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More on Patients United Now - Their Corporate Funders |
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I just love how all of these opposition groups to President Obama’s health care plan front like they’re real, grassroots organizations. AHIP’s Campaign for an American Solution? Fake! Rick Scott’s Conservatives for Patients’ Rights? Funded with his ill-gotten gains. And now there’s Patients United Now.
As I noted yesterday, Patients United Now (or PUN for short!), is a front group for Americans for Prosperity, a group behind the lobbyist-funded tea parties last month. Igor Volsky at Think Progress has put together some of the history of Americans for Prosperity. Even though on PUN’s website they claim that they are “people just like you,” they are actually just corporate-funded lobbyists:
After orchestrating and funding the so-called Tea Parties movement, Americans for Prosperity — a nationwide front group founded and funded by the right-wing polluter Koch Industries — is launching an ad campaign characterizing President Obama’s effort to reform the health care system as a government take-over that will ration care and care and deny treatments.
Americans for Prosperity is notorious for its fake grassroots efforts, funneling millions of dollars into conservative campaigns designed to undermine Democratic initiatives. As Lee Fang put it, “AFP is a professional AstroTurf machine”:
- Hosted ‘Drill Baby, Drill’ rallies around the country.
- Financed Joe the Plumber’s tour against the Employees’ Free Choice Act and other anti-EFCA rallies.
- Started NoStimulus.com, “a grassroots website that we hope will be a focal point for the widespread frustration ordinary Americans feel at the runaway government growth that we see during good economic times and bad.”
Now we’ve got Joe the Plumber’s backers against health care - oh noes!
I guess these groups have no choice but to astroturf. It’s not popular right now to represent these groups’ real constituencies - corporations. So they have to front like real people are behind them. They’re not, of course. As Media Matters Action Network points out in their point-by-point factcheck of PUN’s ad, health care reform is seen as a necessity by Americans, and they want the plan Obama is proposing.
So, good luck with the astroturf, PUN, you’re going to need it!
(also posted at the NOW! blog)
I stumbled onto your website. I don’t find it independent at all. I look for something that talks about both sides of an issue (there always are) but this website is one sided. Good luck and good bye.
Independent doesn’t mean that both conservative and liberal viewpoints are represented. It means that this site is not owned and operated by any political party, corporation, or other organization. It stands on its own. That being said, The Seminal is without a doubt a progressive group.
Such anger and disgust for “right-winged funded, so-called grassroots” tea parties. It’s irrelevant who funded getting the message out about protesting; the actual protesters weren’t PAID to attend (unlike Congress members who are paid by big business to vote for advantageous business laws). It’s all a sham. … Regarding healthcare: The dollar is already falling as this debate heats up. If 46 million Americans currently don’t have health care, where are they going to go and who’s going to treat them when they do? We don’t have the facilities or healthcare personnel to service 46 million extra people. Where do we get the money to pay for new buildings and new doctors/nurses? And what happens to health care in the meantime?
Arina– You have tapped into the soul of this blog site. They are angry and uninformed, but follow a logic that is illogical and guided by an irrational hatred that they can only defend by killing the messenger. If you peruse the site you will find absolutely vile and corrupt charges, with no factual information, against people that they oppose. I would have never believed it had I not seen it.
Having said that, Rosenbaum, does try, but he is so overwhelmed by the lunacy of the many inflamed minds, he loses some of his effectiveness. However, it appears to me , me is so far Left that he needs a lot of these people as they cannot critically analyze what he says and just become trolls.
Arina - The 46 million uninsured Americans get health care, they just get it in a very inefficient way. They put off treatment until they get really sick, and then they end up in emergency rooms and are paid for by you and me. If they had government-backed insurance and could get regular, preventative healthcare - they would still be paid for by you and me, but at a much lower cost both to their health and our checkbooks.
What Jason and the rest fail to tell you is theat the 46 million Americans without health insurance is really a false statement that furthers their agenda.
“For starters, the statistic does not mean that there are “46 million uninsured Americans,” as the New York Times reported in a recent story on health care, and as is echoed throughout the media. Just a quick look inside the Census Bureau data shows that 9.7 million of the uninsured are not citizens of the United States. Liberals can argue that we still have a moral duty to cover non-citizens, but this doesn’t change the fact that as a matter of accuracy, the Census data only tells us that 36 million Americans are uninsured.” http://spectator.org/archives/2009/03/20/the-myth-of-the-46-million
The article goes on to say that the census counted prople between jobs as having no inusrance for the entire year which just was’t so. The real uninsured figure is probably somewhere around 10 million (still a problem) if we can keep the liberals from trying to inusre illegals in the country. Lets see if hey address that openly.