Yesterday was a rough day, disappointing to be sure. But today is a new day with a new fight. The House will vote tomorrow on the Budget bill which once again cuts aid for the poor and contains big breaks for corporate interests, especially for the health insurance industry.
So it's a new day and a new fight. Join me after the flip for the new fight.
E.J. Dionne at the Washington Post says
"Where's the Budget Outrage?"
Let's be clear: Anyone who votes for this fiscal mess will be standing for the bad old ways of doing business in Washington. Those who do so will have no claim to being "reformers."
He also says there is justification for changing the vote of Republicans who voted yes.
It's worth citing in full the first paragraph of an important piece of investigative reporting last week by The Post's Jonathan Weisman: "House and Senate GOP negotiators, meeting behind closed doors last month to complete a major budget-cutting bill, agreed on a change to Senate-passed Medicare legislation that would save the health insurance industry $22 billion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office."
And Bush will have the nerve to talk about health care tonight. The New York Times reported yesterday that this hurts millions of low-income people because of higher co-payments and premiums for Medicaid.
"In response to the new premiums, some beneficiaries would not apply for Medicaid, would leave the program or would become ineligible due to nonpayment," the Congressional Budget Office said in its report, completed Friday night. "C.B.O. estimates that about 45,000 enrollees would lose coverage in fiscal year 2010 and that 65,000 would lose coverage in fiscal year 2015 because of the imposition of premiums. About 60 percent of those losing coverage would be children."
The budget office predicted that 13 million low-income people, about a fifth of Medicaid recipients, would face new or higher co-payments for medical services like doctor's visits and hospital care.
Apparently this bill was pushed through after 1am, or railroaded through as reported by the Hartford Courant.
The conference bill, nearly 800 pages, was put forward after 1 a.m. A vote was called about four hours later. U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons said he didn't read the bill - how could he have in that time period, he asks. How indeed. Yet he voted for it because of the "reasonable expectation that there was some good in it" and because "that's the way it's done."
So start calling, emailing, and faxing your representative to vote no on S.1932 budget bill.