Dazzling: Olbermann indicts elected officials on healthcare-funded campaigns

Watch this video!

Keith Olbermann reveals the numbers behind those Senators and Congressmen and women who have funded their elections with health industry money, and who now deliver the goods by killing the public option.

I believe that Iowa’s own Chuck Grassley (who lately has joined in the “death panels” fabrication)  is among the top ten recipients of health industry contributions in the Senate.  Sen. Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, received more campaign money from the industry than from his home state.

The public option is the single greatest cost-cutting measure of this entire process.  It creates competition for an industry that operates in near-monopoly conditions. It takes the need to make a profit out of the choices doctors offer their patients.

It is good for Americans but bad for health industry millionaires.  And the CEOs are calling in their debts.

The politicians who rode industry money into office know what’s at stake:  choke the the public option, or find other money to fund your re-election.

Write your elected officials today.  Tell them you want the option to choose insurance that doesn’t connect care with profits.  You can find their addresses in the right sidebar, under the heading “E-mail.”

They’ve got the money.  But we cast the votes.

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Media: GOP ‘death panel’ claims like insisting ‘the earth is flat’

Outstanding video:  News media anchors express astonishment that GOP leaders (Iowa’s own Chuck Grassley being today’s lead) would be so brazen as to fabricate the “death panel” scare.  It’s like insisting “that the earth is flat.”

The truth? A Republican Congressman wrote a provision into one of the House bills calling for insurance payment to be available to people who want to consult their physician about making a living will.

That’s it.   The rest is simply made up.  There is no government involvement at all.

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Nurses: If you ever had to see a sick child turned away because they had no healthcare coverage…

clipped from www.huffingtonpost.com This ad, called “Nurses,” premieres on Sunday.  “Patients aren’t the only ones crying out for health care reform,” it says. The initial buy for the “Nurses” ad begins Sunday, July 26 and will continue on networks and cable through July 29th.

What kind of a nation turns away sick children in order to protect profits?

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The irony of the “empathy” hearings

From the party of George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Antonin Scalia:

Lectures on the peril of emotional reasoning

Maureen Dowd writes:

clipped from www.nytimes.com Like the president who picked her, Sotomayor has been a model of professorial rationality. … it’s delicious watching Republicans go after Democrats for being too emotional and irrational W. and Dick Cheney made all their bad decisions about Iraq, W.M.D.’s, domestic surveillance, torture, rendition and secret hit squads from the gut, based on false intuitions, fear, paranoia and revenge. Sarah Palin is the definition of irrational, a volatile and scattered country-music queen without the music. Her Republican fans defend her lack of application and intellect, happy to settle for her emotional electricity. Republican Lindsey Graham read Sotomayor some anonymous comments made by lawyers about her, complaining that she was “temperamental,” “nasty,” “a bit of a bully.” Then he patronizingly lectured her about how this was the moment for “self-reflection.” Maybe Graham thinks Nino Scalia has those traits covered.

GOP Rep despairs over public option savings

Will the GOP and conservadems protect rich health insurance companies from competition?  Or consumers from high prices?

clipped from www.huffingtonpost.com Image via Wikipedia Minnesota Representative John Kline recently went on Minnesota Public Radio to despair over the way the public option would save his constituents money: “There are some things in this legislation that I find particularly troublesome,” … “[O]ur fear is that if you actually get in there looking at the legislation that it’s set up in a way that employers would increasingly opt to letting their employees move over to the… public option. And because it is cheaper, it’s designed to save money, which the government-run program has some very clear advantages. […] Brian Beutler at TPM adds: I assume that public opinion polling must show overwhelmingly that Americans want to pay more for health care so that insurance companies don’t have to contend with a superior, cheaper competitor. Otherwise it’s hard to understand Kline’s statements anything other than a call to subsidize insurance companies […]

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Public Option is bipartisan – everywhere but Congress

Image via Wikipedia

Fivethirtyeight.com observes that over 50% of Republicans and 74% of Americans overall favor a strong public insurance option.  Then, an obvious conclusion: The public option has strong bipartisan support.

1/2 of Republicans and 3/4 of all Americans.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

But in the Congress, dogmatic opinions prevent such unity.

So here’s an irony:  America is in pretty good agreement.  But we can’t get our Congress to go along with us.

Matter of fact, there are threats of removing that which we want in order to gain the approval of Congressional holdouts—most notably, Iowa’s Senator Grassley (who, like most of the holdouts, is among the top recipients of health care industry contributions—Mr. Grassley is fifth among Senators).

Should we allow Congress to deny what the people overwhelmingly desire in order to please industry-funded Senators?

Write ’em.

clipped from www.fivethirtyeight.com the two most credible surveyors of public opinion on this subject, the Kaiser Family Foundation and CBS/New York Times, have both found that at least half of self-identified Republicans favor a well-described public option. So the question must be asked: if Barack Obama wants to conduct a bipartisan approach to universal health care, what does that mean in terms of the public option? Killing or watering down the public option in order to (maybe) attract the support of Sen. Chuck Grassley, and not much of anybody else in the congressional Republican ranks? Or maintaining it to appeal to rank-and-file Republicans, who favor it despite the views of their “leaders” and the polarized atmosphere in Washington? ultimately, “bipartisanship” on health care may actually mean looking past congressional Republicans and pitting them against their own supporters across the country, particularly on the public option.

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Sen. Grassley: “Bipartisan” means “no public option”

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Aw, c’mon, Senator.

72% of Americans want health care reform to include a “public option.” Nearly three-fourths of the nation.  Including more than half of all Republicans.

Sen. Grassley, however, insists that the  “public option” must be killed if there is to be a “bipartisan” bill.

But wait.  Isn’t America already bipartisan on this?  Even Iowans, Mr. Grassley’s constituents, support a public option 56% to 37%.

Mr. Grassley wants the Senate to ignore what a bipartisan majority of American people want in order to get what a minority of U.S. Senators want.

Ah.  Then, he’d maintain, we’d have something bipartisan. In Washington. Hooray for that.

clipped from thinkprogress.org Grassley: In Order For Health Care To Be ‘Bipartisan, ‘We Need To Make Sure There Is No Public Option’ On MSNBC this morning, Norah O’Donnell asked Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, “what needs to be in” a health care reform bill “for it to be bipartisan.” After saying it needs to be paid for, Grassley declared, “We need to make sure that there’s no public option.” When O’Donnell double-checked that Grassley was saying that a public option was a dealbreaker for Republicans, he replied, “Absolutely.” Watch it: Watch Video By claiming that a public option would destroy bipartisanship, Grassley is ignoring the preferences of a strong majority of Americans. Earlier this week, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that a public health insurance option (which would lower costs and improve quality) is supported by 72 percent of Americans, including 50 percent of Republicans. 56 percent of Iowans support creation of a public plan, 37 percent oppose

By the way,  Senator Grassley is the 6th-largest recipient of health care industry money in the U.S. Senate.

Looks like the industry’s getting what it wants from Mr. Grassley.

Looks like Americans—and Iowans—aren’t.

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