The Senate's Healthcare Reform

The bill has now been watered down such that it's acceptable to all of the 60 needed to pass it. This means Senator #60 has full control of how far the bill goes. Strange.

There are two perspectives from progressives:

There's been a little bit of revisionist history in the post-mortem over the public option. The fact is that progressives did very, very well to get to within a handful of votes in the Senate on a weak-ish public option -- perhaps as close as one or two votes on the latest compromise, the Medicare buy-in.

and

Insurance companies win. Time to kill this monstrosity coming out of the Senate.

I haven't done the reading to understand this, but with a polarized Senate, it wasn't exactly unpredictable.