Yesterday while Michelle Bachmann’s mob gathered at the capital to once again compare health care reform to nazism, the White House announced some key endorsements of the House health care reform bill: the AARP, the American Cancer Society and the AMA. So, will the Blue Dogs listen to these groups that represent millions of Americans or are their weak knees still knocking together because some Republicans won in an election this week? We’ll find out soon because the House could vote on the bill as soon as tomorrow.
In other health care reform news, the CBO released their analysis of the uni-partisan Republican health care bill. As you probably expected, it’s not pretty:
The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that under the $61 billion Republican amendment to the House health care bill, the number of uninsured Americans would increase to 52 million by 2019, but deficits would decrease by $68 billion over the 2010–2019 period. The bill could slightly reduce premiums for Americans who purchase coverage independently.
See, it is possible to get a plan that is worse than the status-quo.
Meanwhile, some tea partiers paid a visit to our senator:
About 50 protesters visited Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), his office said. In other offices, some dropped off literature, some staged sit-ins.
I doubt we need to worry about the tea partiers influencing Senator Carper unless they came with buckets of cash.