Health Care Reform Is All Chucked Up.

From ThinkProgress:

In an impromptu news conference with reporters today, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) lashed out at President Obama and the White House, saying that he “resents” the administration “associating” him with “extreme” claims about “the end-of-life situation.” Obama “gave some speeches during August in which he was associating me with efforts to make this a political document and efforts that other people in the country were making to give extremes, like on the end-of-life situation and associating me with things — I [never] used the words he said,” Grassley told the reporters. But as FirstRead points out, Grassley did “lend credence” to the outrageous “death panel” attacks:

And on death panels last month, Grassley did lend credence to the idea that the government would “determine if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.”

“There is some fear because in the House bill, there is counseling for end-of-life,” Grassley said at an Iowa town hall after fielding a question about it from a town hall attendee. “And from that standpoint, you have every right to fear. You shouldn’t have counseling at the end of life. You ought to have counseling 20 years before you’re going to die. You ought to plan these things out. And I don’t have any problem with things like living wills. But they ought to be done within the family. We should not have a government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.”

This isn’t the first time Grassley has attacked Obama for calling him out on his endorsement of some the worst lies about health care reform. In August, he told CBS News that “the specific language I used was language that the president had used at Portsmouth, and I thought that it was — if he used the language , then if I responded exactly the same way, that I had an opposite concern about not using end-of-life counseling for saving money, then I was answering.”

Butting Heads With Buttheads.

Ah, the putrid stench of bipartisanship!

From the New York Times:

For the moment, at least, Max Baucus has come up short.

Mr. Baucus, the Montana Democrat and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee who has led a months-long effort to develop bipartisan legislation to overhaul the nation’s health care system, is expected to unveil his plan Wednesday morning with Republicans not yet on board.

The Finance Committee’s top Republican, Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa – who is one of the so-called bipartisan six — issued a statement on Tuesday evening chastising the Democratic leaders and the White House for pushing forward on a bill that he said was not ready and that he could not yet support.

In many ways, however, the legislative dance is just starting.

Democrat and Republican aides alike say they expect the negotiations among the bipartisan six to continue until the Finance Committee begins formal proceedings on the health care legislation sometime next week. A deal with Mr. Grassley is still possible.

Once Mr. Baucus puts out his proposal, the committee will go over it in an executive session. The senators on the committee, 13 Democrats and 10 Republicans, will also be given a deadline for submitting any amendments. And there will be a torrent of them on both sides.

Mr. Baucus, however, like a baseball manager with a bench full of pinch-hitters, has the advantage.

When the deadline for amendments arrives, Mr. Baucus will have a clearer picture of where lawmakers stand, particularly his fellow Democrats, some of whom, like Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, say he has already made too many concessions to Republicans.

And until the start of the committee’s formal mark-up proceedings, Mr. Baucus can incorporate amendments into his bill, or negotiate with Mr. Grassley and other Republicans with an eye toward compromises that might make certain other amendments moot.

So a fuller test of whether Mr. Baucus has succeeded in securing a bipartisan deal will come as he and Mr. Grassley negotiate changes to the bill over the next week or so. Mr. Grassley, in his statement, promised to keep trying.

“We’ve been clear from the start that we’re willing to stay at the table,” Mr. Grassley said. “There’s no reason not to keep working until we get it right. In the end, legislation that impacts every American should have strong bipartisan support.”

Why should Democrats continue to capitulate to a Republican Party with no apparent interest in meaningful health care reform? Why should my desire as a self-employed person working on contracts and commission to buy into a public option be in the hands of people like Chuck Grassley when Democrats control Congress? Indeed, why vote for Democrats at all if they mirror Republican Party members with no ideas and for whom I have never cast a single vote?

I'm not writing Democrats off--yet. But they'd better give me some of that change I've heard so much about on this one, or all bets are off.

Hey! Is That Chuck Grassley In The E.R.?

Of course not...

If You Still Think Chuck Grassley Is Interested In Health Care Reform...

...do I ever have some Iowa bullshit for you, in the form of this fundraising letter:

As I have written here on numerous occasions, screw bipartisanship. Republicans have negotiated in bad faith all along, they have no intention of cooperating on meaningful health care reform legislation, they are--in fact--campaigning against it (as Grassley's letter proves), and they are little more than the party of "no."

F*** 'em.

I agree with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. His strategy--which he has advocated all along--is here.

I Told Ya So...

I saw that headline on Huffington Post this morning. I hate to say, "I told ya so," but...

From The Hill:

Leading liberal activists are pressing Senate Democrats to forget about Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and move ahead with their own plans for healthcare reform.
Comprehensive healthcare reform legislation stalled in the Senate last month as Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) spent weeks cooped up in his office with Grassley trying to hash out a healthcare deal.

Despite frequent assurances from Baucus that he was making good progress, the Senate left town for its monthlong August recess without any deal, breaking the deadline set by President Barack Obama for passing legislation through the upper chamber.
Baucus and other Democratic members of the Finance Committee plan to resume negotiations with Grassley when they return in September, but leaders among the party’s liberal wing say that path leads to a “dead end.”
“We need to push the Senate to move and pass a bill at a time when Sen. Grassley will probably not support any bill the Finance Committee has formulated,” said Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future.
“We are encouraging Finance Committee members and Senate Democrats to do their own bill and not compromise with a bunch of Republicans who are not going to vote with them anyway.”
Grassley, the senior Republican on Finance, alarmed liberals when he announced in a television interview Monday that he would not support healthcare legislation that does not have widespread Republican support.
“I’m negotiating for Republicans and if I can’t negotiate something that gets more than four Republicans, I’m not a good representative of my party,” he said on MSNBC. “It isn’t a good deal if I can’t sell my product to more Republicans.”

Hey, Dems: we voted you in, we voted for change. We did NOT vote for "Republican Lite." No retreat, no surrender...

Chuck Grassley Loses At Liar's Poker.

Why is it that Democrats are trying to play nice with Chuck Grassley?

From Swampland at Time.com:

You would think that if Republicans wanted to totally mischaracterize a health care provision and demagogue it like nobody's business, they would at least pick something that the vast majority of them hadn't already voted for just a few years earlier. Because that's not just shameless, it's stupid.

Yes, that's right. Remember the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill, the one that passed with the votes of 204 GOP House members and 42 GOP Senators? Anyone want to guess what it provided funding for? Did you say counseling for end-of-life issues and care? Ding ding ding!!

Let's go to the bill text, shall we? "The covered services are: evaluating the beneficiary's need for pain and symptom management, including the individual's need for hospice care; counseling the beneficiary with respect to end-of-life issues and care options, and advising the beneficiary regarding advanced care planning." The only difference between the 2003 provision and the infamous Section 1233 that threatens the very future and moral sanctity of the Republic is that the first applied only to terminally ill patients. Section 1233 would expand funding so that people could voluntarily receive counseling before they become terminally ill.

So either Republicans were for death panels in 2003 before turning against them now--or they're lying about end-of-life counseling in order to frighten the bejeezus out of their fellow citizens and defeat health reform by any means necessary. Which is it, Mr. Grassley ("Yea," 2003)?

Chuck Grassley remains a major obstacle on the road to real health care reform. He's a liar, a hypocrite and his pockets are overflowing with health industry money. It's high time Democrats remember why we voted them in and past time to freeze Grassley's ass out.

F#ck Bipartisanhip!!!

With Grassley Channeling Palin, Dems Need To Pull The Plug On Bipartisanship.

Senator Chuck Grassley--a key GOP member of the Senate Finance Committee--has officially thrown in with the likes of Sarah Palin and other arch-conservative mouth-breathers by perpetuating the lie that there is a "let's pull the plug on Grandma!" clause in pending congressional health care reform legislation.

And like Palin and and her fellow Death Panel paranoiacs, Chuck Grassley is a goddamn liar.

President Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi need to kiss their whorish flirtations with bipartisanship goodbye and produce a Democratically-designed health care reform bill with a robust public option--by any means necessary.

Chuck Grassley's Straw Man Is A Rich Man's Best Friend.

If you were in the richest 1 percent of households since 1979 or so, you like the looks of that graph. The other 99 percent are wondering why Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa thinks a surtax on that 1 percent to help pay for health care is "idiotic."

Grassley made that charge in an interview with the far-right Newsmax.com:

[Democrats have] got the feeling you can raise taxes on the top one percent and solve all the problems of government. That's not real. You could confiscate, let alone tax, all the income over $250,000 that people make each year, and you couldn't run the federal government for more than three or four months. So it's idiotic to think that's a solution...

As Media Matters points out, Grassley's argument is pure Iowa bullshit:

But Grassley is setting up a straw man -- and a ridiculous one at that. Nobody is talking about solving "all the problems of government," nobody wants to "confiscate" all income over $250,000, and nobody suggested that doing so would raise enough money to "run the federal government."

What some House Democrats are proposing is a surtax on the super-rich, who in recent years have seen their income skyrocket while middle-class wages remained somewhat flat. As noted by Pat Garofalo, "Between 1979 and 2006, the inflation-adjusted after-tax income of the richest 1 percent of households increased by 256 percent, compared to 21 percent for families in the middle income quintile."

Nonetheless, Bush's tax cuts gave the top one percent of earners over $700 billion in tax breaks over ten years, which didn't exactly stimulate the economy for everyone else. The proposed surtax, which would have no effect on 98.8 percent of Americans, would require them give a portion of that unearned money back, while raising significant revenues for health insurance reform.

At any rate, Grassley's claim that such a plan is "idiotic" is in line with his other recent failures in bipartisanship. Earlier this week, Grassley used Sen. Ted Kennedy's brain tumor to fear monger about a public health insurance option.

That's right; it isn't beneath the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee and a key player in supposed "bipartisan" talks to politicize the medical condition of a dying Senate colleague.

It seems to me that's the real idiocy.

Get Smart.

From Roll Call:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday ordered Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) to drop a proposal to tax health benefits and stop chasing Republican votes on a massive health care reform bill.

Reid, whose leadership is considered crucial if President Barack Obama is to deliver on his promise of enacting health care reform this year, offered the directive to Baucus through an intermediary after consulting with Senate Democratic leaders during Tuesday morning’s regularly scheduled leadership meeting. Baucus was meeting with Finance ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) Tuesday afternoon to relay the information.

According to Democratic sources, Reid told Baucus that taxing health benefits and failing to include a strong government-run insurance option of some sort in his bill would cost 10 to 15 Democratic votes; Reid told Baucus it wasn’t worth securing the support of Grassley and at best a few additional Republicans.

Welcome to The Show, Harry. You need to be the "Chief" because Baucus is clearly "Max." And the GOP is nothing but KAOS.

UPDATE: Once again, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders takes the lead. Read about it here.

Will He Stay Or Will He Go?

From Politico.com:

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) tries his best these days to elude the horde of congressional reporters who stake out every negotiating session on health care. He will slip through obscure exits, sprint down hallways and brush past those trying to suss out his views — with good reason.

Right now, Grassley can’t please anyone.

As one of the last prominent Republicans engaged in bipartisan talks, Grassley is the man in the middle of a colossal legislative debate that could realign American politics for years to come.

To many Republicans, he is a Democratic enabler, playing into President Barack Obama’s strategy of winning a few GOP votes and calling the final product bipartisan. Senate Republican leaders have gone so far as to suggest Grassley doesn’t speak for their members. To many Democrats, Grassley is the guest who stayed at the party too long. They can’t do much of what they want to do on health care as long as he stays at the negotiating table.

There are a handful of big decisions hanging over the next month of deliberations: Create a public insurance option or not? Tax health benefits or find the money to pay for an overhaul someplace else?

And will Chuck Grassley stay or go?

The answer to the last question could do just as much to shape the dynamic of the debate as the first two, because Grassley’s departure, should it come, would effectively end Obama’s hopes of getting more than token GOP support for his signature legislative effort.

Grassley said he plans to stay as long as his conservative views are being heard and to leave when the bill crosses the line. That could happen in three weeks, when two Senate committees merge their separate bills ahead of a floor vote, or in three months, when the House and Senate meet in a conference committee.

But if Republicans allow Democrats to get their way, “it is going to screw up the health care system ... and [it] will be screwed up forever,” he said.

That's not very bipartisan of you, Senator.

And leave it to GOP shill and FOX News tool Dick Morris to bitch about a final bill that hasn't been written yet.

“Republicans should not, under any circumstances, give this bill even a single vote,” (the) conservative commentator and former strategist to Bill Clinton wrote on Human Events last week in a column that singled out Grassley. “To do so would be to offer Obama an out, doom America to a deteriorating health care system and take away the Republican Party’s best shot for regaining political power and majority status.”

Along with signing the legislation that repealed Glass-Steagall, DADT and NAFTA, hiring Morris wasn't one of Bill Clinton's better ideas. And Dick, are you aware that after Clinton canned you for letting that hooker listen to your conversations with him, nobody takes your advice anymore? I mean, you work for FOX News!

The entire Politico piece is here.

Chuck Grassley's Guide To Health Care.

That's Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, dancing around questions about health care at a town hall meeting. A constituent asked why average citizens can't have access to the same type of quality, affordable healthcare coverage that Grassley and his other government buddies have.

Grassley is one of the top recipients of health insurer and HMO lobby money. He's outspoken in his opposition to a public option in healthcare, and since he's the ranking GOP senator on the Finance Committee, he's also a key player in reform debate.

And as you can see in the video, his sense of empathy is pathetic.

Attention, Democrats: Meeting Halfway Is Futile When The Other Side Hasn't Left Yet.

As previously hinted at on JackRabbit Café, it looks like all that insurance company and HMO money really does have Democratic Senator Max Baucus bought and paid for:

From Sam Stein on HuffPo:

Senator Max Baucus, one of the key players in crafting health care reform, broke some big news on Thursday, when he announced that the Senate Finance Committee he chairs could get a bill done for under $1 trillion.

"We are much closer on the scores for a health care reform package than were at this point last week," he said, according to remarks passed along by his staff. "We have options the Congressional Budget Office tells us would cost under $1 trillion and be fully paid for. Based on these developments, I'm even more confident in our ability to move forward. And as I've said before, we will not put out a mark until we are sure we have it right. I'll continue to work with Senator [Chuck] Grassley and members on both sides of aisle to turn these options into a package that can pass the Senate and become law this year."

The details of the Montana Democrat's cuts and proposals have yet to be fully fleshed out, though they likely involve drops in the percentage to which the bill would expand coverage and additional tax increases. An aide on the Finance Committee said that members would be working through the details during the afternoon.

Either way, in the context of congressional politics the pronouncement of a trillion dollar bill is big news. The Finance Committee's initial proposal had come in at a cost of $1.6 trillion, a number that was met with heavy criticism from Republicans in the senate. Even the Obama White House had to backtrack from the prospective bill, saying it was stage one in an ongoing legislative process.

Baucus's GOP counterpart Chuck Grassley was already paying dividends to his donors.