The rate at which the Koch Industries funded Americans for Prosperity (AFP) churns out front groups to promote its right-wing corporate agenda sets the organization out among similar conservative “think tanks.” This week, AFP created their latest front group called “Patients United Now,” an entity set up to defeat health care reform. Patients United follows a familiar pattern AFP has used for their other front groups: create a new stand alone website, fill it with lines like “We are people just like you” to give the site a grassroots feel, and then use the new group to recruit supporters and run deceptive advertisements attacking reform. This “astroturfing” model has been used by AFP to launch groups pushing distortions against other progressive priorities:

– The “Hot Air Tour” promoting global warming skepticism and attacking environmental regulations.
– “Free Our Energy,” a group promoting increased domestic drilling.
– The “Save My Ballot Tour,” a group that pays Joe the Plumber to travel around the country smearing the Employee Free Choice Act.
– “No Climate Tax,” a group dedicated to the defeat of Clean Energy Economy legislation.
– “No Stimulus,” a group launched to try to stop the passage of the Recovery Act.

Notably, AFP was also instrumental in orchestrating the anti-Obama, anti-tax tea party protests in April.

With nearly 70 Republican operatives and former oil industry spokesmen working behind the scenes of AFP’s various fronts and disclosures that point to ever increasing oil and corporate donations to the group, one must wonder, who is guiding this massive front group factory? The answer is Tim Phillips, the President of AFP who has built a long career of inventing fake grassroots causes. In Phillips’ official biography, there appears to be over a 10 year gap — but that period was when Phillips developed his very first astroturf groups to do everything from smearing his opponents with anti-Semitic attacks to laundering money for criminal lobbyists.

Click More To Read The WonkRoom’s Investigation Of AFP’s Tim Phillips
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Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn are right to celebrate the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) recent decision to exclude the federal mandate to purchase health insurance from the federal budget “so long as people had a variety of private plans from which to choose and a government entity was not in charge of collecting their insurance premiums.” As Ezra notes, an opposite ruling led to disastrous consequences during Clinton’s reform efforts:

In 1994, a pretty similar question was decided in the other direction. Robert Reischauer, then the director of the CBO, decided that the premiums that individuals were charged to purchase private insurance under Clinton’s plan would be included in the budget. This didn’t change the nature of the proposal. But it made its cost tag look huge.

Donna Shalala, Clinton’s secretary of health and human services, later termed the ruling “devastating.” And it was. It made health care reform look obscenely expensive. And the same thing could have happened this year. Rather than costing $100 billion per year or so, it could have cost a couple trillion a year. No change in the plan. Just a change in the budgetary treatment of the plan.

This time, the CBO ruled that the mandate could remain off the books if consumers could “choose among a number of insurance plans,” the plans offered “different levels of coverage,” and consumers could “choose among several different insurance companies competing on price.” Most conceptions of the health insurance exchange envision just this kind of competition — a key distinction from the Clinton proposal which funneled all health insurance dollars through various Health Alliances.

But the very fact that we’re all so worried about the CBO highlights the craziness of allowing one office to hold health care reform hostage. Why exactly are reforms jumping through hoops to satisfy the CBO? We do it because we have to — that’s the process, the CBO has the magic numbers — but shouldn’t we design legislation based on what’s most effective in controlling costs and increasing access, not around how some actuary chooses to calculate something?