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August 18, 2009 12:06 AM UTC

AM760 Interview: Perlmutter Says He Doesn't Know If He'll Vote for Health Care Without Pub Option

  • 21 Comments
  • by: davidsirota

( – 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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21 thoughts on “AM760 Interview: Perlmutter Says He Doesn’t Know If He’ll Vote for Health Care Without Pub Option”

  3. 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.

      1. Sarah Palin got some traction with that oft-repeated Reagan quote, Steve Benen reminds us at Political Animal: http://www.washingtonmonthly.c…

        During last year’s debate for the Vice Presidential candidates, Sarah Palin paraphrased a famous Reagan quote: “It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction…. We have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.”

        The problem with the quote was that Reagan was, at the time, condemning the very idea of Medicare. In context, Reagan actually said, “[I]f you don’t [stop Medicare] and I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” The line wasn’t about “freedom,” it was about a program to provide seniors with health care.

        Apparently, conservatives still love the Reagan speech in which the line was delivered, but overlook pesky details, such as context.

  4. 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.

    1. Of the 47 total claims that were offered from the first 495 pages of the 1018 page bill, Patients First finds:

      *25 to be TRUE

      *18 to be a PARTIALLY TRUE

      *4 to be FALSE

      H.R. 3200 is a massive reordering of America’s health care services with a heavy bias toward injecting the government’s judgment in place of doctors, installing bureaucratic control in place of patient discretion and enacting significant tax increases in hopes of stemming the deficitbusting costs of the new programs.

      The analysis above provides a starting point for the digestion of the complex and onerous provisions in the … proposal. On balance, Patients First finds the provisions examined to be a significant threat to the quality of country’s health care. But don’t take our word for it, read the sections of the bill outlined above and make your own decision. That’s the best way to fight back against the big government mentality that is attempting to seize the nation.

      -Patients First

      1. 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…

        AFP advocates pro-tobacco industry positions on issues like cigarette taxes and clean indoor air laws. The name “Americans for Prosperity” will sound familiar to tobacco prevention policy advocates, as Americans for Prosperity worked around the U.S. in recent years to defeat both smokefree workplace laws and cigarette excise tax increases.

        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):

          1. 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.

            2. 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

                  1. 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?

          3. 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…

      2. 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.  

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