Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), recently told Michigan’s WXMI-GR news that the biggest growth in the uninsured has come from an increase in immigration — both legal and illegal. According to Krikorian, “From 1989 on, more than 70% of the increase in the total number of uninsured people is immigrants or their young kids.” Watch it:

CIS’ “findings” were also featured in Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert newsletter. Corsi is already well known for authoring two error-ridden anti-Obama books. His “controversial and often bizarre views,” include xenophobic government conspiracy theories as expressed in his book, “The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger With Mexico and Canada.” Stephen Camarota, Director of CIS Research, told Corsi, “It is not too much to say that the nation’s problem with those lacking health care insurance is being driven by the nation’s immigration policy.” Krikorian is also quoted as saying, “We don’t have an uninsured crisis…We have an immigration crisis.”

What Corsi, Krikorian, and Camarota all conveniently fail to mention is that there were years during the post-1989 period during which the number of uninsured native-born citizens dropped dramatically. By leaving out this significant piece of information, anti-immigrant zealots are able to make it look as if immigrants were a larger share of the total increase in the uninsured than is really the case.

In a personal email correspondence, Dr. Walter Ewing, Senior Researcher at the Immigration Policy Center (IPC) further criticizes CIS for muddying the national health care debate with their anti-immigrant agenda. “Given that nearly 80 percent of the uninsured adults and children in this country are U.S. citizens, it is difficult to fathom how Mark Krikorian can treat this as an immigration issue,” says Ewing.

Ezra Klein has pointed out that excluding immigrants from a national health care system, as groups like CIS advocate, could do more harm than good as unskilled or semi-skilled insured native workers are left to compete with cheaper uninsured undocumented immigrants. As CIS and their anti-immigrant allies exploit the health care issue to make the case against immigration, some have gone as far to argue that immigration reform which includes a legalization program for undocumented immigrants could actually solve labor cost disparities and pave the way for health care reform:

“Most immigrants—legal and illegal—to this country are hard-working, young, and in relatively good physical shape (especially compared to native-born Americans). They make far fewer demands on the public purse than, for example, the average retiring baby boomer. If placed on a pathway to citizenship, they comprise a potentially huge new block of taxpayers—taxpayers that could be critical to balancing the long-term ledger for health care, social security, and other entitlements.”

Over at ThinkProgress, Faiz Shakir reports that “in an emailed statement to Bloomberg News, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said she’s open to the idea of dropping a public health insurance option in favor of a medical-insurance cooperative,” even if the proposed co-operative is a mosaic of state-based programs.

Sebelius explained that the administration was open to any proposal that would “have a comprehensive approach that lowers costs” and provides “coverage for everyone.” “The administration remains open to all serious ideas including national and state co-ops as well, public plans modeled on Medicare, as long as such plans achieve the president’s goals of reducing cost, improving quality and giving Americans real health-care choice,” Sebelius said.

But it’s a unclear that a national cooperative — much less state-based cooperatives — would be able to lower costs. A single health insurance plan has limited scope to influence the practices of providers and other insurers. It lacks the clout of Medicare — which can drive system innovations and payment reforms — Medicare-like administrative efficiencies, or the ability to use Medicare leverage to ensure a large provider network that accepts Medicare prices. A new cooperative health care plan won’t be able to lower costs and drive private insurers to aggressively bargain with providers (and pass the saving on to its beneficiaries in the form of lower premiums). Multiple cooperatives — operating as non-profit health insurance plans — would have even less market leverage to bargain for lower prices.

In fact today, during a press briefing with reporters, former Sen. Tom Daschle — who has been criticized for failing to strongly advocate on behalf of the public plan — argued, “I can’t think of a tool that more effectively controls costs than a public option. I mean every study that has been done on a public option shows what remarkable cost savings you can derive”:

Actually as I said at the beginning, the degree to which Republicans make themselves less and less relevant is the degree to which a public option is more and more likely, because we are negotiating with the Democrats rather than the Republicans who oppose it. So I would say that a reconciliation vehicle would probably have a pure public option just because most likely it will only involve Democrats deciding what that reconciliation package will be.

Watch it:

Health care reform isn’t all about a public option, but a public option may be essential to sustaining the effort. Progressives certainly shouldn’t allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good — a health care bill that provides coverage to more Americans but lacks a public option is better than no reform at all. But Democratic lawmakers should be careful not to sacrifice good policy for the sake of winning one or two Republican votes. As the New York Times reports this morning, there is “Little Hope for G.O.P. to Support Health Bill.” Republican opposition is rooted in ideological stubbornness and a political unwillingness to allow Democrats to win on the issue, not sound policy rebuttals. As GOP word-smith Frank Luntz has conceded, Republicans will label Obama’s reform effort a “government takeover” of health care regardless of the actual proposal and they continue to misrepresent and lie about the consequences of a public option.

But as Daschle points out, if Republicans continue to lie and obstruct reform, they may push Democrats into reconciliation and, ironically, contribute to the creation of a robust public option. Unfortunately, it’s not yet clear that everyone in the administration agrees that this is good policy.

Transcript: Read more

Today, the Center for American Progress hosted a breakfast with former Sen. Tom Daschle and John Podesta to discuss the prospects of health care reform. “July will be the most historic and consequential in all of history,” Daschle explained, arguing that it will be “extraordinarily critical when it comes to health reform.”

Indeed, after the July 4th recess the Senate Finance Committee and the three House committees with jursidiction over health care will begin marking up legislation. All four are expected to focus on the great elephant in the room: how do we finance reform that could cost north of $1 trillion?

Most progressives propose a mix of different revenue streams. 1) Eliminating or reducing excessive or wasteful spending in Medicare and Medicaid could seed approximately $400 billion. 2) Modernizing the system by implementing electronic health records and instituting payment reform could yield costs savings of 1.5 percentage points annually (or over $500 billion). 3) Additional revenue from the employer mandate, limiting tax preferences for medical spending and sin taxes (taxes on alcohol and soda) would generate more than $400 billion.

This basket of pay-fors provides Congress with a menu of options, making fully financed health care reform more probable. As Podesta pointed out during the briefing:

One of the reasons I think this is important, is if you settle in on 400, 400, 400 then the cuts are sustainable. If you are imagining all of the costs coming from the revenue side, or all of the costs coming from traditional cuts in public program, it is very very hard to get the package put together right. But if you can take 400 out of over payments, 400 out of modernization, 400 out revenues, that’s a doable deal. None of it is easy. If it was easy, it would already have been done.

But what “if experience falls short of expectations?” What happens if productivity improvements, investments in health information technology and payment system reforms fail to slow the growth of health care spending and lower costs? How then do we ensure that health care reform is budget neutral? Well today, Harvard economist David Cutler and CAP Senior Fellow Judy Feder released a new report in which they argue that should reform fail to produce savings, Congress could rely on a series of so-called ‘failsafe’ proposals:

A commission would monitor health care spending and, after some time would have the authority to implement a series of measures to address the problematic areas. “The first piece is the trigger,” Feder explained. “You would have some combination of a mechanism to ensure adequate funding for health care reform and the other is a target for the rate of growth of health care spending. That’s the kind of trigger that we would see…A commission would at a point, say 5 years out, would evaluate experience and if we were somewhat short, if all of the modernization hasn’t happened or the savings hadn’t gone where we needed them to go, then that commission would make the decision as to what actual measures would be taken to get growth under control.”