I got an email from Dan at Pruning Shears:

Hi Jane. You wrote:

So, the single payer advocates on the committee caved on tying reimbursement rates to Medicare, which Ross believed would have "led to single payer," in exchange for a vote on single payer on the floor — which everyone acknowledges will fail, and the Blue Dogs had no problem with.

Just a thought:

Howard W. Smith, the powerful Virginian who chaired the House Rules Committee, opposed civil rights laws for blacks, but he supported them for women. Smith had long been close to Alice Paul, one of the leaders of the Suffrage Movement since 1917. At her urging, Smith jokingly and insincerely included gender as a protected category. His purpose was to make the bill unacceptable, and this attempt to openly ridicule the legislation infused the debate with howls of laughter. Smith’s strategy, however, backfired, and was ultimately used against him by Representative Martha Griffiths, a liberal feminist from Michigan, whose support of Smith’s amendment resulted in the inclusion of gender as a protected category in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Sometimes what "everyone acknowledges" is wrong.

Let’s do the math. The Democrats have 257 seats in the House. A majority is 218. The Blue Dogs have 55 seats. You need 15 of them to pass anything.

Mike Ross brags that the Blue Dogs held the bill "hostage" explicitly to kill any hope of single payer. For 10 days. Maybe someone would enlighten me about how the math works such that Single Payer, when it comes to floor later this year, could possibly pass?

Because Mike Ross thinks they just fought hard and won something that could realistically lead to single payer. Which Jan Schakowsky traded away for a vote that has no hope of passing, at least according to my second grade math skills.

Help me out here. How does this happen? How is Jan Schakowsky not playing everyone for a fool?