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.

Watch it:

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.

Watch it:

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.

For those of us covering health care reform, waiting for the Congressional Budget Office to score is always somewhat nerve wracking. We sit at our desks refreshing the CBO web page, scouring the latest twitter updates and reading the tea leaves of lawmakers’ cable news appearances — all this in an effort to see the language the very moment it comes out.

We receive desperate phone calls from our colleagues — who don’t spend the entire day staring at their TweetDecks — asking, “where is it?,” “how much longer?” “why isn’t it here yet?” We’re all incredibly frustrated — particularly since Democrats continue to insist that they will pass the House health care bill before the end of the week — but in this case, the delay is understandable.

As the Washington Post explains, under the rules, the reconciliation package must reduce the deficit by at least $2 billion over the next five years and avoid increasing the deficit in any year thereafter — as measured against the Senate bill:

But virtually everything House Democrats want to achieve in their package costs money. For example, Obama and House leaders have promised to increase government subsidies to help lower-income people purchase insurance, to fully close the coverage gap known as the doughnut hole in the Medicare prescription drug program, and to extend to all states the deal cut with Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson (D), under which the federal government would pay for a proposed expansion of Medicaid.

Meanwhile, House leaders want to dramatically scale back one of the most powerful deficit-reduction tools in the Senate bill: a 40 percent excise tax on high-cost insurance policies. Obama has proposed to delay implementation of the tax until 2018 and to limit the number of policies that would be subject to the tax.

In other words, it’s taking so long because Democrats are trying to practice what Republicans only talk about — responsible spending and deficit reduction. To accomplish this, lawmakers have to go back and forth with the CBO, “scrambling to come up with additional sources of cash.” So in many ways, the slow, laborious process is to be expected. But having said that, have you heard anything yet?

Jonathan Chait argues that political reporters and bloggers have failed to “fully explain” deem and pass “to their readers and put them in the proper context.” Well, this morning on Good Morning America, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) explained the rule in some very clear terms:

HOYER: We are going to have a clean up or down vote on the Senate bill, that will be on the rule. This is a procedure, by the way, that was used almost 100 times under Newt Gingrich and over 100 times by Speaker Hastert, which my friend Mr. Cantor supported most of the time, if not all of the time. So this is not an unusual procedure. We’re going to vote on a rule. It’s simply like a conference report. Conference report comes back. You vote on it, with amendments.

Unfortunately, the Republicans are a little bit like the boy who killed his two parents and then wants sympathy because he’s an orphan. They’ve tried to stop the passage of this bill. Slowed it up. Wouldn’t agree to go to conference, so what we’re going to do is report out what essentially is a conference report with amendments. So we’ll vote on the Senate bill in the rule and we will amend the Senate bill in the process…

Watch it:

Cantor sheepishly smiled at Hoyer and ultimately agreed. “Yes, Steny is right. The rules of the House allow for this type of deeming provision, it’s called a self-executing provision which means that once the bill, the rule for the next bill passes, the Senate bill is automatically is deemed as having passed,” he said. As Norman Ornstein points out, “that strategy, then decried by the House Democrats who are now using it, and now being called unconstitutional by WSJ editorialists, was defended by House Republicans in court (and upheld). Dreier used it for a $40 billion deficit reduction package so that his fellow GOPers could avoid an embarrassing vote on immigration.”

Now, House Democrats are using it for two reasons. 1) They don’t want to vote for the Senate health care bill (which, as I argue here is a bit of a self-indulgence) and 2) Republicans won’t vote for cloture on the conference report.

Remember, if Republicans really believed that this rule is so unconstitutional — which Cantor actually backed away from asserting this morning — or that passing health care reform would undermine the Democratic party, then they would preserve our founding document and bolster their prospects in the midterm election by voting to “move forward.” After all, they vote for cloture on things they don’t like all the time (on March 10th Sen. Scott Brown voted against a bill extending health benefits after voting for cloture to allow the legislation to move forward a day earlier). Here, they’re choosing to continue obstructing reform and forcing the Democrats’ hand.