I know the White House wants no part of this discussion, and the media wants no part of this discussion, but without a public insurance option providing the same kind of coverage that private insurance provides, particularly for women, you don't really have legitimate competition.

Up to this point, the administration has avoided discussing this issue directly, despite increasingly frenzied congressional debate on abortion's place in health reform. During President Obama's July 1 health-care “town hall” event in Annandale, Virginia, the topic of women’s health care never came up; the White House had preselected many of the audience questions. In a March interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody, chief White House domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes -- who once sat on the board of Planned Parenthood -- claimed she had never spoken to the president about whether or not abortion services should be covered under a universal health-care system. “We haven't proposed a specifics benefits package or a particular health-care proposal, so we're going to be engaging with Congress to have this conversation,” she said.

If there's one question I wish I could have asked in yesterday's town hall meeting it would have been about this. Clinton apparently was pretty adamant that public plans cover what most private plans cover in 1993. About 90% of all private insurance companies cover abortions, a legal medical service available to women. If you follow the Hyde Amendment, which restricts abortion services through Medicaid, in the public plan, you basically both deny legal services to women and make the public plan significantly less attractive to them. And as I wrote last week, the idea that this would represent "government funded abortions" is a lie:

In addition, the entire premise of Matthews' critique, ripped from the pages of The Weekly Standard, is just wrong. As the just-released House Tri-Committee bill describes, the public insurance option is completely self-sustaining and pays for everything out of its own premiums. There's public money involved in the sense that the Health and Human Services Secretary would have to hire administrators, but basically this is a self-funded insurance program.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY
Public option must be financially self-sustaining, as private plans are.

Public option will need to build start-up costs and contingency funds into its rates and adjust premiums annually in order to assure its financial viability, as private plans do.

As Goldstein notes, the Hyde Amendment, that law from the 70s that Tweety cites, "is not under threat from any of the proposed House or Senate health reform bills." Meaning that Medicaid and other public health programs will continue to deny legal abortion services as part of their coverage. It's sad that Democrats are already conceding that, but Republicans want more. Not only do they want reproductive choice banned from a self-sustaining public option, they want it banned from any private insurance company that offers coverage inside these "insurance exchanges" designed to provide small businesses and individuals more choice and greater purchasing power to receive health insurance. As said before, 90% of all private insurers include abortion services in their coverage. Anti-choice Republicans don't just want to follow existing law, they want to create new policy that says anyone the federal government does business with cannot offer abortion services as part of their coverage to consumers. The Hyde Amendment already discriminates against poor women who cannot afford health insurance; the anti-choicers would extend that.

I'm sorry this is a messy matter, and everyone feels icky about it, but this is not a common-ground issue. Either women have the right to choose their own medical care or they don't. Leaving them out in the cold is not good enough.

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Chris Matthews highlighted this nutcase birther at a town hall with Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE), questioning Obama's citizenship and forcing a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. It's unfiltered crazy in action. In the 1990s, the media took these fringe scandals regarding Bill Clinton and gave them a platform and some credibility, seeping them into the mainstream. You can draw a through-line from the out-there lies of the extreme right like the alleged murder of Vince Foster and the Clinton impeachment. Some in the media, like Lou Dobbs, continue to do that today, legitimizing the birther movement. And several far-right Congressmen have co-sponsored a bill to require Presidential candidates to provide proof of US citizenship. Today on Hardball, Rep. John Campbell, who thinks Atlas Shrugged is non-fiction, tried to dodge the issue by claiming that this is merely a technical bill to ensure Presidents meet the requirements of office in some official capacity, but Matthews was having none of it. He called it a "crazy proposal" and tried to peg down Campbell on whether or not he believed Obama was an American citizen. It took him all of 10 minutes to finally say he believed Obama was.

MATTHEWS: Congressman, nice try. But what you're doing, it's a nice try, and I'm laughing with you only to this extent, because I know it's a nice try. What you're doing is appeasing the nutcases. As you've just pointed out, this won't prove or disprove whether Barack Obama's a citizen. By the way, let me show you his birth certificate. That's the way to deal with this. Mail this birth certificate to the whacko wing of your party, so they see it and say, "I agree with this, it's over." [...] you're verifying the paranoia out there. You're saying to the people, "That's right, it's a reasonable question whether he's a citizen or not."

Campbell squirmed and shuffled, first saying that Obama was an American citizen "as far as I know," (Matthews responded: "As far as you know? I'm showing you his birth certificate!") and then eventually saying "I believe he is."

Now, I don't remember Matthews being so insistent about "appeasing the nutcases" back in the 1990s, when he had Paula Jones on his shows, and Dan Burton, and the Arkansas State troopers, and every other two-bit huckster peddling juicy gossip about "Slick Willie." But clearly the atmosphere has changed, at least for Tweety. The birther movement has become a bridge too far.

Never mind that the Senate went so far as passing a unanimous resolution that John McCain, born in the Canal Zone in Panama, was a natural-born citizen. Democrats resolved the issue quickly; Republicans will raise questions and put out clarifying legislation and just put it "out there."

It just shows you how diverged the conversations have become in this country. Democrats are debating how to tackle health care and whether a public option works best and how best to get costs under control, and the right has become fixated on the idea that Barack Obama's family faked his birth certificate 47 years ago, knowing he would run for President eventually and need a cover story.

I wonder how many single payer advocates are going to make it past the audience screening:

The White House promised a very public campaign on health care by President Obama, and next week he's going prime time.

On the night of June 24, ABC News and Obama will host a health care town hall at the White House. The president will take questions "from an audience made up of Americans selected by ABC News who have divergent opinions in this historic debate," according to the network.

Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer will moderate the program to be held in the East Room. The one-hour telecast starts at 10 p.m. on June 24. The next morning, Sawyer will interview Obama for Good Morning America.

I hope this means Obama's going to push for a "real" public plan, and not the fake one Olympia Snow is selling:

WASHINGTON — After months of insisting he would leave the details to Congress, President Obama has concluded that he must exert greater control over the health care debate and is preparing an intense push for legislation that will include speeches, town-hall-style meetings and much deeper engagement with lawmakers, senior White House officials say.

[...] But Mr. Obama has grown concerned that he is losing the debate over certain policy prescriptions he favors, like a government-run insurance plan to compete with the private sector, said one Democrat familiar with his thinking. With Congress beginning a burst of work on the measure, top advisers say, the president is determined to make certain the final bill bears his stamp.

“Ultimately, as happened with the recovery act, it will become President Obama’s plan,” the White House budget director, Peter R. Orszag, said in an interview. “I think you will see that evolution occurring over the next few weeks. We will be weighing in more definitively, and you will see him out there.”

However, there's this:

Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, recalled how Mr. Obama made a personal pledge of bipartisanship when he and Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the committee’s Democratic chairman, joined the president for a private lunch at the White House last month.

“I said, ‘Yeah, it’s a problem,’ ” Mr. Grassley said of the public plan, “and he said something along the lines of, ‘If I get 85 percent of what I want with a bipartisan vote, or 100 percent with 51 votes, all Democrat, I’d rather have it be bipartisan.’ ”

now.

President Obama has been reading out blogs and now says he will use his bully pulpit to push Congress on health care reform.
The NY Times: Obama to Forge a Greater Role on Health Care

After months of insisting he would leave the details to Congress, President Obama has concluded that he must exert greater control over the health care debate and is preparing an intense push for legislation that will include speeches, town-hall-style meetings and much deeper engagement with lawmakers, senior White House officials say.

Mindful of the failures of former President Bill Clinton, whose intricate proposal for universal care collapsed on Capitol Hill 15 years ago, Mr. Obama until now had charted a different course, setting forth broad principles and concentrating on bringing disparate factions — doctors, insurers, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, labor unions — to the negotiating table.

But Mr. Obama has grown concerned that he is losing the debate over certain policy prescriptions he favors, like a government-run insurance plan to compete with the private sector, said one Democrat familiar with his thinking. With Congress beginning a burst of work on the measure, top advisers say, the president is determined to make certain the final bill bears his stamp. “Ultimately, as happened with the recovery act, it will become President Obama’s plan,” the White House budget director, Peter R. Orszag, said in an interview. “I think you will see that evolution occurring over the next few weeks. We will be weighing in more definitively, and you will see him out there.”

Newt Gingrich was whining about this article on Face the Nation this morning.

In April, Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the Budget Committee chairman, balked at the idea of having the Senate consider health legislation under the fast-track process known as reconciliation, which could avoid a Republican filibuster. At a private meeting, Mr. Obama pressed him on it.

“ ‘I want to keep it on the table as an option,’ ” Mr. Conrad recalled the president saying. Not long after that, Mr. Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, visited Mr. Conrad on Capitol Hill. Mr. Conrad was not convinced, but decided not to stand in the way. “The Budget Committee chairman does not top the president of the United States,” he said.
“He’s doing good by staying out of it as much as he is,” Mr. Grassley said. “He’d better use kid gloves at the start.”

Why does Grassley need to be coddled and treated like a kid? What's wrong with these babies? This is not a bipartisan issue. Health care is an American issue. If Republicans want to get on the fast track of actually really helping American families and Corporations then they should get out of the way and work like Americans. Needing 51 votes seems like the right course of action. Republicans will block and obstruct any real change in health care and so will the Ben Nelson's on the left. By forcing reconciliation, it sends a real message to these un-American obstructionists.

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From the GOP's National Council for a New America town hall meeting with Jeb Bush, Eric Cantor and Mitt Romney. The questioner has obviously been listening to too much Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. He managed to cram in almost every right wing anti-Obama talking point that's out there in a matter of just a minute or so. He also apparently thinks that listening to right wing radio is a substitute for...going to school.

Q: I have another question on education and kind of to disagree with what you said Gov. Bush. I really think the past is important and I think we do emphasize science and math over liberal arts like history and I'm looking at Barack Obama who is basically the hippie flower child of Saul Alinsky who's a long dead hippie. And I guess like, yes math and science are important but what does it matter if you have highly productive people who, because they have no grasp of what's happened in the past, they're willing to let people who are going to create a marginal tax rate of 60 or 70%, I mean they're, is it surprising that Barack Obama was elected and he goes around apologizing in every country he goes to, when people are spoon fed years in high school and college of anti-American history? I mean quite honestly I think people learn more from listening to Rush Limbaugh's show than they do in high school and college. And do you have a response?

Bush: Well the context that I was talking about the past was really candidates running for office that have a kind of a nostalgic view of the world. That's a perilous thing and I think to President Obama, candidate Obama's credit he waged a 2008 campaign that was relevant for people's aspirations whether you agree with him or not. It was not a look back. It was a look forward and so our ideas need to be forward looking and relevant. I felt like there was a lot of nostalgia for the good old days in the messaging and, you know, it's great, it doesn't draw people towards your cause.

[....]

I do agree with you that just as it's important to have a civil debate, a dialog about issues, it's okay to talk about history as well and in fact if you haven't read the book about the times that are going on now the best book to read about what's happening now is probably The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes which describes how the government tried to deal with the Depression. And to get to this point of tinkering and challenging and changing and creating so much uncertainty that it created a void that only government could fill and the private sector froze in place and it prolonged the Depression. And I think there is a lesson in history in that regard.

I love how these history revisionists always want to have a "civil" debate about topics where they're just dead wrong.

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February 10, 2009 ABC Nightline

Part 1

Part 2

February 10, 2009 MSNBC Keith Olbermann

Or so he says.

Download | play   Download | play  

"I think the tone of this whole campaign would have been very different if Senator Obama had accepted my request for us to appear in town hall meetings all across America, the same way Jack Kennedy and  Barry Goldwater had agreed to do so. I know that because I''ve been in enough campaigns."

Of course they would have smeared Obama anyway, because that's how Republicans win elections.