We've been putting in our time while you were playing games

Apparently there is shock - shock! - that Joe Lieberman is once again torpedoing the Senate health care bill. Who could have imagined that he wouldn't want a provision that allows people aged 55 to 64 to buy in to Medicare - giving them an option other than Connecticut-based big insurance? Who could have imagined that he wouldn't have been negotiating in good faith?

UPDATE: The blogosphere is now all over this, pointing out, among other things, that the Medicare buy-in plan was strongly supported by Joe Lieberman no less recently than September. Now it's cause for a filibuster. How about we get it in Lieberman's own words:


And the saddest part - the Democrats are going to have to cave if they're going to get any bill at all.

At this point, I'm struggling with the idea of whether health insurance reform makes sense anymore. Truth be told, my wife will tell you that I've been struggling with it for some time, but the politics of failure, and the damage it would do to the President if it fails entirely, has held me back. But the bill that we're headed toward doesn't possess most of the feature set that made health insurance reform - health security - important to me. And the long term cost to individuals, in the form of a mandate without any competition in the form of a true public option, giving insurance companies free rein to overcharge policyholders, could have more negative political impact than a failure to enact the bill.

At the end of the day, I still support the effort, because three steps forward and two steps back still puts us a step ahead of where we were. The principle that everyone is entitled to health care is important, and if this reform can begin to rein in costs, despite its payoffs across the industry spectrum, it will be valuable without the other provisions. And whatever passes out of this Congress isn't the end of the line, but failure to pass something very well may be. But the political risks of bad implementation - a not unlikely outcome - are tremendous in this flawed proposal which will most likely now become reality. And all of this is qualified by the fact that I am just not sure I understand what is left in what remains of health care/insurance reform, or why we cannot get a straight answer about that.

And so my practical and political unease remains.

And one final point. No matter where this ends, it's not Joe Lieberman who will be blamed after he has finished screwing the American people in order to institutionalize and guaranty the long term profitability of Aetna and The Hartford.