Welcome to “Battle at the Blair House,” the bipartisan health care summit taking place today between 10:00am and 4:00pm. You can watch it live on C-Span 3 here, or via the embedded video.
The meeting will be divided into four segments:
Controlling costs – introduced by the President
Insurance reforms – introduced by Secretary Sebelius
Reducing the deficit – introduced by the Vice President
Expanding coverage – introduced by the President
This is part three, which should still be focussed on insurance reform, at least at the start. . . part one’s liveblog can be found here, part two is here.
We are picking up in the second half of the second section. And away we go!
1:45 – Just waiting for everyone to come back from the lunch/vote break. Anyone want to place a bet on whether they will be better able to stay on track time wise?
1:52- I am watching this on MSNBC and Chris Mathews made an interesting point about the end time of this summit. If they go late then the President will not be able to get out and spin the summit for the evening news. Tweety gets up my nose sometimes, but I think he is on to something.
1:56 – Unbelievable! MSNBC is going to the Winter Olympics. I wish my statelite company carried C-Span 3. Now the President is coming back. They should start up in just a minute.
2:01 – President setting out the next steps of the summit. Rep Rangel wants to be sure that he will be to talk. A question asked about when it will adjourn, 4:15 is the goal. Rep. Dingle wants to speak too. With all of these folks who want to speak on insurance reform, that end time looks dubious.
2:10 – Sen. Mike Enzi – Wants separate the Medicaid from the rest of the overhaul. Pining for the old days while failing to note that the Republicans are the ones the ended any pretense of bipartisanship. Brings up the HSA for younger Federal Employees. Says that he likes the exchange idea (is that going to get him pilloried by the Tea Party folks?), then comes the but (as PeeWee Herman said, everyone has a big but).
Sen. Harkin – Another story. I love that we are getting these, but they really slow things down. Farmer got a 14.6% increase in cost from his insurer. Getting less while paying more. The farmer can’t control his insurance risks and costs and wants to be able to get out of the “high risk” pool. Sen. Harkin lays out the amount of time already spent on the HCR. Notes the number of Republican amendments. Notes that 9 out 10 of the Republican Houses proposal are in the Senate bill (which is why it is such a bad bill). Great point about the inability to do this piecemeal. “Incremental approach is like throwing a drowning man 50 off shore a 10 foot rope” .
Segregation is not allowed by disability or color or race or creed, but we do allow it based on health. Health insurance is flawed because of segregation by health (nice idea, but the real flaw is for profit health care. The incentives are all wrong as long as profit is a motive.
(Liveblog continues after the jump.)
