I'm sure you saw the post over at fivethirtyeight about lessons Democrats should learn from this debate and the Clinton era one, and it echoed many of my own thoughts over the past year. Obama completely lost, even ceded, control of the debate, to a party that rests most successes for a generation on framing debate in terms favorable to them. One issue Nate Silver raised was that there were so many different possible forms the final bill could take, and the administration was so taciturn about which specific points they supported, that it was very difficult for Obama supporters to defend positions that remained vague and undefined. Put more simply, Obamas particular views on healthcare throughout 2009 were uncertain and dubious, so it was very easy for opponents to sow additional uncertainty and doubt.

The Medicare accusations are a good example; at one point some Medicare services WERE on the chopping block simply because they were envisioned as being universally available through the new national healthcare system. If the national healthcare plan guarantees cancer screening to all patients at no cost, it's rather pointless to have Medicare provide them as well, yes? Further, one thing that seemed completely ignored in the negotiations with Lieberman is that Medicare will be operating at a net loss within a decade because more people will be paying out than paying in; lowering the enrollment age so that those people began receiving Medicare NOW rather than then was a rather questionable carrot to offer liberals. Yahoos article on the bill early this morning mentioned reduced federal payments to retirement homes and similar private institutions partially paid for by Medicare, and the Yahoo article linked below says of GOP plans for the midterms that, "McConnell signaled his intent to zero in on items like planned cuts to the hugely popular government-run Medicare program for the elderly, and tax increases on the wealthy. " Reality notwithstanding, Republicans seemed to have learned the lesson that when one side says a popular public program is under attack and the other denies it the public has enough snap to know they're only in danger if the latter is lying.

The proof is in the pudding, but the fact remains that the motive to healthcare reform was existing high costs continuing to rise at alarming rates, and the only provision of the healthcare bill addressing that directly are in the reform of the reform set for a Senate vote later this week. It was added as an afterthought, and only barely even then. Meanwhile, all the current bill does is require the entire country to buy into a private system while doing little to reduce costs or limit their growth. That's why it will take a $900 billion dollar subsidy to those who can't afford to do so, but that so few know where that number originates speaks as poorly of Democrats as it does of Republicans who want to focus on the cost of the bill without explaining it. And that's still a very pressing concern; opponents say it's irresponsible to allow government input in 1/6th of the economy, but that's a BIG chunk of GDP whose growth shows no sign of abating.

From where I sit it still seems that we're trying to eliminate ravenous private insurance greed by shoving so much additional money down their throats that they choke on it. At the risk of sounding like a right wing conservative, while some problems may be resolved by throwing money at them, greed is not among them.