The Hill asked Peterson’s office where he stands on the reform bill and his office told them he was a firm “no.”

Oberstar is part of the “Stupak 12,” a group of Democrats who oppose the health care reform bill if it doesn’t ban funding of abortions.

Politico reports that Oberstar still maintains that position, quoting the Weekly Standard saying “I will not vote for a health care bill that doesn’t have the House abortion language in it.” (That quote is originally from Congressional Quarterly, a subscription-only publication quoted by the Weekly Standard.)

Despite his unwavering stance on abortion, Oberstar is for the bill and says he supports going even farther — advocating single-payer health care.

Democratic Reps. Keith Ellison and Bettu McCollum have said they will vote for reconciliation. Rep. Tim Walz says he likely will as well, but he has some conditions, according to Minnesota Public Radio.

Right off the bat, Bachmann offered a refrain often made in her media appearances, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is personally targeting her in the 2010 election (last month she went so far as to say Pelosi “hates” her). It’s a claim that was recently proven misleading by the Star Tribune, and even Bachmann’s handlers say it’s not quite true. She told listeners:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has made me her number-one target for defeat politically this November at the ballot box, and trust me, she has all the money and all the volunteer power to make that happen. So, I am in the process of fighting for my political life so that I’m not defeated. She knows it’s vulnerable for me to speak out and take a very strong stand against this leap toward socialism but my opinion is I was sent to DC to do a job, and I’m going to do it.

Bachmann was asked what religious leaders can do to help get conservatives elected. She responded that Congress should repeal the ban that prevents 501(c)3 nonprofits and churches from endorsing candidates. (In Bachmann’s first run for Congress, Living Word Christian Center Pastor Mac Hammond got into hot water for endorsing Bachmann from the pulpit.)

The reason why clergy are afraid to be involved is because of an amendment that former President Lyndon Johnson passed when he was a senator from Texas… that stops 501(3)c [sic] organizations from saying anything political from the pulpit. Now, churches can be political from the pulpit. They can talk about issues all they want. What they can’t do is endorse a candidate from the pulpit. But the ACLU has been all over the backs of churches… Christian and Jews and people of faith are not second class citizens… but these radical leftist organizations have been intimidating Christians for so long and pastors don’t generally now that they do have the right to speak out from the pulpit. Congress should repeal that amendment from Lyndon Johnson… We need to repeal that and give Christians back their first amendment rights to free speech in the church.

Bachmann wrapped the appearance up by saying Tea Partiers need to make even more noise:

That’s why with everything within us we need to literally start banging garbage lids together to create enough noise so that our neighbors and our co-workers realize where the time clock is at this point because the second hand is literally banging up against 11:59 on the clock of freedom when it comes to health care… we cannot rest; we can’t take our marbles and go home.

“Although every major poll clearly shows a supermajority of Americans oppose the current health care ‘reform’ bill, Nancy Pelosi is planning to ram the bill through Congress with a vote scheduled for March 18,” said an email from Minnesota Majority on Sunday. “If you care about preserving your right to make health care decisions for you and your family, please be sure to come to Saturday’s rally. Bring a sign demonstrating your opposition to the bill.”

The rally will be Saturday, March 13 from noon to 1 pm at the Minnesota State Capitol.

Bachmann said, “President Obama’s bill won’t bring down the costs (of health care) for average Americans — or really for very few Americans, if any.”

Politifact checked with the nonpartisan Congressional Budgeting Office and, on Friday, found that her claim does not stand up to scrutiny.

Using the strict, unsubsidized figures, 60 percent of Americans in the private insurance market should see their premiums fall. And taking into account the subsidies, a full 70 percent would see their premiums fall. And almost 94 percent would see their premiums either fall or stay the same. No matter how you slice it, the overwhelming majority are likely to see a decline. So we find her claim False.

Here’s the full debate:

Photo by Neeta Lind

Advocates of legalizing medical marijuana for chronically and terminally ill patients have decided to scale back their campaign to pass such legislation this year because of Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s veto pen. In 2009, both chambers at the Capitol passed medical marijuana legislation with bipartisan support — only to see Pawlenty veto the legislation. Medical marijuana advocates had hinted at a constitutional amendment this session to bypass Pawlenty, but that won’t be the plan for 2010.

“Because Governor Pawlenty has announced that he is not seeking re-election in 2010, and because we don’t want to give him the ‘pleasure’ of vetoing another bill to help seriously ill Minnesotans, our focus has shifted to 2011,” read a statement from Minnesotans for Compassionate Care. “We intend to do everything in our power to ensure that a supportive gubernatorial candidate is in office when the next legislative session begins in January 2011.”

The group says it will continue to work with the law enforcement lobby to see if they can reach a compromise this session.

“MCC is meeting with law enforcement to answer their questions and learn about their objections,” the group wrote. “If law enforcement works with us in good faith, we may be able to introduce a bill that Governor Pawlenty will sign.”

“This clarification fails to recognize the limited physician supply in remote, rural communities,” the delegation wrote in a press statement accompanying the letter. “Previously the rule only required that a provider be accessible by phone and available to come to the hospital within 30 minutes. This new rule threatens access for patients and the ability of these hospitals to provide necessary care to Medicare patients.”

The full letter:

Minnesota’s congressional delegation requests your attention to an urgent issue that threatens the financial stability of rural hospitals throughout our state and around the country. Specifically, we request that the Department of Health & Human Services rescind the new interpretations and attempt to clarify physician supervision requirements that were contained in the Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) final rule for calendar year 2010, as well as any retrospective enforcement of those interpretations. Your quick actions to remedy this issue will help ensure that Medicare patients in Minnesota, as well as those in rural communities throughout the United States, will continue to have access to safe, high-quality outpatient services delivered in the most cost-effective and efficient manner possible.

In the final OPPS rule, which went into effect January 1, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) intended to do no more than clarify previous policies. However, this rule contained significant changes to longstanding policies and practices regarding the level of supervision required for outpatient therapeutic and diagnostic services to qualify for payment under Medicare. In the few weeks since the rule took effect, it has caused significant concern and financial pressure for hospitals, especially critical access hospitals (CAHs), in Minnesota and throughout the country.

The new policy essentially mandates that a physician or certain non-physician practitioners be immediately available at all times for numerous outpatient services, including observation services. These new requirements are not mandated in statute, nor did Congress intend for them to be gleaned from existing law. Even more concerning, CMS imposed these new mandates without any identified clinical need or discernment between the few medically complex services that naturally require more hands-on participation by a physician and the numerous routine, low-risk procedures that have been performed safely for decades by trained health care professionals working under a physician’s general supervision and direction if not always in his/her physical presence.

This new policy directly conflicts with CMS’s conditions of participation for CAHs. When designing the conditions of participation, CMS recognized both the severe shortage of available physicians in rural communities and the Medicare patients’ interests in having access to outpatient services in their communities without the added costs, risks and challenges that would result from traveling great distances. Accordingly, CMS thoughtfully wrote the conditions of participation so that they did not require a physician to be on a hospital’s campus at all times. Instead, the conditions of participation require a CAH to ensure that a physician is immediately available by phone and can respond in person within 30 minutes.

Given the need to contain and reduce health care costs, the continuing health care workforce shortage in rural areas throughout the country, and the longstanding history of safe delivery of outpatient services in CAHs prior to this new shift in policy, the undersigned senators and representatives from Minnesota urge you to rescind the new interpretation in the OPPS CY2010 rule pertaining to physician supervision.

Sincerely,

Amy Klobuchar
United States Senate

Al Franken
United States Senate

James L. Oberstar
United States House of Representatives

Collin C. Peterson
United States House of Representatives

Betty McCollum
United States House of Representative

John Kline
United States House of Representatives

Michele Bachmann
United States House of Representatives

Keith Ellison
United States House of Representatives

Tim Walz
United States House of Representatives

Erik Paulsen
United States House of Representative

Sen. Tom Harkin. Photo: WDCpix

Calling yesterday’s health care summit in Washington the “the final port of call” in achieving health care reform, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) says he can see “that final harbor… without binoculars,” adding that he thinks action on a health care bill will be taken in the next four to six weeks. As the Iowa Independent reports, he emphasizes that the bill may be modified, but it won’t be rewritten from scratch, as some Republicans have called for, and it will pass with or without Republican support.

“The House is pretty insistent on a public option,” said Harkin, who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions (HELP). “The Senate is a little bit more divided on it. I think in our negotiations with the House in the next week or so there may be some decisions made on that. I just don’t know which way it is going to go,” he said, adding that his personal belief is that the bill will likely not have a public option.

According to a new Research 2000 poll, 62 percent of Minnesotan support inclusion of the public option in reform measures. So far, 24 senators, including Sen. Al Franken, have signed a letter urging Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid use reconciliation to pass health care reform with a public option.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar has indicated she supports a public option and reconciliation but hasn’t signed the letter to Reid.

Here is the full text of Kline’s remarks on Thursday:

KLINE: Thank you, Leader.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I think that Senator Alexander framed our overall position very well when he said that we’re looking at thousands of pages of legislation, and we believe a better approach is to go step by step to address these issues of cost.

We certainly agree that you get better economies of scale if you can come together. We have proposed, in both the House and the Senate — in fact, for a number of years — that small businesses be able to band together in small-business health plans or association health plans.

We all know, and I’ve heard everybody say here, that small businesses are the engine that drives our economy. We also know that about half of the uninsured either work for small businesses or depend upon somebody who does.

And so we believe that we ought to address that issue by allowing these small businesses to band together in the same way that I think, Mr. President, you mentioned large companies do. And I mean really the same way, so that they get all the advantages of, if they self- insure, being able to avoid the 50-state mandates; being able to lower their administrative costs because they’re not having to deal with that.

And it will lower the cost of premiums for these small businesses and allow them to insure more people and to keep people that are already insured on the books, because we all know — we all know stories like we’ve heard here of small businesses that are saying “I can no longer provide insurance for my employees.”

Small businesses have been asking for this for years. It’s not a new idea. They’ve been asking for it for years. And we think it’s a far better way to get these economies of scale than the exchange thing that’s in the huge — that’s in the huge bill, that this will actually allow businesses to be able to lower their costs exactly the same way that large businesses do.

Bachmann’s declaration states in part, “We the People reject the imposition upon us of a new, Washington-controlled system of government-run health care. We demand Constitutional protection of the right to make our own health decisions and our own health care choices free of government denials, bureaucratic red tape and greater intergenerational debt.”

Rep. John Kline has signed on to Bachmann’s document, and well over half the House Republican caucus in the House is on board.

Bachmann gave this message to voters on WorldNetDaily on Tuesday:

“They need to turn out of office people who agree with President Obama’s economic policies, and they need to replace them with people who agree with our founders and our Declaration of Independence and Constitution that we are a constitutional republic. We cannot drown our nation and our people in debt, and we can’t force upon them tax increases so egregious that we will never again know true prosperity.”

Rep. Patti Fritz, DFL-Faribault, introduced the amendment to ban taxpayer funding for abortions under GAMC.

“The GAMC program already does pay for and has paid for 60 abortions recently,” Fritz said Thursday.

But that’s incorrect, said Rep. Erin Murphy, DFL-St. Paul. “I want to be crystal clear. GAMC does not cover pregnant women.” she said. “In our legislation one of the categories of eligibility that we are being very clear about: pregnant women go to Medical Assistance.”

Murphy noted that the reason Minnesota’s Catholic bishops had put their support behind the GAMC bill was because abortions aren’t part of the program.

Who is correct? According to the Minnesota Department of Human Services, women who become pregnant while on GAMC are automatically transferred to the state’s Medical Assistance program. They don’t even need to fill out an application.

But, MCCL blurred the lines in their press release about the vote, conflating the two programs.

Taxpayers have been forced to fund abortion procedures done under both GAMC and Medical Assistance (MA), the Minnesota Medicaid program. In 1993, taxpayers paid about $7,000 for 23 abortions performed in cases of rape, incest, or where the life of the mother was in danger. In 2007, taxpayers funded 3,914 abortions at a cost of $1.58 million, according to the Minnesota Department of Human Services; the total since 1994 is 47,115 abortions and $14.1 million.

“Taxpayer funded abortions—forcing citizens to pay for the killing of unborn children—is an issue that rises above partisan and ideological politics,” Fischbach added. “Minnesotans must not be forced to pay abortionists for their destruction of innocent human life.”

The measure failed on a tied vote of 67-67.

Over the weekend, reproductive rights group hailed the defeat of the amendment.

“Anti-choice forces attempted to add an anti-choice amendment to the GAMC bill which that funds our state’s health program for low-income people,” Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota. “Thankfully, this amendment was defeated in a tie vote of 67-67.”

And NARAL Pro-Choice Minnesota sent a similar alert to members. “On Thursday the anti-choice forces introduced an egregious anti-choice amendment to the bill that funds our state’s health program for low-income people,” said the group’s director Linnea House. “That’s right; it was a Stupak/Pitts-type amendment to a program that doesn’t even cover abortion. Fortunately, the amendment was defeated by a tied vote and the bill went on to approval 125 to 9.”