Few problems require federal action more urgently than global warming. I admire the members of Congress who have been trying to address this issue. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman tried to get the best deal he could. Senator John Kerry has tried to keep things moving in the upper chamber. Senator Lindsey Graham is getting tons of grief from fellow Republicans because he admits that climate change is a problem.

I want to support these people and their efforts to get a bill on the president's desk. Unfortunately, the time has come to accept that Congress is too influenced by corporate interests to deal with climate change in any serious way. Pretending to fight global warming won't solve the problem and may even be counter-productive.

This depressing post continues after the jump.

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House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman is ready to shine a light on the health insurance industry's business practices, according to this piece by Bill Boyarsky at Truthdig:

Waxman has already begun by demanding that major insurance companies reveal how much they pay top executives and board members and, most important, the size of their profits from selling policies. [...]

I asked Waxman whether he expected the insurance companies to reply to his letters. "Oh yes," he said. "When we write letters, we expect to get answers." And what was his purpose in seeking the information? At first, he was reluctant to discuss the investigation. Finally, he gave a guarded reply: that many folks perhaps take too benign a view of private insurance companies. [...]

The letters from Waxman and his colleague, Bart Stupak, chairman of the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, went to every major insurance company, ranging from Aetna to Wellpoint. The lawmakers want to know the pay, stock options, perks, incentives, and retirement and other financial information of executives earning more than $500,000 a year. They are curious about the cost of promotional junkets. They are seeking disclosure of premiums, revenue, claims payments and sales expenses for health insurance policies. This includes sales to employers, individuals and the government. Interestingly, while insurance companies rail against the federal government, they earn money from participating in a number of federal programs, such as Medicare.

David Mizner has more on why this is important.

Speaking of insurance industry practices, Froma Harrop of the Providence Journal wrote a powerful column last week on the "death panel" her late husband faced from their insurance company, United Healthcare, after he was diagnosed with liver cancer.

A United Healthcare subsidiary owns the Lewin Group, which has been putting out so-called "non-partisan" research to discredit the idea of a public health insurance option.

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Originally posted at The Wayward Episcopalian. This post is called "Dear Opponents of Socialized Medicine." That's clearly not the MyDD crowd, but maybe you can find a new talking point (like "socialized defense") for when Uncle Pete comes over for dinner tomorrow night.

Dear Opponents of Socialized Medicine,

CONGRATULATIONS, YOU'VE WON! This is good news, it means you can stop screaming now! Neither the Senate nor the House is giving serious consideration to government-run health care. What they are doing, with limited leadership from the President of the United States, is trying to reform the private health care system that currently leaves 1/6 of the country in the cold, provides shoddy care to another 1/6, and is on track to consume 31% of the our GDP. What Congress is NOT doing is trying to make it a public system, so please, stop distorting debate over the issue! I would suggest that you pay attention to what is really being considered rather than screaming about a non-issue. Nevertheless, since opposing socialized medicine is all the rage these days, I have three observations that I would like to offer.

1) It seems hypocritical to me to say that the government-run programs are socialist when you don't like them but are democratic when you do. If government-run health care is "socialized medicine," how come the far-right isn't whining about "socialized freeways" or "socialized defense"? My point is this: if the security provided to you and me by the United States Armed Forces is not socialism, then neither is universal access to quality health care.

2) The most common talking point from the status quo crowd is that the government is too incompetent to run something as large as health care. This came up at an Arlen Specter event and has been pushed by organizations like Fox News and the American Spectator. This makes me wonder: does the right-wing also opposes Medicare, or thinks we should take away the government-run health care given to American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan? (On a related note: Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol said three things on The Daily Show last week: the government cannot provide quality health care, it does provide quality care to soldiers, and normal citizens don't deserve the best health care they can get. Watch the interview here.)

3) Points one and two aren't really that important anyway because no one who matters is proposing government-run health care. President Obama has said that he wants a "public option" but his position carries little weight since he refuses to introduce his own plan to Congress. The House bill's public option was all but dropped following negotiations between Henry Waxman and the Blue Dog Democrats. Finally, the Senate bill will probably be based on the work of a bipartisan Senate Finance Committee working group, a group that will not include a public option in its bill. At least four of the group's six members, Democrats Max Baucus (full disclosure: my former boss) and Kent Conrad and Republicans Chuck Grassley and Mike Enzi, have said so.

Let me be very clear: NEITHER THE HOUSE NOR THE SENATE HEALTH CARE BILLS WILL CONTAIN A PUBLIC OPTION, AND THE PRESIDENT HAS NOT INTRODUCED A BILL OF HIS OWN. So please, PLEASE stop distorting the debate. Stop acting like thugs at respectful town hall meetings. Stop surpressing discourse and squelching voices you don't like. Stop protesting what no one is doing; stop acting like anti-Bush liberals afraid of a draft. For the love of God, stop spreading false information and baseless fear!!! (And while you're at it, stop getting false information in the first place and turn off Glen Beck!)

Crossposted from Hillbilly Report.

After President Obama came back from overseas and "persuaded" Congress to get serious about Healthcare, lawmakers in the House have gotten on the ball. They unveiled their plan today to overhaul the system. It has a lot of good things in it, but predictably awaits an uncertain fate in the "House of Lords" known as the U.S. Senate and will probably draw opposition from Corporate Democrats as well as Republicans.

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Marc Ambinder has written up what I think is one of the most important and interesting pieces I have read in a long time on what the anti-obesity movement can learn from the anti-tobacco efforts of the last several decades. I recommend you read the post in full, but here's Ambinder's final graf:

Apply that lesson to the debate over obesity. The same cognitive frames apply; lawmakers, supported by the food and agribusiness industries, see obesity as a personal issue, one where willpower and individual choices matter. Science sees obesity as a complex epiphenomenon. Our health care system has few incentives to fight obesity; health insurance have few incentives, right now, at least, to proactively cover preventative interventions, like paying for personal trainers and nutritionists for the slightly overweight. The food industry lobby is huge and powerful; the anti-obesity lobby is correspondingly weak and not terribly sophisticated.  Many health economists and scientists believe that action is needed now, but if the tobacco model repeats itself, it may be a while before something -- whatever that something is, because there is no consensus -- gets done.

I'm not sure that I have much to add beyond the call again to read the article in full.

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