This story, shyly hiding on page A15 of today’s New York Times, unarguably exposes the Glenn Becks, the Rush Limbaughs and the Sarah Palins — among so many others — for the filth they are. And ignorance, as in Palin’s case, is no excuse. The truth is out there, Sarah, hidden in the pages of books and the tubes of the internet. Go look.

As for the Becks and the Limbaughs and the Congressional troglodytes of both parties, a just Lord would, as their ends approached, bring each of them before life panels. There they would be sentenced to death by modern medicine — weeks or months entombed in dead bodies kept warm by pumps and tubes as the tenants cursed their own cruelty.

In a study that sheds new light on the effects of end-of-life care, doctors have found that patients with terminal lung cancer who began receiving palliative care immediately upon diagnosis not only were happier, more mobile and in less pain as the end neared — but they also lived nearly three months longer…

It shows that palliative care is the opposite of all that rhetoric about ‘death panels,’ ” said Dr. Diane E. Meier, director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and co-author of an editorial in the journal accompanying the study. “It’s not about killing Granny; it’s about keeping Granny alive as long as possible — with the best quality of life…”

Those getting palliative care from the start, the authors said, reported less depression and happier lives as measured on scales for pain, nausea, mobility, worry and other problems. Moreover, even though substantially fewer of them opted for aggressive chemotherapy as their illnesses worsened and many more left orders that they not be resuscitated in a crisis, they typically lived almost three months longer than the group getting standard care, who lived a median of nine months.

The other day I mixed a can of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken into left-over brown rice. I added a can of tuna, stirred vigorously. After cooking it into a sort of casserole, I ate it. Yummy.

Isn’t it strange how we find ourselves doing what our parents did at the same age? At 73 (just my age now) “D”, as we called my dad, was a widower who lived alone and existed on concoctions often involving canned soups and leftovers.

D was proud that he could make do on his own, inventing dishes that reflected his frugality. Brimming with pride, he would don his threadbare cook’s apron. He’d ask a grandchild to tie it behind him because he could not manage that arm twist any more.

Then out would come the big pot, the cans, the small custard dishes containing, well, limp leftover carrots, shriveled peas, and always, it seemed, lumpy mashed potatoes.

His grown kids might dutifully nibble at the resulting cacophony of tastes, but the grandchildren, culinary cowards, would either suddenly remember a pressing date, or say they had just finished a “huge” meal.

As for me, I’d generally eat it unless there was fuzzy stuff atop a custard cup leftover. One time I stayed with my dad for several days before my wedding, and he stirred up a breakfast blend in a frying pan.

“This salt pork’s been here a while, but it’s okay, I’m sure,” he promised as he tossed it in. That was my first experience with food poisoning. Luckily I had three days to recover before the wedding, and so all was well.

As D grew into his late 80s, he had his meals delivered. Having lived on institutional food most of his life, he thought the steam table meals were tasty. So good, in fact, that he put the unfinished portions in the trusty custard cups and saved them for “later.” Trouble was “later” might mean a few weeks.

As the years went by, and D outlived his friends, he became depressed and less and less able to take care of himself properly, though he would insist he was okay. In his 90s, he began to feel as if he had had enough of life. “One thing about old age,” he would say, ”if something goes wrong with your body you can be sure it will never get better.”

One day my brother Jerry visited and bravely began clearing out the aging leftovers from the fridge. Jerry is not demonstrative unless he’s talking politics, but this time was an exception. Holding up a particularly rancid leftover, he turned to his father and said, “Someday you’re going to kill yourself eating this stuff.”

“So?” my father replied. It didn’t, either. He made it to 97, and died of being worn out.

With the Democrats’ health-care-industry bill nearing passage, the President has finally begun to make use of his extensive leadership skills.

The more active role is a change for the White House, which for months gave wide latitude to Congress as it shaped a bill.

A Senate aid who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the closed-door meetings said that the White House has signaled it will “convene and run” meetings from now on as lawmakers strive to reach a consensus, reflecting a “significant uptick” in the Obama administration’s involvement.

The Democratic leadership welcomes a more hands-on White House, as Obama’s imprimatur could provide political cover to members casting a tough vote in an election year.

It’s initially counterintuitive that a bill to reform the world’s 37th-best health-care system in the world’s richest country would be a tough vote. After all, when the Democrats were still using the bait-and-switch tactic with the public option, something like two-thirds of those polled were on board. As that got watered down to a Medicare buy-in, cleverly pitting the 20- and 30-somethings against the 50s and 60s crowd, support naturally dropped, but was still above 50% until it became clear that the Democrats would once again cave to the super-rich and the corporations that front for them.

But Obama, being The One, now appears at the critical moment. Will he follow through on any of his campaign promises, such as a public option, not increasing taxes on the middle class to benefit the wealthy, and so on?

President Obama told top Democratic House members on Wednesday that he favored a tax on insurance companies offering more-expensive healthcare plans as a means of extending insurance to millions of people who are not covered, according to a person familiar with the meeting.

The so-called “Cadillac tax” is a feature of a healthcare bill that cleared the Senate before the Christmas holiday. But the House has chosen another financing method — a tax hike on the wealthy.

Powerful labor unions at the core of the Democratic base are opposed to the Cadillac tax, saying that in some cases union members gave up wage increases in return for richer healthcare benefits.

Obama’s preference may put pressure on the House to adopt the Senate tax as part of a compromise between the two bodies. Obama made his views known at a late-afternoon meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D- San Francisco) and other senior Democrats.

I admit that I voted for Obama assuming he’d be a pretty bad President, so I’m not really disappointed in his performance policy-wise. But I thought he was a better politician than this.

The Democrats gain control of the White House and both houses of Congress and use that control to make none of the changes they promised. When the biggest domestic-policy question in a generation comes along, they operate with Cheney-like secrecy, cut back-room deals with precisely those corporations at the root of the problem, ensure that such deals preclude any meaningful reform in Congress, and finally off-load the costs of the whole insurance- and drug-company giveaway onto the middle class. They really have very little chioce; after all, if they didn’t, some Republican somewhere would be angry.

Funny thing is, no Republicans will be voting for Reid or Dodd’s replacement or Dorgan’s replacement. And not that many Democrats will, either; the intensity gap has been large for quite a while. To me it looks like the Democrats will end up barely controlling the Senate given that Lieberman is really a Republican; on the bright side, a margin like 54-46 would make Lieberman dispensable. The House, with its 81-vote margin, is probably safely in Speaker Pelosi’s hands, but losses, I predict, will be heavy in 2010.

And heavier in 2012, unless the party invests a huge amount of money in PR and spin to persuade people to enjoy being forced to buy insurance now, and wait four or five years for the presumed benefits. Americans are not that dumb, they understand the Democrats have cheated them once again. They also see the Democrats chuckling behind their hands at the thought that Americans have nowhere else to go.

Which may be accurate. So we’ll just stay home then, and let the Democrats buy their votes from insurance company executives.

McClatchy’s Joseph Galloway is a journalist who writes books with generals, and features this compliment from Norman Schwarzkopf in his bio: “The finest combat correspondent of our generation — a soldier’s reporter and a soldier’s friend.”

So it’s always interesting to see how far left many of his opinions are. For example, he’s underwhelmed by the Senate’s health-care bill.

Absent from the legislation now is anything that even remotely threatens the profits and the big bonuses and the private jets and the gold-and-marble office towers of the health care and insurance and pharmaceutical corporations.

[…]

The pirates of Wall Street and the political charlatans have won.

The American people, especially those who are sick and poor or sick and middle class or just poor and middle class and afraid that one day they will get sick, have just lost.

What we needed was principled and determined leadership in the White House and on Capitol Hill. What we got from the people whom we elected and sent to Washington to clean house and shape up a corrupt system was much ado, and then nothing.

So why isn’t the failure of the health-care reform initiative an epochal example of the failure of leadership? Democrats know who I mean…

Or perhaps you don’t agree that having dumped the public option and the Medicare buy-in to get Lieberman and/or Snowe, Senate Democrats have neither of those two votes, so they’re looking around for some piece of the store that has not yet been given away.

They’ve forced millions of Americans to buy insurance, which is useless. I don’t need insurance against something that’s certain to happen, I need health care. Most of those Americans can’t afford insurance, so government will have to pony up the money that supplies the insurance companies with profits. Why do I have to pay taxes that get handed over to insurance companies?

And they’ve removed any hint of a competitor for those insurance companies. Medicare won’t expand, and we’ll all have no option but to purchase insurance from private corporations with histories of lawlessness, dishonesty, and disregard for public welfare. Do you believe that having insurance means you’re covered when you get sick? Ask the 1.5 million Americans who filed for bankruptcy last year, of whom over 60 percent are estimated to have been driven to the extreme by problems that included significant medical bills.

Bankruptcies due to medical bills increased by nearly 50 percent in a six-year period, from 46 percent in 2001 to 62 percent in 2007, and most of those who filed for bankruptcy were middle-class, well-educated homeowners, according to a report that will be published in the August issue of The American Journal of Medicine.

“Unless you’re a Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, you’re one illness away from financial ruin in this country,” says lead author Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., of the Harvard Medical School, in Cambridge, Mass. “If an illness is long enough and expensive enough, private insurance offers very little protection against medical bankruptcy, and that’s the major finding in our study.”

[…]

Overall, three-quarters of the people with a medically-related bankruptcy had health insurance, they say.

“That was actually the predominant problem in patients in our study — 78 percent of them had health insurance, but many of them were bankrupted anyway because there were gaps in their coverage like co-payments and deductibles and uncovered services,” says Woolhandler. “Other people had private insurance but got so sick that they lost their job and lost their insurance.”

The Democrats consider forcing everyone to buy private insurance, which is unlikely to cover you in extremes, to be a step forward. It is, for the insurance companies; but not for me, as one of the forty-some million uninsured Americans.

Then there’s the timed phase-in of the so-called benefits over a period long enough to include two or three election cycles. This is a trick Congress uses to look as if it’s doing something without making any commitments that some money-making war in some remote location can’t pre-empt.

This bill is certainly historic, in other words, but not in a positive way. It’s a holiday gift to the insurance and drug industries, following on the lavish presents bestowed earlier on the perpetrators of the recent financial farce. Remember, after all, that the Democrats handed $787 billion to Wall Street firms and their bankers and insurers, precisely the culprits in the disastrous chicanery that led to the bubble that ruined so many. Now the same folks are handing billions per year for the foreseeable future to the drug and insurance companies, without even a hint of a means of riding herd on those vicious organizations. Or as Jim Dean at Democracy for America puts it,

…the bill doesn’t actually “cover” 30 million more Americans — instead it makes them criminals if they don’t buy insurance from the same companies that got us into this mess.

It seems the Democrats have once again failed to act on their promises. In particular, the Democrat in the White House has neglected to act when he could have. Yes, the bill is being written by Congress, not the White House, because the Obama administration decided to go the opposite way of the Clinton attempt, which largely handed a bill to Congress to be passed or, as it happened, rejected. Politically, as with everything Obama does, this is a good strategy, because something will come out of it, and that’s the only goal for the administration.

But Obama is the main reason the bill sucks so much. He started by taking the only reasonable option off the table; then he exerted no leadership to force things, whether by gambling on pressure through stating publicly what he wanted, or working behind the scenes for a consistent goal. By making it clear that all he wanted was some bill, he created the situation in which there was no threat of extreme actions from the left, only from the right. Thus Snowe and Lieberman can affect the content of the bill, but Feingold and Sanders can’t. If he had ever come strongly for a public option, there’d be one in the bill. If he’d supported anything at all, it would be in the bill. But he didn’t, because the only thing he really wants is whatever gets the votes.

If they pass a bill similar to the current Senate version, I’ll be rooting for the Democrats to lose Congress again.

Why the Medicare buy-in is a fine idea — probably better than an anemic “public option” that has been practically strangled pre-birth by the insurance lobby. This from Gooznews.

…The decade before people enter Medicare (55 to 64) is the time of life when many people develop the chronic diseases that will make them the most expensive patients in Medicare once they get there. Diabetes, heart disease and many cancers often emerge in late middle-age. Intervening when the warning signals of these diseases first appear can moderate or even eliminate many of these costly conditions.

Medicare is the ONLY insurer with a long-term interest in engaging in this kind of health care system-delivered secondary prevention. Every other insurer has a self-interest in kicking the can down the road because they know it will be the government and taxpayers that ultimately pick up the tab when those chronic conditions become the most costly…

I can’t imagine any of the three gentlewomen giving a good goddamn what I think, but unless the final bill is a whole lot better than the House version I expect to be urging my Senators and my Representative to oppose the health care reform bill, and the President to veto it.

It is of course possible that the more conservative Senate will remove the abortion restrictions and turn the public option into something with at least a shred of meaning. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

As I understand the House bill, the Democratic leadership traded away the public option in all but name, and allowed the abortion restrictions to be tacked on, in exchange for ten votes. In other words, gut the only relevant item and destroy something else on your way out, and you can demonstrate leadership. Thanks, Madame Speaker, heckuva job.

Since this bill’s public option will cost more than private insurance, it will do nothing to drive down costs; but the federal legal mandate to buy insurance will have been issued. What will this be? A windfall for the insurance companies, who are the source of the original problem.

Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care. Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick.

But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies — a bailout under a blue cross.

The Democrats have once again proven where their allegiances lie. Everyone has to believe in something, and they believe they want to be re-elected. Where’s the money for the next campaign coming from? The corporations any reasonable government would rein in. So they sell us out. Again. At least the Republicans are honest about trying screw us.

“Personally and politically, Pelosi won big on health care”, says the McClatchy headline. Nuff said.

I think I’ll pull out Bulworth, at least I’ll laugh until the ending.

After hitting the Medicare Part D doughnut hole, this old rooster became so confused he wound up at a demonstration in support of Colonel Sanders:

If my initial take turns out to be accurate, it’s a sad moment for the country, as it appears the Democrats have caved once again. “Oh what a night!” said Speaker Pelosi, my representative, and in that she did not lie.

When will people learn? Homer Simpson asks. Democracy doesn’t work! Or at least the Democrats don’t. First the Presidential candidate takes the only reasonable solution off the table, possibly fearing that he’ll follow in the footsteps of Jay Billington Bulworth and be assassinated by a representative of an insurance company. Of course, he was only following one of the leaders of his party, the Speaker of the House, who took her Constitutional duty to investigate White House crimes off the table to increase her party’s shot at power.

Next the now-elected President, who promised transparency and openness, negotiates a back-room deal that lets the drug companies, about a third of the problem, off the hook for the equivalent of pocket change.

Gradually the usefulness of the health care bill is eroded by the majority Democrats continuously moving toward the corporatist Republican right in the vain hope of getting some political cover.

And it turns out they’ll need a lot of cover. Giving away so much in the abortion-rights area won’t play well with the country, let alone the Democratic base. Setting up a public option that will cost more than private insurance, while requiring everyone to have insurance of some sort, simply caves 100% to the insurance companies, who constitute the other two-thirds of the problem.

Such an option is a slap in the face to anyone who wanted what the term was supposed to mean. The point of a public option is to do the function as efficiently as government is capable of. Medicare shows that such a method works, and provides society with some means of controlling costs. That’s why the Republicans and the insurance and drug industries oppose such a plan. Now we know the Democrats do too.

Everyone knows the reasons Congress won’t allow us decent health care: they’re owned by the insurance and drug companies. And the banks, of course. It’s not because they can’t find the money; eliminate insurance altogether, and presto, you pay for universal health care. And we’re not even talking about the couple billion a week we waste on foreign wars to enrich the oil companies. That’d pay for a lotta health care.

Yes, the bill does appear to strip insurance companies of their antitrust exemptions at the same time it compels millions of new customers to purchase their products. If you trust corporations, and you don’t mind the restrictions on abortion funding, then you’ll be fine with that.

We need a second political party in this country. If this travesty is what the Speaker and her majority call a strong bill to take to the negotiations with the much more conservative Senate, God help us. I wonder if we might not start to see challengers to the Democrats from the center (what the TM calls the left), similar to those conventional Republicans are seeing from the far right.

Let’s hear it for the death panels, Lewis Lapham more or less says:

Like the military industrial complex, the medical industrial complex invites the practice of large-scale fraud, the hospital surcharges for an apple or an artificial limb comparable to the cost-overruns paid by the Pentagon for a cruise missile or a wrench. The “waste” and “inefficiency” in the system is its bone and marrow. Of the $304 billion appropriation levied by the seven richest pharmaceutical companies in 2007, $97 billion was allotted to marketing and sales promotion ($27 billion in the form of free meals and drug samples given to attentive physicians), another $76 billion to payroll (earnings worth $29 million to the Chief Executive of Johnson and Johnson, $25 million to the Chairman of Wyeth), lastly $40 billion (13% of the whole), to Research and Development…

Which isn’t to suggest that our doctors forswear the Hippocratic Oath, or that our politicians abandon hope of squeezing the pus out of the health care system. But where is the blessing to be found in the wish to live forever? A substantial fraction of the annual tithe collected by the medical industrial complex is the invoice ($528 billion) submitted to payees in the last, often wretched, years of their lives.

The corpses in waiting serve as sacrificial offerings placed on the altars of the god in the ATM. Plato thought it “shameful” to provide medical help “not for wounds or some seasonal illnesses” but because one “is filled with gases and phlegm, like a stagnant swamp…” Socrates in the dialogue with Glaucon strengthens the argument with the observation that it is wrong to prolong lives no longer “profitable either to themselves or anyone else.” Medicine, he says, isn’t intended for such people, “not even if they are richer than Midas.”

Most days David Brooks’s columns just make me mildly impatient. Not this time. Read what he says in today’s New York Times about President Obama and healthcare.

And while we’re on the subject, take a look at this depressing story out of Wisconsin, where a group of merciful and compassionate doctors tried to apply intelligence to end-of-life decisions — only to run into Sarah Palin and her fellow deathers. Of all the lies and hypocrisies spread by the GOP in this summer of discontent, surely this has been the most ignorant, the most cruel.

Watch the repulsive physician/senator Tom Coburn as he comforts a grief-stricken Oklahoma constituent with a sick husband. Oklahoma voters (their other senator is James Inhofe) have a lot to answer for.

Those poor, ignorant, deluded dupes at the town hall meetings almost got it right. But death panels aren’t just on the way; they’re already here.

One of them is named Colin McEnroe, whose talk show used to be the only bright spot on your dial if you were tuned to WTIC in Hartford. But he was, as you will see from his blog posting below, afflicted with empathy. And so he was fired, and now it’s wall-to-wall Limbaugh wannabes. (Speaking of walls and Limbaugh wannabes, you used to see this message a lot in public toilets: A man’s ambition must be small, To write his name on a shithouse wall.)

I got my mother back to the nursing home. A few weeks later, she contracted another devastating infection. I met her in the hallway of a different hospital, lying on a gurney in a very backed-up warren of emegency rooms. She had severe diarrhea, and the whole situation was an icky, messy nightmare, and the hospital had nowhere to put her, and we were stuck in a hallway, and none of the doctors who were making the big decisions — not her primary care guy or her neurosurgeon — were going to be anywhere near this 2 a.m. ordeal.

No too long after that, I became my mother’s death panel. I had found a lovely, quiet room for her in the nursing home. I got flowers for it every day. I had Maggie working with me to make her comortable. I forged alliances with the other nurses too, and then I brought hospice in, over the objections of my mother’s primary care doctor, an old-time guy who just didn’t see things this way.

She had almost stopped eating. Her neck was not healing. Her Alzheimer’s was exacerbated by all the stress. The infections were coming at her fast and furious. She didn’t have an acute fatal condition. She had a bunch of non-fatal conditions that had collected around her in sort of a whirlpool, pulling her down.

I, “this Jack, joke, poor potsherd” was what was left on this earth to love her and fight for her. And all we ever did, from that day forward was try to make her comfortable and happy. We didn’t do any more tests, because we knew she was dying and hurting. We actually saved you taxpayers a lot of money, not that I gave a damn. I just wanted to do the right thing, and this felt so right.

She died September 11. Her last days were much better than the ones that preceded my decision to be her death panel.

There is no death panel in the 2009 health care bill.That’s just a made-up thing.

But if there were death panels, they would not be taking the place of some really good system we have right now that provides perfectly targeted care to patients who need it and can benefit from it. The truths of life and death are so much more complicated and rich than any healthcare debate can make them seem. In the case of my mother, you could almost say that she received bad health care until I decided it was OK for her to die.

The gun-toting wackos showing up to protest the idea of helping people are, to Richard Hofstadter fans, modern instances of The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

“More or less normal” is a pretty broad range, most likely including, for example, Chuck Grassley, who after talking up the idea that health-care reform includes death panels is now blaming the meme on the far left. As if there were such in America. Paranoia strikes deep, into your heart it will creep… But not as fast as corporate money creeps into your campaign coffers if you spout the right nonsense. Ask Kent Conrad.

Where do right-minded spouters look for inspiration? According to Jeff Sharlet, who’s written the book, the answer is surprising even to the jaded.

The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power — not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an itinerant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the far right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who speak the language of establishment power, a “family” that thrives to this day. In public, they host the National Prayer Breakfast; in private they preach a gospel of “biblical capitalism,” military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao as model leaders, the Family’s current leader, Doug Coe, declares, “we work with power where we can, and build new power where we can’t.”

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Still, there are some positive signs in the fight over health care. And I don’t just mean the opportunity for folks who really know what they’re talking about, like Andrew Weil, to weigh in on the real issues.

One of the best signs so far is the stand taken by the Progressive Caucus in the House.

Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, responded to the wavering around the public option by reiterating the threat to block reform that doesn’t include it.

“As we have stated repeatedly for months now, a majority of the members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus will oppose any healthcare reform legislation that does not include a robust public option. Our position has not, and will not, change,” he said. “As Co-Chair of the Progressive Caucus, I look forward to working with my colleagues to develop comprehensive legislation that allows all Americans to choose the healthcare plan that’s right for them and their families. But I will not support any bill that does not include a public option.”

Then there’s Pelosi’s statement today, beginning

As the President stated in March, “The thinking on the public option has been that it gives consumers more choices and it helps keep the private sector honest, because there’s some competition out there.”

We agree with the President that a public option will keep insurance companies honest and increase competition.

As Greg Sargent notes, Pelosi stops short of a full-throated endorsement of a public option, but quoting Obama’s words back at him is a little confrontational. Which to this constituent of hers is more than a little surprising.

Right now it appears to me that the House Progressive Caucus is the best hope for some kind of meaningful reform. If you want to thank and encourage its members, you can do so here. And if you tweet, you can auto-tweet your support.

Reich is right.

The White House wonders why there hasn’t been more support for universal health care coming from progressives, grass-roots Democrats, and Independents. I’ll tell you why. It’s because the White House has never made an explicit commitment to a public option.

Senator Kent Conrad’s ersatz public option — his regional “cooperatives” — won’t have the scale or authority to do what a public option would do. That’s why some Republicans say they could buy it. What’s Conrad’s response? “The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for a public option. There never have been,” he tells “FOX News Sunday.” Conrad is wrong. If Obama tells Senate Democrats he will not sign a healthcare reform bill without a public option, there will be enough votes in the United States Senate for a public option.

I urge you to make it absolutely clear to everyone you know, everyone who cares about universal health care and what it will mean to our country, that the bill must contain a real public option. Tell that to your representatives in Congress. Tell that to the White House. If you are receiving piles of emails from the Obama email system asking you to click in favor of health care, do not do so unless or until you know it has a clear public option. Do not send money unless or until the White House makes clear its support for a public option.

This isn’t just Obama’s test. It’s our test.

Republican Tom Coburn is a medical doctor, a church deacon, and the junior U.S. Senator from Oklahoma. Here he is on Meet the Press yesterday:

Look, the, the idea that we ought to talk about our future health and what our family and what we want done is a good idea, it’s legitimate. What is not legitimate is having government even weigh in on it. It is intensely personal; your health care, your plans, your family. There is no role for government in that. And where we’ve seen a role — and, and this happens all the time, which goes to one of the things that never gets talked about in health care — is we have statements, living wills. We have people who have made those very tough decisions. And then, because they’ve made them, but because of the malpractice situation and liability, they’re ignored. And we still intubate and put people onto ventilators that never wanted it because a family member threatens through a situation, even though you have that end of life counseling there.

Help me out here. Does Coburn mean, for instance, that government should keep its grubby paws off a woman’s decision to have an abortion? That he would defend Dr. Kerkorian? Would he oppose any effort by “the government” to punish medical malpractice? To regulate or otherwise control drugs and their prescription by doctors? Does all that stuff about ventilators and intubations mean anything, and if so, what? That he wants death panels but only if he’s on them?

The most validating aspect of the current health-care debate, so called, is seeing how straightforwardly the Democratic party is dumping all the claims it made during the most recent election in exchange for campaign contributions from the scummiest parts of American society. Disturbing, but validating.

The late, great Senator Paul Wellstone (D-Minnesota) once said “If you don’t fight hard enough for the things you believe in, at some point you have to realize you don’t really believe in them.”

Can you name anything — anything — in this health care battle that Democrats have been willing to fight for? Like really go to the mat for?

Naturally the true believers will excuse any and every compromise The One deigns to grace us with. We are so lucky to have him to take care of us! We dare not criticize or obstruct whatever crumbs his generosity grants.

Of course Wellstone’s quote applies to the rest of us as well, and the only thing that might put some fight back in the Democrats is if we constantly harangue them. Some right-minded members of Congress have managed to force a vote on single payer in the House in September. Make it your mission this August to contact your Representative regularly and demand that they vote for single payer health care. Tell your Senators too. Go to their town hall meetings, and to their offices as well, now that they are on break.

And when you talk to them or their staff, don’t worry about their political calculations, or [tell] them you’re okay with a weak public option. Just demand single payer.

Or, alternatively, call ’em up and tell them how happy you are that Obama and the Democrats are giving away the store in an obviously futile attempt to bring feral Republicans (but I repeat myself) and immoral corporations (ditto) on board.

How could real, honest, intelligent people overcome the gun-toting racists who are shouting down any discussion of health care? Simple.

“Make me do it” was the advice of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to reformers when faced with legislation he desired but did not have the votes for in Congress. Mr. Obama is not exerting that plea for people power. Were he to do that, he would be encouraging daily public hearings in the Senate and the House on the bureaucratic waste, greed, overbilling, collusion, and fraud that many in the corporate world have inflicted with their costly, pay or die health care industry.

[…]

It is up to the people of our country to “make him do it” whether this year or next. A mere one million immediate calls to members of Congress by one million assertive citizens will start sobering up these legislators who think they can get away with another sale of our public trust.

The Congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121. The full Medicare, single payer bill (backed by nearly ninety legislators) is H.R. 676. The go-to citizen group for your sustained engagement is singlepayeraction.org. The rest is up to you, the majority, who want to put the people first.

From Paul Krugman’s blog:

A correspondent writes in, denouncing my latest column, and says that if things go my way we’ll end up with the government providing health care to everyone, which will “destroy the American way of life.”

Hmm. There’s a country this correspondent — and many others who denounce “socialized medicine” — should look at. It’s a country where there is, indeed, a substantial private health insurance industry, which pays 35 percent of medical bills. But the government pays a larger share — 46 percent. (Most of the rest is out-of-pocket spending.)

The country is called the United States of America.

The New York Times reports that nearly three-quarters of Americans favor a government-run Medicare-like health care plan that’s open to everyone. This is a serious and direct threat to the existing power structure, and as such a perfect measure of whether The One is really gifted, or simply fluent. Let us hope for the former, because we need it.

What really surprised me is not that

• People with greater incomes are more upset about taxes
• Folks are concerned that their own personal health care might suffer, but they’re willing to deal with that outcome to make sure everyone has some
• Even half the Republicans responding favor a government-run option
• By 65-26, Americans think covering everyone is more important than controlling costs

No. What surprised me was that the Times straightforwardly asked the single most relevant question.

When anti-single-payer people are pressed to the wall, they’ll often say, “Well, do you want your health care run by the government?” No reasonable person is completely comfortable saying yes. But considering that the alternative is insurance companies running your health care, I was happy to see the Times mention what pollwatchers have long known.

The Times poll asks, Do you think the government would do a better or worse job than private insurance companies in…

• …providing medical coverage?
• …holding down health care costs?

For the first question, it’s Better by 50-34. Two years ago it was 30-44. For the second, it’s gone from 47-37 to 59-26. Another reason to thank George W. Bush.

No semi-intelligent semi-rational being falls for the insurance company propaganda about private enterprise doing things cheaper because they have the profit motive. If you’re assuming I’m that dumb, you can expect business from other locales.

Bernie Sanders, the only actual socialist in the Senate, is right again.

He’s pushing a single-payer health care system, he’s got a petition, and he’s asking people to contribute their stories.

Clearly single payer is the cheapest way, which is precisely why it hasn’t happened. The American health care system, like pretty much every part of American economic life, is designed to concentrate wealth. Any actual health care given or received is incidental to the process.

As the petition says,

The U.S. does not get what it pays for. We rank among the lowest in the health outcome rankings of developed countries, and on several major indices rank below some third-world nations…

It also points out that the number of insurance company bureaucrats has grown at 25 times the rate of the number of physicians. Ah! That’s where all the money’s going…

So sign the damn petition already!