Transparency & Obamacare

Didn't find this on C-Span:

Obama, Top Democrats, Organized Labor Spend All Day in Private Meetings Cutting Deals [Stephen Spruiell]

Unprecedented openness and transparency:

After an unusual day-long negotiating session, President Barack Obama and top Democratic congressional leaders said late Wednesday that they were making “significant progress” towards reconciling the House and Senate health care reform bills.

Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid issued a statement at the close of more than eight hours of White House talks – by far the most significant, high-level negotiations undertaken during the yearlong push for health care reform. [...]

In reality, the session at the White House was a de facto conference committee, with House and Senate leaders meeting privately to hash out differences in the bill. Pelosi and Reid have been heavily criticized by Republicans for circumventing the normal conference committee process, even though much of the work under that structure also takes place behind closed doors.

Those involved in the talks sought to keep details of their progress under wraps. The negotiations delved into the Senate’s controversial tax on expensive insurance plans, which unions and House members strongly oppose, and, for a while Wednesday, labor leaders huddled privately with top administration aides.

No question about it: Obama has changed the way Washington works. Not in Tom DeLay's wildest dreams...


Unions to be Exempted from Cadillac Tax? [Daniel Foster]

Congress Daily is reporting that union lobbyists on Capitol Hill today scored a tentative deal that would exempt "collectively bargained healthcare plans" from the so-called Cadillac Tax on high-cost policies.

As The American Spectator's Philip Klein notes, this means that two Americans receiving identical health-care benefits could be taxed differently if one happened to be a member of a union and the other not.

Update: It is easy to see why the excise tax will need a pro-union makeover before a House-Senate reconciliation. AFL-CIO and SEIU officials have spent the week hitting key Democrat offices on Capitol Hill, and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was at the National Press Club on Monday making threats, warning Democrats that if the final version of Obamacare doesn't make organized labor happy, 2010 could be 1994 all over again, since it would be dificult to "persuade enough working Americans to go to the polls."

"A bad bill could have that kind of effect," Trumka told reporters. "People could stay home. It could suppress votes."

House Dems seem to be getting the message. Reps. Joe Courtney (D., Conn.) and Sander Levin (D., Mich.) have already rounded up more than 190 of their caucus-mates to sign a letter opposing the tax.Update II: Look for Obama and Congressional Democrats to the expand the union carve-out to cover a swath of the "middle-class" (the universal solvent of American politics), so they can camouflage this massive giveaway to a pet constituency.

One House Democrat is already saying a "consensus" could be built around such a scheme by further increasing the Medicare payroll tax and applying it to capital gains to make up for lost revenue.

This would amount to nothing less than a bill of attainder against on all constituencies that are not especially useful to the president and his party.