Americans want health care reform with a strong public option, as poll after poll after poll has shown. So we might expect that if roughly 70% of Americans want the public option, 70 US senators would line up to vote for the kind of solid, cost-effective legislation that will soon come out of the Senate HELP Committee. Unfortunately, even with the Democratic caucus soon to hit 60 votes in the Senate, we still don’t know where many Democrats stand on the critical question of support for a strong public option.

Democrats who waver on this issue need to hear our voices telling them to stand with President Obama and their party’s leadership to back a strong public option. Pressure from constituents can help make the difference in this battle.

One of those wavering Democrats is Arksansas Senator Blanche Lincoln, and a group of activists have come together to air ads telling her to support the public option. Please consider making a donation to help them place these ads, and be sure to vote for your favorite ad of the three they’re considering.

Why target Lincoln? Two reasons: “Blanche Lincoln is on the health sub-committee of the Senate Finance Committee and she’s running for re-election in 2010.”

John Amato and Jane Hamsher have more background on the campaign.

Please consider donating. The fight over a public option is critical for building a progressive mandate to govern, for Democrats’ electoral chances, for public debate over the role of government in our country, and for defining the role of grassroots progressives in the current political climate.

To expand on that last point, all the good guys are playing an important role right now - the President, Senators Kennedy, Dodd, and others, think tanks and organizations in DC like the Center for American Progress and Campaign for America’s Future, unions like SEIU and the groups in the AFL-CIO coalition, and brave progressives in the House. Grassroots activists have their own unique but crucial role to play: criticizing and pressuring the wavering Democrats that others cannot openly target. Supporting grassroots campaigns like this is the best way that citizen activists can affect the debate and support progressive champions and causes at this pivotal moment.

Today, Health Care for America Now released a short (well, 40 page) report [pdf] on insurance industry abuses. It’s not new information per se, more of a compendium of insurance industry bad practices over the last few years.

The list of abuses covered in the document is criminal. Here’s the table of contents:

• Insurers Leave Patients with High Out-of-Pocket Costs
• Insurers Deny Coverage for Medically Necessary Care
• Insurers Discriminate Against Women
• Insurers Wrongly Drop People’s Coverage
• Insurers Scam People Through Marketing Abuses
• Insurers Defraud Taxpayers
• Insurers Reward Employees for Denying Coverage
• Insurers Export Dollars Over State Lines to Help Affiliated Companies
• Insurers Reward CEOs for Bad Practices
• Insurers Deny Emergency Care
• Insurers Overcharge Small Businesses
• Insurers Collude With Some Providers to Drive Up Prices
• Insurers Prevent Doctors from Delivering Care They Feel Is Best for Their Patients
• Insurers Delay Reimbursement to Patients and Providers
• Insurers Deny Rural Americans Good Coverage
• Insurers Oppose Steps to Create Health Security

To add to this, just yesterday, the insurance industry admitted under oath in Congress to dropping people’s coverage when they got sick. That practice is illegal, and yet they do it anyway. Watch:

It is insane that Members of Congress, after seeing all this, still defend the insurance industry. They still bellyache that the industry won’t be able to compete with a public health insurance option. And they refuse to give you the choice to drop the criminal insurance industry if you want to.

It’s galling that Congress can be so in the pocket of the insurance industry when faced with these criminal abuses. It’s galling that Congress still trusts them to provide health care to most of America, and is actively working to weaken a public health insurance option with triggers or co-ops. These companies cannot be trusted, period, and we Americans should have the right to choose to get out from under their thumb if we want.

Add in the latest polls and this gets way worse. Yesterday, NBC and the Wall Street Journal found that 76% of Americans support the choice of a public health insurance option. Anyone who is against this is putting profits before people.

That’s what this is about - choice. Do you trust the insurance industry? If not, why are you forced to buy their products and live by their rules? Shouldn’t you be able to vote with your feet and choose something else?

If you think so, email your Members of Congress and ask them where they stand on a public health insurance option and what kind of public option they stand for. It’s crucially important we get these answers.

(Sometimes the only reasonable response to farcical world events is humor - ed.)

Various agencies and periodicals reported on June 12 that 13, or maybe 17, Uighur (pronounced wee-gurr) prisoners from the camp at Guantanamo Bay will be resettled in the Pacific island republic of Palau. The men, who are from Xinjiang province in western China, speak a Turkic language. They were “captured” by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001. Probably they had come to the area to train for attacks against Chinese police and officials.

In 2008 the Bush administration decided after a mere seven years in captivity that the Uighurs were not “enemy combatants” as far as the U.S. was concerned. But if they were sent back to China, they would surely be treated even worse than they were in Gitmo. Hence a search began for some place that would take them; after 100 countries refused, the quest ended with a warm reception by a “tropical tourist getaway,” Palau. Life there, among some 20,000 mostly Christian inhabitants, will be a little different from what the Uighurs knew before 2001. Urumqi, the dusty capital of Xinjiang province, is known as “the most remote city from any sea in the world.”

Obviously this occasion calls for a song, so here it is.

Wastin’ Away not in Uighurville (lyrics by R. Thurston, with apologies to Jimmy Buffett)

Wastin’ away I’m not in Uighurville
Where are my lost camels and sand?
Some people say Mr. Obama’s to blame
But I recognize Dick Cheney’s hand

Wastin’ away and it’s not Uighurville
Can’t go home now I’m banned
In Kabul they sold me
To Cuba they told me
But Gitmo was not quite the real promised land

Wastin’ away and not in Uighurville
My AK’s not at hand
They say I’m in Palau
And where the hell’s that now?
Their pig meat is not the food I had planned

Wastin’ away I’m far from Uighurville
Wishin’ for that old Taliban
My guards are all meanies
They’re wearing bikinis
Somehow it’s just not Afghanistan.

The American Medical Association is now saying it is willing to collude with insurance industry near-monopolies in an effort to prevent real competition and choice from entering the marketplace in the form of a public health insurance option:

Nielsen also said doctors and insurers need to change their “wildly adversarial” relationship marked by lawsuits over reimbursement rates and other issues. That’s prevented sharing patient data and ranking doctor performance that could help improve care and hold down costs, she said.

“Doctors are dispirited and depressed and it is going to take a lot to try to make them listen to their better angels and have trust where trust has not been rewarded in the past,” Nielsen said in a speech at the meeting, held by America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s trade group.

Obama said in a June 3 letter to the Senate Finance and Health committees that a government plan would help reduce the number of uninsured people.

“This will give them a better range of choices, make the health-care market more competitive and keep insurance companies honest,” Obama wrote.

That, right there, is the basic conflict. The AMA (which hardly represents the view of all doctors) and the insurance industry say we should trust them. They will use their market monopolies to make sure everything is ok for us, the little guy. Should we trust them? Or should we force them to make everything right by us by making them compete.

I think the history of the insurance industry and the AMA speaks for itself.

(also posted at the NOW! blog)

Since I heard that Dr. George Tiller was murdered, I have been thinking about how to respond to this outrage.  I have been doing some writing, arguing that it is past time for supposedly responsible leaders in the Republican party to renounce incendiary rhetoric that equates abortion with murder and provides a justification for those who kill doctors.  Another thing we can do is support health care providers who make sure women get safe medical care, and support the activists who defend womens’ rights.  There’s a great event on June 25 that gives you the chance to do both of these things–it’s Choice USA’s Generation to Generation celebration.  Choice USA is an organization dedicated to developing young pro-choice leaders on college campuses and in communities.  (Full disclosure–my wife is a board member).

Anyways, if you’re in DC and want to come by to support Choice USA’s work, it’s Thursday, June 25 at 6:30 pm at the K Street lounge, 1301 K Street, NW.  Tickets are $50, so hopefully that doesn’t break the bank–all proceeds go directly to supporting Choice USA’s trainings and programs for young activists.  You can check out more information here.

Seeing as politicians have largely agreed that the public health insurance option will be part of reform in some way or another (see: Republicans looking for compromises on the issue, though it’s not a real compromise), a lot of talk has turned to how to pay for health care reform.

It’s a good question, but there’s also a good answer. And that answer is largely what President Obama ran on during the campaign: tax the rich just a little bit more.

The Center for Tax Justice has released a report called “Progressive Revenue Options to Fund Health Care Reform,” [pdf] which Health Care for America Now is supporting. The report proposes a wealth of options to pay for health reform that don’t involve, say, taxing your employer health benefits.

Here’s how we could raise $1 trillion+ with progressive policies, in convenient chart form:

If you want (lots) more detail, avail yourself of the full report.

This all fits in within the larger framework of shared responsibility. Everyone should shoulder the burden of health care costs. Individuals should pay based on their ability to pay (no free rides), business should either help provide their employees with health care or pay the government to provide it for them, and government should chip in to make health care accessible and affordable. To add to that, those of us in society with the most should pay a bit more to give health care to those of us with the least.

The taxes we’re talking about here are not onerous: 1% more for the Medicare tax. 8% for capital gains. And eliminating loopholes and giveaways to big business. It’s time these levels of society paid their fair share.

(also posted at the NOW! blog)

Sometimes Republican hypocrisy is so rank, so unbridled, so lacking in self-awareness, that it takes your breath away.  I am no fan of Nancy Pelosi’s, but the way Republicans have attacked her is a case study in utterly sanctimonious false outrage–a “manufactured hissy fit” as Digby aptly puts it.  Republicans charge that Speaker Pelosi slandered the CIA by saying the agency lied about waterboarding.  House minority leader John Boehner declared that Pelosi should either prove her claim or else apologize to the CIA.  Accusing the CIA of lying, he and other Republicans gravely intone, is a despicable slur.

As Steve Benen and others have observed, the first problem for the Republicans is that some in their own ranks have slurred the CIA in the same terms.  Boehner ended up agreeing with one of his own Republican colleagues who, like Pelosi, accused the CIA of lying.

This is head-spinning stuff, and it is well worth it for Steve Benen, Think Progress, and Digby to point out that Republicans have engaged in exactly the same conduct that they say marks Pelosi as a miscreant.

But the hypocrisy runs deeper still.  Boehner yelped that Pelosi had better prove her claim against the CIA, as if Republicans, models of intellectual honesty that they are, never make any claim without backing it up.  Boehner’s assertion made me think: how many examples are there of Republicans making claims they can’t back up?  How often do they slime people, or groups of people, without bothering to offer a shred of proof?  They dared Pelosi to “prove it”, but exactly the same words can be thrown back in Republicans’ faces in response to the unsupported, utterly unproven claims they casually make at every opportunity.  Here’s a partial list–these are examples only:

• Dick Cheney claims that torture “saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives“.  Prove it, Dick.
• Conversely, Cheney claims that Obama, by rejecting the authoritarian tactics made infamous by Bush-Cheney, has made Americans less safe.  That’s a hell of a thing to say about a sitting president without backing it up.  Perhaps Rep. Boehner will get around to asking Cheney to back up his bluster with proof, now that Boehner has staked out the moral high ground when it comes to responding to unsupported assertions that undermine an American institution.
• Many right-wingers hurl scurrilous, utterly unsupported charges against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.  For instance, elected Republicans have claimed that gay people are a bigger threat than terrorists, the biggest threat America faces.  No proof is ever offered for these outrageously absurd slanders against an entire group of Americans.
• Republicans complain about “activist judges” substituting their own views for the supposedly clear text of the Constitution.  Sen. Orrin Hatch has suggested that some unnamed judges are “partisan“.   Those who attack the courts are content to slander the judiciary and undermine Americans’ confidence in the courts without actually offering specific examples, naming specific judges, or backing up their claims with actual evidence.
• One of the Pelosi attackers, Newt Gingrich, claims that Pelosi has made the nation more vulnerable to nuclear attack.  He doesn’t seem to have gotten around, yet, to offering any concrete basis to undergird his rather breathtaking charge.  (Maybe he was too busy trying to find a way to explain why, when Republican Peter Hoestra accused the CIA of lying, that was no big deal).

So, here’s what I’ve learned from the contrived Pelosi “controversy”: (1) it only matters if a Democrat accuses the CIA of lying.  That exposes the United States to the gravest danger and undermines national security.  If, on the other hand, a Republican accuses the CIA of lying, that is a non-event; and (2) when Democrats make serious claims, especially claims that might put someone in a bad light, they had better be ready to prove their claim in a court of law.  Republicans, on the other hand, are free to slander and slime with impunity.

This is an Orwellian moment.  On Morning Joe today, Joe, Mika, and the rest of the crew were making some dumb joke about a viewer who sent in an email explaining why Willie Geist couldn’t attend charity events.  Joe said that this was a security breach and he might have to waterboard the person who sent the email.  Mika laughed uproariously.

When Wanda Sykes “joked” about Rush Limbaugh being the 20th hijacker on September 11, a chorus of commentators insisted this was off limits.  I agree.  Torture “jokes” are similarly off limits.  Will Joe Scarborough’s attempt to turn torture into a punch line be met with the same response?

America is more open to a public conversation about government regulation of companies than at any time in many, many years. (Yesterday in a discussion with union leaders in a highly regulated industry they could not agree on the starting date for this wave of deregulation. Was it 1965 or 1971?)

Congress is talking about regulating credit cards. Remember, they used to be regulated, state-by-state. Then they all moved to South Dakota or some other lawless place. Now, America wants Congress to start minding the store again. There is strong popular sentiment to outlaw sub-prime mortgage scams and predatory lending practices. The word “predatory” is used openly to describe giant financial companies. Again, Americans want Congress to mind the store.

Yesterday’s “let us do it” letter from big health care industry stakeholders can be seen in this context. They see the regulatory wave growing, and want to be out ahead of it. The only proper response is to step up the call for regulation with teeth. If the industry mends its ways, regulations won’t bother them. If they don’t, the machinery will be in place to act quickly.

We can help people see the need by shining a light on “predatory” practices by insurers. After all, they are financial institutions like banks and credit card companies. Denial of payment should be treated the same as a bank refusing to give you your money. It’s not the insurance company’s money. They are just holding it to pay for my health care.

“Sub-prime” insurance should be outlawed. A policy that does not cover the purchaser is a scam. High-deductible policies are sub-prime. Bare-bones policies are sub-prime. If we don’t demonize them, the other side will describe them as bargains and run a “one size does not fit all” media blitz. If ever there was a time to set a reasonable floor on health coverage, it is right now.

We have to wage this regulatory fight to make the “level playing field” attack less damaging. A public health insurance plan should not have to compete with a high-deductible, low coverage, low premium rip-off plan. The power of the public option is magnified when combined with a strong regulatory wall keeping insurance companies from a big part of their plundering and pillaging business model.

We should join the industry in the call for a “specific focus on obesity prevention commensurate with the scale of the problem.” A good place to start is corporate fat cats and bloated bureaucracies. The recent Georgetown/RWJ study [pdf] shows people can’t figure out their policies, can’t figure out what is covered and what isn’t, and can’t estimate what the real costs will be. They call for truth in packaging. We should add strong content standards.

The public hates insurance companies for a reason. Even Luntz sees it. Turn up the heat on insurance company predatory practices. It’s regulation time for American health care.

Nick Unger works for the AFL-CIO’s health care campaign.

(also posted at the NOW! blog)

The Hill has released their rankings for the most and least bipartisan Senators:

The Hill asked all 99 seated senators which member of the opposing party they most enjoyed partnering with on legislation. The senators were also quizzed (on a not-for-attribution basis) about their least favorite.

Here are the results:

MOST BIPARTISAN

DEMOCRATS
1. Edward Kennedy (Mass.)
2. Tom Carper (Del.)
3. Chris Dodd (Conn.)
4. (tied) Evan Bayh (Ind.)
4. (tied) Tom Harkin (Iowa)

REPUBLICANS
1. Susan Collins (Maine)
2. Olympia Snowe (Maine)
3. Orrin Hatch (Utah)
4. (tied) Richard Lugar (Ind.)
4. (tied) John McCain (Ariz.)

LEAST BIPARTISAN

DEMOCRATS
1. Patrick Leahy (Vt.)
2. Charles Schumer (N.Y.)
3. Chris Dodd (Conn.)
4. Dick Durbin (Ill.)
5. John Kerry (Mass.)

REPUBLICANS
1. Jim Bunning (Ky.)
2. David Vitter (La.)
3. Tom Coburn (Okla.)
4. Jim DeMint (S.C.)
5. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.)

That’s right. Chris Dodd is both the third most bipartisan and least bipartisan. Further proving that the word bipartisan actually has no meaning.