Health Care

From Mitch Stewart, Organizing for America:

Congress is moving rapidly toward finalizing health care reform legislation, with crucial votes expected in both the House and the Senate within days. With so much at stake -- and the D.C. lobbyists going into overdrive -- we have to take our grassroots campaign to the next level.

There's an important difference between Blue Dogs and the rest of us: Universal Health Care isn't necessarily part of their agenda; it's most definitely part of ours.

Blue Dogs can afford to wait around hoping for something less earthshaking to come up. They can even afford to risk not getting anything at all.

It's the rest of us who are going to get screwed.

So turning up the heat on them makes a whole lot of sense. Here's what Mark Kleiman recommends:

From TPM:

Six key Senate Centrists--Ben Nelson (D-NE), Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Ron Wyden (D-OR)--are asking Democratic and Republican leaders to slow down the pace of health care reform efforts.

From the same crowd, Wyden excepted, who gave us Sam Alito.

From the AP:

Obama wants the House and Senate to act on health care this summer so lawmakers can reconcile differences in their respective bills after Labor Day and put final legislation on his desk this fall.

Obama's all-out effort since he returned from his overseas trip last week has "galvanized things," Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said.

Yahoo! It's time we made the same shift. It's time to bring universal health care to America.

The headline in the HuffingtonPost reads:

"House Health Care Bill Arrives: Would Cover 97 Percent Of Americans, Cost $1 Trillion"

I found this discussion between Senators Grassley (R-IA) and Schumer (D-NY) on CBS's Face the Nation truly bizarre.

Most of the segment was spent discussing health care in the usual superficial, made-for-tv way with a handful of talking points and the obligatory promise of "bipartisanship". I felt dumber after watching the thing than before.

Paul Krugman encourages us to resist the temptation to define down 'centrists' and 'moderates'.

The real risk is that health care reform will be undermined by "centrist" Democratic senators who either prevent the passage of a bill or insist on watering down key elements of reform. I use scare quotes around "centrist," by the way, because if the center means the position held by most Americans, the self-proclaimed centrists are in fact way out in right field.

I love it how on NPR, Mara Liasson keeps calling the Blue Dogs who are against the Public Option, 'Moderates'.

She did it again this morning. Someone should tell her that 'moderate' is halfway or in the middle of where the American people stand -- not where conservative Dems leave off and even more conservative GOPers begin.

From the AP:

President Barack Obama warned Thursday that if Congress doesn't deliver health care legislation by the end of the year, the opportunity will be lost, a plea to political supporters to pressure lawmakers to act. "If we don't get it done this year, we're not going to get it done," Obama told supporters by phone as he flew home on Air Force One from a West Coast fundraising trip.

Mark your calendars: October 15th will be a Day of Health Care Liberation for millions of our fellow Americans who currently have no access to health care: