Obama signs 2010 health care bill-----Nancy Pelosi has federally-financed orgasm.
"My healthcare bill insures we have a permanent Democratic majority. All except those Tea
Party types, swallowed hook, line and sinker my promises that those stupid Americans could":
(1) keep their existing health plans,
(2) keep their own doctors that they like,
(3) keep their 25-year-olds on the family health plan,
(4) never be denied coverage for a pre-existing condition,
(5) sign up instantly on my tech-savvy government Web site,
(6) buy insurance only after becoming seriously ill."
(7) save $2,500 in annual premiums in the bargain....
(8) All without any new taxes.
"Them sonovagun Tea Partiers will rue the day they criticized my wonderful bill."
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/rahm-orders-health-care-article-be-must-read-for-staffers?ref=fpblg
Rahm Orders Health Care Article Be Must-Read For Staffers
ByCHRISTINA BELLANTONIPublishedNOVEMBER 24, 2009, 3:35 PM EST
When President Obama likes a magazine article, White House staffers had better read it.
Obama’s must-read is Ron Brownstein’s Saturday blog post “A Milestone in the Health Care Journey” at the Atlantic’s political Web site.
Politico noted today that Obama found the article, which lauds Max Baucus’ approach to health care, a good summary of the cost controls in the health care bill.
An administration official tells TPMDC that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel assigned the article as homework during a recent meeting.
According to the official, Emanuel told senior staffers “not to come back to the next day’s meeting if they hadn’t read the article.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/11/a-milestone-in-the-health-care-journey/30619/
A Milestone in the Health Care Journey
RONALD BROWNSTEINNOV 21 2009, 11:29 AM ET
When I reached Jonathan Gruber on Thursday, he was working his way, page by laborious page, through the mammoth health care bill Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had unveiled just a few hours earlier. Gruber is a leading health economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is consulted by politicians in both parties. He was one of almost two dozen top economists who sent President Obama a letter earlier this month insisting that reform won’t succeed unless it “bends the curve” in the long-term growth of health care costs. And, on that front, Gruber likes what he sees in the Reid proposal. Actually he likes it a lot.
“I’m sort of a known skeptic on this stuff,” Gruber told me. “My summary is it’s really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can’t think of a thing to try that they didn’t try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here....I can’t think of anything I’d do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn’t have done better than they are doing.”
Gruber may be especially effusive. But the Senate blueprint, which faces its first votes tonight, also is winning praise from other leading health reformers like Mark McClellan, the former director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services under George W. Bush and Len Nichols, health policy director at the centrist New America Foundation. “The bottom line,” Nichols says, “is the legislation is sending a signal that business as usual [in the medical system] is going to end.”
(snip)
In their November 17 letter to Obama, the group of economists led by Dr. Alan Garber of Stanford University, identified four pillars of fiscally-responsible health care reform. They maintained that the bill needed to include a tax on high-end “Cadillac” insurance plans; to pursue “aggressive” tests of payment reforms that will “provide incentives for physicians and hospitals to focus on quality” and provide “care that is better coordinated”; and establish an independent Medicare commission that can continuously develop and implement “new efforts to improve quality and contain costs.” Finally, they said the Congressional Budget Office “must project the bill to be at least deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window and deficit reducing thereafter.”
(snip)
http://www.politico.com/playbook/1109/playbook874.html
Obama makes a Ron Brownstein blog post mandatory reading for the West Wing
By: MIKE ALLEN on November 24, 2009
EXCERPT
WHAT THE PRESIDENT IS READING — Sources say President Obama declared that a Saturday blog post by Ronald Brownstein on The Atlantic’s “Politics” channel — on how health reform would control costs — was mandatory reading for all senior staff and that everyone involved in, or covering, the health care debate should see the piece, headlined: “A Milestone In the Health Care Journey”:
You said....
All except those Tea
Party types, swallowed hook, line and sinker my promises that those stupid Americans could”:
(1) keep their existing health plans,
(2) keep their own doctors that they like,
(3) keep their 25-year-olds on the family health plan,
(4) never be denied coverage for a pre-existing condition,
(5) sign up instantly on my tech-savvy government Web site,
(6) buy insurance only after becoming seriously ill.”
(7) save $2,500 in annual premiums in the bargain....
(8) All without any new taxes.
“Them sonovagun Tea Partiers will rue the day they criticized my wonderful bill.”
Except the public never bought the WH claims on this bill. The Democratic Party base were the only ones that did