If they're already admitting to causing deaths, why should they care about a little girl's hearing?

What more do we have to do to fight back against these horror stories? What will it take to get these insurance companies to see the inherent immorality of focusing on the bottom line to the exclusion of all else? Think Progress:

One of the worst abuses of the private health insurance industry is its practice of denying claims to pay for necessary care for patients. This practice has become so rampant in the industry that a recent study by the California Nurses Association found that a whopping 21 percent of all insurance claims filed in the first half of 2009 in the state of California were denied by insurers.

As the story of six-year-old Madison Leuchtmann of Franklin County, MO, demonstrates, even children are victims of this insurance company abuse. Madison was born with bilateral atresia, which means she lacks ear canals in both ears. In order to hear, she wears a special device on a headband that allows her to make out sounds. Despite her disability, Madison is at the top of her kindergarten class and is slowly learning to read.

Yet Madison, due to her growth, will soon require a new hearing implant to be able to recognize sounds. Her hearing and speech therapist warns that “if she doesn’t get her implants by age seven, she’s not going to be able to blend her words. … She won’t be able to hear herself [talk].” Madison’s pediatrician, Dr. Randall Clary, also insists that without the implant, the girl may never be able to hear again. Unfortunately, the Leuchtmann’s family insurer, Cigna, has issued "one denial after another,” flatly refusing to cover the $20,000 bill for the implant. In a written statement to the local news station Fox 2, Cigna explained, “It is not unusual for commercial benefit plans to exclude hearing assisted devices,” prompting Dr. Clary to angrily respond, “This is obviously medically necessary. You have a child that has no ear canals!” Dr. Clary also told Fox 2 that he sees these sort of denials “on a weekly basis.”

Apparently the Catholic Church, just like the other Beltway lobbyists, now writes our legislation.

The drama had built for months, pitting a group of Democrats against the Catholic Church. Priests and bishops were calling members to lobby for stricter language to limit abortion coverage, members and aides said last week.

But the final decision played out over a few furious hours Friday night as the fate of the broader bill still hung in the balance and stirred up long-dormant tensions within the Democratic Party over reproductive rights.

The beneficiary of this impasse was Stupak, an outspoken abortion-rights opponent whom the leadership had tried to circumvent, in order to pick up the votes he claimed to represent. After months of stalemate, the speaker was forced to accept language Stupak first drafted over the summer that would bar any insurance company that participates in the exchange — including the government option — from offering insurance plans that would cover abortions.

“Normally, at the end of the day, you’re arguing over fine-tuning,” said an aide whose boss was involved in the negotiations. “But this is a sizable change to current policy. So everyone was kind of stunned.”

For more than a decade, the Hyde amendment has prohibited the federal government from paying for abortions through any existing government program. The law needs to be reauthorized each year as part of the appropriations process, but the two sides had come to something of a détente.

The health care fight, however, disrupted that balance, and a big bloc of anti-abortion Democrats were threatening to derail the entire bill unless party leaders agreed to stronger restrictions the church could accept. Since mid-September, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer had been working closely with Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D-Ind.) to craft language that would thread what proved to be an impossible needle.

Ellsworth, in consultation with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, was trying to amend legislation passed out of the Energy and Commerce Committee to make sure insurance companies that receive federal funds under the programs created by the bill don’t use any of that money to pay for abortions.

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One of the things that you can never anticipate fully before becoming a parent is the absolute ferocity of the instinct to protect your child. It's innate, feral, and so deep that it can actually scare you. I am profoundly grateful every day that my children were born healthy, but I know that should my luck run out and one of my kids develop some sort of life-threatening illness, there is no stone I would leave unturned in my quest to save my child. There is no length I wouldn't go for my babies.

And if all those efforts were in vain, I don't know how I'd survive the loss of my child. I had a miscarriage some years back, and I carried that loss like a huge, gaping wound inside me for so long. And that was for a child with whom I never got a chance to know or develop a real bond.

Now imagine how Hilda Sarkisyan feels. The daughter she bore, raised and nurtured for seventeen years dies just hours before the insurance company she battled finally relented to give her daughter the liver transplant she needed. Can you imagine that grief, that anger at how unnecessary Nataline's death was? All the obstacles placed in their way by a for-profit insurance company in addition to just missing Nataline had to be paralyzing in its pain.

Which makes how CIGNA employees treated Hilda Sarkisyan so much more contemptible:

Surrounded by supporters, Hilda Sarkisyan marched into Cigna Corp.’s Philadelphia headquarters on a chilly fall day, 10 months after the company refused to pay for a liver transplant for her daughter.

"You guys killed my daughter," the diminutive San Fernando Valley real estate agent declared at the lobby security desk. "I want an apology."

What she got was something quite different.

Cigna employees, looking down into the atrium lobby from a balcony above, began heckling her, she said, with one of them giving her "the finger."

Sarkisyan walked out, stunned and hurt.

"They showed me their true colors," she said. "Shame on them."

This woman has just gone through a pain I wouldn't wish on anyone--watching her child die needlessly--because CIGNA decided there wasn't enough of a cost-benefit to them to authorize a liver transplant. A for-profit insurance agency acted as a de facto death panel, opting to let this child die. Got that, GOP? There's the death panel you fear-monger. But they're not some hypothetical used to scare Grandma and Grandpa, they're REAL and some day, they may decide that you--or worse, your child--are not worth the cost of saving.

And don't be surprised if they show their heartlessness by heckling you and flipping you off when you walk in their doors to ask why.

And as if on cue, here comes Fox News, defending CIGNA:

Dear God, where's the humanity?

I found this in the comments over at Corrente and wanted to share it:

Insurance companies reserve the right to make changes to their formularies at any time, but are supposed to notify you and allow you one month's supply of your current drug in order to give your medical provider the opportunity to "pre-authorize" your access to said drug. Your doctor cannot simply write a letter saying "I'm the doctor by god, and I want the patient to have this drug". No, he must provide evidence that he has "stepped" you. Stepped means that he/she has tried you on "approved" A, B and C drugs to little or bad results first.

Now, A and C may no longer be on the formulary, so they don't count, so he/she has to find out what approved drugs are on the formulary so that he/she can say that they have been tried and if that is true, or he/she will say it is true, then it will go to the Pre-Authorization department.

If the PA department can't sort it, say because your diagnosis does not fit neatly into what the insurance company says the drug can be used for, albeit that it works for what ails you, the application goes to the in-house pharmacist. The in-house pharmacist (average salary $90,000 per annum) will make the final decision based on following company guidelines and keeping his/her job. If the decision is that you get the drug, then said drug will be approved for you as "off formulary", moved to class 3 and if your co-pay was $25.00, it will now be $60.00 or more.

If the drug is not approved, then you will be properly stepped with the ineffective, approved drugs before your pre-authorization can be reconsidered. After you have been stepped, the drug will still be off formulary and the co-pay will still be increased. It sucks and I am so sorry.

Signed Anguished in the PA Department - United Health Insurance Inc

Lovely. This is why we can't stop fighting:

(CN) - An insurance company's "reprehensible" decision to rescind a South Carolina man's coverage after he tested positive for HIV warrants a $10 million punitive damage award, the state Supreme Court ruled.

Jerome Mitchell applied for health insurance with Fortis Insurance Co. in 2001 at the age of 17. Fortis issued him a policy after he stated that he had never been treated for an immune deficiency.

One year later, Mitchell tried to donate blood to the Red Cross, which informed Mitchell that he was HIV-positive. Mitchell's doctor confirmed this finding.

Fortis investigated Mitchell's medical history and rescinded his policy, stating that Mitchell had misrepresented his HIV-positive status.

Mitchell sued for breach of contract and bad faith and presented evidence that he would die of AIDS within four years without medical treatment.

The trial court ruled in Mitchell's favor, awarding him $186,000 in actual damages and $15 million in punitive damages.

The state high court upheld the awards, but reduced the punitive damage award to $10 million based on the ratio of the projected $1 million cost of Mitchell's treatment.

"We find ample support in the record that Fortis' conduct was reprehensible ... Fortis demonstrated an indifference to Mitchell's life and a reckless disregard to his health and safety," Justice Toal wrote.

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You know just how crazy Ann Coulter's worldview is getting when Bill O'Reilly serves as an honest-to-God voice of sanity in dealing with her proposals for how to reform health care, as she laid them out on The O'Reilly Factor on Thursday.

Coulter, who's evidently just wrapped up another genuflecting session before the altar of Ayn Rand, thinks the whole problem could be solved just by doing away with state regulations and "opening up competition," at which point "every problem would go away":

O'Reilly: But every problem wouldn't go away. The one thing that I would like to see the federal government do is strict oversight on the insurance companies when they hose people. I mean, I don't think they should be throwing you, Ann Coulter, off the rolls if, God forbid, you get MS or something.

Coulter: That will not happen. But Bill, that will not happen under competition. Look -- [Crosstalk] -- no, no, let me make this point. No it will not. The government was regulating, the SEC was closely watching Bernie Madoff. Government regulation doesn't stop that sort of thing. What stops it is, people knowing you're investing with this guy at your own risk, and then all these private organization develop. Competition is what enforces that.

O'Reilly: Yeah, well, I don't believe that. I think competition can drive the prices down, but it cannot make an insurance company honest. Only a federal oversight committee that says if you don't do it, we fine you.

Coulter: Yes it can. Yes it can. Otherwise, what about the SEC with Bernie Madoff?

O'Reilly: No, Bernie Madoff got away with it because the SEC, under a Republican, Christopher Cox, simply wouldn't investigate him. That's why he got away with it.

Coulter: That's the government regulation! Why do you keep thinking a different regulator will be better? Government regulation does not solve these problems, competition does.

Because if I belonged to a health-insurance company that threw me off when I got sick, people would hear about it. There would be magazine articles. And I don't mean to be me, I mean people --

She's really been drinking the Randian capitalist kool-aid, hasn't she? Hell, people get thrown off their insurance when they get sick all the freaking time and there sure as hell aren't magazine articles about it.

But the Madoff analogy really takes the cake. O'Reilly, as we noted, is sensible about this: The SEC failed in its regulatory capacity precisely because it was under the guidance of a Republican who didn't believe in regulatory oversight!

Coulter subscribes to a philosophy which argues that less government regulation makes for better competition which in turn enforces honesty and ethical behavior. But when in fact it's demonstrated that such governance produces outrageously (not to mention criminally) dishonest behavior, she blames not the practitioners who gutted that oversight for its then-predictable failures, but rather the entire concept of oversight itself.

It's a classic tautology: Let's gut government oversight so that when it fails, we can blame it, thereby creating an excuse to do away with it altogether.

It's also, of course, the kind of completely insane thinking that has dominated movement conservatism in recent years. And a large part of the reason we have Bernie Madoffs and AIGs in the first damned place.

Angela Braly, the CEO of Wellpoint, called for health care reform at a meeting in Indianapolis.

One of them most powerful women in the nation is calling for health care reform. Wellpoint CEO Angela Braly says she supports guaranteed coverage for everyone - as long as everyone gets and stays covered [...]

"The high and rising cost of health care in America is just not sustainable," Braly said. She said the current system, including Medicare, which is administered by the federal government, was inefficient and promotes quantity over quality. She also said it posed "a real threat to the social and fiscal obligations of the government and to the health and prosperity of the American people."

"We believe insurance companies have a role to play. We can and are making a difference," Braly said. She said Wellpoint's strategy was moving beyond processing claims and managing risk, noting employee incentives when customers get healthy.

Braly says the what worries her most about the plan currently under consideration is the "public option."

This is, essentially, the insurance company-approved argument for health care reform. They see it as forcing everyone to buy their coverage, making refusal to buy their insurance a crime, and offering no competition to their monopoly over it. I'm sure they don't want to see that anti-trust exemption of theirs lifted either, the one that has led to 94% of the individual insurance market becoming "highly concentrated" in the hands of one or two companies.

Braly kept talking about how the current system is inefficient and leads to skyrocketing costs, as if she has no agency over that whatsoever. There are issues with how the fee-for-service system promotes quantity of medical care and not quality, but that's due to the profit incentive, which is exactly the same in the insurance market. Braly's argument seems to be that it's doctors and hospitals at fault for chasing profit in health care, but insurance industry CEOs like her are good samaritans and innocent bystanders who just so happen to do the same thing. If a profit-driven health care system is wrong, then it's pretty much wrong across the board. And she actually advocated for an outcome where insurers would be "free to offer a range of choices," while worrying about a public option... which would just be another choice, one that could deliver quality coverage at a lower cost.

Braly tried to argue that health insurance profits aren't all that big:

According to Braly, the difference between the Medicaid or Medicare payouts and actual costs are shifted to the private plans, costing you $1,500 a year. Add that to the $1,000 a year shifted to the private plans to cover the uninsured and it costs you a total $2,500 a year.

"Sounds a lot like the Fannie Mae for health care and I think we all know how that experiment is going," Braly said [...]

"If you completely eliminated insurance company industry profits which is clearly the aim of some, you would pay for two days of health care in America and in the process you would eliminate the market mechanism to control costs and improve quality of health care being delivered," Braly argued.

I don't know what any of this means. The market mechanism in health care has not controlled costs in America whatsoever, yet throughout the industrialized world we see public programs that control costs and provide better health outcomes. Private industry has begged off completely from limiting health care costs through any means other than denying coverage to their customers and rationing. Health care spending in Medicare and Medicaid is lower than spending through the insurance market. And insurers have used the employer market effectively to confuse employers and employees alike about the true cost of their service. Braly throws out "Fannie Mae" for health care, but the current system is clearly "Goldman Sachs" for health care - where the relentless drive for profit at the expense of people creates a spending bubble that nobody ever bothers to burst until it's too late.

In the end, Braly calls Wellpoint a "supporter" of health care reform. That's funny, I would think that a company committed to health care reform wouldn't illegally force their employees to lobby against it.

Consumer Watchdog in Santa Monica has asked California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown to investigate its claim that UnitedHealth Group and WellPoint Inc. pushed workers to write their elected officials, attend town hall meetings and enlist family and friends to ensure an overhaul that matches their interests [...]

WellPoint, whose Anthem Blue Cross unit is the largest for-profit insurer in California and employs 8,000, took a more overtly negative tack.

"Regrettably, the congressional legislation, as currently passed by four of the five key committees in Congress, does not meet our definition of responsible and sustainable reform," Anthem said in a company e-mail last week. The proposals would hurt the company by "causing tens of millions of Americans to lose their private coverage and end up in a government-run plan."

The appeals amount to illegal coercion under California law, Consumer Watchdog research director Judy Dugan said. "While coercive communications with employees may be legal, if abhorrent, in most states, California's labor code appears to directly prohibit them," said Dugan, citing sections forbidding employers from "tending to control or direct" or "coercing or influencing" employees' political activities or affiliations.

Insurance companies like WellPoint support health care reform, all right - completely on their terms, and guaranteed to provide them a financial windfall. Anything else would be unacceptable, and they will take any tactic - no matter legal or illegal - to stop it.

Today I had an appointment with the surgeon who I expected to do the surgery on my ankle. I presented him with the second opinion from one of his colleagues, and he agreed with it.

"Yes, you really do need this surgery," he said. "But you need someone who can do an arthroscopic exam for bone fragments and a ligament reconstruction at the same time, and I can't do that. There's only a handful of people
who do."

Is there any reason why I couldn’t have those surgeries separately? I asked.

Well, no, he said. But it really didn’t make sense to separate them and the insurance company would probably dispute it. The thing is, he knows the other orthopedic group with whom I have the appointment - one of the best in the city, he hastened to add - and he knows they have a lot of restrictions about what insurance they’ll take. He said they probably wouldn’t accept the open car insurance claim in payment.

At this point, I was almost in tears. “What are my options?” I said.

There’s this one guy over at Jefferson who does both, and he might take the insurance, he said. “And there’s another guy up in Princeton, but that’s it as far as I know.” (And by way of passing, told me he had a patient that week from 100 miles away who drove to his office with a badly broken arm because he couldn't get anyone closer to accept his Medicaid.)

So I came home and called the doctor at Jefferson. The office assistant informed me they’re no longing accepting New Jersey car insurance cases. “No, no, my health insurance is Jersey. My car insurance is Pennsylvania,” I said, desperate to get a break.

Finally, I got one. The office assistant took all my information and said she had to verify my coverage and the open claim. I told her I was on COBRA, running out of money and really needed to get this surgery done ASAP.

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I am thoroughly disgusted by Obama's lack of effective leadership on this - and Congress's willingness to lard the bill for their contributors at our expense. It's very important that we keep the pressure on, because if we don't, we're going to be saddled with a very expensive dog of a health care "reform" bill.

I suggest you send this story to your congress creature and ask what they intend to do to protect our interests:

Reporting from Washington - Lashed by liberals and threatened with more government regulation, the insurance industry nevertheless rallied its lobbying and grass-roots resources so successfully in the early stages of the healthcare overhaul deliberations that it is poised to reap a financial windfall.

The half-dozen leading overhaul proposals circulating in Congress would require all citizens to have health insurance, which would guarantee insurers tens of millions of new customers -- many of whom would get government subsidies to help pay the companies' premiums.

"It's a bonanza," said Robert Laszewski, a health insurance executive for 20 years who now tracks reform legislation as president of the consulting firm Health Policy and Strategy Associates Inc.

Some insurance company leaders continue to profess concern about the unpredictable course of President Obama's massive healthcare initiative, and they vigorously oppose elements of his agenda. But Laszewski said the industry's reaction to early negotiations boiled down to a single word: "Hallelujah!"

The insurers' success so far can be explained in part by their lobbying efforts in the nation's capital and the districts of key lawmakers.

The bills vary in the degree to which they would empower government to be a competitor and a regulator of private insurance. But analysts said that based on the way things stand now, insurers would come out ahead.

"The insurers are going to do quite well," said Linda Blumberg, a health policy analyst at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. "They are going to have this very stable pool, they're going to have people getting subsidies to help them buy coverage and . . . they will be paid the full costs of the benefits that they provide -- plus their administrative costs."

One of the Democratic proposals that most concerns insurers is the creation of a "public option" insurance plan. The industry launched a campaign on Capitol Hill against it, grounded in a study published by the Lewin Group, a health policy consulting firm that is owned by UnitedHealth Group. The lobbyists contended that a government-run plan, which would have favorable tax and regulatory treatment, would undermine private insurers.

More Kabuki. After reading Taibbi's article, It's clear the public option is already gutted and not worth fighting for in its present form.

[...] Undermining support for the public option wasn't the only gain scored by insurance lobbyists.

In May, the Senate Finance Committee discussed requiring that insurers reimburse at least 76% of policyholders' medical costs under their most affordable plans. Now the committee is considering setting that rate as low as 65%, meaning insurers would be required to cover just about two-thirds of patients' healthcare bills. According to a committee aide, the change was being considered so that companies could hold down premiums for the policies.

Most group health plans cover 80% to 90% or more of a policyholder's medical bills, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service. Industry officials urged that the government set the floor lower so insurers could provide flexible, more affordable plans.

[...] Consumer advocates argue that a lower government minimum might quickly become the industry standard, placing a greater financial burden on patients and their families.

"These are a bad deal for consumers," said J. Robert Hunter, a former Texas insurance commissioner who works with the Consumer Federation of America.

Meanwhile, companies would probably see a benefit by providing less insurance "per premium dollar," Hunter said.

"It would be quite a windfall," said Wendell Potter, a former executive at Cigna insurance company who has become an industry whistle-blower.

From The White House blog:

The President talks about how the chatter and ruckus around health insurance reform on television obscures the reality of what's happening in America. He discusses how in most towns people and Members of Congress are having constructive conversations, and how people are learning how reform will help them and their families with the real problems they have faced with the insurance system.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Every sane liberal and Democratic activist and analyst who has a brain knows that co-ops are a worthless concept only put out there so Max Baucus and his bi partisan jelly fish can help rip off the American people and pad the pockets of the health care industrial complex. Welcome to our liberal elite.

ALTER: Well, there has to be some kind of cooperative, maybe what they call a souped-up cooperative, one that can actually withstand pressure from insurance companies which in the past have taken something like BlueCross, which is originally nonprofit and turned it into just another insurance company. So, the problem with the co-op idea is that it-they have been putty in the hands of the insurance company. But there still is room for compromise there. They could design a new kind of co-op that could provide some real competition.

OLBERMANN: Yes.

ALTER: It could be essentially a public-private option that satisfies enough people to get something through. So, I don't think liberals should go, you know, public option or bust. There are other alternatives and you have to remember that there are many, many important things in this bill that have become almost non-controversial that two years ago, if you'd been told they're going to-they're going to end discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions, they're going to insure another 30 million Americans, we say, "Great, where do we sign up?" And now, some progressives are-maybe a little bit too wed to the public option. Even though, my favorite, too, but we shouldn't go down with the ship, with the public option.

Listen, Jonathan. There is no room for compromise with co-ops. Jay Rockefeller already disproved them in detail, if you were keeping track of these things. It's a con game cooked up to fool people like you into thinking Kent Conrad and Chuck Grassley would actually design a new kind of SUPER CO-OP that will save the day. Are you that daft or just sucking it up for the David Broder-bipartisan coalition?

We were promised real health-care reform, not some sad sack of a plan that includes ginned-up co-ops that have all been panned by the "serious people" who write about health care. As usual we're the dirty f*&king hippies who better live without our public option. Obama was only elected with a clear mandate to reform health care and we should be thankful for what we get.

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Bob Shrum jumped in with the same lame argument and he said on Hardball that if co ops are included that provide competition then the bill is just fine too.

SHRUM: I certainly think he should do that. reconciliation was...

MATTHEWS: No, he doesn't have to. SHRUM: ... used by Reagan. It was used by Bush.

MATTHEWS: No, but what's the-if he has to choose between a bill that comes out of that bipartisan panel in the Senate, Finance Committee, and going with a much more liberal bill, what would you do?

SHRUM: I would-I would look-I'd judge it by what's in that bill. If there's a co-op that effectively does provide competition with the insurance industry, then I think you can move forward. By the way, in other respects, that bill is not a vastly scaled-down bill. It's $100 billion less over 10 years out of a program that costs $1 trillion over 10 years.

What data does he have to suggest that co ops can bring that to the table? None.

ABC's John Stossel is a buffoon of the highest order...and I believe that's being generous. Stossel has long shilled for right wing and corporate interests, and right on cue, he jumps head first into the health care debate and he's not pulling any punches -- Insurance company profits are more important than sick Americans:

"Insurers agreed to abandon some of their most controversial practices, like denying coverage to applicants with pre-existing medical conditions."

That's from the first paragraph of today's New York Times "news" story on health insurance.

Do the Times writers and editors take pride in their economic cluelessness? They take it as fact that denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions is "controversial," and that abandoning the practice shows "good will."

In the entire debate over health care reform, I have seen no greater example of why we need a public insurance option (actually, we need a universal plan) than Stossel's blog post.

Doing that may be required by Congress and cheered by the New York Times, but that doesn't make it a good thing for America. It doesn't even make it insurance. It's welfare. We can debate whether such welfare is good policy, but let's discuss it honestly. Calling welfare "insurance" muddies thinking. Read on...

The only mud here lies between Stossel's ears. If someone with a pre-existing condition is paying for their insurance policy, it's not welfare, unless you're a corporate shill who only cares about company profits and not people. Health insurance companies need to be returned to non-profit status, for the good of the country.

I watch a video like this - thoughtful doctors pointing out the pressing need for health care reform - and I just have to shake my head at the travesty we have instead. I'm especially furious at the obstructionist role taken by the Blue Dogs, the quasi-Democrats.

The thing is, the Blue Dogs are not negotiating in good faith - that is, they are not trying to improve health care - or people's lives, unless that person is an insurance company lobbyist. It's about money and influence, and how much they're willing to do to get it and keep it. Nice to see prostitution pays off!

On June 19, Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas made clear that he and a group of other conservative Democrats known as the Blue Dogs were increasingly unhappy with the direction that health-care legislation was taking in the House.

"The committees' draft falls short," the former pharmacy owner said in a statement that day, citing, among other things, provisions that major health-care companies also strongly oppose.

Five days later, Ross was the guest of honor at a special "health-care industry reception," one of at least seven fundraisers for the Arkansas lawmaker held by health-care companies or their lobbyists this year, according to publicly available invitations.

The roiling debate about health-care reform has been a boon to the political fortunes of Ross and 51 other members of the Blue Dog Coalition, who have become key brokers in shaping legislation in the House. Objections from the group resulted in a compromise bill announced this week that includes higher payments for rural providers and softens a public insurance option that industry groups object to. The deal also would allow states to set up nonprofit cooperatives to offer coverage, a Republican-generated idea that insurers favor as an alternative to a public insurance option.

At the same time, the group has set a record pace for fundraising this year through its political action committee, surpassing other congressional leadership PACs in collecting more than $1.1 million through June. More than half the money came from the health-care, insurance and financial services industries, marking a notable surge in donations from those sectors compared with earlier years, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.

A look at career contribution patterns also shows that typical Blue Dogs receive significantly more money -- about 25 percent -- from the health-care and insurance sectors than other Democrats, putting them closer to Republicans in attracting industry support.

Most of the major corporations and trade groups in those sectors are regular contributors to the Blue Dog PAC. They include drugmakers such as Pfizer and Novartis; insurers such as WellPoint and Northwestern Mutual Life; and industry organizations such as America's Health Insurance Plans. The American Medical Association also has been one of the top contributors to individual Blue Dog members over the past 20 years.

Many liberal Democrats and advocates of health-care reform were angry about the compromise bill and view the Blue Dogs as being too cozy with drugmakers, hospitals and insurers, and they argue that the conservative Democrats should be more supportive of the agenda set by President Obama and Democratic leaders.

"The Blue Dogs are carrying water for the industry instead of their constituents," said Richard Kirsch, national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now, a liberal pro-reform group. "In effect, the Blue Dogs and the Republicans are taking positions that are closer all the time and further away from what most Americans want."

(Reality flow chart) (GOP propaganda chart)

As Media Matters points out, today's GOP is trying the same old tricks of yesteryear, when they set out to destroy the Clinton health care plan in 1994. They've released a confusing and misleading flow chart (pictured above, right) to show how awful a public option would be -- and it's already being picked up by the right wing media.

On July 15, the Drudge Report, Fox News, and CNBC's The Kudlow Report provided a forum for a chart released by congressional Republicans that day -- a day after House Democrats introduced their health care reform bill -- that purported to show "the complex health care reform proposal by Democratic congressional leaders." The release from Rep. Kevin Brady (TX) about the chart, titled "BAFFLING FLOW CHART; Public Gets Peek at Complicated Bureaucracy in Democratic Health Care Plan," stated that the chart "depicts how the health care system would be organized at the national level if the Democrats' plan became law. These new levels of bureaucracy, agencies, organization and programs will all be put directly between the patient and their health care."

In response, TNR's Jonathan Cohn has come up with his own flow chart (pictured above, left) that describes the incredibly confusing private system most Americans are currently trying to understand and forced to endure:

But these charts--and, more important, the Republicans who use them as propoganda--tend to ignore one inconvenient fact: American health care is already complex. Ridiculously complex. Thanks to decades of haphazard, disorganized growth, it's evolved into a mind-numbing web of institutions, agencies, businesses, and individual actors. And while that may be self-evident to anybody who's ever had to deal with, say, a billing dispute between an insurer and hospital, it's easy to lose sight of that when the discussion is all about what reform might do--rather than what health care would be like without it.

Debbie Stabenow was on CNN's State of the Union this morning and made the case for the public option.

STABENOW: Well, my first choice and very strong choice is a public option. And I have to say, Wolf, that what my friends are saying, Senator Gregg and Senator Alexander really are scare tactics that have been put forward by folks that don't want to change the system because they make a lot of money off the current system right now.

The reality for families today is if there's an insurance company bureaucrat between you and your doctor telling your doctor what they're allowed to do because of what they'll pay for, telling you what they'll pay for, putting you through all kinds of bureaucracy to try to figure out if you can get care, assuming you're not dropped if you get sick or can't get insurance if you have a pre-existing condition. So what we're talking about is putting somebody on your side, being able to make sure that the insurance company, the for profit insurance company won't provide you with a low cost insurance policy for your family that you have another choice.