| That's deficit reduction Rockefeller just sorta somehow "forgot" to mention. I wonder why.
Instead, he used his allotted committee time to simply give lip service to the left by slapping around health care providers, completely ignoring the requirements of the recently passed PAYGO deficit reduction bill.
Since Rockefeller's talking points were delivered to a right-leaning senate FINANCE committee, and because his opponents actually used the CBO and boatload of other stats to defeat his public option (pdf file), his working over the insurance industry instead of reporting the numbers was like bringing a knife to a gun fight. All it really did was give fellow committee members even more incentive to kill it.
You can watch Rockefeller delivering his classic sandbag performance at this link.
Of the many facts and figures provided by his Republican opponents, the actual CBO forecast regarding how the public option would affect the deficit was cleverly avoided. Instead, right wing "think tank" economic predictions were put into the record which depict the public option as a net drag on the economy and a deficit buster.
It wasn't as if Rockefeller's staff had failed him. His #1 health care legislative assistant Jocelyn Moore is a member of the nonpartisan Alliance for Health Reform ("AHR"). Back in December of 2008 when Ms. Moore was a speaker at an AHR forum, she called health care "the economic engine of the twenty-first century," noting that health care reform can go a long way to stabilizing the economy.
She apparently knew what she was talking about, because not long after, Ms. Moore's AHR also conducted a briefing called Show Me the Money: Options for Financing Health Reform wherein William Hoagland, former member of the CBO, demystified the "scoring" process of the Congressional Budget Office for AHR members.
An overview of that briefing begins;
As the key congressional committees draft health reform legislation, they are keenly mindful of the costs of various provisions. Congress will look to an array of options, including both savings from the health care system and new revenues, to finance coverage expansions and reforms to both the delivery system and insurance markets.
It is notable that once his public option provision failed in the finance markup, Rockefeller later undercut efforts to add the public option back in during budget reconciliation. Claiming that it was "too partisan", despite having publicly pledged to fight for its conclusion to the bitter end, and ignoring the fact that the HCR bill passed out of the Senate on a supermajority vote!
It is also notable that he has been pledging to control pharmaceutical costs by legislating competitive pricing in much the same way that our nations veterans have bought their prescription meds for years. Yet he was all but silent on its inclusion into the Obamacare bill even though the West Virginia Legislature has overwhelmingly expressed its desire to give his home state that type of savings option.
Finally, many Republicans have gone on record and stated that they don't believe the CBO scoring of the current bill, citing their own numbers and predictions. Yet there are only a few Democrats who have looked outside the CBO to understand whether or not its predictions are accurate.
The insurance industry certainly hasn't stopped trying to figure out ways around the caps placed on their profits by the current bill. Having spent over a million bucks a day for around a year to try and defeat Obamacare, they already have their minions trying to overturn it before the President has even signed it.
Perhaps they've seen the writing on the wall as outlined in a report by the Institute for America's Future and the University of California Berkeley School of Law's Center on Health, Economic and Family Security, (a strong public option) would create a public health insurance plan like Medicare to compete with private health plans and could produce $1 trillion in national savings over 10 years by driving down costs, improving efficiencies, and fostering innovation.
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