Good rebuttal to Nate Silver on the "benefits" of Senate HRC bill

From "A Night Light" blog:

Darcy Burner is absolutely right when she writes "affordable coverage for everyone: FAIL." Silver is absolutely wrong when he says that "we can debate whether $9,000 is 'affordable' for a family of four earning $54,000" - we can? Really? - or when he says the individual mandate penalty is "not very harsh." I'm astonished that anyone grounded in the real world could believe that these numbers (and those for higher middle-class earners) are not "harsh," unaffordable, and even potentially devastating for middle-class people trying to get by in this economy. That's craziness of the flying-rodent-feces variety.

Silver is most off-base in the area that arguably matter most in the long run: political context, strategy and tactic. He falls right into the trap that the Democratic leadership has set for progressives - the belief that, even with weeks to go in the process, it's either this bill or nothing. That's simply not the case. Yes, I saw a previous post where he argued that this outcome was inevitable given Senate math. But it's only inevitable if you assume a) no targeted use of reconciliation, and b) that the "centrist" Senators were inevitably going to be opposed to a bill with better provisions. To believe that, you also have to assume continued lack of strong leadership from Reid and the White House, together with continued lack of progressive pressure on them to step up.

Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me.

The Senate bill Silver so admires places enormous burdens on middle-class families, while going easy on high-earners and employers. The overall combination of mandates and weak cost controls shapes up to be political suicide for Democrats. It will hurt Democratic candidates in precisely those parts of the country where they can least afford the damage, like the Midwest. (This survey offers a preview.) And it's not too late to fix it.

That gets us to strategy. The day may come when the Silver argument needs to be deployed - namely, when a decision must be made on whether the final bill being voted onbetter than nothing. But that day isn't here yet. There's still time to change it, either in the Senate or House. Instead of accepting this bill as the best they can get, progressives should keep the heat on the Democratic leadership to fix it. That means eliminating the excise tax in favor of the House high-earner proposal, pressing for a robust public option, and pushing for stronger subsidies.

Doing anything else would be crazy.