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UPDATE: Our friends at the NRSC take Specter to task, reminding us of what defines "loyalty," "consistency" and "reliability."

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Tonight, Vice President Joe Biden is holding a fundraiser in Pittsburgh for Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA). Back in April, Biden said he worked “double-time for … 100 days” to get Specter to switch parties. Biden probably worked “double-time” because he wanted to get another Senate vote for labor unions’ top priority: the “Employee Free Choice Act” (EFCA), otherwise known as “Card Check.” After all, Biden did tell a labor union back in May: “We owe you.”

So has Biden seen any fruits of his labor? Let’s look at the timeline:

• March 24: Facing a Republican primary challenger, Specter announced he would oppose EFCA.
• April 28: Specter becomes a Democrat, and Obama announces his “full support” for Pennsylvania’s senior Senator.
• August 14: Specter says he will support cloture on EFCA with “no doubt.”

Looks like Biden succeeded. But it ... more

The Obama Administration has not felt at all shy when it comes to using similar Chicago-style pressure tactics to get what they want. White House Chief Of Staff Rahm Emanuel has cajoled Democrat groups to stop attacking fellow Democrats. Energy Secretary Steven Chu is openly advocating the destruction of the US Chamber Of Commerce because they dare oppose global warming legislation. And they’re punishing Fox News for not being flattering in their Administration coverage.

But in an attempt to dump bad news late on Friday (a long-time Washington tradition), the Obama Administration announced it would lift its “gag rule” on insurers providing Medicare Advantage plans.  

It began last month when an insurance company sent out a mailing informing their customers about Obama’s plan to cut $177 billion from Medicare Advantage and the resulting benefit cuts and premium increases they would create, a fact confirmed by CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf. The Centers For Medicare And Medicaid ... more

On NBC’s “Meet The Press” this morning, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) argued that doing nothing would be worse than passing the Democrats’ government-run health care experiment:

“What are the alternatives here if we do nothing, as some are suggesting? … [I]f you look in the next seven years, we could have premium costs go from $13,000 to $24,000. 3.5 million jobs could be lost in the process. The cost of business could double to nearly $1 trillion as a result of doing nothing. The impact of doing nothing is so much more costly than what we are talking here that my hope would be that we get together on this. The American public cannot withstand more years of rising costs, rising premiums and more unemployment.”

Unfortunately, there’s ample evidence that Democrat plans would make those terrible problems worse by increasing the cost of health care and insurance premiums and also ruining the economy. 

Even worse, Obama and Congressional Democrats are ignoring plenty of Republican ideas that ... more

This morning, on CNN’s State Of The Union with John King, White House Chief Of Staff Rahm Emanuel was asked why so much of the work on government-run health care is going on behind closed doors. Rahm is part of a small group that’s meeting with Senators Reid, Baucus and Dodd to write the health bill that’s going to come out of the Senate. This is contrary to a promise made by President Obama during the campaign that all of his health care negotiations would be televised on C-SPAN so everyone could see who was making what arguments. Here’s the exchange:

KING: You are deeply involved in these health care negotiations on Capitol Hill, right now, behind closed doors in the Senate. This is a story from The Washington Post today: ‘small group now leads closed-door negotiations.’ And it quotes the president, from candidate Obama saying ‘we will have these discussions televised on c-span. Everyone will be at the table. We'll do this in an open and transparent way.’ Why does it have to be ... more

They can run, but they can’t hide. And from Virginia to Nevada, we made sure Americans knew what Democrats were really up to today.

With Al Gore holding a fundraiser for Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds, we took the opportunity to show how the “Goracle” must love the fact that “Cap-And-Trade Creigh” supports a job-killing national energy tax.

But not all Democrats play well together. In fact, throughout this whole government-run health care debate, the debate has chiefly been between Democrats. So we produced our 23^rd edition of CHAOS, noting that Democrats, labor unions and left-wing organizations are launching attacks on Sen. Max Baucus’s version of government-run health care.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is writing Obama’s government-run health care plan behind closed doors with White House aides. So Biden is holding a fundraiser today for the embattled senior Senator from the Silver State. Our research shows that deploying Biden on health ... more

Earlier today, we did a roundup of the continuing chaos brewing among Democrats overgovernment-run health care, but we couldn’t have said it better that MSNBC’s Ken Strickland did:

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) hid part of the cost of his health care pseudo-bill by making states pick up a big part of the tab, prompting howls from both Republican and Democrat governors. As the House attempts to bring the cost of its $1.6 trillion government-run health care bill under Obama’s magic number ($900 billion), it appears Speaker Pelosi may opt for a similar path.

According to the Washington Post’s Lori Montgomery, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated the cost of two versions of the merged House bill and one depends on such a cost shift:

The report from the Congressional Budget Office, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, puts the cost of one plan at $859 billion over the next decade and the other at $905 billion. The cheaper version would rely heavily on a more dramatic expansion of Medicaid, the government health plan for the poor that is funded partly by the states -- meaning already-strapped governors would have to pick up more of the cost ... more

Democrats are taxing everything in sight to pay for their new government-run health care experiment.  A tax on the health insurance industry will likely be in whatever final bills the House and Senate end up voting on, and the Senate Finance Committee bill included a $6.1 billion annual levy on the insurance industry. 

In their haste to tax, Democrats haven’t thought through the implications of this policy.  The tax would start immediately in 2010, so insurance companies would have very little time to adjust their rates and policies to compensate for the new expense.  This tax would have a large effect on the smaller companies with less money. Those smaller insurers would have to raise their premiums, which will help entrench the largest insurers, leading to less competition. InsideHealthPolicy.com (subscription required) explains:

“‘In the worst case, United and WellPoint certainly have the capacity and the capital to pay the tax,’ the analysts write in an Oct. 6 note obtained by ... more

Our friends in Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s office had some fun today with the media’s recent breathless coverage of Republicans such as Bob Dole and Bill Frist coming out in favor of health care reform.  Never mind that their statements were being misrepresented by the Obama White House (and the DNC, which was forced to pull their ad on the subject), the media still covered each statement from these former Republican elected officials and Cabinet appointees as a break from the current GOP.

But in fact, as the Senate Leader’s office noted, tongue in cheek, today, “Breaking News: Every Senate Republican Supports Health Care Reform,” providing a statement from every member of the Senate GOP Conference in their release.  But similar to the viewpoint of the American people, that doesn’t mean Republicans will support the Obama/Pelosi/Reid plan to rush through a massive, costly government takeover of our health care system that does nothing to reduce cost of health care for ... more

The answer? No one.

Ten months into the Obama Administration, the Centers For Medicare And Medicaid Services (CMS) is without a full-time leader. President Obama has yet to even nominate a candidate to head this massive agency, which runs two of the biggest programs of the federal government.  According to health expert Stephen Parente’s post on the American Enterprise Institute’s blog, CMS spends approximately $2.2 billion per day:

“Take the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator post. I would find it far more credible that the administration will bend the cost curve down if a CMS administrator had been appointed nearly 9 months post inauguration (a record), and if 70 percent of other CMS posts weren’t vacant (also a record). Assuming nearly $800 billion spent on Medicare and Medicaid for an annualized 2009, each day past the president’s inauguration, $2.2 billion has been spent (with 55%+ for Medicare alone) without a leader. The civil service running such ... more