video courtesy of Media Matters

Those uppity females in Congress. Who do they think they are, trying to participate in our democracy on one of the biggest bills in front of Congress?

Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), one of the GOP's minions, continues the Joe Wilsonification of Congress to prevent discussion over Stupak's amendment, one that may actually lead to effectively a ban on abortion for low income women:

“The real goal of abortion opponents isn't to maintain the status quo. It's to extend federal prohibitions into private pocketbooks. By restricting coverage offered through the exchange, they hope to make abortion coverage so unattractive that insurers eventually stop offering it in the market for individual and small-group policies.”

And they don't even want us to discuss it. Those white men of the GOP don't want women to insert their remarks into the record.

How dare they? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Party of No:

UPDATE: from Think Progress: GOP Gone Wild!

From the department of You Can't Make This Sh*t Up:

Republican Rep. Tom Price, of Georgia, has introduced a House resolution that would, if passed, express the legislative body's "gratitude and appreciation" to Tea Party members who marched on Washington on Sept. 12 to "show their love of liberty and their grievance with recent government actions."

The proposed resolution is co-signed by more than 70 members of the House.

The proposed resolution would single for praise the "hundreds of thousands of American patriots, who refuse to sit idly by as the Federal Government advances skyrocketing deficits, taxpayer-funded bailouts, pork-barrel projects, burdensome taxes, unaccountable policy czars, command-and-control energy policy, and a government takeover of health care, came to Washington, D.C, to show their disapproval ..."

So let me get this straight...Price wants to pass a resolution that would praise anti-government, right wing extremists who want to overthrow their president? Really? If one single Democrat votes for this garbage, you can be sure we will call them out and ridicule them mercilessly.

Just to be clear, there weren't hundreds of thousands of people at that joke of a march on September 12th. And this was not an anti-tax march, this was a well funded hate-fest that was organized by Fox News and Glenn Beck.

You can read Price's entire resolution here. For added entertainment, click through to the original article and check out some of the comments. Didn't they learn anything from our Jon Perr's 10 Lessons for Teabaggers?

That the elderly of all groups of Americans most strongly oppose President Obama on health care reform shows the success of Republican fear-mongering over supposed Medicare cuts and "death panels". And on Monday, the Washington Post did the GOP a great service in a piece titled, "On Medicare Spending, a Role Reversal." While exploring the impact of projected savings in the program that serves 46 million Americans, the Post left unchallenged the Republicans' laughable claim to be the new protectors of Medicare after decades of war against it.

Readers who stopped after the first two paragraphs could be forgiven for wrongly assuming that the party that brought you Medicare would now kill it but for the stalwart defense of the Republican Party. After the subhead declaring, "Republicans, Not Interest Groups, Fight Plans to Cut $400 Billion Over 10 Years," the Post's Lori Montgomery concluded:

After years of trying to cut Medicare spending, Republican lawmakers have emerged as champions of the program, accusing Democrats of trying to steal from the elderly to cover the cost of health reform.

It's a lonely battle. The hospital associations, AARP and other powerful interest groups that usually howl over Medicare cuts have also switched sides.

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When the GOP trotted out the hapless Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) to deliver the response to President Obama, the former cardiologist became just the latest Republican physician deployed to halt health care reform. As it turns out, the repentant Birther was an unfortunate choice to carry the GOP banner of tort reform, given his own history of malpractice suits. Of course, as his colleagues Tom Price, Tom Coburn and Bill Frist all show, when it comes to the politics of health care, Boustany isn't the only Republican doctor offering Americans the wrong diagnosis and bad prescriptions.

Georgia's Tom Price, a one-time orthopedic surgeon and current chairman of the Republican Study Committee, is a case in point. While the GOP tried to block the passage of Medicare in the 1960's and tried to slash its budget by 15% in the 1990's, today's Republicans pretend to be the defenders of the system Newt Gingrich famously said they hoped to see "wither on the vine." But in a July op-ed, Dr. Price reminded America's seniors why it is Republicans and not President Obama they should fear when it comes to Medicare:

Going down the path of more government will only compound the problem. While the stated goal remains noble, as a physician, I can attest that nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government's intrusion into medicine through Medicare.

Then there's Oklahoma Senator and unexpected Obama confidante Tom Coburn. As a Senate candidate in 2004, Dr. Coburn famously warned that "lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom." Upon his arrival in the Senate, the former obstetrician was elevated to the Judiciary Committee despite having advocated the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions. More recently, Coburn the C Street marriage counselor to John Ensign and Mark Sanford turned Deather:

In an interview with KOTV, Coburn said that he disagreed with Obama's dismissal of fears that reform will "pull the plug on grandma."

Coburn said that he'd offered three amendments seeking an "absolute prohibition" on rationing care based on effectiveness research.

"Why would you not want an absolute prohibition? Because you ultimately plan to ration care," Coburn said. "Their plan is to control costs by limiting options."

Last but certainly not least is former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

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Even as Republicans wage their new war against the latest efforts at health care reform, they are still fighting the last one. 44 years after the passage of Medicare, Republicans leaders like Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) are attacking Democratic proposals by blasting the popular health system for America's elderly. Sadly for the GOP, Medicare's proven success in reducing poverty among the elderly and its strong support from beneficiaries belies Price's claim that "nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government's intrusion into medicine through Medicare."

As ThinkProgress noted, Republican demagoguery on Medicare has a long and sordid past. While George H.W. Bush in 1964 used the now-eternal sound bite to describe it simply as "socialized medicine," Ronald Reagan warned three years earlier that failure to stop Medicare meant " you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free."

On Thursday, orthopedic surgeon turned Georgia Congressman Tom Price picked up the baton of GOP fear-mongering on Medicare. In a Politico op-ed which unsurprisingly omitted any estimates of the cost and coverage of the Republicans' latest supposed health care reform plan, Price slammed Medicare as the poster child for everything that's wrong about proposals backed by the Obama White House:

Going down the path of more government will only compound the problem. While the stated goal remains noble, as a physician, I can attest that nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government's intrusion into medicine through Medicare. Because of Washington's one-size-fits-all approach, its flawed coverage rules and broken financing mechanisms, seniors are increasingly having care rationed while federal health spending spirals out of control.

And though newly eligible Medicare patients struggle even to find a doctor who can accept them, the president appears immovable in his belief that what is needed to fix health care is more government involvement. His proposal can only be described as a government takeover of health care.

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(h/t Shoq Value)

This incident is a perfect illustration of how the right's noise machine is fooling the American people all over again, using easily debunked lies and misinformation, and how this very kind of irresponsible broadcasting—which they so often pretend is "journalism"—is empowering them to do it.

We came thisclose from having an honest discussion of health care reform this morning on Morning Joe. Not surprisingly, the "journalists" at the table dropped the ball, instead allowing two Republican congresspeople free airtime to lie to the American people once again. Hey GOP, where's your alternative plan again?

Republican Representatives Tom Price (MD--he's a doctor, you should listen to him!) and Dave Camp--having no constructive things to do to address Americans' health care concerns--appear on the Morning Joe show to field concern trolling, er...questions from no less than four "journalists" on health care. And Mike Barnicle gets the closest to actually digging for the truth when Rep. Price drops the name of The Lewin Group and Barnicle asks who funds The Lewin Group. Price deflects it with a mealy-mouthed answer about their foundation, but since he's a Republican and he's moving his lips, you gotta know he's a big fat liar:

The political battle over health-care reform is waged largely with numbers, and few number-crunchers have shaped the debate as much as the Lewin Group, a consulting firm whose research has been widely cited by opponents of a public insurance option.

To Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican whip, it is "the nonpartisan Lewin Group." To Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee, it is an "independent research firm." To Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the second-ranking Republican on the pivotal Finance Committee, it is "well known as one of the most nonpartisan groups in the country."

Generally left unsaid amid all the citations is that the Lewin Group is wholly owned by UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation's largest insurers.

More specifically, the Lewin Group is part of Ingenix, a UnitedHealth subsidiary that was accused by the New York attorney general and the American Medical Association, a physician's group, of helping insurers shift medical expenses to consumers by distributing skewed data. Ingenix supplied its parent company and other insurers with data that allegedly understated the "usual and customary" doctor fees that insurers use to determine how much they will reimburse consumers for out-of-network care.[..]

Lewin's clients include the government and private groups with a variety of perspectives, including the Commonwealth Fund and the Heritage Foundation. A February report contained information that could be used to argue for a single-payer system, the approach most threatening to private insurers, Sheils noted.

But not all of the firm's reports see the light of day. For example, a study for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association was never released, Sheils said.

"Let's just say, sometimes studies come out that don't show exactly what the client wants to see. And in those instances, they have [the] option to bury the study -- to not release it, rather," Sheils said.

Well, they might not be partisan, but they sure as hell ARE biased--they are paid by the LARGEST health insurer in the nation (remember when Elizabeth Edwards said that $1 out of every $700 spent in healthcare went in the pocket of United Health's CEO?) and bury reports that are unfavorable? Where's that report on single payer? Why aren't the Republicans quoting that one?

Price also spews out another patented Luntz-crafted lie about the House bill, claiming that the bill states that in five years, all insurance will have to look the same, claiming this is proof of government intervention into your well-being. Price isn't the only one to give this zombie lie:

(G)reat message discipline! That's always been their forte. But it makes a tiresome chore to smack down all the odd lies they come up with, again and again, just like in the old zombie movies. You give it both barrels of a 10-gauge, but it shambles forward mindlessly. "Braaaiinssss..."

The one I have seem pop up most recently is the odd lie that the House Tri-Com bill (HR 3200) will "outlaw individual private coverage."

Huh? I thought that's what the National Insurance Exchange was for?! Where did that come from?

I remembered that I had seen some crazy rant from Rep Michelle Bachmann (R-Loon) along these lines:

It’s over 1,000 pages long. On the 16th page, it says whatever health care you have now, it’s going to be gone within five years. So your current health care plan, you’re not going to have in five years. What you’re going to have is a government plan and a federal bureau is going to decide what you get or if you get anything at all.

And some commenters on Kevin's blog linked to this unsigned opinion piece from Investors.com:

It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.

How odd that they both cite "page 16" in their rants, both of which were published on the same day. It's almost as if this were somehow coordinated... Nah. I must be getting paranoid.

The provision they are referring to, by the way, is this [..]

So what does this mean in the real world?

1. Individual health insurance policies already in effect may continue but may not be altered.
2. Employer-sponsored plans have five years to get in compliance with the new regulations.
3. New individual health insurance policies will only be available through the National Insurance Exchange (NIE).

Remember, the NIE is where the private insurers will be competing against one another as well as against a possible public plan, if it survives. It is not synonymous with a "government plan," though I hope that consumers will have the choice of a government-sponsored insurance policy. The new regulations referred to are simply those I've outlined many times before -- community rating, guaranteed issue, and a minimum benefits floor.

Ezra Klein has more on the disingenuousness of the Republican talking points.

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The new House Republican budget unveiled by Congressman Paul Ryan last week does many things. Ryan’s so-called “Path to Prosperity” would deliver yet another massive tax cut windfall for the wealthy and pay for it by gutting the social safety net he pretends to protect. “Ryancare” would end Medicare as we know it with a premium support gambit that would dramatically shift health care costs to America's seniors. While increasing defense spending, the House Budget Chairman would repeal the Affordable Care, slash Medicaid by a third and leave an estimated 48 million more people without health insurance. And despite his lofty pledges to eliminate many tax loopholes and deductions to fund his gilded-class giveaway, Paul Ryan doesn’t have the courage to say which ones.

Which is why the Ryan plan does not do the biggest thing it claims to achieve. Rather than reducing the U.S. national debt, Paul Ryan’s House GOP budget would bleed trillions in more red ink from the U.S. Treasury.

Nevertheless, as Heather of Crooks and Liars’ Video Café pointed out, Republicans and their water carriers at Fox News continue to pretend otherwise. On Sunday morning, Mike Huckabee aided GOP Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) in perpetuating that myth:

HUCKABEE: Well, one of the things that your committee has put forth this week Congressman is a chart. It's pretty startling and it shows that if we continue on the current trajectory, here's what happens to really the debt as a share of the economy verses Congressman Ryan and your committee's plan. You see in the green, that's the path that Congressman Ryan has that gets us back to a balanced budget.

Frankly, it takes a while, to the year 2040, but describe what happens if we don't do something pretty bold.

PRICE: Well, you see the gray on that chart on the left side of the chart is the amount of debt, the percentage of debt that relates to the gross domestic product that we've had in this country since 1940 until now. The red is not made up. That is the President's budget. That's the current plan that the President has in order to get this economy rolling...That's just going to kill us as a country. So what we believe again is there are responsible, positive ways to solve this. The green on the chart is that responsible way, which gets us on a path to balance and then allows us over period of time, yes a significant period of time, but allows us to pay off the $15 trillion plus in debt that this country has.

As it turns out, not so much. There’s nothing “responsible” or “positive” about it.

That may seem like a surprising result, given Rep. Ryan's declaration that his mission is to "prevent an explosion of debt from crippling our nation and robbing our children of their future." But even with his draconian budget blueprint that cuts Medicaid by a third, ends Medicare as we know it, adds 48 million people to the ranks of the uninsured and by 2050 would result in ending all non-defense discretionary spending, over the next decade Ryan would unleash torrents of red ink from the U.S. Treasury. Ezra Klein explained how Paul Ryan came up $6.2 trillion short:

The Tax Policy Center looked into the revenue loss associated with House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan's plan to cut the tax code down to two rates of 10 percent and 25 percent. They estimate the changes would raise $31.1 trillion over 10 years, or 15.4 percent of GDP. That's $10 trillion less than the tax code would raise if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire, and $4.6 trillion less than it would raise if all of the Bush tax cuts were extended.

The Republican congressman says he'll "broaden the tax base to maintain revenue...consistent with historical norms of 18 to 19 percent." So let's say Ryan needs to find close-enough deductions and loopholes to hit 18.5 percent of GDP. That means he'd need to close about $6.2 trillion in tax deductions and loopholes over 10 years.

(See chart after the break.)

And so far, Ryan hasn't had the courage to name a single deduction he would end or loophole he would close. As Matthew Yglesias pointed out, in Ryan's 13-page description of his tax reform vision, those politically tough choice are completely missing:

Thirteen pages dedicated to explaining his vision for revenue-neutral tax reform. And even so he manages to not name a single tax deduction that he's planning to eliminate. Home mortgage interest deduction? I dunno. Electric vehicle tax credit? I dunno. Deductibility of state and local income taxes? I dunno.

Rolling out his plan on Tuesday, Ryan admitted as much. The responsibility for making the numbers work and taking the heat for ending popular deductions would go to House Ways and Means Committee, which Ryan claimed would "show how they would go about doing this." It's no wonder Greg Sargent said Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" plan simply "is not serious" while the New York Times called it "careless."

And one other thing. Over the next 10 years, the Ryan House budget would add substantially more to the national debt than President Obama's proposed 2013 plan.

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