GOP operatives are running a secret campaign to kill health care reform, and it's based on Karl Rove's old playbook
"The insurance industry is up to the same dirty tricks, using the same devious PR practices it has used for many years, to kill reform," says Wendell Potter, who stepped down last year as chief of corporate communications for health insurance giant CIGNA. "I'm certain that people showing up at these town halls feel that they're there on their own — but they don't realize they're being incited, ultimately, by the insurance industry and the other special interests."
Behind the scenes, top Republicans — including House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, Minority Leader John Boehner and the chairman of the GOP's Senate steering committee, Jim DeMint — worked hand-in-glove with the organizers of the town brawls. Their goal was not only to block health care reform but to bankrupt President Obama's political capital before he could move on to other key items on his agenda, including curbing climate change and expanding labor rights. As DeMint told an August teleconference of nearly 20,000 town-hall activists, "If we can stop him on this, the administration won't be able to go on to cap and trade, card check and the other things they want to do."
How Obamacare opponents scam physicians and the public.
The NRCC's Physicians' Council is dishonest in two ways.
1. Quite obviously there is no Physicians' Council for Responsible Reform. Serving on a real council requires some commitment of time. You can't receive "special briefings" and provide "input to Republican members of Congress" if you're just a name on a page. The real purpose is to identify doctors riled up enough about Obamacare that they'll give money to the NRCC. (Good luck getting that face time with Minority Leader Boehner if you don't write a check.) Since June, the NRCC has raised more than $1.2 million this way.
2. Fred believes that had he never phoned back and requested his name be removed, it would have remained there. When I asked a call center employee whether that was true, I was told it was not. But the draft press release did imply, falsely, that the other physicians listed had already agreed to be on the council. Yet when I phoned another name on the list—an oncologist in Missouri whom I'll call Dr. Blank because, like Fred, he never asked to be included—I was told that Dr. Blank had not agreed to join. The NRCC is employing a variation on the old Georgetown dinner-party trick of leveraging Henry Kissinger by saying Alice Roosevelt Longworth is coming, then leveraging Alice Roosevelt Longworth by saying Henry Kissinger is coming. When committed on a large scale for a purpose weightier than social climbing, we call this fraud.
The Los Angeles Times reported today that the California-based Consumer Watchdog has submitted a letter to Attorney General Jerry Brown calling for an investigation of insurance giants Wellpoint and United HealthCare (UHC). The complaint comes in response to the insurance companies’ practice of actively encouraging employees to engage in anti-health care reform political activity. According to Consumer Watchdog, "while coercive communications with employees may be legal, if abhorrent, in most states, California’s Labor Code appears to directly prohibit them."
Some of the most vociferous opposition to the proposals before the House and Senate comes from residents of rural states that could benefit most if the present system is revamped.
"The states that tend to be more conservative have a higher rate of people who are uninsured," said Ron Pollack, executive director of FamiliesUSA, which backs a healthcare overhaul. "As a result, healthcare reform is going to provide a disproportionate amount of resources to those states."
At a Barney Frank town hall meeting in Dartmouth, MA, a constituent asks, "Why are you supporting this Nazi policy?"
Frank responds: "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" He then calls her approach "vile, contemptible nonsense." He closes by saying: "Trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table." Watch it on YouTube
Two British women who appeared in anti-health reform ads in the United States say they were duped into thinking they were participating in a documentary about health care, the UK’s Daily Mail reports.
"Furious Kate Spall and Katie Brickell claim that their views on the NHS have been misrepresented by a free market campaign group opposed to Mr Obama’s reforms in a bid to discredit the UK system," the newspaper states.
The "free market campaign group" in question is Conservatives for Patients' Rights, which is headed up by Rick Scott, the former head of private health provider Columbia/HCA. Scott was forced out of his position after revelations of billing fraud at the company.
Reporters from McClatchy Newspapers reveal that much of the money and strategy behind the so-called grassroots groups organizing opposition to the Democrats' health care plans comes from conservative political consultants, professional organizers and millionaires, some of whom hold financial stakes in the outcome. Read it all here.
She was the vice chair of the Republican Party of Kewaunee County until last year. She worked on the John Gard campaign, who ran unsuccessfully against Kagen last year. And it says she’s a part of the Republican Party for Kagen’s district, as well as the Republican Party of Wisconsin, and the Republican National Committee.
The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems
Rachel Maddow exposes the Republican-funded and staffed PR firms behind the movement that's trying to disrupt town hall meetings and slow down/shout down health care reform in the U.S.
Employees of Express Scripts, a St. Louis-based pharmacy benefit manager that's ranked 115 in Fortune's rankings of America's largest corporations, on Monday received an email from the firm's CEO, George Paz. Titled "Take Action: Your Voice Matters on Healthcare Reform," the email, obtained by TPMmuckraker, denounces the "rush to pass legislation that could fundamentally alter our current system without a full understanding of the costs and consequences of those changes."
It then directs employees to a company web page which allows them to send an email to members of Congress, under the heading "Concerns With Health Care Reform." That form email to lawmakers appears to come from an ordinary citizen, giving no indication that the sender works for a company that would be directly affected by reform.
