( – promoted by ClubTwitty)
During our health care discussion this morning on my AM760 drive-time show, we focused in on the public option and President Obama’s controversial comments about it in Grand Junction over the weekend. In the 8am hour, Congressman Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) happened to be listening in, and decided to make an unexpected call in to discuss the ongoing legislative wrangling. You can listen to the discussion here – it starts about halfway through the clip.
Perlmutter made the point that right now, the important insurance regulatory reforms are still in both the House and Senate bills (specifically, he was referring to the ban on discriminating against patients with a pre-existing condition). He also reminded listeners that the health care debate is still in flux – and that things are bound to change as the process continues.
Knowing the public option topic was on the mind of listeners, I made sure to ask him whether he would vote for a health care bill that did not include the public option. Perlmutter responded that he didn’t know. He did, however, seem to begin conflating a public option with the so-called private “co-op” plans that the insurance industry wants substituted for the public option. He didn’t go as far as to call them synonymous, but he did seem to suggest that a co-op plan could be as good as a public option – a notion that most empirical data suggests is just not true.
Listen in to the interview here, and decide for yourself how you feel about Perlmutter’s position. Though Perlmutter and I agree on far more than we disagree on, I’ve certainly had my occasional disagreements with him in the past – and may ultimately have a disagreement with him on the health care issue. But one thing you can say about him is that he’s a straight shooter always willing to answer tough questions – and I really do appreciate that.
Tune in at www.am760.net or on AM760 on your radio dial tomorrow (Tuesday) in the 8am MT hour – we’re going to have on historian Rick Perlstein to go over his Washington Post article this weekend that looks at the historical roots of the conservative anti-health care protests.
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That’s stepping up to speak on a controversial topic. Very rare in a politician and it speaks very highly of how good a rep we have in Ed Perlmutter.
The public option is the fiscally conservative thing to do, since it saves money ($150 billion over 10 years).
“Spend more, get less” is not the conservative position.
David,
I’m not sure if you got to this on the show today, but I’m assuming by now you heard Dick Armey refer to Medicare as “tyranny” on Meet This Press this weekend and now today Limbaugh and several other right-wingers on FixedNews who are pushing the lies behind the manufactured protests against health insurance reform, are attacking Medicare as a socialist take over of health care.
I shit you not my friend, they’re going after Medicare using Ronald Reagan’s 1961 red-baiting campaign! Check it out here.
Republicans not only want to protect the status quo but really are trying to destroy Medicare.
I’ll use it!
Sarah Palin got some traction with that oft-repeated Reagan quote, Steve Benen reminds us at Political Animal: http://www.washingtonmonthly.c…
He’ll vote for reform with or without a public option. I know for a lot of single payer supporters the public option IS the compromise, but I can’t get over all the other great provisions in the House health insurance reform bill.
David, and again let me apologize before assuming you haven’t already discussed this at great length, but have gone through the House version of the bill with your listeners besides for the public option to point out all the good it would do for Coloradans?
Trust me, I’m not advocating for ditching the public option – far from it – I’m a huge supporter of it, but I think we also need to focus on the other 1,000 pages of the bill; and I’m not referring to the imaginary pages found somewhere over Alaska.
-Patients First
Sounds like a group that would know what it’s talking about, doesn’t it? Except it’s a creation of Americans for Prosperity, one of the more audacious right-wing shill organizations out there. http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind…
Yeah, they’re the ones I turn to for health care wisdom.
Here’s some more background on your “facts,” Libby: http://www.miamiherald.com/new…
And for the more audiovisually inclined, here’s what else Patients First has to say about health care reform (at a rally in Pueblo this month):
Patients First exists to manufacture the kind of conclusions Lib cites. It’s like Chuck Grassley said over the weekend — even if a bill emerges that meets all his demands and with which he agrees entirely, he will still vote against it. Those aren’t facts you’re promoting, it’s blind partisan rage and nothing else.
Face it, your party and its core principles damaged the country greatly, and voters soundly rejected you. All you’ve got left are the fringe nutjobs and a news industry that relies on them to keep things tense.
They are helping Obama, you know a non profit working to off load the government so that it may focus on ….flag@whitehouse.gov
Then the conclusions should be quite easy to debunk, should they not? If instead you choose to attack those who spread the conclusions, rather than the conclusions themselves, you’re either not clever enough (or too lazy) to debunk them, or they’re actually true. Either way, it tells us more about yourself and the conclusions than it does about the messenger you’re attacking
Attacking the messenger who’s attacking the messenger. How meta.
If that’s the level we want the argument on, I can do this all day.
There’s no context (or link) for the supposed fact-checking from Patients First. (Find the whole document here: http://www.hudsonny.org/2009/0… )
It sounds like they’re fact-checking the bill, but they’re not. They’re supposedly tracking down claims by opponents of the House Bill (not including amendments from three committees, which actually address some of the “charges”). They find many of the claims to be true, some to be partially true, and a handful to be false (including the illegal immigrant canard).
What it boils down to is, the proposed health care reform legislation will amount to a massive shift for health care accountability to the federal government — claim after claim makes this “charge.” But you know what, that’s what Democrats ran on last year, and voters overwhelmingly approved, so they’re just pointing out the obvious.
What Libertad posted is really meaningless without the context he failed to provide, and it frames the question in a way I believe misses the point. And on top of that, Patients First is an industry shill organization posing as something else, so who cares what they say anyway. OK?
are Republicans.
There are no ‘death panels’
I get my mail regularly, it stops when I request it, and resumes when I return. My mail carrier is very courteous.
Stalin? Pol Pot? (not ‘during the Viet Nam War’–actually in Cambodia after the war)… Hitler?
What the hell? And Libby cites it as a “source” and Yokel defends it…
because it’s based upon what the U.S. would like under the control of the teabaggers, birthers and deathers in this country – the people the Washington DC based K Street lobbyists at the so-called “Patients First” are manipulating.
and that lie is repeated often enough, it’s still a lie.
Face reality – don’t be a ditto head.
If that’s the case, shoot the message. If it’s not a lie, and only an uncomfortable truth, then you have to shoot the messenger.