Lindsay Beyerstein's blog

Weekly Pulse: Senate Prepares to Cast First Votes

2009-12-02T13:25:44-05:00

The Senate is scheduled to begin voting on proposed amendments to the health care reform bill today. It takes 60 votes to pass an amendment and most of the proposed measures for the health care bill will never pass. It’s a great opportunity to grandstand over pet issues, however.

For example, Sen. John McCain wants to eliminate about $500 million in Medicare cost savings, which he’s trying to portray as Medicare cuts. In fact, these savings will not result in cuts to benefits. McCain is getting hammered by Democrats for reversing on the Medicare issue. As Nick Baumann reports for Mother Jones, McCain promised to fund health care reform with Medicare savings when he ran for president in 2008. Much of the proposed savings would come from eliminating over-payments to private insurers. As Harry Reid’s spokesman told Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo, protecting this revenue stream amounts to “a big fat wet kiss” to McCain’s friends in the insurance industry.

Alex Koppelman of Salon reports that conservative Democrat Ben Nelson (D-NE) will try to get a mirror image of the Stupak Amendment added to the Senate bill. As Koppelman observes, it’s unlikely that Nelson has the votes.

Even if the controversial, anti-abortion Stupak language stays out of the Senate bill, legislators will have to revisit the issue of federal funding for abortion coverage when the House and the Senate put their respective bills together to form the final legislation.

Roger Bybee of Working In These times reports that the Stupak Amendment has become a major headache for organized labor. Many union leaders see the Stupak Amendment as a wedge issue that is dividing advocates of health care reform within the labor movement. For example, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-MI), one of labor’s staunchest allies in the House, voted for the Stupak Amendment.

The Stupak wars have been an opportunity for religious groups like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to flex their lobbying muscle. If a secular organization wanted to send its staffers to practically camp out in legislators’ offices during key floor votes, they’d have to register as lobbyists and disclose how they spend their money. Carol Joffe of RH Reality Check wonders whatever happened to the separation of church and state in the era of lobbying. She makes an important point. Why should lobbyists get special treatment because their fees are paid from collection plates?

Progressives are clamoring for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to use budget reconciliation to thwart a filibuster and pass a health reform bill by majority vote. Alex Koppelman of Salon takes an in-depth look at the procedural obstacles of such a strategy. One of the major sticking points is that budget reconciliation can only be used to pass legislation that has to do with the budget. In order to qualify, the final bill would have to be contorted in various ways that progressives might not like. Koppelman argues that the public option could be a casualty of reconciliation.

In other health-related news, Lincoln University has embraced fat-shaming as a tool for behavioral change. In an effort to curb high rates of obesity among its students, the school has ordered students with a body mass index over 30 to attend 3 hours of gym class per week. If they don’t, they can’t graduate. Samhita Mukhopadhyay of Feministing characterizes the plan as a form of fat hate. She argues that, like many dieters, Lincoln has lost sight of health in its pursuit of sveltness.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Weekly Pulse: Crunch Time in the Senate

2009-11-25T09:08:59-05:00

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is determined to get a health care bill passed in the Senate by Christmas.

This is a momentous time, as John Nichols writes in The Nation:

…Harry Reid has a health-care reform bill, and it is advancing. Indeed, with Saturday night’s 60-39 Senate vote to open a historic debate on the measure, the movement humanize America’s healthcare system — which began almost 70 years ago — is closer to a congressional breakthrough than at any time in its history.

It won’t be a cakewalk, though. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has famously threatened to torpedo the bill if it includes a public option. This week he tried to rewrite history. “This is a kind of 11th hour addition to a debate that’s gone on for decades,” Lieberman told reporters that “Nobody’s ever talked about a public option before. Not even in the presidential campaign last year.” Brian Beutler sets the record straight at Talking Points Memo: In fact the Obama campaign’s health policy white paper explicitly called for the creation of a public option.

According to Mike Lillis in RH Reality Check, progressive senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is feeling optimistic about the public option’s prospects.

Also in RH Reality Check, reproductive health policy analyst Jessica Arons reports that the merged Senate bill does not call for the much-debated abortion restrictions encoded in the Stupak amendment to the House bill.

In the Progressive, Ruth Conniff takes a closer look at the controversy over the latest mammogram guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a commission appointed by the Department of Health and Human Services. Compared to the old guidelines, the new recommendations suggest that women start getting regular mammograms later and wait longer in between screenings.

Liberals and conservatives are accusing the federal government of cheating women out of preventative care to save money. But as Conniff explains, more mammograms aren’t necessarily better. There’s just not much statistical evidence that screening women in their forties saves lives. In this age group, regular mammograms are more likely to generate hair-raising false alarms than lifesaving discoveries. Furthermore, mammograms use x-rays, which are inherently carcinogenic. That doesn’t mean that mammograms are dangerous, just that unnecessary exposure should be avoided. Conniff writes:

…[O]verscreening and overtreatment are as much of a plague in the U.S. medical system as cost-cutting measures. And looking at breast cancer screening rationally, as the federal panel has done, makes a lot of sense.

Speaking of public health, as I report for Working In These Times, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration has published new guidelines to help retailers reduce the risk of crowd stampedes and trampling deaths at Black Friday sales. Have a safe and happy holiday and good luck standing in line for that $99 Blu-Ray player.

Weekly Pulse: The Stupak Setback

2009-11-11T13:59:49-05:00

This article is published in partnership with The Media Consortium, of which RH Reality Check is a member organization.

A clique of anti-choice Democrats in Congress joined forces with Republicans to write abortion access out of the House’s health care reform bill last Saturday. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) wants to force women to choose between affordable health insurance and abortion coverage, even if they pay for abortion coverage with their own money.

Pro-choice Democrats and women’s health activists are up in arms over the eleventh hour deal. Ellie Smeal of Ms. Magazine denounces the Stupak amendment as a betrayal of women:

Millions of poor and middle-class women would be denied abortion coverage and millions more would lose the coverage they already have, since 85 percent of private plans now cover abortion. Far from being abortion-neutral, the Stupak amendment is a giant step backward for women. It’s unacceptable. In the compromise to get the bill passed, women and their health-care rights were thrown under the bus.

Yesterday, The Pulse interviewed Jodi Jacobson, political director of RH Reality Check, about the implications of the Stupak amendment for reproductive choice in America. Jacobson explained that, if language from the Stupak amendment finds its way into the final health care bill, insurance companies would be forced to eliminate all abortion coverage if they wanted to participate in any aspect of the health care reform plan. Listen to the full interview here. (Note: there’s a slight delay before the audio starts.)

Jacobson calls the Stupak language a “monumental setback.” If an insurance plan accepts customers who take government subsidies, then nobody on that plan could have abortion coverage—not even those who were paying their whole premium out of pocket. In effect, the Stupak amendment would be “a total ban on public and private money for abortion coverage,” Jacobson said.

In TAPPED, Michelle Goldberg accuses the Democrats of “leaving women behind” in their rush to pass health care reform at any cost. Goldberg warns that if the amendment becomes law, Democrats will have handed the anti-abortion lobby its biggest victory since the 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Act.

In the Nation, Eyal Press argues that the Stupak amendment would be an especially cruel blow to poor women:

If this highly regressive amendment makes its way into the legislation that Barack Obama eventually signs, millions of less affluent women who obtain access to affordable health insurance will thus join the ranks of low-income women on Medicaid, most of whom live in states that don’t cover abortion procedures. The two-tiered system that dictates who in America has “choice” (more privileged women do, less affluent women do not) will be further entrenched.

Robin Marty of RH Reality Check wonders whether the Stupak amendment would apply to miscarriages as well as elective abortions. Sometimes, when a fetus dies in utero, doctors must surgically remove it. It’s the same procedure as an elective termination and it has the same name: Abortion. Last month, Marty lost a much-wanted pregnancy. Doctors laid out her options: a $1500 surgery, a $40 chemical abortion, or an interminable wait to expel the dead fetus naturally. Marty chose the surgery. She worries that the Stupak amendment would take that choice away from other women.

The House bill is not yet the law of the land. There is still time to strip the Stupak language out in conference (the merging process whereby the House bill is combined with whatever comes out of the Senate).

But will it actually get stripped out in the senate? Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) announced that “If it isn’t clear that government money is not to be used to fund abortions, I won’t vote for it.”

On a conference call yesterday, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) told The Pulse that he was optimistic that a compromise could be worked out. “Ben Nelson said he wasn’t going to support a bill if it isn’t clear that government money won’t be used to fund abortions,” Specter said, “Well, we can make it clear that if someone wants to buy abortion coverage with her own money, she can do it.”

Weekly Pulse: Joe Lieberman and the Opt-Out Revolution

2009-10-29T06:12:49-04:00

This article is printed in partnership with The Media Consortium, of which RH Reality Check is a member organization. It first appeared here.

Progressives rejoiced when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced this week that the final Senate health care bill would include a public option. The announcement was a major victory for left-wing Democrats.

Better yet, it would be a public option without a trigger. Earlier proposals called for a triggered public option which would only take effect if private insurers failed to bring down costs on their own. Under the opt-out compromise, the public option would come on line automatically (albeit not until 2013), but states would later have the option of quitting.

The jubilation was short-lived. Alex Koppelman of Salon explains:

Progressives didn’t even get 24 hours to celebrate the victory they won in getting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to include a version of the public option in his health care reform bill. The celebration was cut off Tuesday afternoon with the news that Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., will vote with Senate Republicans to filibuster the legislation.

The Democrats have 60 Senate votes. If they all vote for cloture, a procedural motion to stop debate, the Republicans can’t filibuster the bill. The Senators who vote for cloture can still vote against the bill. Reid’s strategy for passing the bill was to get all Democrats to vote for cloture and let them vote their conscience on the actual bill. Even without Lieberman, Democrats have the votes to pass the bill by majority vote if they can avoid a filibuster.

Health care is the most important domestic policy initiative of the Obama administration. Would Joe Lieberman really torpedo reform? The Senate leadership thinks Reid is bluffing, according to Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly.

I understand the argument. Lieberman loves attention and power. By threatening to join the Republican filibuster, he gets both—Democrats have to scramble to make him happy, since there’s no margin for error in putting together 60 votes. Lieberman gets to feel very important for the next several weeks by making this threat less than 24 hours after Harry Reid stated his intentions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he wants to be known forever as The Senator Who Killed Health Care Reform.

I find it very easy to believe, however, that Lieberman is capable of doing just that. He left himself some wiggle room, but not when it comes to the public option—he’s against it, no matter what, even with all of the compromises thrown in.

In other words, if this is all a ploy for leverage, why would Lieberman open by swearing that he won’t support a bill with a public option? You’d think he’d just say he was keeping his options open and force Reid to make him a counter-offer. Reid has already decided that the public option is politically non-negotiable. He’s afraid that the base won’t come out for the 2012 elections if they don’t get what they want. Benen speculates that Lieberman wants to be the Senator Who Killed Health Care because he wants to drum up massive Republican support for his 2012 reelection bid. On this theory, Lieberman is joining Rep. Joe “You Lie!” Wilson (R-SC) and Balloon Dad in the quest to make bank on ridiculous publicity stunts.

Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) says that she will side with the Republicans to filibuster the bill “if she has to,” as Evan McMorris-Santoro reports for TPM. Snowe was the only Republican to vote for the Finance Committee’s health care bill.

Reid must walk a fine line. The administration really can’t afford to alienate organized labor before the 2012 elections. Newly elected AFL-CIO President Ricahrd Trumka continues to push for his three core demands for health care reform: a public option, a mechanism to make employers pay their fair share, and no taxes on health care benefits. Last week, AFSCME President Gerald McEntee said that his union would oppose legislation that taxed benefits, but Trumka hasn’t gone that far, as David Moberg reports at Working In These Times.

Finally, in other health-related news, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the division of the Labor Department that oversees workplace safety, has issued a sweeping new report condemning Nevada’s state-level OSHA program. As I report for Working In These Times, the investigators found that NOSHA inspectors were being pressured by their superiors to write up employers on lesser charges, even when their repeat offenses killed workers.

Weekly Pulse: Pelosi Champions Public Option

2009-10-21T11:49:05-04:00

This article is published in partnership with the Media Consortium, of which RH Reality Check is a member organization.

A plan to reform health care that includes a robust public option would actually cut the deficit, according to preliminary estimates by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). For the purposes of this analysis, a robust public option was defined as one that reimburses doctors at Medicare rates plus five percent. The latest CBO estimate is critical for Democrats because President Barack Obama said he wouldn’t sign a health care bill that adds to the deficit. (There’s a double standard at work. Health care has to pay for itself or save money. But as Jo Comerford notes for Democracy Now!, the president has no compunction about bloating the budget with defense spending.)

As health care reform moves into the closed-door, intra-party negotiation phase, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi is emerging as a champion of a public option. Pelosi has always said that she can’t pass a bill without some kind of public plan, though she has wavered about how tough that plan should be on payouts to providers. But according to Brian Beutler of TPMDC, yesterday’s “favorable CBO report seems to have settled all that, and Pelosi’s decided to go all in for a public option.”

And why not? A clear majority of Americans now favor a public option, as John Byrne reports in Raw Story. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll published on Tuesday, 57 percent of respondents favor a public health insurance option to compete with private insurers. That’s an increase of five percentage points in two months.

Two bills made it out of committee in the Senate, one with a public option (the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee’s effort) and one without (the Senate Finance bill). So, proponents of the public option are putting pressure on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to include one in the final bill. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee is running ads in Reid’s district that ask if he’s strong enough to back a public option. Reid might be more susceptible than usual to progressive pressure because he’s up for reelection and facing dismal poll numbers, according to Alex Koppelman in Salon.

The public option has come back from the abyss several times, thanks to a combination of popular appeal, political courage and determined progressive activism. But Mike Lillis of the Colorado Independent argues that Democrats shot themselves in the foot by taking single payer off the table early on. Single payer health care would abolish private health insurance and cover everyone through a Medicare-like system. It would be an easier and cheaper way to achieve universal coverage than any of the options Congress is considering now, but it’s an anathema to the insurance industry.

As Lillis observes, a basic principle of negotiation is to ask for more than you think you’re going to get and negotiate down from there. But the White House made a point of shooting down single payer in May and Congressional Democrats held but one hearing on the prospect. Talk about lousy business skills.

By choosing the public option — not single payer — as the left-most negotiating point, Democrats left themselves with few places to go but toward more conservative proposals for insurance reform, experts say, including the co-op model and a system of triggering public plans only if private insurers fail to meet certain cost and coverage targets. In the blood sport of congressional negotiating — which dictates that you over-ask, and then move toward your goal during the subsequent bartering — Democrats were asking merely for the public plan they wanted in the final bill.

While we’re on the subject of preemptive concessions to unreasonable political parties, Amanda Marcotte of RH Reality Check describes how Democrats have bent over backwards to accommodate the anti-choice lobby on funding abortions under a public plan. Democrats have proposed elaborate bureaucratic workarounds to make sure that abortions are only covered by private money. Still, anti-choice militants like Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) are accusing them of backing abortion fieldtrips for school kids. Speaking of starting high and negotiating downward, Democrats should threaten to overturn the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for most abortions. Let’s see what the anti-choicers are prepared to give up in exchange.

In a sense, it’s reassuring that legislators are taking the public option seriously enough to argue about how it might pay for abortions. If they didn’t think we were going to get a public option, it would be a moot point.

Weekly Pulse: Finance Committee Passes Health Bill

2009-10-14T12:03:39-04:00

Yesterday, the Senate Finance Committee finally passed its health care bill. John Nichols of the Nation reacts:

If every kid in class finishes their homework except for one, guess which kid will get the most attention. That’s right, the slacker.

And, when the slacker finally does turn in the assignment, it is invariably a slapdash job that fails to meet minimum standards.

So it is in the U.S. Senate, where the Finance Committee finally got around to finishing its health care reform assignment.

The bill passed by a vote of 14-9. All the Democrats, plus Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) voted in favor. As we know, it doesn’t include a public option.

Robert Scheer, also of the Nation, sums up the bill as written:

The main thrust of the proposal is to forcibly submit even more customers to the tender mercies of the insurance industry while doing nothing significant to cut costs. Insurers will now pretend that the burdens on them are onerous and will demand concessions to make this an even bigger boondoggle for the medical profiteers than George W. Bush’s prescription drug coverage initiative

Sheer sees the Finance Committee bill as a sop to the health insurers. If it were to pass in its present form, it would deliver millions of new customers to private insurers by requiring everyone to carry insurance. The free market keeps costs down when companies compete to give the best value for the lowest price. But most health insurers operate as monopolies on their home turf. If insurers had to compete for customers, they’d have an incentive to lower their prices. That’s why progressives want to introduce competition in the form of a public option.

An all-private insurance system gives power to an industry that it is indifferent to the needs of the people it claims to serve.

Before we go any further, our warmest congratulations to Robin Marty, who is expecting her second child. In a piece for RH Reality check, Marty details how the private insurance industry toys with people’s lives in pursuit of profit. For Marty and her husband, joy is mixed with apprehension because their maximum out-of-pocket insurance cost just doubled. By the time the baby arrives, Marty’s husband expects to pay 10% of his pre-tax income just to keep his family insured. And they’d better hope that bundle of joy is of an actuarially-approved size. An insurance company in Colorado refused to cover a 4-month-old baby because he was “too fat,” according to the boy’s father. The company relented after media pressure, but there’s no indication that they plan to drop their general rule that babies whose weight is above the 95th percentile don’t get covered.

Earlier this week, the insurance industry broadsided the Obama administration by releasing a “report” warning that health care reform would cause premiums to skyrocket.

As economist Robert Reich explains in TAPPED, the industry was upset that the Senate Finance Committee was considering more lenient punishments for young healthy people who don’t buy health insurance. (They would still be fined, just not as much.) The industry report claimed that if the government spares the rod, only old sick people will sign up, and premiums will be higher for everyone. Reich argues that the report inadvertently makes the case for the public option:

But the bomb went off under the insurers. The only reason these costs can be passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums is because there’s not enough competition among private insurers to force them to absorb the costs by becoming more efficient. Get it? Health insurers have just made the best argument yet about why a public insurance option is necessary.

Steve Benen of the Washington Independent notes that former Democrat Joe Lieberman (I-Conn) went on Don Imus’s syndicated shock jock radio show to echo the insurance industry’s talking points. “I’m afraid that in the end, the Baucus bill is actually going to raise the price of insurance for most of the people in the country,” Lieberman said.

With all this hypothesizing and posturing, it’s easy to forget that neither Lieberman–nor anyone else—is going to vote on the Baucus bill as written. The Finance Committee bill is just one of several proposals to have passed their respective committees. In the Senate, the more liberal Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) passed a bill with a public option this summer. All the House health reform bills also include a public option.

As Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent explains, the tone of the debate is expected to shift dramatically: Now that the various bills have cleared their bipartisan committees, power shifts to the Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate who are in charge of shaping the final legislation.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

Daily Pulse: Meet America's Biggest Anti-Health Reform Crusader

2009-10-02T11:23:09-04:00

This article appears in partnership with The Media Consortium, of which RH Reality Check is a member organization.

It was a roller coaster week for proponents of the public option. While the Senate Finance Committee rejected two proposed public option amendments, four of the five health bills produced by congressional committees include a public option. The next stage is to put those bills together in a process called conference, that results in a final piece of legislation that the House and the Senate will vote on. In this video clip, Marcy Wheeler tells VideoNation that progressives can continue the fight for a public option by emulating a tried and true Blue Dog strategy: Focus on building a bloc of votes, not on flipping the opposition.

This strategy is working pretty well in the House where dozens of progressive members have pledged to vote against any bill that doesn’t include a public option.

In an exclusive audio interview with Tristam Korten, whose two-part series on anti-health reform crusader Rick Scott ran in Salon this week, Korten and I discuss how Scott is personally bankrolling a multimillion dollar campaign against health care reform.

Who is this man? Scott used to run the largest hospital chain in the country, until the firm was found to have defrauded Medicare out of $2 billion. Scott was never charged, but he was sent packing in the wake of the scandal. He has since founded Solantic, a Florida chain of bare-bones walk-in clinics that profit by offering the uninsured lower rates than they’d get at the ER. Why are their rates lower? Because hospitals currently jack up the price of ER visits to compensate for the fact that so many uninsured patients don’t pay their bills at all. If we had universal health insurance, everyone would pay the same price and Solantic wouldn’t seem like such a good deal.

As Korten and I discuss in our interview, Scott has been accused of discriminating against employees who don’t meet his marketing-driven image of an attractive, “clean cut,” young staff. Solantic recently settled out of court with several staffers who said they were fired for refusing to enforce the company’s biased hiring policies.

Korten’s research was supported by a grant from the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on health care affordability, health care laws, and health care controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.

Daily Pulse: "I Love My Socialist Kidney"

2009-10-01T11:44:53-04:00

This article appears in partnership with The Media Consortium, of which RH Reality Check is a member organization.

Lindsay Beyerstein interviews Jennifer Nix: Listen here. Nix is a journalist and the publisher of Guernica Magazine. She published an essay in Salon this week about her personal and political history with single-payer health care titled “I Love My Socialist Kidney.”

To most Americans, single-payer health care seems like political science fiction; a bold idea that could never happen here. Most people don’t realize that the U.S. already has single-payer options for certain groups of people. The familiar examples are Medicare (for the aged) and Medicaid (for the poor). My guest Jennifer Nix knows first hand about another group of Americans who get single payer health care: Patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) who need dialysis or kidney transplants.

In 2008, Nix learned that she had inherited the same cystic kidney disease that nearly killed her father in the early seventies. In 1972, Wayne Nix was a young schoolteacher with two small children, a new mortgage, and renal failure. Dialysis was astronomically expensive and private insurers refused to cover patients with ESRD. Luckily for the Nix family, activists successfully lobbied to create Medicare ESRD, a program that has since helped over 1 million Americans survive with ESRD since 1973, regardless of their ability to pay.

Amazingly, the program enjoyed strong bipartisan support in the seventies. It was assumed that covering ESRD patients was just a stop-gap to tide them over until universal health care covered everyone. Even Republican president Richard Nixon was on board with the idea. As we all know, we’re still waiting for universal health care. Luckily, when Jennifer Nix found out she needed a kidney transplant, the Medicare ESRD was still there for her. If single-payer works for one disease, Nix argues, why shouldn’t all Americans enjoy the same health security?

Daily Pulse: Finance Committee Rejects Public Option

2009-09-30T11:59:04-04:00

This article is published as part of a partnership with tTe Media Constortium, of which RH RealityCheck is a member organization.

Yesterday, the powerful Senate Finance Committee met to debate two amendments that would have inserted a public option into the committee’s health reform bill. Both amendments were defeated as key Democrats sided with Republicans and the insurance companies. David Corn of Mother Jones diagnoses what ails Senate Democrats. It’s split personality disorder: “They are the best friends of the health insurance industry. They are fiercest foes of the health insurance industry.”

Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s (D-WV) strong public option amendment was defeated 15-8 because senators Max Baucus (D-MT), Kent Conrad (D-ND), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Bill Nelson (D-FL), and Tom Carper (D-DE) joined the committee’s ten Republicans. In the next round of voting, Nelson and Carper backed Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) amendment, but Baucus, Conrad and Lincoln stuck with the GOP and voted it down. Ironically, as Corn observes, the Senate Democratic communications team was busy emailing blistering indictments of the insurance industry while key members of the caucus were doing the insurers’ bidding.

John Nichols of The Nation worries that yesterday’s defeat is a sign that Congress is backing away from a public option, which was itself a compromise alternative to a single-payer, Medicare-for-all type system:

Tuesday’s day-long gathering of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, where chairman Max Baucus has spent months lowering expectations, offered a sense of just how dim prospects for meaningful systemic change have become.

Baucus, the insurance-industry representative who doubles as a Democratic senator from Montana, long ago rejected the notion that a robust public option might be a part of any healthcare reform measure that would pass the Senate.

The Senate Finance Committee went on to add tens of millions of dollars for discredited abstinence-only propaganda for teens, as Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent reports. Well, at least pseudoscience has a public option. If kids can learn this nonsense for free at school, maybe they’ll ditch church, where you have to put your money in the collection plate to hear the sermon.

Chris Bowers of AlterNet argues that a public option still has 51 votes in the Senate. Which means that the Democrats could still pass a healthcare bill by majority vote in the upper chamber, if they decided to forgo their quest for a filibuster-proof 60 and pass the bill through budget reconciliation.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), chair of the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, claims to have the votes to pass a plan with a public option, Lynda Waddington reports in the Iowa Independent. Harkin believes that the full Senate should have the opportunity to vote on the public option, considering that it’s part of four out of the five bills that have been approved so far.

The fight for a public option isn’t over yet. To date, all of the other health reform bills that are out of committee include a strong public option. The next step is putting these bills together to create the final legislation for the House and Senate to vote on.

Daily Pulse: Public Option Is Alive and Kicking

2009-09-28T13:23:28-04:00

Reports of the death of the public option were greatly exaggerated. According to Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly, liberals are once again optimistic that health care reform will include a publicly-run insurance option to compete with private insurance companies. The main excuse to drop the public option was that Republicans wouldn’t go for it. As Benen explains, now that a bipartisan bill is out of reach, Democrats can move further to the left. Progressive Democrats have convincingly argued that the public option would save money, which undermines the Blue Dogs’ opposition for the sake of fiscal conservatism.

The Senate Finance Committee will tackle the public option tomorrow. Meanwhile, the House Democratic caucus is wrestling over what kind of public option to support. Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly rejected a so-called “trigger” which would activate a public option only if private insurers failed to control costs. “A trigger is an excuse for not doing anything,” she said. By contrast, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid supports a trigger. The views of the Speaker and the Majority Leader are important because they will lead negotiations to merge the House and Senate versions of the bill, creating the final text that both houses will vote on.

Meanwhile, in international news, scholars at the London School of Economics released new research last week showing that reproductive choice is the most powerful tool in the fight against climate change. The news broke as nearly a hundred heads of state gathered in New York for the UN Summit on Climate Change. As Amanda Marcotte notes in RH Reality Check, the report’s recommendations are sure to spark controversy from both the right and the left:

It’s easy enough to assume that the Obama administration and the Sierra Club are shying away from the issue because reproductive rights are such an explosive topic, and even touching it brings a hail of crazy from the anti-sex nuts down on your head. … But I can honestly say that I don’t think it’s the fear of the Anti-Sex Mafia that causes this sort of allergy. It’s the history of the fear of overpopulation being used as an excuse to coerce childbirth choices, and the fact that as soon as the potential for coercion is introduced, you suddenly attract a sea of racists who love to pontificate about eugenics all day, and would love to be able to influence policy to reduce the number of non-white people in relation to the number of white people.

At Feministing, Ann Friedman argues that the rubric of population control is irrevocably tainted by its historical links to eugenics and other forms of racism. She argues that international development should focus on empowering women for their own sake, not because we hope that they will have fewer babies.

I agree that the phrase “population control” is a misleading frame. You could just as easily call it “helping women have as many children as they want.” The key is that virtually all women want fewer children than they will bear if nature takes its course. And the more opportunities women have for education, paid work, and healthy children, the fewer kids they tend to want. The phrase “population control” should be scrapped, but the effort to put women in charge of their own fertility must continue, for the good of humanity and the planet.

Daily Pulse: Interview with Howard Dean (VIDEO exclusive!)

2009-09-25T12:14:15-04:00

Last night Dr. Howard Dean, former chair of the DNC and 2004 presidential hopeful, appeared in conversation with journalist Joe Conason at the 92nd Street YMCA in New York. Dean discussed his new book, Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Health Care Reform.

Later on, I had a chance to ask Dean about the prospects for passing health care reform in the Senate through budget reconciliation, a parliamentary tactic that would allow the bill to pass by majority vote and thwart a filibuster.

Many Democratic strategists consider reconciliation to be extremely politically risky, but Dean is unconvinced. He argues that passing a bill through budget reconciliation is not only doable, but also likely to result in a stronger bill.

"I'm not worried about doing this through reconciliation," he said, "I think we'll probably have a better bill if it's through reconciliation because the people who are involved in the passage of the bill will only be Democrats and a very high proportion of Democrats want a public option."

View entire interview:

Daily Pulse: Astroturfing the Public Option

2009-09-23T10:59:27-04:00

This article is published in partnership with The Media Consortium, of which RH Reality Check is a member organization.

The Senate Finance Committee is slogging through literally hundreds of proposed amendments to the Baucus health care reform bill. The bill still doesn’t have a public option, but there’s a good chance that insurance subsidies will be revised upwards, as Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly reports.

Last Sunday, President Obama made his pitch for health reform on five national TV talk shows. John Nichols of the Nation criticizes Obama for his uninspired and frankly unappealing depiction of the public option:

Indeed, as Obama describes his notion of a public option, it is so constrained, under-funded and uninspired in approach as to be dysfunctional.

While there is no question that the right reform remains a single-payer “Medicare for All” system that provides quality care for all Americans while eliminating insurance company profiteering, if the best that can be hoped for is a government-supported alternative to the corporate options, then it should be robust enough to compete.

Obama advocates a public option open to the uninsured only, not to anyone who wants to buy in. If the goal of the public option is to reduce costs through competition, a limited public option would be self-defeating. A public option is supposed to drive down prices through competition. Obama’s version of a public option couldn’t compete: It would only take cases the insurers already rejected!

Speaking of insurers, Brian Beutler and Zach Roth report in Talking Points Memo that insurance company Humana is under fire for trying to scare senior citizens into resisting health reform, specifically cuts in Medicare Advantage, a federally subsidized private insurance plan. If so, Humana is in big trouble. Astroturfing seniors is a violation of the strict rules the government imposes on communications with Advantage beneficiaries.

Public News Service reports that health care activist Joe Szakos goes on trial in Virginia today for allegedly trespassing while protesting insurance rate hikes. Szakos is a member of the Virginia Organizing Project, a non-profit social justice group seeking accountability from insurers.

Obama made his first speech to the United Nations (UN) yesterday at the UN Summit on Climate Change in New York. Nearly a hundred heads of state met to iron out differences face-to-face before the official negotiations on a global climate pact begin on Copenhagen on Dec 18. In RH Reality Check, Karen Hardee and Kathleen Mogelgaard explain the link between reproductive freedom and climate change. New research reaffirms that contraception could be a powerful tool to help fight global warming:

So how does reproductive health fit into this picture? A new study by the UK-based Optimum Population Trust and the London School of Economics shows the connection between contraceptives and climate change. The study concludes that universal access to reproductive health could be one of the most cost effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. A Population Action International report from May detailed how population dynamics, not just overall growth, contribute to climate change.

Note that population activists aren’t saying that women in the developing world ought to have fewer children for the sake of the planet. They’re saying that societies grow in smarter, healthier, and ultimately greener ways when women have the power to control their own fertility.

Daily Pulse: Women's Health Beyond Pink Ribbons

2009-09-21T14:21:11-04:00

This article is printed in partnership with The Media Consortium, of which RH Reality Check is a member organization.

While the Senate Finance Committee tinkers with the Baucus Bill, First Lady Michelle Obama is taking center stage in the health care reform debate. Obama’s director of communications announced last week that the FLOTUS would be focusing on the health care needs of women and children. Mindful of the conservative backlash against Hillary Clinton’s crusade for health care reform, Mrs. Obama is expected to steer clear of policy issues, according to Salon’s Judy Berman.

Tying health reform to women’s health is a smart political move. The Far Right lured anti-choicers into a corporatist tax revolt with tall tales of tax-payer funded abortions. Now the White House is reminding Progressives that it cares, in a very general, non-policy kind of way, about women’s health. While Progressives will appreciate the White House shining a spotlight on reproductive health, it won’t mean much without policy specifics. It certainly won’t make up for the President Obama’s waffling on the public option.

The failure of the private insurance system has galvanized Dr. Willie Parker, an obstetrician/gynecologist active in Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, as a passionate advocate for health care reform. In a piece on RH Reality Check (originating with American Forum), Dr. Parker tells how the status quo falls short on women’s health care:

I am not talking about withholding the latest, cutting-edge, exorbitantly priced medications or treatments. No—I’ve had patients whose health insurance doesn’t cover such basic health needs as Pap smears and birth control prescriptions. And forget about having a baby—many insurance policies don’t cover prenatal care or labor and delivery, or they treat pregnancy as a pre-existing condition.

In the Progressive, Mike Ervin reminds us that disability issues are also getting short shrift in the health care debate. Ervin takes aim at a Medicaid system that won’t help until a person is completely destitute. He suggests that a robust public option might be a lifeline before disability erases the savings of a lifetime.

This week, expect the wheeling and dealing on the Baucus Bill to continue behind the scenes as the Finance Committee marks up the legislation before the final committee vote. But with Sen Olympia Snowe’s (R-Maine) 60th vote in doubt, there are rumblings about reviving budget reconciliation as an option for passing a health bill in the senate with a simple majority.

Daily Pulse: It Could Happen to You

2009-09-16T12:52:19-04:00

This article is reprinted in partnership with The Media Consortium, of which RH Reality Check is a member.

Opponents of health care reform are trying to pit the insured against everyone else. Conservative Republicans like Rep. Mike Pence warn that if we get a public option, millions of Americans will lose their private coverage because so many employers will stop offering private insurance. What Pence doesn’t say is that right now, employers can stop providing insurance at any time and their workers will have nothing to fall back on. As costs rise, fewer and fewer employers are providing any health insurance at all.

Most insured people have no idea how fragile their coverage is under the status quo.

The Uptake carries President Obama’s address on the uninsured, in which he hammered home the message that anyone under 65 can lose their coverage at any time. Luckily for those over 65, they have a popular public option, Medicare.

There are lots of ways to become uninsured, including job loss, employers cutting off benefits, or insurers kicking customers off the rolls. As Obama said:

Over the last twelve months, nearly six million more Americans lost their health coverage – that’s 17,000 men and women every single day. We’re not just talking about Americans in poverty, either – we’re talking about middle-class Americans. In other words, it can happen to anyone. And based on a brand-new report from the Treasury Department, we can expect that about half of all Americans under 65 will lose their health coverage at some point over the next ten years.

It’s common knowledge that insurance companies drop customers with preexisting conditions and cut paying customers off when they get sick. It might surprise you to learn that domestic violence counts as a preexisting condition in many states.

Amie Newman of RH Reality Check reports that the insurance industry figured out what feminists have been saying for decades: Once a man becomes a batterer, chances are he’ll continue to abuse his wife with increasing brutality. If you’re a human being, that’s an outrage and a tragedy. If you’re a conscience-free health insurance provider, it’s a big red flag to drop victims because their wounds will cost you money. This is the logic of for-profit health insurance in a microcosm: Identify the most vulnerable and purge them because they hurt your bottom line.

Meanwhile, the Senate Finance Committee is set to unveil its long-awaited bill today. The committee will vote on the bill next week. We’ll examine the bill in tomorrow’s Pulse.

After a seemingly endless quest for a bipartisan bill, Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont) is signaling that he’s prepared to move ahead without GOP support. Good thing, too. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) swears he’s serious about bipartisanship, according to the Iowa Independent, but he spent the summer telling tall tales of death panels and fundraising as an opponent of “Obamacare.” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one potential Republican swing vote, now says she rejects the very idea of public/private competition, according to Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly.

Finally, you can use the Washington Independent’s new Public Option Scoreboard to keep track of every senator’s position, based on their public statements.

Daily Pulse: Obama's Health Care Speech

2009-09-10T15:13:35-04:00

This article comes to RH Reality Check through The Media Consortium, of which we are a member organization.

Last night, President Obama laid out his vision for health care reform before a special joint session of Congress. The pillars of his plan are: i) Curbing the worst abuses of private insurance, ii) Requiring everyone to have insurance, iii) Insurance exchanges, which are basically government websites where customers can order insurance off a “menu” of plans, the idea being that if tens of millions of people order the #2 Combo, everyone’s lunch will be cheaper.

The president made it clear that the country can’t afford to wait for reform. Last night, he took on the self-proclaimed fiscal conservatives who claim that they oppose reform because it would increase the deficit. “Put simply, our health care problem is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close,” Obama said. The president reminded the audience that each of us pays a “hidden tax” of $1000 dollars a year to subsidize charity and emergency care for the uninsured.

It was an impressive performance, but as John Nichols of the Nation observes, it was hardly a rousing, “to-the-barricades” oration:

Obama still talked about “options” and “choices.” But he suggested that they would be offered mainly by insurance companies that would be enjoy “incentives”—i.e., new streams of taxpayer dollars—if they agree to abide by consumer-friendly regulations and come up with strategies for covering more of the uninsured.

The president expressed support for a very limited public option, a kind of welfare program that only about 5% of Americans would choose to join. This is not the public option his liberal supporters had in mind. It’s non-threatening to the insurance companies, though. Private insurers love the idea of the government low-grading the insurance pool and taking on the sickest people who can’t get coverage anywhere else. That means private insurers can make even more money off the remaining healthy, paying customers.

James Ridgeway of Mother Jones is even less optimistic, “As for the public option, that’s pretty clearly gone down the drain.”

One GOP legislator decided that a joint session of Congress was basically a town hall with the president. Rep. Joe Wilson (SC) screamed “You lie!” when the president explained, for the umpteenth time that undocumented immigrants will not be covered. As with the town halls, Wilson’s performance had a whiff astroturf about it. Sure enough, Sue Sturgis of Raw Story found that Wilson pocketed over $2 million in campaign contributions from the health care industry.

The president also reminded America that health care reform will not pay for abortions. (For more on myth-making around women’s health, see Laurie Rubiner’s excellent post at RH Reality.)

Instead of presenting a vision and asking Congress to line up behind him, the president stressed that he was synthesizing a compromise position incorporating ideas from the left and the right. Instead of a coherent vision, the president’s scheme sounds more like a last-ditch compromise plan to enable him to declare victory. Like many Democrats, the president seems to be confusing the strategic with the expedient. If “reform” means saddling ordinary Americans with expensive mandatory insurance without a meaningful public option to keep costs in check he could doom the electoral fortunes of the Democrats for years to come.