The Unacceptable Senate Bill

Howard Dean is right: Let’s ditch the Senate health care bill.

Without a public option, and without a Medicare buy-in for people 55 to 65, the bill doesn’t do nearly enough.

A better approach, as Dean suggested, would be for the Senate to take up the House bill and vote it up or down under the rules of reconciliation, so that only a 51 majority is needed.

But Harry Reid isn’t up for that. Nor is the Obama Administration.

Let’s remember how we got in this fix.

Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel bollixed this thing from the start.

Instead of proposing their own plan, they tossed the whole ball to Congress.

They took single-payer off the table. (Senator Bernie Sanders, to his great credit, took to the Senate floor on Wednesday to propose a single-payer amendment. See http://sanders.senate.gov.)

They didn’t even propose Medicare for All Who Want It, even though 60 percent or more of the American public want it.

Instead, they continually pooh-poohed the public option.

And they focused all their political attention on Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and now the execrable Joe Lieberman.

They could have chosen a different path.

They could have insisted on Medicare for All Who Want It, and they could have rallied the American people to come to Washington and lobby their legislators for it.

In short, they could have used a grassroots strategy of empowerment.

But they opted for a Washington strategy of appeasement.

And so, as Governor Dean realized, we’re left with a very unacceptable outcome.

Postscript: On December 16, Sen. Bernie Sanders wanted to introduce the first single-payer health care legislation ever to be discussed on the floor of the Senate but Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma forced the Senate clerk to read the entire 767-page amendment out loud, thus bringing all Senate work to a halt. Coburn crowed about this on his website.

After a couple of hours, Sen. Sanders pulled his amendment so the Senate could go back to work.

But listen to this excerpt from Sanders's speech about Coburn's shenanigans--and the need for single-payer.