Over at The American Spectator blog, Phillip Klein isn’t very surprised about Kucinich’s new-found support for the Senate legislation.”There’s no shock that every single-payer advocate in Congress would talked tough for over a year will ultimately support the final bill,” he writes. The legislation is a slippery slide towards single-payer and Kucinich would be a fool not to support it, the argument goes. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) agreed:

GRAHAM: Well, I like Dennis, but if you had any doubt this was a liberal bill, now any doubts removed. I don’t think Dennis would be voting for this bill if he didn’t think it accomplished a lot of the liberal goals of expanding health care and giving the government a bigger role in health care. It does cut Medicare, it does raise taxes and I think Dennis’ goal of more government run health care is being accomplished or he wouldn’t vote for it.

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But this argument really doesn’t make much sense. During the presser, Kucinich explained that he was voting for the bill “as is” and described his support as a “detour” from the single-payer cause. “As this bill passes, I will renew my efforts to help those state organizations which are aimed at stirring a single payer movement which eliminates the predatory role of private insurers who make money not providing health care”:

KUCINICH: I have doubts about the bill. I do not think it is a step toward anything I’ve supported in the past. This is not the bill I wanted to support even as I continue efforts until the last minute to try to modify the bill….I know I have to make a decision not on the bill as I like to see it, but as it is…. I’ve taken a detour through supporting this bill. But I know the destination I will continue to lead for as long as it takes, for whatever it takes to an America where health care will be firmly established as a civil right.”

In other words, Kucinich doesn’t believe that a bill that excludes the public option and requires Americans to purchase private coverage will lead to some tremendous increase in government involvement and neither do most of the Democrats in the Senate who voted for the legislation. In fact, even the Congressional Budget Office has concluded that the Senate bill would create “no significant change in [the government's] commitment [to health care].”

If anything, the bill represents a tremendous compromise of Democratic and Republican ideas. The final product is something neither side is incredibly happy with, but most Democrats believe (now with Kucinich on board) that it will establish the necessary foundation for achieving universal coverage.

Conservatives sometimes try to rally progressives to oppose the Senate health care bill by characterizing the legislation as a give away to private insurers. But this morning, retiring Congressman John Shadegg (R-AZ) took this manufactured outrage to new heights, telling MSNBC’s David Schuster that the bill would give insurers “exactly what they want”:

SHADEGG: The reality is this bill is going to reward for-profit companies that have done a disservice. This bill mandates, with the IRS executing the penalty if you don’t go along, that you and I buy health insurance plans from for-profit companies. That’s an outrage. It’s the same for profit health care companies that have done a lousy job of taking care of this. And yet this bill gives them exactly what they wanted. The insurance industry, the for-profit insurance industry wanted an individual mandate and that’s what they are getting out of this bill. The for-profit insurance industry did not want a public option because they don’t like competition. And guess what? They are getting that. This bill is giving to the for-profit insurance companies and I happen to believe that Dennis is making this point, it’s giving the for-profit insurance companies exactly what they want.

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When Schuster pressed Shadegg on whether he would support a “government-run medicare expansion,” Shadegg described his personal health care proposal which, ironically, would go a lot further towards pleasing the insurance industry than the Senate bill. Shadegg’s plan would allow insurers to continue providing completely unregulated insurance policies to cheap-to-cover younger Americans and push older more expensive Americans into tax payer funded high risk pools. Shadegg takes some preliminary steps towards limiting premium growth, but it’s unlikely that these programs will offer affordable or even adequate coverage.

Nationwide, high-risk pools can afford to cover fewer than 200,000 people. States grapple with the high cost of insuring a large pool of very sick people by charging higher premiums, denying benefits for treatments related to their preexisting conditions and limiting eligibility. In fact, according to the Tax Policy Center, subsidizing sick people by grouping them together into a single risk pool could cost as much as $1 trillion over ten years.