But what took so long for these pleas to go out, and why have so few taken up the cry?

I posed that question to more than a dozen people last week including politicians, legislative aides, political party spokesmen, union demonstrators, advocates, and policy experts. It has been an exhausting week, they say, so a big reason people haven't been talking more about Medicaid is that the bill is being moved so quickly through the Legislature that it took them some time to catch up to its implications. "We're just trying to keep our heads above the water," says one Democratic staffer who hasn't slept for several days. Graeme Zielinski, communications director for the state Democratic Party, says the party is having trouble keeping up as well. "It's like we have gunshot wounds to the head, to the belly and to our front. We're doing triage to a very, very bad bill," he says.

The Republican Party, for its part, was quick to respond to my questions about the issue by claiming that the focus on workers' rights proves Democrats are controlled by special interests. "There are all these serious issues, but when it comes to priorities the unions are most concerned about their own pocketbooks and how does it affect them specifically," says GOP state director Mark Jefferson.