Germantown Mennonite Church - Healthcare Resources

Archived News NOV 09

Ming Shem Lu — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:49:45 GMT

NOTE: The opinions expressed in this column belong to the author and do not reflect the official position of Germantown Mennonite Church.

Nov 30, 2009
The Senate begins debate on the healthcare reform bill today.

Reality is, Senator Harry Reid does not have the necessary 60 votes to bring the bill to a final vote. Holdout Senators who're opposed to public option are still holding out. There is also mounting pressure from anti-abortion forces to make that a wedge issue to delay the bill's passage.

If you have a few minutes, read the Kaiser Family Foundation's "Public Opinion on Healthcare Issues" tracking poll for November. The support for public option remains at 59%. Significantly, the percentage of the public paying attention to healthcare reform has waned quite a bit, down 6 points to 28%. The Foundation reports this is "a level we last saw in July before the contentious August recess galvanized people’s interest. Older Americans--a group more likely to be opposed to reform--have consistently reported a higher level of attention than younger and middle aged Americans."

The period around July and August was also when the pundits declared public option dead, but with progressives energized and inspired into action, awareness about its benefits began to spread and members of Congress became emboldened in their support. The public option was "resurrected" and included in both the House and Senate bills.

We seem to be at that juncture again. It's important to keep the momentum going, as the public option might well be killed by holdout Senators and anti-abortion ideologues (for a heated discussion between Bishop Thomas Tobin and Chris Matthews of msnbc on the morality and legality of abortion--whether they should or shouldn't mix--watch this video.)

David Balto, Senior Fellow at The Center for American Progress (former Senator Tom Daschle is also a fellow there), has written a column in The Huffington Post on how to strengthen the Senate bill to increase competition in the healthcare marketplace--it provides a pretty good framework for following the upcoming debate.

Check out the latest actions at The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC). And at Health Care for America NOW!

Nov 28, 2009Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina is facing backlash for its mailer and robo-calls urging customers to lobby Democratic Senator Kay Hagan to vote against public option. The state's Insurance Commissioner has started an inquiry into the mailer--which warns, "if the federal government intervenes in the private health insurance market, it's a slippery slope to a single payer system"--and the state's Attorney General is looking into the robo-calls.

Customers expressed their outrage by sending the mailer back to Blue Cross Blue Shield with a brick attached to it. Others forwarded the pre-paid postcard to Senator Hagan but altered it to express support for the public option.

Meanwhile, there is evidence that another Blue Cross Blue Shield--this time of Kansas City
--is enlisting its customers to lobby against public option.

Nov 27, 2009Another lie ("Thou shalt not bear false witness"--remember?): The Senate bill will cost $2.5 trillion, about $1.7 trillion more than the CBO estimate. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seems to have pulled that number out of thin air. No matter, it's since gone viral thanks to Senators Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and John Ensign of Nevada, who we know is such a standard bearer of moral integrity, truth-telling, and marital fidelity. Talking Points Memo calls this one of the GOP's 5 big lies in this Congress.

Nov 25, 2009Posted by Ming Shem Lu
As part of a faith community who take seriously the biblical teaching of "do not bear false witness" (one of the Ten Commandments--remember?), I usually try to stay informative and won't stoop to mentioning the fear-mongering lies spread by the fringe, lies such as death panels, government takeover of healthcare, etc. etc. But as we are about to celebrate a most American holiday that exemplifies our generous spirit, I want to take a moment and smoke those liars out, expose them as what they are, because their mean spirit doesn't represent America.

Thanksgiving is the time when we affirm the American value of caring for each other, sharing with "the least of the least"--which is what healthcare reform is about.

Here are a few of their latest lies:

Gun Owners of America claimed that "special 'wellness and prevention' programs [in the healthcare reform bill] would allow the government to offer lower premiums to employers who bribe their employees to live healthier lifestyles--and nothing within the bill would prohibit rabidly anti-gun HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius from decreeing that 'no guns' is somehow healthier." Read more here.
An example of how the fringe is constantly being fed lies about the public option: Fox News anchor said it "would be paid for by the taxpayers," which of course is NOT TRUE (i.e., the "false" in "false witness"). See video here.

It's high time we speak out--we who treasure the American political system and its potential to bring out the best in us--and in that spirit I applaud the recent comment made by Martha Stewart on a certain ex-governor of Alaska. She called that self-styled rogue "boring and dangerous." Asked about whether she's seen the latest interviews, Martha said, "I wouldn't watch her if you paid me." See video here. THANK YOU, Martha, for being fearless and for speaking the truth.

Deepak Chopra has written an interesting column on that rogue as representing the "shadow" (a psychological term referring to the dark side of human nature) in American politics. He cites Ronald Reagan as another example of the shadow's manifestation.

Chopra counsels: "I hope the left will take a deep breath and stop treating Palin like a diabolical force. The American character has always had a large dose of orneriness in it...But nobody is being fooled. A recent Gallup poll showed that 67% of responders don't want Palin to run for president. Fear of Palin is ill-advised on two counts. First, fear is what the shadow wants. Without it, the shadow has no power. Second, the left needs to learn how to win graciously. The current upheaval in American society, which has been an enormous threat on many fronts, called forth a president and a constituency that knows how to handle crisis. The voices of sanity are prevailing. The solutions that have emerged on all fronts--economic, social, and international--represent the best in the American character."

One thing: that other example of "shadow" Chopra mentions--Ronald Reagan--had helped define American political discourse for the past three decades. We shouldn't fear the fringe and make them more powerful than what they really are--the fringe, but we also shouldn't be afraid to call their lies what they really are--lies. I'd say that even as we graciously
bring out the best in us, we need to boldly affirm WE are the real Americans and start defining the political discourse. We, too, should sing America!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Nov 24, 2009 7:30 pmOne thing you may not realize about the Senate bill: Repeal of the antitrust exemption
enjoyed by the health insurance industry is NOT in there (it is in the House bill). Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided to drop the repeal from the bill itself and instead would go for it as an amendment. Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post reports, "The move was seen as a sop to Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson, an industry backer who [at the time] had yet to offer his support for Reid's motion to proceed and who is a strong public supporter of keeping the antitrust exemption in place."

Nov 24, 2009 9:00 amClick here for an interactive map, released by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, that features state-by-state analyses of the benefits of healthcare reform. NOTE: Public option is not mentioned in the analyses.

Nov 23, 2009Now it's the time to put those holdout Senators on your speed dial!

Nov 22, 2009Posted by Ming Shem Lu
On Saturday evening, Nov 21, the Senate passed the cloture motion 60 to 39 to bring the healthcare reform bill to the floor (see video here). Debate will begin after Thanksgiving, and it promises to be intense.

Last-minute holdouts Senators Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln (who both come from states where a free clinic was recently held, with hundreds lining up for free healthcare) decided to join the Democratic causus, but they made it clear their "yes" votes were for this stage only. Lincoln in particular has firmly stated if the final bill contains a public option, she will vote against it.

That means it's still up in the air whether the public option will stay in the final bill. Two other Senators--Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut--remain strongly opposed to it.

Dana Milbank of The Washington Post has written a column entitled "Sweeteners for the South" about Landrieu and Lincoln's delaying tactics--that they are positioning themselves as deal breakers to get extra federal money for their states. However, David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo argues "it's wishful thinking to conclude that's the only thing going on here. Blanche Lincoln's floor speech in particular seemed to foreclose her being able to plausibly turn around later and vote for a public option. You can't come out as strongly against it as she did and then vote for it anyway without seriously compounding your political problems back home."

On the other side of the political aisle, NO single Republican voted "yes" for the motion. At least two Republican Senators compared the bill to Bernie Madoff's scam. "Move over, Bernie Madoff. Tip your hat to a trillion-dollar scam," said Senator Kit Bond of Missouri. Senator John McCain, who almost became President last year and was instrumental in hoisting a certain Alaska governor to the national stage, said something like: "Didn't Bernie Madoff go to jail for doing something like this?"

The Huffington Post reports that before the vote, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky begged for a Democratic defection. "All it takes is one vote. Just one. The simple math is this: If there were one Democrat, just one of our friends on the other side of the aisle, just one, who would say 'no' tonight, the voices of the American people would be heard."

As the Senate is set to begin debate, if you are one of "the voices of the American people," if you feel your country's welfare is being hijacked by two or more holdout Senators, if you feel your intelligence insulted by the irresponsible hyberbole of Medicare-recipient millionaire Senators, then DO SOMETHING to get your voices heard!

Nov 21, 2009Some of the sound and the fury surrounding tonight's Senate vote to bring the healthcare bill to the floor:

By now some of us may feel a little fatigued about healthcare reform--thankfully, many remain vigilant. The Senate switchboard was flooded with calls yesterday, many from supporters of healthcare reform.
The opposition is stepping up too. The Tea Partiers are organizing a rally in DC today. A certain former Vice Presidential candidate tweeted to her 25,000 followers: "Call senators! Tell 'em KILL THE BILL tonite; horrible govt healthcare takeover."
President Clinton, who is in Little Rock, Arkansas for the 5th anniversary of the Clinton library, said he would skip the Free Clinic (see Nov 20 posting below) and blamed Keith Olbermann of msnbc for politicizing it.
The Associate Press reports that Senator Blanche Lincoln has issued a statement saying, "This one-day clinic is a blessing, but it is not a sustainable way to deliver healthcare for the thousands of uninsured and underinsured Arkansans." Lincoln, who opposes the public option and still hasn't indicated whether she will vote "yes" this evening, must in her mind know best how to serve her uninsured and underinsured constituents--we'd hope.

Nov 20, 2009 10:00 amDoes Senator Harry Reid's opt-out version in the Senate bill turn out to be the public option that isn't? The CBO estimates only 4 million will sign up (compared to the 6 million under the House bill--see Senator Ron Wyden's criticism and amendment in Nov 17 posting below). Also, it is state-based rather than nationwide, so how big a pool it will create is questionable.

Read more in this Washington Post article. Note that Senator John D. Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia and strong advocate for a robust public option, says that he supports Reid's version but will "probably" offer an amendment to strengthen it.

Robert Reich has written a scathing column on the opt-out version in The Huffington Post.

Nov 20, 2009 9:00 amJust as the Democrats are working last minute to secure 60 votes to bring the healthcare bill to the Senate floor (read more in this TIME magazine article), another free clinic organized by the National Association of Free Clinics takes place tomorrow, this time in Little Rock, Arkansas, the home state of wavering Democrat Senator Blanche Lincoln. The Associate Press reports that 800 people have already signed up. Many more are expected to show up.

A Progressive Change Campaign Committee poll shows that 56% of likely voters in Arkansas support the public option, while 29% say that a "no" vote from Senator Lincoln, who is up for re-election in 2010, will cost her their votes.

Nov 19, 2009 9:30 amMore details from the Senate bill: It includes a public option that allows states to opt out. Talking Points Memo reports that, according to the CBO, "enough states will 'opt out' to prevent a full third of consumers from purchasing government insurance."

The abortion language in the Senate version is less restrictive than in the House. While it does specify that no public funding should be used for the procedure, at least one plan in the exchange will cover abortion (in the House version, women will have to purchase an "insurance rider" to get abortion coverage).

The main difference between the House and the Senate bills is funding. Whereas the House relies on increased taxes on the rich (individual income of $500,000 and above), the Senate imposes an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans--the version unveiled yesterday puts this "cost" at a higher value than in the Finance Committee bill ($8500 for individual and $23,000 for family of four), and workers in high-risk jobs will be exempt. Read more in this Huffington Post article.

For link to full text of the Senate bill, see posting below or go to the Congress Bills page.

Senator Reid is expected to file for a cloture motion today, a vote will take place on Saturday (60 votes are needed to pass the motion), then the debate begins. Read more on "cloture" here.

Nov 19, 2009 12:00 amSenator Harry Reid unveiled the Senate version of healthcare reform bill, which would cover 94 percent of Americans, including 31 of the about 50 million uninsured. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates it will cost $849 billion and will cut the federal deficit by $127 billion over the next ten years. Read more in The Huffington Post, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

Click here to download the 2074-page bill, HR 3590 "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act."

Nov 18, 2009 9:30 amRead Dick Polman's column on philly.com about the health insurance mandate, its constitutionality, and how Republicans might use that to energize their base in the 2010 election.

Nov 18, 2009 9:00 am
The Washington Post reports that Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid is "optimistic" there will be 60 votes supporting the bill he may unveil as early as today.

Nov 18, 2009 8:30 amA group of 20 economists (almost all from universities) wrote a letter to President Obama supporting healthcare reform and stressing its potential benefits to the economy. It lists 4 elements that, according to them, would bring down costs--deficit neutrality, tax on cadillac plans, medicare commission, and changes in delivery. NOTE: public option is NOT one of them. Read the letter included in Sam Stein's article in The Huffington Post.

Nov 17, 2009Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, has been advocating what he calls "The Free Choice Proposal" (click here for a PDF summary). His basic idea is to let Americans have more say in choosing their health plans--if you are happy with your employer-sponsored insurance, you can keep it; if not, then you should have the choice of shopping for something else, including the public option.

Back in October, the Senate Finance Committee rejected Wyden's amendment. That didn't stop him. He seems ready to introduce it again as the bill gets to the Senate floor. In an Op Ed for The Huffington Post, he points to the weakness of "the exchange"--that it is open only to those NOT getting insurance from employers, and of those 30 million a mere 6 would choose the public option, not large enough to offer real competition. Robert Reich in his "Open Letter" to Senator Harry Reid makes a similar point. Under Wyden's proposal, people dissatified with the health plans their employers offer will be given vouchers to shop in the exchange.

Read also Ezra Klein's Washington Post report on Wyden's run-in with the Senate Democratic leadership. NOTE the comment by a reader, evangeline135: "Ron Wyden's amendment is popular with insurers because it could break up the group market, which is less profitable for them, and push more people onto the individual market, which is much more profitable for them and a place where it is easier for them to deny claims and dump people (they do most of the denying claims on the individual market customers). It is popular with liberals because they want everyone to be able to buy into the public option. I am only in favor of it if there is a nationally available public option. Otherwise it is a scam for the insurers to break up the groups--just when moving people into larger risk pools is what is essential for lower premiums. Anyway, that is why Ron Wyden is called 'the insurance companies' best friend.' They love the idea of getting a bunch of government subsidies to take people onto their overpriced and crooked individual market."

In the July 27, 2009 issue of Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg writes that the American healthcare system actually reflects our national character, just as other countries' reflect theirs (that's the lesson he draws from T.R. Reid's "The Healing of America"), and he mentions Senator Wyden's proposal as one example of "how we can build on what works in this hodge-podge [of the American system and] bring health care into better alignment with our national identity."

Nov 16, 2009 9:40 amRead Robert Reich's "An Open Letter to Harry Reid on Controlling Healthcare Costs."

Nov 16, 2009 9:30 am
The New York Times reports that the pharmaceutical industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by 9 percent during 2009. This, the largest inflation of drug prices since 1992, is happening when the Consumer Price Index has dropped 1.2 percent.

Duff Wilson of the NYT writes, "Critics say the industry is trying to establish a higher price base before Congress passes legislation that tries to curb drug spending in coming years." And quoting Joseph P. Newhouse, a Harvard health economist: "They try to maximize their profits."

Nov 16, 2009 8:30 amSenator Harry Reid is expected to unveil the Senate bill this week, and President Obama and his aides have repeatedly stressed he wanted a final bill by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, the opposition is stepping up its efforts. The Washington Post reports that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is soliciting $50,000 for a study by a "respected economist" that will show healthcare reform to be a job killer and a threat to the economy.

In an email James P. Gelfand, the Chamber's senior health policy manager, details the course of action (he seems to know beforehand what the study's outcomes will be): "The economist will then circulate a sign-on letter to hundreds of other economists saying that the bill will kill jobs and hurt the economy. We will then be able to use this open letter to produce advertisements, and as a powerful lobbying and grass-roots document."

Read more in this article in The Huffington Post.

Nov 15, 2009Read this article in The New York Times on how, in a rare demonstration of bipartisanship, Democratic and Republican House representatives made strikingly similar statements regarding a provision in the healthcare bill--yes, in ONE voice, and that voice belongs to lobbyists working for the biotech company Genentech, a subsidiary of Swiss drug giant Roche. The provision would give brand-name companies like Genentech an advantage over competitors producing generic versions of expensive biotechnology drugs. (See also Nov 10 & 11 postings below.)

Robert Pear of the NYT writes, "Members of Congress submit statements for publication in the Congressional Record all the time, often with a decorous request to 'revise and extend my remarks.' It is unusual for so many revisions and extensions to match up word for word. It is even more unusual to find clear evidence that the statements originated with lobbyists."

Nov 14, 2009 7:30 pmThe National Association of Free Clinics (NAFC) organized a CARE (Communities Are Responding Everyday) clinic today in New Orleans, at the convention center that once served as temporary medical clinic after Katrina.

Louisiana is, of course, the home of Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu (Governor when Katrina hit), who is on the fence regarding public option.

Over 1000 received free healthcare--many of them are working Americans who either have no health insurance or, even if they do, can't afford the out-of-pocket costs. Preliminary numbers released by the clinic indicate 53% seen today have not seen a doctor in more than a year, with many not since Katrina, while 90% have more than one diagnosis, hypertension and diabetes being the most common.

ABC News tells the story of a man who didn't sign up for coverage under his wife's policy because he can't afford the $500 monthly premium. He hasn't seen a doctor in years. At the clinic, he was told he has diabetes.

Watch also this heated discussion on msnbc's Morning Meeting with Dylan Ratigan.
Nov 14, 2009 9:00 amPosted by Ming Shem Lu
Goldman Sachs shows in a study how healthcare reform could affect the stocks of the big 5 (Aetna, UnitedHealth, Wellpoint, CIGNA, and Humana).
The best case scenario--surprise!--would be if reform failed and no legislation was passed. "Earnings per share would grow an estimated ten percent from 2010 through 2019, and the value of the stock would rise an estimated 59 percent," reports Sam Stein of The Huffington Post. "What the firm sees as the best path forward for the private insurance industry's bottom line is, to be blunt, inaction."

The worst--Goldman Sachs calls it the "bull case" scenario--would be if lawmakers passed the House version; earnings per share would decline an estimated 1 percent, the stock value 36 percent.

Now, if the Baucus Plan (Senate Finance Committee version) was approved instead--the "base" scenario--the result is mixed: earnings grow 5 percent, value drops 4 percent.

Sam Stein writes, "The report, a Goldman official stressed, was analytic not advocacy-based. Their job was to provide a sober assessment of the market realities facing private insurers under various versions of healthcare reform. The study does note on the front page that the firm 'does and seeks to do business with companies covered in its research reports.'"

Call this "consciousness raising" among the health insurance cartels.

And more...UnitedHealth Group sent an email to its 75,000 employees urging them to voice their opposition to public option by contacting their Senators and writing to local newspapers. For a PDF of the email, click here.

Dan Eggen of The Washington Post writes, "Consumer Watchdog, the California-based advocacy group which obtained the documents, says the letters are full of misleading GOP talking points, such as the claim that millions will lose coverage. The group also says the campaign amounts to intimidation of employees of UnitedHealth Group."

UnitedHealth officials countered that the letter-campaign was "completely voluntary."
Nov 11, 2009 2:30 pmMore on how drug companies may reap big profits thanks to the current reform bills (see Nov 10 posting below for context):

This article by Karen Tumulty and Michael Scherer of TIME magazine documents the fight between Rep Waxman and Rep Eshoo over the 5-year vs. 12-year protection (the latter won). It's also an expose of the powerful drug-industry lobby and their allies, who include some surprising names like Howard Dean and the late Senator Ted Kennedy (Eshoo cites him as a fellow supporter of the 12-year protection; what she hasn't said is that Massachusetts is home to many biotech firms).

Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic reports that IMS Health, a respected research and consulting firm, forecasted in October that, because of provisions in the healthcare
reform bills, the drug industry could experience an average annual growth of 3.5% between 2008 and 2013. Back in March, when the bills' details were still murky, their projection was zero or negative growth.
Nov 11, 2009 9:30 amPhysicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), which advocates for a single-payer system, reports that Harvard Medical School researchers estimated over 2200 veterans died last year because they lacked health insurance.

The article explains why veterans don't necessarily receive care from the VA (quoting from the 2007 testimony before Congress by Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, professor at Harvard Medical School):

"While many Americans believe that all veterans can get care from the VA, even combat veterans may not be able to obtain VA care...As a rule, VA facilities provide care for any veteran who is disabled by a condition connected to his or her military service and care for specific medical conditions acquired during military service.

"Veterans who pass a means test are eligible for care in VA facilities, but have lower priority status (Priority 5 or 7, depending upon income level). Veterans with higher incomes are classified in the lowest priority group and are not eligible for VA enrollment."

The article also contains (scroll down to the bottom of the page) a table showing the number of uninsured veterans. In the 55-to-64 age group, it's as high as 450,000, representing 10% of all uninsured in this age group.

Nov 10, 2009 9:00 amPosted by Ming Shem Lu
One provision in BOTH the House bill and the upcoming Senate version has received little attention but could have far-reaching consequences. It's the 12-year market protection for high-tech drugs used to combat cancer. When a group of us visited Senator Arlen Specter's office, even his aide acknowledged that he knew little about it (and referred us to the legislative aide, who wasn't around).

Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake.com has written about the disastrous effects this could have on breast cancer survivors. She also points to "an 'evergreening' clause that grants drug companies a continued monopoly if they make slight changes to the drug (like creating a once-a-day dose where the original product was three times per day)." In other words, it's possible those high tech drugs will never become generics.

Representative Anna Eshoo, Democrat of California--whose legislation granting a 12-year protection was chosen by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over a tougher 5-year protection advocated by Representative Henry Waxman--denied that there is this evergreening clause. Read Hamsher's reponse here.

Nov 10, 2009 8:00 amPosted by Ming Shem Lu
Whether you think the issue of abortion is important in the healthcare reform debate (or not), you'll be interested in the President's stance. In an interview with ABC News, he seems to want to have it both ways--again! "I want to make sure that the provision that emerges meets that test--that we are not in some way sneaking in funding for abortions," Obama said, "but, on the other hand, that we're not restricting women's insurance choices."

Sam Stein of The Huffington Post sees this as "an implicit rebuke to the House for passing an amendment that could considerably restrict women's access to abortions. The president said that he doesn't want to change 'the status quo' one way or another." Yet, if you read his full reply to the interviewer's question, his position is much more ambiguous. It all depends on what the President means by "status quo." If that means no public funding should pay for abortion, then the amendment can be seen as an extension of that principle. If Obama is referring to women's right to choose insurance plans that pay for abortion, then the amendment is a restriction on that choice.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that former President Bill Clinton will speak to Democratic Senators on healthcare reform. Clinton, whose own attempt in 1993-94 failed, knows how high the political stakes are. Is he going to rein in the Blue Dogs? Or is he going to help further water down the public option? Most significantly, is the former President doing what the current President is unable, or unwilling, to do?

Nov 9 2009 2:00 pmThe Washington Post reports that Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, has collected 40 signatures from House Democrats vowing to oppose any final bill that includes the anti-abortion amendment (see Nov 8 posting below).

The WP article also contains comparisons between the House bill and the Senate version (still to be unveiled), pointing to the difficulties that the Conference commitee might face when it tries to reconcile the two bills.

Read a working copy of Representative DeGette's letter here.

Nov 9, 2009 11:00 amRead this column by Dick Polman in The Philadelphia Inquirer, on Saturday's vote tally: "Next year, it's a cinch bet that the Republicans will target most of the 31 red-district Democrats who voted No on health reform. Even though those Democrats voted with the GOP, they won't get a pass from the GOP attack team...[They] are likely to realize, sooner rather than later, that they have failed to insure themselves against attack. They have been denied coverage, simply because they are Democrats. Call it their pre-existing condition."

Nov 9, 2009 10:00 amDemocratic Senators such as Evan Bayh of Indiana and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, who are still on the fence regarding public option, come from states where a majority supports it and may have trouble getting re-elected in 2010.

Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) released polls showing that in Indiana voters favor public option 52% to 42% (and as high as 59% to 33% among Independents), in Arkansas 56% to 37% (57% to 32% among Independents).

Democratic voters, in particular, said they would be less likely to vote for Bayh and Lincoln in the primaries if they joined Republicans in a filibuster.

Read more here.

Nov 8, 2009Before the historic vote, the House approved an anti-abortion amendment stipulating that the public option does not cover abortion and, when a woman receives government subsidy to buy insurance through the exchange, she cannot choose a private plan that covers abortion; she will have to purchase, with her own money, a separate "insurance rider" for that coverage.

Introduced by Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, the amendment was
supposedly instrumental to getting conservative Democrats on board for the actual bill--64 of them voted for the amendment. Jane Hamsher, founder of Firedoglake.com, bemoans how the inaction of pro-choice politicans and advocacy groups had allowed this to happen.
Nov 7, 2009 11:20 pm

House passes healthcare reform bill 220-215.

See video here.

29 Democrats voted "no," while 1 Republican, Representative Ahn Joseph Cao of Louisiana, voted "yes." The Washington Post has a vote tally, with each representative's campaign contributions from health industry and the percentage of people in that district without insurance. The New York Times has an interactive map so you can tell where the districts are.

Daily Kos puts it best: "Now the really hard work: the Senate."Nov 7, 2009 6:00 pmAs the nation awaits for the House vote, Representative Patrick Murphy, Democrat of Pennsylvania, a self-identified "fiscally conservative Blue Dog," has spoken out in support of healthcare reform. In an op ed he wrote for The Huffington Post, he reminds us, "It has been 16 years since Congress' last attempt...Since then, over 700,000 people have died because they lacked access to affordable healthcare coverage. Every day, 500 Pennsylvanians--and 14,000 people across America--lose their health insurance. We simply can't afford to fail again."
Nov 7, 2009 9:00 amThis is the day...
Nov 6, 2009Posted by Ming Shem Lu
On this day overshadowed by the tragic event at Fort Hood, our thoughts and prayers are with the loved ones of those killed or injured, also the killer's family who is in shock, and with the Muslim community as they brace themselves for possible backlash.

Those of us who believe in peace and interfaith understanding must actively walk our talk
--reach out but also boldly face the realities of conflict and strife.

Meanwhile, as the House is getting ready to vote on the healthcare reform bill tomorrow, here are some of the sound and the fury, and backroom maneuverings, surrounding this historic occasion:

Representative Alan Grayson, Democrat of Florida, reads the names of those who died because they didn't have health insurance.
Right-wing "Tea Partiers" storm the capital and the halls of Congress.
Negotiations continue with moderate Democratic senators who have withhold their support for Senator Harry Reid's bill.

YOU can still have your say by contacting your Representative and Senators--and, don't forget him, the President! Visit our What Can One Person Do? page for details.
Nov 5, 2009The House will vote on the healthcare reform bill this Saturday. This article in Detroit Free Press reports that progressives may be allowed to introduce a single-payer amendment; it also has some interesting details about last-minute debates on abortion.

The CBO has released its report on the Republican bill. Read this New York Times article for details. It will extend coverage to 6 million, leaving 52 million uninsured, and will reduce the federal deficit by $68 billion over the next 10 years, compared to the Democratic bill's $104 billion, while costing $61 billion compared to the other's $1.1 trillion price tag.

The House Republican leadership has said that one of the bill's primary goals is to reduce premiums, and it might--by about 3% in large group markets, where 80% of Americans get their health insurance.

The Republican bill does not ban insurance companies from denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing condition.
Nov 4, 2009Click here for House Republicans' version of healthcare reform bill.
Nov 3, 2009Go Vote!

The Wall Street Journal reports that the House Democrats want to bring the bill to the floor as soon as Friday and to vote on it before the Nov 11 Veterans Day weekend.

Meanwhile, they are still tackling with hot button issues such as: "Can illegal immigrants participate in the exchange?" (according to WSJ, the House bill "leaves open the possibility" as long as they pay their own premiums) and "Does the bill pay for abortions?" (the House bill prevents the use of public money, but it does stipulate that the exchange offers at least one plan that covers abortion and one that doesn't).

Click here for a more detailed article on the same topic in the Washington Post.

The House Republicans are preparing their own healthcare reform bill--it's being scored by the CBO right now. The bill contains the four core ideas that House Minority Leader John Boehner outlined in last Saturday's weekly address, including allowing people to buy insurance across state lines and letting states enact their own reform to lower costs. It doesn't, however, require health insurance companies to drop pre-existing condition as a reason to deny coverage.

Read more about the Republican plan here.

In the Senate, the healthcare debate seems to be several weeks away.
Oct 31, 2009Here's a really useful step-by-step guide to the legislative process, what the healthcare reform bill has to go through before the President signs it into law. The guide is put together by Health Care for America NOW! We are at Step 4: "Congress Passes Legislation." Be sure to read "What You Can Do to Help."
Oct 30, 2009Read this article in Talking Points Memo on the pros of having the public option tied to Medicare rates (the House bill's version isn't). The CBO, in its analysis of the bill, concludes that the 6 million expected to enroll in the public option may end up paying higher premiums than people buying private plans.
Oct 29, 2009 11:00 pmSenator Harry Reid is doing what President Obama is not--urging the progressive grassroots to contact our representatives in Washington and "push hard" to make sure public option is included in the final bill. Read more here. (For context, check out the
Oct 26 postings below.)
Oct 29, 2009 11:00 amPosted by Ming Shem Lu
To download full version of the House healthcare reform bill, HR 3962 "The Affordable Health Care for America Act," click here. NOTE: Unless you want the whole 1990-page document, DO NOT click on it!

A summary of the bill can be found on the website of the House Committee on Education and Labor.

Click here for a comparison between the bill as it was first introduced by the 3 House committees (HR 3200) and its current form (HR 3962).

Click here for The Huffington Post's article on details of both the House and Senate bills.

As expected, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi didn't get enough votes to support the most "robust" form of public option, tied to Medicare rates. Rather, "the consumer option," as Pelosi is calling it now, has to negotiate reimbursement rates with providers just as private insurance companies do. The Blue Dog Democrats want this, arguing that Medicare rates are unfairly low in rural states.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has issued a preliminary cost estimate of the House bill. It costs $894 billion--under President Obama's $900-billion ceiling--and is projected to reduce the deficit in both the first ten years and the second ten years after enactment. Read more here.

The New York Times paints a less rosy picture of the bill's costs: "By the most commonly used yardstick, the bill would cost $1.05 trillion over 10 years, roughly $150 billion more than President Obama had said he wanted to spend on the legislation." It's unclear what that "most commonly used yardstick" is. Read more here.

The bill is expected to provide coverage for 36 million of the current 50 million uninsured.
Oct 28, 2009House Democratic leaders will unveil their healthcare reform bill tomorrow at 10:30 am.
Oct 27, 2009Posted by Ming Shem Lu
Talking Points Memo has a good article, "End Game: So When Will Health Care Really Happen," outlining what we might expect in the next few weeks, or months, as well as--most importantly--how advocacy groups can continue to put pressure on moderate Democrats whose opposition to public option may still tank it.

Senator Joe Lieberman, now an Independent, already said he would join a Republican filibuster. When asked whether "the heavy concentration of the insurance industry in Connecticut [is] influencing his vote," Lieberman replied, "It has nothing to do with it."

Oct 26, 2009 3:30 pmPosted by Ming Shem Lu
Senator Reid announced that the "opt-out" public option will be in the Bill he brings to the Senate floor. Read more here.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin said this resulted from pressure by progressive Democratic senators. The Huffington Post reports, "For many years, it's been centrist and conservative-leaning senators who have been scoring legislative victories by digging in their heels, so this represented a quite dramatic turnabout. It is difficult to remember the last time that progressives won a legislative victory by laying down firm demands and sticking to them."
Oct 26, 2009 11:30 amPosted by Ming Shem Lu
The whole healthcare reform drama is so fluid right now, every day there are news and leaks--we're all eager to find out what's happening behind closed doors.

The latest: Senator Harry Reid almost has the filibuster-proof 60 votes for a public option that allows states to opt-out. But when he presented that to Obama and his aides, the President seemed lukewarm and didn't offer Reid full-fledged support. The Administration still prefers the "trigger" version, thinking that would keep Senator Snowe's vote, which is
--the way the Administration sees it--crucial to keep the sheen of bipartisanship and the Blue Dogs on board.

Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic has a written a pretty good summary of the most current developments--please DO read it.

Many have pointed out the irony that Reid seems to have taken a more progressive--and stronger--stance than President Obama.

But perhaps it's not so surprising after all. Reid is coming up for re-election, and his poll numbers are not encouraging. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) has recently fundraised successfully to put a TV ad in Nevada targeting Reid and questioning whether he's strong enough. That could very well have made a difference.

Conventional wisdom is that politicans only listen to their constituents--if you don't live in someone's state or district, they just won't listen to you. However, in this internet age, there are easy ways of showing your support other than votes. You can give money to campaigns that will challenge their chances.

PCCC has moved on from Reid and now is trying to put out an ad reminding President Obama of his campaign promises and WHO helped him get elected. It's a good ad--please check it out on PCCC's home page.

Archived News JAN 2010

Ming Shem Lu — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 23:46:18 GMT

NOTE: The opinions expressed in this column belong to the author and do not reflect the official position of Germantown Mennonite Church.

Jan 29, 2010Call our elected officials and tell them to move ahead with healthcare reform and NOT to, as President Obama said in his State of the Union address, "run for the hills"!

The Capitol switchboard: (202) 224-3121

Senate and House Democrats are still in "stalemate"--proving that, notwithstanding a good speech, the party (the President included) still can't deliver. Read more in this article by Erica Werner of The Huffington Post.

The last paragraphs of Werner's article are most sobering: "While lawmakers struggle, Wall Street is celebrating the sinking prospects for a sweeping overhaul that would put new taxes and requirements on insurance companies. Insurers have opposed the overhaul even though it aims to insure more than 30 million people over the next decade with a new requirement for nearly everyone to be covered.
"An analysis distributed by UBS Investment Bank after the State of the Union speech stated: 'Investors should proceed as if the health care effort is dead.'"

See the posting from Nov 14, as well as this article from The Huffington Post, for more on Wall Street's predictions of how healthcare reform could affect the stocks of the big 5 health insurers.

Jan 27, 2010 10:00 amIf you missed NBC's Dateline presentation "Critical Condition," here's the link.

Jan 27, 2010 9:00 amPosted by Ming Shem Lu
Call Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and your Senators today, and call to thank Reps. Chellie Pingree and Jared Polis (see posting below).

The Capitol switchboard: (202) 224-3121

Jan 27, 2010 8:30 am
As we wait to hear what President Obama has to say about healthcare reform in his State of the Union speech tonight (one thought: reforming healthcare is about saving our economy), focus has shifted from the House to the Senate as there are signs the Representatives and their leadership are coalescing around the idea of voting for the Senate bill and then bringing key provisions through the reconciliation process.

They want the Senate to show its willingness to do the same--putting key provisions such as federal vs. state exchanges, excise tax, etc. on the negotiation table. Surprise! Harry Reid and his Democratic caucus are waffling, and conservatives like Senators Evan Bayh and Blanche Lincoln already declared they are against reconciliation.

For a provision to pass reconciliation, only a 51-vote majority is needed, and the provision must be budget-related (hence abortion coverage won't be a reconciliation item).

Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post reports 2 House freshmen, Reps. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Jared Polis (D-Colo.), are circulating a letter, looking for signatures, that supports putting public option through reconciliation. They plan to deliver the letter to Senator Reid on Thursday.

Polis in particular argued that healthcare reform became less popular when the public option was taken out but the mandate to purchase health insurance stayed. "I think the fading of the public option from the Senate bill really hurt the Democrats' prospects in the Senate [race], because they were seen as following the typical pattern of tax and spend and caving to insurance companies."

Jan 26, 2010Posted by Ming Shem Lu
Faithful America is organizing a "No Time To Quit" national call-in for healthcare reform. Call their toll-free number to connect to your representative: 1-866-279-5474 (you'll first listen to a prep message from Faithful America, then you'll be asked to enter your zip code). You can also call the Capitol switchboard: (202) 224-3121.

I made 6 phone calls yesterday, to Rep. Chaka Fattah and Joe Sestak, Progressive Caucus co-chairs Rep. Raul Grijalva and Lynn Woolsey, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

I had NO problem getting through--which is not a good sign. NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE ARE CALLING!

Jan 22, 2010 10:00 amPosted by Ming Shem Lu
The White House and Congressional Democrats are all playing the game of "it's off my hands now." If healthcare reform FAILS to pass, who is accountable? ALL OF THEM! And once again the Democrats are the party that FAILS TO GET THE JOB DONE.

Read more in this series of article in Talking Points Memo: The White House's "Who's the chief executive? Scott Brown?" approach. And the Senate-House tug-of-inaction.

See also the latest tally sheet prepared by Talking Points Memo, of which House members have said they are prepared to go forward and how.

When I read moveon.org's poll from Tuesday's Massachusetts election, at first I didn't understand why Obama supporters would vote for someone like Scott Brown, specifically why supporters of healthcare reform (49% of those polled) would vote for someone who stated clearly he would be the 41th vote to derail it. To me and to many of my liberal friends, that seems so "irrational," so "illogical"!

Yesterday, when I had seen one too many progressive House Representative said on TV that in no way he would vote for the Senate bill (in this case Rep. Dennis Kucinich on The Ed Show), thus dragging on what already has been a too-long too-long process, I can understand the anger, the frustration, the VERY REAL emotion that prompted Masschusetts voters to do what they did: "if this party can't do anything, get them out."

Jan 22, 2010 9:00 amPosted by Ming Shem Lu
I made another 5 calls yesterday, the first one to my Representative, Chaka Fattah (D-PA). His aide confirmed Fattah was ready to vote for the Senate bill. I then called Rep Joe Sestak (D-PA), who's running against Senator Arlen Specter and possibly Rep. Pat Toomey (R-PA) this Fall and who's been a strong advocate of healthcare reform. He is non-committal. After Tuesday night, the Pennsylvania Senate race looks like it will be hotly contested as the Massachusetts one--both Democrats will face voters' anger if they FAIL to get the job done.

My third phone call was to the Washington office of House Speaker Pelosi. Just as I started saying to the live person who answered the phone, "I urge...," without uttering another word she transferred me to voicemail. What customer service! My last 2 calls were to the co-chairs of the House Progressive Caucus--Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA). Both have said in public statements they won't vote for the Senate bill.

Jan 21, 2010 9:30 amRead this column by Martha Stewart in The Huffington Post on "The Other Healthcare Crisis--America's Elderly"

In the last paragraph she sums up why we all have a stake in the state of elderly care (and of healthcare in general): "We're all in this together. Whether or not you care about policy or older people, you will, if you're lucky, be one of them. It's not just a demographic. It's personal--it's you, your parents, your aunts, uncles, friends and children. We need to do a better job caring for this population--and supporting those who care for them."

Jan 21, 2010 9:00 amSenate Democrats unveiled their new talking point: Blame the Republicans for failure to pass healthcare reform. Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo reports that a memo was released yesterday with these words: "It is mathematically impossible for Democrats to pass legislation on our own. Senate Republicans to come to the table with ideas for improving our nation and not obstructionist tactics."

The Democrats can try blaming the other side, voters will still place a major share of responsibility on the majority party. Two readers of Talking Points Memo sum up the public mood:

One writes: "What really bothers me about the Dems' epic collapse, more than anything, is how easily they gave up. Not even on a political level, but on a human level, it boggles the mind."

The other: "This legislation was historic. A monumental achievement that would, and I still hope will, save thousands of lives and save thousands from medical bankruptcy. They were weeks, if not days, from passing this epic legislation and with one stumble, they throw up their hands and declare that the bill is doomed. How can you work so hard on something, spend so much time and man hours, get so close, and at the first hint of trouble, walk away like that? Where is the courage of their convictions? They have none. They're cowards.

"To me, it's like getting ten feet from the summit of Mount Everest, tripping on some ice and declaring that not only can you not make it any further, but that surely you are doomed to die of frostbite on the mountain. Well, if you just lay there feeling sorry for yourself, surely you will. But if you dust yourself off and keep walking, you'll probably be fine."

Jan 20, 2010 9:00 pmReaders on Talking Points Memo--especially those from liberal districts--said they have been calling their elected officials.

One reader writes: "A lot of folks (including me) who live in liberal districts were sort of leaving it to Obama to push for reform. As long as he was there, what need was there for us to push someone who we knew was a reliable D vote. I contacted my rep (Zoe Lofgren) today for the first time (ever) and I doubt I'm the only one."

Another comments: "I want a bill. I want some concrete results. This has taken too long. Saying that you aren't satisfied with the Senate bill on the day when this entire bill is teetering on the brink of failure, is just terrible PR.

"I first called at around 11am this morning, to his D.C. office and the line was busy. I then called his Manhattan number and immediately reached a live person. I told him that I supported the Senate HCR bill and that I wanted results. The receptionist told me that he would pass on my comment to Rep. [Jerrold] Nadler. Then I called his D.C. office again, this time without a busy signal. I said the same thing, and was asked for my contact information, I assume just to get on a mailing list. I didn't really get any substantive information, but I got to vent a little and feel better.

If guys like [Anthony] Weiner and Nadler can't get behind something that can pass, then why do we elect liberal Democrats? Keep fighting!"
Still another: "I called up my congressman, Rep. Nadler, of the West Side of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn (I live on the Upper West Side). More than the MA Senate result, I was unhappy with his comment that you reported."

Jan 20, 2010 8:00 pmPosted by Ming Shem Lu
What? What? What? In an interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, President Obama said, regarding healthcare reform, "the Senate certainly shouldn't try to jam anything through until Scott Brown is seated." Read more here.

Senator Harry Reid also said, "The Senate certainly shouldn't try to jam anything through until Scott Brown is seated." Read more here.

What? What? What? I thought the Senate ALREADY VOTED on healthcare reform.

Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, on both The Ed Show and Countdown with Keith Olbermann, kept saying just that--the Senate already voted on healthcare reform ("What passed the Senate is still good to go."). When both hosts pressed him to clarify whether that means the House will accept the Senate version and move ahead--and if he is contradicting what his boss said in the ABC interview--Gibbs did what he does best, talking a lot but saying nothing.

This column by Dick Polman of Philly.com may clarify somewhat what's going on. Polman lays out different scenarios of what Democrats can do: (A) The House and Senate work out a reform package (incorporating elements from both bills) and vote on it BEFORE Brown is seated. Both Obama and Reid signaled today that is NOT their preference; (B) Go to "budget reconciliation," which requires only 51 votes--but it's too long drawn-out and messy a process; or (C) The House votes for the Senate version and send it to Obama's desk.

Polman recommends (C): "The only decent Democratic option is quite readily available: The House can simply agree to pass the Senate version--heck, why not vote on it this week--and the whole thing can then be sent to Obama for his signature. This is procedurally legit; this way, health reform wouldn't have to go back to the Senate for any more votes.

"The problems with this option, however, are both institutional and political. The House hates playing second fiddle to the Senate, and there are provisions in the Senate bill that many House Democrats oppose; pro-labor liberals don't like the proposed tax on expensive health insurance plans, and anti-abortion Democrats don't like the Senate language on their pet issue. Moreover, there are no guarantees at this point that a majority of House Democrats would even agree to vote Yes one more time on the floor; it's possible that a fair number of moderates from swing districts might be too spooked by the Massachusetts results to stick with Obama one more time.
"And yet...the Democrats really have no alternative but to enact something. They're too far in to back out."

If we analyze what Obama and Reid said--in particular the wording--it's possible they are leaving room for this (C) option. (Let's hope so!) And Reid might just be signaling to House progressives who still say they won't vote for the Senate version: Listen, if you send this bill back to the Senate, it's dead.

One more tidbit: Rep. Barney Frank backtracked from his doomsday statement last night, saying now he's open to voting for the Senate bill. Read more here.

Jan 20, 2010 12:00 pmPosted by Ming Shem Lu
I made 5 easy, short phone calls today, to the Washington offices of House Speaker Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Reid, my Representative and 2 Senators. Make a PLEDGE now to make those 5 (or more) phone calls every day until the healthcare reform bill passes.

Jan 20, 2010 10:00 am
NO RETREAT!!!Those of us who support healthcare reform, WRITE or CALL our elected officials now. Click here for addresses and phone numbers. The number for the House AND Senate switchboard is (202) 224-3121.

Tell them to pass healtcare reform NOW!

Jan 20, 2010 9:00 amSome of the sound and the fury in the aftermath of Republican Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts last night, which ended the Democrats' 60-vote majority in the Senate:

The New York Times has a detailed analysis of who and which districts voted for Scott Brown. Support from independents who are worried about government spending seemed to be key. Also, turnout was significantly down--54%, from 73% in November 2008. In areas where Obama was strongest, turnout was about 30% lower, compared to 25% in other areas in the state--in Boston, a mostly liberal district, turnout was down 35%. It's hard to read these statistics without concluding that democrats failed to galvanize their base while losing independents' support. Most importantly, they allowed the big-spending narrative to dominate and did not fight back.

Scott Brown made it clear he would be "the 41th Senator" to derail healthcare reform. Yet as a State Senator he voted for Massachusetts' universal healthcare legislation. Read more here in The New York Times.

Minutes before Brown declared victory, House Democratic leaders still sounded optimistic about passing the healthcare bill. But rank-and-file House progressives are expressing reluctance to just move ahead and vote for the Senate bill. Read more here in Talking Points Memo.

Rep. Barney Frank said in a statement that the healthcare bill will fail unless the it gets some Republican votes in the Senate: "Our respect for democratic procedures must rule out any effort to pass a health care bill as if the Massachusetts election had not happened." Frank's comments prompted Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo to write, "I've always been such a big admirer of Barney Frank, on so many different levels. So I was genuinely surprised, really shocked to see this statement he put out tonight that is just an embodiment of fecklessness, resignation, defeatism and just plain folly. The gist of his point is that that's it for healthcare reform. If a few Republican senators will come across the aisle and help maybe it will happen. But if not, that's it. Amazing. Just amazing."

Senator Jim Webb (D-Virginia), usually more conservative than Barney Frank, made similar remarks: ""In many ways the campaign in Massachusetts became a referendum not only on health care reform but also on the openness and integrity of our government process. It is vital that we restore the respect of the American people in our system of government and in our leaders. To that end, I believe it would only be fair and prudent that we suspend further votes on health care legislation until Senator-elect Brown is seated."

White House senior adviser David Axelrod said Democrats must press on with healthcare reform. "We need to move forward aggressively, continuing on job creation, and on financial regulatory reform. But we should finish healthcare because the caricature of that bill is there and everyone who voted for it will have to live with that. The way to deal with that is to pass the bill and let people see... the value of it." Read more here in The Huffington Post.

Jan 19, 2010If you live in Massachusetts, please GO VOTE today. (If you live elsewhere, email or tweet or call your family and friends to urge them to vote.)

Don't give yourself any excuses not to. Don't miss this chance of injecting your voice AND VALUES into the political process. One way or another, your VOTE will help determine the direction of this country.

Jan 18, 2010Read this piece on "Hope 2.0" by Arianna Huffington on The Huffington Post. She writes:

"The 2008 election was all about 'Hope.' But Hope is simply not cutting it. What we need is Hope 2.0: the realization that our system is too broken to be fixed by politicians, however well-intentioned--that change is going to have to come from outside Washington. This realization is especially resonant as we celebrate Dr. King, whose life and work demonstrate the vital importance of social movements in bringing about change. Indeed, King showed that no real change can be accomplished without a movement demanding it.

One year ago, Hope was about crossing our fingers and electing leaders that we thought would enact real change. Hope 2.0 is about using the lessons of Dr. King to create the conditions that give them no other choice."

Jan 15, 2010Labor leaders announced yesterday afternoon they reached a deal with the Obama administration on the sticky issue of excise tax. It stays in the bill, but until 2017 plans that are part of collective bargaining will be exempt. The thresholds are also raised slightly, to $8900 for individual and $24000 for family. Read more in The Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo.

Excerpt from the White House's description of the deal can be found in this article by Christina Bellantoni of Talking Points Memo, who also reports that negotiations between House and Senate leaders continued well into the night. Senator Joe Lieberman, though not part of the negotiations, were at the White House this week discussing healthcare.

Meanwhile, stories about the political intrigues behind the bill have already begun to emerge. In an article to be published in this week's New York Times Sunday Magazine, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Lieberman "double-crossed me." Talking Points Memo also reports what Senator Arlen Specter said, in a conference call with liberal bloggers, about GOP discipline: "The pressure was tremendous on everybody not to participate, and the pressure was on me not to participate, and you know what I did."

Latest polls from Massachusetts show the Republican candidate Scott Brown taking a slight lead over Democrat Martha Coakley. A GOP victory will have significant impact on healthcare legislation. Read more here (see also posting from Jan 13).

Jan 14, 2010Our prayers and thoughts are with the people of Haiti, after a 7.0 earthquake on Tuesday destroyed its capital Port-au-Prince, killing 50,000 and leaving many homeless and in desperate need of medical care.

Click here for how you can help.

You can also donate through the Mennonite Central Committee. Go to mcc.org for details.

Jan 13, 2010 9:30 amNext Tuesday is when the special election for Senator takes place in Massachusetts, and the latest poll does not look good for the Democratic candidate Martha Coakley (49% for her and 47% for Republican Scott Brown). The Democrats may lose their 60th vote.

Talking Points Memo has an analysis of how, if Brown wins (and he has already said he opposes healthcare reform), what the Democrats might still do to save the bill.

Meanwhile, negotiation on the final bill seems to be at an impasse. Read more here.
Jan 13, 2010 9:00 amListen to this interview of Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic, "Next Up: Turning Two Healthcare Bills Into One," by Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air.

Jan 12, 2010In public and during their meeting with President Obama last night, union leaders
expressed in no uncertain terms opposition to the excise tax, going so far as to threaten Democrats a repeat of 1994 (when Democrats lost their majority) this November.

Harold Schaitberger, President of the International Association of Fire Fighters, said in a statement: "In 2008, then-candidate Obama promised three things: he said he would not raise taxes on folks making less than $250,000 a year; he vowed not to tax health insurance benefits; and he promised that under his health reform plan, people would be able to keep their existing coverage.

"Now, President Obama supports the misguided excise tax passed by the Senate...The president's support for the excise tax is a huge disappointment and cannot be ignored. If President Obama continues to support it and signs a bill that includes the excise tax on workers, we will hold him accountable."

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in his speech at the National Press Club, "The tax on benefits in the Senate bill pits working Americans who need health care for their families against working Americans struggling to keep health care for their families. This is a policy designed to benefit elites--in this case, insurers, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and irresponsible employers, at the expense of the broader public. It's the same tragic pattern that got us where we are today."

House and Senate negotiators seem to be working on a compromise--taxing people in the top 2% income bracket, raising the thresholds for taxable premiums (the Senate bill has $8500 for individual and $23000 for family) while exempting those in high-risk jobs. Watch this interview of Rep. Joe Courtney--who wrote the letter opposing the excise tax--on The Ed Show.

Jan 9, 2010Tension between the Obama Administration and House leaders over how to pay for the healthcare bill--excise tax vs. taxing the rich--has not subsided. Brian Beutler reports in Talking Points Memo that, during Thursday's meeting, a heated exchange took place between Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Nancy "there-were-a-number-of-things-he-was-for-on-the-campaign-trail" Pelosi.

Meanwhile, Representative Joe Courtney (D-Connecticut), wrote a letter, signed by 190 House Democrats, expressing strong opposition to the Senate tax plan, which they believe violates Obama's campaign pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class. Representatives Joe Sestak, Allyson Schwartz, and Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania were among the ones who signed. Write or call now to thank them or to express your view.

One line from the letter sums it up: "Real life experience with both health insurers and inelastic market for services such as health insurance has clearly warned us that this tax will be passed along to insurance payers."

Beutler quotes Rep. Courtney, "The polling just hasn't moved an inch. Frankly, it's the same polling that was there when Obama went after McCain on this." Courtney was referring to recent polls that show a two-to-one majority of Americans oppose this so-called "Cadillac tax."

The major unions are firmly against the tax. Sam Stein of The Huffington Post writes, "Many union members are enrolled under those plans--having given up salary increases to get the additional health care benefits. Now, they stand to have those benefits taxed." Obama is planning to meet with union leaders in the next few days to address their opposition.

For more on the excise tax, see posting from Dec 22.

Jan 7, 2010 9:30 amListen to this interview on WHYY's Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane on "What You Need to Know About Healthcare Legislation"

Jan 7, 2010 8:30 amBrian Beutler of Talking Points Memo reports that Nancy "there-were-a-number-of-things-he-was-for-on-the-campaign-trail" Pelosi indicated after her meeting at the White House (see yesterday's posting), "[The excise tax is] not a very popular initiative in the House or in the public. It's something the President is committed to, and we'll see how it works out."

Read more in this article by Erica Werner of The Huffington Post.

Jan 6, 2010Latest disagreement reported between the White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who quipped sarcastically about Obama yesterday, "There were a number of things he was for on the campaign trail." She wants to cut the Senate bill's excise tax and instead go for the House bill's chief funding source--taxing the rich. The White House wants her to basically adopt the Senate bill in its entirety (excise tax, no public option, state-based exchanges). Read more here.

The Daily Kos adds, "Those 'high-income' Americans that would be subject to the surtax [in the House Bill] are actually millionaires--couples making more than $1 million, a much, much fairer solution than the Chevy excise tax [in the Senate bill]. Given everything progressives have had to swallow in this process, a fairer tax structure is little to ask for the price of their votes."

The President meets with the principal authors of the House bill today.

Jan 5, 2010 10:00 amListen to this report on NPR's "All Things Considered" on Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), a pilot program in the healthcare bill designed to cut Medicare costs. Read more about what ACOs are in this article on the website of American Medical News (amednews.com).

Jan 5, 2010 9:30 amMore on how Democrats will likely bypass "conference committee" (see also yesterday's posting). Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo writes:
"Instead of creating a final conference report that both chambers would pass, principals in both chambers would agree upon a package of changes to the Senate bill that passed on Christmas eve. The House would then vote to amend the Senate bill to reflect those agreed-upon changes, pass the legislation, and send it back over to the Senate for--they hope--a final vote...

Just what the House will demand in exchange for some of the major concessions it will have to accept--most notably the public option--have yet to be finalized, but should become more clear in the hours and days ahead. Under discussion going into holiday recess were fairly major issues, such as whether the exchanges would be organized at the national level (as in the House bill) or at the state level (as in the Senate bill), and whether to adopt the House's earlier implementation date.

House members will huddle in a caucus conference call later this week to sort out their priorities."

Jan 4, 2010 10:00 amDick Polman of philly.com has written a very insightful column on how the Democrats can use passing healthcare reform to their advantage in the 2010 midterm elections.

He writes, "A Democratic health reform sales effort would not necessarily be as impossible as some assume. In December, a bipartisan NBC-Wall Street Journal poll reported that, while only 35 percent of Americans had positive feelings about the Democrats, just 28 percent felt that way about the Republicans. And even though polls typically report majority opposition to health reform, that’s misleading. Many of the naysayers are liberals who dismiss the Democratic proposals as insufficiently ambitious; indeed, a CNN poll last month found that only 39 percent of Americans view the reforms as 'too liberal.'"

Jan 4, 2010 9:30 amJonathan Cohn of The New Republic reports that House and Senate Democrats are "almost certain" to bypass the step of convening the "conference committee" and will instead negotiate informally on the final healthcare bill. Cohn writes, "Doing so would allow Democrats to avoid a series of procedural steps--not least among them, a series of special motions in the Senate, each requiring a vote with full debate--that Republicans could use to stall deliberations, just as they did in November and December."
For postings before Jan 4, 2010, go to Archived News DEC 09 page.

Congress Bills

Ming Shem Lu — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:21:16 GMT

For the text of Reconciliation Bill, click here. And here for summary of changes that the House has proposed for the Senate bill.

Click here to download full version of the Senate healthcare reform bill, HR 3590
"Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." NOTE: Unless you want the whole 2074-page document, DO NOT click on it!

Click here to download full version of the House healthcare reform bill, HR 3962 "The Affordable Health Care for America Act." NOTE: Unless you want the whole 1990-page document, DO NOT click on it!Click here for the Health Insurance Reform Resources page on the website of the Senate Democrats.

A summary of the House bill can be found on the website of the House Committee on Education and Labor.

Click here for House Republicans' version of healthcare reform bill.

Archived News DEC 09

Ming Shem Lu — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 15:21:31 GMT

Click here to go to Latest News

NOTE: The opinions expressed in this column belong to the author and do not reflect the official position of Germantown Mennonite Church.

Dec 31, 2009
The fight for real reform is far from over. As we wait for Congress to reconvene and start merging the House and Senate bills, here's the latest sound and fury:

An important consideration during the "conference" process is what kind of insurance exchange will the final bill set up--the House version, which is federal-based, could create competition, and has stronger regulatory powers, or the weaker Senate version, which is state-based. Some House Democrats, such as Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut (who recently talked about recalling Joe Lieberman), said keeping the federal verson might be a possible compromise in exchange for public option. Read more in Sam Stein's article in The Huffington Post.
13 Republican Attorney Generals, led by Henry McMaster of South Carolina, are threatening lawsuit over the constitutionality of the healthcare reform bill. They focused on the deal Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska made, arguing it will unfairly burden the other states. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, also of South Carolina, said the threat was a political ploy. "[It] stinks of partisan politics." Read more here.
One of the 13 Attorney Generals who signed a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi threatening lawsuit is Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania. Like McMaster, as well as the Michigan and Florida AGs who also signed the letter, Corbett is running for Governor.
In his latest appearance on The Ed Show, Wendell Potter--when asked by host Ed Schultz on what citizens can do to counter powerful lobbyists--said we have no alternative but to keep being engaged in the political process. See video here.

Dec 27, 2009
Wendell Potter weighs in on "Why I'm Not Joining the Call to 'Kill the Bill'":

"Instead of sending more 'Kill the Bill' emails, we need to turn our attention now to leaders in the House, insisting they stick to their guns on important elements of their bill and improve on what the Senate has passed. It will not be easy to merge the two bills to the satisfaction of reform advocates, but at the very least the House should add language to strengthen the regulation of insurance companies and close the loopholes that would allow them to circumvent the intent of the legislation.

"There will be plenty to do later--including paying close attention to how this legislation is implemented, changing the way the Senate conducts its business and getting real campaign finance and lobbying reform enacted--but let's get this part done now. Millions of people are counting on it. Many of them won't live to see the next debate if we do exactly what the opponents of reform hope we will do, and that is to join them in trying to 'Kill the Bill.'"

Dec 26, 2009
Paul Krugman writes in his latest New York Times column:

"Disappointed progressives have valid complaints. But those complaints don’t add up to a reason to reject the bill. Yes, it’s a hackneyed phrase, but politics is the art of the possible.

"If progressives want more, they’ll have to make changing those Senate rules a priority. They’ll also have to work long term on electing a more progressive Congress. But, meanwhile, the bill the Senate has just passed, with a few tweaks--I’d especially like to move the start date up from 2014, if that’s at all possible--is more or less what the Democratic leadership can get.

"And for all its flaws and limitations, it’s a great achievement. It will provide real, concrete help to tens of millions of Americans and greater security to everyone. And it establishes the principle--even if it falls somewhat short in practice--that all Americans are entitled to essential health care.

"Many people deserve credit for this moment. What really made it possible was the remarkable emergence of universal health care as a core principle during the Democratic primaries of 2007-2008--an emergence that, in turn, owed a lot to progressive activism. (For what it’s worth, the reform that’s being passed is closer to Hillary Clinton’s plan than to President Obama’s). This made health reform a must-win for the next president. And it’s actually happening.

"So progressives shouldn’t stop complaining, but they should congratulate themselves on what is, in the end, a big win for them--and for America."

Dec 25, 2009
Posted by Ming Shem Lu
President Obama claimed, in an interview with The Washington Post, that he "didn't campaign on the public option." Is that true? Sam Stein of The Huffington Post has written a detailed piece chronicling Obama's tango with the government-run health plan.

Stein concludes, "The Obama campaign clearly did incorporate the public option into its healthcare agenda...It also, however, seems clear that the philosophical attachment of the candidate to the issue was limited. Obama would discuss the public option more frequently once he took office. But on the trail he almost always highlighted other elements of his healthcare agenda first."

Talking to NPR's Robert Siegel, Obama said, "This notion among some on the left that somehow this bill is not everything that it should be, that we still need a single-payer plan, etc., etc., I think, just ignores the real human reality that this will help millions of people and end up being the most significant piece of domestic legislation at least since Medicare and maybe since Social Security."

What strikes me here is the way the President calls "the left" out by name, and this is not the first time he's done so--back in the Summer, when he waffled on the public option, he referred to it as something that "the left" just got too excited about.

I have no problem of Obama wanting to appear centrist--truth be told, he probably is staunchly moderate, or at most center-left--just don't do so at the expense of the base! What strikes me as unwise on his part is the disparaging way he speaks of a constituency that, whether he and his aides like it or not, helped elect him and continued to be a core segment of his support.

Obama has signaled that he aspires to be a "game-changer" of a President like Ronald Reagan--bringing in a whole cultural ethos (in that case, of shameless self-righteousness and materialism)--but it's inconceivable that someone like Reagan, not to mention George W. Bush, would speak in that kind of tone about "the right." And, please correct me if I'm wrong, I can't recall Bill Clinton ever talked like that about "the left"--Hillary's "right-wing conspiracy" comes to mind instead. (Come to think of it, it's also inconceivable that the community-organizer Obama would talk that way.)

The approach of the Obama administration toward progressives since they have entered the White House has been, "they will fall in line--they can't afford not to." In terms of realpolitik and just realpolitik, that might be true. But, if Obama thinks he would look more appealing to "the right" if he comes across as moderate, then he's wrong--as his failed attempts at bipartisanship lay bare, that segment will never embrace him.

But even our "can't-afford-not-to" acquiescence may have a limit. The latest drop in his approval ratings show a decline of support among progressives and moderates (the latter probably perceive him as weak and waffling). Maybe instead of speaking disparagingly about "the left," he and his aides should do a better job channeling our passion to good use.

I do think that progressives need to tread a fine line between being vocal and firm, on the one hand, and being critical to the point of cannibalizing our own, on the other (and it's likely that Obama spoke disparagingly out of frustration--maybe he does want us to get along). Yes, the relationship has to be mutual and reciprocal.

John Neffinger has recently written an insightful article on The Huffington Post about this symbiotic (but tricky) relationship between a center-left President and "the left." He writes, "For Obama to do his job, he needs progressives to do theirs: let progressives fight on the left flank to make room for the President to steer a middle course. Yes, that will mean some strife within the Democratic family, and the President seems to prefer when we all just get along in public. But we have just witnessed what that gets us: taking forever to pass weak legislation that betrays the hopes that got Obama elected, sapping public enthusiasm for his Presidency."

Dec 24, 2009
Around 7:15 am the Senate passed the healthcare reform bill 60-39, without a single Republican saying yea. Read more in Talking Points Memo and The Huffington Post.

President Obama said he would start getting hands-on and work on reconciling the House and Senate bills. House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi hopes to get a final bill to the President's desk before the State of the Union address in late January.

Dec 23, 2009
This afternoon the Senate passed the last of the 3 "cloture" motions needed to prevent filibuster of the healthcare reform bill. The final vote to pass the bill is scheduled for 7 am tomorrow morning.

Dec 22, 2009
This morning the Senate voted 60-39 to end filibuster on the core elements (vs. the amendments) of the healthcare reform bill, inching closer to its passage expected on Christmas Eve. Read more in Talking Points Memo and The Huffington Post.

Meanwhile, debate among progressives on whether to support the bill rages on. Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake.com lists "Top Ten Reasons to Kill the Senate Health Care Bill." She writes, "The Senate bill isn't a 'starter home,' it's a sink hole. ['Starter home' is Senator Tom Harkin's much-used analogy.] It needs to die so something else can take its place. It doesn't matter whether people are on the right or the left--once they understand the con job that's about to be foisted on them, they agree."

Ezra Klein of The Washington Post then posts his point-by-point response to Hamsher's list. He writes, "[Hamsher's] points about the bill's provisions are, in most cases, misleading. Sometimes, the facts are off. Other times, Hamsher obscures the affected population...The world in which we kill the bill is a world in which everything just continues to get worse, and politicians are scared away from the issue for decades. A world in which we pass the bill is a world in which things get better, and politicians remember that they can pass big pieces of legislation that take on, or begin taking on, big problems."

On 2 points Ezra Klein agrees with Jane Hamsher that the current legislation has fallen short: ban on drug reimportation and monopoly of companies making expensive bio-tech drugs (Hamsher has started raising awareness about the latter quite early on--see Nov 10 posting).

On the issue of excise tax on expensive "cadillac" plans, there continues to be confusion. Klein paints a picture in which mostly "better-off workers" are affected, comparing "a worker at Wal-Mart" and "a worker at Goldman Sachs." Jon Walker, also at FireDogLake.com, shots back by pointing out, "By 2016, the CBO says it will affect 19% of people with employer-provided health insurance (roughly 30 million Americans). By 2019, it would affect the health insurance of roughly 58 million."

On this same issue of taxing high-premium plans, Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos said on Countdown with Keith Olbermann that it will affect disproportionately union workers and those with high-risk jobs, like police and firefighters, and that it is "unconscionable."

Ed Schultz, the host of The Ed Show, has continued to decry mandate-without-public-option as a big bail-out for the insurance industry.

Dec 21, 2009
At 1:18 am this morning, the Senate voted 60-0, along party lines, on the cloture motion to end debate (and prevent filibuster) on the amendments attached to the healthcare reform bill. Read more in this New York Times article, or on Talking Points Memo.

This is the first of a series of three "cloture" motions the Senate has to go through before finally getting to vote on the bill's passage on Christmas Eve.

Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post notes, "The bill does not include a public health insurance option that would compete with private insurers in order to keep them honest. The proposal does include tighter regulations on the insurance industry than currently exist, but the law would not create any new regulatory agencies and would leave policing the new rules to individual states, which have shown an inability to combat the major insurers. Those companies will have billions more in resources if the Senate bill becomes law."

On Saturday, Majority Leader Harry Reid unveiled details of the latest deal he made with holdout Democrats to secure 60 votes. For Senator Ben Nelson, these include tighter restrictions on abortion coverage, additional Medicaid money, and increased Medicare payments. Read more here.

The latest change regarding abortion coverage: States can opt out of allowing plans to cover abortion in the exchanges, and a woman receiving government subsidies has to write two separate checks to pay her premiums--one for abortion coverage, the other (presumably more than or equal to the subsidies she's receiving) for everything else.

For latest comparison of the House and Senate versions, click here.

Next step: another cloture vote to end filibuster on the actual reform package is scheduled for around 7 a.m. on Tuesday.

Dec 20, 2009 11:30 pm
Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, one of the strongest progressive voices in Congress, released a statement today announcing his support for the current bill. He also urged House and Senate negotiators to re-insert the public option into the final bill during conference committee. An excerpt:

"I've been fighting all year for a strong public option to compete with the insurance industry and bring health care spending down. I continued that fight during recent negotiations, and I refused to sign onto a deal to drop the public option from the Senate bill. Unfortunately, the lack of support from the administration made keeping the public option in the bill an uphill struggle.

Removing the public option from the Senate bill is the wrong move, and eliminates $25 billion in savings. I will be urging members of the House and Senate who draft the final bill to make sure this essential provision is included.

But while the loss of the public option is a bitter pill to swallow, on balance, the bill still delivers meaningful reform, and the cost of inaction is simply too high."

Read more here.

Dec 20, 2009 9:30 am
The CBO has released its score of the Senate bill without public option or Medicare buy-in. It will cost $871 billion, $20 billion MORE than when it had the public option.

Brian Beutler writes in Talking Points Memo: "The CBO has concluded that, on average, premiums will be the same as they would have been if the Senate had the public option, but that the public option saved the federal government more money by putting downward pressure on the premiums of low-cost private plans, which will be heavily subsidized."

Click here for the CBO report, and here for a summary on the CBO blog.

Dec 19, 2009 10:00 am
Holdout Senator Ben Nelson seems to have finally agreed to be the 60th vote after a marathon meeting last night with Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is expected to announce the details of the deal today. Senator Barbara Boxer, a supporter of women's reproductive rights, was present at the meeting, a sign that something about abortion funding is part of the deal. Read more here.

Dec 19, 2009 9:00 am
Read this op-ed by Vicky Kennedy, widow of Ted, in The Washington Post.

She writes, "The bill before Congress will finally deliver on the urgent needs of all Americans. It would make their lives better and do so much good for this country. That, in the end, must be the test of reform. That was always the test for Ted Kennedy. He's not here to urge us not to let this chance slip through our fingers. So I humbly ask his colleagues to finish the work of his life, the work of generations, to allow the vote to go forward and to pass health-care reform now. As Ted always said, when it's finally done, the people will wonder what took so long."

More who weighed in:

Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect and Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone on Bill Moyers Journal. Click here for more.
Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic: "Yes, I Can Be Excited About This Bill"
Paul Starr on "An Alternative to the Mandate"

Dec 18, 2009 9:30 am
Read this heartbreaking story about a Pittsburg woman who became a healthcare reform activist after her brother died because he couldn't afford to replace the battery for his defibrillator. Arthur Delaney of The Huffington Post writes, "She'll talk to anyone about healthcare reform...She goes door to door in her Pittsburgh neighborhood and even chats up strangers at bus stops."

Dec 18, 2009 8:30 am
Heads of the two most powerful labor unions, Richard Trumka of AFL-CIO and Andy Stern of SEIU, have spoken out against the latest developments in the Senate bill. Read more here.

Robert Reich, former labor secretary under Clinton, weighs in on the watered-down bill: "Is the effort worth still worth it? Yes, but just. Private insurers will have to take anyone, regardless of preconditions. And some 30 million people who don't now have health insurance will get it. But because Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and the AMA will come out way ahead, the legislation will cost taxpayers and premium-payers far more than it would otherwise. Cost controls are inadequate; in fact, they barely exist. If Wall Street's top brass are 'fat cats,' as the President described them last weekend, the top brass of Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and the AMA are even fatter. While they don't earn as much, they're squeezing the public for even more. We are slouching toward healthcare reform that's better than nothing but far worse than we had imagined it would be."

Sounding a more positive note (and repeating the main points in his NYT op-ed "Fighting the Wrong Health Care Battle"--see Dec 4 posting), Paul Starr writes in Talking Points Memo: "There are critical differences between the House and Senate bills (and still unresolved questions about the final version of the Senate bill, assuming there will be one). Ideally, the House's stronger regulatory provisions and faster timetable for implementation will prevail over the weaker regulation and slower timetable in the Senate bill. But I have no doubt that this legislation, even with many compromises, is worth supporting."

Dec 17, 2009
Progressives are at the juncture where we need to decide whether to continue supporting healthcare reform efforts in Congress--and what we are exactly supporting.

Senators like Jay Rockefeller, Tom Harkin, and Sherrod Brown who are staunch supporters of public option made passionate pleas saying we should not abandon the Senate bill or reform efforts altogether. "There are still many good things in the bill."

Princeton economist Paul Krugman writes in The New York Times that progressives shouldn't "take [their anger] out on the tens of millions of Americans who will have health insurance if this bill passes."

Howard Dean said to kill the bill and instead bring key elements through "reconciliation"
(that is, majority-wins, up-or-down votes). Read Dean's latest Op-Ed in The Washington Post. Senator Sanders now agrees that reconciliation is the way to go, and should have been all along.

Others like Markos Moulitsas of the progressive blog Daily Kos reminded us that the House bill is much stronger--we should continue to fight for a "less bad" bill. We may want to direct our focus on the "conference" process, when the House and Senate merge their bills.

Wendell Potter, who had been an insurance insider, while not abandoning the Senate bill altogether, repeated his characterization of its current incarnation--without the public option or the Medicare buy-in--as a "gift to the insurance industry." Potter said it contains many loopholes that the cartels will use to maximize their profits.

Meanwhile, calls for taking out the "mandate" provision continues to grow. In his special comment last night, Keith Olbermann (a "self-insured by choice") pledged that he would personally refuse to buy private insurance forced upon him.

Dec 16, 2009 8:00 pm
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) introduced a "single-payer" amendment. The Republicans promptly exploited this for their obstructionist goals. Using parliamentary procedure, Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) forced the Senate clerk to read out loud the 767-page amendment. Several hours into what was expected to be a
12-hour reading, Sanders withdrew the amendment and angrily called GOP delay tactics an "outrage" and "wrong."

Click here for fact sheet on the Sanders Amendment.
Click here for the full text (767 pages).

Dec 16, 2009 7:30 pm
The latest sound and fury:

Talking Points Memo reports that the Republicans want to delay the healthcare bill so there will be a repeat of the August "townhall uproar" when lawmakers go home for the holidays.
Democratic lawmakers began to lash out at President Obama for not doing enough on healthcare reform. Representative Dave Obey of Wisconsin said: "It's ridiculous, and the Obama administration is sitting on the sidelines. That's nonsense." Representative John Conyers of Michigan: "The insurance lobby is taking over."
The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows support for Obama's healthcare plan dropping--47% say it's a bad idea, 32% it's good. Most of the decline seems to have come from disillusioned supporters of public option.

Dec 16, 2009 10:30 am
With the public option and Medicare buy-in gone, people are getting concerned about "mandate"--30 million will be forced to become new customers of the private insurance companies, some using subsidies aka tax payers' money. By the way, candidate Obama campaigned AGAINST mandate.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo puts this concern in perspective:
"The best argument I've heard from people who say the emerging bill isn't just insufficient but just bad law is this: If you're going to force people to buy coverage (mandates), you need to provide them an alternative to buying private sector health insurance to prevent them from getting gouged by the insurance companies. In the abstract that makes a lot of sense. And it even makes a decent amount of sense in the non-abstract, real world.

"Here's the problem though. The fantasy Public Option would have served this role and put a lot of downward pressure on private sector insurance premiums. And at the beginning of this debate I thought that's what was being discussed. In fact, though, none of the Public Options that had any support in Congress really accomplished this. They were all designed to keep most people from being able to buy in. That's why the scoring from the CBO showed very few people actually buying into it (2 million for the senate bill and 6 for House bill, if memory serves) and relatively little downward pressure on premiums. Why they were so feeble-ized is a good question--for which I've heard some good and some bad answers."

"My point though is that if you are worried about mandates now (and I think that's a very legitimate worry) you should have been worried about them with a Public Option too."

Dec 16, 2009 9:30 am
The Senate voted 51-46 (9 short of being filibuster-proff) to kill Senator Byron Dorgan's
amendment for reimportation of drugs from Canada. 30 Democrats, joined by Joe Lieberman, voted no. Arlen Specter voted yes, Robert Casey no.

The White House (though aides had denied it) didn't want to piss off the big drug companies represented by PhRMA (see posting from Dec 12 below). Harry Reid made a deal with yes-leaning Democrats to kill the amendment in exchange for closing the so-called Medicare doughnut hole. Chris Dodd, who is facing a tough re-election battle, was one of them.

Meanwhile, some Republicans acknowledged that they voted yes because they thought it would cause trouble for the overall Senate bill.

Read more, including the full roll call, in this article by Ryan Grim in The Huffington Post. Grim writes, "President Obama and the Senate leadership can't whip up the votes necessary to pass a public option or even a Medicare buy-in compromise, but they didn't have any trouble persuading 30 Democrats to vote against prescription drug reimportation Tuesday night."

Dec 16, 2009 8:30 am
Howard Dean bluntly called for the watered-down Senate bill to be killed althogether. He had previously endorsed the Medicare buy-in without public option, but said the bill is no longer real reform after the Democrats caved in to Joe Lieberman.

Read more on Greg Sargent's blog and watch this explosive interview of Dean by Lawrence O'Donnell on Countdown.

Dec 15, 2009 9:00 am
Read John Neffinger's article in The Huffington Post: "Why We Lost Healthcare"

Dec 15, 2009 8:30 am
The saddest sight in the world: Senators who were strong advocates of public option and gung-ho about passing real reform now trying to do damage control. After the caucus meeting last night, Ron Wyden on Rachel Maddow and Sherrod Brown on Keith Olbermann saying things like not-the-best-bill-but-still-a-good-one could not hide their dejection.

And Mr. President doesn't come through as "can-do"--just weak, conciliatory.

Dec 14, 2009 9:30 pm
Senator Reid held a special meeting with the Democratic Caucus this evening and there is strong indication they are dropping the Medicare buy-in. Read more here.

Looks like The Huffington Post is confirming it: "Lieberman Wins"

Dec 14, 2009 5:30 pm
Politico reports that the White House told Senator Reid to cut a deal with Joe Lieberman, even if that means sacrificing the Medicare buy-in--which, it turns out, Lieberman supported in no unclear terms just three months ago!

The White House denies the "rumor," but if it were true, it really makes you question not only what this administration stands for, but also how good it actually is in political strategy. Is Obama's intention just to get a so-so bill and claim mission accomplished? Is he counting on the progressive base to turn out for the 2010 election no matter what (because we have no choice)? If so, this assumption seems unwise--because the worst that could happen in 2010 is for disaffected Democrats to stay home.

What's more, if the polls are correct and 59% of Americans support public option, then the White House and the Democrats risk cooling (if not alienating) the support of Independents as well. Lukewarm voters tend to be MIA in elections.

Dec 14, 2009 12:00 pm
DON'T MISS: Heartbreaking stories from the Free Clinic held last week in the real (third) world of Kansas City, USA (see also posting from Dec 10).

Dec 14, 2009 9:00 am
Joe Lieberman told Harry Reid to his face that he will filibuster the Senate bill if it includes the Medicare buy-in or the public option. Reid has few options left, none of them look promising. Read more in this article by Sam Stein of The Huffington Post.

Ezra Klein of The Washington Post writes, "Each time [Lieberman] does that, he increases the chances of the bill's failure that much more. And if there's a policy rationale here, it's not apparent to me, or to others who've interviewed him. At this point, Lieberman seems primarily motivated by torturing liberals. That is to say, he seems willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score."

Brian Beutler of Talking Point Memo reports, "What makes the new turn even more outlandish in the eyes of [Senate Democratic] leadership and others is that Lieberman ran for Vice President on a platform that included a Medicare buy-in for people not-yet eligible for the program." John Marshall comments, "Lieberman isn't negotiating in good faith...he's now basically mocking his Democratic colleagues by moving the goal posts every time a new agreement is struck."

Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America commissioned a poll asking 800 people whether Lieberman's position on healthcare should affect his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. 81% of Democrats said yes, joined by 43% of Independents. Read more here.

Progressive Change Campaign Committee also plans to air an ad reminding
Connecticut voters, 68% of them support public option, "it's not about you, it's all about Joe."

What's next? Recall?

Meanwhile, there are talks about a nightmare scenario taking place this week--if the CBO's analysis of the compromise deal says it would end up costing more than the original bill, then it's back to the drawing board.

Dec 12, 2009 11:00 am
Read this column by Arianna Huffington: "Health Care Reform: Sifting Through the Suboptimal Solutions"

Dec 12, 2009 10:00 am
Senator Byron Dorgan's amendment that would allow reimportation of drugs from Canada (US-manufactured drugs are cheaper there than in its place of origin!) is creating quite a bit of drama in the Senate. The White House is against it, because it made a deal earlier with the powerful PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) getting them to support healthcare reform.

Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post reports that the White House, not wanting to piss off PhRMA, is "working hard to crush the amendment." If only they would work as hard on securing the public option!

Meanwhile, some Republicans said they would vote for the amendment. Grim writes, "Opponents of the amendment worry that many more Republicans may join...not because they agree with it, but because they want to put the healthcare bill in jeopardy." And Democrats like Senator Rockefeller, who is a co-sponsor of the amendment, are now signaling they might oppose it.

Working with the White House, Senator Tom Carper (D-Delaware) has placed a "hold" on Dorgan's amendment and, in response, Dorgan (D-North Dakota) says he will object to any other amendments being considered before he gets a vote on his.

The White House's deal with PhRMA has effectively shut down the Senate healthcare debate.

According to an UPDATE in Grim's article, the White House denies any involvement in trying to defeat the amendment. An aide said the White House has taken no position on the amendment.

Dec 11, 2009
Posted by Ming Shem Lu
The latest tactic used by the health insurance industry to derail reform: they will pay you fake money to play games on Facebook if you submit a form telling your Congressional representative "to get health reform right."

While we're talking anti-reform tactics, I'd like to address an email petition that has been circulating around (I've received it from 2 people I consider progressives). The petition calls for Congress members to commit to signing up for the public option as their health plan, supporting Republican Senator Tom Coburn's recent amendment and Representative John Fleming's similar idea that he introduced earlier in the House. The petition reads, "If Congress forces this on the American people, the Congressmen should have to accept the same level of healthcare for themselves and their families."

That a number of progressives found this petition agreeable speaks to the confusion surrounding healthcare reform, much of it deftly created by the right, some of it just due to the fact that healthcare reform IS complicated. Also, I think Fleming's seemingly popularist reasoning appeals to progressives because it mimics our wish for a single-payer system (let everyone enroll in the public plan) and our principle of equality (let everyone enroll in the same plan).

But, wait, let's look at the real politics behind this petition and dissect its logic a little more.

Back in July, before all the townhall hoopla, Representative Fleming, Republican of Louisiana, started calling for elected officials to enroll in the public option as a way to lobby AGAINST it. The idea was to create in people's minds the impression that public option was something undesirable. His logic was: if you liberal Democrats like public option so much, why don't you enroll in it.

Fleming's petition was based on a fear-mongering lie, that the public option will be "mandated," forced upon you. Fact is, as it was designed, the public option will be available ONLY to those who aren't covered through their employers or a government program like Medicare or Medicaid. And it is an OPTION--a choice you can pass over if you choose to buy private insurance instead. (NOTE: Congress members are considered "federal employees" and already get insurance through their "employer" the US government, so they aren't eligible for public option.)

Think of it another way: people who will be allowed to choose the public option don't belong to any big insurance pool in the current system and are forced to buy expensive individual coverage that many can't afford. Now, the Congress and the federal government, like a big company, form a big insurance pool; the public option, as well as the exchange in which it will be offered alongside other (private) plans, are designed to bring enough uninsureds and underinsureds together to form larger pools. Even so, comparing what Congress members have (a choice of different private plans) and the public option (one plan among others) is a bit like comparing apples and oranges--the Congress pool is more comparable to the pool created by the exchange.

During the townhall meetings, this question ("why don't you enroll yourself?") was used by many anti-reform people to try to "gotcha" their elected officials. I was at Representative Joe Sestak's townhall and he was asked exactly that question. His answer was: YES, he would enroll in the public option as long as the doctor his daughter is seeing (she has had some serious illness) is in the network.

Jason Linkins rightly points out in his article in The Huffington Post that if we apply Fleming's own logic, then all those Republicans who say that we have the best system in the world should go out and purchase those private plans as individuals, NOT as part of a big PRIVILEGED pool of federal employees.

So when you sign the Coburn/Fleming petition (if you so decide), you might also want to write another letter, this one asking elected officials like them to buy high-deductible, very costly individual coverage they so praise.

One more thing: Now that Senate Democrats are working on having the Office of Personnel Management negotiate premiums for certain populations, effectively extending the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan to them, the Republicans--including Coburn and Fleming--would most probably be against that.

There is the same Republican flip-flop regarding Medicare. Before this week, they were lambasting the Democrats for destroying Medicare. Now that the Democrats are talking about extending Medicare to people 55 and above, they are deadly against the idea.

Dec 10, 2009 10:00 am
Wendell Potter appeared on msnbc's The Ed Show Wednesday night. He said he agreed with host Ed Schultz's assessment that, if the Democrats were to compromise away the public option, the Senate bill would basically be a "lobbyists' bill." See video of the whole segment here (Potter appears toward the end).

In his latest report on the compromise deal, Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post writes, "The details of the trigger [public option] are crucial: written by a public-option advocate, a hair-trigger could bring a public plan into being on the first day; written by insurance companies, it will never be triggered, just as the trigger for Medicare Part D's prescription program has never been pulled despite soaring prices."

Dec 10, 2009 9:30 am
The National Association of Free Clinics (NAFC) is having another of its CARE (Communities Are Responding Everyday) clinics, this time in Kansas City. About 1000 lined up in the middle of the night in freezing weather to sign up for free healthcare yesterday, and the same number are expected today.

Two stories from this Associated Press article:

"Stephanie Cole has been without health insurance since cancer made her so sick that she had to leave her job at a Ford Motor Co. assembly line in Claycomo four years ago...[She] has received little medical care since learning two years ago that the cancer that started in her lungs was in remission. Still without work, she also had thyroid problems but can't afford the medicine to treat the condition.

"Sitting nearby was Kathleen Shaw, who recently moved in with her parents in Kansas City. The 45-year-old hadn't been to a doctor for two years since she was laid off from her office manager job at a Pasadena, Calif., construction company. Despite two college degrees, she has been unable to find work or health insurance since then."

"[Shaw said,] 'People who have health care or money, they forget what it's like to be locked out of the system. If they have a broken tooth or an ache or a pain, they can just call their doctor. But if you are locked out of the system, you can't get anything. You have to go around feeling like a charity case all the time.'"

Dec 9, 2009 10:30 am
More details of the Senate Democratic "deal" have emerged, but these aren't "official" until the CBO is finished with its analysis and Reid et al have made their annoucements:

The opt-out public option is out.
The government, through the Office of Personnel Management, will negotiate premiums with private insurance companies on behalf of people participating in the exchange. This effectively means extending the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan to those people--that instead of choosing a public option they become part of an insurance "pool" under the goverment's auspices but run by private insurance. Also, it's unclear whether they will get the same health plan (with the same benefits) as federal employees.
There will be a "trigger" public option: Insurance companies are expected to offer nationally-based non-profit plans in the exchange. However, if they don't, a national public option will be triggered into existence, run by the OPM.
Uninsured people aged 55 to 64 can enroll in Medicare starting in 2011, three years before the exchange opens. NOTE: From 2011 to 2014, the Medicare option will not be subsidized--people will have to pay what will likely be quite expensive premiums. After 2014, the Medicare option would be offered in the exchange, and people could pay for it with their subsidies.
There will be new, strengthened regulations (in addition to what are currently in the Senate bill). No details yet.

Dec 9, 2009 10:00 am
One of our GMC-ers wrote in an email yesterday, in reference to the nationwide "Cost of Delay" vigil organized by MoveOn.org:

"I know that this subject [of healthcare reform] is beginning to be really old, with the compromises and the hard reality of politics. Bottom line, as we knew from the beginning, is that this round of reform is the first step that must be taken before other steps that will get us closer to what we really want. Anything we can do to support this reform is important and meaningful.

Imagine what it actually felt like for Rosa Parks that day, or someone on the Selma march
--putting one foot in front of the other, wondering how trivial this protest might be, and what a nuisance and distraction.

Now think how awestruck you are when you meet someone who actually was there at the Stonewall riots, or who integrated a school. I'm absolutely positive that it felt grinding and discouraging for all activists at times, but you never know what is going to make that small difference between a failed push and a movement.

We can't afford to let this effort fail. Thanks for keeping up the momentum, however you can, and especially if you can represent us all at this rally."

Dec 8, 2009 8:45 pm
The 10 Democratic Senators emerged from their meeting and, at an impromptu press conference, signalled they have reached a tentative agreement. But they declined to give any details, just that they will "take the next step and ask the CBO to score what [they've] been discussing." Read more here.

Dec 8, 2009 8:00 pm
The Senate just voted 54-45 to table Senator Nelson's anti-abortion amendment--which was identical to Stupak's in the House bill--effectively killing it.

Nelson had earlier threatened he would filibuster if the bill didn't include stricter anti-abortion language. If he sticks to his threat, then the Democrats will need Republican Olympia Snowe's vote--so far she's still firmly against public option and hasn't warmed up to the two possible alternatives (see earlier posting below). And, yes, Joe Lieberman is still against any form of public option. Read more on the latest vote count in this Talking Points Memo article by Brian Beutler.

After the vote, Nelson seemed conciliatory and did not repeat his filibuster threat.

This Huffington Post article on the vote includes an interesting tidbit: Representative Bart Stupak, Democrat of Michigan, the sponsor of the anti-abortion amendment in the House bill, is a member of The Family, based in a house on C Street in Washington DC (The Huffington Post calls it "a secretive evangelical organization"). Stupak, who according to some reports live in the house, had denied any knowledge of that group--the subject of a recent book by Jeff Sharlet, "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power."

Today, we seem to have taken for granted that religious people must be against abortion. Reverend Tom Davis, a United Church of Christ minister, has written a very interesting piece in The Huffington Post on the history of clerical support FOR abortion.

In the early 1900s, birth control was illegal in America, and more than 18,000 women died of childbirth every year. Out of compassion, throughout the 30s and 40s Protestant and Jewish clergy joined forces with Planned Parenthood to promote birth control.

In 1967, clergy began to fight for legal abortion, forming the Clergy Consultation Service for Abortion, and by 1970 had referred almost 100,000 women for abortions.

Davis writes (in the present tense), "Believing that it is profoundly unjust for the state to control the intimate reproductive lives of women, clergy across the nation cooperate with the Planned Parenthood Clergy Network, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and other groups. We come to reproductive justice out of our faith teachings, as well as our pastoral care experience demonstrating the way women and families arrive at informed decisions about their medical needs, including reproductive health. We maintain that no religious leader or government official has the right to force a decision that is contrary to the beliefs of the individual. Justice means that a woman must have control of her own life."

Dec 8, 2009 10:00 am
Two ideas are being talked about as the compromises that Senate Democrats are looking for. (The 10 Senators working behind closed doors are conservatives Lincoln, Landrieu, Nelson, Carper, and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, liberals Schumer, Rockefeller, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Tom Harkin of Iowa, and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin).

One idea is the government negotiating rates with private insurance companies on behalf of certain (risky? previously uninsurable?) populations. The other is expanding Medicare to enroll people under 65. The exact age is unclear. The Huffington Post reports it might be 55.

These ideas are being touted as "substitutes" for the public option and "concessions"
for progressive Democrats. Let's be clear: the forces out to kill a public plan--one that exists to deliver healthcare rather than Wall Street profits and may offer some real competition to the insurance cartels--are winning.

Dec 7, 2009 6:00 pm
MoveOn.org is organizing nationwide "Cost of Delay" vigils tomorrow, Tuesday Dec 8:

"As the Senate debates their version of healthcare reform, we need to ramp up public pressure on our Senators to pass real reform before the end of the year...We'll shine a spotlight on the number of Americans in our communities who can't afford to pay the costs of their medical bills and are being forced into bankruptcy. And we'll show the Senate that we can't afford to wait to pass healthcare reform with a national public option this year."

Click here to find a vigil near you.

Dec 7, 2009 9:30 am
Read this latest column by Wendell Potter on the significance of "medical loss ratio" (MLR). He mentions an amendment that Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, and holdout Senator Blanche Lincoln are expected to introduce; it would require 90 percent of premiums to be spent on actual healthcare costs.

Dec 7, 2009 9:00 am
President Obama gave a speech (another speech) yesterday, this time urging the Senate Democratic caucus to wrap up the healthcare reform bill. He DID NOT mention the public option, and afterward Senator Joe Lieberman seemed elated.

Meanwhile, Democratic Senators working on a public-option compromise are not revealing much. The latest significant development: according to Talking Points Memo, "some senators began discussing a separate plan to let the government negotiate premiums with private, non-profit companies on behalf of some insurance consumers--much as they do for federal employees."

The Huffington Post also reports: "a leading proposal involves increasing the ability of the Office of Personnel Management--which oversees the federal employee health plans--to negotiate on behalf of individuals and small businesses. It was unclear how exactly it would be set up, but that it would take the place of the public option managed by the Health and Human Services Secretary."

Read more here (scroll to the UPDATE sections at the bottom of the article).

Dec 5, 2009
Posted by Ming Shem Lu
Aetna plans to raise premiums so it would meet profit goals, forcing 600,000 or more to lose coverage. Company executives announced the move in a third-quarter earnings conference call. The health insurance giant has actually been making a profit this year, just not as much as it projected.

Watch Ed Schultz's Dec 4 interview of Roy Sekoff from The Huffington Post (if you're using Microsoft Internet Explorer, it may ask you to install an add-on; if you don't want to, watch the interview, called "Insurance Giant Bows to Greed," on the website of The Ed Show). Sekoff said, "This is what happens when you make the health and well-being of the American people a bottom line business and as you said, it's why we need a public option. And we need a strong public option that starts on day one, not 2014."

NOTE: Aetna is based in Connecticut, the home state of holdout Senator Joe Lieberman. He explains why he is against public option in this Wall Street Journal
interview.

Yesterday's posting refers to Paul Starr's op-ed that suggests liberals and progressives should move on from public option and call for strong regulation and faster
implementation. It seems to me the lesson is NOT to abandon public option, but to see it as part of a comprehensive reform package.

If you haven't yet, read this Talking Points Memo article from Oct 30, which reports
that, according to the CBO's analysis of the House bill, the public option's premiums
would be higher than those of the private plans in the exchange, partly because--as Starr also says--it might attract "a less healthy pool of enrollees."

However, interviewing Edwin Park, a senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the article's author writes, "It's possible that without the public option, these same, sick people would be paying yet more still. Additionally, as the insurance exchanges grow to include a broader, healthier segment of the population, the mix of people will be healthier, and the public plan's negotiating power will increase. But it's certainly a weaker animal than it could have been.

"The best hope for reform is to create strong regulations and a strong public option, and the worst hope for reform is to create weak regulations and no public option."

We shouldn't put all our hopes on the public option, but I won't say, as Starr does, it's "a mere symbol." The latest Aetna profit-maximizing strategy shows we do need an insurance option that doesn't see healthcare as mere bottom line.

Dec 4, 2009
As Senate Democrats work behind the scenes to reach a 60-vote consensus on public option and abortion coverage, this New York Times op-ed by Paul Starr, a Princeton sociologist, entitled "Fighting the Wrong Health Care Battle," may help put things in perspective.

Starr argues that the public option, in its current weakened form (the House version isn't tied to Medicare rates; the Senate's, yet to be finalized, has opt-out/opt-in provision and is state-based), would neither offer real competition nor bring costs down. Instead, it might "attract more than its share of the chronically ill and other high-cost subscribers [and] go into a death spiral of mounting costs."

Starr suggests liberals and progressives should focus on other measures to ensure coverage and cut costs (he calls the public option as it now stands "a mere symbol"):

(A) The final bill should have provisions for "effective regulatory authority to prevent insurers from engaging in abusive practices and subverting the new rules." The House bill places this authority in the federal government, the Senate bill in the states--Starr outlines the latter's weakness (indeed, this "federal vs. state" issue has so far been scarcely mentioned when pundits discuss the Senate bill's merits).

(B) "Accelerating the timetable of reform ought to be a priority." The most important reform measures, such as banning pre-existing condition, does not go into effect until 2013 (2014 in the Senate bill!). Starr argues that is too late--and his argument here seems more a matter of political strategy (preventing opponents of reform from undoing it).

A sidenote: Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out how Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Chief Peter Orszag takes Starr's comments out-of-context, saying that public option has received more attention than it deserves, without qualifying, as Starr does in his op-ed, that "an earlier version of the public option, available to the entire public, might have realized progressive hopes and conservative fears [offering real competition and bringing down costs]."

Orszag is making a point that President Obama and his aides had made before. Josh Marshall writes, "I suspect [his] reference may tell us more about White House thinking than people realize."

Dec 3, 2009
The latest poll finds that about 60% of Americans favor public option--consistent with recent data (see Nov 30 posting below).

Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, wrote a letter to his GOP colleagues detailing their "minority rights"--it's essentially a catalog of delay tactics aimed at preventing the healthcare reform bill from final passage. The GOP is counting on the American people getting frustrated or simply tuned-out by such prolonged back-and-forth. Gregg was once tapped by the President to be Secretary of Commerce--a sign of the administration's naive belief in bipartisanship or wisdom in keeping your enemies close by? Read Gregg's letter here.

Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, is expected to introduce an amendment that will repeal the antitrust exemption enjoyed by the health insurance industry. Holdout Senator Joe Lieberman, who represents a state where a few insurance giants are headquartered, says he will join Leahy in calling for a repeal. Is Lieberman letting us know that he's for competition but against government intrusion into the marketplace? Or is it a sign that insurance companies are willing to accept antitrust repeal in exchange for killing the public option (that is, even without their antitrust-exempt status, they will find ways of profiteering from healthcare)?

Dec 2, 2009 9:30 am
SIGNIFICANT DEVELOPMENT: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, knowing that he doesn't have the 60 votes for the opt-out public option in the current bill, has asked Senator Tom Carper, Democrat of Delaware, to come up with Plan B.

Carper is expected to unveil an alternative public option early next week, and then offer it as an amendment. This version combines the "trigger" approach favored by Senator Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, and an "opt-IN" idea often mentioned by holdout Senator Ben Nelson.

A public plan will be triggered into existence in states where insurance companies fail to meet standards of availability and affordability. States where those standards are met can still opt-in and offer a public plan in its insurance exchange.

Unlike Snowe's version, which gives insurance companies 1 year to meet availability and affordability standards, this opt-in public option is supposed to start when the bill goes into effect in 2013.

Dec 2, 2009 8:00 am
Holdout Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska said he would vote against the bill if there were no further restrictions on abortion coverage. He is expected to introduce an amendment that is as strict as the Stupak amendment in the House bill (see Jane Hamsher's article in The Huffington Poast, as well as postings from Nov 8 to 10 in Archived News).

Choice USA, a pro-choice group, is organizing a national call-in TODAY to urge Senators to, according to them, "ensure the needs of women and young people continue to be front and center in the reform debate."

Dec 1, 2009
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just released an analysis of how the Senate bill will affect health insurance premiums. It's a reflection of our partisan times (or just Republican obstructionism) that different media outlets report opposing interpretations of the CBO's findings. Predictably, FOX News and the right-wing Washington Times say premiums will rise. Others such as the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News say the bill will cut premiums.

So what does the CBO analysis really say? According to an Associated Press article, published on Yahoo (emphasis mine):

"It said that by 2016, premium prices for Americans working at large companies, about 70 percent of the under-65 population, would be between zero and 3 percent LOWER on average than would otherwise be the case.

At small companies, covering 13 percent of the under-65 population by 2016, the average premium would be between 1 percent HIGHER to 2 percent LOWER on average.

CBO said that for individuals buying insurance on their own, 17 percent of the non-elderly population, premiums would RISE by between 10 percent and 13 percent on average. But more than half that group is expected to receive federal subsidies that would result in premiums as much as 59 percent LESS costly on average than would happen under current law."

NOTE: The group that will see premiums rise is people buying their own insurance. But (A) they are getting more with what they pay, and their plans won't have the kind of high-deductibles that are currently the norm; and (B) those with lower incomes will get government subsidies and will end up paying less.

These two points are emphasized on an NPR "All Things Considered" segment about the Senate healthcare debate. Click here to listen.

To read the CBO analysis yourself, here are the 29-page PDF and the CBO blog.

One more thought: If critics say under the current Senate bill "premiums will rise," wouldn't it make sense to include a MORE robust public option?

For postings before Dec 1, 2009, go to Archived News NOV 09 page.

Healthcare Reform Experts

Ming Shem Lu — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:38:44 GMT

Wendell Potter, a former PR chief of health insurance giant CIGNA turned outspoken critic of "Wall Street healthcare," was the main speaker at GMC's Oct 18 "Healthcare Reform Neighborhood Forum."

Here is the link to video & transcript of Wendell Potter's appearance on Bill Moyers' PBS show.

Wendell Potter's blog.

*******************
Timothy Jost, a Mennonite, a healthcare policy expert, and Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University, is a wonderful speaker.

Click here for a list of his articles, interviews, etc. on healthcare. Don't miss his Aug 25, 2009 interview on WHYY's "Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane"!

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Dr. Walter Tsou is a Philadelphia-based physician associated with the single-payer advocating PNHP (Physicians for a National Health Program). Click here for a YouTube video of Dr. Tsou's speech, "A Common Sense Solution to the Health Care Crisis."

For more on single-payer healthcare, visit the Single-Payer Resources page on this website.

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WPVI Channel 6 interview of Dr. David Grande, who is a professor of health policy at University of Pennsylvania. He seems very knowledgeable and is able to explain complex ideas quite clearly and succinctly.

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"This American Life" two-part special on healthcare (DON'T MISS!):
Part I: More Is Less Part II: Someone Else's Money

Single-Payer Resources

Ming Shem Lu — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 01:07:06 GMT

HealthCare4AllPA is an organization "working to secure comprehensive single-payer health care system for every citizen in Pennsylvania."

********************
Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) is "a single issue organization advocating a universal, comprehensive single-payer national health program."

Check out their Resources page.

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One of the physicians associated with PNHP is Philadelphia-based Dr. Walter Tsou. Click here for a YouTube video of his speech, "A Common Sense Solution to the Health Care Crisis."

********************
Click here for fact sheet on the "single-payer" amendment Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, introduced to the Senate healthcare reform bill (see Dec 16 posting in "What's the Latest")
Click here for the full text (767 pages).

GMC Healthcare Forum

Ming Shem Lu — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:01:22 GMT

Healthcare Humor

Lois Ann Handrich — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:25:19 GMT

Books

Lois Ann Handrich — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 23:31:37 GMT