This morning Senator Hagan held a conference call with members of the media to discuss her trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq as well as her other activities over the spring recess. She stepped out of a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting to speak with us and the first question to her was about the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Senator Hagan responded that we have a volunteer military and she feels anybody who is willing and able to serve should be afforded that right.

When pressed further as to whether she supports Senator Lieberman's bill Senator Hagan emphasized that she supports repeal of the policy, but fell short of specifically endorsing Senator Lieberman's bill.

I'm supporting turning back that bill. The department of defense is committeed to repealing the outdated policy and Secretary Gates has announced that he will conduct a study to determine how best to implement the repeal.

More on the conference call later.

The chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has delivered his scoring of HR 3962 to members of Congress and the news isn’t good. Not only does it look like the bill will wind up costing more than projected by the CBO, the pledge that the bill will not reduce services to Medicare recipients will be difficult, if not impossible, to keep.

Some of you may remember Rick Foster from the fiasco surrounding George Bush’s Medicare Prescription Drug Plan. Foster’s cost estimates for the plan were more than $200 billion higher than the CBO’s.

In an email to members this morning, Progressive Democrats of America calls HR 3962, "a very bad bill."

This bill is, so far, a very bad bill that will further enmesh corporations into our government and our daily lives without addressing the problem. It diminishes all of our rights, not just reproductive ones, by failing to recognize healthcare as a human right, not a commodity to be traded on Wall Street.

And, it does next to nothing to help Americans who are now being gouged by healthcare corporations. “if you like your insurance--you get to keep it” has morphed into “if you have insurance, you have to keep it whether you like it or not, and if you don’t have it--you have to buy it.”

:::snip:::

Ahhh, Stupak and fellow Dems and Republicans want to force women using the public option to buy a supplemental plan to cover abortions even though the Capps Amendment preserves/protects the Hyde language which basically says no federal dollars will be used to pay for abortions.

Rep. Capps said current federal language is maintained. Calls this a devastating amendment.

At some point I thought they would vote for this, but I think they are waiting until after the debate on the Republican's crappy substitute.

Update
This sucks. However, this is how they got enough votes to pass the healthcare bill. They sold out women. Nice.

If you've been following the announcements coming out about the healthcare debate over the past two days they have certainly included some mixed messages. A couple of days ago I received an email from PDA (Progressive Democrats of America) excited that Speaker Pelosi was going to allow a 20 minute floor debate on Rep. Weiner's single-payer amendment followed by an up-or-down vote. We were encouraged to put together action plans for our readers.

From the email:

Last night PDA got word from Congressman Weiner’s office that Speaker Pelosi is keeping her promise to allow the Weiner single-payer amendment full debate and vote on the floor of the House. This will happen on Friday or Saturday.