Howard Dean caused quite a stir when he said “kill the bill.” A lot of people trust Howard Dean and the reaction from the White House was anger. Dean appears to have had a change of heart. He’s still not a fan of the bill, but he’s saying that the manager’s amendment has improved the bill and let’s see what happens in the House/Senate conference.
This morning, Howard Dean walked back from earlier statements encouraging Democrats to “kill” the Senate health care bill. On Thursday, Dean wrote that “this bill would do more harm than good to the future of America,” but during his appearance on Meet The Press, Dean argued that yesterday’s manager’s amendment significantly improved the legislation. “My position is let’s see what they add to this bill and make it work,” Dean said:
Well, let’s start with the positive things. Over the last week, there were things that were improved. There were some cost containment mechanisms that were gutted. They got restored. I would certainly not vote for this bill if this were the final product, but there are, the House bill is quite a good bill. This bill has improved over the last couple of weeks, I would let this thing go to conference committee and let’s see if we can fix it some more…so there are a lot of things that need to be fixed, but if they are fixed you may actually get the foundation of a bill, coming out of the House. If most of the House provisions survive, then we can have a bill that we could work with…I don’t think this is the compromise that has been achieved. I think we have yet to see the compromise that could be achieved.
To me this says that the focus from activists on the provisions that are left in the bill is working. If we keep up the pressure perhaps we can get something even better out of the bill. Keep working, keep up the pressure and let’s get the best bill we can get.