We need about $4500 to finish off paying for the 2 week buy that will be seen on network TV approximately 10 times by almost every Democrat in Ross’s district.

Sure hope Ross is a Razorback fan.

The Baucus bill was “authored” by a former WellPoint VP.  Tom Carper admits that PhRMA paid good money for advertising in support of the $80 billion deal they cut with the White House, so the Senate must honor it.  And now the overweening concern of Pat Roberts is for the rights of lobbyists.

There’s a new problem that just cropped up for the ethically-challenged Blue Dog, Rep. Mike Ross, on the heels of news reports about his possibly illegal pharmacy sale to a major pharmacy chain with a major stake in health insurance reform. It seems that CREW, an ethics watchdog group, has just filed a complaint with [...]

The Hill is reporting that a new bipartisan group of seven senators has been formed to try to pass “bipartisan” health care reform. The new Senate group includes GOP Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Democratic Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.), Landrieu and Ron Wyden (Ore.). [...]

Earlier, reading the comments during the liveblogging of the Senate Finance Committee mark-up, there were those who cheered when Senator Snowe voted against the Hatch amendment with other Democrats. They shouldn’t be cheering when Senator Snowe decides to vote with the Democrats on health insurance reform because it means the final bill will likely have [...]

In an interview with Bloomberg.com, White House Budget Director Peter Orszag talked about his support for so-called "co-ops" and "triggers." Orszag signaled the administration doesn’t consider a government-run insurance program essential to the legislation. He suggested it would be sufficient to either create nonprofit insurance-purchasing cooperatives or set “triggers” to activate a public option if [...]

Mike is right –  this is a transparent attempt to kill the public option, and no progressive organization should be helping them. 

In a stunning moment during the Senate Finance Committee markup Sen. Tom Carper defended a secret deal that the White House, Baucus, and PhRMA had reached. The White House has long denied the deal. Carper publicly acknowledges that part of the deal was that PhRMA would run millions of dollars worth of campaign ads in support of health care reform.

According to Carper the “golden rule” in Congress is that secret back room deals in exchange for advertising buys must be honored.

Pelosi’s spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, pushed back against recent news reports that Speaker Pelosi was going to drop the deal that she had made with the Blue Dog Democrats not to have the public option be pegged to Medicare plus rates in order to be competitive. Here’s what he said below: Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami emailed [...]

Jon Walker wrote earlier about Speaker Nancy Pelosi backing off on her deal with the Blue Dogs in order to get the bill out of the Energy and Commerce Committee, but there’s more to the article about that story. Towards the last paragraph, you get this juicy little tidbit—the Blue Dogs are still planning to push the co-op [...]