Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) laid out the battle over health care reform in simple terms on Tuesday.
"There's serious money made in health care in this country and all of that money is pushing back. This will be a fight and it will be an ugly fight. If anybody had some notion that this would go smoothly, or it was going to happen easily, I don't think they've been paying attention," she said before entering a closed-door weekly Democratic luncheon.
The push back from the financial interests opposed to health care reform is being felt strongly in Congress. But McCaskill warned that "whoever wants to be part of bringing all this down ... will have to own" the consequences of their resistance.
"Everybody's free to run whatever ads they want to run. I think there'll be real consequences if we don't provide stability to the American people as it relates to health care," she said.
A group opposed to health care reform -- she was unsure who funded them -- is currently running ads against her in Missouri, she said.
Fears that a week of bad news would derail reform, she said, were misplaced. It was never going to be simple, and the loss of momentum is the natural result of the opposition from the interests afraid to lose their piece of the health care pie.
"You know what, I think the momentum is only slowing down because it's hard. If this were easy, it would have been done last year or the year before that or the year before that," she said. "If this were easy, it would have happened a long time ago."
Ryan Grim's book, This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America, is now on sale