Health care reform in trouble

I've been posting at my other blogs this morning, and need to run a few errands so just a quick recap on a couple of points. I have Republican Congresslizards to fight at DetNews so I'll be doing my wordy posts over there, but Ezra has been posting some great stuff on the political process and rightly notes today that reform is in trouble. He also makes some excellent suggestions on how to improve the CBO rating. Unfortunately, it's unlikely our idiot pols will take his advice.

On another note, Digby flags the insurance companies' admission they will continue to cancel coverage for their sick policy holders who require expensive treatments so they can protect their profits. Although, of course, they call it fraud prevention. And even more galling, she points us to this old blogpost that lists the monetary compensation of just the CEOs of 23 of the largest insurers. In 2005, these 23 guys received $559.8 million, and over a five year period, the sum total was $14.9 billion. Just for the 23 of them. It doesn't count the various other top brass like VPs and Board members, nor shareholder gains, or the other 200-300 insurance companies that aren't quite as big.

As the author points out, if just those 23 guys gave up 10% of their compensation, it would be enough to fund insurance coverage for five years for 35,000 families. Puts a new perspective on it, doesn't it? This is the best case for the public option I've seen yet.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]