So, how well or poorly do the House and Senate bills on health care reform match up to the clarion call of this decade, Sicko? Jon Greenbaum does an excellent job of sizing it up for you by comparing each case study from the movie to what the bill has to offer:

Would the House and Senate proposals address the problems raised in SiCKO? | Chant Down Babylon.

By and large, while the bill is no peach for us Progressives, the fact is that it does address a lot of the endemic problems associated with the insurance-based system we have. My concern is that, if we lose the public option as a means to control costs, forcing insurers to insure those they previously dumped from their roles will only serve to add an excelerant to the already escalating costs of health care.

Not sure if this is really the kind of thing he wants, but you push a guy like Eric Massa around, you’re bound to get some feisty words.

Eric Massa calls Senator Grassley’s “Pull the plug on grandma” line “treason.” Talking Points Memo is picking up the story, and I suspect the nationals won’t be far behind on this one. For a bit of a backgrounder on where the tensions are coming from, check out Keyless Piano. Jon Greenbaum also comments at DFE here.

I think Massa’s always got a great way to creatively spin his position in the most just-short-of hyperbolic way. Perhaps he’s stepped over the line this time, or else misplaced his ire. It’s not Chuck Grassley but rather the Hitler effigy-carrying, gun-toting nutbags he’s playing to that are in danger of crossing the line into treason or worse.

It’s a shame that a substantive discussion of health care reform is not possible. It would be nice to think that fiscal conservatives could voice objections and help us trim the bill into a lean, mean reform bill. But if opponents of health care reform are going to allow themselves to be defined by the most extreme whackjobs in their midst, we’re not going to get anywhere. Just remember that when you hear them bitch about this bill forty years after its passage like they bitch about Social Security.

You have one chance to be a positive force in history. The Republicans are bound and determined to lose theirs.

Channel 8′s got a new article up about a former aid to David Patterson getting a plum job working for State Senator John Sampson. This revelation comes as it is revealed that State Senator and turncoat Espada’s son was given a plum as well by the state Democrat’s central staff:

Another Controversial Hiring in Albany.

Well, what do you know? One loser in Albany gets called to the mat and then the accusations just keep on coming. Who could have ever predicted such a thing?

And oh-so loath as I am to compare the crimes of the Albany set, allow me to point out a few things which – on the face of it – don’t appear to achieve “scandal parity:”

1. You can hire whatever idiot you like. Hiring is not the problem.
2. In Espada, we have a clear narrative of nepotism and blackmail: dude abandons the Dems, then gets coaxed back, then his kid gets a job.
3. Who did Sampson bribe? Not saying he didn’t, but where is the crime? We’re comparing nepotism to,.. what? a bad hiring choice.

So perhaps this case gets juicier. I won’t be holding my breath. Meanwhile, I’m sure there are others’ arms being twisted. Better stuff is on the way, no doubt.

The D&C opinion page has decided to go Pollyanna with its descriptions of town hall meetings happening here and across the country. While insisting how important it is that politicians do more of these types of meetings, they describe the Eric Massa town hall as follows:

More than 500 people questioned Massa for two hours outside the Mendon Community Center last Thursday night. The meeting felt Lincoln-esque in its nature, with citizens gathered in a circle around Massa. Most behaved with respect, although a few people shouted now and then.

Wow. Sounds like a splendid ice cream social. But the story I’ve gotten from those who are there is that, to start, the crowd was at least three to four times the size of a normal crowd. The people running the meeting went the extra mile to accommodate those who showed up by holding the event outside. And then, the stories about euthanasia and forced abortions came spilling out of the crowd’s email in-boxes and into what normally would be considered rational company.

It is convenient for those who oppose health care reform – among whose numbers the D&C appears to be – to insist that politicians subject themselves to the attacks of the crazies. But until someone learns how to deal with astroturf uprisings and converse directly with their constituencies, these meetings are doing more harm than good for everybody involved. Which is a shame, because the town hall meetings are what politicians like Eric Massa have built their careers on.

Setting aside all the nitty-gritty specifics of the various bills running through Congress, it seems to me that reestablishing some baseline facts on health insurance is in order. In writing this post, I am setting out to prove that there is not, in fact, any such thing as a free market economy where insurance is applied to a given industry. To demonstrate this, I’ll build on a few Economics 101 concepts that we all know and love. The point of this exercise is to establish that any economic structure which employs for-profit insurance is endemically doomed to fail.

Economics 101: Supply and Demand

In the capitalist marketplace – in its purest form, what we call “Free Market Economics” – there are two fundamental building blocks of the system: supply and demand. There are those who produce goods and services and there are those who require or want those services. It is the interplay between those two building blocks that determines price, quality and availability.

More specifically, the Marketplace requires an Educated Consumer and an Honest Producer. The educated consumer is not necessarily a college graduate; the education I’m referring to in this case is the knowledge of the product or service that the consumer is buying. In the Free Market, if I require an appendectomy, I check with local hospitals and doctors, patients and consumer groups to determine which doctor or medical facility performs this procedure with the greatest success rate, greatest customer satisfaction and lowest price. Basically, I bargain shop for the best deal. This process, multiplied over all the people in my area seeking appendectomies and other procedures, forces producers to keep honest about what it costs to perform their duties to the best of their abilities. Hence the price and quality of medical services is kept at a balanced level, relative to the ability of consumers to pay.

This is a concept upon which every economist agrees, as do the rest of us who took seventh grade business math. There is no doubt that this concept, like Bernoulli Principle in physics, is a quantifiable, predictable force on our economy. But what happens when, rather than paying for services directly, we pay insurance companies to provide that service?

Enter the Insurance Company

In our current health care market, things work a bit differently. As consumers, those of us fortunate enough to have insurance pay insurance companies a monthly fee, in conjunction with our employers, to have constant coverage for our medical needs. When we require medical services, we go to a doctor, get the work done, get a prescription for whatever pain or antibiotic medication they deem necessary, pay a copay for the service and be on our merry way. But the important point is this: we do not pay our health care provider and we do not consider cost when choosing that provider.

Right off the bat, without much thinking or digging, we find that one of the fundamental pillars of the Free Market is eliminated from the equation. There is no Educated Consumer in this scenario, because we as consumers have no idea whatsoever what a given service costs, what a prescription costs, what the total of the bill will be. What’s more, we really don’t care because as consumers of insurance products, there is an expectation that we will get what we paid for.

With no educated consumer, only unrestrained need, there is nothing to control medical costs. As medical costs rise, so too do insurance premiums. Of course, this is what happens in a supply and demand economy when the cost of supplies goes up without a correlating change in demand. There will be no change in demand, because we all need medical attention from time to time, no one can afford it on their own and thus we all actively pursue jobs with health benefits. The inevitable result is that insurance companies – who have a profit motive and will not simply go bankrupt on moral grounds – need to lower demand the only way possible: cutting off services.

Let’s Stop There

We could go farther with our example, citing case after case where the above scenario is currently in effect and speculating where it heads next. We could continue to expand on how the imbalance of insurance surrogating the Demand side of the equation is continuing to erode our medical security in this country. We could discuss the effects of the uninsured and the Hippocratic Oath that compels doctors to treat them. But while in doing so, we could come up with much that is demonstrably wrong with our current system, we would stray further from the central point and in my opinion, the most critical for a serious discussion of health care reform in this country. That point is to say that there is no scenario in which the unfettered health insurance industry – free of government reform or a public option – will arrive at any other result than the one we find ourselves with now.

It is an important concept which cannot be ignored: we are not in a health care crisis because of a few bad apples; we are not where we are because we need some new laws passed. We are in our current dire straits because our current system is fundamentally, systemically flawed at its core. The solution is to introduce a new player to the field; one which can arbitrarily change the rules of the game to fit the best interests of the American people.