Krugman on the myths of health care reform

Paul Krugman

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?

...
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.

If we want to have a health care debate, let's have a health care debate. The wingnuttia, and the media who gives them credence, have turned this into a debate about everything other than health care: socialism, citizenship, death panels, hypocrisy about debt (given what Bush spent in 8 years).

If you want to debate, let's debate Krugman's points. What is wrong with reforming a broken market? and don't quote me anything from the Tea Parties, who have been duped itno siding with those who do not promote their interests.

Lehman meltdown, accounting gimmick "like a drug"

Dylan Ratigan's easy to follow primer into what went wrong, with former Governor Elliott Spitzer:



Also read an excellent compilation of sources from Huff Post

Stewart: Fox News Is The Meanest Sorority In The World

Patrick Kennedy explodes on press about priorities. He's right.

Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) exploded on the floor of the House over the "despicable" job that the national press was doing covering politics. As Congress was debating a motion on Afghanistan, there were 2 reporters in the gallery. Presumably because they're all tripping over each other for more lurid details on Eric "The Naval Tickler" Massa.

Kennedy is right. It is shameful and it is despicable. And it's no wonder that America is disillusioned with government when all they see is the sensationalism.

"There's two press people in this gallery," Kennedy yelled during a debate over an anti-war resolution. "We're talking about Eric Massa 24-7 on the TV, we're talking about war and peace, $3 billion, 1,000 lives and no press? No press."

"You want to know why the American public is fit?" he continued. "They're fit because they're not seeing their Congress do the work that they're sent to do. It's because the press, the press of the United States is not covering the most significant issue of national importance and that's the laying of lives down in the nation for the service of our country. It's despicable, the national press corps right now."

Democrats grow a pair on healthcare and financial reform

The freaking public option is freaking back.

In the last few weeks, more and more senators have lined up to support the public option in the health care debate. With reconciliation apparently on the table, and only 51 votes now required (imagine that, majority rules, huh... about that Comet...) it appears that there is at least a shot that we get a public option.

However, I'm of the opinion that the Dems finally got smart and brought it in as something to trade away. On one hand, not thrilling. On the other, at least they've learned the lesson of the stimulus and figured out that you don't start negotiating at the price you're hoping for.

Huff Post

The public option faces its last stand. With more than 40 senators publicly willing to vote for a health care reform reconciliation package that includes the option, the opportunity to reinsert it into the final bill has never been greater, though the battle is nearly over without having been fought.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the Democrat in charge of rounding up votes for the health care reconciliation bill, said on Thursday that he will whip support for whatever package comes through the House. With 50 Democratic votes, Vice President Joe Biden could then break the tie and send the bill directly to the White House.

Chris Dodd is going to move ahead with Financial Reform without Republican support. Finally, some issues just couldn't be worked out and so Dodd, nearing the end of his Senate career, is going to use (gasp!) his own majority to pass the much-needed reforms. Which actually take us back to before 1999 when regular banking and risky casino-like maneuvers were kept separate by the Glass-Steagall Act.

MarketWatch

After months of trying to get Republican support for tougher regulations to prevent the next global financial crisis, Sen. Chris Dodd has decided to move ahead with or without bipartisan backing.

Dodd desperately wants a financial reform bill as a capstone to his 36-year career in Washington. But his lengthy negotiations with his Republican counterparts Richard Shelby and Bob Corker had produced little agreement, just headlines.

Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, announced Thursday that he would present his own bill to his committee on Monday. The banking committee -- with 13 Democrats and 10 Republicans -- will likely vote on the bill next week.

Dodd's decision to abandon an endless quest to reach a bipartisan deal may make it more likely that Congress will actually enact legislation this year to rein in the worst of the abuses that helped lead the global economy to the brink.

The more Dodd negotiated with Shelby and Corker, the more watered-down the bill became. Each compromise with the Republicans made it less likely that the House of Representatives -- remember them? -- would go along.

The last straw may have been when Corker demanded that any consumer protection agency would not only have to be toothless, but it would also have to be run by the Federal Reserve, the omnipotent agency that utterly failed to protect consumers, the banks or the economy during the housing bubble.

The path to landing a final bill on President Barack Obama's desk will still be complicated. Dodd will have to clear the bill out of his own committee and then find at least one Republican in the 100-member Senate to help him overcome the inevitable filibuster. And then he'll have to compromise with the House.

By all accounts, the Republicans negotiated in good faith. But there were some issues that just couldn't be compromised. It is time to act.

Colbert and Stewart

Colbert on Beck's advertisers


Colbert on GOP's most insane euphemisms


Stewart on Massa

This is the Obama I voted for. More like dis plz

The Up or Down vote on Obama's whole presidency

Frank Rich - New York Times

Now that we have finally arrived at the do-or-die moment for Obama’s signature issue, we face the alarming prospect that his presidency could be toast if he doesn’t make good on a year’s worth of false starts. And it won’t even be the opposition’s fault. If too many Democrats in the House defect, health care will be dead. The G.O.P. would be able to argue this fall, not without reason, that the party holding the White House and both houses of Congress cannot govern.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that Obama does eke out his victory. Republicans claim that if he does so by “ramming through” the bill with the Congressional reconciliation process, they will have another winning issue for November. On this, they are wrong. Their problem is not just their own hypocritical record on reconciliation, which they embraced gladly to ram through the budget-busting Bush tax cuts. They’d also have to contend with this country’s congenitally short attention span. Once the health care fight is over and out of sight, it will be out of mind to most Americans. We’ve already forgotten about Afghanistan — until the next bloodbath.

While I can quibble with some of this, on the whole, Rich is not incorrect.

The 2010 Political Dictionary

via Cesca

Josh Marshall:

Jamming it through: to vote on a bill.

Steve Benen:

Treason refers to Democrats criticizing a Republican administration during a war.

Patriotism refers to Republicans criticizing a Democratic administration during a war.

Bob Cesca

Mixed-race, liberal pragmatist: Nazi fascist

Medicare: 1) Expensive government entitlement that should be cut and privatized. 2) Not a government program and should never be meddled with.

Glenn Beck: "Social Justice" is code for Nazism, Communism

This guy is dangerous, unhinged and dangerously unhinged.

Politics Daily

On his daily radio and television shows last week, Fox News personality Glenn Beck set out to convince his audience that "social justice," the term many Christian churches use to describe their efforts to address poverty and human rights, is a "code word" for communism and Nazism. Beck urged Christians to discuss the term with their priests and to leave their churches if leaders would not reconsider their emphasis on social justice.

"I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"

Later, Beck held up cards, one with a hammer and sickle and other with a swastika. "Communists are on the left, and the Nazis are on the right. That's what people say. But they both subscribe to one philosophy, and they flew one banner. . . . But on each banner, read the words, here in America: 'social justice.' They talked about economic justice, rights of the workers, redistribution of wealth, and surprisingly, democracy."

Hypocrite watch: Palin part 624

Huff Post

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin -- who has gone to great lengths to hype the supposed dangers of a big government takeover of American health care -- admitted over the weekend that she used to get her treatment in Canada's single-payer system.

"We used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada," Palin said in her first Canadian appearance since stepping down as governor of Alaska. "And I think now, isn't that ironic?"

The irony, one guesses, is that Palin now views Canada's health care system as revolting: with its government-run administration and 'death-panel'-like rationing. Clearly, however, she and her family once found it more alluring than, at the very least, the coverage available in rural Alaska.

Dinesh D'Souza and the arrogance of the theoretical

When meeting Dinesh D'Souza he is, by all measures, a reasonable man.

D'Souza has served in the Reagan White House and worked for both the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. His neo-con bona fides are in place, going back to 1981 when D'Souza published the names of officers of the Gay Student Alliance in an article for The Dartmouth Review, including the names of those who were still closeted. Prior to marrying, he was romantically linked to both Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, to whom he was engaged.

I met Mr. D'Souza last Tuesday at a dinner and lecture at Wilkes University. He seemed an unassuming and polite man. His credentials show him to be an educated man.

But as I listened to him spin like a fan in a gale wind during his lecture, I couldn't reconcile the man with the performer. Because a performer is what he was. He began with a crude dick joke about Churchill and went from there.

Let us be clear, that he is an apologist for the right is no crime. That he bends and skews facts to meet his needs is. It is no wonder that his nickname is Distort D'Newza.

The title of the lecture was "Why Is America Loved and Why Is America Hated?". He argues - rightly - that America is a land that gives people a chance to break outside of the rigid expectations of conformity that had historically been a part of so much of the rest of the world. As an Indian immigrant, he is much more qualified to speak to that than am I.

My problems with D'Souza came during the "Why Is America Hated?" segment (which, not coincidentally, was approximately 40 of his 55 minutes of lecture time).

D'Souza argues that there are two liberalisms. "Liberalism A" is the liberalism of the Founding Fathers, that we are free to pursue life, liberty and happiness. He argues that much of the world admires us for Liberalism A. The problem, he states, is "Liberalism B". Liberalism B is the stereotypical 60's mindset of free love and no boundaries. It turns out that D'Souza is an excellent stereotyper.

The target for much of his disdain is Hollywood, and it's here that D'Souza makes the most elemental mistake. He treats Hollywood as a monolithic entity, storming through small-town America, bent on corrupting youth and instilling counter-cultural values.

We can argue about the content of what comes out of Hollywood, and I will agree that there is a lot of trash. However one feels about content, conservatives ought to embrace Hollywood, as it's the ultimate capitalist proving ground.

Hollywood is not a monolith. Hollywood is a loosely connected amalgam of businesses, each of whom has the sole goal of turning a profit. It's all about money - money from advertisers who buy based on ratings, money from DVD sales, money from merchandising. Simply put, they produce what people will purchase.

It is the free market at work. Hollywood introduces a product and the nation votes with their wallets. If a product succeeds, it spawns imitators. If a product bombs, it goes away.

So while Hollywood is an easy whipping boy for the right, when they decry Hollywood, they're really criticizing free market capitalism. When they say 'something should be done', they are in effect saying "we must be rescued from ourselves". This is the very definition of a nanny state.

But don't let the facts get in the way of a good argument.

D'Souza argues - rightly - that America is a force for a lot of good in the world. He correctly cites World War II as an example. Then he tries to slide Iraq in there unnoticed. Iraq, he claims, was an attempt to introduce a third option to the Middle East. Instead of secular tyranny or religious tyranny, we offered democracy.

Inspiring.

Revisionist and patently untrue, but inspiring.

The argument he makes is the 2006 argument, not the 2002 one. It's the revisionist argument. The "Oh, there weren't any WMD's, sorryboutthat" argument. The "Whoops, Saddam didn't have any ties to the 9/11 hijackers, so try this one on for size" argument.

I defy anyone to present contemporaneous evidence that President Bush ever suggested the 'spreading democracy' argument as the primary reason to launch war. He didn't because no one would have followed him. His arguments were fear-based. Yellow cake from Niger. WMD. Terror and 9/11 plots were offered as reasons. 'Bringing democracy' was a fallback after the lies that launched the Iraqi War were brought to light.

Again, don't let the facts get in the way of a good argument.

D'Souza then offered a piece of advise to President Obama, telling him that he should offer a vision of regular America, not Hollywood, to the world. Show them our hard-working people, our families. On this subject, I could not agree more.

Then he offered what he called "the most salable version of America": the 1950's.

REALLY?!?!?

Is he talking about the television version of the 1950's (you know, the one from Hollywood) or the real 1950's? A commentator once posited that when people cite "the best generation", they cite the generation that existed when they were children. We see the world in far more simplistic terms as children, and so it's no surprise that the vision of the 1950's that D'Souza has is Ozzie and Harriet. He offers the vision of the 1950's that was on TV in 1966 when he was 5.

The real 1950's weren't Ward, June and the Beav. It was Joe McCarty and the Red Scare, the Korean War, Brown v. Board, Montgomery, Orval Fabus and Little Rock desegregation, Sputnik and nuclear annihilation.

This vision of a divided America at war with itself and its own citizens, not to mention an unprovoked foreign invasion based on the debunked Domino Theory, is what D'Souza wants to present to the world?

Again and again, its simplistic arguments, devoid of any of the hard truths that experience brings. For a man that bemoans Hollywood's artifice, he can certainly lay on the paint with the best of them. Stereotyping indeed.

But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of a good argument.

D'Souza attempted to make the case that the Founding Fathers would be disgusted at what Liberalism A has turned into. On this he's both hypocritical and quite likely wrong.

He's hypocritical because not 5 minutes before, he took a shot at recently deceased Rep. John Murtha for attempting to tell Congress exactly what the Iraqis want. 'The Iraqis don't want this war, they want this, they don't want that'. D'Souza stung, following it up with "John, how would you know?". In that aspect, he's right. Although Murtha is not by any stretch the only politician who confabulates what he thinks people want**, D'Souza is right. How would Murtha know?

(**remember "we'll be greeted as liberators"?)

So then why would D'Souza think he is capable of speaking with any authority on what the Founding Fathers would think? What makes him more prescient than Murtha? "Dinesh, how would you know?"

Again, monolithic generalizations. "The Founding Fathers would be...", as if they all agreed on the same things. Which, as any 9th grader knows, is not true.

D'Souza repeatedly mentioned Thomas Jefferson. I thought to myself, "Yes, Jefferson would be appalled at everything. He was such a sexual stick-in-the-mud, what with caring so much about convention that he had a child-bearing affair with a slave. Which was so in keeping with the mores of the time." I can make an equal argument that Jefferson would have loved porn and would have kept a Hustler in the outhouse at Monticello.

Then there's the Jefferson Bible, which conservatives routinely omit when discussing the faith of the Framers. The Jefferson Bible was Jefferson's attempt to compile and examine the moral teachings of Christ apart from any questions of his divinity, as well as to strip away the often self-serving interpretations that had been piled on those teachings by the time they were written down.

"In extracting the pure principles which he (Christ) taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms, as instruments of riches and power to themselves."
- Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson was a deist who didn't believe in a God of miracles, or even a God who interfered in human events.

This is the same Jefferson that suggested that the Constitution should be scraped every 20 years to avoid one generation imposing its outdated will upon the next.

"This principle, that the earth belongs to the living and not to the dead,... will exclude... the ruinous and contagious errors... which have armed despots with means which nature does not sanction, for binding in chains their fellow-men."
- Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789. ME 7:460, Papers 15:396

This is Jefferson admonishing the likes of D'Souza for daring to attempt to cite Jefferson's will.

"Dinesh, how would you know?"

This is also Jefferson admonishing the Glenn Beck's of the world, who attempt to use Jefferson's 18th century to try to steer a 21st century course.

So I sarcastically offer that yes, Jefferson was most orthodox. Please know that one can make an argument that Jefferson would be aghast at what became of his nation. But to D'Souza, I ask, "but how do you know?".

This is the problem of modern conservatism - the presumption that they KNOW. They don't know, any more than the rest of us. But instead of honest debate, they've claimed the holy truth of the Framers for themselves, they've presumed to know and they've sunk to generalizations, stereotype, and fabrication of 'truth' out of whole cloth.

For all of his scholarly credentials, D'Souza was far more entertainer and performer than scholar at Wilkes. He played the crowd for the easy laugh, not the challenging thought. His act, which admittedly felt toned down for a university crowd, seems tuned to throw red meat to his constituency. He did that well.

What you've been told is not accurate: mid-term election edition

Excellent DailyKos article from pollster Charlie Cook about how the poll numbers have been skewed to make it seem like a GOP landslide is imminent. Why would the GOP want to fudge pre-electoral numbers? Simple, Americans like winners and want to back a winner. Give them the impression that Obama is dead in the water, and a fair number of sheeple will say "yeah!" and follow.

The more pertinent question is "why is the media blindly reporting polls instead of doing their own journalism?".

Our media sucks.

The ACORN hoax and the lies that try to cover it up

Shortly after the 2008 Presidential election, grass-roots organization ACORN came under fire when a video aired that supposedly showed a 'pimp' (in reality, James O'Keefe, an independent 'filmmaker' who wore an outlandish Halloween costume) walking into an ACORN office and receiving advice on how to shelter his illegal earnings from the government.



In the week after it erupted, Congress defunded ACORN and O'Keefe and Breitbart became heroes at Fox News has been using it to hammer Obama with thinly-veiled racist attacks and theories that the election was stolen. O'Keefe appeared on Fox and Friends in his pimp get-up, Sean Hannity has been practically masturbating on-air has gleefully laughed at how stupid ACORN must've been to fall for what looks like a frat party Pimps n' Hoes costume.

In a story closely followed by Media Matters' Eric Boehlert, it has now come to light that Andrew Breitbart, the right-winger whose website 'exposed' these videos (and who used this controversy to launch himself into the wingnut stratosphere) was either duped by 'filmmaker' James O'Keefe, or (more likely, IMO) went along with a great shining lie: The videos were heavily edited to show the message that the right-wing wanted shown. O'Keefe was shot in the pimp outfit outside the ACORN offices, but when he went in, he was not wearing the outfit. The "B-roll" footage was later spliced in, a charge that Breitbart admits, but dismisses as not important.

In other words, it didn't happen and there's no 'there' there.

By the way, O'Keefe was arrested in January for attempting to bug the phones of Sen. Mary Landireu, presumably for another 'gotcha' expose.

Sadly, as ACORN runs an accountability campaign, The New York Times, while admitting it got its facts wrong when it ran with the story, hook, line and sinker, has refused to print a retraction or an apology.

Not surprisingly, Sean Hannity, who has flogged the story to death, has been silent about the revelations. Colbert addresses this:

Reaganomics worked? For 400 families, sure.

Notes on this graph:

1) In 1995, when the spike started, the Republicans controlled Congress. Remember the Contract On With America?

2) Note that while pre-tax income grew by 409%, these 400 wealthiest families also got tax breaks that raised their net income by 476%. How does one justify giving more back to people who have increased their income by 400%?

3) The argument that Gingrich made in his Contract was that Reaganomics worked. The trickle-down idea that if you put more wealth into the hands of the business owners, it would create more jobs. This is simply NOT the case.

Ezra Klein

This graph, from EPI, is probably the sort of thing most of you have seen before.

The normal takeaway from this is that the American economy is very unfair. But I don't think that's a sufficient conclusion. Rather, there's something dangerous in these lines. One of two things happen when the majority of a country goes through a sustained period of wage stagnation. Either political unrest reaches destabilizing levels or we mask the trend by amassing enormous amounts of debt so that people can spend more and have more services even as they're making less and the government is getting less in revenue. The outcome of that latter approach, of course, is a debt bubble, and we're enduring the aftermath of one of those right now.

So much as there's been real energy devoted to averting total financial collapse and mitigating the recession, there's really not been that much energy left over for figuring out how to rebuild an economy that shares its gains. Quite the opposite, in fact. Wall Street and high-end industries are either rebounding or were never hit very badly, while middle-class workers are still in terrible straits. There might not be much that we can do about this until economic growth returns and we can see what the economy looks like once it's settled back down, but if we're to avert either more bubbles or a much more gruesome level of political division, people better start considering it.

Peter Orszag and Nancy-Ann DeParle defend Insurance Reform

Washington Post

Health reform that won't break the bank

Health-insurance reform offers many benefits, such as common-sense rules of the road and basic consumer protections to keep insurance companies honest and prevent them from denying coverage to anyone because of a preexisting medical condition. But some critics complain that the administration has slipped in its commitment to fiscal responsibility in health reform

These critics are mistaken. The president's plan represents an important step toward long-term fiscal sustainability: It more than meets the president's commitments that health-insurance reform not add a dime to the deficit and that it contain measures to reduce the growth rate of health-care costs over time.

To take one recent example, some skeptics have claimed that the $100 billion in deficit reduction the president's plan would achieve over the next decade is mere gimmickry because the legislation would pay for only six years of coverage expansions with 10 years of budgetary offsets.

Now, it's certainly a time-honored Washington budget gimmick to pay for just a few years of costs with many years of savings. But if that were the course being taken, we would expect to see a large hole at the end of the first decade and ever-larger deficits in the second. Instead, the savings in the president's plan grow faster than the costs over time, generating greater deficit reduction with each passing year -- roughly $1 trillion, all told, in the second decade.

Some fiscal hawks like us have also contended that we should scrap comprehensive health reform altogether and focus on "cost first" -- devoting the savings now used mostly for coverage expansions to deficit reduction instead. Even leaving aside the moral imperative of extending coverage to millions of Americans, it seems implausible that Congress would take the crucial step of creating a dynamic infrastructure for containing costs in legislation dedicated solely to deficit reduction.

That would mean forgoing reforms that would be building blocks for a feedback loop of reform and improvement in our health-care system. For example, by bundling payments and creating accountable care organizations, as well as by imposing penalties for unnecessary re-admissions and health-facility-acquired infections, physicians and hospitals will be induced to redesign their systems, coordinate care to keep people healthy and avoid unnecessary complications.

Moreover, since health care is so dynamic, even if we thought we had the answer for containing costs and improving quality today, that would quickly change as health care evolved. With the additions of investments in health information technology, research into what works and what doesn't, and an Independent Payment Advisory Board of doctors and other medical experts making recommendations to improve the Medicare system, the legislation under consideration would create a virtuous circle in which more information becomes available, different delivery system reforms are tested and successful reforms are scaled up quickly as we learn more.

Other critiques are similarly misplaced. For example, skeptics have pointed to the five-year delay, relative to the Senate-passed bill, that the president has proposed for the excise tax on "Cadillac" health insurance plans -- a key bipartisan measure to contain health-care costs over time -- as further evidence of the administration's wavering fiscal resolve.

Here, the first thing to observe is that the key cost-containment pressure from the excise tax involves neither its start date nor the initial dollar threshold at which it takes effect, but rather the rate at which the threshold grows. And, just as with the version in the Senate-passed bill, the president's excise-tax proposal would increase that threshold more slowly than the rate of health-care cost growth. As a result, firms would have a gradually increasing incentive to seek higher-quality and lower-cost health plans.

Second, history suggests that the political system is capable of following through on just these types of fiscal reforms that are imposed with a delay and then gradually grow. For example, the delayed and gradual increase in the full benefit age from age 65 to 67 under the Social Security reforms of 1983 continues slowly but steadily to go into effect almost 30 years later.

Third, if a future Congress tried to repeal the excise tax in, say, 2016 or 2017, it would violate the statutory pay-go law just enacted -- and Congress would therefore either need to find hundreds of billions in offsets or waive the pay-go rules. Circumventing pay-go was perhaps a feasible option for Congress the last time that law was in effect during the budget surpluses of the late 1990s. But it is much less likely to be feasible in the projected fiscal environment.

Fiscally responsible health reform is now eminently doable, and we have presented a plan that will significantly improve the nation's fiscal situation. All we need is the will to act.

Peter Orszag is director of the Office of Management and Budget. Nancy-Ann DeParle is director of the White House Office of Health Reform.

Bart Stupak called out by ABC News, his abortion claims are flase

This is why Obama is going grey: not only does he have to deal with liars in the GOP, his own party is to dumb to read. if you're going to vote 'no' on the bill that's fine. But at least have valid reasons.

Huff Post

ABC News found that one of Rep. Bart Stupak's (D-Mich.) biggest contentions in his fight against health care reform legislation -- that federal money will go to "directly subsidize abortions" -- is not true in all cases.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has repeatedly asserted that there is "no federally funded abortion" in the bill.

According to ABC's Jonathan Karl: "Pelosi is right in that the bill makes it clear, there can be no federal money for abortion, except in cases of rape, incest, or to protect the life of the mother."

Stupak argued that "when you read the legislation, $1 per month for all enrollees must go into a fund for reproductive care which includes abortion coverage."

Karl's research of the wording of the bill finds this statement to be false. "That's actually wrong," Karl reports. "In fact, you only pay the $1 abortion fee if you choose a plan that covers abortion. To anti-abortion advocates like Stupak, the only acceptable solution is a complete ban on abortion coverage by any insurance policy that accepts any federal money at all."

Chat Roulette. Yes, that's what I said.