This just in from my local single-payer activism source on Thursday's DC trip (which I missed because of illness, isn't it ironic). This just goes to show what what happens when you refuse to be ignored. Names have been removed to protect the heroic from their employers. This is the aftermath of a meeting with Spector's aide:

A followup to this post on CBO's Jim Elmendorf from the Montana Great Falls Tribune (via PNHP), first I'll give the details on the action:

Protesters in Helena, Great Falls, Missoula, Bozeman and Butte gathered at Baucus' local field offices and demanded that Montana's senior senator, and chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, put single-payer back on the table.

Good tactic to gather at local offices, since Versailles is so far away....

Bloomberg

June 10 (Bloomberg) -- Doug Elmendorf, a low-profile economist who leads a little-known congressional office [the Congressional Budget Office, or CBO*], may hold more sway in the debate over President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul than many lawmakers, administration officials or lobbyists.

The 47-year-old head of the Congressional Budget Office is the official scorekeeper for the cost of health-care proposals on Capitol Hill.

Elmendorf’s agency gets the final word on the price of a government insurance plan, the savings from fighting obesity and whether a bill fulfills Obama’s pledge to expand health-care coverage and cut costs without raising the budget deficit. The fate of the entire effort may rise or fall on that judgment.

“They’re god,” said Iowa Senator Charles Grassley, the top Republican on the Finance Committee. “If they say something costs X number of dollars, we can disagree all we want but unless you got 60 votes to override them it doesn’t do any good.”

Elmendorf, who had worked at the CBO in the early 1990s, was appointed to the top job in January. While earning a doctorate at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Elmendorf’s dissertation advisers included Lawrence Summers, director of Obama’s National Economic Council. Elmendorf has worked at the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department and the Washington-based Brookings Institution, a policy research group. ...

Sounds like a fully paid up Finance Democrat.

Here. Comments are off; fucking Republicans. Oh, wait...

Jonathan Cohn, writing at TNR, [via Matt Yglesias]:

Instead of a politically daunting $1.5 trillion, the CBO figures the price tag will be closer to $1 trillion, at least under certain parameters.

PNHP Blog: CBO’s deficient report on analyzing health insurance proposals

What is clear is that each policy decision under this scenario increases the administrative complexities of the financing system, and that the inevitable tradeoffs that must be made can only result in compromises that cause us to fall short on our goals of universality, equity, efficiency, quality, access, and affordability. Once the decision is made that we must build on our current system, there is no possible way to avoid spending more money for reform that would fall so short of a high-performance system.