John Conyers (D-MI)
I’ll see your Michael Capuano and Sam Farr and raise you a John Conyers, who pledges to oppose any health care bill that does not have a Medicare-like public plan. No triggers, no co-ops, no BS:
The centerpiece of this reform is a robust Medicare-like public health insurance plan tied to the Medicare provider system. Like many of my colleagues in both the House and Senate, I will oppose any health care reform bill that lacks such a plan. I will also oppose any legislation that seeks to replace a robust public health insurance option with health care cooperatives or which ties the availability of the public option to a trigger mechanism. In this effort, I stand in solidarity with House progressives, the majority of my friends in organized labor, millions of health care providers, and 72 percent of the American people.
Although 60 members of Congress signed a letter saying they would vote against any bill that did not have a robust public option, the list we watch more closely has always been the one where members explicitly say they understand that "public option" means no co-ops and no triggers — the two trojan horses we’ve known since the day we started the whip count operation which would be deployed to destroy a true public plan.
If we can get that list to 40, then no bill can pass the House that does not have a real public option, as opposed to a "fake" public option (co-ops) or a fantasy future public option (triggers).
Call members of Congress and ask them to take the pledge to vote against any bill that does not have a real public option — no co-ops, no triggers.
And call Chairman Conyers once again and thank him for being a leader: 202-225-5126
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Your tireless efforts are an inspiration to us all. Muchas gracias.
Excellent.
Will this pledge make it easier for others to speak up as well? Conyers is a leader — who will follow him?
Just tried calling — busy!
me too
busy
Jane’s coaching us to push….
Time for the full court press for the public option/solution
Congratulations JH. Great news. With you all the way on this. Conyers can also be reached through his website via email message. Easy and quick way to thank him for his courage and leadership.
I got through ’bout 40 minutes ago.
Thanks, John Conyers! Glad to see he finally came around.
I was wondering if it was timed as pushback on Steny’s latest bs
I found that what staffers say on the phone may differ from the Representative’s position. I called Majority Whip Clyburn’s office this morning and asked if he supported the PO and was told yes, but it was a qualified yes. They said he supported the PO but was willing to listen to other options. A few hours later Clyburn was on MSNBC promoting a bunch of incremental BS to the PO, which seemed to boil down to a trigger.
That notwithstanding, the staffer told me it was important for people to call because they were measuring constituent support for PO based on calls, etc. They emphasized that the stronger the constituent support for a PO, the greater the likelihood Clyburn (or whomever) would support the PO. So, calling does work, or so they tell me it does.
Since my Senators are DeMint and Graham, I decided there would be little benefit in calling those asshats. I’ve written them numerous times, to no avail.
Yep, we have to make the next 4 weeks count … apply more pressure on Congress, including BlueDogs & ReThugs !
Is there any possible way someone could sneak a provision in the health care bill, a la Senator Sphincter and the Patriot Act, that would legalize wacky weed? It’s great for whatever ails ya.
I don’t understand the head count. Is the assumption that all repubs will vote “No” to any health care bill? What are the chances of some repubs joining with the blue dogs to pass a plan without a public option?
Is that the same John Conyers who said who could read a bill that is 1200 pages long? Or the thats wife wife plead guilty to taken bribes?
Man I love this site.
Thank you Jane, and thank all of the commenters.
And Jane I’ve given to the cause, I’ve sent emails, I’ve made phone calls.
What else can I do to make sure we get enough to agree to vote against it? (if it doesn’t include a good PO of course, which IMO it’s not going to).
What continues to amaze me is that as people watch who is controling the debate,These people have”HEALTH CARE”and they are giving you and I “THEIR” opinion,when is the last time you saw or heard a “TALKING HEAD”complain about his or her health coverage?
Think about it!!
Hey is Conyers the same rep from MI that has one of the highest unemployment rates in the U.S?
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I’m reading some articles on the hilarious wingnut newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, on the issue. Literally, this is what passes for supposedly factual “news” reporting there:
“A ruckus crowd held the Congresswoman accoutable… on the health care issue.”
“A robust debate ensued with tough questions like; ‘Are you going to vote how your constituents want? A poll you put up on your website about health care asked ‘Do you want health care reform?’ 85 percent of the voters said no.’”
“…she indicated that she was in favor of a public option. The standing-room only crowd erupted with boos at the prospect of another congressperson not voting the will of the people.”
They went onto report that the critter in question is from a “wealthy district” and thus is prepared to act against the interests of working class Americans by supporting healthcare reform. wtf.
BC/BS are mostly crooks (3+ / 0-)
Recommended by:
3goldens, jayden, Heyroot
Maryland BC/BS tried to go private a few years ago, they wanted to pay their CEO $20 million or so, the $8million he gets now was somehow not enough to keep him in the style he wanted to live in!
And of course like any BC/BS, the Maryland group pays doctors just about nothing and routinely disputes ANY charge above $3,500- just to try to wear down the sick patients.
BC/BS is a total scam.
Any chance we can get them to sign on to Americans should pay for drugs what Canada and Mexico does? I’d love to see the Tea Baggers argue that Americans should pay more for drugs. We can control the debate/battlefield lets fight where the terrain is to our advantage.
Dollars to donut holes that’s not what they’d argue.
They’d argue we’re again trying to kill Grandma by selling her less effective drugs from Mexico.
You can’t be serious. They are 100% united in using this to embarrass the administration, and to jump start their fruitcake 2010 election campaigns. Compromising with Rethugs is nothing but the kiss of death.
Legalize wacky weed now!
Sure and if we tax it it could cut the costs of healthcare:)
hey! that’s my provider! well, at least CA BC/BS. ;-P. I have no idea how good they are. They never answer the phone.
Very good question.
ju st called Cong,Conyers and told him i sent Teddy a Lion stuffed animal,and felt he was OUR LION in the Congress
Or, that the PO and Medicare can negotiate those prices to reasonable levels, at least.
It’s sad that my first thought reading this was “is this a bridge too far?” It shouldn’t be, really. It makes sense and it really has to be done, but to hear Congress and the President you’d think we were asking to pull all the teeth out of their mouths – with pliers.
If the public plan is so wonderful for every american why did the house vote down an amendment saying that all congress and senate will be enrolled in it?
oh.. I think my congresscritter could use some help with her online healthcare survey, if anyone is from CA-53.
http://www.house.gov/susandavis/survey/090804.html
Wingnuts have taken it over. It’s going something like 80% against cost reform.
True but their racism don’t work saying NO to Canadian drugs:)
Jane, why can’t we call them out with Conyers own HR 676 Medicare for All bill coming up for a vote the way Weiner challenged them to vote Medicare down if they were so anti-socialism.
Everyone has said it is best, but it is not politically feasible, which means, corporate profit-needs must be honored because reps are compromised with their lobby money. That is not good enough or should not be for us Americans. Why can’t, since we have been burned by their betrayal to have a Medicare-for-all like public option which gets turned Trojan Horse, step up for HR 676 and go to that. And not miss this opportunity in our generation to get something serious done. I feel like if not now, when? Like when Gore stepped back.
Obama’s slack is up. He is going to tell us tomorrow night how the good little corps paying $2 million a day for lobby bribing have assured him personally that they will reform themselves just like those bonus baby bankers did. HAH.
Obama is going to play High Noon with the left, when his Gary Cooper should be pointed at the Repubs and Blue Dogs. We gotta play High Noon back.
There is a structure that will work if honorably administrated. That is the key. Medicare for all. And as progressives we could roar for it, hang the wingnuts and on the other side, the obama apologists who aren’t getting it yet.
I have to go but will check in later. I respect you and your fight, but I gotta ask the question of why we can’t have more unity with the left. You are one of the leaders. Time is of the essence. And there is a voting appointment for Single Payer 676. I say get really dramatic with strategy.
Thanks.
sadlyyes September 8th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
7
PLEASE pass this around
During Obama’s speech tomorrow…he should say,
” I want everyone in this room who has the Government Healthcare plan to stand up.”
” I want you to sit down if you do not like your healthcare plan.”
B I N G O!
Reid just now on MSNBC – ‘majority of Senate for the Public Option . . .”or something like it”
That’s been an operating assumption for some time. The reason is, in addition to their behavior on previous bills, that they’ve said they want to deny Obama the ability to say he got a health care bill passed.
One should note that not all of us support 676 because of the costs issue. I could live with a hybrid of the single-payerish features of S.703 but something would have to be done with the state control issues in that bill and an expansion of the community health clinics to national (and not just rural) scope.. but as it is, it is a much sounder bill than 676 in some respects.
The “or something like it” is triggers.
And it’s just more bullshit.
Believe me, with triggers, they could put in Hacker’s public option (the best one, IMO), and it wouldn’t matter, because there’s no way in hell the triggers they set up will ever be “met.”
I think reasonable is to little to ask when you got 72% support the same price as Canada and Mexico for drugs is a great talking point.
If the GOP and Blue Dogs kill this I hope Harry and Nancy cut all their pork. Either they do that or we start pushing for a new leadership vote in the House and Senate.
I wonder what the Blue Dogs and moderates are polling at? This issue is hot standing against it must be hurting a few of them.
Transfer the money that businesses now spend on health insurance to the single-payer fund, and there’s no cost issue. You immediately save money that’s now spent on underwriting costs and “medical loss ratio” (the 20 to 30 percent of premiums that insurance companies keep for themselves.
Obama is going to play High Noon with the left, when his Gary Cooper should be pointed at Blue Dogs. We gotta play High Noon back.
————————-
Actually it was Grace Kelly who won the day
JANE H = OUR Grace Kelly
that’s not my concern. It’s the underlying unit costs that present the problem. As I’ve commented here repeatedly and exhaustively in the past, I’ve run the numbers repeatedly and can’t see how 676 even begins to work after 3-5 years. Also, to your point, getting employers to pay into the fund by obligation in the manner your suggest is going to present all sorts of takings issues, I suspect.. I’m not even sure it would be constitutional.
What numbers? Can you name a thread or a post where you’ve done that?
There’s plenty of money being spent on healthcare that doesn’t need to be. Much of it has to do with the waste and inefficiency of the health insurance industry. That’s not to say there isn’t other waste, or that the other parts of the problem will go away. It does make the biggest waste go away, though, and it does give the government considerable leverage over the other cost drivers, like lack of preventive care.
Cujo.. I commented extensively on this on about 20 different threads here last week and the week before… I don’t have the specific threads in front of me now. I’m at work now, but I’ll try to repeat my concerns on a relevant thread, if one comes up, here, late tonight.
Basically, I’m committed to the idea of a strong PO, and I don’t think we should rethink that. There is no workable (underlying.. not insurance) cost containment mechanism in 676 (or in Medicare for that matter), and thus 676 just represents a naked transfer of premium obligations from individuals and corps to the government (which I’m fine with, by the way, if you could figure out how to make it work) without corresponding cost containment or a competitive mechanism to contain underlying healthcare costs (when those underlying covered costs are growing at about 8-10% a year, even within Medicare). Trying then to “take” those costs back from corporations only exacerbates this problem and would quite possibly be illegal (by the way, how the heck would you plan to cost this “tax” – premium rate – when the underlying premium cost of Medicare is effectively zero?). We have to solve the underlying costs problem. This is a healthcare problem NOT an insurance problem.
The underlying problem with Medicare’s cost structure is illustrated here;
http://www.brookings.edu/~/med….._small.jpg
You have to first solve this problem before Medicare-for-all works.
The hybrid system (with the Strong PO) and a price-taker mechanism gives us a shot at simulating a competition mechanism that might contain costs. Unless we stop paying twice as much for healthcare services as the rest of the OECD, both within and without Medicare, then this problem will continue to be in place with any single payer system that does not actually nationalize at least part of the underlying service provision system. The whole system is performing with a flat price elasticity of demand far below the production possibility curve. Get rid of private insurers and you just buy time, without improving the underlying system.
For these reasons, I frankly can’t think of a major OECD health system that depends on single payer without at least partial public ownership (and thus financial/budget management) of hospitals, clinic, etc. You’d do better to advocate for VA-for-all or the Canadian system (eith of which I would support). Either that or the strong PO with portability and dual mandates. Now, if you want to put forward a viable proposal for outright system nationalization combined with harsh cost cutting after takeover, I’m all ears.
If taking those costs from employers is illegal, then a lot of states are in trouble. We do payroll deductions for all sorts of things, like SSI, Medicare, workmen’s comp, etc. Those aren’t illegal, and neither would imposing a tax on employers to help cover health care.
Since you mention unit costs, I’ll just mention that there’s are reason that microeconomics and macroeconomics are separate subjects. Widget sales and production don’t always scale up the way you think they do in the real world.
what’re you talking about. there’s no “macro” here. This is all microeconomics (GDP is a macro concept but that’s just basic sector-sizing math, not a confusion of two theoretical approaches) ;-). Yes, it would be OK to structure this as a trust fund deduction for individuals as you mention, which is exactly how the current payroll deducion system works. This is entirely different than forcing corps to subsidize that system as opposed to individual payroll deductions (which are NOT a corp expense). You may be confusing apples and oranges, I think: Payroll deductions for government trust funds are the same as payroll deducations for your share of private healthcare premiums and do NOTHING to contain underlying costs. The only difference is that the former is governed by the Feds and not discretionary while the latter is governed by the states (and generally not discretionary either, except in certain out-of-mandate cases). Getting employers to pay, as you suggest above, would imply that you can somehow force employers to pay a private-insurance type subsidy to Medicare from their own money, not their employee’s payrolls. This would be a completely different thing.. Anyway.. can’t debate this now.. going into a meeting soon.
Jane, congratulations on securing Conyers’s statement regarding co-ops and triggers. The whip pledge performs the unequivocally laudable function of protecting the paltry from the venal, and we all would be far more fucked than we already are if you hadn’t spearheaded this vital work.
To be clear, Conyers would be among the last in Congress to concur that averting co-ops and triggers ensures a “real” public option. I have heard him speak forcefully and disdainfully about the public option as written into HR 3200. Additionally, he is on record as pledging not to vote for any bill from which the Kucinich state single-payer amendment is stripped. So no one should expect that the mere absence of coops or triggers will necessarily be sufficient to secure his vote on a public option bill.
Don’t anyone make any bets on Conyers. If there has ever been a Congressman that flipped on the biggest issues of our times it has been Conyers. Seriously the man wrote a book about how he would see that Bush would be impeached only to let Nancy Pelosi force him to walk around naked in his surrender of his honor.
Jane, I left a message on Ehlers machine this evening( had a big Costco day ). Will try to stir up a friend in Idaho who might know some of the old McClure-Church Team. It’s quite the bedroom community of Sen. Hatch
these days though. My Grandpa admired Conyers for his guts, I will too if
he comes through.
This is a copy of a comment I made to my diary asking for support at FDL for single payer advocates. Hope it is okay to also post it here to explain my thinking. thanks.
****
Going to throw out some thoughts here. Appreciate the honesty and thoughtfulness of the commenters.
Special note to Boo, point taken. My title does sound like I spent too much time at the Ralph Nader school of charm, maybe, but I think I was feeling so frustrated and confused by the single payer activists and the public option activists. Kind of like parallel play with industrious children. Why can’t we find common ground, is that impossible, and undemoralize the left?
Everyone who believes in Jane a lot raise your hand. All hands go up, including mine.
Everyone who believes in Congress raise your hands. How about who believes in Obama?
Obama used up his slack with me. I suspect he is going to make a case for us trusting the corps tomorrow night. And the corps and the Congress have betrayed us yet again. And if Obama sings their song tomorrow night, so has he.
We wanted health care reform. Now we are begging them not to change anything because they will make it worse. Crazymaking.
We got crumbs from Bush. Now with our bipartisan Pres we are negotiating for croutons. And then, it turns out not croutons, even smaller crumbs. I am saying, why don’t we demand the whole loaf of bread? We deserve it. Unalienable right and all. Universal health care.
Corporations are vendors. Why are the vendors running the show. They cheat you, you fire them.
$2 million a day, they are truly running scared. That is a lot of investment. That is the good news. Bad news is $2 million a day lobbying big investment for influence.
Medicare for all …. could work if the same type of crippling adjustments that Bushco made in 2003 don’t continue on with the prototype. To prevent Medicare from discounting drugs, meant no longer getting 58% pricing like VA, suddenly 100%. And Medicare Advantage D helped the corporations.
Obama has apparently told pharma there will be no discounting on this new plan either.
12,000 private health care companies, which means now there are 25X more administrative personnel than doctors in this country. 1/3 of all health care money goes to overhead, paperwork, advertising, and exec pay.
Health care is 17% of the economy and it is important to take care of those employes but not by bleeding the remaining 83%.
Between 2003-2007 profits for health care companies increased 170%. In these hard times, like Exxon and Goldman, they are riding high.
800 military bases around the world, none could be liquidated to release some money for healthcare to prevent 22,000+ deaths a year from inadequate health care and 1 person going bankrupt every 30 seconds? Wow, why is the military budget so sacrosanct? 27 million underinsured. $100 billion a year goes to upkeep of all those bases. Imperialism can surely be cut back for the common good. Well, in a democracy anyway, not a fascistic state.
Nader points out that so much fraud going on with contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why would domestically the same kind of insane greed not be happening since oversight has been so crippled by Bush and Obama is not that big on accountability in the name of bipartisanship. Nader said, “Obama will sign anything that squirms through a cowardly Congress.” Obama will use his political capital for “pretend reform bill” and hope the media will help him spin. Andrea Mitchell recently dissed any Dem congressperson willing to challenge “reform.” I think we have been damaged enough by the Greenspan family.
129 million Americans were supposed to be covered in the original Hacker PO plan says Kip Sullivan of PNHP. Now the plan being most discussed will cover only 10 million.
Blue Cross may be the outsourcee to oversee health care which is pretty much delegating the fox to run the hen house.
Apparently the legalese is intense in the new proposed bills, hard to comprehend. And loopholes making the po into a Trojan Horse. It would mean people would have to take what the employer chooses for them and not opt for Medicaid in place of a crap plan.
Pelosi asked the backers of single payer to give it up for a robust plan. Robust is not the plan, though she smiles through her teeth and calls it healthy and affordable.
The single payer advocates have been treated shabbily by Congress people and obama. Taibbi’s account of how Baucus had 8 single payer advocates removed from his meeting in handcuffs is appalling. Round tables mean everyone gets to share. obama and baucus and others big hypocrits on that one.
I am not great at details of the plans. It seems clear, though, that with a single payer, if $350 billion is released a year that will be a relief and sustainable and if Medicare can get cleaned up. Maybe S703 is better than HR676 and if that is open for a vote, hot diggedy. But I think HR676 is coming up for a vote and holds more workability.
I think Obama is going to tell us tomorrow night things like big pharma has promised to save us $80 billion in the next 10 years and we should say thank you and wait. And one more time we are asked to trust the untrustworthy.
No crumbs. No croutons. Time to demand the full loaf of universal health care bread. Call the question with a vote on 676 or 703. And let us exit denial and see the leaders taking us down the garden path to further fascism, Obama most likely included. At least we can put the heart back into our community. Asking for what we deserve and fighting for it. Going the distance. I called my reps and I am still calling reps and saying don’t vote for a PO that is a Trojan Horse, AND vote for 676. I also mention I want torture accountability to go all the way up to Pres. level and that I think Goldman Sachs needed a windfall profits tax levied against it when it got $13 bill from AIG bailout. Where is the oversight? The list is long but those are my top three this week.
Thanks for listening to all this.
I am not trying to be a troll of any kind, here. I don’t think the campaigns against a non-robust public option and for single payer should be so divorced. I think Jane is a brilliant strategist and maybe could be a catalyst to help with such a re-bonding and re-rallying.
I don’t know what is up with Obama. Personality issues or moral ones. Or did he have to sell out a lot to get elected.
Thanks to anyone who waded through all this. I am putting this down from top of my head and most of my statistics are from my last 4 or 5 diaries. Sorry not to leave links.
libby