While moderates hold up the health reform so that they can get their holy grail of cost savings - a tax on employer provided health benefits - the conservatives and free market fundamentalists are getting ready to rock and roll. John R. Graham, who is well paid by the Pacific Research Institute to think such thoughts, opines in toady's SF Comical on a piece of disinformation about the SF Health Program:

Under negotiation between congressional politicians and lobbyists, the "public option" refers to a new complex of bureaucracies that would provide health insurance to any American who prefers to have his health insurance paid by taxpayers rather than receive it as a benefit of employment or acquire it himself. Former Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt describes this as a "Trojan horse" that would crowd out health insurance chosen by employers or individuals and metastasize into a government monopoly.

The public option aims to tax privately purchased health benefits to subsidize these new bureaucracies, which, like Medi-Cal, will probably be scattered across federal, state and local governments. That is a key reason an estimated 119 million Americans will lose their private health benefits and become dependent on the "public option," according to economists at the Lewin Group, which analyzes health policy.

Now the Lewin group report said no such thing and the report is strongly supportive of the "moderate" health policy bill, the Wyden-Bennet Healthy Americans Act, which aims to tax privately purchased health benefits to subsidize new state bureaucracies. But these bureaucracies are O.K. with moderates because they will force us to buy insurance from private health insurance companies and there will be no public option.

We should also note that SF's Health program does not tax private health benefits.

The misrepresentation of the truth is about what we would expect from Mr. Graham, he is typing which is a good sign that he is lying, but more important for us right now is the turn this rhetoric is taking. If the moderates get their way and health reform includes a tax on employer provided health benefits, libertarians and conservatives will use this to kill the bill. Their slogan will become: "Don't let them tax your jard earned benefits to pay for health care for those lazy poor people."