If the final health care bill DOES have:

• Individual mandate (everyone required to buy health insurance)
• Community rating (everyone pays the same premium)
• Guaranteed issue (no denial for pre-existing condition)
• Minimum package of covered treatments

But also has:

• NO Public plan
• NO Rates tied to Medicare
• NO Ability to negotiate drug prices

Do you believe that progressive members of Congress should vote for or against it?

Help me welcome Laura Clawson, senior writer at the AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America (and also front-page blogger on Daily Kos…shhhh. Don’t tell.). Laura joins us today for our discussion.

You’d have to be living in a cave, or in a willful veil of ignorance, not to know how people in this country are suffering in our broken health care system. If you have health insurance through your job, that’s one more reason to be desperately afraid of losing that job (with unemployment at 9.4 percent, no less;), if you get it as an individual or a family, you have to worry that your insurance company will find a reason to dump you the minute you need it most (whether you’re insured through your job or on your own, your health care costs are exploding. Then, of course, there are the 47 million people without insurance in the United States.

Blah blah blah.

But did you know that the lolcat community is suffering? If, so far, you’ve been able to push the health care crisis to the back of your mind and put off making your voice heard, how does it make you feel to see that Dr. Tinycat can’t get care because he’s out of network?

Kennedy fought for affordable universal health care, not a mandate to bail out the insurance companies. Kagro is right — Kennedy’s name should be given to the public option, not used to push through a bill that obliterates it.

Max Baucus and his fellow travelers for Big Pharma and Big Insurance are pretending that single-payer champion Teddy Kennedy would approve of their selling him out with their co-op bills, saying he would welcome that “compromise”. What they aren’t telling you is that Teddy already did compromise by dropping single-payer for the public option, and eliminating the public option would make a “reform” bill worse than no bill at all.

They’re still the best lawmakers money can buy.

Among those mentioned to succeed Ted Kennedy in the Senate are five members of the House. Where do they stand on the public plan?

Chris Hayes writes a classic. . . .

Lanny Breuer’s spokesperson says he doesn’t have a conflict in the Cheney FOIA case because his representation of John Kiriakou was more than two years ago. That raises the question of just whose interests Breuer is representing.

On April 7 1968, Ted Kennedy gave a speech to the Alaska Democratic Convention days after Martin Luther King’s assassination, on the subject of civil rights.

Per MBH

Yesterday was Women’s Equality Day — and the 89th anniversary of women winning the right to vote with the passage of the 19th amendment. I spent an hour yesterday on a call organized by the White House regarding health care and inequality of coverage and services for women. It’s an important issue, especially since women have the most to gain from better health care provision.