The Final March for Reform is going strong — yesterday, OFA supporters made the phones ring off the hook in Congressional offices on Capitol Hill and across the country. But for every member of Congress, there are eight anti-reform lobbyists swarming Capitol Hill — and the upcoming vote is still too close to call.

So in these crucial, final days, we must make sure the voices of constituents break through the lobbyist attacks. And here’s the plan to make it happen:

As the next step in the Final March for Reform, OFA supporters like you will be gathering at volunteer phone banks across the country. We’ll be calling supportive voters in critical districts nationwide, asking them to reach out to their representatives and express their strong support for reform. A local OFA organizer will be on hand at every event, and no experience is required.

Here’s how to join in: First, RSVP for an event near you — there’s one in Houston, on March 13th. Before you go, make sure to invite friends to come with you, or help them find an event in their area on our website. Then join with local supporters at your event and reach out to as many voters as you can — each call makes a vital difference.

RSVP here to get started. Here are the details for the event nearest you:

What: Final March for Reform Phone Bank
Where: 1102 Pinemont Dr. #I
Houston, TX 77018
When: Saturday, March 13th
12:00 PM

Can’t make it to that event in Houston? Click here to search for other events near you.
As we speak, insurance-industry lobbyists are deploying from their emergency base at the D.C. Ritz-Carlton, banging down the door of every Congressional office on Capitol Hill to derail reform and preserve their ability to jack up premiums and deny care to those in need.

In the old Washington, that would have been an unstoppable barrage.

But thanks to your unprecedented organizing, the lobbyists have finally met their match: the American people.

So let’s get out there, and make sure the people’s voice is heard.

Please sign up to join the Final March for Reform event in Houston, on March 13th:

http://my.barackobama.com/FinalMarch-RSVP
Let’s finish this,
Jeremy
Jeremy Bird
Deputy Director
Organizing for America

Meet the people who are percolating in the Coffee Party

By Jessica Ravitz, CNN March 12, 2010 10:17 a.m. EST

Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) — In one chair sits a rural retiree, his financial security shot in the slump, a humble Southerner who’s never thought much about politics. In another seat is a born Northerner, an inner-city native, a relative of a civil rights giant. And nearby, circling a table, are an economist, an artist, a onetime John McCain supporter and a long-haired guy who’s rich in Woodstock memories.

Meet these members of the Coffee Party Movement, an organically grown, freshly brewed push that’s marking its official kickoff Saturday. Across the country, even around the globe, they and other Americans in at least several hundred communities are expected to gather in coffeehouses to raise their mugs of java to something new.

They’re professionals, musicians and housewives. They’re frustrated liberal activists, disheartened conservatives and political newborns. They’re young and old, rich and poor, black, white and all shades of other.

Born on Facebook just six weeks ago, the group boasts more than 110,000 fans, as of Friday morning. The Coffee Party is billed by many as an answer to the Tea Party (more than 1,000 fewer fans), a year-old protest movement that’s steeped in fiscal conservatism and boiling-hot, anti-tax rhetoric.

This new group calls for civility, objects to obstructionism and demands that politicians be held accountable to the people who put them in office.

"The government has become so broken that the will of the people has been lost in the political game," said Stacey Hopkins, 46, coordinator of the Atlanta, Georgia, chapter. "And the only voices you’re hearing are the ones of those who are screaming the loudest. They have a right to their views, but they don’t have the right to speak for all Americans."

CONTINUED

Meet the people who are percolating in the Coffee Party – CNN.com

You have to see this video.

On Tuesday thousands of everyday people performed a citizens’ arrest on the insurance companies who were meeting in Washington, D.C. to plot to kill health care reform. I’ve never seen so much energy in a crowd before. You have to watch!

It’s getting down to the final push for health reform.
The House is preparing to pass the health care bill the Senate passed in December, along with a package of improvements to that bill. Those improvements will then be sent to the Senate for an up-or-down vote, with the goal of having President Obama sign both bills by the end of the month.

The House may vote on these bills as early as this coming week, and the vote is going to be close. Many Representatives will try to take the side of the insurance industry instead of the side of the American people. It’s up to us to make sure they hear what America wants – real health care reform, now!

Can you pledge to make as many calls as it takes to your Representative, urging them to vote YES on health reform? Click here to pledge and tell as many friends as you can.

The health care package being considered by Congress isn’t everything we wanted. But the bills will do a world of good for everyone in America. Here’s how:

• If you have insurance, you can keep it. But insurance companies won’t be allowed to spike premiums every year and will have their profits and administrative expenses subject to federal and state scrutiny.²
• If you lose your coverage or need to buy insurance on your own for any reason, insurance companies won’t be able to deny you coverage and they can’t charge you more because you’re sick or because you’re a woman. If you get sick, your insurance company won’t be able to cancel your insurance retroactively like they do today. Preventative care will be free and young people can stay on their parent’s insurance policy until they are 26. And small businesses and individuals will be offered steep subsidies so everyone can afford coverage.³
• Insurance companies will no longer be able to sell junk insurance. If you’re buying insurance on your own, insurers will have to offer plans with a standard comprehensive benefit package, they will be required to spend 85% of your premium dollars on your medical care, they will no longer be able to cap your benefits, and your out-of-pocket costs will be limited – severely reducing their profits and bad practices.
• And, if you’re uninsured, you will be able to purchase insurance you can afford. In all, 30 million uninsured will get good coverage, saving an estimated 30,000 lives per year.

In addition, the fixes being put to an up-or-down vote will dramatically cut back the burden of the so-called "Cadillac tax" on working families, increase subsidies so everyone can afford insurance, and fully close the Medicare donut hole for seniors.

There’s a lot to support in these bills, and the staus quo is unacceptable.

Click here to pledge to call your Representative as much as it takes until they vote YES on health reform.

If these bills fail, if we lose this chance for health reform, we won’t get it again for decades. If these bills fail, if we let the insurance companies win, the insurance industry will get to continue on with business as usual.

We’ve come so far, and these bills do so much good for so many. We can’t turn back now.

It’s time for Congress to choose which side they’re on: Will they listen to us and pass health reform? Or will they listen to the insurance companies and doom America to more needless deaths, bankruptcies, and denials of care?

Click here to pledge to call your Representative as many times as it takes and make them take our side.

We’re at the finish line. Only a few more votes are left. Let’s win this thing!

To your health,
Levana Layendecker
Health Care for America Now

Op-Ed Columnist

Health Reform Myths

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 11, 2010

Health reform is back from the dead. Many Democrats have realized that their electoral prospects will be better if they can point to a real accomplishment. Polling on reform — which was never as negative as portrayed — shows signs of improving. And I’ve been really impressed by the passion and energy of this guy Barack Obama. Where was he last year?

But reform still has to run a gantlet of misinformation and outright lies. So let me address three big myths about the proposed reform, myths that are believed by many people who consider themselves well-informed, but who have actually fallen for deceptive spin.

The first of these myths, which has been all over the airwaves lately, is the claim that President Obama is proposing a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, the share of G.D.P. currently spent on health.

Well, if having the government regulate and subsidize health insurance is a “takeover,” that takeover happened long ago. Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care, while private insurance pays for barely more than a third (the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses). And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated.

The only part of health care in which there isn’t already a lot of federal intervention is the market in which individuals who can’t get employment-based coverage buy their own insurance. And that market, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a disaster — no coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, coverage dropped when you get sick, and huge premium increases in the middle of an economic crisis. It’s this sector, plus the plight of Americans with no insurance at all, that reform aims to fix. What’s wrong with that?

The second myth is that the proposed reform does nothing to control costs. To support this claim, critics point to reports by the Medicare actuary, who predicts that total national health spending would be slightly higher in 2019 with reform than without it.

Even if this prediction were correct, it points to a pretty good bargain. The actuary’s assessment of the Senate bill, for example, finds that it would raise total health care spending by less than 1 percent, while extending coverage to 34 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured. That’s a large expansion in coverage at an essentially trivial cost.

And it gets better as we go further into the future: the Congressional Budget Office has just concluded, in a new report, that the arithmetic of reform will look better in its second decade than it did in its first.

Furthermore, there’s good reason to believe that all such estimates are too pessimistic. There are many cost-saving efforts in the proposed reform, but nobody knows how well any one of these efforts will work. And as a result, official estimates don’t give the plan much credit for any of them. What the actuary and the budget office do is a bit like looking at an oil company’s prospecting efforts, concluding that any individual test hole it drills will probably come up dry, and predicting as a consequence that the company won’t find any oil at all — when the odds are, in fact, that some of the test holes will pan out, and produce big payoffs. Realistically, health reform is likely to do much better at controlling costs than any of the official projections suggest.

Which brings me to the third myth: that health reform is fiscally irresponsible. How can people say this given Congressional Budget Office predictions — which, as I’ve already argued, are probably too pessimistic — that reform would actually reduce the deficit? Critics argue that we should ignore what’s actually in the legislation; when cost control actually starts to bite on Medicare, they insist, Congress will back down.

But this isn’t an argument against Obamacare, it’s a declaration that we can’t control Medicare costs no matter what. And it also flies in the face of history: contrary to legend, past efforts to limit Medicare spending have in fact “stuck,” rather than being withdrawn in the face of political pressure.

So what’s the reality of the proposed reform? Compared with the Platonic ideal of reform, Obamacare comes up short. If the votes were there, I would much prefer to see Medicare for all.

For a real piece of passable legislation, however, it looks very good. It wouldn’t transform our health care system; in fact, Americans whose jobs come with health coverage would see little effect. But it would make a huge difference to the less fortunate among us, even as it would do more to control costs than anything we’ve done before.

This is a reasonable, responsible plan. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Op-Ed Columnist – Health Reform Myths – NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist

Health Reform Myths

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: March 11, 2010

Health reform is back from the dead. Many Democrats have realized that their electoral prospects will be better if they can point to a real accomplishment. Polling on reform — which was never as negative as portrayed — shows signs of improving. And I’ve been really impressed by the passion and energy of this guy Barack Obama. Where was he last year?

But reform still has to run a gantlet of misinformation and outright lies. So let me address three big myths about the proposed reform, myths that are believed by many people who consider themselves well-informed, but who have actually fallen for deceptive spin.

The first of these myths, which has been all over the airwaves lately, is the claim that President Obama is proposing a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, the share of G.D.P. currently spent on health.

Well, if having the government regulate and subsidize health insurance is a “takeover,” that takeover happened long ago. Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care, while private insurance pays for barely more than a third (the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses). And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated.

The only part of health care in which there isn’t already a lot of federal intervention is the market in which individuals who can’t get employment-based coverage buy their own insurance. And that market, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a disaster — no coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, coverage dropped when you get sick, and huge premium increases in the middle of an economic crisis. It’s this sector, plus the plight of Americans with no insurance at all, that reform aims to fix. What’s wrong with that?

The second myth is that the proposed reform does nothing to control costs. To support this claim, critics point to reports by the Medicare actuary, who predicts that total national health spending would be slightly higher in 2019 with reform than without it.

Even if this prediction were correct, it points to a pretty good bargain. The actuary’s assessment of the Senate bill, for example, finds that it would raise total health care spending by less than 1 percent, while extending coverage to 34 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured. That’s a large expansion in coverage at an essentially trivial cost.

And it gets better as we go further into the future: the Congressional Budget Office has just concluded, in a new report, that the arithmetic of reform will look better in its second decade than it did in its first.

Furthermore, there’s good reason to believe that all such estimates are too pessimistic. There are many cost-saving efforts in the proposed reform, but nobody knows how well any one of these efforts will work. And as a result, official estimates don’t give the plan much credit for any of them. What the actuary and the budget office do is a bit like looking at an oil company’s prospecting efforts, concluding that any individual test hole it drills will probably come up dry, and predicting as a consequence that the company won’t find any oil at all — when the odds are, in fact, that some of the test holes will pan out, and produce big payoffs. Realistically, health reform is likely to do much better at controlling costs than any of the official projections suggest.

Which brings me to the third myth: that health reform is fiscally irresponsible. How can people say this given Congressional Budget Office predictions — which, as I’ve already argued, are probably too pessimistic — that reform would actually reduce the deficit? Critics argue that we should ignore what’s actually in the legislation; when cost control actually starts to bite on Medicare, they insist, Congress will back down.

But this isn’t an argument against Obamacare, it’s a declaration that we can’t control Medicare costs no matter what. And it also flies in the face of history: contrary to legend, past efforts to limit Medicare spending have in fact “stuck,” rather than being withdrawn in the face of political pressure.

So what’s the reality of the proposed reform? Compared with the Platonic ideal of reform, Obamacare comes up short. If the votes were there, I would much prefer to see Medicare for all.

For a real piece of passable legislation, however, it looks very good. It wouldn’t transform our health care system; in fact, Americans whose jobs come with health coverage would see little effect. But it would make a huge difference to the less fortunate among us, even as it would do more to control costs than anything we’ve done before.

This is a reasonable, responsible plan. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Op-Ed Columnist – Health Reform Myths – NYTimes.com

This is the reason why their base is so misinformed. It is not that most on the Right are selfish ideologues, it is that their leaders are a disservice to them. We must help them to new real leaders and informed resources.

Update on reconciliation

by David Waldman

Fri Mar 12, 2010 at 06:45:58 AM PST

Republicans have been lying about reconciliation being the "nuclear option" for weeks. So it should come as no surprise that CQ (subscription) now reports:

Republican aides, reporting the decision, interpreted it to mean the House would have to clear the Senate bill and President Obama would have to sign it before the reconciliation bill could be passed. House leaders had been hoping that the two bills could be passed almost simultaneously.

The parliamentarian, however, later reportedly clarified his position to Senate aides, saying that the reconciliation bill could be written in a way that would not require Obama to sign the Senate bill into law before the reconciliation bill is voted on.

Thank you, and have a pleasant day.

If you don’t have a CQ subscription, for now you’ll have to settle for Politico’s story:

[A]ccording to reporting by POLITICO’s David Rogers, the accounts aren’t accurate and misconstrue what the Senate parliamentarians have said. That is that reconciliation must amend law but this could be done without the Senate bill being enacted first. "It is wholly possible to create law and qualify law before the law is on the books," said one person familiar with situation.

For example, if the big bill itself amends some Social Security statute, reconciliation could be written to do the same –with changes sought by the House. Then if reconciliation is passed and signed by President Barack Obama after he signs the larger bill, the changes made in reconciliation would prevail.
This jives with what Pulse sources were saying soon after the first wave of stories hit – in essence, don’t take the reported parliamentarian’s declaration to the bank.

CONTINUED

Congress Matters