Obama Gives Congress Some Health Care Marching Orders

What did you link to? It won't open for me.

The former is what liberals say they want to see; the latter, the most the insurance industry says it will accept.
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This is the heart of the problem. We saw it during the bankster bailouts as well. Elected by nobody,pursuing no interests except those of their stockholders and senior management, having made the US into the country with the worst health care system in the OECD, Congress has to pass a bill that the insurance industry will "accept."
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What does that mean? It can only mean, as Durbin said with respect to the banksters, that the health "insurance" companies own enough of the Senate to have a veto over legislation created by our elected officials.
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Is this not a big story?

Failed to open on my Mac KT but I found it here. It's long.
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http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/documents/CEA_Health_Care_Report.pdf
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P.S. and unrelated to anything but I thought you might be happy to know I took my nephew for his first Hell's Kitchen breakfast this morning. He liked the peanut butter.

I have at least three points:
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I believe that employers have a responsibility to support health insurance for their employees, small businesses face a number of special challenges in affording health benefits and should be exempted.
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I am employed by a small business that has tried to do right by all our employees by providing health coverage. However we lost one of our best employess because she was virtually uninsurable (due to her weight). She was able to find an employer with a larger 'group' so the story has a happy ending, but the long-term solution to the problem will require that everyone be in the pool. A rick pool that only includes the people who need it will rapidly run out of money.
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I too was quite taken aback by the notion that insurers have the option to 'accept' federal legisaltion. We don't ask bank robbers if they're OK with larceny laws before we pass them.
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Not everybody has MS Office installed. PDF files are preferable given a choice.

KT:
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Thanks so much for the continued coverage of this hugely important issue --one could argue it's the Obama Administration's top issue-- but far from being settled by Presidential decree, I'm not sure that we're even going to get the choice of a public option --at least in the real sense of the word.
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Mike Lux at HuffPo points out that the "conditional trigger" will kill the public option for the vast majority of Americans, leaving them without a choice at all:

The insurance lobby has had multiple tactics for stopping the public option idea, which they despise because they know if regular folks have choice to go to a public option, insurance companies won't have the same ability to treat their customers like garbage when they get sick. The first tactic was just to try to kill the public option outright, and the good news is that they appear to have failed at that. This so-called trigger proposal is the second tactic: the idea is to write a "trigger" that will allow for a public option only under certain conditions, but write the legislation so that those conditions would never get met in the real world. It's a classic DC tactic, right up there with calling for a commission to study something. Olympia Snowe is carrying the insurance industry water on their trigger proposal, proposing triggers that would only get tripped in some fairyland none of us have ever visited.
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The great thing for the insurance companies in a tactic like this is that it gives "centrist" Senators (centrist in Washington, DC usually means those who have taken massive amounts of campaign contributions from the affected industry) an excuse to help the insurance industry while looking like they are open to the public option that their constituents have been demanding.
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Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress have gotten some good things done so far, and are building real momentum in getting us moving in the right direction on health care. But if conservative Democrats force the adoption of the trigger, it will destroy Democratic unity and doom health care reform, because progressives will start attacking Democrats rather than insurance companies. We really are at a critical moment.
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The only committee seriously considering the trigger turkey is the Senate Finance Committee, whose members average several hundred thousand a piece in insurance industry contributions. If you care about getting true health care reform, now is the time to make your voice heard: call the Senate Finance Committee members and tell them "NO to a trigger."

Damn right we'll start attacking insurance-lobby Democrats! We didn't wait so long and come this far for them to ruin our chance at health care reform now! There will be consequences far in excess of the kind (Ned Lamont) we saw during the Congress' failure to end the Iraq war, if we get screwed out of real health care, and are left to the tender mercies of the health insurance industry spreadsheet-sorters again...
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The only way that a public option can be a public option is if it truly is a choice open to every American to make about their coverage. If the public option becomes a public plan, for which certain applications must be approved, and family or health conditions must be certified to have been met (by some bureaucrat), then this whole deal turns from "health care reform" into "health care welfare". In order for a public option to really exist, the choice must be given to every American family and not to a select few who meet the "conditions" deemed necessary by the system to "trigger" receipt of welfare...if they are lucky enough not to die before their applications are processed, that is.
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Coverage is important, for sure, but just because the Obama Administration seems to insist that there must be a choice available to every American with respect to a public option insurance plan doesn't mean that Congress will enact into law what the American people deserve to have.
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The real question for the Obama Administration isn't whether they are pressing for a public option, it's whether they will accept proposals from the insurance lobby --I mean the Senate-- that deprive the American people that choice. When the Obama Administration talks about the necessity of a public option, do they mean that they're willing to consider a "triggered" welfare plan, or do they mean business when it comes to offering the American people a real choice in health care coverage?
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If you had the time and inclination, might you please be so kind as to ask the Finance Committee Chair and the Administration exactly what public option proposals are under consideration, and what the level of their support is for such "trigger" limits on the public's options, KT?
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Thanks for reading and considering this, and for keeping this epic battle in the light of day where it belongs, KT.

KT:
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I wish I could help...email it to me, and I'll link to it in commentary for now?

I like that there is no double talk about the insurance industry demanding unelected vet power over legislation. KT and others laying it out plainly helps provide for an honest debate.
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Bankers are worried about how the public sees them now, the insurance industry mat share their pain.

KT
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Try the save as html option.
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And those of you who don't have office, OpenOffice.org is free. On this netbook, it seemed crazy to spend nearly as much on Office as on the machine itself, so I am using OpenOffice. Works fine on Excel and word docs.

Is this not a big story?
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For the savvy Beltway insiders, it's too commonplace of an assumption to be a big story.
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For somebody to write a piece full of shocking details on what everybody knows would be...well, the work of some kind of activist not a member of the hard-nosed, hard-boiled, fedora-ed, political-crime-scene press. It would earn ex-communication from the Church of Savviness...Far better to put out Fluff For The Rubes, instead.
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Plus, where's the controversy angle? Where's the D vs R? Where's the Gingrich v Pelosi? If everybody plays the game, if everybody stands to lose, if true bi-partisan consensus is the only force at odds with the desperate wishes of the American people, then where's the conflict? People might accuse the producers of such a story of demagoguery, "playing for the crowd with the pitchforks", and we all know how irresponsible that kind of reporting is. If there's no personality conflict, if it's a systemic issue --or even something to do with the nature of the current class of important people in the Beltway-- then putting out the big story might just put some new questions into peoples' heads.
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It's a big story, alright. But like the dead coming home from Iraq, it's just not the kind of big story that can be truly reported without troubling consequences for those who produce reports...

I'm still confused on one simple point about the health insurance companies having veto over removing health care from employers' books.
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Namely, how is it that every other business in America (who presumably combine to own far more senators than the health insurance lobby does by itself) don't get together and just make congress take a public option? I mean, there is a definite time limit where if health costs continue to rise at their current rate then it will literally become impossible to do any type of business in the U.S. and remain profitable while still paying for employee health care.

KT:
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You may be shocked to hear that they will not tell me the answers.
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I'm shocked --shocked-- to hear that politicians and bureaucrats are avoiding answering any questions that would put them on record.
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Maybe somebody who can be counted on to portray the answers in the light best suited to the public debate that the Administration or the Senators or the Beltway political press corps would like to see happen could put something out with authoritative-sounding quotes from "Administration Officials" or "persons familiar with conversations between Senators" that, in addition to giving the public something to chat about, shows their colleagues how awesome their access is, and how important that reporter really is in the scheme of things.
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Wouldn't that be just as good?

[...] Karen Tumulty, I see this letter that President Obama has sent Sens. Ted Kennedy and Max Baucus, following their meeting yesterday, [...]

Not pointing fingers at KT, but it is interesting to note that a US serviceman was murdered by a Muslim convert under surveillance by the FBI and not a Swampland blogpost, particularly after Tiller got two posts. Interesting too that Obama didn't (as far as I've seen) have a word to say about that, although he did mention Tiller. And then Obama calls the US a "muslim country" (in the context of which big Muslim nations).
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Like I said, interesting.

It just strikes me as odd that our congress is mostly bought and paid for, and we just treat it as fact.

KT:

.pdf works fine here. Thanks.

Did you get my strawberry suggestion?

On the merits of the post, at least we're getting to the point where we're able to consider nuts and bolts of a health care reform plan instead of vague, unrealistic promises in support and fact-free, knee-jerk statements in opposition.

O/T – I noted the story about the murdered serviceman with great regret. My reaction was to wonder whether there's any difference in the "justifiability" of the two homicides – are "Muslim" extremists any more or less justified in killing for their professed beliefs than are "Christian" extremists? To compound the quandary, how many people were shot to death in the last few days without the stories being picked up by the national news at all?