Any time I want to see how a recipe can be done, I go to Tastespotting—and boom! It’s all food porn right there, in their depictions of how food can and should be if followed to the letter in a recipe.

Richard Kirsch, who leads the Health Care for America NOW group which supports the public option in a public-private health care reform plan, speaks out about the coming fight against the health insurance companies, like the ones backed by the front group AHIP:

But the insurance industry only backs reform that protects — better still, boosts — its bottom line. That’s always been true and became crystal clear once again as soon as President Obama proposed raising $176 billion for health care reform by putting an end to Medicare overpayments. The proposal’s not complicated. Private health insurance companies have been ripping off the government, and President Obama wants to save money by making it stop. He wants health insurance companies to go through a new competitive bidding process. AHIP — seeing less zeros tacked onto its profits — now claims that having to compete would mean a “major disruption” to Medicare. It sounds ridiculous because it is.

AHIP has also made it clear it will do everything it can to oppose another competitive feature of Obama’s health care plan — giving Americans a choice of a public health insurance plan to compete with private insurance. AHIP understands that if private companies have to compete with a public health insurance plan — which like Medicare is likely to do a better job of controlling costs than private insurers — they will lose customers and money.

This is why we really have to fight for the public option, and to have it accessible to ALL OF US, not just the elderly, disabled, and the low-income, so that we can have affordable health care. Also, in my view, this is a backdoor to single-payer health care, which is why the insurance companies are gearing up for a battle royale over the issue of the public option. They don’t want it to happen. They want a forced mandate with no public option, so we’re stuck with paying for crappy junk insurance plans with no capped premiums, and fined if we can’t afford the premiums.

Remember this flyer from the primaries? President Obama was right about the danger of forcing Americans to buy unaffordable insurance coverage, which as we’ve seen in the Massachussetts plan does not work at all in lowering the insurance premiums. And this will be the coming right-wing attack against insurance mandates in a health care reform plan.

Dr. Susan King, in an opinion editorial for the Boston Globe, points out the failure of the Massachussetts health insurance reform plan and the failure of the mandates to lower the premium costs for residents in Massachussetts:

First, it has not achieved universal healthcare, although the reform has been a boon to the private insurance industry. The state has more than 200,000 without coverage, and the count can only go up with rising unemployment.

Second, the reform does not address the problem of insurance being connected to jobs. For individuals, this means their insurance is not continuous if they change or lose jobs. For employers, especially small businesses, health insurance is an expense they can ill afford.

Third, the program is not affordable for many individuals and families. For middle-income people not qualifying for state-subsidized health insurance, costs are too high for even skimpy coverage. For an individual earning $31,213, the cheapest plan can cost $9,872 in premiums and out-of-pocket payments. Low-income residents, previously eligible for free care, have insurance policies requiring unaffordable copayments for office visits and medications.

This is what the forced mandates did for residents in Massachussetts—-gave them no affordable coverage, and fined them when they couldn’t afford the junk insurance premiums. This doctor supports H.R. 676, a single-payer plan sponsored by John Conyers, and points out that the administrative costs of Medicare are low in comparison to those of the private insurance plans.

This is where she and I differ—-she advocates for a single-payer plan, while I support the public option in a public-private health care reform plan. But we both agree on the five principles outlined by Institute of Medicine:

Coverage should be: universal, not tied to a job, affordable for individuals and families, affordable for society, and it should provide access to high-quality care for everyone.

If you support single-payer, and if you support the public option, let’s work on making sure that the public option is open and accessible to all. The lawmakers that we have to contact on this should be from the Senate side—Dodd, Kennedy, and Baucus. And we have to put as much pressure as we CAN on Senator Max Baucus, who wants to limit the public option, if it’s offered at all, to the elderly, disabled, and the low-income. The public option MUST BE a competitive player, well-funded and open to all Americans, in order to work on a fair level playing field against the insurance companies.

Here are their office numbers:

Senator Max Baucus:

(202) 224-2651 (Call and ask to speak to his health care policy advisor or legislative staffer)

Senator Christopher Dodd:

(202) 224-2823 (Call and ask to speak to his health care policy advisor or legislative staffer)

Senator Ted Kennedy:

(202) 224-4543 (Call and ask to speak to his health care policy advisor or legislative staffer)