As It Should Be

There's a lot of disappointment and outright snark that SuperObama hasn't trained his unstoppable firevision on the evil hordes that have delayed public option legislation for so long:
Sold us out. Obviously holding back the ultra-falcon-punch maneuver that could have ended this debate long ago. And maybe that's true -- maybe he's an alien exile, biding his time to see whether or not humanity is worthy of his advanced technology. People who believe this are probably really heartened by the news that he's quietly trying to shore up support for a public option. They might say, here it comes! The part where a million lobbyists surround him and he wrecks them all with nunchucks or maybe a Klingon Bat'leth.

I'm heartened, too, but not because I spend much time paying attention to the president's temperature on the public option. I'm heartened because I see lines like this in the article above:

...at a closed-door meeting of Senate Democrats on Tuesday, Assistant Majority Leader Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) marshaled polling data from districts represented by conservative Democrats that showed a majority would back the requirement that Americans get health insurance so long as there was a public option.

"To argue that this is some fringe position is to ignore the obvious," Durbin said.

That's us represented there -- not swept up in the wake of a charismatic politician or a wave election, not knee-jerk motion towards Democrats because George W. Bush was a bad president and the economy went sour, but people reading the newspaper and deciding that this policy is good for them and their children, and supporting it.

We're the only part of the political process that can't be bought outright -- we are the only part of this debate that isn't worried about re-election, or donations, or finding a golden parachute in private industry. This is why FreedomWorks tried to falsely inflate the numbers of people who attended the 9/12 rally -- it's why town hall opponents tried to yell over the voices of others, and why opponents of reform generally want to look like 'regular people' and not an amalgamation of strong party supporters, industry beneficiaries, and ideological extremists. Because we, and by that I mean we the people, have the promise of the Constitution that the policies that we want will become law.

And what we want is cheaper, less exploitative health insurance for more people. Of the many programs that have been proposed, it is the strong public option that puts people over profit and respects the American tradition of private industry. We know -- the mortgage crisis and Bear Stearns/AIG/Fannie/Freddie taught us -- that unregulated industry can literally destroy itself, and we're the ones that end up suffering when that happens. Any crucial industry, and there are few more crucial than health-related industry, has to be carefully balanced into our national community.

This will only be brought about through citizen action: that's as it should be. We wouldn't want something as important as this to be dictated from Washington.

All this is to say -- keep up the pressure. Google your Senators and put in four calls -- two for each, one at the national office, and one at the nearest local office. If they have an office in your town, stop by and tell them what you care about and what you expect from your representatives.

I'll do the same, and somehow try to encourage constituents from Arkansas to visit the blog. I've got a dozen hits from Turkey, and one last night from Japan, but no Arkansas so far -- and people from Japan can't pressure Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) to get her head right.

EDIT: This great article ably underlines the point that it's not just whether we get a public option, but how strong that public option is -- which is a great point to make when you're talking to your representative. The best public option is one that anyone can choose, as well as one that has significant license to negotiate prices with providers.

If It Gets Real Bad, Think About Space

Well, the public option amendments were both voted down yesterday in the Senate Finance Committee. Three questions: first, why? Second, what happens next? Third, what can we do?

1) The reason this amendment was voted down was lobbyist money. One of the votes that almost nobody counted in the press, and which I overlooked as well, was that of Max Baucus himself, the chairman of the Finance Committee -- who kept repeating that the bill didn't have 60 votes in the Senate, so he couldn't vote for the amendment. But Baucus, as 538.com points out, has told his own constituents that he "wants a public option too" and there's a strong argument to be made that his leadership alone could have motivated a fence-sitter like North Dakota's Kent Conrad. The Senate as a whole, when they take up the debate, could easily strip the Finance Committee's public option amendment -- the HELP committee didn't seem to have any trouble putting a public option into their bill, whether it would pass the general vote or not. For the Schumer amendment, Baucus and Conrad alone would have been enough for passage -- just these two senators. But Baucus (as well as Blanche Lincoln, and frankly all the 'no' votes on the public option) is a MASSIVE recipient of health insurance lobbying money. Here is a graphical representation of the clouds of buzzing health insurance industry lobbyists that feed on the Montana senator (explained here). A comparison of 'no' voting Democratic senators with the money they accept from industry lobbies is here -- Baucus is at the head of the list with 7.7 million dollars raised over the course of his career, and Lincoln is second. We could have had this amendment: we should have had it. Voters and activists have done their part and the nation wants it. It is very specifically the political patronage of the health insurance industry that has prevented the passage of a public option.

2) Nobody really knows what happens now. The Baucus Bill will have to be merged with the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee (HELP) bill, which contains a public option, and it will have to go up for debate on the floor of the Senate, and it will have to be merged with the House bill, which also contains a public option. It seems true that there are more than 50 votes to pass a public option in the Senate -- but to prevent a Republican filibuster, we need 60 votes, which means all 58 Democrats, plus Sanders of Vermont, plus one other vote. Nobody can work on that one vote, though, and nobody can really put together a strategy to pass parts of the plan through budget reconciliation (a legislative option that only requires 51 votes) until Senate Democrats get it into their heads that a public option is what the nation wants, that it is overwhelmingly what the party wants, and that the coming election will be much harder for everyone if the health care plan they end up passing is a give-away to insurance interests.

3) What we can do now is much more than what we could before we knew what was going to happen in the Finance committee -- in the coming floor debate, we will be well served by Senators of all stripes, from all states coming forward to support the bill. Signing up with HCAN or just using their service to call your senator sends a clear message that supporters of the public option have supporters among the public. If your senator's for the public option, tell them to get up and speak out for it. If they're waffling (this list is a good source to figure out who's a trustworthy supporter, and who's weak), tell them how much you hate waffles, and threaten to make pancakes of them in the 2010 elections (or some such metaphor, which is better constructed and less threatening).

And if you find yourself wanting to hock a lugie at Max Baucus for selling us out, maybe it'd be a good idea to take a second, chill out, and listen to Carl Sagan sing techno about space.

Insurance Companies Need Our Support

A meaningful debate about healthcare reform has to include voices on both sides. There just aren't many people willing to take an unpopular stand and defend the interests of health insurance executives. Thankfully, a team of celebrities has stepped up to invigorate the discussion. Check out the Protect Insurance Companies PSA:

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Getting Involved -- New Media Style

Got a comment yesterday from a facebooker who's starting her own group in support of the public option -- so I thought I'd go through some ways that individuals can affect the debate, but this time, with Web 2.0 sparkle! This will be difficult for me, as my level of social media savvy can be described as Yeti-like.
(Picture of me from About.com. If you crane your neck, you can see that I'm reading HR 3200 on a Dell Inspiron B130 laptop, held in my right hand.)

But my research savvy is average! So away we go:

Public option action on Facebook seems spread out, reasonably enough, among groups of friends -- one of the first and easiest things anyone can do is change their wall status to "I support a strong public option to reform our broken system of health insurance." or "I want lower health insurance costs, so I support a strong public option."

The next step would seem to be joining one of the fan clubs/interest groups. There's one with more than 11,000 members here, one directed at President Obama and the Senate here, and "I Support the Public Option" here. Abby's group, which I haven't been able to get through to yet, should be here shortly.

Twitter is actually -- this is the first time I've really rolled up my sleeves and gotten into it -- kind of cool, although I'll never use it due to the ancient Yeti law which requires me never to be fashionable. Congress uses it like nobody's business -- TweetCongress tracks the last tweets of all the standing members of congress and shows community responses as well. A lot of progressive-to-progressive conversation happens at the #publicoption hashtag, which you can search here, and is full of fast (although not always perfectly accurate) information that falls through regular media cracks (i.e. public statements an official might make that aren't important enough to warrant a news article, but which indicate that they're moving in one direction or the other on health care reform).

All in all, though, my gold standard for organizing is still Health Care for America NOW! -- professional, targeted pressure that is completely issue-specific and designed to create the maximum amount of change. Just in my region, they've got one event coming up in Los Angeles and two in San Francisco -- it's likely they've got something in yours, too.

Regardless of how you get involved, though, it comes down to the same few things: talk to your friends. Call and write your senator. Get your voice heard through letters to the editor, and your face seen through public demonstrations.

And why? Because courts from South Carolina to Los Angeles agree that insurance companies break their promises for the purpose of profit. We deserve at least one trustworthy option for insurance coverage so that no more HIV-positive teenagers or breast cancer victims are dropped by their insurers.

Who's protesting?

I have to stop reading the New York Times -- I read their headline today, "Thousands Rally in Capital to Protest Big Government" and eagerly clicked in -- news, news! But the article never once told me who organized the protest. Who's out there? Who's in charge? Who rented the microphone? No answers -- and a group with some kind of specific opposition to some particular policy or government priority is transformed into a faceless checkmark on a party-politics scorecard.

So I figure, hah. Liberal media bias. And I go over to the Drudge Report -- nothing. There isn't even a headline today, but buried somewhere down the page is an article "Bomb Threat Forces Evacuation of DC TEA Party Planners" from which one can find out that the demonstration was planned by FreedomWorks, headed by former House Majority leader Dick Armey. So -- as opposed to the groundswell of opposition to health care reform that the Times (and FreedomWorks) would like us to believe this demonstration represents, let's look at FreedomWorks specifically.

FreedomWorks, formerly called Citizens for a Sound Economy, is funded in part by donations from MetLife, Phillip Morris, and the Scaife family fortune. Their stated goal is to increase individual freedom by decreasing taxes; they were organizers of the April 15th tea parties (pictures here), although they generally prefer to label their events and websites as 'grassroots' in an attempt to prevent the devolution of responsibility onto them personally. The term NPR uses, daintily, is 'faux grassroots'.

As far as I can tell on their website, FreedomWorks formally opposes: the bank bailout, the stimulus package, environmental cap-and-trade legislation, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act, and most other government initiatives that require significant spending or limit corporate power (which they equate with individual liberty) in any significant way. As a group, they also seem to be strong supporters of Israel, strong opponents of abortion, and Christians generally. This has led to them being confused for rank-and-file Republicans, but although they were real supporters of President Bush (who was the right religion, and passed big tax cuts for the wealthy), the last presidential candidate they really loved was Steve Forbes, who serves on their board of directors.

Much of the press online about FreedomWorks centers around discoveries of the extent to which they are willing to go to lie to their own members and the public about their tactics. The Washington Post caught them out secretly signing up members through insurance sales (i.e. want a low group rate? Sure! Just sign this contract -- um, petition/membership form/contract) and they are particularly energetic astroturfers -- creating fictitious sites and conversations online in order to expand positive perception of their issues (we'll see if tagging their name and linking to a bunch of stories about them as I do here attracts some 'concerned democrats' who are worried that government is 'just too big').

Anyway, this is still developing -- if they break 50,000 demonstrators (by any estimate other than their own, which I'm sure is already at like 4 million people) in Washington, I'll do a little bit about Dick Armey tomorrow. He's a colorful fellow!

EDIT: I seem to be getting some traffic from searches for estimates for the size of the rally, so I'll bite: ABC is going with the DC Fire Department's estimate of 60 to 70 thousand people; CNN is elaborately silent on the issue of size; the New York Times's headline says that "thousands" came to the capital; the Washington Post says only that 30,000 people registered for the protest. It seems like all the links estimating 2 million (which, if it really happened, would be larger than the Inauguration, FIFTY times larger than the largest sourceable media estimate, become immediately visible to any onlooker of any party, and be the lead in any news story that wanted to be credible) go back to Michelle Malkin. For a complete debunking of the 2 million figure, see here.

The 9/9/9 Speech

First off: people watched it. 2500 comments on Fark, the top two slots at Reddit (this and this -- Reddit is pretty liberal, though, in addition to its Ron Paul contingent), headlines in every respectable newspaper, and twenty-three THOUSAND comments at the Huffington Post, plus another five thousand in the sub-stories about Joe Wilson, etc. Now, Internet fancyparties aren't really an indication of what the rest of America is doing or thinking, but interest online is pretty intense. I didn't hear too many televisions through my thin thin Los Angeles walls -- but the speech played pretty early here, and most people likely weren't home from work yet.

From the perspective of someone who believes very much that a public option for health insurance is the best way to limit costs and provide insurance for those who don't have it, the speech was a punt. Congress will decide -- the President pointed out only that legislation needs to pass, that it's Congress's job, and that too much time has been wasted bickering. He remains, it seems, a personal supporter of the public option (much has been made of the text of his recommendation at the whitehouse website) but seems to have no compunctions about triggers, co-ops, or any other way Congress thinks might work to cost-effectively insure Americans. His "door is open" -- his priority is clearly to get effective legislation in place, and to do it quickly. This is hard to hear for me, a little -- because there's a lot of doubt as to whether a public option has enough votes to pass in the Senate, and other policies might have a better chance -- but I, for one, was never expecting him to release some sort of magic fungus that would digest and then replace senators who've been bought off by the insurance industry, mimicking their shapes long enough to pass a strong public option. I wasn't expecting that at all. It might have occurred to me as a nonzero possibility, but I wasn't expecting it. This is okay. I have always suspected that the best policies are those that the people dictate to the government, rather than the other way around: I'll continue dictating, and I invite you to do the same.

As an American, though, and someone who's sat through interminable debates (I got called a fascist AGAIN today -- wassup, guys? Wass! Up!) that use divisive language, code, and 20th-century cliches in the place of substantive discussion of policy, I was really relieved that the President did his best to insist on change without the assumption that he or his party was the sole determinant of that change. He seemed to understand that there is a significant part of the nation that has their own ideas about how to best bring about reform, and that Congressional Republicans and Blue Dogs represent a lot of those people. At heart, he really is a negotiator, and regardless of the right's fears about him, he seems to be pulling for a majority solution. I'm sorry if we lose the public option -- and I fully intend to keep advocating for it as a fiscally responsible, morally preferable, centrist policy -- but it's a small price to pay for a real reform that we feel like the whole nation weighed in on. I poked around the conservative rageblogs a little bit this evening, and their response was muted: a lot of talk about tax-and-spend, a lot of talk about number-fudging with regards to uninsurance rates and cost overruns. Not a lot of "treason" or "Communism". That seems like an improvement, to me, and well worth some negotiations with regards to reform.

I know that a GOP representative from Louisiana heckled the President during his speech -- he's since apologized, probably realizing that it wasn't that sort of speech and that we're no longer having that kind of argument.

If, I say if, the reform Congress produces ends up representing a real and positive change. The most valuable plan plank for the insurance companies -- an insurance mandate, with fines for Americans who don't get insured -- seems to have gained wide acceptance in Congress, but cost limiting measures and social assurances for the unemployed and underemployed have not. Luckily, someone's been jamming up the phone lines at the Congressional switchboards (1-877-264-HCAN), and maybe they should just stay jammed until Congress gets the idea.

Presidential Address to Congress, 9/7/09

My fellow Americans and members of Congress,

We have been engaged, for the last four months, in a heated debate over the future of American health insurance and the shape of American health care. Most agree that our system is broken, that when we buy health insurance, we pay too much and get too little as individuals, communities, and as a society.

The debate about reform has too often been described as a debate between parties and ideologies, and I know there are ideological differences here in the Senate about the right kind of reform to make. But the biggest threat to change right now isn't the Republicans or the Democrats. George Bush senior failed to pass health legislation he wanted in 1992, then Bill and Hillary Clinton failed again in 1994. George W. Bush added a prescription drug benefit for seniors in 2003 by a single vote, and his party was forced to write a gap into the bill, in which many seniors still suffer. The biggest threat to reform is moneyed interests, campaign contributions, political action committees, and lobbyists.

The reason we pay so much for so little in the current system is that it is extremely profitable for health insurance, pharmaceutical, malpractice and other industries. The reason that they have spent tens of millions of dollars in the past few years trying to avoid real reform is that they know that they have neither earned nor do they deserve the profits they've earned -- their profits come not from offering us the finest health care in the world, because they don't, but from the inefficiencies and waste of a broken system. They pay government to ensure that the system remains broken.

Soon you will make a vote on a bill to match HR 3200, which has already been passed by your colleagues in the House of Representatives. There is currently no other bill before you with a level of support that makes it likely to pass both houses. Members of my party and yours have gone through the bill to make it as appealing to both sides of the aisle as possible. It is not single-payer socialized medicine, but a piece of legislation specifically crafted to limit costs, insure the uninsured, and prevent the worst abuses of the insurance industry such as rescission and the refusal to insure pre-existing conditions. It is rigorously opposed by that industry, as you well know.

I bring to you tonight a challenge. I challenge this session of Congress to voluntarily and transparently fight the influence of the moneyed interests that have kept us from having reform for so long. I challenge the fifteen senators who have taken the most money from the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, whether through PAC donations or corporate contributions, to recuse themselves from this vote. To my Democratic colleagues including Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, and Blanche Lincoln, as well as to my Republican colleagues, I mean no disrespect and I do not mean to argue that your vote is or has ever been for sale.

The American people deserve that this issue, about which they feel so passionately, be given a fair vote that lacks even the appearance of submission to the politics of money. Their government has failed them, in this respect, for many years. You have the constitutional power to make this right. May God bless you and give you strength and may God bless America.

Sound Bites

I got an opponent-of-reform-posing-as-a-liberal comment last night, which I deleted (I didn't know I had this policy, but I Forbid Outright Lies in the Comments [FOLC]), but something about it interested me -- namely, that this person who wants no reform, never seriously considered reform, and has a deep-seated ideological opposition to reform repeated the oft-trotted-out phrase that President Obama has done an awful job of "explaining" the health care bill to Americans.

Now, this muttonhead Libertarian dude did not invent that argument. Republicans didn't invent that argument. I don't even think it was the media -- I think supporters of the public option invented this argument. Many supporters of reform are supporters of the President -- many supporters of the President have significant faith in and high hopes for his administration -- but this can also create a kind of dependence. The President, remember, is not a legislator -- where the Constitution's concerned, he doesn't have much role in making bills past the presence or absence of a veto. He is a leader to the extent that we agree with him and support him, and he's the first one to admit this.

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This may have come off in the Inauguration as a stirring show of faith in America -- but the way I heard it was that we don't get anything we don't earn. No administration-backed disinformation campaigns to confuse and divide our opponents. No use of the bully pulpit to drown out opposition. No dirty tricks; no cash lubrication of difficult obstacles. We get the policies that we support, and the ones we agitate for. If he opens his mouth and we don't understand, it's our job to do the legwork, decide what we believe, and go out and get it. Every, every single supporter of the public option that wastes ink or time analyzing the President's inability to tell a good, sound-bite narrative about health care reform has lost a chance to educate his or her fellow citizens about health care reform.

So here are my sound bites:

Our priority as a nation must be providing insurance and care to the 11 million uninsured American children, who make up all too large a part of America's 45 million uninsured citizens. It is a moral duty and an investment in the future: no plan currently considered by Congress does this, except for HR 3200.

Insurance costs are strangling our neighbors and our households. 30% of the dollars we pay to private insurance companies go to overhead, paperwork, and profit. If this system works for you, you'll have the choice to retain it. If it doesn't, HR 3200 will give you the chance to enroll in a government-run insurance program that is responsible to citizens and not shareholders. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that inclusion of a public option in any health reform bill will decrease the costs of that bill by $400 billion over ten years.

The regulations of the current insurance system discourage small business and individual entrepreneurship, make spouses dependent on one another, create obstacles to those who want to change jobs or industries, ruthlessly punish those with chronic illness, and create dangerous levels of uninsurance among those under 25. These injustices can be ended with the stroke of a pen: they are failures of government to regulate insurance, and they cost Americans not just money, but suffering and lives.

And here's a shorter take on the situation --

Right on. In case you missed it yesterday, you can call your congresspeople through the service at 1-877-264-HCAN. We have, probably, less than two weeks to affect what legislation is written and whether or not it passes -- this is the exact wrong time to analyze the varying effectiveness of our elected officials, and the exact right time to decide what you believe and work to make it happen.

LA Health Reform Rally, 9/4/09

So yesterday I said, 'man forget this stuff man' (in person, I say 'man' at least once in every sentence), took a few hours off work, and I left sweet Hollywood.
(ghost of Michael Jackson entertaining tourists. A-wew-hew!)

My destination: a health care rally that, according to the website I signed up on, had 14 RSVPs. I was visualizing something like a crack team of organizers, surrounded by massive waves of angry, insurance-company supported teabaggers. But it was in Chinatown, and I do love Chinatown:
(it's funner than it looks.)

When I got there, though, I didn't find fourteen people, but hundreds -- two organzations (Organizing for America and Health Care for America NOW), a dozen speakers, Representative Jane Harman, the chief resident of LA County Hospital, a representative of the LA city council (which recently passed a resolution calling on the President and Congress to pass a strong public option), Veronica De La Cruz, who I wrote about early this week (she is apparently attempting to be everywhere at once -- she was in Nevada yesterday and on the East Coast at the beginning of the week) as well as all kinds of other folks. It looked like this:
The teabaggers I was so worried about: not in attendance. There were about eight abortion protesters, though, but even with their massive chopped-up baby pictures (which, if you can tell, were repurposed from another, likely more significant anti-abortion campaign) and their megaphones, they seemed sort of lonely and sad.
Still, though, someone there was taking them seriously -- the LA Times, apparently on the strength of their shouting, looked into the public option bill overnight and ran this editorial this morning, arguing that the bill is actually written, with respect to abortion, in a particularly sensitive way with respect to the abortion debate -- it cannot increase, and may decrease, the number of abortions for which the government provides funding. Still, it's a little bit depressing that somewhere, somebody is manipulating believers who want to help children into opposing legislation expressly designed to help children. It makes me a little bit happy that they're not having much success.
(Note: the cancer survivor's sign did not say "rightwing pies". Rightwing pies are actually pretty good pies.)

At the height of the rally, the organizers hefted up 200,000 Californian pledges for health care reform, in a mighty-big suitcase, added those we had signed during the rally, and headed off to Washington. Our representatives are reconvening -- President Obama will address Congress next Wednesday, September 9. This is, for the best chance we will have to see comprehensive reform in our generation, the final and most crucial stage. Everything -- and the energy and effort that President Obama's Organizing for America put into creating these rallies for a strong public option proves this to me -- everything is on the table. Anyone who is wasting their time arguing over who lost the health care battle has given up too early. If you care, you need to pitch in and call your senator (which Health Care for America will help you do with their toll free number at 877-264-HCAN).

I did. We called Diane Feinstein right there from the fairgrounds and told her to get it done. Afterwards, Chinatown seemed much nicer:
But Hollywood was still exactly the same. I didn't ask this guy if he has health insurance: that question would be silly, since nobody who works Hollywood Boulevard as a look-alike character does. Which is a shame, because he was working that suit hard.

Neighborhoods

One of the things I'm realizing is that while the opposition to the public option is national, and includes large numbers of people who have essentially the same empty talking points (government is always bad, socialism is always bad, you have to read every page of the House bill because there are weird hidden genocidal policies in it), support for the public option is local and personal.

At first I thought that this was because of party politics, etc. -- but now I think it's more that you don't really know how broken our system is until you encounter it. So you have full-time politicians, pundits and talk-radio hosts who see nothing but cost and political ideology, and then you have citizens and patients who have seen how destructive the system can be. I say this as a way to introduce Veronica De La Cruz, who lost her brother to a treatable heart problem even though she raised a million dollars to pay for his transplant and treatment. She explains it better than I could in this open letter. Veronica was on-air at CNN and has a big microphone, but this system repeats itself in small ways every day:

-- a new father forced into hour-long negotiations on his cellphone in a hallway at work because the insurance company has once again delayed payment for his son's care (Hi Bryan!)

-- the terrifying job hunt of a recent college graduate who is not just trying to avoid moving back in with her parents, but to keep her insurance from lapsing and causing her recently diagnosed depression and anxiety to become uninsurable pre-existing conditions (Hi M!)

-- an adjunct teacher making $15,000 a year who pays $250 a month in insurance premiums -- that's $3000 a year, 20% of her take home pay (Hi Emily!)

These are the activists we have in the fight for the public option -- their suffering is the motivation to get this bill passed and this system reformed -- and there are millions of them, scattered out over the whole country. The trick is to make sure their voices are heard.

So: I found two events this week in my area through Health Care for America NOW, which can show you where town halls, rallies and speeches in your area will be held, and I've seen events planned through President Obama's community organization website. There's also a really vigorous conversation on Twitter, centered in part around (but certainly not limited to) the #PublicOption hashtag -- a lot of this seems to be among and between networks of friends and acquaintances. Finally, though, the ultimate effect of organization is to put pressure on your representatives -- you can find out where your senator stands on reform here, and contact them through the same site, or any of a number of others.

EDIT: forgot to mention this site, where you can see some of the impact HR 3200 would have on your community specifically.

Nothing's Over

I took a few days and posted pieces I had saved up so that I could mull over what's happened to the public option in the last week -- after the Obama administration hinted that it was willing to drop a public option as part of a health reform bill and then said that nothing was settled yet. I didn't want to flip the hell out without really thinking about it.

And I'm not flipping out. It's U. S. politics. We didn't suddenly get a better political system once President Obama was elected, and I've never doubted that if he was Imperial Lord, we'd probably already have a health insurance guarantee for every American. I've looked at questions about whether the administration is working hard enough on our behalf, and tried to figure out, but I just don't know.

Here's what I can answer, though. Am I working hard enough to be able to say that I've done everything I can to ensure that all American children have health insurance? That my friends and neighbors don't have to put off doctor visits or lose their homes over medical bills? The answer to that would be no.

One thing that has held me back a great deal was the assumption that what proponents of a public option have been working against is the attitudes and beliefs of other citizens, but this isn't entirely true. This statistical analysis at fivethirtyeight.com makes an argument that should be familiar to most of us: insurance company PAC money and direct donation have had a significant impact on health care reform votes in the Senate. Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia has raised $69,000 in health insurance contributions in the six months since he entered the U. S. Senate -- that's $10,000 a month, and he's not up for reelection for another five years. This article breaks down contributions accepted by the Gang of Six, the bipartisan committee that called for a slowdown of public option legislation in July. Republicans accept health insurance corporate funds across the board -- and that certainly has strengthened their resolve to oppose a public option -- but what is surprising is that Democrats like Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Ben Nelson of Nebraska have each, over the course of their careers, raised more than two million dollars from donors in the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries. This is more than a debate between people who want a government option for health insurance and those who want an unrestricted free market; all citizens who want what they feel is best for their nation are pitted against corporate interests who are attempting to purchase favorable policies for themselves.

If you aren't convinced that health insurance companies intentionally and aggressively court industry-positive policies in Washington, check out this interview with a former executive for CIGNA who helped end reforms during the first Clinton administration, and is now speaking out about the excesses and cruelties of the current US health system.

So no basic principles, for me, have changed -- I support affordable health care for every American, and a competitive government option for the provision of that health care. I oppose profits earned by encouraging human suffering, and the disproportionate voice that monied interests have in our government.

What has changed is that I no longer trust my elected officials to make good law without the energetic oversight and intervention of people like me and you. So let's get to intervenin'.

What can we do?

Most of my posts are about why it's good to support a public option for national health care -- but I just read this brilliant post, which gives a solid set of guidelines about having health care debates with those who don't support reform, and it reminded me of this AskMetafilter question, which asks what supporters of the public option can do to ensure that it becomes law. Here's my brief list:

1) Write your representative and senators. If they support a public option/legislature you like, write a letter of support; if they don't, call on them to change their minds. Here's a brief introduction that will help get you started -- all I would add to their list is to be persistent! Every polite letter gets read and considered, if only briefly.

2) Write a letter to the editor or op-ed piece for the press you read -- including alternative weeklies, magazines, newsletters, church bulletins, and anything else. Another brief introduction, to which I would add that many letters in city newspapers refer specifically to an article run in the paper, and that you have an advantage in writing to a paper that you already read.

3) Visit a town hall -- here are lists of upcoming Democratic and Republican town halls all over the country, and they run through late September, so there's plenty of time. I'm of the opinion (I've never been) that just going and sitting quietly and listening to what your representative has to say has a positive impact on the debate -- six people screaming makes a lot less sense when they're in a crowd of two hundred who came to listen.

4) Get organized with a Public Interest Research Group -- they're organized by state, like MoPIRG (Missouri) and CalPIRG (California). They're running campaigns right now in support of the public option, and are usually happy to accept letters, volunteers and donations.

5) Leave me a comment! Well, that's more of a gesture of support than it is actual support. Start with 1-4, and then use 5 to let me know what happened.

EDIT: 6) Or, if you're a Whole Foods customer, write them and let them know that you think this op-ed is a stellar piece of trash (which is to say, stellar trash, which is to say a plume of hot waste gas).