Recently in Health care Category

by the Medical Advisory Board of Women's Voices For Change

introduction by Dr. Elizabeth Poyner

On Monday evening, the way that we are supposed to recommend breast cancer screening to women was radically shaken to the core and has left many physicians and their patients angered and confused. Mammograms have been one of our great triumphs in the early detection of cancer, resulting in fewer deaths from breast cancer in women over the age of 40 years.

On Monday, a panel of medical experts released their conclusions from a re-analysis of mammogram data, which has been analyzed multiple times before and resulted in our current screening recommendations of yearly mammography for women 40 years and above. This panel has now recommended that for women who are not deemed to be at elevated risk for the disease, screening begin at the age of 50 years and then only every two years thereafter.

They cite unnecessary anxiety in women undergoing mammography and false positive results leading to negative biopsies as problems with screening women under the age of 50. Many women and their physicians are having emotional and visceral reactions to these new recommendations.

My husband, who is a prominent academic breast surgeon in Manhattan, told me bluntly on Monday: "I could fill a room with hundreds of women whose lives were saved by a mammogram under the age of 50 years." It is important to take a step back and really analyze this recommendation, the potential motivating factors behind it, question why we are spending energy reanalyzing old data, and to solicit and review reactions from leaders in breast cancer screening and management.

Thomas M. Kolb, M.D., who opens our discussion below, is widely regarded as a leader in the field of women’s health care and imaging. Continue reading at Women's Voices For Change.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

A Michigan woman threatened a Minnesota newspaper with mass murder for criticizing Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN)’s anti-health reform rally, reports Paul Schmelzer in the Minnesota Independent:

…A woman in Michigan, angered over a newspaper editorial criticizing Bachmann’s event, threatened to take a gun to the paper and “do what they did at Fort Hood” in response.

How pro-life.

David Corn of Mother Jones reports that Bachmann (R-MN) may also face an ethics investigation for using her taxpayer-funded website to promote the Tea Pary-Superbowl of Freedom, a partisan political rally to defeat health care reform. The Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a non-profit political watchdog, alleges that Bachmann violated a House rule against using official websites for “grassroots lobbying or [to] solicit support for a Member’s position.” She literally told her supporters to come to Washington on Nov 5 and tell their representatives to vote against health reform. That’s textbook grassroots lobbying and a clear no-no for a taxpayer-funded website.

Speaking of pesky rules and regulations, Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-MI) C Street residence is no-longer tax exempt. Stupak, who became famous for inserting a radical and far-reaching abortion funding ban into the House health reform bill, lives with several other lawmakers at a house on C Street. The house is owned by a secretive fundamentalist sect known as The Family. For years, C Street avoided paying property taxes by claiming to be a church. All that’s over now. Ed Brayton of the Michigan Messenger reports that the IRS has finally figured out that C Street is a dorm .

Alex Koppelman reports in Salon that Stupak is reiterating his threat to kill health care reform if his language is stripped from the final bill:

“They’re not going to take it out,” Stupak said of Senate Democrats during an appearance on “Fox and Friends” Tuesday morning. “If they do, healthcare will not move forward … At least 10 to 15 to 20 of us will not vote for it.”

At Feministing , Jos Truit discusses the Hyde Amendment, a piece of 1976 legislation that bans the use of federal funds for abortions. The Hyde Amendment is back in the news because Stupak is falsely claiming that his amendment merely applies Hyde principles to health insurance.
Does he know that 45,000 born people die every year because they don’t have health insurance?

The fight over abortion coverage in a reformed health care system is far from over. It’s unlikely that Reid wrote Stupak language into his version of the bill, and it’s equally unlikely that anti-choicers have the 60 votes to add it back in as an amendment. (Contrary to popular belief, the Senate is much more pro-choice than the House.) Anti-choice Dems Sens. Ben Nelson and Bob Casey seem to be walking back from their earlier threats to vote against a bill without Stupak language.

Harry Reid announced that Democrats would meet today to preview the Senate’s version of the health care bill. The first procedural vote on the Senate bill could come before Thanksgiving.

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.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

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.)

As a woman, as a feminist, my first though on the health care bill's abortion restriction is that no one should be able to restrict access to medical care due to ideological reasons.

My second thought is that although the restriction sucks, it sucks monumentally less than our current health care system. 

As written in the AP Wire piece by writers Phil Elliott, Alan Fram and Erica Werner: "As drafted, the measure denied the use of federal subsidies to purchase abortion coverage in policies sold by private insurers in the new insurance exchange, except in cases of incest, rape or when the life of the mother was in danger."

In a bill that will reportedly cover 96% of Americans, (though there is no word on whether or not the left out 4% will be members of the poorer classes), these are restrictions I think we can all live with.

Would it be a good thing to cover all abortions?  I can't answer that, I've never had or needed one, and I think my perspective would change if I did.  What is more important to me than that, is that insurers cover birth control.  That they cover preventative doctor's visits.  That they cover vasectomies, tubal ligations, and hysterectomies.  That they cover prenatal and postnatal care.  That they cover assistance for mothers with postpartum depression.  That they cover classes in early childhood care and nutrition.  That they cover vaccinations, breast feeding consultants, rape counseling, well-baby checkups, and all those things which turn emergency rooms into primary care physicians.

Would it be a good thing to cover all abortions?  Maybe.  But for right now, it's not going to happen.  We have to live within the reality we have, and strive to make better that which we dislike about that reality.  And if we have to take it in baby steps, at least now we know those babies can see a doctor if they need one.

Hey Feministing Community!

I'm trying to find some information on how midwifery and other alternative birthing options are treated in all the health care reform bills, but finding comparisons about this topic is proving difficult.

Anyone know of any resources that could be useful?

Thanks!

The folks at Raising Women's Voices have put together a wonderful fact sheet about what women's issues are at stake with health care reform. It outlines specifics about what women want in health care, and whether or not the bills in the House and Senate will help us or hurt us.

Check it out!

It's under "Our Publications" in the Resources tab on our webpage raisingwomensvoices.net

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

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.

Here in Chicago, we're thrilled with a recent victory for health care access!

On October 7, the Chicago City Council passed an ordinance establishing a buffer zone outside all medical facilities to protect health care workers, volunteers, and patients from harassment and obstruction.

A week earlier, the Chicago City Council Human Relations Committee passed an the ordinance, sponsored by Aldeman Vi Daley (D-43), to create a 50-foot zone outside the entrance health clinics and hospitals, an area in which all individuals would need permission to come within 8 feet of another person. Violations would result in a fine of up to $500. The full City Council then voted 28-13 in favor of the ordinance. Here is a list of how all the Chicago aldermen voted on the measure.

People seeking medical care at health facilities that perform abortions often face protesters outside, some of whom use intimidating and threatening tactics . In fact, Planned Parenthood of Illinois reports a significant increase in the number and aggressiveness of protesters since the May 2009 assassination of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas. The buffer zone ordinance is intended to protect patients as well as staff and volunteers from any form of harassment. Meanwhile, the zone still preserves the right to free speech by allowing people to protest peacefully from a safe distance.

Accessing health care can be a challenge for men and women of all ages. I work for an adolescent health advocacy organization, and we know that youth, in particular, often face many hurdles to access sexual and reproductive health care -- insurance coverage, transportation, and confidentiality, to name a few. Creating a safe environment outside medical buildings -- free of physical obstruction and verbal harassment -- is crucial for adolescents.

Mayor Richard Daley has now agreed to sign the new ordinance into law. Thank you, Mayor Daley and the City Council, for protecting the rights of all people, including youth, to gain safe access to health care.

Samhita mentioned in her "What We Missed" yesterday the latest in the series of shockingly horrible pre-existing condition injustice stories in the news recently. A woman went uninsured for three years because she sought treatment after she was raped, was prescribed a anti-AIDS medication as a precaution, and later found it was impossible to find an insurance company that would cover her .

In case you've lost track (because I know I did at one point), let's recap. Being a victim of domestic violence can be considered a pre-existing condition. Having had a previous C-section can be a pre-existing condition (unless, of course, you get sterilized ). Just being pregnant can be a pre-existing condition (or, if you're lucky, maybe you'll be able to buy an expensive rider for maternity coverage). Seeking treatment (for mental health problems or HIV/AIDS) after a rape can be a pre-existing condition. And if you've managed to get coverage after all that, you'll probably have to pay more for your plan simply because you are woman .

The National Women's Law Center has launched a stellar campaign, Being a Woman is Not a Pre-Existing Condition , to call attention to these gender disparities and mobilize women to support health care reform that meets their needs. The website and accompanying report are worth a read. They include some pretty outrageous stats--such as the fact that in most states a female non-smoker is charged more for health insurance than a male smoker and only 13% of health plans offer maternity coverage. The message is loud and undeniable: health care reform is clearly a feminist issue.

Inevitably, in reporting on the NWLC's campaign, some have framed it as Battle of the Sexes . Which, of course, is silly and inaccurate. A lot of the problems with our current health insurance system are gendered. And women are getting really screwed over. But it's important to remember that the solutions--God willing--won't be. As usual when we're talking about gender equality, when women win, everyone--women, men, and whole families--benefits.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

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."

I'm not sure about you, but watching abortion coverage become the catch-all phrase for the "evils" of health care reform and hearing about how insurance companies classify cesareans as "pre-existing" conditions has made me pretty frustrated with the whole health care reform process.

Which is why I'm so excited that for the October 20 National Health Care Day of Action,  Planned Parenthood of New York City is asking folks to send in photos of themselves holding up a sign saying what they want to see in health care reform. PPNYC will be posting the photos online, on facebook, and sending them in to Congress, so the your representatives will have to (virtually) look you in the eye as you tell them that yes, you really do want coverage for contraception, cancer screenings, emergency contraception, visiting your local health clinic or even for getting an abortion.

Check out the examples up on the PPNYC blog , and then download the sign & permission slip to send your photo in too!

I recently read in the newspaper that the Planned Parenthood clinic where I used to go to receive my yearly Pap smears and contraceptives on E. Washington St. in Springfield is now performing abortions. To be exact, they are not performing surgical abortions, they are only dispensing the RU-486 abortion pill, which is given to women in very early stages of pregnancy who wish to terminate. I was pleased to see that this particular clinic was broadening its services to women. This will help more women receive the reproductive healthcare that they need without having to travel long distances to Champaign or Granite City. The RU-486 pill is also a much easier, cheaper, and less invasive method of ending a pregnancy than the surgical methods. Women can receive this medication from medical personnel at the Planned Parenthood clinic and return home to go through their termination in the privacy of their own home, where it is much like just having a very heavy menstrual period. However, at the same time I read something else in the newspaper that disturbed me--letters to the editor from people already bemoaning this new service at the Planned Parenthood clinic and calling out for people to begin protesting outside of the clinic. There is a big problem with family-planning clinic protestors--they are often rude, harrassful, and unpredictable. And they also assume that every woman entering the clinic is there to have an abortion. The majority of women coming to Planned Parenthood clinics are there to receive Pap smears, contraception, and STD testing, not abortions. Millions of women come to Planned Parenthood to receive their basic reproductive health services because they do not have health insurance and cannot afford to see a regular gynecologist. Before I became employed full-time and got health insurance through my employer, I too went to Planned Parenthood for my gynecological needs where I could receive these services for a reduced fee. The women who do come to Planned Parenthood to receive abortion services are almost always in the early stages of pregnancy where it is impossible for bystanders to tell if they are pregnant or not. (Contrary to what many anti-choice people may say, women do NOT walk into Planned Parentood with big 6-month pregnant bellies seeking abortions.) Therefore, the people protesting outside of these clinics really cannot distinguish between which women are there to have an abortion and which ones are there just to get a yearly Pap smear. So they harrass & intimidate EVERYONE who comes to these clinics. Imagine walking into a women's clinic just to receive your annual pelvic exam and having to listen to complete strangers scream at you, call you a whore, slut, and a murderer, and perhaps even physically block you from walking in the door!! Now that I have great health insurance from my employer, I no longer visit Planned Parenthood for my reproductive health services. However, after reading the asinine letters that these people wrote to the Editor, I'm thinking that I just might return to Planned Parenthood for my healthcare needs just to see if any sidewalk protestor will dare to say something to me on my way in....because any looney sidewalk protestor that dares to jump to conclusions and harrass me is going to quickly have MY face right up in THEIR face!! At the very least, I'm seriously considering volunteering as an entrance escort during my free time so that I can help provide at least some sense of security and dignity for the women entering the clinic for whatever reason. Everyone is entitled to express their opinion regarding abortion...but the privacy of a doctor's office is neither the time nor the place to do so!!

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.

As a second year medical student, many times in Pharmacology class I learn to have contempt for so-called “alternative medicines.” Lecturers usually make two points: 1) the alternative medicines that have been tested are no more efficacious than placebo, and 2) alternative medicines are not regulated by the FDA, and hence may contain less or more than the therapeutic level, or worse, be contaminated. I agree with both points. This attitude about alternative medicines is not limited to the pharmacology of herbal drugs, but it is also the way conventional Western doctors view therapies like Acupuncture, Chiropractic, Reiki, etc. I agree that many of these treatments are not shown to be more effective than placebo for treating a particular disease. Yet, I myself use a very Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) treatment on myself. What follows is an explanation for how I can incorporate these seemingly contradictory thoughts in my life.

Some of my classmates wonder why many Americans spend so much money on CAM when CAM “doesn’t work.” I have an answer for them, and it starts with my personal story. I grew up in Bangladesh where the holistic Ayurvedic system is embedded in the culture, even though the predominant medical system follows a Western model. When I suffered from acne, my family would tell me to “keep my digestive system clean, drink lots of water, etc.” Being a typical teenager, I scoffed at these suggestions. Once we came to America, my acne got worse, and I finally saw a Dermatologist and took Tetracycline for about 7 months. A couple of years later, my acne flared back, and this time I took Doxycycline for a year. Meanwhile, I learned that studies have shown that diet has no link to acne, so I had found even more reason to disregard Mom’s advice on chocolate and coffee. The antibiotic therapies worked, but I was concerned about the effects of such long-term antibiotic therapy on other bodily functions. In medical school, I used birth-control pills instead of antibiotics for my acne for a while, then stopped using any medication once my skin was reasonably clear.

I am a fat woman and I have been fat most of my life. I have my issues with my weight, but overall I believe that fat people (especially women) are unfairly treated in western culture, and the health care system is no exception. I have suffered the humiliations of going to the doctor as a fat woman more times than I care to remember. For me, going to the doctor - even if it is for something completely unrelated to my body size, like a hurt shoulder - means being stripped down to nothing more than body fat. I am reduced to a child; a complete moron who must not know anything about weight loss or nutrition or exercise and who desperately needs a talking-to by the nurse/physician's assistant/doctor or whatever other self-righteous health professional is seeing me that day.

This problem is always worse when I am seeing a new doctor for the first time. I moved to the UK a couple of weeks ago to start a master's program in Gender and International Relations. It has been great so far. However, today I had to go to the (free!) student health centre to get me some birth control pills. I was prepared for some bullshit, given my past experience, but my reaction was no better than any time before. I sat down with the nurse who checked my height and weight, determined my BMI and then started in on me.

"Oh my, your BMI is high. I think I will sign you up to see the nutritionist, she can help you figure out some better eating choices. And have you thought about signing up for the gym here on campus?"

And on, and on. 1) How the fuck does she know how I eat? I could live on salad and water for all she knows. In fact, I have before. 2) I am already signed up for the gym and I just came from a workout there. Her assumptions that I have never heard about weight loss/exercise/nutrition before, that a fat woman cannot possibly be active or eat well, or that it has never occurred to me that I am fat is just mind-boggling to me.

But here's the kicker:

"Women with a BMI over 30 are advised not to take oral contraceptives in the United Kingdom, so you are going to need to choose another method of birth control."

WOW. I was stunned. No doctor I have ever seen has implemented this rule with me before. I realize there are risks associated with taking the pill, especially for fat women, older women, and women who smoke. Those risks are rare and I am an adult who can make that decision on my own. I cannot believe they won't let me have the pill. Apparently it is some kind of rule in the UK that completely discriminates against fat women. It is ridiculous, but I have decided to just have my home prescription shipped to me here because I wouldn't want to go back to that place again anyway.

Overall, the way this woman spoke to me was astounding. It's as though because I am fat, I was stripped of my agency as an adult woman. She had no respect for me, and you could hear in her voice that she thought I was just some idiot who let herself go and has no idea how to eat or what to do to lose weight or just be healthy. She knew nothing about me. She didn't know that I have been on every diet and read every book about nutrition/weight loss I could get my hands on since I was 10 years old, and that I am therefore probably on par with the nutritionist when it comes to knowledge about this stuff. She didn't know that I have lost close to 75 pounds over the last three years. She had no clue that I need to be on the pill to keep me from having one, long period due to issues with my reproductive cycle. In her eyes, I was reduced to an alarmingly simple being, because I am fat.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

This week's biggest health care story shouldn't even be making headlines: Democratic leaders in the Senate are finally pressuring the entire caucus to help bring a health care bill to the floor by sticking with the party on procedural motions. Astute readers will ask: "But aren't Senators supposed to stick with their party on procedural motions?" Yes, of course they are.

Health care reform is the Democrats' biggest political battle in two generations and the crown jewel of the president's domestic agenda. It's hardly unreasonable to demand that Senate Democrats side with their party to defeat a filibuster.

Democrats knew Republicans would filibuster a health care bill no matter what. So the central political question was how to thwart them. The options were: Pick off enough Republican votes to defeat a filibuster, pass the bill with a simple majority through budget reconciliation, or demand that all 60 Democratic senators vote as a bloc to defeat a filibuster. (These senators could still vote against the bill, if they so chose, but without a filibuster the bill would pass by majority vote.) The first strategy failed spectacularly, and the second was controversial and difficult to execute. The last option is the simplest and most obvious. It's scandalous that it took Senate leadership all summer to lay down the law.

...because right now, a lot is on the line.

Sup y’all,

Well, I was knocked on my behind this week by the flu (of the regular, not swine, variety), and, since I couldn’t really do anything other than lie in bed and watch daytime television, I did a lot of thinking about health care and how important it is.

I took my coughing, sniffling self to the doctor, and subsequently acquired medication that got me all healthy in no time flat. It was a simple and inexpensive affair, and here I am, a few days later, back at work, good as new. It sounds crazy because it’s so basic, but I am very, very lucky. You see, I am fortunate enough to have both health insurance and access to affordable health care, but for the 46 million Americans without health insurance , this is nothing short of a pipe dream. And for the 45,000 Americans who die every year because of lack of health insurance , this is nothing short of a tragedy.

And that, frankly, really pisses me off.

I am also fortunate enough to have abortion coverage in my health insurance and a stable enough income to be able to pay out of pocket for an abortion if I happened to have a plan that didn’t cover it.

Like I said, I am really, really lucky. I hope never to have to utilize this privilege, but I sure am grateful it’s there.

The problem is, access to health care shouldn’t be a privilege, and neither should access to abortion and other reproductive services. My ability to easily acquire a full range of care should be the norm, not the lucky anomaly.

Unfortunately, it’s about to get a whole lot worse.

Anti-choice extremists are trying desperately to make abortion as inaccessible as possible for ALL American women. They are not just trying to deny uninsured women access to reproductive care. They’re fighting to eliminate abortion coverage in ALL plans – including private plans - within the insurance exchange. If they are successful, access to abortion will basically be obliterated in health care reform, and without access, THERE IS NO CHOICE. After all, they don’t need to try to criminalize abortion if they can just eliminate all avenues through which women can acquire it.

Women CANNOT be worse off in health care reform than they are now. I’m simply not willing to stand by and let that happen. It’s why I work at Planned Parenthood and why I’m a supporter, and I know that’s why you all are supporters, too.

So what can we do?

Right now we’re asking people to use our health reform awareness graphic as their social networking profile image, to raise awareness and stand in solidarity with those who are fighting to make sure that health care reform leaves nobody out.

We’re also asking you to call your senators , and call them a lot. Call them today, call them tomorrow, call them next week, and call them every week, until Congress passes health care reform that protects EVERYBODY. Seriously, guys, we need your voice more than ever on this one, and the link above will patch you right through to your appropriate representative and make it easy to figure out what to say.

And of course, please tell your friends , family, neighbors, pizza delivery guy, everyone you know to call too. Share this on your Facebook Wall, or send it to your friends. We need everybody on board.

So, suffice it to say, we might be bothering you a lot in the next few weeks. Sorry – but it’s what has to be done. We need to be louder than anti-choice extremists. We need to be relentless. And we need to let them know we’re not going to settle, not going to back down while they try to trample the rights of over half the population. We are American women, men, and families. We want access to health care, and we want it now. This country deserves nothing less, and they’re counting on us.

Thanks everyone!

Kendall at Planned Parenthood Action Fund

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

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 .

*trigger warning*

I've been reading posts on the feministing website for about a year now and have seen several post relating to this issue so I hope I can get some of your input.

Some back-story: I have recently started seeing a therapist because of depression and one of the issues that came up was the fact that I was raped when I was 16 (I am now 21) by my cousin. I had never discussed it with anyone, not with my family or with any friends. What I literally said was that I had had 'a bad experience with a male family member'. My therapist then asked if he did something against my will and I said yes and had a panic attack immediatly after. After I had calmed down we discussed it further and I said it was hard to see him at family functions because he stills makes comments about it under his breath (like: I want to pleasure you again).

My therapist then said: does he know he did something wrong? This made me feel really defeated because it seemed like she was trying to excuse his behavior. I said yes and after that our time was up.

Now I'm home and having really weird feelings about her reaction. Am I being too sensitive and was this just a misunderstanding, can I keep seeing this therapist? The whole therapy thing is new (this was my second session) and I didn't feel assertive enough in the situation to speak up. Any advice/similar stories would be greatly appreciated.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

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?

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 .

It's been a rough couple days for health care reform as the Senate Finance Committee marked up its bill. Women's health dodged a couple bullets on Wednesday as the first two anti-choice amendments to come up for a vote were defeated . But I'm appalled they were even on the agenda. Add to that the defeat of the public option and the restoration of millions of dollars for abstinence-only programs , and there's plenty to be angry about.

One of the amendments voted down prohibited all private health plans involved in the government exchange from covering abortion. The proposal would have let women pay extra for a supplemental “rider” that would cover abortion (in case they planned ahead for an unintended pregnancy, I guess.) The other, a so-called "conscious clause," would have expanded existing "opt-out" laws, allowing entire insurance companies to refuse to cover abortion on principle.

I cannot believe we've gotten to a point where women could actually lose reproductive health coverage after reform. Abortion rights advocates have already compromised a whole lot. They didn't try to use reform to reverse the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal funding of abortion through Medicaid, even though it's an outrage. They've agreed to ensure that federal funds are not used to pay for abortions by private insurance companies participating in the exchange by segregating the government subsidies from private premiums and co-pays. The fact that the anti-choice minority in Congress is pushing to further restrict abortion access--and cause millions of middle- and low-income women to lose the abortion coverage they currently have --is absurd. And President Obama's lack of strong leadership on the issue is a huge disappointment.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

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.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

Howard Dean on Health Care Reform: Daily Pulse Video Exclusive from Lindsay Beyerstein on Vimeo.

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 .

Steve Crow, a New Zealand porn importer, producer, director, and creater of Boobs on Bikes, Erotica Expo, and owner of Uncensored Magazine, has had a cry over the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation unwillingness to partake in his attempt at credibility by rejecting his $5000 "donation" (in exchange for 100 women taking off their tops at his expo) and promptly given the money to Clitoraid (a shonky looking organisation run by Raelian, with the money funding a procedure that is apparently total BS.)

"The NZ breast cancer foundation's refusal to accept the donation on the grounds that it is 'morally unethical' is surely a case of discrimination and hypocrisy toward an organization that merely seeks to gain a wider acceptance of sexuality and break down antiquated social taboos." declares Mark Woodgate, Clitoraid's representative in NZ

What Woodgate, and almost every other New Zealander I have discussed this with so far (and most alarmingly, quite a few feminists), don't seem to realise is it is dirty money. It's not about discrimination (although, I laughed at that. Irony, anyone?), so much as not taking money from a man who makes said money off the backs of exploited and mutilated women (the main attraction at Boobs on Bikes and Erotica will be Chelsea Charms). Trying to help women by breaking down gender norms with money made from an industry that relies on these norms to stay in place and intensify, is like SAFE taking money from the pork industry.

HOWEVER, what makes this even better is that Steve Crow donated this money AFTER I (and several others) questioned his actions on a facebook group.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

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.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

The public option remains in limbo. The Senate Finance Committee is fine-tuning the bill it unveiled last week, which does not include a public option. However, Brian Beutler of TPM reports that Democrats have already submitted three separate amendments that might add a public option.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) submitted what he calls a "level playing field" amendment, which would, incongruously, create a public option that couldn't set its own rates. A second amendment submitted by Schumer and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) would create a public option much like that outlined the HELP Committee bill. Finally, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) submitted an amendment that would create a robust public option, much like the one originally drafted in the House.

It's pretty clear that no bill containing a public option in its first draft will get 60 votes in the senate. However, as Beutler reports in a second TPM piece, the Democrats are seriously revisiting the prospect of using budget reconciliation to get a health care bill through the senate with a simple majority. However, Beutler explains that Democrats are reluctant to go the reconciliation route because senate rules restrict the kind of bill that can be passed through reconciliation. For example, only provisions that "materially affect" spending can be passed through reconciliation. But what qualifies as a material effect?

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

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.

by Karina
Web Editor
Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota Action Fund

As you may remember, Planned Parenthood Action fund held a visibility event prior to President Obama’s visit in Minneapolis this past Saturday for a health care reform rally at the Target Center. While I was there, I interviewed Tim Stanley, Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota Action Fund about why Planned Parenthood chose to hold a visibility event, and what Planned Parenthood’s role is in the health care reform debate. Check it out!

After the visibility event, many of our supporters headed inside to see President Obama speak and attend the rally. Check out this video , shot from the floor of the Target center, to see what the rally was like!

Thanks to all those who attended!!

You can subscribe to our videos and audio podcasts by subscribing to our podcast in itunes.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

Last Saturday, veteran right wing watcher Adele Stan of AlterNet covered the Tax Payers' March on Washington (aka the 912 March or the DC Tea Party). About 70,000 conservative protesters converged on Washington to air their grievances, including opposition to President Obama's health care reform agenda. Protesters carried signs warning of death panels, tax-funded abortions, and healthcare for "illegals."

In this interview, Stan explains that while the event was billed as a grassroots convergence, it was in fact orchestrated by Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and the right wing Americans for Prosperity . The rally also received massive amounts of free publicity from Fox News host Glenn Beck, coordinator of the 9-12 project. Stan describes how all the abortion-, immigration- and death panel-talk binds social conservatives, nativists, and big business interests into a cohesive rightwing coalition.

Stan says that ,while the tea baggers have cropped up recently, the leaders of the movement have been at this game since LBJ trounced Barry Goldwater in 1964.

To learn more, check out Addie's recent writing on the Tea Parties at AlterNet. The Wing Nut Code explains the significance of those creepy yellow snake flags and other right wing symbology; and The Same Old Faces explains how old guard Goldwater partisans are still pulling the strings for the right wing.

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 .

I was motivated by Miriam's post to write about why health care reform matters to me. But when I starting thinking about a health care experience to share, I wasn't very inspired. It seems like everyone has a horror story to tell in that department--and most are probably a lot worse than mine . I could talk about recently spending a day trucking all around Brooklyn in search of a doctor in my roommate's limited network and, after waiting for six hours in an ER, finally deciding that talking on the phone with a friend's doctor father was treatment enough for a head injury.

But stories like that abound. We know the health care system is a joke. All the experts say the status quo is unacceptable and things are only going to get worse . Most doctors are in agreement that reform should include a public option. Nearly everyone has their own story of pushing through paperwork and red tape to get the care they need, struggling to pay insanely high bills, or being denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions like, you know, domestic violence or a previous C-section .

I do believe it's important to tell our personal stories about health care so the realities of people's lives don't get lost in the political calculations, willful misrepresentation, and racist fears. But, while I'm appalled thinking about what I'll have to pay after I lose my parents' insurance, that's not why I care so much about health care reform.

It is simply a matter of morality. At the end of his last speech to Congress, Obama finally started talking about reform not as a dry policy debate but as the great moral question it is. Quoting the words of Ted Kennedy, he said: "What we face is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country." My happiness that the President was finally addressing the principles at stake was matched only by my frustration that we are so dangerously close to betraying them.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

Yesterday, a long and pathetic spectacle came to an end. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont) released the first draft of the Senate Finance Committee’s health care bill.

After months of fruitless negotiation in search of elusive bipartisanship, Baucus delivered a bill with no Republican support. You’d scarcely know it to read the bill. As Tim Fernholtz observes on TAPPED, the Baucus bill looks like a retread of the Republican alternative to Clinton’s health care plan.

Sure enough, the Baucus bill is a boon to the insurance industry. The government would force people to buy more of the same expensive, crappy private insurance that necessitated reform in the first place. Instead of driving down costs through competition with a public option, Baucus wants the government subsidies to help people buy bad insurance they can’t afford. That’s not the free market. In capitalism, if your product is too expensive, people don’t buy it. Under Baucusism, the government forces you to buy insurance and kicks in some money to help you afford it.

by Thao Nguyen, Outreach Manager, National Women's Law Center 

Dear Anti-Choice & Anti-Reform Friends,

Can I begin by thanking you for so often being the same people? It makes it so much easier to not have to read twice the number of inflammatory blog posts and articles on the internet. You have so conveniently gone from one bad argument to another, melding the anti-reform and anti-choice messages so seamlessly into one incoherent mistruth - it's just made it really easy for me to keep up by not expecting your claims to be based on any facts. This has been an amazing time saver allowing me to spend more time on taxing projects like watching the previous seasons of Mad Men so that I can understand the hype and outbid all my competitors on Ebay.

This brings me to my next point - thank you for providing shallow and outrageous arguments why women's health should be undermined in the current health care legislation. Since polling shows that Americans want medical professionals, not politicians, to decide what should be part of a health benefits package, it did make me wonder - will this finally throw a wrench in their grand scheme of playing politics with women's health?

Of course you didn't disappoint. Amidst all your abortion talk, it's funny that you never remember to mention the fact that the Energy and Commerce bill includes an amendment that would bar the use of federal funds to pay for abortions. The Senate Finance Committee mark that was released today has a similar provision.

Instead, you continue to push including proposals in health reform that would threaten the 80% of private insurers that currently choose to pay for abortion care. So, actually your greater goal is to make women lose coverage that most of us already have - well, what can I say? Way to use the health bill you detest to your advantage. It's a real moment of turning lemons into lemonade.

Though, from my professional communications standpoint, I have to tell you - being against government help to repair the broken health care system and for government on regulating a woman's body, well that's just confusing. I believe we call that in the political world flip flopping. In rest of the world, I believe its called hypocrisy.

Look, I don't mean to hammer you on your efforts. You have saved me countless hours of fact checking and reading through nuanced arguments. So, I thought I should send a quick note to thank you for that.

All the best,

Thao

P.S. For all those who want to make sure that our anti-choice friends don't take away the coverage women already have - take action today!

Cross-posted from NWLC's blog.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger 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.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), perhaps the only moderate Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, predicted that the committee’s forthcoming bill will not include a public option with a trigger. (Note that even if the Finance Committee’s bill doesn’t include a public option, one could still be added later in the legislative process, with or without a trigger.)

Still, the lack of a trigger in the Senate bill would be strange, says Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly, because the trigger was Snowe’s idea .

A public option with a trigger is a compromise whereby a public system would only come into effect if private insurers failed to cut costs within a certain number of years. The alternative would be for the Finance Committee to pass a bill with no public option at all.

To progressives, adopting the “wait and see” approach is like giving Bernie Madoff another five years to run his Ponzi scheme, just to make absolutely sure he’s a crook. On the other hand, if the trigger is written fairly, we can be confident that we’ll get a public option eventually, given the insurers dismal track record for cost control and the lack of competition.

A triggered public option may also appeal to moderates looking for political cover. It lets them say “the public option if necessary, but not necessarily the public option.” If costs come down on their own, the public option won’t kick in.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

Approximately 70,000 right wing protesters converged on Washington, D.C. over the weekend to protest government in general, especially president Obama’s health care reform package. The signs they carried offered a glimpse of the unrestrained id of the American right.

Some carried placards that read “Bury Obamacare with Kennedy.”

Signs denouncing imaginary death-panels and non-existent government-funded abortions were among the less extreme messages on display. Watering the liberty tree with blood was a popular theme. (Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with that slogan when he was arrested.)

Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks, the premiere sponsor of the march, exaggerated the turnout by a factor of thirty when he falsely attributed to ABC News the claim that 1.5 million people showed up. In fact ABC reported the DC Fire Department ’s estimate of 60,000-70,000 marchers.

A crowd of 70,000 is still cause for concern, especially if its leaders have no compunctions about lying. Saturday’s march was the culmination of months of organizing by the same right-wing, corporate-funded institutions that steered disgruntled folks to shout down health care reformers at town halls: FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, Patients United, and their various offshoots.

Kibbe and his colleagues are trying to paint the march as a spontaneous grassroots movement, but as Adele Stan explains in AlterNet, the Tea Party/Town Hall/Taxpayer March phenomenon is the culmination of years of work by the institutional right. That explains the jumble of messages on display in Washington this weekend: healthcare/guns/taxes/abortion. FreedomWorks didn’t even try to impose message discipline because the cacophony is the message. The entire rag tag New Right coalition, forged in the sixties after the defeat of Barry Goldwater, has risen again.

[Photo by bosspop1, Creative Commons.]

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 .

Everyone should be reading Pandagon, but in case you don't, give this a look-see. I linked Marcotte's post rather than the original (two links away) because it's better-written and more informative.

What do you even say to this? How does one react in a way that doesn't involve hunting down the nearest insurance company CEO and giving him a few new pre-existing conditions to enjoy?

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

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.

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 .

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger

Today, President Obama will spell out his vision for health care reform before a special joint session of Congress. The president's speech marks the final phase of health care reform. This is Obama's last chance to recapture the momentum that Democrats lost to corporate-backed town hall hooligans and misinformation during the August recess.

The Uptake asks movers and shakers in Minnesota what they want to see from the president today (video above). Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn) says he wants to see the president explain why the public option is necessary to hold down costs, and reassure them that the public option will not threaten private insurance or lead to cuts in Medicare. "It's going to be the biggest moment of his presidency," Ellison tells the Uptake, "I hope he makes it a Roosevelt moment, a Kennedy moment, a Lincoln moment, because I think he has the ability to do that."

Devona Walker of New America Media on what Obama needs to do today: Explain the plan clearly, enforce party discipline, and convince the public that reforming health care is the only way to reduce deficits in the long run.

Brooke Jarvis of Yes! Magazine offers a history lesson on why so many presidents have tried and failed to achieve universal health care:

In each case, says historian Beatrix Hoffman, “the relentless opposition of medical, business, and insurance interests pushed reformers to design health care proposals around placating their opponents more than winning popular support. In turn, ordinary people had trouble rallying around complex proposals [that didn’t recognize] a universal right to health care.” The root of the problem, Hoffman says, was that the proposals came from elites who sought to compromise with interest groups, where they believed real power lay, rather than to ally with grassroots movements

In the Progressive , Cristina Lopez argues that, while everyone needs affordable high quality health insurance, Latinos and women are most in need of a public option because they are at greater risk of being uninsured and unable to afford private insurance.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wonders if the Democrats are courting disaster by forcing people to buy heavily subsidized private insurance with no public option to reign in costs:

Am I the only one who thinks that if the Dems pass a bill with mandates and subsidies for poor and moderate income people to purchase it but no public option or competition with the insurers, that it will be pretty much a catastrophe for the Democrats in political terms? You 'solve' the problem of the uninsured by passing a law forcing them to buy health insurance which, by definition, most a) cannot afford or b) are gambling they won't need because they're young and healthy. Either you end up with low subsidies which still leave it onerous to buy, thus creating a lot of disgruntled people, or you get generous subsidies, which cost a lot of money.

The health care reform battled has created deep divisions within the Democratic Party. Tonight, the president will pick his side. Will he stand with the progressives for a public option, or will he back the Blue Dogs and their watered-down, politically risky compromise proposal? Keep your eyes on tomorrow's Pulse for the post-game breakdown.

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 .

Washington Post Columnist Ruth Marcus gets it. With health care reform, women simply cannot be worse off than we are today. We need access to a full range of reproductive health care.

Dear Senators Burr and Hagan,

I'm sure that you've each received hundreds, maybe even thousands, of calls, letters and e-mails concerning the health insurance reform debate. Here's one I'll bet you haven't heard before:

On September 3, 2007, I started my dream job. Switching jobs meant a short lag in my health insurance coverage, as my new employer's plan didn't kick in until I'd been on staff for 30 days.

On October 7, I was raped while on vacation. As I'm sure you're both aware, in order to file criminal charges for a rape one has to complete a "rape kit" to collect evidence. You can't get a rape kit in your family doctor's office, and you can't collect this evidence yourself and turn it over to the police. The exam must be conducted by a trained sexual assault response (SART) nurse in a hospital emergency room.

North Carolina did reform the way these forensic exams were funded in 2008. But this practice varies from state to state, so many other crime victims still go through what I went through.

By Monday, Oct. 8, I hadn't received my insurance plan membership card. So, on top of the physical and emotional trauma associated with being the victim of a violent crime, I had the added stress of wondering whether I'd even be able to report the crime to authorities. There was no way I could've afforded ER fees out-of-pocket.

Fortunately, I was able to get my membership and plan information over the phone from my provider. I wrote it all down on a Post-it Note, which I still carry in my wallet as a reminder. This allowed me to visit the ER at Forsyth Hospital, make sure I wasn't seriously injured, obtain emergency contraception and STD testing, and provide the evidence to prosecute my case. All for a $150 co-pay.

I've since spoken with other sexual assault survivors, and it's astonishing to hear how often this comes up. Putting aside all of the other hurdles that come along with reporting a sexual assault, there are crime victims who never even get to begin the process of seeking justice because they lack adequate insurance. This isn't just a health issue; it's a criminal justice issue. Maybe our country is complacent when it comes to the idea that health is a privilege for the well-off, but justice should not be.

It's not enough to say that you support the general concept of insurance reform. I'm disappointed to say that I have yet to see either of you take a role in making that reform happen.

I'm writing to you today to make you aware of a dimension to our flawed private insurance system that you may not have heard about before. If the other "horror stories" you've no doubt heard so far haven't been sufficient to move you to fight for real reform - including a competitive public option - then perhaps the plight of thousands of crime victims in our country will be.

I've been reading about all these seniors opposed to heath care reform but it sure doesn't comport with my experience. All the seniors I know are supporters of universal health care with a robust public option. Many would rather have single payer, but see that as a battle for another day. They are disgusted with the Republicans' cynical ploys and scare tactics aimed at seniors.

The seniors I know are concerned about our children's and grand-children's access to health care, not just our own. Most of us are far more worried about a painful prolongation of our lives, about becoming a burden to our families than we are about someone pulling the plug.

At a local town hall meeting and at a recent Health Care for All demonstration I attended, seniors were well represented among the supporters of reform. I live in Philadephia, one of the bluest patches of what is now considered the reliably blue state of Pennsylvania. My Mt. Airy neighborhood is deepest indigo blue, and granted this kind of skewers my perspective.

So I acknowledge the Philly bias, but still question whether the majority of my age cohort is really as selfish as the press would have us believe. In all these accounts of frightened seniors, there is a theme which tends to recur. There are seniors standing up to the Republican disinformation machine.

There have been some whoppers this summer. Nothing like an effort to make health insurance more affordable and available to all Americans to bring out the conspiracy theorists. Among my “favorite” whoppers: (1) Grandma is going to go before a government death panel (I wonder if the government death panel will be modeled on the death panels of profit-motivated insurance bureaucrats that deny people lifesaving treatments every day in this country?); (2) According to a recent Republican National Committee mailer , the Democratic government is going to check your political party registration, and if you’re a Republican you’ll be denied health care; (3) Catholic bishops are persuading their parishioners that health care reform will mean that every single American is going to have to pay for their neighbors’ abortion. Perhaps the most egregious of all in this debate has been New York Times columnist Ross Douthat , who decided to start a sibling rivalry in heaven between the late Senator Ted Kennedy and his late sister Eunice Shriver over their respective views on abortion. Let’s hope that in time, Mr. Douthat will look back on this most inhumane column and regret what he wrote.

With all this hyperbole, we have lost sight of the original goal of health reform: to expand access to health care, improve quality, and reduce costs — not to litigate abortion rights, no matter how much anti-choice groups may want to use it for that purpose. And Planned Parenthood knows firsthand that women in particular need access to more health care, better quality health care, and more affordable health care. After all, women are affected far more than men by the costs of our health care system — they pay more for health care, use the health care system more, and make the health care decisions for their families.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger

Ed. note: The Weekly Pulse is becoming the Daily Pulse for September. Every weekday, we'll bring you highlights from the health care reform debate, including exclusive video interviews with leading experts and independent journalists each Friday. Even better, you can be a part of the conversation . Stay tuned to find out more!

A power shift is underway in Washington. Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick announced on Monday that a special election to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy would not take place until January 19, 2010. With Kennedy's seat empty, the Democrats no longer have the 60 votes they need to break a filibuster in the Senate. Up until this point, the White House was hoping for a compromise bill that the entire Democratic caucus, and maybe even a few Republicans, could agree on.

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly notes that the Gang of Six has made itself irrelevant. These powerful members of the Senate Finance Committee were in charge of hammering out a bipartisan health care bill.  They forgot that they were only powerful if people believed a bipartisan compromise was attainable.

Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards discusses the importance of Health Care Reform in her latest video blog entry.

When it comes to the debate around health care, you've heard the same voices of pundits and politicians repeated on the morning and evening news. You've seen a small group dominate the airwaves by shouting and spreading lies at town hall events. You've even seen guns at presidential events enter the fray . But have you seen your personal health care story told? Or that of your friends, families, co-workers, or neighbors?

Your story is getting lost in the shouting and political posturing. But it's these stories that can make the difference in how health care is covered in the national media and how politicians will vote. We're asking you to join us in this exciting citizen journalism project to help uncover the the health care stories of real people, including your own.

At MyRapidReport.com, it's easy to become a citizen journalist. We've broken this down into three simple options. You can do one or all!

1) Videotape the proceedings of a health care town hall - try to interview speakers or other attendees.

2) Conduct interviews around your community and gather personal healthcare stories. We've even provided some helpful starting questions for you.

3) Tell your own personal healthcare story. (Ideas on how to structure your personal story are here .

Upload your captured video by going to MyRapidReport.com and click UPLOAD VIDEO . It's just that simple.

So what will happen with your stories? Like YouTube, they will be open for the public to view. But you will also have a captured audience of reporters, editors, organizers and more who will be combing over these stories during the next month. Your videos will help identify the needs and hopes of everyday citizens around the future of our healthcare as they continue to monitor, report and organize around this critical issue.

For guidelines on how to capture a successful video story, click here.

If you're passionate about shaping the future of your health care - and American's health care - participate in this critical storytelling project.

By the way, if you happen to live in New York City, GRITtv has generously offered their studio space for you to come in and tape your own personal story starting on Sep. 11 and every Friday afterward. Email gritv@grittv.org to get more information and reserve your time to tell your healthcare story!

Feel free to spread the word about this opportunity to your family, friends, neighbors, and local community groups. If you're on Twitter, you can use the #mrrhealth.

And one last note, starting on September 1, Lindsay Beyerstein, The Media Consortium's own health care blogger , will start doing daily posts on the most current debates and round-up of reporting around health care for the next month. You can check out the Daily Pulse on this site every day or at The Consortium Report .

In an under-reported story on an over-reported topic, The New York Times did a good article on how "some" Catholic Bishops would like to threaten the massive project of healthcare reform so that they can impress upon women that their bodies are not like (in an inferior way) the bodies of men and that women's primary purpose in life is to think of themselves first and foremost as incubators.

The failure of other media outlets to address this propagandistic and co-opted effort by sexless men allows their backdoor approach (which is different from grassroots, because they are making decisions as an elite minority and then running around to gather support from Catholics who may or not agree with them politically) gives it power and momentum. It needs to be called out. Statements like these excerpts below show how these men would like to deny health services to all people (children, whom they profess to save, the old, and the poor, the people whom they profess to support), just because they want to make a statement about something that they will never experience:

“'No health care reform is better than the wrong sort of health care reform,' Bishop R. Walker Nickless of Sioux City, Iowa, declared in a recent pastoral lette r, urging the faithful to call their members of Congress.

"In a diocesan newspaper column this week , Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver agreed, saying the proposal was 'not only imprudent; it’s also dangerous.'"

What's more "dnagerous" than holding back medical services from the poor?

They'd rather damage the lives of the poor than let women make decisions about their own bodies while also pushing abortion underground to the point where it may kill mothers. These men are a danger.

(About men, fertility and privileged experiences with medical care. This piece is crossposted from Yes Means Yes Blog.)

"You'll have to make the appointment for him," she said. That was not going to happen.

My spouse heard this several times from several other married women. When they and their husbands were done having kids, they had concluded that the most sensible long-term contraception was vasectomy. That's an easy conclusion to reach. It's not really a big deal at all. Yet for some reason that they could not or would not articulate, these men all dragged their heels. They had to be pushed, prodded and handheld through a medical decision that they reasoned to but about which they felt a nameless unease.

That was not how we were going to handle things. I made a medical decision about my fertility; carrying it out was my responsibility. I got recommendations for two surgeons, I called both. One had just moved to set up a small town practice, and I made arrangements with the other.

We sat down in his office. My spouse wasn't there. I told her she could come if she wanted but she didn't need to. She told me later that it was important to her that I did this alone without the slightest suggestion of prodding, because of that assumption that guys drag their heels until their wives make them do it. She missed all the fun.

I'm a litigator, so I make doctors nervous to start with. And it wouldn't be true to say I don't like doctors -- some I like very much. But it would be true to say I'm tough on doctors. I don't have any sense of deference to them. They are degreed professionals, I'm a degreed professional. They went to school, I went to school. They're smart people, I'm smart people. My clients expect me to explain to them why they should do what I'm recommending and ... some doctors still seem a little surprised that their clients want to probe behind the headlines. And I expect the same kind of equal-footing discussion with doctors as clients have with lawyers.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, TPM MediaWire Blogger One of healthcare reform's greatest champions died last night. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 77. During his 46-year career in the senate, Kennedy's name appeared on virtually every major piece of progressive legislation from civil rights to economic justice, to healthcare. Kennedy called healthcare reform "the cause of my life." Jack Newfield of The Nation remembers Kennedy as the senate's fighting liberal , the "best and most effective senator of the past hundred years." James Ridgeway of Mother Jones laments :

We are left with weak, squabbling, visionless Democratic puppets and a President whose domestic reform policies are adrift—sliding towards the horizon with each passing day.

The loss is a blow to healthcare reform. Alex Koppelman of Salon notes that with Kennedy's passing, the Democrats have lost one of their most effective bipartisan deal-makers. Democrats will also be down a vote in the senate for the foreseeable future because Massachusetts state law doesn't allow for the appointment of an immediate replacement. Naturally, with congress on vacation, wackos are rushing in to fill the media vacuum. Eric Boehlert asks in AlterNet why Republicans the only ones allowed to get angry about healthcare reform, or anything else. He notes that in 2003, the media decided that Howard Dean was too angry for prime time. During the Republican National Convention in 2008, SWAT teams were sent to raid the homes of suspected anarchist protesters. And yet, conservative demonstrators in Arizona are allowed to tote rifles just outside the security perimeter of a presidential event. RNC Chair Michael Steele raised eyebrows by championing single-payer healthcare in an op/ed in the Washington Post framing the GOP as defenders of Medicare. Odd that Steele has so much love for Medicare, but none for the nation's other leading source of government-run healthcare, the Veterans Administration (VA).

Besides the US Chamber of Commerce, anyone out there feeling at all bad about the US House Energy & Commerce Committee asking large national health insurers about their finances? Certainly not I, especially after what we learned about the Wall Street bail out and big institutions that received billions in federal bailouts who in turn were handing out bonuses and continuing with other corporate spending that certainly raised the eyebrows - and ire- of the American public. Various health reform proposals will no doubt have a financial impact on the insurance industry (ie: by imposing a requirement that all people obtain health insurance and providing subsidies for those who can't afford it). Representatives Waxman and Stupack have it right: before health reform creates a "bonanza" for the health insurers, let's at least understand their current spending and business practices. It seems fair to me to ask the health insurers about their profits, salaries and bonuses for employees earning over $500k, how much they're spending on retreats, etc.

All seems reasonable to me. Of course, the insurers had to rely on the Chamber of Commerce to do their complaining about the request. Give me a break. There are at least a few other things that come to mind about the need for health reform that the Chamber could complain about. Wouldn't it be nice to hear the Chamber saying they were "deeply troubled" about the burden businesses will face if family health insurance premiums nearly double by 2020 if we do nothing? Or the burden employers face today given the current insurance industry practice of charging employers with more women and/or older workers more for the same insurance coverage?

Cross-posted from NWLC's blog.

By Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger

Will healthcare reform include a public health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance? President Obama campaigned on the promise of a public option, but over the past week he and his top advisers have repeatedly signaled that they aren’t willing to fight for it.

On Saturday, Obama told a town hall meeting in Colorado: “Whether we have it or we don’t have it, [the public option] is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”

“I don’t understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo,” an unnamed senior White House official gripes in this morning’s Washington Post .

The White House is sorely mistaken if it thinks that the public option belongs in the “nice but not necessary” category. Josh Holland of AlterNet explains why the public option is the pillar of healthcare reform . Without it, there’s little hope of containing costs or reigning in the power of insurance companies:

"It may be just one “aspect” of health reform, but without it, the legislation promises to be a massive rip-off; a taxpayer give-away of hundreds of billions of dollars to an unreformed ‘disease care’ industry.

The industry would get millions of new customers thanks to generous government subsidies and a law requiring that (almost) everyone carry insurance. And that windfall would come without the structural changes needed to bend the medical “cost curve” in years to come — without any provisions that might endanger the industry’s bottom line."

In Salon, Robert Reich agrees. Competition between private insurance companies and the public option is the only hope to controlling costs . A public plan could bargain with providers to reduce costs and pass the savings on to taxpayers. The private insurance industry would have to slash its prices to compete.

Without a public option, “reform” would likely involve subsidies to private insurance companies, temporarily dulling the pain as premiums rise unchecked. That’s the worst of both worlds.

Progressives shouldn’t be surprised at the White House’s noncommittal stance, though. Obama campaigned on a public option, but he has always framed it a darned good idea, not as a non-negotiable demand.

Why is it so difficult to get a healthcare bill through the Senate with the supposedly filibuster-proof majority? The simple answer is that the Dems need 100% of their delegation to cooperate in order to break a filibuster. So, the Democrats have 60 seats in the Senate but no way to advance their agenda without capitulating to the conservative Blue Dogs. The Republicans can be counted on to filibuster whatever the Democrats come up with. Which means that conservative Democrats like Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) hold the balance of power.

As Ari Melber of The Nation explains, Baucus and his Republican counterpart Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) also rule over the powerful and conservative Senate Finance Committee , which has been tasked with writing the Senate version of the healthcare bill.

Also in The Nation , Tom Geoghegan argues that it’s time to break the stranglehold by abolishing the procedural filibuster . Unlimited debate in the Senate is enshrined in the constitution. In an old school filibuster, senators simply refuse to shut up until the session ends and the bill dies without a vote. In 1975, a group of liberals wrote a rule of Senate procedure that effectively allows senators to “filibuster” simply by saying they want to. In the old days, a filibuster was a grueling public ordeal. Senators slept on cots and spelled each other off. Today, “filibustering” means signing a form. It’s private, easy and cost-free. The Republicans can, and will, filibuster all major Democratic legislation without having to stand in public and risk being branded as obstructionists.

As a result, 60 is the new 50 in the Senate. Since it’s just a rule, the procedural filibuster could be abolished by a simple majority vote. Friends of the filibuster defend it as a bulwark against tyranny. Abolishing the procedural filibuster would discourage frivolous obstructionism, but keep the old school filibuster for cases when legislators actually care enough to lose sleep over it.

Ever wonder why the strongest public option, single-payer, was never on the table? Maybe because even the strongest proponents of the public plan are taking money from the insurance and biomedical industries. Mother Jones Rachel Morris wants to know why UNITEDHealth consultant Tom Daschle was on Meet the Press Sunday. A former Democratic senator, Daschle is a senior adviser to Obama on healthcare reform and a leading advocate of a public plan. However, he recently resumed a private consulting arrangement with UNITEDHealth, America’s largest health insurer.  Even public plan champion Howard Dean is a strategic adviser on healthcare policy to the lobby firm of McKenna, Long, and Aldridge. Dean won’t disclose his clients, but McKenna represents a number of clients in the biomedical and health science industries.

The prospects of a public option are dimming, but not necessarily because of any rapid about-face by the White House. The Senate bill is in the hands of the Blue Dogs, who say they won’t have legislation until November. Obama won’t put the screws to the Blue Dogs, but there’s still plenty of time to for citizens to make their voices heard.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about healthcare and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare 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 .

I just got back from a town meeting put on by one of my local representatives here in NC, or at least I got close to it.  The event was held at a large auditorium on one of the local college campuses, but filled up well before the scheduled start time.  My two friends and I, though we were disappointed at first, soon decided that the best part might have been the theater of democracy going in the crowd outside.  Yes, so many people turned up that those of us who couldn't get into the event became part of a sizeable and spirited crowd that gathered around outside, on the lawn, on the sidewalks.  It was inspiring to see so many people turn out, people who obviously cared about this issue and wanted to be part of a conversation about it.  Watching the news or reading the paper, you'd think everyone had given up, was cynical, didn't care...but people do want to be involved, informed, engaged.

And it certainly was democracy in action.  People from all walks of life miling about and sorting into what eventually became two camps...those for some kind of health care reform to cover people who fall through the cracks or have been shut out of the current system, and those who seemed to be  against any kind of change, threatening socialism and the end of world as we know it.  The former clearly outnumbered the latter. 

Funny too how the two groups seemed to portray the two Americas, as least through my bleeding heart liberal lens.  The anti-reformers were almost all middle-aged white men, heavy on the paunch, dressed in business wear and carrying Blackberries or in jeans and flag/patriotic T-shirts proclaiming gun rights and states rights (really!).  The pro-reformers were much more diverse in age, gender, race/ethnicity, dress, and though most of us didn't agree on what should be done or how, we did want to do SOMETHING, which I feel is a first step.

Even though I didn't get to attend the actual event, I'm glad I went and got to see peaceful assembly and democracy in action.  I talked with lots of interesting folks, signed a few petitions, and came away feeling a lot better about the fact that people DO care and do want a say, want to problem solve, roll up the sleeves, and tackle the hard issues that affect so many people's lives.  Democrats and Republicans, I hope you are listening...

by Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger

By now it’s clear that the Senate Finance Committe won’t cough up a heathcare bill before the summer recess. As Nick Bauman points out in Mother Jones , the delay is sure to sap momentum for reform. Worse, the break will give healthcare reform’s opponents more time to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Disinformation is already running wild.

Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent points to July 31 memo from House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) entitled “A Very Hot Summer,” in which he announces that the GOP has launched an “entrepreneurial insurgency” against healthcare reform.

And now the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is openly celebrating the angry mobs of anti-reform protesters that are disrupting town hall meetings and shouting down pro-reform Democrats, as Eric Kleefeld of TPM DC notes. “Roaring Chants Interrupt Healthcare PR Campaign As Dems Lose Their Cool and Town Halls Turn Into ‘Town Hells’,” gloats one NRCC email message to reporters. This campaign’s official logo depicts a donkey being roasted alive (image at right) .

If the reformers used the NRCC’s playbook, reporters would be deluged with retaliatory tweets claiming that teabaggers are killing babies and raping old women, but facts are stubborn things. As of press time, the Pulse is not aware of any ritual sacrifices by teabaggers at townhall meetings.

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly warns that the GOP’s strategy to egg on the wingnuts could have unintended consequences:

It’s probably the one angle the corporate interests and their lobbyists haven’t considered: the unintended consequences of rallying confused right-wing activists to shout down policymakers who’ll improve their health care coverage. Once you wind up the fanatics and point them in the direction of a town-hall meeting, you never really know what they’re going to say, do, wear, or hold. In at least one case at the Doggett event, there really was a sign with Nazi “SS” lettering.

Top Obama adviser David Axelrod denounced groups like Conservatives for Patients Rights for stoking the protesters. Axelrod pledged to aggressively combat misinformation about the Obama administration’s reform plan, as Rachel Slajda of TPM reports. Is it a coincidence that Axelrod was abruptly issued a Secret Service detail this week without explanation?

In the American Prospect , Paul Waldman describes how Republican members of Congress are promulgating the urban legend that the healthcare bill includes mandatory euthanasia :

In some tellings , government bureaucrats will visit the elderly to force them to choose their manner of death. In another, their doctors will be required to “tell them how to end their life sooner” (this one is being popularized by Betsy McCaughey, as despicable a merchant of lies as has ever slithered through our public debate). One GOP member of Congress after another has simply dispensed with all the complexity and said that the Democratic health plan will cause seniors to be “put to death by their government” or some variation thereof.

The rumor grew out of a provision to reimburse doctors for end-of-life care, including discussions of living wills, as Waldman explains.

Speaking of misinformation, Rep. Kent Sorenson (R-Iowa) is tweeting nonsense about a shadowy healthcare commissioner who decide’s everything for you, as Jason Hancock of the Iowa Independent reports. “Page 42 healthcare bill ‘Health Choices Commissioner’ will decide health benefits for you. You will have NO choice,” Sorenson breathlessly informed his followers. In fact, according to an analysis by the Pullitzer Prize-winning website PoliFact, the healthcare commissioner would regulate insurance companies to make sure they don’t exclude people for preexisting conditions.

At the rate misinformation is mutating, perhaps Republicans will have convinced themselves that the bill will create Health Care Commissar who will involuntarily euthanize you and make your grandmother have an abortion by tomorrow morning.

Congress will return from summer break on September 4. Expect heated rhetoric and increasingly frenzied political theater in the weeks ahead.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about healthcare and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare 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 .

by Nancy Duff Campbell, Co-President, 
National Women's Law Center

Cross-posted from Reuters.

Insurance companies and others who profit from our broken health care system are mobilizing to defeat comprehensive reform by using misinformation and scare tactics. A prime example is the allegation that healthcare legislation - specifically the plan being considered by the House of Representatives - will hurt small businesses.

The fact is that small business owners, especially women, are already hurting under our current healthcare system. Leah Daniels, 29, is the owner of Hill's Kitchen - a gourmet kitchenware store that opened last May not far from the U.S. Capitol. Daniels can't afford to offer health insurance to her three employees. She purchased her own bare-bones plan on the individual market for protection "in case I get hit by a car," but not much else. It costs her just under $200 a month and doesn't cover such services as routine doctor's visits or maternity care. Daniels, who often works 7 days a week, says that she is constantly worried about getting sick.

Daniels' problems are, unfortunately, all too typical. A new report by the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) found that small businesses pay up to 18 percent more than large firms for the same health insurance policy. These higher costs mean that small businesses are considerably less likely than larger businesses to provide health insurance to their employees, and those that do tend to have less comprehensive plans. And Census data show that women-owned businesses are generally smaller than male-owned businesses.