Just got off another blogger conference call, this time with Howard Dean, former CIGNA exec Wendell Potter, and Mike Lux.

Dean announced the results of a DFA poll that is "really quite stunning," he said. (You can read the results here.) The Senate cloture vote is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve, he said.

Democracy for America's "No Option, No Mandate" campaign to contact Harry Reid clocked 7000 calls in four hours, too, he said.

Dr. Dean opened the call by saying "this bill has always been a giveaway to the insurance industry, but we were willing to compromise" to get the public option.

He recapped all the compromises we made: "We wanted single payer, but that was taken off the table early on. That was a mistake. We had to get to the place where we had health insurance for all Americans." But now, he said, there's no public option, and no Medicare option.

"You're forced to pay money to an insurance company or get fined $750 by your government, while 27% of your money goes to CEOs who are flying around in these private jets," he said.

He talked about the compromises made for pre-existing conditions, the most disturbing one the ability to charge you 300% more, merely for being older. "It's guaranteed issue, but if you’re making $65,000 a year for a family of four and you’re paying $20,000 for insurance, how is that reform?"

He said the real bad stuff in the Senate bill was
"hidden in the weeds, so you can’t find it."

Dr. Dean brushed aside the "Get a bill, any bill" mentality in Washington. "Any legislation passed will have a huge impact on American healthcare. If they can’t fix it, it shouldn’t pass."

Wendell Potter, former CIGNA executive and reform activist, said the insurance industry got "every single thing they wanted" in the Senate bill.

"There's no individual mandate, no public option. There's also three words, 'benefit design flexibility' in Senate bill – that means the freedom to design plans that will pass more and more of us into ranks of the underinsured - and charge up to 22% of income if someone gets sick," he said.

In Massachusetts, they have a 2 to 1 premium ratio, "and they're already having trouble finding affordable, adequate insurance. The industry wants to shift even more costs to individuals and families, having the government pay them half a trillion dollars. The Senate bill meets every one of their requirements," Potter said.

"They will continue to shift the cost burden to consumers and get around not using preexisting conditions by charging for certain factors like high cholesterol."

Dr. Dean pointed out the House bill "is the compromise, we didn’t think it was right to take the option of an employer-based system away if people liked it."

In Vermont, he said, you can't be charged more than double the lowest premium.

Dean listed some more of the insurance company wish list the Senate was so eager to fill. "Getting rid of the anti-trust provision. This contributes to the predatory effect of the insurance companies – they're essentially unregulated. We need to get the provision in, get them regulated.

Wendell Potter talked about something you often hear pushed from the Republican side: "Just let us sell across state lines and let the market decide." As he points out, insurers would go to the states with least regulation.

Paul Hogarth from Daily Kos asked them to address criticism that if the bill is killed, "there's no reform and we’re worse off, the momentum is gone."

"I don’t know that we’ll be worse off," Dr. Dean said. "We ought to strip down this bill and get rid of the mandate. It should have been done by reconciliation."

Continue reading »

File this one under "Law of Unintended Consequences" and hope to God someone brings this to the attention of the relevant parties:

Where are the chips falling, so to speak, when it comes to the popular State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)? The press ought to be finding out, and fast. Last week, the Children’s Defense Fund sent me an invitation for an informational call discussing SCHIP’s future: “If the Senate doesn’t take a stand for children in the next days or weeks, our worst fears could clearly come to pass.” The dire-sounding invite piqued my interest, especially since I had read in the House bill that SCHIP would be repealed. What was going on?

It turns out that the House indeed wants to repeal the program and require kids to get coverage via the insurance exchange, the government’s soon-to-be gigantic brokerage service. Their parents, of course, would be getting subsidies to help buy coverage, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. Rep. John Dingell, a Democrat no less, touted the advantages of dumping SCHIP. One advantage: the program wouldn’t be subject to the periodic and occasionally problematic Congressional reauthorizations that threaten its existence. Dingell said kids could have the same insurance as their parents—an incentive to force parents to cover their kids. (Sometimes parents, daunted by bureaucratic red tape, don’t enroll their children even if they are eligible.)

Another reason for killing SCHIP, some believe, is to force kids into the new exchange’s risk pool. Kids are usually healthy; bringing them into the pool may help spread the risk and keep premiums somewhat lower for the sick people whom insurers would have to cover.

But in return, kids would be hurt, says Alison Buist, director of child health at the Children’s Defense Fund. She told me that if the House provision were to take effect, kids might lose some valuable and comprehensive benefits now available to kids on Medicaid and SCHIP. If parents, strapped for cash, had to shop in the exchange, they might choose low-cost insurance with skimpy benefits and pay more out-of-pocket than SCHIP currently requires them to pay. SCHIP rules limit a family’s out-of-pocket costs to five percent of their income. States don’t even impose the five percent, Buist said, because they have found parents with low incomes couldn’t pay that much. So it seems that there’s a cost shift here—making poor families pay more so that sick (and most likely older) people buying in the exchange would pay less.

The more I see of this Frankenstein plan, the more I see we need single-payer universal coverage. Period.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (551)

PLAYS: (1561)

Without one Republican vote, the House passed a deeply flawed bill that attempts to control the excesses of the financial services industry - while also letting them escalate many of the same crazy practices that led to this crisis. The Republicans, of course, thought the bill was too stringent.

The good news is that authorization for the Consumer Financial Protection Agency is included, and now the fight moves to the Senate:

Dec. 11 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. House voted to tighten rules for derivatives and create powers to break apart healthy financial firms that threaten the economy in legislation passed today over objections of Wall Street and Republicans.

Lawmakers voted 223-202 to set up a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, expand oversight of hedge funds and build a $150 billion industry fund the government would use to take apart failed systemically risky firms. The House failed to add language letting bankruptcy judges reset mortgage terms, known as a “cram-down.” The focus now shifts to the Senate, where lawmakers lack a schedule for action on a bill.

“We are sending a clear message to Wall Street: The party is over,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at a news conference after the vote.

The measure is central to lawmakers’ effort to end rescues of firms deemed too big to fail, which led to bailouts of New York-based American International Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. The banking industry and the nation’s biggest business lobby fought to scale back the legislation. Republicans called the bill a permanent government bailout and 27 Democrats joined to vote against the measure.

“The free market, particularly when it’s in an innovative phase, works best with a fairly defined set of rules, and that’s what we’ve done,” House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who offered the legislation, said today at the news conference.

Of course they did. After all, you can't make all those big donors unhappy, right? The amount of corruption in our political system has far outstripped our ability to change it. The NDC thinks our nation is ill-served by state laws that are more difficult to game on behalf of the financial services industry.

Is there anything they won't do to screw us?

The compromise reached late Wednesday between pro-reform House Democrats and the banker-friendly wing of the party could significantly weaken consumer protection in states where lawmakers support tougher rules against tactics such as predatory lending and excessive ATM fees than historically submissive federal regulators.

Members of the New Democrat Coalition -- whose deference to big banks is reflected in the massive amounts of money they have taken from the financial services industry since 2008 -- temporarily blocked the landmark financial regulatory reform bill from hitting the House floor on Wednesday.

At issue was whether federal regulations should be a floor or a ceiling for consumer protection in the states, particularly as they affect big national banks like JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

The Obama administration, Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, state attorneys general and a coalition of consumer advocates and law professors want states to be able to enforce tougher consumer financial protections.

The big banks, obviously, want federal regulations -- which they have found relatively easy to influence -- to preempt any more onerous state rules for banks operating in more than one state.

Working on behalf of the big banks, the New Dems were able to extract a compromise that will allow federal regulations to preempt state laws on a case-by-case basis.

State regulators have extracted billions of dollars from predatory lenders over the past decade through fines and court settlements, and state legislatures adopted strong anti-predatory lending measures years before Congress. Federal regulators were largely absent from the fight to protect consumers or acted too late, consumer advocates argue.

You know, it really is depressing - and infuriating - to see how little will actually be accomplished with this so-called health care "reform."

And unless the House leadership waves a magic wand in the conference committee hearings, I doubt much will change:

Measured against the promises President Obama and congressional Democrats have made about health-care reform, the bill the Senate begins debating this week could be setting Americans up for disappointment: Some of the main reforms would not take place for several years, and even when they do, some observers say, the bill does too little to make sure they would be enforced.

Until 2014, insurance companies could continue to deny coverage or charge higher premiums based on people's medical history. Another highly touted reform -- banning annual and lifetime limits on coverage -- would take effect in 2010, but it would permit significant exceptions.

Even with those rules in place, "there's no power to really hold the insurance companies accountable," said consumer advocate Betty Ahrens, executive director of the Iowa Citizen Action Network. "It's toothless."

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), said the bill was a compromise. "This is not the legislation we would have written in a perfect world, but Senator Reid believes that this bill has the best chance possible to get the 60 votes necessary to overcome a Republican filibuster," Manley said.

The delay in implementing some key reforms contrasts with the urgency of Obama's call for action.

Although some changes might take years to implement, Obama said in July, "We shouldn't have to wait a long time to make sure that people don't lose their insurance because of a preexisting condition."

Delaying relief until 2014 means that Obama could face reelection -- and Congress be transformed by two elections -- before voters begin feeling the legislation's full effect.

Here's the real kicker: The feds won't even enforce their own laws. That's right, kids, it'll be left to the notoriously industry-friendly state regulators. The feds will only get involved under rare conditions.

Which means never. This is exactly what happened with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). Insurers weren't allowed to make rescissions unless consumers defrauded the insurer or deliberately misrepresented their medical condition.

SS,DD.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (980)

PLAYS: (2396)

Mika and Joe have a great time bashing John Boehner after finding out the House minority leader's PAC spent almost $83K on golf outings.

Scarborough compared him to Evita Perón, who would show poor people her jewels so they would have something to aspire to. "Think about the people in his district who are out of work right," he said. "Thirty thousand dollars on one golf outing!" He noted that was more than most of the people in Boehner's district make in a year.

"Howard, you wouldn't do that, would you?" Mika asked Howard Dean.

"I don't play golf," Dean replies. (See why I love him?) He said it was difficult for Republicans to hold themselves up as the model for fiscal responsibility when they spent money on things like this.

A viewer wrote in to say Boehner's tan "was proof that global warming is real."

In a breathtakingly tight argument, Chris Matthews corners Rhode Island Bishop Thomas Tobin, who has banned Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., from receiving Holy Communion due to his views on abortion.

Because here's the moral hypocrisy at the heart of the Church's abortion position: If it's really and truly murder, you're talking about prosecuting mothers, sisters, lovers and friends for having them. Tweety is quite aggressive with the bishop, demanding to know exactly what legal penalties he thinks should be legislated.

I mean, we won't even touch the concept of one religion imposing its moral position on everyone else. We don't have to. Because if you're saying abortion is murder, you may not create a separate class of penalties under the law. You can't argue that women "didn't know what they were doing." You can't say they were "confused" or "coerced" if there's no evidence they were, anymore than you can say that about any other murder for hire. Either she paid someone to murder her child - or she didn't.

So she has to be tried for murder. The churches can't have it both ways. They can't advise forgiveness and legal exemption for one specific class of murders.

And there's no way the majority of Americans would ever support sending their relatives, neighbors and friends to prison for it.

This is really what Tweety was getting at, and it was damned brilliant. Go, Tweety!

From Chicago journalist Kristen McQueary, this deplorable story:

As a journalist covering Chicago politics, verifying information is like climbing a mountain of sand. With each step you take, the deeper you sink.

Last week while researching claims from a local Tea Party activist, I found myself asking a family for proof that they had lost an unborn grandchild.

The family, Dan and Midge Hough, of Chicago, spoke in favor of health care reform and in support of U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-3rd) at a Nov. 14 town hall meeting in Oak Lawn.

Their daughter-in-law, Jenny, and an unborn grandchild died recently due in part, they believe, to a lack of health insurance. They said Jenny was not receiving regular prenatal care and ended up in an emergency room with double pneumonia that developed into septic shock. Her baby died in the womb, and Jenny died a few weeks later, leaving behind a husband and a 2-year-old daughter.

Catherina Wojtowicz, of Chicago's Mount Greenwood community, an organizer for a Tea Party splinter group, Chicago Tea Party Patriots, falsely claimed that the Houghs fabricated their story. In an e-mail, she called them operatives of President Barack Obama who "go from event to event and (cry) the same story."

When the Houghs spoke at the Lipinski event, some Tea Partiers ridiculed them. They moaned and rolled their eyes and interrupted. Midge Hough began to cry.

The audience, Wojtowicz later explained, was exasperated by stories of isolated tragedies that cloud debate over the health care bill itself.

"What we are talking about is the bill," she said. "We've all had family members pass away, but would this health care bill really have prevented (Jenny's) death? We do question it."

Congressional Democrats are calling for two inquiries after the New York Times reported earlier this week that drug companies were jacking up their prices, negating savings they promised for healthcare reform:

Responding to news reports of unusually high wholesale price increases in brand-name prescription drugs, four House leaders and one senator asked for government reviews of the pricing practices.

Although drug makers challenge the theory, some experts say the run-up in wholesale prices may be partly related to the industry’s concerns about future cost containment under any health care legislation.

“Recent studies have indicated that the industry may be artificially raising prices for certain pharmaceutical products in expectation of new reforms,” the House Democrats wrote in a letter to the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress. “Any price gouging is unacceptable, but anticipatory price gouging is especially offensive,” the letter added, asking the G.A.O. to conduct an expedited review of the price increases.

[...] Separately, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a Democrat who has led efforts in the Senate to seek more concessions from drug makers, wrote to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services asking for “an immediate and thorough investigation into drug industry pricing and recent increases, and the extent to which these increases may affect the Medicare and Medicaid programs.”

Video courtesy of Media Matters

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Rush Limbaugh has some serious issues. I mean, we knew that already, but the anger he uses to mask his blatant fear is quite stunning, and not a little Freudian.

Going after an admiral and counter-terrorism specialist like Joe Sestak? Not so smart, Rushbo:

Following an appearance on Fox News Channel to discuss the federal prosecution of terror suspects, radio host Rush Limbaugh attacked former 3-star Navy Admiral and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Congressman Joe Sestak as a "dangerous left wing radical ideologue."

"Rush Limbaugh's attacks on a Veteran for supporting our American values shows a lack of understanding and respect for the very people who serve our country to defend those values," the campaign said. "Instead of helping to bring about justice for the families who lost loved ones on 9/11, too many on the right seem interested in politicizing the issue of prosecuting terror suspects."

Joe Sestak voiced his support for the Administration as part of his continuing call to close the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Attorney General Holder announced that five high-value Al Qaeda suspects --including the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed-- will be tried in federal court, rather than be held indefinitely or tried via military commission. Current legal procedures are in place to ensure that sensitive information used to support our national security efforts are kept private.

"As an Admiral, I led this Nation's fighting men and women into harm's way in defense of the United States -- in defense not only of American citizens, but of the beliefs that we hold dear and that define us as a nation, Joe" said in his statement on Friday. "I have watched the legal black hole at Gitmo erode our moral standing in the world -- weakening our hand in diplomacy in all corners of the world and providing Al Qaeda and other extremists propaganda for a new generation of terror. The last thing we should do is allow these terrorists to cause us to abandon our American principles."

Sestak points out some statistics for the WATB Republicans: As of December 2008, there were still approximately 250 detainees in custody. Federal courts have convicted 195 terrorists since 2001 in contrast to just three convictions by military commissions. Here's Sestak on The O'Reilly Factor trying to explain why there is nothing to fear from these trials. My suggestion for next time, Congressman, is to use smaller words. That fancy book-learning elitism is as scary to them as dem Islamofascists.

Via Huffington Post, the latest from Bart Stupak, clearly under the loving spiritual guidance of his C Street family:

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) is warning fellow Democrats not to mess with his restrictive anti-abortion amendment.

Pro-choice outrage was sparked by the inclusion of a provision in the House health care bill making it harder for private insurers to cover abortion. President Obama himself suggested that the language disrupted the status quo and should be taken out of the final legislation. Abortion rights supporters in Congress requested a meeting with the president next week to discuss the issue.

Now Stupak is saying he won't go easily.

"We won because [the Democrats] need us," Stupak said. "If they are going to summarily dismiss us by taking the pen to that language, there will be hell to pay. I don't say it as a threat, but if they double-cross us, there will be 40 people who won't vote with them the next time they need us -- and that could be the final version of this bill."

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1604)

PLAYS: (5700)

For months, Crooks and Liars has documented an often overlooked but inescapable truth of the contentious health-care reform debate: Health care is generally worst in those red states where the Republican political leadership is most opposed to reform. (For example, see here, here, here and here.) Only now, after the narrow House vote this weekend, did CNN look at the Republican Senators committed to blocking health care for their residents who need it most.

Monday's "Keeping Them Honest" segment hosted by Anderson Cooper came three days after Texas Governor Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich in a Washington Post op-ed proclaimed the Lone Star State a model for health care policy. But as Cooper finally discovered, Texas "lawmakers voting against health care reform" happen to represent "the state with the worst number of people covered by health insurance."

RANDI KAYE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Anderson, here's what we found out today. There are more uninsured in red states than there are in blue states, which is interesting since all Republican senators are expected to vote against the public health care option.

As for Texas, which leads the nation with a staggering 25% of its population uninsured, the human toll of Republican obstructionism is devastating:

COOPER: And what about Texas? The state with the most uninsured, I mean --- with the most uninsured?

Continue reading »

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.

Continue reading »

There's no questioning the historic nature of the vote. What the Democrats did to get there is pretty ugly (I can't believe we cut a deal with anti-woman C-Street true believer Bart Stupak), but we did get there, and most people will see some real improvements in their lives as a result. Now it's on to the Senate, where hopefully women's rights won't be treated as peripheral to the political process.

And in the meantime, John Boehner warns us that the bill "will dim the light of freedom." Uh huh.

Hours after President Obama exhorted Democratic lawmakers to "answer the call of history," the House hit an unprecedented milestone on the path to health-care reform, approving a trillion-dollar package late Saturday that seeks to overhaul private insurance practices and guarantee comprehensive and affordable coverage to almost every American.

After months of acrimonious partisanship, Democrats closed ranks on a 220-215 vote that included 39 defections, mostly from the party's conservative ranks. But the bill attracted a surprise Republican convert: Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao of Louisiana, who represents the Democratic-leaning district of New Orleans and had been the target of a last-minute White House lobbying campaign. GOP House leaders had predicted their members would unanimously oppose the bill.

Democrats have sought for decades to provide universal health care, but not since the 1965 passage of Medicare and Medicaid has a chamber of Congress approved such a vast expansion of coverage. Action now shifts to the Senate, which could spend the rest of the year debating its version of the health-care overhaul. Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) hopes to bring a measure to the floor before Thanksgiving, but legislation may not reach Obama's desk before the new year.

At the Capitol, Obama urged the few Democrats who were still wavering on Saturday afternoon to put aside their political fears and embrace the bill's ambitious objectives. "Opportunities like this come around maybe once in a generation," he said afterward. "This is our moment to live up to the trust that the American people have placed in us. Even when it's hard. Especially when it's hard. This is our moment to deliver."

The House legislation would for the first time require every individual to obtain insurance, and would require all but the smallest employers to provide coverage to their workers. It would vastly expand Medicaid and create a new marketplace where people could obtain federal subsidies to buy insurance from private companies or from a new government-run insurance plan.

Though some people would receive no benefits -- including about 6 million illegal immigrants, according to congressional estimates -- the bill would virtually close the coverage gap for people who do not have access to health-care coverage through their jobs.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (948)

PLAYS: (1837)

What color is the sky in Mean Jean Schmidt's world? Because we are clearly through the looking glass when the Wicked Witch of Ohio claims that most Americans are against this bill (LIES), that the CBO says healthcare costs will not be reduced (LIES, although in fairness, they trashed the Republican version), and reduced Medicare benefits (LIES).

Maybe if the Republicans have nothing but lies and scare tactics to offer up as their objection to health care reform, that should tell their tea-baggin' supporters something.