The Progressive Change Campaign Committee released a new ad today that calls out New Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D) and other Senate Democrats on campaign contributions they’ve received from the health and insurance industries. The Campaign is trying to put some pressure on the lawmakers to support a public-option in health-care reform legislation currently in Congress:

Well, popping over to Sen. Bingaman’s official site this afternoon, the first thing you see is a policy statement on, wait for it, health-care reform. Specifically, a public option:

Much attention has been given to whether the bill we send to the president should have a “public option.” I strongly support a public option.  The most critical elements of such a plan are that it would be established and overseen by the federal government, and made available to all Americans. The primary purpose of the public plan is to ensure that there is at least one option for Americans that is affordable and would provide meaningful care. By leveraging competition, a public plan would also safeguard against unscrupulous insurances practices.

Of course, the devil’s in the details, but if you like the idea of a public option you should head over to WeWantThePublicOption.com to register your support. And if you can find Sen. Tom Udall talking about a public option, let me know in comments.

Or, as we here in the U.S. call it, Medicare:

Private insurance companies participating in Medicare have been allowed to keep tens of millions of dollars that should have gone to consumers, and the Bush administration did not properly audit the companies or try to recover money paid in error, Congressional investigators say in a new report.

That sort of behavior is, by now, to be expected from Bush & Co. the administration. However, the article goes on:

In separate action, the Bush administration is vigorously pursuing money that it says is owed to insurance companies by Medicare beneficiaries. The Medicare agency has sent letters to more than 135,000 people saying they still owe premiums for prescription drug coverage provided in 2006. In most cases, the premiums were supposed to have been withheld from monthly Social Security checks, but the government withheld the wrong amounts or nothing at all.

Kerry Weems, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said, “I am intently focused on this matter and will make it a priority to correct the errors and minimize them in the future.”

And, yet, somehow, I’m not surprised. Oh, and by the way, Weems — a New Mexico native — was appointed in May to head up Medicare.

Our friend Ezra has a great article in The American Prospect this month detailing the benefits of health care systems around the world. He touches on Canada, France, Great Britain, Germany and the U.S. Veterans Health Administration (VHA), showing that each system spends less on care than the U.S. as a whole, all while providing quality care:

Putting aside the VHA, America’s annual per person health expenditures are about twice what anyone else spends. That actually understates the difference, as our 45 million uninsured citizens have radically restricted access to care, and so the spending on the median insured American is actually quite a bit higher. Canada, France, Great Britain, and Germany all cover their entire populations, and they do so for far less money than we spend. Indeed, Canada, whose system is the most costly of the group, spends only 52 percent per capita what we do.

The article is pretty concise, and delivers a relatively damning blow to the health care system in the U.S., and our focus on making money off of sick people:

This makes it hard to move toward a preventive system, as Canada has, because preventive medicine pays less. It makes it hard to address moral-hazard issues wisely, as the French have, because it’s unprofitable to insure diabetics, and less profitable still to make their care essentially free. It makes it hard to institute the cost savings that Great Britain has, because with less money flowing into the system, there would be far less profit to be made. It makes it hard to harness market forces while protecting against individual risk, as Germany has, because insurer business models are predicated on shifting risk to employers and individuals, and profits are made when insurers can keep that risk from being shifted back onto them. And it is impossible to implement the practices that have so improved the VHA, because doing so would require a single, coherent health system that stuck with its members through their life cycles rather than an endlessly fractured structure in which insurers pawn off their members as they grow old, ill, or unemployed.