Howard Dean: Dems will pass health reform through reconciliation, without Republicans

Former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean is currently conducting a health-care town hall meeting here at Netroots Nation in Pittsburgh, where he predicted that health-reform legislation will pass through reconciliation in the Senate, without a single Republican vote. And he just took a minute to address the other kind of health care town halls, the ones that have dominated the news cycle this past week.

Responding to a throwaway question from Progressive Strategies co-founder Mike Lux (”I’m Bobby Birther … are you going to serve on these death panels?”), Dean said he’d “actually respond to the question seriously” and told the audience of progressive bloggers and activists, “The truth is, those meetings aren’t about health care.”

He continued: “Look carefully at the people who are shouting their congresspeople down. They don’t look anything like the generation that elected Barack Obama.”

But Dean said those meetings are a sign that the right-wingers recognize the strong prospects for health-care reform. “They’re desperate,” he said. “They’re just making things up.”

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