{"id":2440,"date":"2009-10-04T16:16:03","date_gmt":"2009-10-04T16:16:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2440"},"modified":"2009-10-04T16:16:03","modified_gmt":"2009-10-04T16:16:03","slug":"final_stretch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2440","title":{"rendered":"Final Stretch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I took a break from health care blogging while the Senate Finance Committee went about the ponderous business of crafting its own version of a bill, but expect me to start wonking out in the coming days and weeks as the debate <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/10\/04\/health\/policy\/04health.html?ref=todayspaper\">moves from the committees to the floors of both chambers<\/a> as well the closed-door conference rooms where the real negotiations will take place. I&#8217;d love to see every bargaining session broadcast on C-SPAN, but our form of representative democracy has never trusted the electorate enough to be comfortable with full transparency. Still, I&#8217;m expecting the floor debates to provide the kind of theater that will have Daily Show writers clapping their hands with unrestrained glee. I also expect that the media will declare negotiations deadlocked at least once before a bill gets signed. I remain confident that a bill will get signed and it might even be a pretty good bill. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure how the politics of this will play out, though. Most bill provisions don&#8217;t take effect for a few years and it seems really awkward to tell voters that they need to hold on for a while longer before they can get health care. I&#8217;m sure Obama&#8217;s advisers are paying attention to the problem, but I hope they come up with something that will provide tangible benefit to people in the short-term.<\/p>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.zemanta.com\/pixy.gif?w=695\" \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I took a break from health care blogging while the Senate Finance Committee went about the ponderous business of crafting its own version of a bill, but expect me to start wonking out in the coming days and weeks as the debate moves from the committees to the floors of both chambers as well the <a href='https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2440' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-Dm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2440\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}