -- to not accept the CBO's scores without adding a dollop of common sense. " I recognize that if you're in that budget office, you've got to project the future," Clinton said. But certain programs would realize savings "regardless of whether the mathematical rules they are now up with will prove it or not." He said that those with a stake in changing the system "almost always get the short end of the stick" when it comes to budget projections.
n order to understand what this really means you you have to recall that there was no discussion, zero, when the last administration asserted without any debate that we were engaged in a war without end, for which costs could not be measured nor should they be. It was accepted by members of both parties as a simple imperative and no discussion of cost-benefit analyses were even on the table. But when it comes to directly benefiting Americans with a life and death threat of another sort, that's all we talk about. This is not an accident
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This whole health care debate has been played very badly. Not getting into the game publicly for so long allowed the right wingers and Evan Bayh Democrats to corrupt the health care messaging. Now we hear that the Blue Dogs have corrupted the EC&C committee also. We'll see what actually happens a little later. People are usually very reluctant to change anything in life, even if it's going to help so it's not a shock that America is split over health care reform in the polls. It's a big deal and in the end people will be more hesitant to actually back change. That's why we need a strong leader to communicate it. That just means the Democratic Party must keep pushing forward. The Republicans went forward with the lunacy of the Terri Schiavo matter even when 79% of Americans were against government intervention in a family matter. That''s their core values. They are birthers. We want real health care reform that will help us all. We believe in America.
You can always count on the Ben Nelsons in Congress to try and destroy any chance we have of health-care reform. He and his five buds sent a letter to President Obama and are asking for a delay in crafting health-care legislation.
A bipartisan group of centrist and conservative senators sent a letter to the Democratic and Republican leaders on Friday urging delay in consideration of health care reform.
The letter, obtained by the Huffington Post, was drafted by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and is also signed by Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.) and Ron Wyden (Ore.). Independent Joe Lieberman (Conn.), who caucuses with Democrats, signed on, as did Maine Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins -- moderates heavily courted by President Obama.
The organized effort to slow down the process is a blow to the reform effort. Obama has pushed hard for a final vote before the August recess, arguing that delaying until September could slow momentum and risk missing a historic opportunity.
It's the same old song being played over and over again by these creeps. And it's the same old tired song we heard back in 1994
If today’s demand by “centrist” Dem Senators that we slow health care reform sounds familiar, that’s because it is: Almost exactly the same thing happened in 1994, courtesy of then-centrist-Senator Bob Kerrey versus Hillarycare.
This is one of the major reasons why our health-care system has remained in shambles for decades. They use the same tactics over and over again because they work. Corporate shills and elitist views trump the hurt that the American family is feeling. President Obama needs to stop issuing orders about deficits and actually get in there and tell these people what he wants.
It's infuriating that suddenly "deficits" are more important than actual reform. Obama is planting the seeds to their own demise by talking up the deficit like it's the Holy Grail. That's just what the teabaggers and conservatives want to focus on in 2010. If you asked most people in America how a large federal deficit hurts them specifically, they couldn't tell you, but just "know that it's bad."
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As I often tell myself, there is rarely any situation in which the attentions of the Republican party can't make it even worse. Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest points out one major problem:
We face a potential swine flu pandemic, and we do not have the people in place in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that we need. Why not? The Republicans are blocking confirmation of Obama’s nominee, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.
Why are they blocking this nomination? Because Gov. Sebelius won’t approve Kansas Republican bills to block abortion even if the abortion will save the mother’s life. They say she is “an enemy of the unborn,” because she thinks doctors should be able to save the mother’s life.
So as you worry about this possible flu pandemic, think about why your government is not yet fully up and running to do its part and protect us. As we saw when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, government-hating Republicans destroyed our ability to respond to emergencies, and instead set up a system where contracts were awarded to cronies who collected the cash but never delivered the services. And now they continue to block our government’s ability to protect us, because they think that a mother’s life is not as important as a fetus.
The Democrats should start a big public relations push to get the Republicans to drop their opposition for the sake of the country.
It might work, but who knows? After all, Republicans always put party above country. Because guess what the Republicans (including "moderate" Susan Collins, helped along by Karl Rove's attacks) stripped out of the stimulus bill? You guessed it: pandemic flu preparedness! (They insisted it had nothing to do with the economy.) From John Nichols in today's The Nation:
When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year's emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.
Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine GOP dealmaker who's been in the limelight this week for helping to pass a watered down stimulus, has been talking a good game about the need to avoid wasting taxpayer money. But it looks like Collins also worked today to strip from the final bill a measure that's crucial to exposing that waste.
Here's what happened:
The House stimulus bill contained a provision designed to protect federal whistleblowers. Currently, those protections are shockingly weak. According to the Project On Government Oversight, whistleblowers who are fired or demoted can file a complaint with a government board -- but over the last eight years, that board has ruled in favor of whistleblowers only twice in 55 cases.
More to the point, the protections were designed to encourage federal workers to point out cases where taxpayer money is subject to waste, fraud, or abuse -- a legitimate concern when Congress spends $800 billion, and one that centrists and Republicans have been particularly exercised about.
Yesterday, 20 members of the House, from both parties, yesterday sent a letter to House negotiators urging them to ensure that the protections remained.
But, according to a person following the bill closely, Collins used today's conference committee to drastically water down the measure, citing national security concerns as the reason for her opposition. In the end, the protections were so weakened that House negotiators balked, and the result was that the entire amendment was removed.
According to the person following the bill, Collins was the "central roadblock" to passing the protections.
But wait, here's the good part!
So when, in the coming months, conservatives start jumping up and down over the fact that money from the stimulus bill is being wasted, as they surely will, it's worth remembering that a key measure designed to help expose that waste was removed from taken out of the bill -- and by a senator said to be a champion of fiscal discipline.
As part of People For the American Way's Save the Court campaign, we're running ads in key states targeting senators who voted against their constituents' interests by supporting George W. Bush's extreme judicial nominees.
The ads below call out senators who sided with Bush when it came to judicial nominees whose decisions had very real — and negative — impacts on families in their state.
I'm a member of PFAW. You can join as well, and your donation will help buy ad time and hopefully help us increase the Democratic majority in the Senate.
By the way, one of the reasons that Dole faces such a tough race? The perception that she is nothing more than an empty suit. In 2006, she only spent 13 days in her state and was rated by Congress.org as 93rd most effective senator. In a field of 100, that's gotta hurt.
Senate candidates Susan Collins (R-Bangor) and Tom Allen (D-Portland) both denounced an ad that hit Collins on her support of the Iraq War.
The ad is from the third party veterans' organization VoteVets.org that opposes the Iraq War.[..]
The campaigns for both Collins, the incumbent, and Allen, a current U.S. Representative, released statement on the ad.
First, the Collins campaign called on Allen to denounce the ad, citing a recent promise Allen made to denounce all third party ads.[..]
One hour later the Allen campaign responded. Communications director Carol Andrews said that Allen would in fact denounce the ad.[..]
Andrews then turned to both candidates' records on the war, criticizing Collins for opposing a deadline for withdrawal.
"Because he feels so strongly about a deadline for withdrawal, Tom Allen has repeatedly voted against measures for funding that do not include binding deadlines for withdrawal," Andrews wrote. "Susan Collins has repeatedly opposed setting timelines or deadlines."
Help me out, why is a Democrat denouncing a VoteVets ad against his rival? Why have they not figured out that they have public sentiment with them to go hard on this Iraq issue? I understand not wanting to go negative yourself, but that's what proxies are for...don't hamstring them, especially when it's the truth.
