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David Shuster talked to Howard Dean about where the health care bill stands in the Senate right now and whether we should not be allowing four Senators to hold up that bill.

Shuster: First Sen. Brown’s position on the public option—your thoughts.

Dean: He’s exactly right. Sherrod’s been one of the real champions of getting real health insurance. Look, what Tom Carper’s doing is silly. A trigger and all this business and opt-out and opt-in and all that—this is silly. Harry Reid’s got a decent bill on the floor, decent, it’s not great but it’s decent—it needs to pass. If they can’t pass it without real insurance reform and there isn’t any in the bill right now to speak of, then they just should go home and use reconciliation which is what they should have done in the first place. To let four Senators hold up the works in addition to the Republicans that we know aren’t interested in health insurance is a silly way to run the business.

Shuster: You mentioned Sen. Carper and his proposal being silly. Are you referring to the actual content of the policy or the politics or both?

Dean: No look, Tom is a serious guy. He’s a good guy. I served with him when we were governors together. But his proposal isn’t health insurance reform. Triggers are not health insurance reform. They’re devices put in for the health insurance industry. You know what today came out? Aetna is going to drop 600,000 people from their insurance so they can make more money. Now why is it that these Senators can’t get it in their heads that putting money in the health insurance system that we have now doesn’t work? That’s not health care reform. Knock it off! Listen to Sherrod Brown. Listen to the 56 Senators who want to do the right thing in the Democratic Party. Stop grandstanding and get this done.

Dean added that he doesn't think Sen. Nelson will actually filibuster the bill and what this means for the midterm elections.

Dean: I think an awful lot of people like me are getting awfully impatient. I think this is going to hurt a lot of people’s reelections too. People…you know the Democratic base has been incredibly demoralized by all this and it’s not going to hurt President Obama. People like him. He’s going to get reelected. It’s going to kill us in 2010 if we don’t get this thing done. The 2009 gubernatorial elections were about taxes, jobs and about getting health insurance off the plate, passing it and then start to work on some of these things like jobs. And if we don’t do that we’re going to get ourselves in big trouble as a party. We have got to get our act together here. You can’t allow four Democratic Senators to hold up the works, particularly when they get their chairmanships because they caucus with the Democratic Party. It’s not fair and I don’t think it’s right.

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(h/t Heather.)

Former CIGNA PR chief Wendell Potter is very, very angry over Obama's movement away from true healthcare reform:

Not only is Obama clearly ready to throw the public option overboard, he is embracing the requirement that we all be forced to buy insurance from private insurers. That means your tax dollars and mine will be used to pay subsidies to the big insurers to provide coverage to people who can't afford to buy their policies, because the big insurers charge far more than they should because Wall Street investors demand that they do.

One of the people who undoubtedly talked Obama away from the public option and into supporting this mandate is his new BFF, Aetna CEO Ron Williams. Williams, who made $65 million off of Aetna's policyholders' premiums over the past two years and who was the mastermind behind Aetna's shedding of eight million members a few years ago to meet Wall Street's demands, is the insurance industry's leading champion of requiring us all to buy insurance. And, of course, without a public option, we'll all be forced to buy coverage from Aetna or one of the other private insurers.

According to a recent article in Forbes, Williams has been to the White House a half a dozen times recently to advise the president and his staff on health care reform. That same article quoted a Wall Street analyst as saying that Aetna likely will dump about 600,000 policyholders during the coming months to satisfy its investors' unrelenting profit demands.

During his speech in Montana, Obama talked a lot of trash about the insurance industry. Don't be fooled by that tough talk. It's all part of a strategy to try get us to believe we'll get the reform he promised during the campaign. Industry leaders are in fact delighted he's denouncing their behavior, because they believe most of his supporters -- who were hopeful the stars might finally have aligned for real reform -- will be fooled into thinking the reform bill that reaches his desk will benefit them more than the special interests with their armies of lobbyists. And they know the nonprofit cooperatives Sebelius and Gibbs are now trying to sell us on don't have a prayer of succeeding. The big for-profits will never let them get off the ground in any meaningful way.

Sadly, I believe the fat cats are winning and that the bill Congress sends the president will be one that gives an industry with an unsustainable business model a new lease on life and a guarantee of unprecedented future profits.

So I hope the president's aides are buying lots of lipstick. He'll need all he can get to put on that pig of a bill.

From Brave New Films, The Health Insurance Racket: Getting Rich by Denying Americans Care:

UnitedHealthcare CEO Stephen Hemsley owns $744,232,068 in unexercised stock options. CIGNA’s Edward Hanway spends his holidays in a $13 million beach house in New Jersey. Meanwhile, regular Americans are routinely denied coverage for the care they need when they need it most. Welcome to the American health insurance industry. Instead of helping policyholders attain the health security they need for their families, big insurance companies get rich by denying coverage to patients. Now they’re sending lobbyists to Washington, DC to twist the arms of lawmakers to oppose reform of the status quo. Why? Because the status quo pays. Learn more about the glamorous lives of billionaire health insurance executives and tell us your story of being victimized by their greed. Then contribute to Brave New Films so we can continue to get the word out about the health insurance racket.

And the HuffPo-- Denied Claims Placed At Health Insurance CEO's Doorstep:

A new video puts denied health insurance claims on United Health Care CEO Stephen Hemsley's doorstep.

The video, made by Brave News Films' Robert Greenwald, intercuts stories of people suffering because of denied claims with images Hemsley's fancy homes, along with details about how much money Hemsley's got ($744,232,068 in unexercised stock options, for example).

Holly Bailey says in the video that United Health Care refused to pay for medicine she couldn't live without.

"They kept telling my local pharmacy...'Oh we're just waiting for one more letter, or we're just waiting for one more script, and then we'll start paying,'" Bailey said. "This went on for six months, and December 4th both the pharmacy and I received a letter from United Health Care saying they deemed it medically unnecessary and that they were not going to pay any of it.

"I tried to explain to them that if I do not have this, I will die. And the only response she gave me was, 'OK.'"

Joanna Joshua, whose child's treatment was denied, asks, "Stephen Hemsley, how are you able to sleep at night?"

The piece aims to gin up the sort of pitchfork-style outrage against health insurance CEOs that so beset Wall Street executives after their industry was bailed out by the government.

"It's definitely similar and in some ways worse, because these are dollars are literally being taken away from you that could help save lives in order to build bigger mansions," said Greenwald in an interview with the Huffington Post. "We hope it will begin a part of the discussion that has not happened: Who is gaining from the current system, and why are they resisting?"

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Bill Moyers weighs in on the appointment of Regina Benjamin for Surgeon General and the influence of money on the health care debate.

BILL MOYERS: This week, Regina Benjamin was nominated by President Obama to be our next surgeon general, charged with keeping the American public informed about our health. She's a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Medical Association and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation 'Genius Grant.'

But more important, she's a country doctor, a family physician along the Gulf Coast of Alabama, serving the poor and uninsured. After Hurricane Katrina destroyed her clinic a second time, she mortgaged her own home to rebuild it. The day it was to reopen, a fire burned the clinic to the ground. Moving to a trailer, Dr. Benjamin and her staff never missed a day of work. Dr. Benjamin will no doubt bring that same ethic to the fight for health care reform.

Many of the folks in Regina Benjamin's bayou town are so poor that sometimes she's paid with a pint of oysters or a couple of fish. She buys medicine for her patients out of her own pocket, and she makes house calls.

Now meet H. Edward Hanway, the Chairman and CEO of Cigna, the country's fourth largest insurance company. At the beginning of the year, Cigna blamed hard economic times when it announced the layoff of 1,100 employees. But it reported first quarter profits of $208 million on revenues of $4 billion. Mr. Hanway has announced his retirement at the end of the year, and the living will be easy, financially at least. He made $11.4 million dollars in 2008, according to the Associated Press, and some years more than that.

That's a lot of oysters, although he lags behind Ron Williams, the CEO of Aetna Insurance, who made more than $17 million dollars last year, or John Hammergren, the head of McKesson, the biggest health care company in the world. His compensation was nearly $30 million.

Here's the difference. To Dr. Regina Benjamin, health care is a service, helping people in need with grace and compassion. To Ed Hanway and his highly paid friends, it's big business, a commodity to be sold to those who can afford it. And woe to anyone who gets between them and the profits they reap from sick people.

That behavior includes spending nearly a million and a half a day--a day!--to make sure health care reform comes out their way. Over the years they've lavished millions on the politicians who are writing and voting on the bills coming out of committee. Now it's payback time. See for yourself here on our website, where you'll find a link to campaign contributions and the politicians who right now are deciding who wins and who loses the heath care debate.

That's it for the week. I'm Bill Moyers and I'll see you next time.