Senate Democrats confidently advanced health care legislation Sunday toward a make-or-break test vote in a push for Christmas-week passage. Republicans vowed to resist what they appeared unable to stop.
Under Senate rules, Democrats needed 60 votes on three separate occasions to pass the measure. The first and most critical test was set for about 1 a.m. Monday. Democrats said Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson’s announcement Saturday that he would vote for the bill gave them the support they needed.
While most Americans are sleeping… yet no one seems to care.
#20 My first reaction to your shocking discovery was that deal making to pass legislation is ordinary, so WTF is LibertyLoser complaining about.
My second reaction was, $45M over a decade? Is he serious. I think the military spends $45M A YEAR on bubblegum (to give away).
#21, Perhaps you should read the rest of the article . . .
And if “free” Health Care was so important, why should a Senator want $45M to vote for it?
You are treading in quicksand if you think this was standard deal making. This was not a compromise.
This was outright bribery and you know it.
Quoted from Campaign For Liberty:
Left-liberal Glenn Greenwald points out that the health industry’s stocks are exploding as Obamacare comes close to passing. This bill is a huge gift to big business, as much as its supporters and some of its opponents claim otherwise. In another post, he notes that the tea party movement and the progressive left, the latter of which opposes a health insurance mandate so long as it doesn’t have a public option, are actually more in agreement than people realize as it concerns their opposition to corporatism:
It’s certainly true that health care opponents on the left want more a expansive plan while opponents on the right want the opposite. But the objections over the mandate are largely identical — it’s a coerced gift to the private health insurance industry that underwrites the Democratic Party. The same was true over opposition to the bailout, objections to lobbying influence over Washington, and most of all, the growing anger that Washington serves the interests of financial elites at the expense of the working class.
Whether you call it “a government takeover of the private sector” or a “private sector takeover of government,” it’s the same thing: a merger of government power and corporate interests which benefits both of the merged entities (the party in power and the corporations) at everyone else’s expense. Growing anger over that is rooted far more in an insider/outsider dichotomy over who controls Washington than it is in the standard conservative/liberal ideological splits from the 1990s.
It’s about time