Big surprise: wealthy conservatives behind attacks on health care reform.

A recent story by Real News Network identified the major players and the money behind the attacks on health care reform.

Along with a significant investment in media advertising, several of these groups have also been stoking the anti-reform anger boiling over at town hall meetings.

Who are wearing the black hats in this political melodrama? According to Real News Network –

Conservatives for Patients’ Rights is led by health care entrepreneur Rick Scott, the co-founder of Solantic urgent care walk-in centers, which he’s spread across Florida and is looking to expand. While 80 percent of its patients have at least some insurance, Solantic also bills itself as an alternative to emergency-room care and a resource for patients with no insurance.

FreedomWorks, which has been advocating against the overhaul but has not launched TV ads, is chaired by Dick Armey, the former Republican majority leader of the House of Representatives from Texas.

Patients First and Patients United are creations of a larger group called Americans for Prosperity. AFP’s Web site describes a grassroots organization with more than 700,000 members that advocates “for public policies that champion the principles of entrepreneurship and fiscal and regulatory restraint. It was started by billionaire David Koch, of the Koch Industries oil family, one of the country’s top donors to conservative, free-market causes. The foundation’s board includes Art Pope, a former North Carolina legislator also involved in conservative causes, whose family owns hundreds of discount stores.

Two other grassroots groups have financed ads targeting peoples’ fears that more government involvement would hurt seniors and hasten end-of-life decisions.

One of them, Club for Growth, which advocates lower taxes, is led by president Chris Chocola, a former Republican congressman from Indiana who lost his re-election bid in 2006. Club for Growth this week announced a $1.2 million ad campaign against a health care overhaul, to run in North Dakota, Colorado, Arkansas and Nevada.

The other, 60 Plus Association, is a conservative senior advocacy group that wants to abolish the estate tax. Singer Pat Boone is the group’s national spokesman. Chairman Jim Martin started the group in 1992 with fund-raising help from conservative direct mail guru Richard Viguerie. It spent $1.5 million on TV ads opposing a healthcare overhaul in the last week.

Anti-reform logic: The poor don’t deserve health care.

Back during the first Clinton Administration, the main assassins of health care reform were Bob Dole and Phil Gramm. They did the dirty work of the special interests. The only thing that has changed since 1993-1994 is that more Americans are uninsured and the health care system is even more dysfunctional.

What hasn’t changed is the ideology that says that Americans without health care must fend for themselves, that the taxes of “well-off” Americans should not be used to pay for health care for the poor (i.e. it’s their fault that they are poor and should suffer the consequences), and that in a theoretical free-market economy the health care providers — doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, etc. — should be free to maximize their profits regardless of the consequences.

The graph below shows who exactly has and who doesn’t have health insurance. According to a Gallop poll taken in June, almost 42% of Hispanics, 20% of blacks, and 29% of those earning less than $36,000 annually are without health insurance.  These are the “Have Nots” in this debate.  The total group without health insurance, according to the poll, includes some 47 million Americans.

Predictably, of those earning more than $90,000 a year, only 4.5% are without insurance. This is the constituency of the GOP and the conservative Blue Dogs who are trying to deny the poor a public option.

It’s easy to imagine how the smug, wealthy conservatives out there can be so callous about denying health care to the poor. Unfortunately, they are the ones with the clout. They are the ones that our politicians are listening to.

We have to make sure they hear our voices, too.

Backtracking on backtracking.

Richard Pryor had this great bit in which he asked a woman who saw him cheating with another woman, “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?”

The White House is basically asking us the same question — only it’s not so funny.

Over the weekend President Obama, Secretary Sebelius, White House spokesman Gibbs went to great pains to tell us that a public option was not an essential ingredient in health care reform. Indeed, the president said that we were “fixated” on the public option.

Yesterday and today we are being told that the president has not changed positions. Really? As the Washington Post reminded us today,

President Obama had pushed a nonprofit, government-sponsored insurance plan as an alternative to existing insurance companies, saying that a public program would compete with the industry and help reduce costs.

But this is what Gibbs had to say about the “apparent” shift in the president’s priorities:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. . .said Obama has not shifted his position, suggesting that the president’s support for a public option had never been absolute. “The goals are choice and competition. His preference is a public option. If there are other ideas, he’s happy to look at them,” Gibbs said. White House officials repeatedly denied that there was any new positioning on the provision, accusing the media of fabricating developments.

Basically, this is the Pryor technique at work in the White House. Our lying eyes and ears are not to be believed. What we saw and heard over the weekend were mere apparitions.

Anyone doing research on this issue can find dozens of occasions when President Obama proclaimed universal coverage as a core principle of health care reform. And, of course, it is and always has been. That is what this fight is about. There are 47 million people in this country without health insurance and not getting the medical attention they need. We are no more fixated on universal coverage than anti-war advocates are fixated on peace. Universal coverage is the centerpiece of reform. Once upon a time, the president was adamant that it was. Now that the GOP and neo-Dems are pushing their own agenda, he is backing away from that commitment.

We can only hope that eventually the president and his staff start believing their own eyes and ears and take note of the millions of people – including leaders in his own party – who are counting on him to bring us real change, not doublespeak and backtracking.