Answering the Call

It's put up or shut up time for President Obama AND us leftists bitching "so where's the change?"

Obama put the call out yesterday to bloggers and by extension our readers:

Blue Dogs and repugs are getting close to killing health care reform, so it's all hands on deck.

Dday recaps the president's call with bloggers today below, (here's the recording), but there were a couple of things he said that dday didn't mention. Obama had two specific things he thought the blogs could be helpful with: countering the lies and misinformation about costs and keeping pressure on members of congress.

So let's start with countering the lies about costs.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released its score of the House health care reform bill and the headlines are painting a distorted picture of the findings. For example, Congressional Quarterly’s article on the subject is titled “CBO: Health Bill Would Hike Deficit by $239 Billion,” and claims:

“The CBO estimate released late Friday pegs the gross cost of the bill (HR 3200) at $1.04 trillion, with the price tag partially offset by a surtax on the wealthy and other revenue raisers that would raise $583 billion and anticipated efficiencies that would squeeze $219 billion out of Medicare and Medicaid...The big deficit number — larger than the one run by the government for all of fiscal 2007 — is likely to add weight to the burden of Democratic leaders, who have said they plan to pass the bill on the House floor before Congress leaves town for its annual August recess.”

Surprisingly, The Wall Street Journal framed the story more accurately in its article, “Doctors' Payments Snag Health Bill”:

“A plan to end a program that would cut government payments to doctors is emerging as the flash point in the debate over whether President Barack Obama's effort to overhaul the health system would increase the federal budget deficit.

SNIP

The House health care reform bill has tackled the problem head on and those who want to kill health care reform are using the House’s courage against it. The bottom line is without the Medicare physician payment fix, the House health reform bill is budget neutral and even produces a surplus, as the House Energy and Commerce Committee explained in its statement, “CBO Scores Confirms Deficit Neutrality of Health Reform Bill”:

“The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released estimates this evening confirming for the first time that H.R. 3200, America's Affordable Health Choices Act, is deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window — and even produces a $6 billion surplus. CBO estimated more than $550 billion in gross Medicare and Medicaid savings. More importantly, the bill includes a comprehensive array of delivery reforms to set the stage for lowering the future growth in health care costs."

As for keeping the pressure on, here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.