Democrats will not be able to "go it alone" on healthcare legislation and force through a bill with a public option on a party-lines vote, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) said Wednesday.
"It's numerically not possible," Cooper, a centrist Blue Dog Democrat who has long focused on healthcare issues, said in an interview on MSNBC. "We don't have enough votes."
The New York Times reported Wednesday that Democratic leaders in Congress, along with the White House, had less faith in continuing to work with Republicans to craft a bipartisan health bill containing a public (or "government-run") option.
Cooper said that just as a matter of procedure, there is no way that Democrats would be able to accomplish such a thing.
"It's really not an ideological question; it's a question of how you pass a bill," he explained. "We don't have 60 Democratic votes in the Senate."
Cooper pointed to the prolonged absences of Sens. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), arguing that Senate Democrats were two votes short of forcing through any legislation past a filibuster, and would need to draw in at least two Republicans to support the final outcome.
"It's just a matter of arithmetic," he explained. "It's not ideology."
A public (or "government-run") healthcare option for Americans would function similarly to the way the post office does, Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.) suggested Tuesday night.
Jackson, in an appearance on CNN, said that just as the government-run post office keeps private mail carriers honest in their prices, so would the public option keep insurers honest.
"Look at it this way: There's Federal Express, there's UPS, and there's DHL," Jackson told CNN host Larry King. "The public option is a stamp; it's email. And because of the email system, because of the post office, it keeps DHL from charging $100 for an overnight letter, or UPS from charging $100 for an overnight letter."
The public option, in that sense, is a "market-based" plan, Jackson asserted.
Of course, that defense comes several days after President Obama ribbed the post office during one of his town hall meetings pushing for healthcare, which postal unions criticized.
"I mean, if you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? No, they are," Obama said at his New Hampshire town hall, to point out that a public postal option hadn't forced out private companies.
"It's the post office that's always having problems," Obama added.
Jackson is one of several dozen liberal members of Congress who are demanding that the president commit to passing healthcare reform with a public option. He said any bill otherwise might be dead on arrival in the House.
"160 members of Congress already signed a letter indicating that without a strong public option, from their perspective -- including my signature -- that this bill is a non-starter," Jackson said.
The idea that 47 million Americans have no form of health insurance whatsoever and the idea that we would create a public option to help bring down costs is something that should be broadly accepted by the American people.
The Federal Communications Commission just announced it created a Twitter account to keep followers up to date on the agency's progress in developing the National Broadband Plan, due to Congress in February.
The FCC is currently holding numerous workshops to gather ideas about the best ways to increase access to high-speed Internet.
You can follow at @fccdotgov. So far, the account has 5 followers.
The FCC also launched a blog dedicated to broadband issues, called "Blogband."
"To foster public dialogue about the National Broadband Plan, we're tapping the power of the Internet to launch a new FCC blog," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski wrote in the blog's first post, sent out via a press release.
"Blogband will keep people up-to-date about the work the FCC is doing and the progress we're making. But we want it to be a two-way conversation. The feedback, ideas, and discussions generated on this blog will be critical in developing the best possible National Broadband Plan."
Congressional Democrats and the Obama administration are trying to create a "diversion" on end-of-life care to distract from their healthcare bill's failing chances, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asserted Tuesday.
Grassley said that attacks on him for having spoken about concerns on end-of-life care at a town hall meeting in Iowa last week were meant to distract from a "miserably poor" healthcare bill in the House.
"I think that there's a bigger goal that they have here -- a diversion away from what's wrong with the Pelosi bill," Grassley said during a phone interview on Fox News.
"I think that this is what a president or speaker of the House has to do when they have a miserably poor healthcare bill that's not being received well by the people," he added.
The veteran Iowa Republican said that President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) were "intellectually dishonest" to criticize Grassley's words on end-of-life care, which some conservatives had derided as "death panels" for the elderly.
Grassley also echoed what Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) had said on Sunday, that the public (or "government-run") option on healthcare for consumers wouldn't be able to pass through the Senate.
"Kent Conrad's absolutely right," Grassley said of the public option's prospects. "That couldn't get through the House or Senate."
The White House says it's happy with Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), who secured the release of an American citizen sentenced to seven years of hard labor in a Burmese prison.
Webb was not representing the White House on his trip, and it was controversial with some human rights groups who don't think U.S. officials should be having any business with Burmese leaders.
Webb thinks the sanctions policy has been a failure, and that the U.S. should engage more with Burma.
The White House should purge any personal information collected on Americans as part of their initiative to investigate "fishy" information on healthcare being propagated in emails, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Monday.
"'m glad the White House recognizes its own bad idea, and have disabled their data collection program," Cornyn said in a radio actuality released by his office. "They've finally come to their senses and acknowledged that this is compromising citizens' free speech rights by causing them to be concerned whether complaints will be compiled into some sort of 'enemies list.'"
The White House had set up an email list (
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) to which bogus healthcare claims could be forwarded for investigation.
But that campaign had been targeted by Republicans, who had claimed that it encouraged Americans to "snitch" on each other to the White House.
Cornyn said that questions still remain about the information collected by the administration, and demand that any information be purged by the White House.
"Questions still remain about information that's already been collected over the last few weeks, and I'd still like to know what steps the White House is taking to purge all names, email addresses, and other personal information they've collected on private citizens as part of their data collection program," he said.
The 2009 battle to reform healthcare in the U.S. is much more broad than the failed 1993 bid waged by President Bill Clinton's administration, Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Steele alleged Monday.
The Republican leader charged that this year's proposed healthcare reforms would threaten to revamp the system in more profound ways than the ones proposed in the '93 battle, which was spearheaded by then-First Lady Hillary Clinton.
"'HillaryCare,' such as it was called back in '92, '93, you know, was tailored in a specific way and had some very fine points that it addressed," Steele said during an appearance on Fox News. "This is much more broad-based."
"It's not just about insurance coverage," he added. "It's about the various ways in which you access the system, who gets to make those decisions."
"I think...that there are some differences that are very clear, in terms of the depth and the breadth at which the federal government wants to intrude in on this issue."
Steele asserted that like in the 1990s, the 2009 debate would turn on the issue of the cost of the reforms -- a key issue Republicans made of the Clinton-era reforms as they have in the Obama-era debate.
Signals yesterday that the Obama administration may be willing to compromise on healthcare reform "heartened" House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican said Monday.
"I am heartened by what the secretary of Health and Human Services said yesterday -- that she doesn't think, necessarily, that a government takeover of healthcare is a necessary component of what the Obama administration is trying to do," Cantor said during an appearance this morning on CNBC.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Sunday that a public (or "government-run") option for consumers was "not the essential element" for a successful healthcare reform push by President Obama and his administration. That suggestion has prompted criticism that the administration had "retreated" from its previous support for the public option.
Republicans have long said that the public option would be a non-starter to win their support, though Cantor gave no hint as to whether or not the GOP would necessarily support any Democratic-crafted bill without the public plan.
The second-ranking House Republican also credited the highly-publicized series of town hall meetings taking place across the country for the White House's potential concession over the public option.
"The system of debate -- the town halls, the forums that have taken place -- I think have yielded a result in that the administration is hearing loud and clear that people in this country don't want a government takeover of their healthcare," Cantor said.
A healthcare reform deal abandoning a public (or "government-run") option for consumers could cost as many as 100 Democratic votes in the House, one House Democratic lawmaker warned Monday.
Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) asserted that rumored compromises on a Senate bill to win centrist votes would torpedo healthcare reform's prospects with liberal members of the House.
"If the president thinks he's cutting a deal to get Senate votes, he's probably losing House votes," Weiner warned during an interview on CNBC this morning.
The liberal New York Democrat said that healthcare reform would be essentially meaningless without having a public option made available for consumers.
Obama administration officials had subtly signaled during the Sunday morning talk show circuit that they may relent on their desired public option in favor of establishing healthcare cooperatives, an issue on which centrist Democrats and Republicans have expressed some semblance of agreement.
"If he says, 'Well, we're not going to have that,' then I'm not really quite sure what we're doing here anymore," Weiner said.
He added that he wouldn't vote for a bill without a public option, as well: "Not only I, but I think there's about 100 members of the House that you need to have something to bring down the prices."
Weiner mildly chided President Obama for his work to defend his healthcare priorities, arguing that the president had done a poor job of convincing senior citizens that the reform legislation would leave their Medicare coverage unaffected.
"Medicare's been used as the bogeyman," Weiner said. "And President Obama up to now hasn't done a great job of putting their mind at ease, and that's part of the problem."
President Obama insisted Friday he's not trying to vilify insurers in his bid to overhaul the nation's healthcare system, subtly breaking with one of the House's top leaders.
Obama said during a town hall meeting this afternoon that he's not seeking to make insurers into a bogeyman, just over two weeks after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called insurance companies "villains" in the national discussion over health reform, and just over a week after his own political arm chided insurers.
Facing a question from a Montanan who sells individual health insurance policies, the president denied that he is trying to turn the powerful insurance industry into a bogeyman in the debate over heath reform.
"My intent is not to vilify the insurance companies," Obama said in his Montana town hall.
"If I was vilifying them, what we would be doing would be to say that private insurance has no place in the health care market, and some people believe that," the president added. "I don't believe that."
Those words contrast a bit with those made by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) earlier this summer. Pelosi accused insurers of a "carpet-bombing" campaign against reform, and said the companies were immoral for engaging in their campaign against reform.
"It's almost immoral what they are doing," Pelosi said in late July. "They are the villains. They have been part of the problem in a major way. They are doing everything in their power to stop a public option from happening."
The president's words toward insurers may also be a bit inconsistent with messaging dispatched by his political arm, Organizing for America. That group, which is administered by the Democratic National Committee, accused insurance companies of using "scare tactics" to "incite" unruly protests in town halls over the August recess.
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