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The Senate Finance Committee hasn’t even voted on their version of health care reform but our growing group of pro-public option Members of Congress are already at work making sure the final bill is better for all Americans.

The big news today is the interesting proposal by Senator Schumer–my predecessor in the House of Representatives and a great leader in our cause.

Senator Schumer is proposing that we pass a bill with a strong public option but then allow states to decide later on whether they want to keep it. This approach has real promise if a couple of elements are included. First, the public option would need some time to get up and running. It would be unfair to clip its wings before Americans had a chance to choose it. And, second, all doctors that accept Medicare should be required to accept enrollment in the new public option. This way the plan would provide true patient choice.

I’m feeling the momentum.

Are you feeling it?

Anthony

Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office, the agency we look to to
figure out the financial impact of a bill announced that the proposal
making it’s way though the senate will cost $829 billion.  For that
much money, you’d expect a pretty good bill. But sadly it comes up
short.

It doesn’t include a public option, so it should not be passed.

Unless we include a public option, it will be impossible to ensure
that all Americans will be able to choose quality health care they can
afford.  Only a public option can provide real competition to
insurance companies that pay billions each year in overhead and
advertising in order to line the pockets of shareholders.

What do you think?

Anthony

The concerns of real Americans should not take a backseat to Beltway politics.

Senator Max Baucus is trying to move his health care proposal closer to a full vote on the Senate floor.  While insiders are waiting with bated breath for the so-called ‘score’ to be released any day that will assess the bill’s cost, we need to focus like a laser on the real issue: Baucus’s proposal should have been dead on arrival when he left out the public option.

The health insurance lobby has won virtually everything it has fought for in the Finance Committee to date.  Now Senators are debating a bill that does nothing to take health care back from insurance companies.  Americans know what is needed: a health care plan that gives all Americans the choice to have affordable, quality health care.

There is only one answer and that is the public option.  Let my colleagues in Congress know that any bill without a public option isn’t worth debating.

Anthony

Much of the debate on health care has been passionate, loud and partisan.  I don’t mind any of that. I want passion and I don’t mind a little volume. As they say in Brooklyn: it’s all good.

What none of us should be happy about is the outright fiction that some players in this debate have engaged in.

There is no bigger fibber in this than Betsy McCaughey.  If you don’t know her, she is the creator of the “death panel” myth.  Last night I debated her and this morning I gave her a second chance.  It’s said that a lie gets halfway around the world before a truth gets its pants on.  In this case, I think the truth won.
Anthony