From Chicago journalist Kristen McQueary, this deplorable story:

As a journalist covering Chicago politics, verifying information is like climbing a mountain of sand. With each step you take, the deeper you sink.

Last week while researching claims from a local Tea Party activist, I found myself asking a family for proof that they had lost an unborn grandchild.

The family, Dan and Midge Hough, of Chicago, spoke in favor of health care reform and in support of U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-3rd) at a Nov. 14 town hall meeting in Oak Lawn.

Their daughter-in-law, Jenny, and an unborn grandchild died recently due in part, they believe, to a lack of health insurance. They said Jenny was not receiving regular prenatal care and ended up in an emergency room with double pneumonia that developed into septic shock. Her baby died in the womb, and Jenny died a few weeks later, leaving behind a husband and a 2-year-old daughter.

Catherina Wojtowicz, of Chicago's Mount Greenwood community, an organizer for a Tea Party splinter group, Chicago Tea Party Patriots, falsely claimed that the Houghs fabricated their story. In an e-mail, she called them operatives of President Barack Obama who "go from event to event and (cry) the same story."

When the Houghs spoke at the Lipinski event, some Tea Partiers ridiculed them. They moaned and rolled their eyes and interrupted. Midge Hough began to cry.

The audience, Wojtowicz later explained, was exasperated by stories of isolated tragedies that cloud debate over the health care bill itself.

"What we are talking about is the bill," she said. "We've all had family members pass away, but would this health care bill really have prevented (Jenny's) death? We do question it."

You know, the Catholic Church certainly gets to enforce whatever rules they make - but this wouldn't bother me so much if they were consistent. After all, when was the last time a bishop singled out someone for supporting what the Church itself labeled an "unjust war" or for voting in support of the death penalty?

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin has banned Rep. Patrick Kennedy from receiving Communion, the central sacrament of the church, in Rhode Island because of the congressman's support for abortion rights, Kennedy said in a newspaper interview published Sunday.

The decision by the outspoken prelate, reported on The Providence Journal's Web site, significantly escalates a bitter dispute between Tobin, an ultra orthodox bishop, and Kennedy, a son of the nation's most famous Roman Catholic family.

"The bishop instructed me not to take Communion and said that he has instructed the diocesan priests not to give me Communion," Kennedy told the paper in an interview conducted Friday.

Kennedy said the bishop had explained the penalty by telling him "that I am not a good practicing Catholic because of the positions that I've taken as a public official," particularly on abortion.

I'm not feeling incredibly optimistic this morning. Sounds like the most conservative (and most expensive) version of this bill will make up the final version, and I don't see much to celebrate. Is it better to have a crappy bill - or no bill at all?

And why should those be our only options?

The fact is, the Democratic leadership lacks, well, leadership. They think constructing a stage set and acting out a scene that looks like they're leading on the public option is enough to placate the people who so desperately need their help. It isn't. They simply don't get it, and it will cost them:

From the liberal end, Burris repeated a threat made earlier: That if the public option is taken out, he's gone. "I won't vote for it," he said.

"You'll lose people on the left," confirmed Brown.

Reid, aware of the fine line he's walking, told reporters that Landrieu, Schumer and Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) are working on a compromise public option, perhaps something that 60 folks could support and save face.

That's what you don't understand, Harry. It's not about "face." But then, it's been so long since you had to worry about paying for your health care, I suppose it's too much to expect.

Yes, this will eventually be good for the country and perhaps our grandchildren - but it won't do much to help the people who need help during these desperate times, and it's certainly going to hurt the Democrats in the midterm elections:

After announcing her intent to support a health care debate this afternoon, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) told reporters she thinks Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will soon have to choose between a triggered public option and no health care bill. She also says Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)--the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate one of its most fierce and vocal public option advocates--has been tasked as a point man on the issue.

"I believe it's going to be very clear at some point very soon that there are not 60 votes for the current provision in the bill, and that the leader and the leadership are going to have to make a decision and I trust that they will figure out how to do that," Landrieu told reporters.

Landrieu has been in negotiations with a number of centrist senators about a compromise that would eliminate the public option, except in states where insurance remains unaffordable. Interestingly, though, Schumer is playing a big role in that process.

"Senator Schumer's working on that. He's sort of been tasked as one of the point people," she told me. "He's been tagged as one of the point people to help negotiate that."

Schumer's involvement as a liaison between liberal and conservative Democrats puts the trigger issue in a new light. When Reid announced that he'd include his opt-out plan in the health care bill in lieu of triggers, many, including trigger-author Olympia Snowe, believed the compromise to be dead. But it now appears to be one of the central points of discussion between leadership and conservative Democrats as they try to find 60 votes for a reform bill.

It's half a victory, and a weak one at that.

Nate Silver on why we shouldn't celebrate just yet:

Needless to say, it would have been very, very bad news for the Democrats if the motion to proceed to debate on their health care plan had failed tonight. But I'm not sure how newsworthy this really is. The potential hold-outs, like Lincoln and Ben Nelson, are going to have much greater leverage later on, when the bill nears its second major procedural hurdle: the cloture motion to proceed to the final vote.

And there's some bad news for Democrats too: Lincoln has joined Senators Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman in making a fairly explicit threat to filibuster a bill that contains a public option. Mary Landrieu, on the other hand, sounds a little bit more open to compromise. But this impromptu Gang of 3 -- Lincoln, Nelson, Lieberman -- could be a tough one for progressives to penetrate.

Yeah, it's going to be ugly by the time they get done dealing away any real hope of competition for the insurance companies. I'm not optimistic about the short-term results here and I have to keep muttering to myself that this will be good for our children and grandchildren - probably.

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Yes, they're perfectly serious. The film's pitch line: "Liberty's march has a new generation of patriots."

Here's the cast of characters, including:

NATE: Nate, a young black man from Detroit, Michigan, voted for Barack Obama in 2008 from an upbringing that taught him to mistrust America because of the color of his skin. As a Libertarian with a paradigm shift and a newfound understanding of the nation he loves, he is risking the anger of family and friends by joining the march against a President’s policies that would victimize the very people he loves the most.

Translation: Nate, the only relatively sane-seeming black person we could find for the film, whose key role is to help blunt the image of tea parties as an almost purely all-white phenomenon featuring angry white nationalists who have no compunction about carrying racist signs and calling the president a racist.

JACK: Jack is a father of two young children, a little league baseball coach and a health insurance agent. He risks losing his job under current healthcare reform. He is a Democrat turned Constitutionalist and the younger brother of a Vietnam veteran who is marching for his children and the future of the America he believes in.

Translation: Even though Jack has a fairly obvious motive for opposing health-care reform, he was included because the filmmakers couldn't find a health-insurance lobbyist who could convincingly portray himself as a moderately sympathetic figure.

JENNY BETH: In 2008, she and her husband lost a multi-million dollar business, were forced into bankruptcy and home foreclosure. Nine months later, she is working as a national leader in the grassroots tea party movement, organizing events and taking her message to the steps of the National Mall with the company of millions behind her.

Translation: Beth helps provide a portrait of America's most benighted victims of the Bush administration: Whole-hog ideological conservatives who made lots of money relying on conservative values (i.e., the cutthroat pursuit of profits at the expense of everything else) and who suddenly lost everything when Bush popped the housing bubble. The resulting cognitive dissonance -- "OMFG we lost our entire fortune because "conservative values" like a mania for deregulation and cutting taxes for the wealthy caused a near-collapse of the entire economic system! And now we have to rely on a liberal black man to fix the problem!!!!" -- drove them completely insane, so that now of course they think the solution is to go back and embrace the very policies that destroyed their wealth in the first place.

WILLIAM: William is a patriot renaissance man, a pastor, colonial re-enactor, painter, poet, Vietnam veteran, former Pentagon and Secret Service employee and a man of the march. He can be outrageous and funny or somber and reflective, full of antics and unpredictability. He marched for the Vietnam Memorial during the Reagan Era and this time, his journey back to Washington, DC leads him to the front lines of the march down Pennsylvania Avenue on September 12.

Translation: Plain ol' nuts.

Anyway, after the movie gets its only scheduled theatrical appearance at the FreedomWorks-sponsored D.C. debut, it's straight to DVD.

Oh, we can hardly wait.

Can Harry pull it off - without giving away the store? Of course we'll be covering today's events here at C&L, so stay around for updates:

Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tonight faces the first big test of whether he can keep his Democratic colleagues united behind health-care legislation.

Senators plan to take a vote at 8 p.m. Washington time that would clear the way for debate on the most sweeping changes to the U.S. health system since the 1965 creation of the Medicare program for the elderly and disabled.

With every Senate Republican opposing the legislation, Reid can’t afford a single defection from his 60-member caucus to enable the chamber to take up the bill when Congress returns from a weeklong Thanksgiving recess. By late yesterday, Democrats had locked up almost all the votes they needed.

“We’re not assuming a thing,” Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, told reporters. “We’re working hard to bring all Democrats together.”

If they're already admitting to causing deaths, why should they care about a little girl's hearing?

What more do we have to do to fight back against these horror stories? What will it take to get these insurance companies to see the inherent immorality of focusing on the bottom line to the exclusion of all else? Think Progress:

One of the worst abuses of the private health insurance industry is its practice of denying claims to pay for necessary care for patients. This practice has become so rampant in the industry that a recent study by the California Nurses Association found that a whopping 21 percent of all insurance claims filed in the first half of 2009 in the state of California were denied by insurers.

As the story of six-year-old Madison Leuchtmann of Franklin County, MO, demonstrates, even children are victims of this insurance company abuse. Madison was born with bilateral atresia, which means she lacks ear canals in both ears. In order to hear, she wears a special device on a headband that allows her to make out sounds. Despite her disability, Madison is at the top of her kindergarten class and is slowly learning to read.

Yet Madison, due to her growth, will soon require a new hearing implant to be able to recognize sounds. Her hearing and speech therapist warns that “if she doesn’t get her implants by age seven, she’s not going to be able to blend her words. … She won’t be able to hear herself [talk].” Madison’s pediatrician, Dr. Randall Clary, also insists that without the implant, the girl may never be able to hear again. Unfortunately, the Leuchtmann’s family insurer, Cigna, has issued "one denial after another,” flatly refusing to cover the $20,000 bill for the implant. In a written statement to the local news station Fox 2, Cigna explained, “It is not unusual for commercial benefit plans to exclude hearing assisted devices,” prompting Dr. Clary to angrily respond, “This is obviously medically necessary. You have a child that has no ear canals!” Dr. Clary also told Fox 2 that he sees these sort of denials “on a weekly basis.”

Congressional Democrats are calling for two inquiries after the New York Times reported earlier this week that drug companies were jacking up their prices, negating savings they promised for healthcare reform:

Responding to news reports of unusually high wholesale price increases in brand-name prescription drugs, four House leaders and one senator asked for government reviews of the pricing practices.

Although drug makers challenge the theory, some experts say the run-up in wholesale prices may be partly related to the industry’s concerns about future cost containment under any health care legislation.

“Recent studies have indicated that the industry may be artificially raising prices for certain pharmaceutical products in expectation of new reforms,” the House Democrats wrote in a letter to the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress. “Any price gouging is unacceptable, but anticipatory price gouging is especially offensive,” the letter added, asking the G.A.O. to conduct an expedited review of the price increases.

[...] Separately, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a Democrat who has led efforts in the Senate to seek more concessions from drug makers, wrote to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services asking for “an immediate and thorough investigation into drug industry pricing and recent increases, and the extent to which these increases may affect the Medicare and Medicaid programs.”

The vote on bringing the bill to the floor may happen by the end of this week:

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid scrambled Tuesday to lock down votes behind a health-care bill that he may present as early as Wednesday.

The Nevada Democrat would not confirm that he had received commitments from all 60 members of his caucus to overcome GOP procedural objections and bring the bill to the Senate floor, saying only, "I feel cautiously optimistic that we can do that. I think we're together as a caucus."

[...] Preliminary estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the legislation's official scorekeeper, have indicated that the Senate measure would cost far less than the bill the House approved last week, while lowering the federal deficit further over the long term, said several senior Democratic aides who have reviewed the CBO data.

Which, of course, makes me wonder: Who did the Senate leave out?

Democrats are hopeful about winning over at least one Republican, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe, on a vote for final passage. But the Maine moderate has pledged to support a GOP filibuster at the outset because Reid's bill is expected to include a public-insurance option that she opposes.

UPDATE from TPM:

Under the terms of the bill, Medicaid would be expanded to cover everybody up to 133 percent of the poverty line. And in a move that will disappoint progressives, tax credits to buy health insurance would be limited to those between 133 and 300 percent of poverty line. (People between 300 and 400 percent of poverty would not be provided any direct federal assistance, but insurers would not be able to set their premiums at more than 9.8 percent of their annual income.)

Here we go again. That's not going to be enough to make it affordable to most people, and it has to change in the final version. Call your Congress critter!

So Harry Reid's holding firm - for now. And you just can't argue with Sherrod Brown: What concessions have the ConservaDems made?

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, met on Monday night with a group of liberal Senate Democrats who urged Mr. Reid not to back down from his decision to put a government-run insurance plan, or public option, in the major health care legislation that he is working to finalize.

[...] “I don’t think in the end, anybody here in our caucus wants to be on the wrong side of history, wants to kill on a procedural motion, something as important as this,” Mr. Brown said. “It’s the most important thing they ever will have voted on except perhaps the Iraq war.”

Mr. Brown, who is a member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which included a public plan in its version of the health care legislation, said that liberals had already given a lot of ground, starting with their willingness to give up a fully government-run single-payer system, which many favor.

“A large number of people in this country including many, many doctors wanted Medicare for all,” he said. “That didn’t happen. Then we wanted a strong public option tied to Medicare rates. Then we wanted a public option building the Medicare network. That didn’t happen. Now we are saying public option coming out of the HELP Committee. And now we’re saying public option with the state opt-out. Where was the compromise coming from their side?”

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(h/t Heather at VideoCafe)

Rich Stockwell, senior producer at MSNBC's "Countdown", writes about his experiences at the free clinic funded by viewer contributions:

New Orleans, La. — - It happened as I watched a 50-something woman walk out, after spending several hours being attended to by volunteer doctors. "She's decided against treatment. A reasonable decision under the circumstances," the doctor tells us as she heads for the next patient. The president of the board of the National Association of Free Health Clinics tells me why: "It's stage four breast cancer, her body is filled with tumors." I don't know when that woman last saw a doctor. But I do know that if she had health insurance, the odds she would have seen a doctor long ago are much higher, and her chances for an earlier diagnosis and treatment would have been far greater.

After watching for hours as the patients moved through the clinic, it was hard to believe that I was in America.

Eighty-three percent of the patients they see are employed, they are not accepting other government help on a large scale, not "welfare queens" as some would like to have us believe. They are tax-paying, good, upstanding citizens who are trying to make it and give their kids a better life just like you and me.

Ninety percent of the patients who came through Saturday's clinic had two or more diagnoses.
Eighty-two percent had a life-threatening condition such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or hypertension. They are victims of a system built with corporate profits at its center, which long ago forgot the moral imperative that should drive us to show compassion to our fellow men and women.

Health reform is not about Democrats or Republicans or who can score political points for the next election, it's about people. It's about fairness and justice in a system that knows none. I'd defy even the most hardened capitalist-loving-conservative to do what I did on Saturday and continue to pretend that the system in place right now is working.

Countdown chose to highlight and raise money for the Association of Free Clinics because we knew the work they do is so vitally important and we wanted to show in real terms how great the need is. We invited several politicians to attend so they could see first hand how critical the situation is. All declined. Some explained that they talk with constituents all the time and know very well of the need for reform.

I have news for them, these people didn't need to speak. Their actions spoke far louder than any words. Having to get a check up and diagnosis at a free clinic because they have no other option tells you all you need to know. There are no words that can accurately describe the quiet desperation on the faces of the patients. Every single one I spoke to, and every one I heard talking with doctors, expressed their gratitude for the event and wished that they were held more often.

As Wanda Sykes might say, "I am so damned sick of these @#!*# Democratic snakes on this @#!*# plane!" Yes, once again, ConservaDems are holding a gun to the head of progress. This time, they want to blackmail Congress into overriding the Constitutionally-mandated power of the House over the nation's purse strings - and hand it over to them:

Seven members of the Senate Budget Committee threatened during a Tuesday hearing to withhold their support for critical legislation to raise the debt ceiling if the bill calling for the creation of a bipartisan fiscal reform commission were not attached. Six others had previously made such threats, bringing the total to 13 senators drawing a hard line on the committee legislation.

“You rarely do have the leverage to make a fundamental change,” said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who said he hasn’t ruled out offering the independent commission legislation as an amendment to the healthcare reform bill.

What is it about Kent Conrad that makes me want to slap him? Is it that perpetually robotic grin? Is it the fact that he's so reliably a corporate tool? Or maybe it's that somehow, I just know that Celine Dion is on his iPod.

The panel, which has been championed by Conrad and ranking member Judd Gregg (R-N.H), would be tasked with stemming the unsustainable rise in debt.

Among its chief responsibilities would be closing the gap between tax revenue coming in and the larger cost of paying for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits. The Government Accountability Office recently reported the gap is on pace to reach an “unsustainable” $63 trillion in 2083.

The panel would also have the power to craft legislation that would change the tax code and set limits on government spending.

The legislation would then be subject to an up-or-down vote; it could not be amended.

Chris Bowers calls it a "national suicide pact":

Let's review the threat that these five Democrats are making:

* They will allow the United States to default on its debt, which will vastly increase the overall amount we have to pay on our debt

UNLESS

* Speaker Nancy Pelosi turns over Congressional power on Social Security and Medicare to an unelected commission that will almost certainly propose deep cuts in Social Security and Medicare entitlements. Keep in mind that if deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare pass under a Democratic trifecta, the party would be doomed at the ballot box for years to come.

This is completely insane, and there is no choice but to call this bluff.

Let's see these five Democratic Senators explain to the entire nation why they allowed the country to default on its debt. No matter how safe their seats appear to be, no Senator is going to win reelection after making the entire country default on its debt. Their rationale does not matter. Being blamed for making the country default on its debt - especially after all five of these Democrats voted in favor of the Wall Street bailout and are demanding that Social Security and Medicare be cut - will be the effective end of their political careers.

Go for it, guys. Form your national suicide pact. Tell the country that you are demanding deep cuts in Social Security and Medicare, or else you will personally cause the United States debt to double. Let's see how well that message plays on the air.

So according to the Times, the pharmaceutical companies are jacking up their prices high enough to cancel out the savings they promised Obama for the health care bill. Why am I not surprised?

What does it take for Democrats to understand how this works, anyway?

And in other healthcare reform news, the Washington Post reports what the usual suspects are up to:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and an assortment of national business groups opposed to President Obama's health-care reform effort are collecting money to finance an economic study that could be used to portray the legislation as a job killer and threat to the nation's economy, according to an e-mail solicitation from a top Chamber official.

The e-mail, written by the Chamber's senior health policy manager and obtained by The Washington Post, proposes spending $50,000 to hire a "respected economist" to study the impact of health-care legislation, which is expected to come to the Senate floor this week, would have on jobs and the economy.

Step two, according to the e-mail, appears to assume the outcome of the economic review: "The economist will then circulate a sign-on letter to hundreds of other economists saying that the bill will kill jobs and hurt the economy. We will then be able to use this open letter to produce advertisements, and as a powerful lobbying and grass-roots document."

Well, of course it's assuming the outcome! They're paying someone good cash money to produce the outcome they want!

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(Abraham Ribicoff - Secretary of Health, Education And Welfare in 1961 - also Hand Holder, Paranoia Assuager, Debunker)

In 1961, JFK introduced a bill that would provide medical assistance to the Aged. It later became known as Medicare and would later pass in 1965 during the Johnson Administration. As is always the case, the mere mention of anything connection with a government aid program where Healthcare is concerned is immediately tossed into the realm of Socialized Medicine. And in 1961 it was no different.

Newly appointed Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Abraham Ribioff was confronted by a dizzying array of skepticism from the Insurance and Pharmaceutical industries who instantly labeled any kind of Healthcare reform as Socialized Medicine. As is evidenced by this exchange between Ribicoff and Meet The Press co-founder Lawrence Spivak:

Lawrence Spivak: “ Mister Secretary, as you know the AMA and others have charged that the Medical Bill for the Aged under Social Security is an opening wedge to Socialized Medicine. Now if you thought there was a chance that the bill might be an opening wedge to Socialized Medicine, would you still be for it?”

Abraham Ribicoff: “ Well, it’s not an opening wedge to Socialized Medicine, I’m for the bill.

Spivak: “No, I’m asking if you thought that it was an opening wedge . . .

Ribicoff: “I would be against it . . .I would be against the bill if it were Socialized Medicine. . . “

Spivak: “If it opened the door to Socialized Medicine?”

Ribicoff: “It doesn’t open the door to Socialized Medicine”

Spivak: “Would you tell us what makes you so sure that it doesn’t?”

Ribicoff: “Because you and I and every other American, Mister Spivak has the right to choose his own doctor. There is nothing in this bill that has anything to do with doctors. This bill takes care of the health needs to the people of America, our aged over sixty-five, and basically takes care of their hospital bills, their nursing home bills and their visits to the home for home care. The bill specifically provides that each and every American has the right to choose his own doctor and his own hospital.”

The bill wound up being defeated, owing to a Congress recess and an overheated paranoia campaign (sound familiar?). But the Medicare Bill did finally pass in 1965.

The eerie sense of Deja-vu is everywhere.

Via Huffington Post, the latest from Bart Stupak, clearly under the loving spiritual guidance of his C Street family:

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) is warning fellow Democrats not to mess with his restrictive anti-abortion amendment.

Pro-choice outrage was sparked by the inclusion of a provision in the House health care bill making it harder for private insurers to cover abortion. President Obama himself suggested that the language disrupted the status quo and should be taken out of the final legislation. Abortion rights supporters in Congress requested a meeting with the president next week to discuss the issue.

Now Stupak is saying he won't go easily.

"We won because [the Democrats] need us," Stupak said. "If they are going to summarily dismiss us by taking the pen to that language, there will be hell to pay. I don't say it as a threat, but if they double-cross us, there will be 40 people who won't vote with them the next time they need us -- and that could be the final version of this bill."