Running Away From Joe Lieberman

Evidently Evan Bayh must noticed everyone on the left starting to dig into his and his wife's financial ties to the health insurance industry because he suddenly is getting himself in check on voting for cloture.

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Hilarity Ensued

I swear man I was laughing my ass off watching this last night. Its like an Onion story come to life!

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Shots Fired

I have to say, its gotta scare the shit out of the health insurance industry when the President of the United States starts threatening their anti trust exemption. I don't think it will necessarily make them stop the bogus ads but it is going to give them a LOT to think about.

The "Librul" CNN

CNN has some 'splainin to do!

The CNN contributor, well-known GOP consultant Alex Castellanos, is best known for producing the racially-charged “Hands” ad, has repeatedly appeared on the network attacking Dem health care plans and the public option, which is strongly opposed by AHIP.

Castellanos’s consulting firm, National Media, also recently placed over $1 million of TV advertising for AHIP, according to info obtained by Media Matters. AHIP’s most recent $1 million ad buy attacks the health care plan as a threat to Medicare.

This connection, you’d think, should be disclosed whenever Castellanos appears on CNN discussing health care. Asked for comment, CNN spokesperson Edie Emery acknowledged the tie and promised full disclosure in the future. She emailed:

“When Alex Castellano returns from his vacation and next appears on CNN, we will clearly disclose to our viewers relevant information including his firm’s relationship with AHIP.”

CNN doesn’t appear to have known about Castellano’s work, and this is not the first time outside help retained by AHIP in the health care wars has created a PR mess. AHIP took heavy criticism after the firm it retained to release a study faulting the reform proposals publicly undercut its own findings.

To me this is a function of CNN concerted effort to take a move to the right. With their lagging ratings and worsening credibility this is the LAST thing they could have wanted at a time like this. To have a guy who has a financial stake in health care failing on their network talk about health care with out full disclosure is a major no no especially for a network that tries to sell itself as a "real" news outlet.

Counter Point

Ezra Klein highlights MIT economist Jon Gruber's counter point to the insurance industry's propaganda piece put out yesterday to try to derail health care reform.

Hey AHIP, 1994 called and they want their dirty tactics back.

If You Wanna Go To War...

The White House ain't playing about calling folks out for lying in the health care reform debate. Linda Douglass takes on the new AHIP propaganda study.

"It comes on the eve of a vote that will reduce the industry's profits," Douglass told TPMDC. "It is hard to take it seriously. The analysis completely ignores critical policies will lower costs for those who have insurance, expand coverage and provide affordable health insurance options to millions of Americans who are priced out of today's health insurance market or are locked out by unfair insurance company practices."

Do yourself a favor and click on the link to get the extended version of the debunking.

The White House is not taking this kinda crap laying down any more and it is about time!

AHIP's Slip Is Showing

I am not a fan of the Senate Finance committee's version of a health care reform bill but AHIP's transparently dishonest attempt to discredit it gives me even more reason to believe that health care reform will get done this year. Now the question is will how much of it will be REAL reform?

Hitting The Right Pressure Points

Greg Sargent is reporting that Health Care For America Now has commissioned a poll of the Blue Dogs' districts to show them that their constituents not only want health care reform but also a public option:

Health Care for America Now, the major umbrella pro-reform group, has commissioned a big new poll of 91 conservative House swing districts — including many Blue Dog and rural ones — that finds the public option has solid majority support among those voters.

The poll and its accompanying memo — which is being circulated among House Dems and was sent over by a source — also send a strong warning to conservative Dems that if health care fails, the resulting damage to the President will rebound on them.

The poll, by respected Dem pollster John Anzalone, finds that 54% of these swing district voters support the public option, and makes the case that these voters emphatically don’t want a “trigger,” the compromise of choice in some quarters:

The public option shouldn’t be considered in isolation. Including a public option is essential to implementing an individual mandate. Voters also already prefer the implementation of a public option, and do not see a need for a trigger. There’s over-whelming opposition to an individual mandate when the only choices are private insur-ance, but there’s net support for a mandate when people have the choice of a public option. And swing district voters are convinced private sector healthcare has failed to make health care affordable, and prefer the public option now rather than waiting on a trigger option.

It also says that failure to get reform done will be courting disaster, and could rebound specifically on swing-district Dems as it did in 1994

Now that is good of course but as we all know the Blue Dogs aren't necessarily opposed to health care reform or a public option because of some misguided belief that their constituents are against a public option or health care reform. With that in mind there was another nugget in the polling that caught my eye.

The risks of inaction to Democrats in swing districts increases if voters perceive opposition stems from ties to the insurance industry, as 74% are concerned that the health insurance industry will have too much influence over reform.

I remember there being a lot of concern trolling back when several liberal and progressive groups went after blue dogs and ConservaDems with ads tying them to money from health insurance lobbyists. President Obama's Chief Of Staff Rahm Emanuel thought it was counterproductive among other things that can't be repeated. But it turns out that this is just the pressure point that strikes a chord with their constituents. According to this poll, the more their opposition to health care reform, a core plank of the Democratic Party, the more their constituents will turn on them.

We are on the home stretch and its time to turn up the heat on those bought and paid for Democrats in Congress. We need to let them know that if they continue on the path of opposing the public option we WILL expose them as being puppets of the health insurance industry. We have to do whatever needs to be done to make sure this bill goes through with a robust public option reflecting the will of the people, including those that live in swing districts.

Bill Moyers On The WaPo "Health Care Salon" Scandal

This is so on point I wish I could excerpt the whole thing.

Remember, the invitation promises this private, intimate, and off-the-record dinner is an extension "of THE WASHINGTON POST brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard."

Let that sink in. The "stakeholders" in health care reform in this case do not include the rabble — the folks across the country who actually need quality health care but can't afford it. If any of them showed up at the kitchen door on the night of this little soiree, a bouncer would drop kick them beyond the beltway.

In other words, before you can cross the threshold in Washington to reach "the select few who will actually get it done," you must first cross the palm of some outstretched hand. The dinner was canceled after the invite was leaked to the website politico.com — by a health care lobbyist, of all people. But it was enough to give us a glimpse into how things really work in Washington. A clear insight into why there is such a great disconnect between democracy and government today, between Washington and the rest of the country.

According to one poll after another, a majority of Americans not only want a public option in health care, they also think that growing inequality is bad for the country, that corporations have too much power over policy, that money in politics is the root of all evil, and that working families and poor communities need and deserve public support when the market fails to generate shared prosperity. But when the insiders in Washington finish tearing worthy intentions apart and devouring flesh from bone, none of these reforms happen. Oh, they say, "it's all about compromise, all in the nature of the give-and-take of representative democracy." That, people, is bull — the basic nutrient of Washington's high and mighty.

It's not about compromise. It's not about what the public wants. It's about money, the golden ticket to "the select few who actually get it done." And nothing will change. Nothing. Until the money-lenders are tossed out of the temple, and we tear down the sign they've placed on government — the one that reads: "For sale."

Bill Moyers doesn't play around and the truth is Democrat or not we have to hold our leaders to account with this health care reform fight. The lobbyists can lavish them with cash and gifts but come election day we are still the ones who decide who stays and who goes. Its time to remind them of that!

Discrediting "Sicko"

This clip of Bill Moyers discussing the concerted efforts of the Health insurance industry to discredit Michael Moore's film "Sicko" is sickening. Its great that Wendall Potter is coming forth now to tell the truth but I fear the damage has been done. But the one way to combat all of the lies that have been told over the years about health care and the effects of any reforms is to pass this clip along to every person you know. I know many people never waste an opportunity to pass along a chain email anyway. Well the stakes are much higher with health care reform and so the need for this to go viral is much greater. Please take the time out to get the url from youtube and distribute it to as many people as you can.

And That's The Bottom LIne....

...Because Josh at TPM said so!

Ok cheesy ode to Stone Cold Steve Austin out of the way, Josh Marshall of the aforementioned TPM fame, has a post up that really boils it all the way down when it comes to the question of whether health care reforme gets passed this year with a public option in tact...

And that's this: the opposition to a so-called 'public option' comes almost entirely from insurance companies who have developed monopolies or near monopolies in particular geographic areas. And they don't want competition.

Note, I'm not saying more competition. I'm saying any competition at all. As Zack Roth explains in this new piece 94% of the health care insurance market is now under monopoly or near-monopoly conditions -- the official term of art is 'highly concentrated'. In other words, there's no mystery why insurance costs keep going up even as the suck quotient rises precipitously. Because in most areas there's little or no actual competition.

It's something everyone can understand that if you have only one widget maker, widgets will get really expensive, and probably decline in quality. And the widget makers will pour lots of money into Congress or whatever the law-making power is, to keep their monopoly in place because their monopoly ensures locked in profits. It's market theory 101 (or perhaps, rent-seeking 102, depending on your perspective.)

Put even shorter, if there is no public option in the health care reform bill then the monopolistic insurance companies will have won, if it does have a public option then everybody else in the country wins.

Its really that simple.

Health Care

Today President Obama is going to have a press conference where he will announce that some pretty big names in the health insurance industry are promising to help with health care reform. Evidently these folks are saying they can help get up to $2 trillion dollars in savings in healthcare over the next decade. While several liberal and progressive voices have come out in measured support for the move Ezra Klein has a post up that I think gets at the heart of the pitfalls inherent in President Obama making a big deal out of this announcement.

Which gets to my skepticism: This is one of those moments when new words are being used to drown out ongoing actions. A major source of potential savings, at least in the administration's estimation, will come from comparative effectiveness review. But the pharmaceutical industry and the device industry -- both of which are represented here -- fought violently against CER when the Obama administration sought to include it in the stimulus. By the end, they had managed to win legislative language stating that comparative effectiveness studies wouldn't include cost-effectiveness and wouldn't be used to make coverage decisions. Another source of potential savings is the public plan, which can marry best practices with federal bargaining power to push down costs. The insurance industry has gone to war against this provision.

What we have, in other words, are promises of future cost containment that exist alongside concrete and continued opposition to the cost containment ideas that are actually on the table. And for good reason. A 1.5 percentage point decrease in health spending is a 1.5 percentage point decrease in medical industry profits. This commitment doesn't contain any examples of concessions that will reduce a participant's revenue streams. Conversely, every time legislators have proposed a reform that will actually cut industry profits -- and thus cut health spending -- the industry has howled in pain and anger. It's hard to sync that with promises to cut spending by $2 trillion over the next 10 years by implementing a set of unspecified reforms.

Indeed, the straight read of today's transaction is rather different. The White House gets messaging help. The health care industry secures, as Karen Tumulty says, "a seat at the negotiating table." The question is what they'll do with it.

The big test is not today. It's a month from now. In June, the Finance Committee will release the first version of its health reform bill. If the bill is what we expect -- something along the lines of Baucus's white paper, or Hillary Clinton's campaign proposal -- and these industry groups not only endorse it but explain how they will save money within its confines, that will be something to celebrate. If they use the credibility they've attained today to unleash a more vicious assault tomorrow -- if they grimly say that they proved their willingness to work with the administration but this legislation and its public plan and its insistence on evidence and its payment reforms sadly proves the administration's unwillingness to work with them -- then that will be a rather less cheery outcome.

All in all I can see how this is a positive development but just like Ezra Klein I am far from being impressed just yet.