Thank you all for being so generous with your time, comments and donations to Blue America's Campaign For Health Care Choice and our project to tell Finance Committee Senator Blanche Lincoln that health care reform without at least a public plan is no plan at all. Now that the HELP Committee has released its report and all the Democratic Senators have committed to it, the action moves to Finance --- and Blanche Lincoln is one of the only Senators on that committee who is up for reelection in 2010. Next week she's going to be hearing from her constituents about her unwillingness to back a quality public plan.
You've been amazingly supportive and we appreciate it. You can still vote for the ad of your choice by clicking here.
But we aren't the only ones doing this sort of thing. Change Congress is also pressuring Mary Landrieu to support a public plan. Landrieu has been pretty strident and explicit in her condemnation of the public plan choice, but needless to say, if there was ever a state that needs more support, not less, it's Louisiana. It's outrageous that she would stand in the way of health care reform:
And the PCCC, DFA and Move On are running an ad in Washington DC with the names of thousands of people who are asking for a public option. You can ad your name to the ad here.
Finally, MoveOn is running this one in California, which is giving Difi heartburn. (The other day she sniffed that it "wasn't helpful," which means, it wasn't helpful to her. And that, of course, is the point.)
Obviously, nobody knows what's going to come out of the legislative meat grinder yet. Everything is very fluid. (What happened to those co-ops?) The devil, as always, is in the details and the details are changing every day. But we're hopeful that we can help guide the basic contours of the debate with this insistence on the inclusion of the public plan. We'll see what happens.