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For example, five days after Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas announced he and the other Blue Dogs were unhappy about the health care bill, “Ross was the guest of honor at a special ‘health-care industry reception,’ one of at least seven fundraisers for the Arkansas lawmaker held by health-care companies or their lobbyists this year, according to publicly available invitations,” Eggen writes.

[T]he group has set a record pace for fundraising this year through its political action committee, surpassing other congressional leadership PACs in collecting more than $1.1 million through June. More than half the money came from the health-care, insurance and financial services industries, marking a notable surge in donations from those sectors compared with earlier years, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.

Let’s see, what’s the number of Americans who die every year because they lacked health care? Somewhere between 18,000 and 20,000, last I heard. I suspect that’s a low estimate. Money taken from the health insurance industry to block health care reform is blood money. There is no other way to look at it.

Lot’s of people are just plain being ground down for lack of decent health care. They don’t necessarily die prematurely, but they suffer more health care problems than they should.

There was an article in Roll Call recently that deserves more attention. Atul Grover (chief advocacy officer for the Association of American Medical Colleges) and Michael Johns (chancellor at Emory University) noted that states whose citizens have the least access to health care also have the highest Medicare costs.

In Louisiana and Mississippi, where poverty rates are 19 percent and 21 percent respectively, both states spend less on health care per capita than the U.S. average, while spending more on Medicare beneficiaries than the U.S. average of $7,439.

Why is it then that the health of citizens in these two state lags far behind the nation as a whole? Could it be that once given health insurance and other benefits — by way of reaching the dual entitlements of Medicare and Social Security — when they turn 65 years of age, Louisianans and Mississippians must eventually pay a heavier price for a lifetime of neglected health needs?

Also,

Babies in all three states [Alabama, Mississippi and Texas] have among the lowest life expectancy at birth — not because of what’s invested at the age of 65 and beyond, but rather because of what is not invested in children and young adults all of their lives.

Of course, the state legislatures of those states never tire of finding ways to “save” babies by blocking access to abortion.

See also Joe Conason, “Blue dogs Heel When Lobbyists Whistle.”

I know some of you have seen the Shatner-reads-Palin video, but for those who missed it, here it is.

Update: OK, I looked for one with Shatner wearing a black shirt, and found this.

Matt Taibi nails it:

The reason a real health-care bill is not going to get passed is simple: because nobody in Washington really wants it. …

…It won’t get done, because that’s not the way our government works. Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. The situation we have here is an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill. It expects something to be done. The task of the lawmakers on the Hill, at least as they see things, is to create the appearance of having done something. And that’s what they’re doing. …

…This whole business, it was a litmus test for whether or not we even have a functioning government. Here we had a political majority in congress and a popular president armed with oodles of political capital and backed by the overwhelming sentiment of perhaps 150 million Americans, and this government could not bring itself to offend ten thousand insurance men in order to pass a bill that addresses an urgent emergency.

We no longer have a functioning government, but I say we go down fighting. It’s imperative that Washington hear from us now. Your senators need to hear you want a public option or nothing. Your representative needs to hear you want a public option or nothing. The Sellout Six need to hear that people know they’re being sold out. The White House needs to hear that we expect the President to veto any legislation that does not contain the public option.

At Salon, Mike Madden writes that the public option isn’t dead yet.

Many Senate Democrats also still seem to prefer a public insurance option, rather than a co-op. Even lawmakers who were skeptical of the public option to begin with admit that the co-op idea is only picking up steam now because the Finance Committee is focusing on it. That might not be enough to carry it through. So lawmakers who aren’t involved in the talks aren’t quite willing to write off the Finance Committee’s compromise without seeing it. But they’re starting to run out of patience. The No. 2 Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, said there was “high anxiety” as Baucus slogs through negotiations with the panel’s top Republican, Chuck Grassley of Iowa. “This is really behind closed doors with six senators,” Durbin said. “The rest of us are truly on the outside.” The only message Democratic leadership has really conveyed to Baucus? “Hurry up,” Durbin said. Baucus wouldn’t say much Tuesday about the progress of the talks, or when the talks will be done.

See also:

Joshua Holland, “How Corporate Media, Sellouts in Congress and Industry Bigs Have Hijacked the Health Care Debate”

Timothy Noah, “Why You Can’t Trust Your Health Insurer”

Must see:

Bill O’Reilly, dumbest man on the planet, says the U.S. has higher death rates than Canada because we have more people.

This kind of ignorance makes me crazy. It’s bad enough to deal with the disinformation from the Right; we’ve got it coming from the Left as well.

All the other countries do industrialized democracies have national health care systems set up so that everyone has access to basic health care. But few other countries have true single-payer systems. Most have mixed public and private systems. This is true of France, long rated number one for health care on the planet. France does not have single-payer health care, but it does have one of the best national health care systems that we would do very well to copy.

See also Joshua Holland.

David M. Herszenhorn and Robert Pear write in the New York Times:

The fate of the health care overhaul largely rests on the shoulders of six senators who since June 17 have gathered — often twice a day, and for many hours at a stretch — in a conference room with burnt sienna walls, in the office of the Senate Finance Committee chairman, Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana.

President Obama and Congressional leaders agree that if a bipartisan deal can be forged on health care, it will emerge from this conference room, with a huge map of Montana on one wall and photos of Mike Mansfield, the Montanan who was the longest-serving Senate majority leader, on the other.

The battle over health care is all but paralyzed as everyone awaits the outcome of their talks.

Why this little scenario needs to change, right now:

Already, the group of six has tossed aside the idea of a government-run insurance plan that would compete with private insurers, which the president supports but Republicans said was a deal-breaker.

Instead, they are proposing a network of private, nonprofit cooperatives.

They have also dismissed the House Democratic plan to pay for the bill’s roughly $1 trillion, 10-year cost partly with an income surtax on high earners.

The three Republicans have insisted that any new taxes come from within the health care arena. As one option, Democrats have proposed taxing high-end insurance plans with values exceeding $25,000.

The Senate group also seems prepared to drop a requirement, included in other versions of the legislation, that employers offer coverage to their workers. …

…In the House, centrist Democrats have temporarily stalled the health care bill, many lawmakers want to see what Mr. Baucus’s group produces before voting on tax increases in the House bill.

I read this first thing this morning, and I cannot tell you how sick I feel. That the lives of Americans rest with this corrupt little crew — at least some of them are essentially sponsored by Big Pharma and other parts of the medical-industrial complex, who are major campaign contributors — is beyond outrageous. It is the utter failure of American democracy in microcosm.

My favorite quote:

“If this is the only bill with bipartisan support,” Ms. Snowe said, “that will really resonate. It could be the linchpin for broad bipartisan agreement.”

And we need broad bipartisan agreement so much more than we need health care.

These people need to hear from us:

Senator Max Baucus, Montana, Democrat

• Washington Office:
  511 Hart Senate Office Bldg.
  Washington, D.C. 20510
  (202) 224-2651(Office)
  (202) 224-9412 (Fax)
• Other office locations, with phone numbers
• Email form

Senator Jeff Bingaman, New Mexico, Democrat

• Washington Office:
  703 Hart Senate Office Building
  Washington, DC 20510
  Phone: (202) 224-5521
  TDD: (202) 224-1792
  Tollfree (in NM): 1-800-443-8658
• Links to state office addresses/phone numbers on this page
• Email form

Senator Kent Conrad, North Dakota, Democrat

• Washington Office:
  530 Hart Senate Office Building
  United States Senate
  Washington, DC 20510-3403
  Phone: (202) 224-2043
  Fax: (202) 224-7776
• Email form
• State offices and all other contact information
• Also, a toll-free number: 1-800-223-4457

Senator Michael B. Enzi, Wyoming, Republican

• Washington Office:
  379A Senate Russell Office Building
  Washington, DC 20510
  Main: (202) 224-3424
  Fax: (202) 228-0359
  Toll free: (888) 250-1879
• All office locations
• Email form

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Iowa, Republican

• Washington Office:
  135 Hart Senate Office Building
  Washington, DC 20510-1501
  (202) 224-3744 (O)
  (202) 224-6020 (F)
• State offices
• Email form (scroll down)

Senator Olympia Snowe, Maine, Republican

• Washington Office:
  154 Russell Senate Office Building
  Washington, DC 20510
  Phone: (202) 224-5344
  Toll Free: (800) 432-1599
  Fax: (202) 224-1946
• District offices
• Email form

Also:

The White House, so you can tell President Obama to veto any bill that doesn’t contain the public option:

• 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
  Washington, DC 20500-0004
• Phone Numbers
  Comments: 202-456-1111
  Switchboard: 202-456-1414
  FAX: 202-456-2461

  TTY/TDD
  Comments: 202-456-6213

• Email form

And

• Your Senator, if not listed above.
• Your Representative

Update: I looked up state populations (as of 2008) and calculated that all six of the senators put together represent 8,444,956 people. The population of New York City is approximately 8.3 million people.

2008 Populations

• Montana 967,440
• New Mexico 1,984,356
• North Dakota 641,481
• Wyoming 532,668
• Iowa 3,002,555
• Maine 1,316,456

Today Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.; head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) said that Senate leaders may need to “pull the plug” on bipartisan negotiations and get the bleeping health care reform package out of committee. In particular, Van Hollen was critical of Max Baucus’s Finance Committee (no surprise).

“What concerns me about what’s happened in the Senate Finance Committee is that they’ve had a whole lot of time to work these things out, and just don’t seem to be able to break the impasse,” Van Hollen said in an interview on the liberal Bill Press Radio Show. “It doesn’t seem to be as much about a disagreement over policy issues, and it seems more to be just the lack of the political will on behalf of some to get it done.”

Van Hollen blamed the committee’s slow work on Republicans, who he asserted were unwilling to make the needed “tough decisions” to craft a healthcare bill.

Of course, a lot of the blame goes to Senator Baucus, who is heavily dependent on the health care industry for campaign contributions.

See also Paul Krugman, “An Incoherent Truth.”

Update: More Krugman —

I’ve been watching commentary from Broder and other “centrist” pundits like Robert Samuelson, and I think I see a pattern. They complain a lot about rising public spending, but confronted with any actual proposal to control spending, they reject it — unless it has one crucial attribute: it must weaken the social safety net. Unless you end up slashing benefits, or denying health care to more people, it’s not what they’re looking for.

And so the cost-saving measures under consideration now — which are the first real effort to tackle Medicare costs, ever — are pooh-poohed, because they’re part of a plan that would expand coverage, not contract it.

Finally, someone in media speaks truth about Broder.