House Repeals Insurance Industry’s Antitrust Exemption

The House of Representatives debated the Health Insurance Industry Fair Competition Act Wednesday, legislation that would repeal the 65 year exemption health insurance companies have from anti-trust regulations.

Speaking on the House floor this afternoon, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) lambasted Republicans for being “a wholly owned subsidiary of an insurance industry,” prompting an offended Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA) to lodge a complaint:

WEINER: You guys have chutzpah. The Republican Party is the wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry. They say this isn’t going to do enough, but when we propose an alternative to provide competition, they’re against it. They say we want to strengthen state insurance commissioners and they’ll do the job. But when we did that in our national health care bill, they said we’re against it. They said we want to have competition but when we proposed requiring competition they’re against it. They’re a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry. That’s the fact!

LUNGREN: Mr. Speaker I ask that the gentleman’s words be taken down.

WEINER: You really don’t want to go there, Mr. Lungren.

A minute later, Weiner returned to the floor and withdrew his words, and then substituted them by clarifying, “Make no mistake about it, every single Republican I have ever met in my entire life is a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry!”

Lungren once again immediately demanded that Weiner’s words be taken down.

Weiner once more finally returned to the floor to withdraw his words, and ended his statement by saying that he has had “enough of the phoniness. We are gonna solve this problem because for years our Republican friends have been unable to and unwilling to. Deal with it!” His colleagues applauded his remarks.

At the end of the debate, the House voted 406-19 to repeal the insurers’ long-held exemption from anti-trust laws.

Transcript

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President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden…

The United States Senate passed a landmark health care reform bill in a rare Christmas Eve vote that could help define President Barack Obama’s legacy and usher in near-universal medical coverage for all Americans for the first time in the nation’s history.

The 60-39 vote on a cold winter morning in the nation’s Capitol capped months of arduous negotiations and 24 days of floor debate, according to the AP. Vice President Joe Biden presided as 58 Democrats and two independents voted “yes.” Republicans unanimously voted “no,” but the tally far exceeded the simple majority required for passage.

The Senate’s bill must still be merged with legislation passed by the House before Obama could sign a final bill in the new year. There are significant differences between the two measures, but Democrats say they’ve come too far now to fail. Both bills would extend health insurance to more than 30 million more Americans.

Vicki Kennedy, the widow of the late Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, who made health reform his life’s work, watched the vote from the gallery.

At a news conference a few moments later, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the vote “brings us one step closer to making Ted Kennedy’s dream a reality.”

“This morning isn’t the end of the process, it’s merely the beginning,” Reid said. “We’ll continue to build on this success to improve our health system even more. But that process cannot begin unless we start today … there may not be a next time.”

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Guest Editorial
by Barack Obama

Early this morning, the Senate made history and health reform cleared its most important hurdle yet — garnering the 60 votes needed to move toward a final vote in that chamber later this week.

This marks the first time in our nation’s history that comprehensive health reform has come to this point. And it appears that the American people will soon realize the genuine reform that offers security to those who have health insurance and affordable options to those who do not.

I’m grateful to Senator Harry Reid and every senator who’s been working around the clock to make this happen. And I’m grateful to you, and every member of the Organizing for America community, for all the work you have done to make this progress possible.

After a nearly century-long struggle, we are now on the cusp of making health insurance reform a reality in the United States of America.

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From the inside looking out, the Senate will pass a health care reform bill…

Failure is not an option on health care, a leading Democratic senator said Monday, even as Republicans turned up the heat on moderates who hold the fate of the legislation in their hands. “We’re not going to NOT pass a bill,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. With or without Republican support, Democrats will get it done, Schumer said, because a health care system that leaves nearly 50 million uninsured and spends more than any other is clearly broken.

Schumer Says Failure Not an Option on Health Care

Get ‘er done…

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann Reports…

When it comes to paying for a health care overhaul, Americans see just one way to go: Tax the rich.

That finding from a new Associated Press poll will be welcome news for House Democrats, who proposed doing just that in their sweeping remake of the U.S. medical system, which passed earlier this month and would extend coverage to millions of uninsured Americans. The poll, conducted by Stanford University with the nonpartisan Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, found participants sour on other ways of paying for the health overhaul that is being considered in Congress.

Meanwhile, Senate health care legislation expected to be revealed this week is likely to include a new long-term care insurance program to help the elderly and the disabled avoid going into nursing homes, Democratic officials say.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is expected to incorporate the voluntary program in legislation to be unveiled as early as Wednesday. Known as the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, or CLASS Act, the program was a top priority for the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass. It would begin to close a gap in the social safety net that’s received little attention in the health care debate.

We say whatever it takes. Get ‘er done…

God and Your Country Are Not With You

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

There must not be a tea-bagger alive who has ever had to sit all night in the Charity hospital in a city like New Orleans, waiting for the morning shift to call their number.

In hospitals across America, the uninsured wait there through the night in the midst of all that painful sickness, some with swine flu, others on the verge of a heart attack.

Others sit there in agony reading old magazines and drinking bad coffee, waiting for something as simple as a cup of pink-cocktail, the drink they mix for those who suffer severe acid reflux disease, a malady that sometimes hurts in your chest so bad you think you are having a heart attack. It is a mix of the anti-acid Maalox, Novocain to numb the esophagus, and the tranquilizer Xanax to relax the muscles and relieve the pain.

The only place you can get it in the U.S. is in a hospital emergency room. They serve it by the drink there, in a little plastic cup — for about $1,000 a drink.

I don’t know if there is a specific provision in the health-care reform bill just passed in the House to make sure poor people who need it can get that drink — without losing their houses or any chance at credit if they can’t pay that bill. But if a so-called “public option” means the hospital cannot deny you that drink and that the government must pay for it, the Senate better vote for that bill, and not just to save America’s poor.

Every time a poor person, who may be poor by no fault of their own, has to seek treatment in an emergency room, the doctors who get paid $700 an hour to treat them send the bill out anyway, knowing the cost will be borne by the rising costs of the bills of those who do have insurance. What do the insurance companies do to continue making their 30 percent profit so they can pay their white male executives a million dollars a year? They raise rates on everybody else, of course, which is the number one factor contributing to the growing squeeze on the middle class.

It is a vicious cycle that escalates until a few people have all the money and most people have none.

That, my friends and enemies, is not even close to the American dream everybody seems to be so concerned about, including the far-right lunatics who believe it should be legal to shoot the president not only because he is black, but because he had the gall to propose that poor people deserve to be treated for their maladies — just like everybody else.

We are a people who have completely forgotten our history, like the Baptists in the South who cannot answer the simple question: What was the man’s name who founded the Baptist Church?

How can we forget that our most visible symbol of liberty contains the words, “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, longing to be free.”

It is kind of hard to feel free in this country if you cannot get a job that pays enough to house and feed yourself, much less one that provides health insurance.

Do the tea baggers even know the stories of their families who came here to escape one oppression or another at one time in history? That is why most of us are here, after all, except for those of us who descend from the natives. We all mostly agree Native Americans deserve a version of health care of their own in return for the genocide we committed against their people — as long as they are willing to be segregated and live on a reservation.

Are the rich not willing to allow the waitresses who serve them to be treated when they get sick? What about the guy who cuts the grass, or the writer you like to read so much on the Web?

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by Glynn Wilson

Agricultural Commissioner Ron Sparks, the Fort Payne Democrat who is running for governor of Alabama against Birmingham Congressman Artur Davis, came out swinging on Monday two days after Davis voted against President Barack Obama’s national public health care plan in the U.S. House.

“It has been said that evil flourishes when good men fail to act. One of the greatest evils of our lifetime is no doubt that in one of the most prosperous nations in the world, over 48 million men, women, and children do not have access to the world’s greatest health-care system,” Sparks said in a press release.

Despite countless attempts over nearly a century, no chamber of Congress has ever before passed comprehensive health reform, he said. This weekend, the United States Congress, “stood firm against lies, misrepresentations, self serving political rhetoric, and the back-scratching and scare tactics of special-interest money to pass a health-care bill that once and for all will provide equal access to health-care for all Americans.”

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