Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC)
Mike Lux wants to know:
This won’t be a long post, because I just need to ask a simple question. With Ted Kennedy too sick to come down to DC and make the committee vote, Democrats will need every Senator on the HELP committee to produce a strong bill, a bill that fights for what Teddy Kennedy has been fighting for his entire life. The last holdout is Kay Hagan, who represents a state (NC) that is one of the worst in the country in terms of percent of people without health insurance. The insurance companies are lobbying Hagan against the bill, because they don’t like having to compete with a public option. My simple question is this: Teddy Kennedy is too sick to be there, Senator Hagan, so he is relying on your vote for the issue that he has fought for passionately his entire life. Will you betray him to help the insurance companies? You need to make up your mind now.
Ted Kennedy helped Hagan get elected last year. His Committee for a Democratic Majority gave Hagan critical early support.
So did Emily’s List, for that matter — they gave her about a bazillion dollars. Where are they?
Update: BlueNC digs up an old Hagan liveblog:
Since 2001, premiums for family health coverage have increased 78%, and now an estimated 47 million Americans are uninsured. Washington is broken.
We need to change the way we deliver health care by standing up to special interests and negotiating lower drug prices and lower premiums. We need to focus on prevention, chronic disease management and implement cost-saving mechanisms such as electronic records.
Without a robust public plan, health care reform is just a bailout of the insurance industry. They’re asking people to contact her office and remind her of her commitment to "stand up to special interests" since she’s now their representative on the HELP committee.
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Maybe the folks at Emily’s List are keeping their powder dry. For something really important.
Up to us to turn the screws.
It always has been.
C’mon, Kay – we had your back when Liddy Dole was slinging filth at you.
Hello Emily’s list, Bueller? Bueller?
Folks down here have been calling her and asking others to call her as well. So far, they answer that they’ve been given is that she won’t have an opinion until she sees complete legislation. She is ginning up a lot of frustrated constituents with her failure to sign on to a strong public option.
Hagan, owes Kennedy for his support.
But, Teddy may not be around for long , the insurance companies though, are gonna be here a long, long time.
It will be interesting to see where her loyalties fall
Nice one!
Last I heard, the people of NC were planning to be here a long, long time as well.
Her loyalty better to be to me — a NC voter who has called her office and let ‘em know I want a public option. Otherwise, she’s gonna be a one-term has-been because I will work to find a primary challenger that will shake Kay’s world.
Yes.
This has been another edition of Simple Answers for Silly Questions, brought to you today by Aetna, AIG and Prudential-Bache, with special sponsorship from the Insurance Industry Institute of America.
I’ve been emailing and calling Hagan from Asheville. E-mailed and said if she’s worried about BCBSNC losing jobs, they can get in line with the rest of us. I agree that the waffling doesn’t help her case. The Kossacks are getting the same responses.
This is an issue that will determine if Hagan is a politician for the people , or just another political hack.
She had better not betray Teddy and us.
Well, I went ahead and called Kay’s office, only because my son’s stationed at Ft. Bragg and is currently on communications blackout at Ft. Irwin.
I was asked if I would hold, and I said I would. I think they noted the New Mexico area code, because rather put me on hold, they hung up on me.
Nice constituent service y’all are getting from her, sjct.
I live in her hometown, Greensboro, NC and have called her office here and in Washington, D.C. Her telephone assistants gave no answer to me on her position on a public option for health care reform. I have urged her on the phone and through email to come out for one. I have received no response to either the emails or the calls, other than taking my concerns down at the time of the calls. We need to let her know we want this.
Wait a sec. She’s on the Health, Education and Labor Policy Committee. She’s supposed to be involved in the bill’s markup.
If something strong emerges from it, it’s because she’s had input to it from the beginning. I’m starting to smell a rat here.
I do not think we are talking loyalties here…expediency, $$, quid pro quo…whatever. Not loyalities.
It’s a little old, and I don’t mean to pimp my own diary, but this seems relevant: Individual Mandate? Not Without a Public Option You Don’t. The comments were also pretty good.
The thing I don’t get is, if we don’t get a public option, just what the hell is reformative about this whole junk show? What will the final text of the legislation say? Healthcare Reform Act of 2009: “See healthcare system from 2008; repeat.”
emptywheel is upstairs!
Judge Sullivan: Steven Bradbury Not Qualified to Withhold Cheney’s Plame Materials
Getting a politician to keep a campaign promise is like… words fail pissing in the wind makes sense by comparison. Bailouts Gitmo FISA torture pictures and videos the George W. Obama administration the spineless Democrats Harry -prince of punkouts Reid. It’s all just much too much. We just have to say no. No money no votes no volunteering none of it unless and until you start keeping your word. When I was a kid calling someone a lair was the worst thing you could do -fighting words. Now they have people that are paid millions to make up lies for them. WTF.
Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding.
The boards in DC are being hit with anti-public plan calls. There are rumors that some of the calls are paid. Can anyone confirm?
Nice Job, Imperial Flow. I sent an email to the President’s Office today asserting the same principle: it is a racket to let the private market set the prices, then demand the individual to buy in through a mandate.
Whose opinion is important in NC on these things?
There are a bunch of folks working the phones and e-mailing to their networks asking them to phone her who hope they are.
But we will see. We will see. Any national exposure of her waffling will help. (I’d like to see Big Eddie call her out on the fact that she doesn’t know what markup is about.)
It would also help if there were some national exposure of (1) what single-payer means in a practical sense, (2) what the options for public option mean in a practical sense (3) what we are talking about when we say “strong public option”, (4) what the other bafflegab (coops, exchanges, …) mean.
And someone needs to be digging into the 852-page House Bill bigtime. The public option language there is very loosy goosy and depends on private contractors (read, insurance companies as in Medicare and Medicaid administration) to administer the public option. I see some conflicts of interest appearing here.
Be sure to attend the Great American Sickout Rally in Washington on June 25. If you can’t go, take the day off from work and picket your Senator’s office if they haven’t co-sponsored HR 676. Start wearing blue bandannas and armbands. Tie blue ribbons around everything. Solidarity!
Should you take the day off as sick leave?
However you want to do it. I think we need to shut the whole USA down!
“There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!” — Mario Savio
I will say it again. All the healthy people need to drop private health insurance ASAP. we need to form a self-insurance plan and assess ourselves $50 or $100 per month, whatever it takes, and let the private system collapse. We can try contracting with Canada for routine surgery and even some specialized surgeries like a knee reconstruction, for example, or we can buy stop gap insurance and then the fund will cover in whole or in part the initial exposure for those who burn through their self-pay.
There is bound to be one or more accountants and/ or actuaries out there who could tell us how much the monthly assessment per person should be based on claims experience and how to manage the funds, invest them and pay them out to third parties. These gutless fuckers will never enact a meaningful public health option, and hell will freeze over before they commit to a universal health plan. We need to do it ourselves. We need those who are sick and/or in poor health to stay on their current private insurance plan and we need the healthy subscribers to bolt. It will take 6 to 12 months for the private health insurance system to fail, which is the goal.
If you think that Blanche Lincoln or Kay Hagan or Evan Bayh or any other of these spineless fucks are ever going to stand up for you and your family and your right to affordable high-quality health care, you will be sorely disappointed. We need to bring the whole system crashing down on itself.
Thank god the Democrats in NC didn’t let the queer win the NC primary! He may have actually voted for single payer!
/snark off
I generally can’t stand the new “Ed” show on MSNBC, but I do think he’s onto something when he suggests that maybe, just maybe, the Democrats don’t want to have to vote on single payer… and actually make a tough, important vote on reform. Accountability? Eh-gad. We better let the flawed, getting-worse-by-the-day status quo stay alive…
*I meant the public option when I said “don’t want have to vote on single payer.” Single payer is still my dream, but good god, we at least need an option.
Rick: I came here for the political activism.
Cop: What political activism?
Rick: I was mis-informed.
/s
That would simply make our current problems worse. We need to move in the other direction of insuring more people at the expense of the health care/insurance industry (rather than the public).
The idea of putting the cost on employers is one I’m not terribly fond of, but makes more sense than putting it all on the public.
I think of a public option where the public dime pays/subsidizes a lot of people as a serious compromise which doesn’t directly assault the huge per/person cost the industry is putting on Americans. Twice what other countries charge is insane! 18% of GDP instead of Canada’s 11% is insane!
That’s what’s happening in Iran. Here’s an amazing quote I copied from another blog-post, over at WashingtonMonthly.com It’s a translation of a blog-post from Iran!