
Enter Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska. He promises to oppose the public option, and to round up other opponents to such a plan. And why is he doing this? The insurers have bought him for $600,000.
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00005329&cycle=2008
http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/sen-ben-nelson-d-ne-opposed-public-he
In less enlightened times, we would call this behavior...bribery.
Big hat-tip to Crooks And Liars for spreading the word.
This increases the odds on the passage of a health care plan via budget reconciliation, a process which only requires 50 Senate votes rather than 60. The White House is pushing Senate Democrats to follow the reconciliation path, or at least to keep that option open, in part to account for clowns like Nelson holding the whole process hostage. Apparently the proposal is to use the reconciliation option only if things aren’t resolved the normal way by 15 October: presumably the aim is to keep that threat on the table, just to keep down the silliness quotient in the Senate deliberations (and as we can see from Nelson, the silliness has already begun). Such a reconciliation move might anger moderate Republicans (the few we have left) and some Democrats like Conrad, but it also lowers the bar by 10 votes.
And to all those Republicans who are screeching that using reconciliation is a naked power grab: Reagan and Bush did the same thing to pass their bills, all with overwhelming support from those same Republicans.

In that same vein: Senator, you want to destroy the hopes of millions of Americans to eradicate the fear of catastrophic illness...for less than a million bucks?
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