Public Option // Current TV

The Missing Voices at the Healthcare Summit

From the moment when the Senate began it's hearings into health care reform one... more

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Weekly Pulse: Obama to Promote Health Plan at Summit

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger

Image courtesy of Flickr user Mad African!: (Broken Sword), via Creative Commons LicenseOn Monday, the White House released its plan for health care reform, which resembles the Senate bill with additional concessions for liberals and labor unions. Tomorrow, President Obama will hold a televised health care summit. Obama is billing the summit as a last-ditch attempt to solicit Republican ideas for health care reform. In fact, he’s hoping to give the GOP enough rope to hang itself.

It takes two…

As Katrina vanden Huevel argues in the Nation, bipartisanship takes two parties, but the Republicans have refused to negotiate unless health care reform starts over from scratch. That’s not bipartisanship, that’s showboating. President Obama is giving the Republicans one last chance to waste the entire country’s time so that he can point to the sorry spectacle and say, “Look, what they made us do.”

In other words, the White House has finally accepted what progressives have been saying for months: There’s no way to pass an acceptable health care reform without using the budget reconciliation process to circumvent the filibuster.

What’s in the White House plan?

What does the White House want for health reform? Kevin Drum of Mother Jones summarizes some highlights of the Obama plan: Increasing premium subsidies for working families; delaying the so-called “Cadillac” tax on expensive health plans and increasing the threshold at which plans are subject to tax; and empowering the Department of Health and Human Services to crack down on exploitative premium hikes, like the 39% increase recently announced by Anthem of California.

In AlterNet, Byard Duncan points to a lesser-known but important facet of the president’s plan, reviving the Indian Health Care Improvement Act—which would modernize the Indian health care system, which serves 1.9 million Native Americans and indigenous Alaskans, and not a moment too soon. American Indians are 3 times more likely to die of diabetes, 5 times more likely to die of alcoholism, and 6 times more likely to die of tuberculosis than any other ethnic group. If Obama’s plan is approved, the Indian Health Service (IHS) will get a 13% budget increase to address these and other pressing issues.

Stupak, stopped?

Abortion continues to cast a shadow over health reform. As Nick Baumann explains in Mother Jones, the original House health care bill only passed by 5 votes. Then Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) resigned and Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) died. Rep. Joseph Cao (R-LA) only voted for the House bill because he liked the Stupak abortion funding ban, which is no longer operative. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) and his coalition of anti-choice Democrats supported health reform last time around in exchange for their notorious amendment. Nobody knows how many of them Speaker Nancy Pelosi can keep in the fold. At this point, she has the counter-intuitive advantage of having nothing to offer them.

The Senate’s abortion language can’t be modified through reconciliation for procedural reasons. The Stupack Pack’s bluff has been called: Either they’ll kill health reform out of spite, or they’ll fall into line. They could go either way.

Speaking of abortion, Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality Check reports that “Amelia”, a young pregnant woman in Nicaragua is being denied chemotherapy because it might hurt her fetus. Amelia’s doctors say she needs an abortion, but all abortion is illegal in Nicaragua. Nicaraguan women’s groups are urging people to write to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and Nicaraguan government officials to protest.

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 Image courtesy of Flickr user Mad... more

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Do you think having health insurance is a right or privilege?

QUESTION OF THE WEEK

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Obama Will Back Public Option If Reid Does

Adding to the building pressure this week from his Senate colleagues who have openly... more

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Late Charge for the Public Option

Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.) are the latest to indicate... more

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Weekly Pulse: Bayh-Partisanship=Giving Your Seat to a Republican

http://www.themediaconsortium.org/2010/02/17/weekly-pulse-another-one-bayh-tes-the-dust... more

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BREAK UP with the broken US healthcare system this Valentine's!

go to: http://www.studenthealthcareaction.org/ to learn more and join the... more

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Street | Talk NY Edition - Health Care I

Health care in the United States embodies a capitalistic structure. To the detriment... more

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DEMOCRATS LEARNING WRONG LESSON FROM MASSACHUSETTS?

EVEN SCOTT BROWN VOTERS WANT THE PUBLIC OPTION, WANT DEMOCRATS TO BE BOLDER... more

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Liberals: The Word Today is Pragmatism

To many liberals the public option was a great way to help control cost and became a... more

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The Huffington Post Plays The Blame Game

For the past three months The Huffington Post has been going after Joe Lieberman and... more

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No Public Option : Investors Flock to Health Insurers

Investors are seeing the Senate's version of health care reform as a massive... more

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No public option, no bill?

David Swanson: Will progressives shoot down a healthcare bill that lacks a public option

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Feingold: Obama Responsible For Loss Of Public Option

Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) formally announced on Sunday that he would support the Senate's final version of health care reform. But in doing so he cast blame for the loss of a public option for insurance coverage partially on the president's shoulders and urged House and Senate negotiators to re-insert the government-run plan back into the legislation during conference committee.

From the Wisconsin Democrat's press office came the following statement:

I've been fighting all year for a strong public option to compete with the insurance industry and bring health care spending down. I continued that fight during recent negotiations, and I refused to sign onto a deal to drop the public option from the Senate bill. Unfortunately, the lack of support from the administration made keeping the public option in the bill an uphill struggle. Removing the public option from the Senate bill is the wrong move, and eliminates $25 billion in savings. I will be urging members of the House and Senate who draft the final bill to make sure this essential provision is included. [Ed. Note: Emphasis ours.]

But while the loss of the public option is a bitter pill to swallow, on balance, the bill still delivers meaningful reform, and the cost of inaction is simply too high. This bill significantly expands coverage and helps protect Wisconsinites from high costs and insurance company abuses, such as denying or restricting coverage based on pre-existing conditions. The bill also improves a flawed Medicare formula that denies Wisconsin fair reimbursement rates, encourages the kind of low-cost, high-value care practiced in our state, increases access to home and community-based long-term care, and reduces federal budget deficits by $132 billion over the next decade.

One of the prominent progressives in Congress, Feingold's statement gives voice to the frustration that many Democrats have felt when watching the health care debate unfold. The Obama White House, quite consciously, refused to draw a line around the public plan even as Senate Democrats practically begged for them to do so.

The decision may have been strategically astute -- positioning the president appropriately for when the public option was to meet its natural sacrifice. But it also opens the president to criticism like Feingold's and it feeds the meme of Obama's timidity.Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) formally announced on Sunday that he would support the... more