Congressman Alan Grayson
Press Release
March 9, 2010

Congressman Alan Grayson, D-Fla., today introduced a bill (H.R. 4789) which would give the option to buy into Medicare to every citizen of the United States. The “Public Option Act,” also known as the “Medicare You Can Buy Into Act,” would open up the Medicare network to anyone who can pay for it.

Congressman Grayson said, “Obviously, America wants and needs more competition in health coverage, and a public option offers that. But it’s just as important that we offer people not just another choice, but another kind of choice. A lot of people don’t want to be at the mercy of greedy insurance companies that will make money by denying them the care that they need to stay healthy, or to stay alive. We deserve to have a real alternative.”

The bill would require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to establish enrollment periods, coverage guidelines, and premiums for the program. Because premiums would be equal to cost, the program would pay for itself.

“The government spent billions of dollars creating a Medicare network of providers that is only open to one-eighth of the population. That’s like saying, ‘Only people 65 and over can use federal highways.’ It is a waste of a very valuable resource and it is not fair. This idea is simple, it makes sense, and it deserves an up-or-down vote,” Congressman Grayson said.

Comment:

By Don McCanne, MD – PNHP

Throughout the reform process members of Congress have been fighting over whether or not the reform legislation should include the option of purchasing a government-sponsored plan through the proposed insurance exchanges – the so-called “public option.” Since Congressman Alan Grayson introduced the “Public Option Act” or “Medicare You Can Buy Into Act” three days ago, a wave of enthusiastic support has been generated based on the perception that this is the perfect solution. Today’s comment briefly discusses this legislation, and it will sound really great at first blush, but do not draw any firm conclusions until you read through to the end.

Okay. What does this bill do? It simply allows any legal resident of the United States under age 65 to buy into Medicare. The program will be paid for by the premiums to be collected from the individuals purchasing the coverage. Six age brackets are established for purposes of pooling funds. This reduces the financial burden on younger, healthier individuals by requiring older individuals to pay the higher premiums that would be required to fully fund their less healthy risk pool.

Many are not aware of this, but Medicare already has a buy-in program. Under Title XVIII, Sec. 1818, individuals over 65 who have fewer than 40 quarters of Medicare-covered employment who would otherwise not be eligible for Medicare can still participate by paying a full premium for Part A coverage (hospital) or a reduced premium if they have 30 to 39 quarters of Medicare-covered employment. Likewise, under Sec. 1818A, disabled individuals whose entitlement ends due to having earnings that exceed the qualification level can also purchase Medicare Part A. Grayson’s bill adds a new Sec. 1818B to Title XVIII to expand the buy-in option to anyone under 65.

For 2010, the premium under Sec. 1818 and Sec. 1818A to buy into Medicare Part A is $461 per month. The premium for Part B (supplemental medical) is the same as for qualified retirees – $110.50 and up, based on income (ignoring the hold harmless exception). Thus the buy-in is about $571 per month, or more for those with higher incomes.

Although Medicare beneficiaries have a high rate of chronic disease plus the costs of end-of-life care, the risk pool is diluted with a very large number of healthy seniors, thus the premiums are not as high as one might think. On the other hand, it is likely that the risk pools for the older but still under 65 age groups in the Grayson proposal would be subject to adverse selection. Since the premiums must pay all costs, they may be higher, perhaps much higher, than the diluted post 65 risk pool. Grayson has not included any risk adjustment mechanism to compensate for this.

At any rate, the Grayson proposal seems to be the true public option, run by the government, that progressives have been fighting for. So what could be wrong with it?

The greatest concern of all is that it still does not fix our outrageously expensive, administratively wasteful, highly inequitable, fragmented method of financing health care. It merely provides another expensive option in our very sick system of paying for health care. Providing yet one more option that people can’t afford really hasn’t moved the process.

Although Medicare is a very popular program, it is highly flawed. It has an oppressive central bureaucracy. It fails to use more efficient financing systems such as global budgeting for hospitals and negotiation to obtain greater value in health care purchasing. There are serious questions about whether Medicare funds are being distributed equitably and in a manner to promote greater efficiency. Its benefit package is relatively poor, covering only about half of health care costs for our seniors. Most Medicare beneficiaries feel that they essentially are forced either to purchase Medigap plans, which provide the worst value of all private health plans, or to enroll in Medicare Advantage plans, which waste too many tax and premium dollars. It would be both much less expensive for all of us and better for Medicare beneficiaries if the extra benefits of these private plans were rolled into the traditional Medicare program. Part D should be stripped of its private market administrative and profit excesses and also be rolled into the traditional program. Medicare also has failed to introduce beneficial innovative programs such as the British NICE system, which would improve both quality and value in our health care.

When we advocate for an improved Medicare for all, we really aren’t advocating for Medicare with a few tweaks. We are advocating for replacing Medicare with a single payer national health program that covers everyone, which we can still call Medicare, just as the Canadians do. Adding another buy-in program to the two buy-in programs that already exist in our highly dysfunctional system will do virtually nothing to fix these flaws we now have. It does nothing to slow the growth in our national health expenditures, and the high premiums for a package of mediocre benefits will do little to reduce the numbers of uninsured.

For those who say that a Medicare buy-in is an incremental step towards health care utopia, explain precisely how that is going to work. Explain each problem that it solves. Explain how it is going to morph into a universal or near universal system in which each individual is paying the full actuarial value of the coverage. It won’t happen.

Playing with a Medicare buy-in is an unnecessary diversion at a time that we need to get serious about reform. We need to fix Medicare and expand it to cover everyone. Nothing less will do.

Unfortunately, President Obama hasn’t listened to the public which is in majority agreement* that a Medicare for All system is the best way to solve our health care crisis.

You can send the message directly to the White House by supporting Improved Medicare for All in the top 10 ideas for change contest at Change.org.

It’s easy to vote. Just go here and you can sign in and vote in less than 20 seconds for the real solution to our health care crisis.

This is the second round of voting. If you voted in the first, you can vote again.

* The Polling is Quite Clear

As the health reform debate rages on, the central issue of how to improve care while reducing costs remains unaddressed.

Fee-for-service has reduced doctors to assembly line pieceworkers, paid by the office visit and procedure rather than by effectiveness of treatment. The result is an inefficient, costly and dangerous system. It is not unusual for a five minute office visit, which excludes clinical examination or note taking. Many patients/consumers can be seen in an hour. Time is money. And let us not forget those insidious, endless co-pays. The perfect storm is gathering as health care costs are now 17.3% of the GDP and rising.

Doctors and patients once had a close, almost familial, relationship lasting decades; a relationship seen in the success of the Veterans Administration, whose doctors are salaried. Today, seeing a doctor is short and impersonal as we shuttle from one “provider” to the next. How can this approach serve a patient better than a doctor engaging in dialogue and a thorough clinical examination?

I recently experienced how fee-for-service “healthcare” works up close, and I would like to share my own experiences here.

Two years ago I fell down stairs and was whisked off to a major New York hospital. I was seen by an ER doctor, not an orthopedist, which the injury clearly warranted. X-rays were taken, I was given a soft leg brace and a cane and discharged. The $35 cab ride home was the first of many costs to follow.

The following week I saw an orthopedist recommended by the hospital — one of only two names offered, the other being their Chief of Orthopedics. A father and son duo. The young doctor briefly touched my leg, announced that I had torn a calf muscle and would be fine in six weeks. His specialty knee replacement, and since I didn’t need a knee replacement, I was dismissed in under ten minutes with no follow up visit recommended.

Needless to say, I was not fine in six weeks. I saw another orthopedist who took X-rays, administered a cortisone shot and prescribed physical therapy at an office he owned, without an examination of the injured leg. At my next visit, I insisted on an MRI, and the doctor was surprised to find I had a torn ACL and meniscus; he thought I had simply a small knee tear.

During my visits, this doctor would simultaneously see five patients and was constantly interrupted. Back and forth he went, and I marveled how he could even remember each person’s issues.

It was now time for orthopedist number three. This doctor prescribed additional physical therapy and recommended I see a physiatrist at her hospital’s spine institute, thinking my leg problems were caused by my back. She couldn’t understand my continued difficulty walking after so many months.

The physiatrist was seen, two MRI’s of the back and cervical spine taken and a cortisone shot arranged, without any warning of its dangers (osteoporosis and stress fractures) or its 50% failure rate. The physiatrist diagnosed two herniated discs, which I did not have, then suggested another cortisone shot higher up in my back. The MRIs showed stenosis of the spine suspected as the root of my problem walking.

The hospital was paid $3,200 for the cortisone shot. A puncture of the skin, an injection is considered surgery and paid accordingly. I refused to pay a $100 deductible, instead expressing my displeasure at my treatment in a letter to the president of the hospital. So far, no response.

Since then, I have seen a spinal neurosurgeon who recommended two back surgeries, though I had no back pain. The first surgery has a 20% failure rate; the second surgery would fuse discs and add a rod to my back. No explanation was given as to why a second surgery was a possibility.

I have also seen three neurologists and was administered a $1,500 EMG test with no negative results, and have also been misdiagnosed with herniated discs, carpal tunnel and a pinched nerve in the neck; all nonexistent. Then there were 30 physical therapy sessions on my injured leg and 7 traction sessions on my back, at which my neurosurgeon laughed. I am reminded of snake oil salesman of another era.

This endless journey has delivered poor results at great physical, emotional and financial costs. I am convinced that fee-for-service and doctors’ defensive medical practices must be addressed in reform, along with medical malpractice. We can learn a great deal by looking at the national health care systems of many leading industrial nations, particularly how they pay doctors and why medical malpractice is a non-issue. These nations provide better health at half the cost.

Meanwhile, I continue to search for answers while my patience, resolve and check book wear thin. In the mean time, last week I saw the neurosurgeon again and after stating my back was not in pain for the third time, he announced that no back surgery was warranted.

He finally heard me. Yet, I am walking with a cane.

Pearl Korn is an advocate of improved Medicare for All, the United States National Health Care Act (H.R. 676).

On Tuesday, the Health Care for America Now (HCAN) coalition performed a “citizen’s arrest” of the insurance industry at a meeting of Americas Health Insurance Plans, the private health insurance industry’s leading lobbying group, in Washington, DC.

Thousands came out to support this action, and rightfully so. There is no other place we need to be than in the streets in protest of the egregious crimes of the insurance companies. Advocates of Medicare for All agree that the private insurance industry must be held accountable for its crimes, and that it should be put out of business…permanently.

Behind the progressive facade, HCAN ultimately supports the Democrat’s bill, which would mandate that everyone purchase insurance from the very same companies they call evil.

Howard Dean stated at the HCAN event, “This is a vote about one thing: are you for the insurance companies or are you for the American people?” This is absolutely true, but Dean’s language is misleading. He implies that voting for the bill will help protect the American people.

In reality, both the House and Senate bills have at their core a regressive and harmful mandate that will force people to purchase insurance plans that will not guarantee they get health care when they need it or that the care will be affordable. It will keep the insurance company bureaucrats in control, handing them hundreds of billions of public dollars to subsidize these utterly inadequate insurance plans. These plans are more akin to an umbrella that melts in the rain. Moreover, the proposed legislation that HCAN is fighting for will continue to drive up health costs, raise premiums, and send people, even those with insurance, into bankruptcy.

The health care crisis will not end, and this bill will not bring us closer to a real solution.

Some at the rally said this bill will get our foot in the door; this is the best health reform we can get right now, but Healthcare-NOW!, the campaign for national single-payer health insurance, remains committed to implementing a real solution to the health care crisis. To get there, we cannot compromise on our principles. We must start the conversation by acknowledging the right to health care for all people, and when we do that, single-payer will be on the table.

As advocates, we must continue pushing for a system that guarantees high quality health care to everyone. We know we can do this at less cost than our current system and less cost to the American people. We will continue fighting alongside the doctors, nurses, and committed activists that support a real solution that puts the health of our people before the profits of insurance companies.

When this current reform fails to pass, or fails to solve our health care crisis, we will be ready with the solution.

The time to fight for what is right is always right now. Join us as we build an unstoppable movement for improved Medicare for all.

Recently, The Maine state AFL-CIO has developed a number of materials, including a power point presentation, leaflets, cost analysis, and other tools to reach out to local unions and rank and file members to help educate and arm them with the knowledge of the benefits of single payer health care and how it works.

All the materials developed by the Maine state AFL-CIO are available here.

The Maine AFL-CIO State Convention first passed a resolution calling on the National AFL-CIO to convene a summit to make plans and to commit the resources necessary to build a successful movement for single payer. That resolution is available here, and state feds, CLCs, and unions are invited to take similar action.

Our thanks to Charlie Urquhart of the Maine Labor Group on Health and to Matt Schlobohm, Public Policy & Political Mobilization Direction of the Maine AFL-CIO for making these materials available.

Distributed by:
All Unions Committee For Single Payer Health Care–HR 676

To keep up, Healthcare-NOW! must expand our capacity and resources to continue building the movement for meaningful reform that will end our healthcare crisis.

That’s why we need you to join Healthcare-NOW!.

We’re now offering membership packages for individuals and organizations that will make our nation-wide, single-payer network stronger.

Members receive perks like updated resources, invites to national single-payer activist conference calls, leadership training sessions, and invites to our conferences and events.

Individuals can join Healthcare-NOW! for a suggested $40 a year contribution and organizations, coalitions, and groups can join Healthcare-NOW! for a suggested $100 a year contribution.

Find all the details, including a list of perks for individuals here and organizations here.

Additionally, we are now offering email/database management, online donation management, and website management to organizations that join. Go here for more information.

With your support, we can make the movement for improved Medicare for all stronger. Please join us today.

Have questions? Email info@healthcare-now.org or call 800-453-1305.

When Jerry Brown was running for President in 1992, he wholeheartedly embraced a single payer national health insurance system.

“When I see in Canada that they pay $500 less per person, that they cover every citizen, and that they live two years longer and their infant mortality is 50 percent less – then I see a model,” Brown said during a debate will Bill Clinton in New York in April 1992.

“You cut out all the private health insurance, you have one single payer either at the national level or through the 50 states and that one single payer will be the one who negotiates with the doctors, the hospitals and the other providers.”

“And since you have only one source of income in the whole medical establishment, you can drive down the costs. With the holding down of the cost, you can eliminate the intermediary, the middle man, the bureaucracy. In some of these hospitals, there’s more people doing the billing that there are in direct patient care on an eight hour shift. It doesn’t make any sense. But through a single payer, as we’ve seen in Canada, you can eliminate tremendous amounts of paperwork both for the doctors, the hospitals and the insurance companies. Through them phase this in over a three or four year period, and with the lid, the tight lid, you put on medical spending, you will generate spending in the neighborhood of $80 billion. That’s enough to cover all of the people who are not now getting health care. You do run it through the government. It’s going to run through a tax system, but the money that will be spent will be hopefully, certainly for all middle class people it will be less than they are now paying in premiums or what their employer is paying and what is now coming out of their paycheck.”

Fast forward 18 years.

Jerry Brown is Attorney General of California.

And he’s now running for Governor of California.

Continue reading…

When Obama came to my neighborhood this week to press for public support for his health “reform” bill, he wasn’t just greeted by teaparty hecklers. Speaking to a large group of mostly supportive students and local residents at Arcadia University in Glenside, the president at one point mentioned that “people on the left” want “single-payer.” But before he could add that that approach wasn’t going to happen, he found himself drowned out by cheers calling for Medicare for all and single-payer.

That kind of says it all.

I’m with Marcia Angell, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. The Obama plan for health care “reform”, as well as the two versions passed by the House and the Senate, are all devious disasters that do nothing to solve the nation’s burgeoning health care crisis, and in fact, will make it worse.

The only thing to do at this point is to take the whole stinking pile of paper and put it in the compost heap. Kill it.

This whole effort was never about reform from the day last March when the new president called on Congress to begin deliberations on health care reform. It was about catering to the wishes of the big players in the Medical Industrial Complex–the big pharmaceutical multinationals, the hospital companies, the physicians and, most of all, the insurance industry. People and their health care needs had little or nothing to do with this.

That’s why we’ve ended up with proposals that would do nothing to control costs, that would force health young people to buy unregulated, high-cost and high-profit plans that would be money in the bank for the insurance industry, and that would finance any subsidies for the poor by cutting back on benefits for the only group of Americans who currently have a form of single-payer insurance–the elderly with their Medicare.

President Obama began this whole obscene nightmare with a lie, when he said that even though single-payer systems clearly work to open access to all and keep costs down while providing better overall health results in places like Canada and some European countries, they cannot be applied in America “because that would mean starting over from scratch.” He knew when he said it that this was a lie. America already has a well-run and successful single-payer healthcare program in place that is bigger than the entire Canadian health care system, and that’s Medicare, which was established in 1965, and which currently finances the care of 45 million Americans. You just have to be 65 or disabled to be eligible for it.

As Dr. Angell pointed out on a recent Bill Moyers Journal segment, the simplest way to solve America’s health care crisis would be to just start a gradual expansion of Medicare, say by lowering the age of coverage to 55, and then 45, and then 35, until everyone was covered and the insurance industry was pushed out of the health sector. The right-wing couldn’t use their scare tactics about a “government takeover of your medical care,” because the elderly love Medicare, and besides, far from “inserting a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor,” Medicare gives the elderly a freer choice of physician and treatment than any but the most gold-plated private insurance executive health care plan.

Obama continued this lie when he claimed, in his last mention of the issue during his State of the Union address to Congress, that he and Congress had considered every idea. In fact, he and Congress have for the last year, carefully prevented any consideration of the idea of single-payer, or of expanding Medicare to cover every American. Bills that would do that, authored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) in the House and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the Senate, were in fact blocked from hearings or votes in both Houses by Democratic leaders, at the White House’s urging, while the White House itself barred single-payer advocates from any of its discussions.

Instead the president met behind closed doors with the lobbyists of the various health care industries, to cut deals with each sector in order to gain their support for his “reform” plan. It was as if the Department of Justice had called meetings with the various crime families of the Cosa Nostra in order to cut deals before developing a plan to “tackle” the Mafia.

The plan being proposed to “reform” health care–actually they long ago stopped calling it health care reform, acknowledging that this was never even contemplated, and started instead referring to what it being contemplated as health insurance reform–is, we are told, going to cost about $100 billion a year. That wouldn’t be bad if what we got in return was universal health care, but we don’t even get that. Instead we have a measure that will reduce access to health care for the middle class by taxing benefits and encouraging higher deductibles, that will force the poor, the young and the self-employed to buy terrible, over-priced plans offering minimal coverage, that will chip away at the coverage provided to the elderly, and that will ultimately lead to higher costs for everyone, and that will still leave nearly 20 million people with no coverage. The US currently devotes 17.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product to health care, and if this “reform” in any of its guises is passed, that share of the economy devoted to health care will quickly rise past 20 percent, with no end in sight.

This is madness. Expanding Medicare to cover everyone, as I have written earlier, would actually save everyone money immediately, and the country as a whole. Consider that the most expensive consumers of health care–the elderly–are already in the system. Adding younger, healthier people to Medicare would cost incrementally much less. That’s why the Canadians spend about 9 percent of their GDP on healthcare, while covering every Canadian, while we spend nearly twice as much and leave 47 million of our citizens uninsured and unable to visit a doctor. How could it be cheaper to add everyone to Medicare? Expanding Medicare to cover everyone would probably cost somewhere between $800 billion and $1 trillion a year. That sounds like a lot of money, until you consider that we already spend $100 billion a year to care for veterans through the Veterans Administration, and $400 billion a year to care for the poor through Medicaid. We also spend $300 billion a year subsidizing hospitals that have to provide “free” charity care to the poor who don’t qualify for Medicaid, too. Since all those people would be covered by Medicare under Medicare-for-All, that’s $800 billion a year in current expenditures saved right there.

So even if my higher figure of $1 trillion for adding everyone to Medicare were correct, we’d only be talking about an extra $200 billion annual expense. And that could be covered by increasing the Medicare tax paid as a payroll deduction. You don’t want to pay more taxes? Well wait. If you were covered by Medicare, you and your employer would no longer have to pay for private insurance, which would mean a savings to workers of thousands of dollars a year, and even more to employers who currently pay the majority of health insurance premiums for employees. The net savings would be enormous.

Nobody has talked about this.

Universal Medicare would make American companies more competitive in the global marketplace, where other companies are not responsible for health care costs of their workers. It would make Americans wealthier, because they would no longer be paying for health care out of their own pockets. It would make everyone more secure, because they would no longer have to fear losing access to health care if they lost their job, and would eliminate most bankrupties, which are reportedly caused by medical bills.

So we know what needs to be done.

And we know that the current “reforms” on offer don’t do it.

So Dr. Angell is right. Obamacare needs to die.

There is reason to hope that it will die. Republicans oppose it, though not for any decent reason. They want unregulated private insurance and unlimited profits for health care industries. Ditto some conservative Democrats, who are also anti-government ideologues whose wallets are stuffed with health industry swag. But their reasons for oppposing health bill don’t matter. All that is needed is for a few progressive members of the House and Senate to admit that the health bills being considered are not reform, but the antithesis of reform, and to also vote against it, and Obamacare will be dead.

At that point we can start seriously demanding that the Congress and the President act to bring us real health reform in the way that really works: expanding Medicare to cover everyone.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com.

A big part of the final push for this health care reform effort is focused on how terrible the private insurance companies are. On the White House blog, communications director Dan Pfeiffer is attacking the huge premium increases and monopoly power of some private insurers. HCAN is doing a “mass citizens’ arrest of the insurance companies.” On the stump, President Obama is hitting the terrible practices of the private insurance corporations hard. From Washington Post:

Obama and his health secretary staged a two-pronged attack Monday in a stern letter to health insurance chief executives and a speech in which the president castigated insurance companies 22 times. “How much higher do premiums have to rise,” he demanded, “before we do something about it?”

The messages are part of a strategy that Obama and those around him have begun to employ lately, to ratchet up the pace and the populist appeal of their rhetoric against the health insurance industry. The barbed tone moves far beyond that of the 2008 presidential campaign, when Obama began to say that medical coverage should be accessible and affordable for more Americans.

I agree with the message. I can’t decide if I dislike the industry more for its morally reprehensible practices or its bloated, inefficient, and completely unnecessary nature. Attacking the private insurers is smart politics and should have been done months ago.

The big problem is that the messaging is incompatible with pushing for Obama’s official health care proposal. That program will use the IRS to force Americans to buy insurance from the same, terrible, private insurance industry everyone is now rallying against.

If the private insurance industry is so evil, why would you ever possibly force me to be their customer?

The messaging would make sense of Obama were pushing for a Medicare-for-all system that would completely marginalize or eliminate the private insurers. It would make sense even if the bill only had a simple public alternative, like a public option or Medicare buy-in. I could understand the message even if the bill had a broad state waiver provision that would allow for states to possibly create single payer plans. I might even except the messaging if Obama was pushing for what Switzerland did by forcing all private health insurance companies to become highly regulated non-profits. It might even be accepting if there were only the new consumer protections but no individual mandate.

The issue is that Obama’s health care proposals don’t do any of those things. It places a few good, new regulations on the private insurance companies (which will probably see a very spotty record of enforcement because that function is left up to the states), but it will now force you to buy insurance from these same, terrible, private insurance companies Obama is now attacking, or you face a fine.

To me, this sounds like pushing for a bill that would force factory farmers and slaughter houses to treat livestock 15% more humanely, but in exchange, the laws would require every American to buy triple the amount of meat.

If everyone pushing for health care reform is pointing out how awful the private insurance companies are, why is Firedoglake the bad guy for saying it is therefore immoral to force people to be customers of these admittedly terrible companies (especially when health care reform could be done without an IRS-enforced individual mandate to buy private–and only private–insurance)?

Meanwhile, Democratic leaders in the House are scrambling to secure enough votes to pass the Senate’s version of the healthcare reform package. Intense pressure is reportedly being placed on some Democratic lawmakers to support the party line. New York Democrat Eric Massa is claiming he was forced out of Congress by White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel because of his opposition to the bill. Massa, who has been a vocal supporter of a single-payer system, made the charge in a radio interview on Monday, just after he resigned from his seat after being accused of sexual harassment.

Rep. Eric Massa: “Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil’s spawn. He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive. And if he doesn’t like that, he can come after me personally. He hates my guts. He’s hated me since day one, and now he wins. So he’ll get rid of me, and this bill will pass, and that’ll end—and I don’t know what we’re going to do in this country.”

Former Congressman Eric Massa speaking on Monday. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio is also reportedly coming under increasing pressure to back the healthcare reform bill.