Your Christmas miracle

If you were hoping that in the next few days that a lonely rich miser would learn the value of humanity, sharing, and good will to all, that some workaholic father would learn the value of time spent with family appreciating the little things, or that a precocious mutt from the pound would reunite an estranged couple and teach the neighborhood the meaning of Christmas, well, you're out of luck. All the Christmas miracle sauce got used up this weekend by the Democrats to get 60 votes for the health care bill and what little was left over got used by the Steelers last night to beat the Packers.

Would we all have liked something a better Christmas miracle than Ben Nelson being sufficiently bought off by the Democratic leadership to pass a compromise of a compromised compromise health care bill? Yeah. But time are tough for everyone, even Santa, and all he could give us was a discount Christmas miracle. The first votes have been finished and things look to be on track for Senate passage of the bill by Christmas day. What did they have to compromise to get this passed?

Under the deal, states could choose to prohibit abortion coverage in plans offered through insurance exchanges that the bill would set up for people who lack coverage through their jobs. The compromise is less restrictive than the abortion language contained in the House bill.

Nelson also secured full and permanent federal funding for his state to extend Medicaid eligibility to everyone below 133 percent of the federal poverty level. The bill would require all states to do so, but Nebraska alone would not be required to pay a portion of the additional cost after 2016. And he won concessions for some nonprofit insurers and for providers of supplemental Medicare coverage from a new insurance tax, and he was able to roll back cuts to health savings accounts.

So under the abortion compromise, which may be unconstitutional, you essentially are at the whims of the states to decide if it's allowed and you have to pay for the transaction with two checks.Nice to see that as part of his principled objection to women paying for things with one check, he also had a principled debate over whether or not his state should get extra Medicare goodies that no other state got. He won that argument of course, but Harry Reid was able to keep out an amendment that declared Nebraska the "most ball out fuckin' radical state ever created." The Senate does have some principles.

If you want to read what's in the actual bill, go here. If you want to read someone lamenting the state of the bill, but saying the bill should still be passed, pick anyone but Howard Dean and Kieth Olbermann. But here are some good ones: Jacob Hacker "The Godfather of the public option", the Washington Post's Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, and.. well fuck it, you have Google. Just type in "smiling while eating a shit sandwich" and it ought to take you to the most relevant articles. I swear on Sean's life that you won't find anything other than health care analysis if you Google that phrase.

Merry Christmas, you got health care, of a sort, to be put fully in place in 2014. Maybe some of this country will even be back to work by then. Enjoy.