Eric Massa in a quandary.
From stargazette.com, this morning, comes Eric Massa’s dilemma with the new health care bill:
“We all know that one in six don’t have health insurance. We all know that we pay more per capita for health care than any other nation in the world. These things need to be addressed, and doing nothing, which is what so many want to do, is simply not an option,” said Massa, D-Corning.
“But I will not vote for a bill that gets it wrong, and if I had to vote today for the current piece of legislation in front of Congress, I would not be able to support it,” he said Tuesday during his weekly teleconference with the media.
(snip)
“Right now, the main crux of cost containment is reducing Medicare payments to doctors, and that’s not a model that’s going to work,” Massa said
I definitely feel for Eric on this one. We’ve waited too long for health care reform to pass the wrong bill. This is 100 years in the making. We have something to work with in HR676. Eric is a co-sponsor. He believes in this bill, as do I.
I wrote a post last week when I was angry. I didn’t publish it cause it had some expletives in there that were not fit for general consumption. I’ve censored it a bit and present it to you here. I’m not convinced this is the right bill:
New Health Care Bill approved by Senate Committee
So the Senate Committee has approved a new Health Care Bill. Really? What was wrong with the old one? Why are we trying to fix what’s not broken?
Read my lips, HR676.
Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the majority leadership, said the efforts to broker a bipartisan deal with Republicans remained on track and Democrats had no intention at this point of pushing health care legislation on their own.
This is not single payer and it is not available on day 1 and it does not cover everybody.
Why are we continuing to try and placate the un-placatable? The Repos are not going to buy into the new Health Care Bill, even if we give them each their own Argentinian girlfriend with glorious body parts in hand to seal the deal. So, instead of trying to make them all stop whining (they need to whine. It’s what they do) why doesn’t the Committee try to do what is best for the masses? Let’s moveHR676 through the house and into the Senate and get the right health care reform on the table once and for all. We’ve got the political capital. “We don’t need no stinkin Republicans!”
Am I angry?
You betcha! ( That’s Palin speak for, “of course I am”.) Why are we trying to piecemeal a different bill starting from the ground up when we could be starting with 676? It’s right there-READ IT
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I am for Single Payer, but know we won’t get close to it as long as we don’t have election finance reform first. Please answer me this, Why in the hell didn’t the Dems go into this fight carrying Single Payer and hang on to it until the bitter end when they negotiated down to a strong Public Option plan? That’s like being in a position to negotiate a raise, and telling your boss that you’ll accept nothing less than 2%, when he was willing to give you 3.5 had you demanded 6 up front. No wonder the Rs think they can run roughshod over us.
Well said, B1/3. But, I’ll tell you why-Max Baucus and others are in bed with the private insurance companies. Single-payer puts insurance companies where they belong-supplementing the primary public plan. Bye-bye record profits. Bye-bye big bonuses. Bye-bye profiting by denying claims.