re: #499 Walter L. Newton

First off he said he was not going to deal with Big Pharma. Second, there is something wrong with the whole picture if you can say “Picking a fight with Pharma is a good way to kill a bill.” Are you saying that our government is not in our control?

Where did I ever say he did anything out of a “love” of something. All I said was there are other people in that room who more concerned with the Insurance industry and lobbyists. Tell me that I’m wrong.

Perhaps I misunderstood. I thought you were implying that Obama was concerned about their welfare, not concerned about them as potential opponents.

I would respectfully suggest that anyone who is approaching HCR with the goal of getting something meaningful done has to spend some time thinking about which fights are winnable and which aren’t. And my read of BHO is that he is ultimately a pragmatist who will make whatever deal he needs to make with whomever he needs to make it to get a minimally acceptable HCR bill passed. If it’s Pharma, it’s Pharma.

I also suspect that if he were asked to define his ideal HCR answer, and was unconstrained by politics, then his answer would be a broader and more comprehensive solution than anything we have seen. But politics is the art of the possible, and that means making deals.

Saying that this implies that our government is not in our control just misses the whole point.