White House as helpless victim on healthcare

Nonsense. The administration is getting the bill that it -- more or less -- wanted all along The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start -- the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry. And kudos to Russ Feingold for saying so:

Glenn Greenwald

Dec. 16, 2009

(Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV - Update V)

Of all the posts I wrote this year, the one that produced the most vociferious email backlash -- easily -- was this one from August, which examined substantial evidence showing that, contrary to Obama's occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it. From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House -- hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama's campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN). Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn't pass it. The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party -- rather than the GOP -- will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse.

As was painfully predictable all along, the final bill will not have any form of public option, nor will it include the wildly popular expansion of Medicare coverage. Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this -- the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional "centrists." Right. The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives. The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start -- the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry. And kudos to Russ Feingold for saying so:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

"This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth," said Feingold. "I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect."

Let's repeat that: "This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place." Indeed it does. There are rational, practical reasons why that might be so. If you're interested in preserving and expanding political power, then, all other things being equal, it's better to have the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry on your side than opposed to you. Or perhaps they calculated from the start that this was the best bill they could get. The wisdom of that rationale can be debated, but depicting Obama as the impotent progressive victim here of recalcitrant, corrupt centrists is really too much to bear.

Yet numerous Obama defenders -- such as Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein and Steve Benen -- have been insisting that there is just nothing the White House could have done and all of this shows that our political system is tragically "ungovernable." After all, Congress is a separate branch of government, Obama doesn't have a vote, and 60 votes are needed to do anything. How is it his fault if centrist Senators won't support what he wants to do? Apparently, this is the type of conversation we're to believe takes place in the Oval Office:

The President: I really want a public option and Medicare buy-in. What can we do to get it?

Rahm Emanuel: Unfortunately, nothing. We can just sit by and hope, but you're not in Congress any more and you don't have a vote. They're a separate branch of government and we have to respect that.

The President: So we have no role to play in what the Democratic Congress does?

Emanuel: No. Members of Congress make up their own minds and there's just nothing we can do to influence or pressure them.

The President: Gosh, that's too bad. Let's just keep our fingers crossed and see what happens then.

In an ideal world, Congress would be -- and should be -- an autonomous branch of government, exercising judgment independent of the White House's influence, but that's not the world we live in. Does anyone actually believe that Rahm Emanuel (who built his career on industry support for the Party and jamming "centrist" bills through Congress with the support of Blue Dogs) and Barack Obama (who attached himself to Joe Lieberman when arriving in the Senate, repeatedly proved himself receptive to "centrist" compromises, had a campaign funded by corporate interests, and is now the leader of a vast funding and political infrastructure) were the helpless victims of those same forces? Engineering these sorts of "centrist," industry-serving compromises has been the modus operandi of both Obama and, especially, Emanuel.

Indeed, we've seen before what the White House can do -- and does do -- when they actually care about pressuring members of Congress to support something they genuinely want passed. When FDL and other liberal blogs led an effort to defeat Obama's war funding bill back in June, the White House became desperate for votes, and here is what they apparently did (though they deny it):

The White House is playing hardball with Democrats who intend to vote against the supplemental war spending bill, threatening freshmen who oppose it that they won't get help with reelection and will be cut off from the White House, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) said Friday. "We're not going to help you. You'll never hear from us again," Woolsey said the White House is telling freshmen.

That's what the White House can do when they actually care about pressuring someone to vote the way they want. Why didn't they do any of that to the "centrists" who were supposedly obstructing what they wanted on health care? Why didn't they tell Blanche Lincoln -- in a desperate fight for her political life -- that she would "never hear from them again," and would lose DNC and other Democratic institutional support, if she filibustered the public option? Why haven't they threatened to remove Joe Lieberman's cherished Homeland Security Chairmanship if he's been sabotaging the President's agenda? Why hasn't the President been rhetorically pressuring Senators to support the public option and Medicare buy-in, or taking any of the other steps outlined here by Adam Green? There's no guarantee that it would have worked -- Obama is not omnipotent and he can't always control Congressional outcomes -- but the lack of any such efforts is extremely telling about what the White House really wanted here.

Independent of the reasonable debate over whether this bill is a marginal improvement over the status quo, there are truly horrible elements to it. Two of the most popular provisions (both of which, not coincidentally, were highly adverse to industry interests) -- the public option and Medicare expansion -- are stripped out (a new Washington Post/ABC poll out today shows that the public favors expansion of Medicare to age 55 by a 30-point margin). What remains is a politically distastrous and highly coercive "mandate" gift to the health insurance industry, described perfectly by Digby:

Obama can say that you're getting a lot, but also saying that it "covers everyone," as if there's a big new benefit is a big stretch. Nothing will have changed on that count except changing the law to force people to buy private insurance if they don't get it from their employer. I guess you can call that progressive, but that doesn't make it so. In fact, mandating that all people pay money to a private interest isn't even conservative, free market or otherwise. It's some kind of weird corporatism that's very hard to square with the common good philosophy that Democrats supposedly espouse.

Nobody's "getting covered" here. After all, people are already "free" to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won't make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn't or didn't want to write. Indeed, it actually looks like the worst caricature of liberals: taking people's money against their will, saying it's for their own good --- and doing it without even the cover that FDR wisely insisted upon with social security, by having it withdrawn from paychecks. People don't miss the money as much when they never see it.

In essence, this reinforces all of the worst dynamics of Washington. The insurance industry gets the biggest bonanza imaginable in the form of tens of millions of coerced new customers without any competition or other price controls. Progressive opinion-makers, as always, signaled that they can and should be ignored (don't worry about us -- we're announcing in advance that we'll support whatever you feed us no matter how little it contains of what we want and will never exercise raw political power to get what we want; make sure those other people are happy but ignore us). Most of this was negotiated and effectuated in complete secrecy, in the sleazy sewers populated by lobbyists, industry insiders, and their wholly-owned pawns in the Congress. And highly unpopular, industry-serving legislation is passed off as "centrist," the noblest Beltway value.

Looked at from the narrow lens of health care policy, there is a reasonable debate to be had among reform advocates over whether this bill is a net benefit or a net harm. But the idea that the White House did what it could to ensure the inclusion of progressive provisions -- or that they were powerless to do anything about it -- is absurd on its face. Whatever else is true, the overwhelming evidence points to exactly what Sen. Feingold said yesterday: "This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place."

UPDATE: It's also worth noting how completely antithetical claims are advanced to defend and excuse Obama. We've long heard -- from the most blindly loyal cheerleaders and from Emanuel himself -- that progressives should place their trust in the Obama White House to get this done the right way, that he's playing 11-dimensional chess when everyone else is playing checkers, that Obama is the Long Game Master who will always win. Then, when a bad bill is produced, the exact opposite claim is hauled out: it's not his fault because he's totally powerless, has nothing to do with this, and couldn't possibly have altered the outcome. From his defenders, he's instantaneously transformed from 11-dimensional chess Master to impotent, victimized bystander.

The supreme goal is to shield him from all blame. What gets said to accomplish that goal can -- and does -- radically change from day to day.

UPDATE II: I'll be on MSNBC this afternoon at 3:00 p.m. EST with David Schuster/Tamron Hall discussing this post.

UPDATE III: Over at Politico, Jane Hamsher documents how Joe Lieberman's conduct on the health care bill provides the perfect vehicle to advance the agenda of the White House and Harry Reid. Consistent with that, she independently notes media reports that White House officials are privately expressing extreme irritation with Howard Dean for opposing the Senate bill as insufficient, but have nothing bad to say about Lieberman, who supposedly single-handedly sabotaged what the White House was hoping for in this bill.

UPDATE IV: Immediately prior to the MSNBC segment I just did -- video for which I will post when it's available -- an NBC reporter explained how Robert Gibbs used his Press Briefing today to harshly criticize Howard Dean for opposing the health care bill. Why did Gibbs never publicly criticize people like Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman and the like if they were supposedly obstructing and impeding the White House's agenda on health care reform (this is a point Yglesias acknowledges as a "fair" one)? Having a Democratic White House publicly criticize a Democratic Senator can be a much more effective pressure tactic than doing so against a former Governor who no longer holds office.

Meanwhile, as one would expect, health insurance stocks are soaring today in response to the industry-serving "health care reform" bill backed by the Democratic Senate and White House -- the same people who began advocating the need for "health care reform" in order to restrain on an out-of-control and profit-inflated health insurance industry (h/t Markos).

UPDATE V: Here's the roughly 4-minute segment I did with David Shuster today

Senate rejects importation of prescription drugs

Sad, but true.. and how much are you paying for medication today? (If you're unfortunate enough to have to buy it, of course.)

The proposal had threatened to derail the Democrats' landmark healthcare bill. Meanwhile, Obama and many liberals back the decision to drop the 'public option.'

By Noam N. Levey and Janet Hook

5:01 PM PST, December 15, 2009

Reporting from Washington

In a victory for President Obama and his allies in the pharmaceutical industry, the Senate today turned aside a bid by a bipartisan group of lawmakers to make it easier to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and Western Europe -- a proposal that threatened to derail the Democrats' landmark healthcare bill.

The vote on the amendment -- cosponsored by Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) -- was 51-48, nine short of the 60 needed to pass.

The politically charged amendment held up the Senate for a week as drug companies, the White House and lawmakers from states that are home to drug makers fought to derail the proposal. Critics, including the Food and Drug Administration, said it would be difficult to implement and hard to guarantee that imported drugs would be safe.

Further adding to the momentum for final Senate approval of the massive healthcare bill, Obama and many liberal Democrats rallied behind the decision to put aside a goal liberals had long held as an article of faith -- a new government health insurance plan to compete with the private sector.

Obama summoned Senate Democrats to the White House today to urge them not to let disagreements over details of the legislation derail or delay the landmark effort.

"This reform has to pass on our watch," the president said. "We are on the precipice of an achievement that has eluded Congresses and presidents for decades."

While some liberals mourned the capitulation that has long seemed inevitable, leaders of several progressive groups signaled that they would support the strategy for now rather than risk stalling their drive.

"The final bill won't include everything that everybody wants," Obama said.

The president weighed in at a critical moment, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was working to unite their party in advance of key votes on the compromise that did not include the so-called "public option" -- a new government-run health insurance plan -- or an alternative plan to expand Medicare, which was popular with liberals.

A vast array of details have yet to be pinned down, but the framework of the Senate bill came into view as Reid pushed the Senate to finish work before Christmas. The sense of gathering momentum was fueled as disputes on other issues were resolved: Behind-the-scenes negotiations continued to resolve differences among Democrats over restrictions on federal funding for abortion.

The drug amendment had in the past enjoyed broad support from Democrats -- including Obama -- but the White House and Senate leaders bowed to the pharmaceutical industry and joined their effort to derail it. The administration feared that if the amendment had passed, pharmaceutical companies, which earlier this year struck a deal with the White House to limit the economic impact of a healthcare overhaul on their industry, would turn against the broader health legislation.

To appease critics, Reid pledged this week to work with House leaders to ensure that a final bill would close the so-called Medicare doughnut hole, a gap in prescription drug coverage that forces millions of seniors to pay for thousands of dollars of drugs out of their own pockets.

On the broader questions, Reid plans to unveil the details of his final compromise Wednesday after receiving an official report on its costs and impact. After that, Reid is expected to begin the complex procedural steps required to cut off Republicans' filibuster, with the first of a series of crucial votes coming as early as Friday.

Without any GOP support, all 60 lawmakers in the Democratic caucus, including two independents, will have to vote for the procedural motions in order for the bill to advance. It will then have to be reconciled with a version passed last month by the House, a stronger bulwark of liberalism than the Senate.

House Democrats welcomed the apparent end of the Senate's stalemate on the legislation, but were not happy about the drift of its compromises.

"We in the House have made a beautiful souffle, but the Senate has scrambled an egg," said Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), noting that Reid already had said he expected to go along with the House in closing the Medicare doughnut hole. "Let's hope they will find more they like in the House bill."

Some liberals pledged to vote against the bill if it is in the Senate mold, but Democratic leaders steered clear of such ultimatums. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters that the House could pass the health bill without a public option, contrary to earlier warnings. That was in keeping with advice Democrats say they received long ago from Obama lieutenants like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who argued that passing any bill would be better than failing to act.

"Rahm told us months ago: Everything can be compromised except our ultimate goal of getting something done," said Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.). "Everything else is negotiable."

And liberals acknowledged they were in a weak bargaining position because conservatives were willing to kill the bill over their disagreements -- and Democrats were not.

"We progressives are negotiating with a gun to our heads," said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.). "Our opponents are saying, 'Go ahead and shoot.' If you're a public option fan, you haven't had a good week."

The final push for Senate action picked up important support today from several leading consumer groups, including AARP, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, Consumers Union and Families USA. The groups plan to join the Service Employees International Union, which has been a leading advocate for a new government insurance plan, at the Capitol on Wednesday to urge senators to quash a Republican-led filibuster next week.

And Health Care for America Now, the influential coalition of liberal activist groups, today decided to send a letter to Reid calling for passage of the legislation, the group's campaign manager Richard Kirsch said.

"There are major problems with the Senate bill," Kirsch said in an interview today. "But if the Senate doesn't act, there will be no healthcare reform. . . . The place to fix [the Senate bill] is in a conference committee" with House and Senate leaders at the table.

The White House meeting came one day after Senate Democrats moved to back down from the idea of expanding Medicare in lieu of the public option, bowing to opposition from conservative Democrats and independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Democrats were infuriated at Lieberman because he had supported the expansion of Medicare in the past, but the White House tried to defuse that anger.

"If we held flip-flops against everybody in the Congress, we'd probably not have many people there," Vice President Joe Biden said in an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program.

Lieberman joined Obama and Democrats at the White House and signaled that he planned to vote for the bill, according to sources briefed on the meeting. Obama urged others to see the glass as half full, emphasizing that the legislation, like the landmark 1965 law that created Medicare, is a foundation for further improvements in the future.

"Be joyful; be grateful," Obama said, according to Senate Finance Committee Max Baucus (D-Mont.). "We'll build upon it in the future."

In his public comments after the meeting, he said that the emerging Senate bill meets the major criteria he set out in a healthcare speech before a joint session of Congress: It would expand coverage, does not add to the deficit, and slows the rate of growth of healthcare costs.

Beyond that, Obama said, "We simply cannot allow differences over individual elements of this plan to prevent us from meeting our responsibility to solve a long-standing and urgent problem for the American people," Obama said. "They are waiting for us to act. They are counting on us to show leadership. And I don't intend to let them down."

Neither does as staunch a liberal as Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who has steadfastly refused to compromise on including a public option. He said after meeting with Obama that he would vote for the bill despite his reservations.

"There is too much at stake," he said. "And it's about me. It's not about any senator. It's not about Lieberman."

noam.levey@latimes.com

janet.hook@latimes.com

Senate healthcare bill: Time to kill it?

Is reform without public option worth it? Markos, Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, Howard Dean and others weigh in

Some progressives say that without a public option, it is. Others on the left say any progress is better than none

Thomas Schaller

Dec. 15, 2009

Is the watered-down, no-public-option healthcare reform bill worth saving? Or should it be killed? That is the question on everyone's lips today.

By Twitter, Markos of Daily Kos let it be known where he and many progressives stand on the issue: "Insurance companies win. Time to kill this monstrosity coming out of the Senate."

That specific tweet, and the broad sentiment that underlies it, is generating quite a bit of response. The WaPo's Ezra Klein writes on his blog:

The core of this legislation is as it always was: $900 billion, give or take, so people who can't afford health-care insurance suddenly can. Insurance regulations paired with the individual mandate, so insurers can't discriminate against the sick and the healthy can't make insurance unaffordable by hanging back until the moment they need medical care. The construction of health insurance exchanges so the people currently left out of the employer-based market are better served, and the many who will join them as the employer system continues to erode will have somewhere to go.

That's all policy. And as I spent yesterday arguing, it has a tendency to overshadow the lives in the balance. You can choose your estimate. The Institute of Medicine's methodology says 22,000 people died in 2006 because they didn't have health-care coverage. A recent Harvard study found the number nearer to 45,000. Since we talk about the costs of health-care reform over a 10-year period, may as well talk about the lives saved that way, too. And we're looking, easily, at more than a hundred thousand lives, to say nothing of the people who will be spared bankruptcy, chronic pain, unnecessary impairment, unnecessary caretaking, bereavement, loss of wages, painful surgeries, and so on.

A lot of progressives woke up this morning feeling like they lost. They didn't. The public option and its compromised iterations were a battle that came to seem like a war. But they weren't the war. The bill itself was. When liberals talked about the dream of universal health-care insurance 10, 20 and 30 years ago, they talked about the plight of the uninsured, not the necessity of a limited public option in competition with private insurers.

Salon reached out to others with strong opinions on this issue, and we will be updating this post as reactions come in, so stay tuned.

In contrast to Klein, Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told us:

The "Joe Lieberman Senate Bill" is ugly. Democrats stand on the verge of ushering in a world of nearly unregulated mandates, in which we're all forced by the state to hand over our money to failed private monopolies, with no cost control in return. Without a public option and no hope of expanding Medicare coverage, this bill is not worth supporting.

We got to this point due to a complete failure of leadership by President Obama--who chose to negotiate with out-of-touch senators instead of rallying their own constituents against them. It's also a failure of leadership by Harry Reid, who failed to exert any leverage over Joe Lieberman--by threatening to take away his committee chairmanship or use reconciliation to make his vote irrelevant.

When Democratic leaders refuse to fight, they can't then ask progressives to cave with them. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee is continuing to fight for the best health care bill possible, and we're intent on holding Democrats' feet to the fire. But we need to think very seriously about whether there will be a moment when it is clear that the bill does more harm than good--we need to be prepared to kill the bill.

Part of being a great negotiator is being able to walk away.

Jonathan Cohn, author of Sick and writer for the New Republic, more closely echoed Klein's view:

Is health care reform without a public option still worth passing? Unequivocally, unambiguously yes.

The case for is simple and straightforward: 30 million additional people, maybe more, will have health insurance. Many more who have insurance will see their coverage become more stable. The ability of insurers to exclude people based on pre-existing conditions will diminish significantly, if not disappear. And that's on top of a host of delivery reforms which should, in combination, help make medical care less expensive over time. The bill could be much better, for sure, but to argue that it's worse than nothing you have to make the case that nothing will somehow lead to more progress in some reasonable frame of time.

I don't see that. Failure to pass health reform won't lead to a progressive revival or resurgence. It will cripple the Democrats, hand the Republicans more political power, and likely to send health care reform into hibernation for another ten to twenty years. It's theoretically possible we could get a better reform at that point. But the historical trend is in the opposite direction. Every new effort is a less ambition version of the old one. Meantime, millions of more people would suffer.

Pass this bill now. Improve it later. That's the way we do things in America, for better or for worse.

PhRMA’s Big Bribe Comes In

Note From Greetings:
Matt's been a great investigative reporter.. unlike so many pundits. It would be sad if this is true... PhRMA about to run ads to convince Americans the weak Baucus bill is best. (With Obama's support?) Time will tell... let's hope not.... But also make sure you're heard. (Dropped for pre-existing conditions is to your benefit??)

True/Slant
by Matt Taibbi, September 14, 2009 Taibblog

The drug industry’s trade group plans to roll out a series of television advertisements in coming weeks specifically to support Senator Max Baucus’s health care overhaul proposal, according to an industry official involved in the planning.

via Drug Makers to Back Baucus Plan With Ad Dollars – Prescriptions Blog – NYTimes.com.

I’ve been completely out of the loop with the health care story these last week and half or so, out of touch actually with the entire earth (I’ve been on a deadline on another story), but upon returning to work today I began getting calls about some alarming maneuverings in congress. We’re apparently finally seeing delivery of the Big Bribe that President Obama and Rahm Emanuel extracted from that pharmaceutical industry in exchange for dropping drug-pricing reform in the health care bill.

To recap: PhRMA, the lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical industry, earlier this year announced that it would be setting aside $150 million to pay for an ad campaign supporting the President’s health care bill. The deal was apparently struck in July, after former Louisiana congressman and current PhRMA chief Billy Tauzin (Rod Blagojevich’s underdog opponent in the upcoming semifinal match of the Corrupt Scumbag of the Century So Far tournament) met with Rahm and other Obama aides in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Also in attendance were representatives of the usual panoply of awful medical corporations, including Abbott laboratories, Merck, and Pfizer. It was in this meeting that the White House agreed to sell out health care reform in exchange for a few bucks to fund the next couple of election cycles.

Tauzin, who has never been one for subtlety or finesse (he took his $2 million-a-year PhRMA job about ten seconds after he finished pushing through the Prescription Drug Benefit bill), stupidly later revealed some of the contents of that shady meeting, saying that the White House had “blessed” a plan involving the $150 million. He disclosed to reporters that he had extracted a promise from the White House to drop two important reforms: one, to allow the government to negotiate bulk rates for drugs in Medicare, and the other to permit the importation of cheap drugs from Canada (which was once an Obama campaign saw).

The only problem with this plan, from the White House’s side, was that not all of the president’s fellow Democrats played along. Specifically, Energy and Commerce chair Henry Waxman put a provision in his health care bill that allowed the government to negotiate lower rates. If Waxman’s language were to be allowed to survive, it would queer the White House’s deal.

So here’s what started happening to kill Waxman’s language. First of all, PhRMA started paying its bribe.

The $150 million it committed to support Obama’s bill is now being rolled out in pro-reform ads, which are being aired mostly in the districts of freshman congressmen. The ads are cheesy, half-hearted tripe blandly supporting the weak-as-fuck remnants of Obama’s health care plan, an example being this “Eight Ways Health Reform Matters To You” ad that salutes the end of coverage denials for those with pre-existing conditions.

Now we’re also seeing pressure from a group of freshmen and Blue Dogs, who have composed a letter to a quartet of House Committee chairs requesting that the Waxman language be removed from the health care bill and replaced with the PhRMA language, which happens to be the language the White House is pushing and which will appear in the Baucus bill in the Senate. The pro-PhRMA language retains the preposterous government subsidy to the pharmaceutical industry in the form of laws banning Medicare from negotiating market rates. It is completely useless and of no possible social benefit to anyone except pharmaceutical companies, but this group still managed to get 60 people to sign this letter.

What does this letter say? Does it argue that the PhRMA language is better for America than the Waxman language? Does it say it will cost taxpayers less and provide cheaper drugs to more people? Hilariously, no. What it says is that this PhRMA language, while worse than the Waxman language, is not quite so bad as you think (it doesn’t save as much as the Waxman language, but it still has a 50 percent price reduction, which isn’t terrible!). Moreover, the letter says, substituting this language will help the bill get passed! Here’s the actual language, addressed primarily to Waxman:

“Your efforts to remove this onerous burden on Medicare beneficiaries… are to be greatly commended. However the commitment by President Obama and the AARP to support legislation that would provide a 50 percent reduction is a dramatic step forward in helping fill the doughnut hole. Equally important, it moves us toward our goal of health care legislation.”

In other words, your attempt to put in a real reform is cool and all, but PhRMA has us by the balls, so help us out.

Interestingly, the congressmen who wrote the bill — former NFL bust Heath Shuler and Illinois Democrat Debbie Halvorson — did not post the letter on their web sites, which is very unusual. One guesses that they are not particularly proud of this particular bit of shameless whoring.

Progressives this week are fighting to accumulate the votes needed to stop any health care bill that doesn’t have a public option. Hopefull they can stop this PhRMA payoff as well. If you’ve got a phone, call your congressman and give him/her hell about this…