On March 9, activists from Connecticut and all over the country converged on Washington D.C. to call out the insurance company executives gathering at the AHIP conference as the criminals they are. This Citizens' Posse rallied in our nation's capital to remind Congress and the President to listen to us, not corporate executives who stand in the way of a better America. The video at right was filmed at the citizens' arrest of the insurance companies.

Sharon Bass reported on the Citizens' Posse for CT News Junkie:

Many carried signs fashioned like wanted posters, each with the picture and name of an HMO CEO, and the reasons for the arrest, such as denial of care, increasing premium costs, and so on. According to recent media reports, the five biggest health insurers made a $12-billion profit in 2009, up from $8 billion the year before. AHIP is reportedly spending $5 million a week to defeat the Democrats’ health-reform effort.

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Tom Swan, executive director of Connecticut Citizens Action Group, called the protest a success. “We know we disrupted their conference,” he said, standing just outside the Ritz. “We clearly redefined sides (of the health-care debate). We saw a willingness to take more drastic action.”

The Washington Post also covered the Citizens' Posse:

"We're declaring this a crime scene!" bellowed Richard Trumka, president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, to the roar of the crowd. AFL-CIO is a federation of about 60 labor unions.

Organizers of the protest said they brought about 5,000 people from across the United States to downtown Washington. They began their march in Dupont Circle, where they heard speeches from politicians and activists.

If you've watched any local television lately, you have probably seen an advertisement from the "Committee for Truth in Politics" that is anything but true. Americans for Financial Reform responded to the advertisement in a recent e-mail to its members:

You may have seen this ad from the "Committee for Truth in Politics" on TV that claims that financial reform is really a $4 trillion bank bailout - a claim that doesn't resemble any truth, as Factcheck.org explains. And where did this group get the idea to say black is white and up is down? From a man named Frank Luntz.

Frank Luntz is a pollster for many of the corporations that created our financial meltdown, including Merrill Lynch and bear Sterns. This is the same Luntz whose health insurance reform talking points - on how to best stir up fear and confusion in the American people to derail reform and protect insurance industry profits - showed up across the web and in the mouths of lawmakers. So it shouldn't be surprising that he's at it again, this time writing a 17-page memo on how to kill financial reform.

Learn more by reading Americans for Financial Reform Director Heather Booth's response on the Huffington Post.

The large turnout for Tuesday's action at the Aetna Building in Hartford received some attention from Sharon Bass at CT News Junkie:

About 150 health-care reform activists rallied with Smith outside of Aetna’s sprawling campus on Farmington Avenue Tuesday afternoon. They came to ask CEO Ronald Williams to sign a pledge promising to stop denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, to stop denying care when customers get sick, and to not lobby against health-reform proposals supported by President Obama and his allies in Congress, especially a provision for a public health option.

The demonstration was one of 150 across the country, simultaneously protesting unhealthy insurance practices and yelling for change in the way this country does medicine.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which analyzes the impact that pending legislation will have on the budget if passed, has a history of underestimating the savings and overestimating the costs of health care policy changes says Jon Gabel of the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago in a New York Times op-ed:

As health care reform makes its way through Congress, the budget office’s assessment of how much various elements might cost may determine the details of legislation, and whether it ultimately passes. But when it comes to forecasting the costs of reform, the budget office’s record is suspect.

Gabel uses research from the Commonwealth Fund to compare CBO estimates of the costs and savings projections for health policy changes over the past 30 years to actual costs and savings. What he found was that the cautiously conservative estimation methods used by the CBO have been consistently off when it comes to major health policy changes:

The Congressional Budget Office’s consistent forecasting errors arose not from any partisan bias, but from its methods of projection. In analyzing initiatives meant to save money, it helps to be able to refer to similar initiatives in the past that saved money. When there aren’t enough good historical examples to go by, the estimated savings based on past experience is essentially considered to be unknown. Too often, “unknown” becomes zero — even though zero is not a logical estimate.

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The budget office’s cautious methods may have unintended consequences in the current health care reform effort. By underestimating the savings that can come from improved Medicare payment procedures and other cost-control initiatives, the budget office leads Congress to think that politically unpopular cost-cutting initiatives will have, at best, only modest effects.

The CBO's track record of overly conservative savings estimates on health policy changes is important to keep in mind when articles such as this one in the Washington Post crop up.