This week's biggest health care story shouldn't even be making headlines: Democratic leaders in the Senate are finally pressuring the entire caucus to help bring a health care bill to the floor by sticking with the party on procedural motions. Astute readers will ask: "But aren't Senators supposed to stick with their party on procedural motions?" Yes, of course they are.

Health care reform is the Democrats' biggest political battle in two generations and the crown jewel of the president's domestic agenda. It's hardly unreasonable to demand that Senate Democrats side with their party to defeat a filibuster.

One of health care reform’s greatest champions died last night. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 77. During his 46-year career in the senate, Kennedy’s name appeared on virtually every major piece of progressive legislation from civil rights to economic justice, to health care. Kennedy called healthcare reform “the cause of my life.”

Jack Newfield of The Nation remembers Kennedy as the senate’s fighting liberal, the “best and most effective senator of the past hundred years.”

James Ridgeway of Mother Jones laments:

Will healthcare reform include a public health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance? President Obama campaigned on the promise of a public option, but over the past week he and his top advisers have repeatedly signaled that they aren’t willing to fight for it.

On Saturday, Obama told a town hall meeting in Colorado: “Whether we have it or we don’t have it, [the public option] is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”

This week’s edition of the Weekly Pulse is shorter than usual. Our team is getting ready for the fourth annual Netroots Nation blogger conference in Pittsburgh, PA. Esther Kaplan, editor of the Nation Investigative Fund, and I are conducting an investigative reporting workshop on Saturday from 1:30-4:15 p.m. Join us and help expose the corporate roots of the Teabagger/Town hall mob movement.

By now it’s clear that the Senate Finance Committe won’t cough up a heathcare bill before the summer recess. As Nick Bauman points out in Mother Jones, the delay is sure to sap momentum for reform. Worse, the break will give healthcare reform’s opponents more time to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Disinformation is already running wild.

The Senate Finance Committee is reportedly very close to finishing its healthcare legislation. But as the bill’s details leak, anticipation is quickly turning to dejection in progressive healthcare circles. Early word has it that the almost finished a bill includes no public option, no employer mandate, and no insurance exchange. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly explains why the Senate Finance Committee bill is going to suck.

Healthcare is dominating domestic politics this week, as Congress and President Obama outline their visions for reform. The president is pushing Congress to pass a bill that keeps healthcare costs in check before the August deadline. Obama must have been disappointed when the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced last week that the Dem’s healthcare bills won’t cut spending. The president won’t sign a bill that doesn’t contain cost cuts, so legislators know they’ll have to tweak the bill.