The Health Care Debate Begins

As the rest of us finish the last of the Thanksgiving leftovers, the Senate begins its health care debate this week. The AP sets the table with a surprisingly pessimistic take on the coming weeks:

While majority Democrats will need 60 votes again to finish, some in the party say they'll jump ship from the bill without tighter restrictions on abortion coverage. Others say they'll go unless a government plan to compete with private insurance companies gets tossed. Such concessions would enrage liberals, the party's heart and soul. There's no clear course for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to steer legislation through Congress to the president's desk. You can't make history unless you reach 60 votes, and don't count on Republicans helping him.

The major problem facing the legislation is public disapproval. Jeffrey Anderson goes through the numbers in this post over at NRO:

In the last two weeks, eight national polls have been released showing what the American people think of Obamacare. The results of those eight polls - Pew, ABC/WaPo, PPP, CNN, CBS, Quinnipiac, Fox, and Rasmussen - show that by an average margin of 8.5 percent (49.0 percent to 40.5 percent), more people oppose Obamacare than support it. That's greater than the margin by which John McCain lost last November. If you drop the high and low polls, the margin is greater still, as half of the eight polls show Obamacare facing a double-digit deficit. Back in June, four national polls - Rasmussen, NBC/WSJ, Democracy Corps, and CNN - showed what Americans thought of Obamacare then. By a margin of 4.3 percent (44.3 percent to 40 percent), they supported it. So the drop in support for Obamacare has been 12.8 percent in five months. And that's not even the full extent of the bad news for Obamacare supporters. Even in June, the intensity of opposition was clearly greater than the intensity of support, but now the ratio of those strongly opposed to strongly supportive has grown even larger. In June, when the Rasmussen poll showed 5 percent more people in support of Obamacare than opposed to it, those who felt "strongly" swung the other way - with 34 percent opposing it strongly and only 24 percent supporting it strongly. Today, the same poll shows that people who feel strongly (one way or the other) oppose Obamacare by better than 2-to-1: 43 percent to 21 percent. A 10-point gap among the vehement has become a 22-point gap.

Does Harry Reid have the skills to convince 60 senators to vote against public opinion? Good question! If he does, it will be a first for the Senate majority leader -- one that might cost him his job.