The thing that is so frustrating about talk a paring down the current Senate bill is that the Senate bill is already pared down.  We went through weeks and weeks of rubbing Ben Nelson’s and Joe Lieberman’s feet by getting rid of the public option, taxes on rich people, and any other good policy ideas that twinged an already raw nerve of “looking liberal.”

What we’re left with then is just basic insurance reform, which goes something like this:

1. People are pissed that insurance companies are screwing them by claiming pre-existing condition exclusions.
2. In order to stop (1), we ban this practice
3. In order to accomplish (2) without people abusing insurance companies (i.e. get insurance when they get sick), we impose an individual mandate.
4. In order to accomplish (3) without forcing poor people to go bankrupt buying health insurance they can’t afford, we provide subsidies to buy insurance.
5. In order to pay for (4), we cut waste in Medicare and impose new taxes.

There’s really nothing here to take out, because it’s all related; you take out one, and all the cards fall.

It’s not just me saying this either.  Check with the experts:

“The idea of scaled back reform, and particularly of doing insurance reforms by themselves, is a fantasy,” says Richard Kirsch, director of the reform campaign Health Care for America Now. “The public wants to stop insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. You can’t do that without a mandate; you can’t do a mandate without subsidizing coverage; you can’t subsidize coverage without Medicare savings and new revenues. The public wants to end medical bankruptcies – but to do that you need to provide affordable coverage to people and you need to mandate decent insurance benefits and put a ban on annual and lifetime caps. Doing all that requires setting up exchanges and subsidizing coverage.”

Thankfully, President Obama sees things the same way:

If you ask the American people about health care, one of the things that drives them crazy is insurance companies denying people coverage because of preexisting conditions. Well, it turns out that if you don’t — if you don’t make sure that everybody has health insurance, then you can’t eliminate insurance companies — you can’t stop insurance companies from discriminating against people because of preexisting conditions. Well, if you’re going to give everybody health insurance, you’ve got to make sure it’s affordable. So it turns out that a lot of these things are interconnected.

Now, I could have said, well, we’ll just do what’s safe. We’ll just take on those things that are completely noncontroversial. The problem is the things that are noncontroversial end up being the things that don’t solve the problem. And this is true on every issue.

Where does that leave us?  It leaves us with 256 gutless, crybabies huddled in a corner.  No one but Congressional Democrats are so good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The path is simple.  Pass the bill.