Ya gotta love Bernie Sanders for always calling it straight.

He’s been watching Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley on the Senate Finance Committee form a conservative "coalition of the willing," all of them more than eager to narrow the limits of health care reform. But yesterday Sanders told Ezra Klein he thinks it’s time for a counter group.

So he’s forming a "coalition of the unwilling" to stand against any reform bill that doesn’t contain a strong public option:

The Coalition of the Willing sounds a bit strange to me. You have a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate, and the coalition that is determining health-care policy are seven people, including four Republicans? . . .

I have a lot of respect for Max Baucus. I know he’s working very hard. But I think his strategy is just not right. The people have given the Democrats the responsibility to bring real change and that’s what people want. You’ve probably seen the New York Times poll showing 72 percent want a Medicare-like public option. No Republicans support that at all.

Max calls his group the Coalition of the Willing. We’ll try and form a Coalition of the Unwilling. People prepared to stay strong for a strong public option. You know my view, which is that single payer is the way to go. But if we can’t do that, at the very very very least you need to have a strong, simple, Medicare-like option that every American can use.

And I especially like Bernie’s thinking on what Al Franken’s win means:

So I think, with all due respect to Max and his hard work, it’s the wrong strategy. I think the strategy should be to say to all 60 members of the Democratic caucus that even if you don’t want a public plan in the final bill, you should commit to ending the Republican filibuster. You don’t need 60 votes to pass legislation. You need 60 votes to end the filibuster. And if we do that, we can get a strong public plan that will be real change. . . .

Look, I like Chuck Grassley. But people in the country are not sitting around saying, "We need a good bipartisan bill! That’s what we need!’" They’re saying we need good, universal coverage for every American, man, woman, and child. And it needs to be affordable. If Chuck Grassley and Olympia Snowe and these other nice people I know decide to vote against it, that’s fine. People in America aren’t sitting up nights worrying how they’ll vote. The goal should not be bipartisanship. It’s passing something that is strong and good.

Now why aren’t Harry Reid and other Democrats saying that?

Help Bernie make it happen. Use the Whip.