West Virginia Blue
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Right wing plans to cut funding for Planned Parenthood are a sign they really don't care about women and use the issue of abortion as an excuse to hurt them.
There is no finding a "middle ground" with people who have no regard for women.
Here's Sen. Jay Rockefeller's statement, emphasis mine:
ROCKEFELLER SAYS NEW REPUBLICAN BUDGET PLAN HURTS HEALTH CARE FOR STRUGGLING FAMILIES & SENIORS
Out-of-touch House Republican Proposal Favors the Wealthy at the Expense of Middle Class Families
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Senator Jay Rockefeller today issued the following statement in response to a House Republican budget plan that calls for vastly scaling back Medicaid and Medicare, which together provide vital health care to children, low-income families, the elderly and people with disabilities.
"The House Republican's budget plan shows how out-of-touch they are. They want to give trillions in tax benefits to wealthy corporations that keep profits offshore, while slashing basic health care for children, seniors, and people with disabilities. This is not just foolish - it's cruel. The Republican budget would end Medicare as we know it and prevent millions of Americans from getting affordable health care. It would shift the financial burden on to states and already struggling families all across the country. In West Virginia, nearly 380,000 people were enrolled in Medicare in 2010 and over 320,000 were enrolled in Medicaid. Anybody who has ever struggled to pay for a nursing home, or to care for a sick or aging relative at home, should be watching the Republican's every move - they are gutting your Medicare and Medicaid support and giving the money to big business and the wealthy."
Speaker Thompson is one of the front runners in the upcoming Democratic primary for Governor but is he turning his back on key Democratic initiatives? Education, LGBT rights, and health care have all been thwarted by Thompson.
Thompson has been unable to get legislation through his chamber on education- efforts that have kept WV from receiving huge sums of funding from the Obama Administration's Race to the Top. I am with the teacher's unions but something must be done and Thompson's inability to find a compromise over the past few years has been telling of his leadership ability.
Thompson has thwarted efforts again this year to pass anti discrimination legislation that would protect LGBT West Virginians from work place discrimination because of their sexual orientation. This legislation passed the Senate the past two years because of support from acting Senate President Kessler to only die in the House.
Finally, the House looks like it will fail to pass legislation to allow the State to implement federal health reform. Kessler's Senate has passed this legislation but nothing has taken place in the House on anything health reform related, including the so called health insurance exchange.
All of these issues are core to the Democratic platform and Thompson has failed on all three. There is still time this session for Thompson to do something to prove to voters he is worthy of consideration. If he thinks playing his guitar will win him favor with the Democratic base or progressives he is badly off key.
Both West Virginia senators voted the right way on the repeal issue.
Update
From an email:
Washington, D.C. - U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) issued the following statement today after he voted in favor of measures repealing the onerous1099 provision that would hurt small businesses.
"I don't think that throwing out the good parts of this bill, like helping seniors afford prescription drugs or ending discrimination against people with preexisting conditions, makes good common sense," Manchin said. "That's why I have repeatedly said that we should make every effort to work together on repairing this bill before we start talking about repealing it."
"In that spirit, I am encouraged tonight that my colleagues put politics aside and started this repair effort by first supporting efforts to repeal the onerous 1099 provision. We should next work on commonsense legislative options to repair the individual mandate."
I got commonsense for you. Make Medicare available to all.
And am I the only one getting tired of Manchin talking about commonsense. I'd prefer he exhibited more of it and talked about it less than instead of the other way around. What did he do? Poll the phrase and test market it?
I guess some hypocrisy knows no bounds. You often see Republicans screaming about the ills of government involved in health care but what people seldom hear about is that those same outraged politicians have GOVERNMENT sponsored HEALTH CARE through the Office of Personnel Management's FEHB.
Republican Congressman and physician, Andy Harris, has spouted off about not getting his government sponsored health insurance until 28 days after he is sworn into office. He is outraged. Well, good sir, with all due respect, there will be tens of millions of Americans that go without health care for the entire next year and tens of millions more that will have lapses in coverage or are under insured.
As Robert Gibbs said, the rhetoric doesn't match the reality when it is YOUR health care that is in question, government or not. Let no American go without health insurance!
That Republicans are now attempting to block all Congressional hearings could be their unified push back at the looming possibility of the public option being introduced.
The polls are certainly showing that since the bill's signing, more and more Americans either like the bill as passed, or else wish the reform did more.
In all of the joy and confusion leading up to the passage of the Senate version, most Dem Obamacare watchers probably thought that Congress stripped the public option out because it somehow lowered the bill's overall chances of passing. Actually, it now appears that all they really need to do is simply put it to an up-or-down vote in the senate to get it passed.
Since 45 senators have already publicly declared support of its passage, which of the remaining Dems would hold out? And even if the option did fail, it certainly wouldn't kill the chances of bill's passage altogether, would it?
BECAUSE THE BILL HAS ALREADY PASSED, HASN'T IT?
The more times HCR bounces back to the House from the Senate during reconciliation, the more people will learn what's actually in the bill. So naturally the more they'll begin to realize they like what's in it.
Except for that nasty lack of cost containment. Thanks to the right-leaning Senate Finance committee, it has the same insurance giveaway loophole as Massachussetts' universal HCR system.
Its just too bad that the media and many progressive websites have been so silent about its virtues. Particularly regarding the CBO score that a strong public option would reduce the deficit at least 500 million bucks, and that other prestigious institutions have valued the measure worth as much as a cool trillion in deficit reduction.
It is notable that the senator who sponsored the strong public option in finance committee markup flatly refused to sign any statement that he'd vote for the measure in the reconciliation process, claiming that to do so would be "too partisan", and has cautioned to "never let the perfect be the enemy of the good". Rockefeller also inexplicably failed to mention that a strong public option would reduce the deficit to the finance markup committee.
OK... while many are watching the NCAA Basketball games, I'll be watching the big sports action of the weekend: The Health Care bill in the House of Representatives.
CSPAN is showing BOTH the debates in the House and the Reconciliation Bill debate in the House Rules Committee (on CSPAN 2). The major players will all be out there, making the points or stalling to try and get the bill bogged down. Whatever happens today will determine what gets voted on tomorrow.
The health reform vote is coming in the House. Representative Alan Mollohan (WV-01) needs to keep listening to us, not the insurance companies.
In Mollohan's district, the House's improvements to the Senate health reform bill will [pdf]:
Improve coverage for 336,000 residents with health insurance.
Give tax credits and other assistance to up to 175,000 families and 11,900 small businesses to help them afford coverage.
Improve Medicare for 120,000 beneficiaries, including closing the donut hole.
Extend coverage to 51,000 uninsured residents.
Guarantee that 10,700 residents with pre-existing conditions can obtain coverage.
Protect 700 families from bankruptcy due to unaffordable health care costs.
Allow 47,000 young adults to obtain coverage on their parents' insurance plans.
Provide millions of dollars in new funding for 33 community health centers.
Reduce the cost of uncompensated care for hospitals and other health care providers by $71 million annually.
A vote for health reform is a vote to stand with these people. A vote against health reform is a vote for the status quo, where insurance companies make record profits by raising rates by double digits (4x faster than wages in West Virginia) and dropping millions of customers from their rolls.
The House may vote on health reform as early as this weekend. When the vote comes, Representative Mollohan has a chance to show us that he's still on our side.
I listened to a Congressman from Alabama give the Republican's weekly statement (after the President's weekly statement) on NBC this morning and was told that despite what Pelosi and Reid want, despite the threat of using reconciliation to push the Health Care bill through, the American People don't want the Health Care bill as it has been debated and argued over the past year. He said the American People want Congress and The President to "start over on a new page."
Here in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, about as American a location as you can find, I sit watching this knowing that I WANT a Health Care bill to be passed NOW. I know that if the government starts on a NEW PAGE it will be in the face of a rate-raising, highly profitable private insurance system and a 10-to-1 ratio of lobbyists who are NOT starting on a new page, who will work day and night to weaken any progress.
Perhaps you may have read it. Perhaps you have not. But via Dana Milbank in the Washington Post
At 4 p.m. Sunday afternoon -- nine hours before the 1 a.m. vote that would effectively clinch the legislation's passage -- Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) went to the Senate floor to propose a prayer. "What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can't make the vote tonight," he said. "That's what they ought to pray."
It was difficult to escape the conclusion that Coburn was referring to the 92-year-old, wheelchair-bound Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) who has been in and out of hospitals and lay at home ailing. It would not be easy for Byrd to get out of bed in the wee hours with deep snow on the ground and ice on the roads -- but without his vote, Democrats wouldn't have the 60 they needed.
It's like we're in a Saturday morning kids scifi show... the goodguy robot (in this case MSNBC) is telling us that the Repubs are getting ready to attack the Senate's vote on a Health Care Plan any way they can.
To start with, more than one of the Repub Senators (led by Lamar Alexander - R, TN) have called for new "Town Hall" meetings, like the ones the House members had in August - and it looks like the groups of lobbyists are ready to bus the same people in.
My voice is getting hoarse from yelling at the television today when the Republicans debating the Health Care Bill make statements which are patently untrue. The primary statement is one Boehner and his biddies keep making, that the majority of Americans have come out against this bill.
Now where is it that this has been shown, John? The various polls for weeks have shown the majority of Americans for this reform. Especially, they have shown a strong favor of the Public Option, something you keep saying all Americans are against.
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