Other media formats with the same interview:
I highly recommend listening to this 30-minute podcast. Very moving. At one point she is almost in tears as she pleads with people to call Washington and tell them not to spend any more taxpayer money. Never heard anything like this before from a legislator in all my life.
Story here at The Hill. (H/T Ace of Spades via ECM)
Excerpt:
Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) both said a Medicare “buy-in” option for those aged 55-64 was a deal breaker.
“I’m concerned that it’s the forerunner of single payer, the ultimate single-payer plan, maybe even more directly than the public option,” Nelson said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Lieberman said Democrats should stop looking for a public option “compromise” and simply scrap the idea altogether.
“You’ve got to take out the Medicare buy-in. You’ve got to forget about the public option,” he said.
If Democrats stick to relying primarily on the bill’s subsidies, the legislation would pass easily and with bipartisan support, Lieberman argued.
Ace also notes that Clair McCaskill will vote against anything that fails to bring down the deficit.
Story here from the left-wing WaPo.
Excerpt:
A plan to slash more than $500 billion from future Medicare spending — one of the biggest sources of funding for President Obama’s proposed overhaul of the nation’s health-care system — would sharply reduce benefits for some senior citizens and could jeopardize access to care for millions of others, according to a government evaluation released Saturday.
[…]…the report questions whether the country’s network of doctors and hospitals would be able to cope with the effects of a reform package expected to add more than 30 million people to the ranks of the insured, many of them through Medicaid, the public health program for the poor.
In the face of greatly increased demand for services, providers are likely to charge higher fees or take patients with better-paying private insurance over Medicaid recipients, “exacerbating existing access problems” in that program, according to the report from Richard S. Foster of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
[…]The report offers the clearest and most authoritative assessment to date of the effect that Democratic health reform proposals would have on Medicare and Medicaid, the nation’s largest public health programs.
WINTERY KNIGHT 