Health Care

The smart take among liberal and Democratic strategists is that Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) is making an empty threat to filibuster his party’s health care bill. But there are short-term consequences for what Lieberman is doing. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is using Lieberman to push Democrats in red and purple states to back away [...]

Randall Terry, the anti-abortion rights activist whose visibility has been on the way up since relocating his operation to Washington, is launching another please-let-this-become-viral campaign: encouraging conservatives to create flaming effigies of Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to protest Democratic support of abortion rights. The explanatory video (which [...]

This seems to have flown mostly under the radar, but on Tuesday, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of the sharpest Democratic critics of a public option, told The Huffington Post that she would probably not support a GOP filibuster of a health care bill that contained a public plan.
“I’m not right now inclined to support [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union just won a court order against Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona, who was illegally pre-charging female prisoners hundreds of dollars for the costs of being securely transported to medical clinics to obtain abortions.

Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio, not content with arresting illegal immigrants despite having lost his federal authority to do so, is now resisting a federal court order to allow women in his prisons to obtain abortions, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing him over this in Arizona.

Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) brings the heat on Twitter, offering one of what will be many friendly fire attacks on Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine).

I just spoke with Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), the progressive firebrand most known for his willingness to call out Republican obstructionism on health care reform. Asked about Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, Grayson noted that he mused on the House floor yesterday that “if President Obama was able to bring about world peace, the GOP would [...]

Here’s an interesting detail/admission from Michael O’Brien’s interview with Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho):
Crapo said that he credited the August recess protests with having created enough of an impression among his colleagues for them to have voted down public option amendments in the Senate Finance Committee, but he worried the protests haven’t had enough of an [...]

The American Association for Justice — the trial lawyers’ lobby group — has just released an astounding statistic:  medical malpractice insurance companies’ average profits are higher than those of 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies.
As the nation remains mired in a debate over health care reform and how to keep down the costs of expanding [...]

Despite growing public support for a government-backed insurance option to compete with private insurers, a Senate panel on Tuesday twice beat back Democratic efforts to create such a plan.