“I do not support…a government owned, government run insurance company,” Collins said.<\/p>\n
“I have only to look at the experience of my own state in establishing a government run plan to see the problems that arise.”<\/p>\n
Collins was referring to the Dirigo health agency, which provides subsidized insurance to poor people in Maine who don’t quite qualify for Medicaid.<\/p>\n
“I think we have learned a lot from the Maine plan,” Specter retorted. “We know what not to do. We’re not going to adopt a Maine plan. That experience will stand us in good stead. We won’t make the same mistake<\/span>.”<\/p>\nSpecter went on: “And when Senator Lieberman talks about single payer, I think he’s putting his finger on the pulse of it. That’s what people have concluded [but] the public option isn’t single payer<\/span>, and it is not going to add to the deficit<\/span>, it’s going to be a level playing field<\/span>. So I would like everyone to read the fine print and [for my colleagues] to re-read the fine print<\/span>.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n(emphasis mine<\/span>)<\/p>\nBy the standards of the Senate, this is actually a pretty nasty slam.<\/p>\n
Yet me note that this is not an endorsement of him. When you get 12-18 months of non wankertude out of a 6-year term, and so it’s not really worth it pulling the lever for him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Or, more accurately, I like him since he’s had a primary challenger, thank you Joe Sestak. It means that we’ll get 18 months of him being a loyal party player….Unfortunately, for the other 54 months of his Senate term, he’s still a contemptible grandstanding untrustworthy jerk. Case in point, now that he’s running ferociously to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[998,1000,1046,1051],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress","category-elections","category-healthcare","category-hypocrisy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190357"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}