Republican mobs?

[Towntalk]

Top insurance lobbyist: August key in health drive

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hKSS23eeW4GYKCareJ8Dn9ZYdJ2AD9A0505O3

[sfc_oliver]

Actually I responded to the White house at that address just this morning when I received their email.


"The honest truth is that most Americans do not need the White House to tell them what the truth is. We can listen to numerous news sources and to what is being said by our Representatives and Senators, even the President himself.
     The point is that we are mostly fairly educated and can decide for ourselves what the truth is. Or what we feel to believe is the truth. This administration and congress have already pulled a few fast ones on us. We would like the time to look over any more fishy things coming from Washington.


Thank you,
Everett Oliver
Sergeant First Class
US Army
Retired"

[Towntalk]

White House Healthcare web site

http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Healthcare web site on Health Reform

http://www.healthreform.gov/


The White House

Dear Friend, Anyone that's watched the news in the past few days knows that health insurance reform is a hot topic — and that rumors and scare tactics have only increased as more people engage with the issue. Given a lot of the outrageous claims floating around, it's time to make sure everyone knows the facts about the security and stability you get with health insurance reform. That's why we've launched a new online resource — WhiteHouse.gov/RealityCheck — to help you separate fact from fiction and share the truth about health insurance reform. Here's a few of the reality check videos you can find on the site: ·   CEA Chair Christina Romer details how health insurance reform will impact small businesses . ·   Domestic Policy Council Director Melody Barnes tackles a nasty rumor about euthanasia and clearly describes how reform helps families. ·   Matt Flavin, the White House's Director of Veterans and Wounded Warrior Policy, clears the air about Veteran's benefits . ·   Kavita Patel, M.D., a doctor serving in the White House's Office of Public Engagement, explains that health care rationing is happening right now and how reform gives control back to patients and doctors . ·   Bob Kocher, M.D., a doctor serving on the National Economic Council, debunks the myth that health insurance reform will be financed by cutting Medicare benefits . There's more information and a number of online tools you can use to spread the truth among your family, friends and other social networks. Take a look:  We knew going into this effort that accomplishing comprehensive health insurance reform wasn't going to be easy. Achieving real change never is. The entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo always use their influence in Washington to try and keep things just as they are. But don't be misled. We know the status quo is unsustainable. If we do nothing, millions more Americans will be denied insurance because of pre-existing conditions, or see their coverage suddenly dropped if they become seriously ill. Out-of-pocket expenses will continue to soar, and more and more families and businesses will be forced to deal with health insurance costs they can't afford. That's the reality. Americans deserve better. You deserve a health care system that works as well for you as it does for the status quo; one you can depend on — that won't deny you coverage when you need it most or charge you crippling out-of-pocket co-pays. Health insurance reform means guaranteeing the health care security and stability you deserve. President Barack Obama promised he'd bring change to Washington and fix our broken, unsustainable health insurance system. You can help deliver that change. Visit WhiteHouse.gov/RealityCheck, get the facts and spread the truth. The stakes are just too high to do nothing.

Thank you, David

David Axelrod Senior Advisor to the President     

[irishbobcat]

Tea Party Conservatives......keeping the Status Quo in Health Care.....Keeping a system which is failing intact and bragging about it....... So tragic it is funny....

[sfc_oliver]

If it wasn't tragic it would be funny.

[irishbobcat]

Health Care in Canada: Facts and Myths

March 1, 2008


Americans spend more money on health care — lots more — and Canadians, sometimes, have to wait longer for non-urgent treatment.

That, in a nutshell, is the practical difference between what are essentially two quality medical systems, according to a first-ever study done jointly by health statistics agencies in both the U.S. and Canadian governments during 2002 and 2003.

"In terms of quality and outcomes, it's a wash," with Americans paying far more for essentially the same results, Morris Barer of the Canadian Institute for Health Research told Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper.

Under Canada's national health care system, citizens can choose their own general practitioner and can usually get in the day they call to see their doctor. While doctors' fees for services provided under the national system are set by the government, doctors work independently and are not government employees.

When care requires a specialist, patients may have to wait a few days or even a few weeks if the case is not urgent. "We usually can't get an appointment with a specialist here right away, either," CWA President Larry Cohen said. "It's important for people to keep that in perspective, because opponents of change are going to exploit the idea of long waits as a scare tactic."

Canadians point out that even if it takes more time to see a specialist, it's a doctor — not an insurance company — who decides what the patient needs. "There's no third party out to make a profit that is deciding on my health care," said Lise Lareau, president of the Canadian Media Guild. (See interview this page.)

Despite the fact that Americans' per-capita health care costs are nearly double Canada's, the United States has a higher infant death rate and lower life expectancy, according to the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

And EPI said Canadians consult with doctors far more than Americans do — an average of 6 annual visits versus 3.8 in the United States.

U.S. costs have skyrocketed since 1993, rising by more than 90 percent. Today, the per capita costs are $3,359 in Canada and $6,401 in the United States.

"The United States rejected any positive lessons from the Canadian single-payer model in 1993, and we are living with the results of that decision today," EPI said.



Video Online
"A Tale of Two Countries," a short video about Canada's health care system produced by the Canadian Media Guild-CWA, is now available online. View it at www.healthcarevoices.org/canada.

[irishbobcat]

Single-payer healthcare advocate Johnathon Ross M.D., M.P.H. takes a local look at the national HMO crisis

by Johnathon S. Ross, M.D.

published August 8th 2007

Johnathon Ross doesn't see Michael Moore's op-ed documentary "Sicko" as a film — it's his life.

Ross has practiced and taught internal medicine at St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center for 27 years and every day witnesses the results of America's crippled state of healthcare. Whether it's trying to find ways to help uninsured patients get treatment or helping insured patients find care when their HMOs refuse to cover their medical expenses, Ross has his hands full.

And he's mad as hell it got to this point.

Ross is one of many advocates of a nationally based single-payer health insurance system and is a member of the state council of the Single Payer Network of Ohio (spanohio.org). He is currently campaigning in support of House Bill 676 (co-sponsored by Dennis Kucinich, Marcy Kaptur and other Ohio House members) ensuring that all Americans have access to tax-paid national healthcare.

In a City Paper exclusive, Ross recounts some of the horrific experiences that Toledoans are forced to endure due to the current state of healthcare. In simple, direct language, Ross explains what national healthcare is, can be, and — more importantly — that it's not akin to socialism.

Perhaps you have seen the billboards and the full-page ads. Perhaps you have asked yourself, as I have, why the health insurance companies, drug companies and health-care systems are allowed to waste so much money on advertising when ordinary people struggle to get the care that they need? Perhaps you have seen the movie "Sicko" and wonder if you could be the next insured person that the system will fail. I have come to believe that in healthcare, market forces are the disease for which they are supposed to be the cure. These "healthcare marketing wars" in Northwest Ohio and elsewhere in the country soak up billions and are symptoms of that disease.

Every day in the St. V's clinic, I see a near miss. Every week I see a wounding. Every month or so I see a death due to a sickness care non-system that leaves 50,000 Lucas County citizens, more than a million Ohioans, more than 45 million Americans uninsured, and all of us unsure if healthcare will be there for us if we need it. The Institute of Medicine, our most prestigious health experts, estimates that more than 18,000 of our fellow citizens, our friends, neighbors and family, die every year from lack of health insurance alone, and nearly another 100,000 will die from medical errors. The system is broken and it needs to be fixed.

By the time you've read this article and have thought about it for just a few minutes, another fellow American will die from lack of health insurance. One person dies every half hour or so, day after day, year after year. While our elected representatives quibble, we sacrifice these people up to our stubborn market ideology.

A day in the life of a Toledo clinicA recent Friday morning was a typical clinic session where I work. Here are a few stories from just that single morning. Imagine similar stories day after day for the past 27 years and you will understand why I am writing this article. I have changed the names for privacy but I did ask each patient if it was OK to tell their story and each agreed.

Tommy's heartTommy is 41. He was making his first visit following bypass surgery after suffering a massive myocardial infarction (heart attack). Tommy can't read or write very well. He was working a low-wage job that did not have insurance so he never saw a doctor. That doesn't matter much now since he lost his job due to his illness. He became very depressed in the hospital and started on medication for his depression and for his heart. Fortunately, he was at the clinic with a family member who had paid more than $100 for medication to keep him alive until his appointment with us. Thanks to CareNet, a free-care program I helped to devise which helps some of the uninsured in Lucas County, he was able to see us in the clinic without charge. But there was little likelihood he would be able to pay for follow up with the heart specialists, let alone the bills they would soon be sending for his hospital care. One of our nurses spends hours every day trying to help people get "free" drugs from the pharmaceutical companies. She looked deflated when we gave her the long list of expensive medication he needed. The drugs may be "free," but her salary is not.

Shelly's stomachShelly works as a temp at another hospital. She doesn't have any benefits or health insurance, even though she works full-time as a nurse's aide. The irony of a healthcare worker who is not covered for healthcare is not lost on me, as I see lots of nurse's aides who work in extended care facilities with no benefits. She was seen in the emergency room for severe stomach pain. She hasn't seen the bill yet, but I suspect her stomach pain will get worse when she does. Her stomach still hurts and she had no money for the ulcer medicine they wrote. I search the free samples and manage to find about two weeks of medicine. I give her a follow-up appointment and hope for the best. Even if she was covered, it can take a month or more to get a gastroenterologist to see my patients at the hospital sponsored GI clinic, although with a personal call sometimes our generous gastroenterologists will let me jump the line for an urgent case.

Where's Nolan's Medicare?A clerk tells me that Nolan is at the window and he is upset. He is out of pills and needs samples of medication for his blood pressure. He should be covered by Medicare as he is 68. He has a card, but the pharmacy says it is no good — he is not sure if it is no good for all or some of his medication. He just knows he is not supposed to miss his medicine. We have referred him several times to the Social Security office and they tell him he is covered by his card. There are 50 different plans, all with different formularies, and there is no time today to sort out (again) why his card is no good. I tell the nurse to give him samples and we will try to sort out what is wrong with his card later. The Medicare D program will continue to send money to the middlemen who will continue to not pay for Nolan's medicine. Somewhere, the stockholders are smiling. Thank you, President Bush, for such a totally complex and confusing program.

Chris: Out of breathChris has asthma, low back pain and high blood pressure. She is doing OK with her current medication but isn't sure if her re-application for Medicaid will go through in time to allow her to get the refills that she needs. She says that she might have to "spin down". She's not sure what this means, but I know. She works a little and may have made too much money this past month to qualify for help and might need to "spend down" not "spin down" to poverty or perhaps she will do both. In any case, she will be out of medicine in about 10 days. The last time she missed her asthma medicine she ended up in the ER with an asthma attack. I give her one of my last samples of an inhaler just in case, and hope I don't need it for someone else with more immediate needs.

Arthur's huntArthur, on the other hand, has insurance. He has Medicaid, our state-funded insurance for the poor. This is his third visit for a rash that won't go away. I would make a referral but it seems there are no dermatologists in town who will take his Medicaid HMO. I try to make light of a bad situation and remark that his new private insurance card (they contract with Medicaid) is actually a hunting license — we get to go hunting for specialists who will accept his plan. We decide to continue our game of musical medicines to see if one will help. At least, he has coverage for his medicines. Welcome to the best healthcare system in the world.

Sharpen the focusFor patients, soaring health insurance premiums are the norm and uninsured Americans now exceed 45 million. Eighty percent of the uninsured are working people and their kids. They are not covered by their jobs or cannot afford to buy health insurance when faced with skyrocketing premiums or are refused coverage for pre-existing conditions. Managed care, with its restrictions and market competition, failed to cure rising costs or expand access, but it surely created hassles for doctors and patients. Those same self-interested insurers who brought us HMOs insist that financially squeezing patients using high deductibles will cure the cost crisis. In reality, high deductible health plans and health savings accounts are just another way that insurers and employers shift the cost burden onto employees, whose co-payments and deductibles soar while their coverage sinks. If doctors and patients have problems now with billing, collections, insurance hassles, and continuity of care, just wait until HSAs with Swiss cheese coverage become the norm. Unfortunately, market forces will not work. There will never be an effective market for healthcare services. Why?

Healthcare is not an ordinary product that people want. Rather, it is a necessity that they must have. The consumer's not sovereign. The doctor, not the patient, orders the care. There's no easy exit from the market for patients. Price does not matter. When critically (and expensively) ill, you buy or die. The most expensive healthcare is necessary not desired. Even the best physicians are unsure at times what tests or treatments will benefit a patient. Thus, the costs of patient care are often unpredictable. It is this uncertainty and unpredictability that creates the need for insurance in the first place. Asking patients to assume more responsibility for out-of-pocket costs will not work. Americans already pay the highest out-of-pocket healthcare costs in the Western world, and this has done little to control costs. Research shows that higher out-of-pocket payments will reduce the number of outpatient visits, but these payments fail to increase the appropriateness of the visits. Paying more does not create wiser consumers of healthcare. To understand the absurdity of using individual market forces to control healthcare costs, imagine open-heart surgery is on sale. Would you have two? The most expensive surgery or medical care is the least optional, predictable or negotiable. The sickest 10 percent of patients generate 73 percent of the healthcare bills at an average of about $39,000 per person yearly. They will save nothing in their HSAs. The market for medical services fails these tests of an effective market and will fail in the guise of HSAs. The insurance industry says that consumers need to have "more skin in the game". They think it's a game. We know who will get skinned.

Massachusetts is forcing uninsured working families to buy bare-bones coverage from private insurers who will keep a big chunk of the premiums for administrative costs and profits. This is hailed as reform but hardly seems wise, fair or efficient. It will leave these families vulnerable to large healthcare bills that are potentially financially fatal to working families, and there seems to be little effort to improve the quality of care under this so-called reform. It is a Marie Antoinette solution: "Let them buy high deductible health plans"! Many of these families cannot afford to keep food on the table and the lights on. A riddle: What is the difference between a mandatory premium payment and a tax? Answer: A mandatory premium allows insurers to keep a larger percentage of the money collected before healthcare is delivered (20 percent for private for profit insurers vs. 3 percent for Medicare).

If market forces cannot work, the proven alternative is a tax-financed universal health insurance system. It may seem counter-intuitive that a tax-financed universal health insurance program that covers everyone could be less expensive than a health system based on cutthroat competition between private insurance companies that leaves 45 million Americans uncovered. Yet, this has proven to be the case for every other industrial democracy. Recently, Taiwan made just such a switch and again proved it could be done. They covered everyone with little increase in cost. On the other hand, national health insurance, as proposed in HB 676 (co-sponsored by Congressmen John Conyers [D., Mich.] and Dennis Kucinich [D., Ohio]), would replace private premiums with fair payroll taxes. These funds, added to current public spending, would create a single insurance pool adequate to cover all Americans with no added spending. Here in Ohio, The Health Care for All Ohioans act could do the same thing for all Ohioans. Ohio could lead the way. How can this be true?

How it could workIn multipayer systems, complexity yields high administrative costs. Each insurer, hospital and doctor must keep track of a myriad of contracts, discount arrangements, benefit packages, formularies, limited referral networks, and insurance regulations designed to reduce utilization. Market solutions leave this insurance and billing bureaucracy in place and add the complexity of tracking 300 million individual insurance policies. The result can be predicted from Economics 101: One person's income is another person's cost. The growth of administrative personnel in healthcare has jumped more than 2500 percent in the past 30 years while the growth of doctors and nurses has grown about 150 percent. Healthcare has become a jobs program for an army of paper-pushers. Most of them are chasing the money to pay for care and, in our multipayer system, chasing money is complicated work.

The current system is failing most if not all of us. Americans and Ohioans need affordable, guaranteed, high-quality healthcare coverage that they cannot lose if they change or lose a job, whether they are rich or poor, whether they are healthy and want to stay that way or whether they are sick and want to get well. Single payer national health insurance or a similar state-based plan could accomplish the goals of guaranteed coverage, quality and cost control.

Doctors would get paid for every patient and malpractice and administrative costs would drop. They could maintain continuity of patient care. Patients would get needed care as ordered without a wallet biopsy. Outcomes and quality would improve. Emergency room overuse and abuse would diminish. Chronic disease management would improve. Multiple studies confirm that the administrative simplicity of a single universal insurance pool — like Medicare — yields hundreds of billions in savings that allow comprehensive coverage for all at current levels of spending. A tax-based public system is simple and efficient. There is simply less work to do. The data from a universal system can also be used to track and evaluate the appropriateness and the quality of care and offers the best opportunity to improve the quality of care.

Healthcare costs are hurting the competitiveness of our products in the world markets. American business and governmental employers are struggling with the burden of healthcare costs and, despite almost twenty years of experimentation with these different approaches to cost control, healthcare costs are growing at double the rate of the Gross Domestic Product. At the same time, the number of uninsured full-time workers has soared by tens of millions, as premiums have become more and more unaffordable. Several large industries are giving up responsibility for insuring their workers, creating insurance trusts that will be maintained by unions who — not surprisingly — support national health insurance. The largest U.S. employer, Wal-Mart, has come under severe criticism for its failure to cover its workers. They are targeted with state laws aimed at forcing them to insure their employees or pay special taxes to the state to help cover the uninsured. More business leaders are calling for a national solution. One can only speculate that it must be ideology alone that keeps many business leaders from supporting a national solution.

Business owners should realize that the healthcare system provides the maintenance on their work force just as other experts provide maintenance on their expensive and complex industrial and business machinery. It makes good sense to get the most comprehensive maintenance system for the best price. More for the same money, value, is what a tax-financed universal health insurance system can provide. Those businesses avoiding the cost of insuring their employees are still the recipients of cost shifting. This occurs through higher taxes to fund indigent care and higher prices paid when doing business with companies who continue to insure their employees and pass along the healthcare costs shifted to them in the price of their products. Counter-intuitive or not, even conservative businessmen should support a single-payer universal health insurance solution. Financially, they already are.

Join the movementThe necessary economic conditions for an efficient competitive market for health services do not exist. Evidence from the current competition between insurers shows it is likely that market forces will aggravate the dual problems of high cost and poor access. A tax-financed universal health insurance offers the best alternative and is consistent with both progressive and conservative principles for reform.

The enactment of tax-financed universal health insurance at the national level will most likely require successful enactment at the state level. A significant mass movement for sweeping health reform will be needed and will require substantial leadership from the provider community to overcome the concentrated insurance and business interests likely to oppose reform. The opponents of reform will try to scare us off again.

"I am Oz the great and terrible — Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! Taxes bad! Government bad! Socialized medicine bad!"

I, for one, will not listen to that humbug any more. Taxes are an efficient way to collect the money. The government is our own. It is not socialized medicine, this is social insurance just like Social Security, and Medicare. These programs work, and what would our seniors do without it?

A single-payer tax-financed universal health insurance, an improved and expanded Medicare program as that proposed in HR 676 or the HCFAO act will cover all of us comprehensively at no added cost. It's good for business and our health. Single-payer national health insurance is conservative of the basic structure of the American healthcare system and in that it changes mainly the financing, easing our efforts to improve quality. It is conservative of individual freedom and responsibility in that it allows free choice of provider and eliminates financial barriers to preventive and chronic disease care. Single-payer national health insurance would cover everyone, save lives, save money, and it is the right thing to do. Join the movement and let's roll.

Johnathon S. Ross M.D., M.P.H. Past President, Physicians for a National Health Program (pnhp.org). Member of the State Council, Single Payer Action Network of Ohio (spanohio.org). Ross will be speaking and giving a presentation at a free screening of "Sicko" on Thursday, August 16 at 6 p.m. at Downtown Latte (44 S. St. Clair Ave.) The film is presented by the Media Decompression Collective (mdctoledo.org).

[sfc_oliver]

Way to pick out a true expert Dennis, Did you bother to see who the guy was you want to quote?


"I'm a medical student, computer geek, health policy wonk, weblogger, health care activist, and all around good guy. "

A real live activist in his own words, and a Student. Are you learning from your students? By the way Dennis congress is not looking at single payer health care. You lost.

[irishbobcat]

Why we need single payer health care......

http://www.grahamazon.com/sp/whatissinglepayer.php

[sfc_oliver]

It has also been pointed out that these so called organized, un-American resisters are carrying homemade signs while those who support the healthcare reform are carrying factory made signs. Now tell me again who is organized?

I also notice Dennis continues to post other peoples points of view, which are way too long to read anyway.

[Towntalk]

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, insisting at the start of a long and politically heated summer congressional recess that healthcare reform can be achieved this fall, today are calling the disruption of "town-hall'' meetings by vocal protesters "simply un-American.''

"These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views -- but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American.''

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

[irishbobcat]

Inside Story on Town Hall Riots: Right-Wing Shock Troops Do Corporate America's Dirty Work

By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet. Posted August 10, 2009.



Since the days in the late 1970s, when the New Right began its takeover of the Republican Party, it has cultivated a militia of white people armed with a grudge against those who brought forth the social changes of the '60s.

These malcontents have been promised their day of retribution, a day for which they are more than ready. Few seem to understand that they are merely dupes for a corporate agenda that will only worsen the conditions in which they live.

Why, you may ask, would men of power and fame shake the rough, unmanicured hands of gun enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists, gay-haters, misogynists and racists?

Because somebody's got to do the dirty work. Magnates don't like to soil their French cuffs, and it's hard for a bunch of rich guys to garner sympathy for threats to their bottom lines. It's the classic inside-outside game that the right wing of the GOP has played for the last two decades.

The Health-Care Industry Executive

Imagine you're an executive at a pharmaceutical company. Your U.S. operations are your cash cow; they earn you wild net profits because, unlike in other industrialized nations, you do not experience the price controls of a government-administered program in which the government negotiates for the best price on prescription drugs and devices.

Along comes a government plan for health-insurance reform that includes a public, government-financed plan. The public option, they call it. As part of the plan, you will be required to negotiate with the government for the price of medications and devices to be distributed within the plan.

Now that could really screw up your massive profit margins. Private plans might then insist on prices more like those the government is getting.

Instead of increasing your profit by double digits in the worst year the economy has seen since the Great Depression, as did an outfit called The Medicines Co., your shareholders may have to settle for profits more in line with the overall growth of the economy. And wouldn't that just stink?

Meanwhile, polls show a clear majority of Americans -- you know, regular Americans, the kind who don't want to own an AK-47, or who do accept the president's citizenship status -- favor the public option. In fact, in June, CBS News found that majority to be 72 percent.

So, whaddaya do? Well, if your lobbying firm counts former Rep. Dick Armey, R-Texas, as its senior policy adviser, you don't have do much. Dick will take care of the rest through FreedomWorks, the ostensibly grassroots, nonprofit organization of anti-taxers, cold warriors and affirmative-action opponents, which he chairs.

Need to make it look like regular Americans oppose the health-insurance reform bills now being considered by Congress? Make sure a handful of those angry white people turn up at the town hall meetings now being conducted by members of Congress throughout the country. Make sure they disrupt the meeting and rattle the congressperson.

Capture it all on amateur video and put it up on a faux, amateur-looking Web site, and try to kid the media into thinking there's a widespread rebellion happening. After all, the media are gonna want that dramatic footage.

The Republican Member of Congress

Now, suppose you're a Republican member of Congress. Your party got totally throttled in the 2008 election, and if you don't derail this health care thing, it's going to be a big win for your Democratic opponents, as millions of underinsured and uninsured Americans finally have some health care coverage -- one bright spot in a largely dismal economy.

Meanwhile, you get a lot of your campaign cash from health-care-related industries and from the Wall Street bankers and brokers who want to keep those profits soaring.

A public option is going to stink for you, too. So, while Armey's army of taxphobes is useful to you, it would be great to get some really hard-core types to further stoke the fires -- especially if marshaled by guys who know how to really tar Democrats with racist imagery and slurs of unpatriotic behavior.

That's where Grassfire.org and its brother networking site, ResistNet, come in. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., who promised to make health-care reform President Obama's "Waterloo," is a big fan. Says so right there on the Grassfire Web site. ResistNet is yet another right-wing hub for organizing the disruption of health-care town hall meetings.

The Media Mogul

Okay, now put on the hat of a media mogul, one who rails against the minimal restrictions the U.S. has on multi-outlet ownership, and one for whom the bottom line is everything. In fact, you actually own the Wall Street Journal.

If you can nip this health care thing in the bud, you could stand in the way of a president who wants to rein in Wall Street's worse excesses and who may depress the profit margins of health-care companies in which your readers invest with his dastardly public option. What's a mogul to do?

Why not hire a guy known for riling the discontented to host a show on your cable news channel, and empower him as an organizer? Let him create a little project pegged to fear and nationalism -- something, say, like 9/11 -- through which he mobilizes bands of those aggrieved by the fact of a black president to disrupt town hall meetings.

That's exactly what Rupert Murdoch did when he hired Glenn Beck to host a Fox News Channel show and to put together a little organizing site called The 9-12 Project.

Although Beck's stated goal is to bring America back to where it was on Sept. 12, 2001 -- a nation pulled together in the wake of the terrorist attacks the day before -- he draws together only those who embrace the goals of the right.

But his project site is shaped like a social-networking tool, and activists in Florida credit the Tampa 9-12 chapter as turning them out to a town hall they helped turn into a ruckus.

Put these three scenarios together, and you have the phenomenon that has become the summer of the town-hall scuff, a heated season of right-wing disruptions of civic fora.

Add to that an oppressed-white-people narrative that has its roots in the origins of what used to be called the New Right, and you have a confluence of interests ready to elevate to prime-time status a disgruntled and paranoid minority with a penchant for misplaced blame.

FreedomWorks and the K Street Lobbyist

In Washington's K Street corridor, Dick Armey is a very important man -- so important, in fact, that he was scooped up, upon his retirement from Congress, by the lobbying firm DLA Piper.

It's been widely reported that Piper lobbies on behalf of health-care industry interests, including Bristol-Myers Squibb, but its top health-care-industry client, according to OpenSecrets.org, is The Medicines Co., a small, below-the-radar firm that has paid Armey's lobbying firm nearly $2.4 million since the beginning of 2008 -- nearly 15 percent of DLA Piper's overall lobbying income for the period.

I called The Medicines Co., requesting an interview with someone on staff who could spell out the company's position on the pending health care bills, and I got back a rather empty, generic statement via e-mail from the company's public relations firm, FD:

The Medicines Co., a small biotech company, was founded on and continues to follow our mission of saving lives, improving patient outcomes and reducing health care costs. Any suggestion that the Medicines Co. has opposed or retained anyone to oppose the pending health care reform bills is entirely mistaken.

I sent an e-mail back, asking for the company's position on the health-care bills what it spent $2.4 million to lobby for, and received no response by press time.

The Medicines Co. operates so below the radar that it is not even listed as a member on the Web site of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturer's Association (PhRMA), which opposes the House bill because it empowers a non-elected panel of experts to oversee cost-containment in public programs.

PhRMA also claims the House plan will raise premiums on senior citizens enrolled in the Medicare prescription drug plan, a plan, as currently construed, largely seen as a giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies.

Last year, The Medicines Co. saw net earnings on its major product, the anti-coagulant Angiomax, increase 17 percent over the course of a single year.

Because of The Medicines Co.'s tight lips, we may never know whether it feels it's getting its $2.4 million worth out of Piper, or its senior policy analyst, Armey, in his effort to derail health care through the FreedomWorks astroturf site.

Go to the site, and you'll find a Health Care Action Kit (PDF), complete with talking points and Armey's "ObamaCare translator" of key terms in the health care discussion, laced with Armey's own witticisms. There's even a mock "ObamaCare insurance card" (PDF) you can print out and pass around at town halls. It promises, among other things on a bulletted list, "Rationed health care" and "Anxiety, pain, risk of death."

At the risk of mixing messages (a big public-relations no-no), Armey also advises health-care protesters to raise their opposition to the energy-reform provision called "cap and trade" in the health-care town halls.

Coincidentally, DLA Piper's lobbying portfolio includes a number of oil and energy companies.

Then, there are the actual members of FreedomWorks, who leave the most enlightening comments on the Web site:

This, from Constantine Ivanov:

June 27, 2009 -- 3:40pm
The problem is that no matter how passionately we are here condemning the socialized (better to say "Socialistisized") Medicine, "die eisernen Stiefel" (the iron jackboots) of Obamistas are methodically and systematicly destroying the very core of our country.

And I recall German troops who at a steady gait moved as close as 10 miles to Moscow in 1941.

Or, this, from Joe Massana:

June 27, 2009 -- 4:00pm
[Obama] and his socilist party are ruining this country ... I know that if I was a black man right now, I would be able to get help from the government with my construction business and household bills.

If an entity providing 15 percent of the lobbying income at Armey's day job took objection to any of this, do you think Armey would be overseeing the FreedomWorks outfit?

DLA Piper also earned $300,000 since early last year lobbying on behalf of the American Council of Life Insurers, which opposes the long-term care provisions in the House bill, which it sees as competition.

Grassfire and ResistNet

The FreedomWorks commenters are tame by comparison with those found on ResistNet, a project of Grassfire.org. Using a social-networking platform, Grassfire claims some 400,000 members who are dedicated to "resisting" the "Democratic agenda," which, by their lights, includes "open borders" and "taxpayer-funded abortions."

A 501(c)(4) nonprofit, Grassfire has been named as a "stealth political action committee" by Public Citizen. Its founder and president, Steve Elliott, has held up MoveOn.org as a model for where he would like to take his organization.

ResistNet, has become a major hub for turning out hard-core right-wingers to health-care town hall meetings. The organization took in $1.5 million in 2007 (the most recent year for which information is publicly available).

It's difficult to find out much of anything about Elliott; he manages to keep a very low profile. But SourceWatch and Public Citizen report that Grassfire is represented by the Washington public relations firm Shirley & Bannister, whose principal is Craig Shirley, the man who gave us the Willie Horton ad of the 1988 presidential election.

Shirley promoted the movie, Stolen Honor, a Swiftboat-style smear piece made about 2004 presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. Today, Shirley's clients, according to the Shirley & Bannister Web site, include the National Rifle Association, author Ann Coulter, religious right co-founder Richard Viguerie, and other religious right figures.

But Shirley & Bannister retains ties to GOP establishment figures; its Web site bears an endorsement from William Kristol, who served in the administration of the first George Bush, who happens to be the candidate whose campaign reaped some of its victory from Shirley's Horton ad.

The firm also promotes the books of former Rep. Joe Scarborough, R-Fla., (now of MSNBC) and former George H.W. Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan (who promised us a "kinder, gentler nation") -- books published by Rupert Murdoch's HarperCollins.

The site also lists several other major publishers as clients for the promotion of books by right-wing authors.

I called Shirley & Bannister on Friday morning, asking if Grassfire/ResistNet was its client, since it is not listed on the Web site. I was told that Amy Haas, the person who could answer my question, was on the phone, and would get back to me. She did not.

On its introductory page, Grassfire.org complimentary words from Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., and Sen. DeMint.

"Grassfire has done a great job and has done a great service to the American people," reads the DeMint quote.

Grassfire makes the point often that it will show the president respect and refrain from personal attacks, as ResistNet, which touts a "no tolerance policy" (they can't say "zero tolerance," since "Zero" is the nickname by which many of their members call Obama -- a play on the first letter of his last name) for "personal attacks, lewd or profane language, or militancy against Barack Obama or others."

Yet a boxed statement on the opening page of the ResistNet site offers this: Welcome to the online community for patriotic citizens who are opposing the Obama-led socialist agenda ..."

ResistNet is full of comments and blog posts that violate its purported "no tolerance" policy, including those calling for social insurrection and even the death of Obama. It promises that such comments will be removed by a moderator, and yet they live on the site for months.

Here's a comment that appears below a letter one ResistNet member named Joel wrote to his congresswoman:

Comment by RBJ 1 day ago
Joel, I hate to be the one to tell you this, you remember the old saying about "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."

Well that is all that we are doing here, just throwing words at the crowd of Socialist in D.C., aka "D.C.Terrorist"...

As we all know, when words fail, reach over and get a 2 X 4 and get after it. Words don't hurt, but a good solid A$$ Whooping will get there attention everytime!

Once you have their attention, then you can talk.

Or check out this one, posted by George and Pat Wilkins on Aug. 6, in which they close a long post warning that "the statists will pass socialized medicine in September" by wishing for the death of the president:

Waiting lines will be long, those waiting will find operable conditions be found to be inoperable, Hospice and palliation for comfort will be their fate. Others will die. Why is this being done? back door reparations. I pray that God will strike Obama dead, and all who stand with him they are evil.

And those just two recent examples. Posted on July 2, and still living on the ResistNet site as I write is a video by the Rev. James David Manning, who warns that "white folks are gonna riot in the streets, and I'm gonna join them." Throughout the video, Manning, an African American, refers to Obama as a "half-breed Mack Daddy" -- slang for a kind of megapimp.

Then there's this charming bit of propaganda, Obama = Hitler (which you can view at the bottom of this story), which dubs video of Obama delivering a speech with the voice of Adolf Hitler, and interposes swastikas and Obama's campaign logo; Obama is shown wearing a swastika armband; Hitler is shown with the Obama logo as a belt buckle.

Footage of Obama supporters, most of them African American, is run side-by-side with Hitler's adoring crowds. As Obama waves and moves his mouth, the dub is Hitler yelling, "Sieg Heil!"

The ResistNet site is also peppered with posts touting the birther conspiracy, and other right-wing favorites. After Thursday's scuffle at the Tampa, Fla., health care town hall, Eric Erikson (cross-posting from RedState) blamed the violence on "SEIU thugs," an emerging right-wing theme reported earlier by Steve Benen.

I tried to contact Grassfire President Steve Elliott to ask him about the conflict between ResistNet's "no tolerance" policy and the vitriol I found on his site. I also wanted to find out if there are health-care interests among his donors. Elliott, said Tina, the woman who answered the phone, was traveling, and his spokesman, Ron DeJong, was on vacation. She promised to text Elliott with my contact information, but I never heard back.

Glenn Beck and the 9-12 Project

Which brings us to Glenn Beck. There's little I can add to what's been reported (click here for AlterNet's Tana Ganeva writing on Beck's racism), except that when I went to the Web site of Beck's 9-12 Project, another hub of organizing for disrupters of health-care town hall meetings, I found that the comments section had been shut down.

The message left by someone named "Editor" bore no time stamp, only a date: August 6, the date of the infamous Tampa brouhaha at which anti-health-care protesters, according to the St. Petersburg Times, said they had been inspired by Beck and his project.

Each of these organizations have this in common: They're all promoting a march on Washington for Sept. 12. Others in the mix include TeaPartyExpress.org, and the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, which was founded by Howard Kaloogian in the heat of the presidential campaign.

Kaloogian was the chairman of the "Recall Gray Davis Committee," which succeeded in unseating the Democratic governor of California. Our Country Deserves Better ran the "Stop Obama" bus tour during the 2008 presidential election, and was faulted by Fact Check.org for airing misleading anti-Obama advertising.

The Inside-Outside Game

The right wing of the GOP has long played this kind of inside-outside game, from the earliest days of the founding of the religious right by Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips and the late Paul Weyrich. All were veterans of the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign, and all had experience within the establishment Republican Party.

Viguerie, following a model pioneered by Morris Dees for the 1972 Democratic primary campaign of Sen. George McGovern, D-S.D., harnessed the power of direct-mail solicitations to land Ronald Reagan in the White House. Weyrich founded the Heritage Foundation, which became a fax-generating spin and policy factory for the Reagan administration.

Phillips took the game outside, organizing on-the-ground misanthropes, and eventually founding his own political party, the U.S. Taxpayer's Party (now the Constitution Party) to exert pressure on the GOP from the outside.

The strategy firmly established the right's foothold in the GOP, leading to the party's takeover. Any remnant of the old establishment of the Republican Party was crushed in 1996, when defeated presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan, now a MSNBC commentator, threatened to walk the delegates he had won in his primary war against Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kansas, out of the Republican National Convention and into the arms of Phillips' U.S. Taxpayer Party if the GOP platform did not firmly enough oppose abortion. He also insisted the platform incorporate a host of other right-wing demands, such as a condemnation of the United Nations.

The GOP forked over the writing of its platform to Phyllis Schlafly (another veteran of the Goldwater campaign) and Buchanan's sister, Bay, and the takeover was complete. The right wing became the Republican establishment.

All of the narratives today embraced by the ResistNet, FreedomWorks and the Glenn Beck crowd find their legs in the one-man clearinghouse that is Howard Phillips.

Through his Conservative Caucus, Phillips disseminated the "birther" theory that Obama is not an American citizen, gave right-wing operative Cliff Kincaid an award for researching Obama's alleged socialist roots, and for years has railed against "socialized medicine" -- even arguing that Medicare is unconstitutional and warning darkly of a time when the government might determine who shall live and who shall die.

"[W]hen the supply of medical care is controlled by politicians and bureaucrats," Phillips told a 1997 gathering of his Conservative Caucus Foundation, "and the demand for that care exceeds the supply, then individual human beings created in God's image become price factors in the eyes of medical gatekeepers -- they're not even medical, they're bureaucratic gatekeepers -- who determine medical decisions not on the basis of medical needs, but on the basis of bureaucratic priorities."

Phillips' disdain for feminists is palpable, and his language about LGBT people, routinely labeled on his Web site as "perverts," "homos" and "sodomites" is contemptible. He refers to Planned Parenthood as "Murder Incorporated."

I called Phillips for comment on this article, but he was en route to Mexico where he has convened a press conference to protest the nonexistent North American Union, another right-wing conspiracy theory. (Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, is an invited speaker.)

Phillips advanced the career of Randall Terry, founder of the militant anti-aborton group Operation Rescue. At one point, it seemed that his U.S. Taxpayer's Party was to Operation Rescue what Sinn Fein is to the Irish Republican Army -- the political wing of a movement steeped in violence. (In Terry's case, the violence was in rhetoric and obstruction designed to incite others to act.)

Conspiracy of Silence

On Aug. 4, Terry, who is seeking to make a comeback with his new organization, Operation Rescue Insurrecta Nex, sent out an e-mail blast urging followers to attend health care town halls convened by members of Congress.

Trotting out the trope the that health-care reform bills provide for taxpayer-funded abortions, he urges his followers:



Stir up some dust!

Be "unreasonable!"

In fact, you might want to be a little noisier and a little more intense than you might normally be.

I put it this way: If you were in danger of being murdered, and I could possibly save you at a town hall meeting, how would you want people to behave in a town hall meeting?

At a July press conference, Terry warned of "random acts of violence" that would occur if the health-care bill passed. There would be violent "reprisals against those deemed guilty," he said.

Think Terry's too out on the fringe to matter? Think again. When AlterNet reported that the Supreme Court nomination hearing of Judge Sonia Sotomayor was being disrupted by Terry's followers, not one Republican senator condemned him by name.

When Terry staged a demonstration outside the White House featuring men in Obama masks "whipping" him, not a distancing word was placed between him and the GOP establishment.

And now he is promulgating the false Republican claim that health-care reform will mean socialized euthanasia for the aged.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin also has links to Phillips; for seven years, her husband, Todd, claimed membership in the Alaska affiliate of the Constitution Party -- the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, whose convention Palin addressed last year via video.

Every other day, it seems, I receive an e-mail from one right-wing organization or another, warning of the grave consequences of health-insurance reform.

The subject line in an e-mail from Human Events magazine screams at me "Grandmas and babies exterminated by Obama 'health' plan," even as another of its e-mails asks, "Obama birth certificate destroyed?" The anti-gay American Family Association warns: "Liberals seek to silence and demonize those who oppose their socialism."

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council sent a plea for money to finance a television ad that features an elderly couple complaining of the government's denial of surgery for the man while financing abortion with taxpayer dollars.

Think these organizations are not the Republican establishment? Consider that the annual Values Voter Summit sponsored by the Family Research Council's PAC will feature former "moderate" GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney as a keynote speaker.

In the corridors of Washington's K Street lobbying offices, in the district offices of Republican members of Congress, and in the executive suite of one singular mogul, the men of power must be well-pleased with themselves, watching YouTube videos of the mayhem they have unleashed on the rest of us. But they may just get their pound of flesh.






                 

See more stories tagged with: gop, lobbyists, glenn beck, rupert murdoch, right wing, republican party, health-care reform, dick armey, randall terry, freedomworks, 912 project, steve elliott, phyllis schlafly, patrick j. buchanan, resistnet, grassfire, grassfire.org

Adele M. Stan AlterNet's acting Washington bureau chief.

[Rick Rowlands]

Dennis's reposting mentions groups like Numbers USA, while failing to mention that the largest grassroots organization in the US is the liberal ACORN.  Liberals engage in the very same tactics, and I guess they are upset now that the conservatives are finally fighting back using their same strategies.

[sfc_oliver]

You may also want to read this article from Real clear politics.

Even the left seems to use their numbers when convenient.


http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/26/how_to_lie_with_statistics_--_again_97189.html

[sfc_oliver]

Dennis,

     Copying and posting someone else words does not make you an expert on the subject nor does it mean you are right. My God you ran for congress, and all you can do is cut and paste? I'm just a dumb old Sergeant and at least I can present my own feelings and arguments for or against an issue.

And I am still against Government controlled healthcare for everyone. And I am still not convinced that there are that many who do not have health insurance or the means to purchase their own.

If congress wants to fix health care they need to concentrate on how to make it less expensive, not tear apart the entire system which could currently cover over 90% of us.