Two Big Votes, And The Words of the Day

There were two big votes Sunday night. (Ok, one is more meaningful than the other. For now I’m primarily posting to note the more entertaining one, and will get to the more important one after I get more of a chance to wade through all the amendments which were voted upon.)  The Democrats got sixty on the big cloture vote and being nice turned out to be more important than being the dominant player on the Survivor finale. Thanks to Shambo, the words for the day are feckless and the c-word (coattail). In this case choosing the right coattails was the winning move for Natalie.

Update: Since blog aggregators are picking this up along with real posts on health care reform I should at least mention something on the Senate vote (although this post was primarily a quick response to Survivor as opposed to anything really serious). As with everything going on in the Senate, the amendments look like a combination of good and bad items. The most disappointing is an increase in the penalties for the rather weak mandate in the Senate bill. The fix to the Medicare payment formula was removed, but it would be better to deal with this separately rather than add this cost, which has been with us for years, to the scoring of the Senate bill.

Reconciliation with the House version will sure be interesting considering the vast differences between the two bills, with both having good and bad aspects (with the House version being preferable). Hopefully we will wind up with the best portions of both bills, but there is also the very real danger that in order to obtain enough votes for narrow passage we could wind up with bad aspects from both surviving.

2 Comments

  1. 1
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  2. 2
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