The President of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce, Steve Roberts, wants West Virginia's Senators Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller to "withhold voting to advance national health care reform until the Obama Administration, particularly the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, backs down on its campaign against coal." One of the measures that Roberts objects to in particular are moves by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to tighten sulphur dioxide emission standards. The EPA states that the proposed rule changes are intended to protect the health of people with asthma and notes that "children and the elderly are especially susceptible to the health problems associated with breathing SO2." They estimate that tighter pollution standards would yield health benefits of between $16 billion and $100 billion from "reduced hospital admissions, emergency room visits, work days lost, cases of aggravated asthma and chronic bronchitis, among others."

The Employment Policies Institute (EPI), a front group created by veteran lobbyist Richard Berman, is planning an advertising blitz claiming that healthcare reform is too costly. The ads will run in Nebraska, North Dakota, Arkansas, Louisiana, Connecticut and Maine. “We’re putting some serious money behind it,” said Berman. As to whose money it is, Berman was less forthcoming. "These are people we do business with and have an interest in the issue,” was all Berman would disclose. EPI's 2007 annual return states that the group received $2.5 million in revenue of which over $725,000 was paid to Berman & Company as the group's management company.

The U.S. health insurance industry is, Noam N. Levey and Lisa Girion report, "on the verge of seeing a plan enacted that largely protects its financial interests.That achievement, should it stand up in the final legislation, would be the capstone of a sophisticated lobbying and strategic campaign that began even before Obama was elected president." The campaign, they report, has been "developed by one of Washington's savviest lobbyists, Karen Ignagni", the President and CEO of the industry group, America's Health Insurance Plans. "Insurers poured campaign donations into the coffers of key sympathetic members of the House and Senate, and loaded up on lobbyists. And when Obama and other Democrats began attacking the industry, insurers made a strategic choice not to walk away from the negotiating table," Levey and Girion write.

Heads are spinning after the discredited Senate Finance Committee blocked the public option from being part of the health care bill proposed by Senator Max Baucus of Montana and then voted for spending $50 million on the (also discredited) abstinence-only education program that President Obama had pressed to eliminate from the federal budget.

According to the Associated Press, "Two Democrats, Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, joined all 10 committee Republicans in voting 'yes' on the measure by Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah."

This is the same group who voted with Chairman Baucus against a public option "level playing field" amendment offered by Senator Charles Schumer of New York in the Committee this week. These three Democrats, who voted with all the Republicans against that amendment, also voted together with the Republican block against a broader public option amendment offered by Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. That measure was endorsed by the Center for Media and Democracy's Wendell Potter.

But, the fight for health care reform and against insurance industry-written proposals continues.

CMD's Wendell Potter has become a frequent guest on Democracy Now!. Host Amy Goodman interviewed him again on September 30th: "Efforts to create a government-run health insurance plan were dealt a setback Tuesday after the Senate Finance Committee rejected a pair of amendments to create a public option. Both amendments were defeated when a group of Democrats, including Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus, joined with Republicans to oppose the public option. We speak with Wendell Potter, the former chief spokesperson at CIGNA -- one of the nation’s largest private insurers -- and now one of the health insurance industry’s most prominent whistle blowers."

Television ads from a new Montana-based group called CO2 Is Green claim: "There is no scientific evidence that CO2 [carbon dioxide] is a pollutant. In fact higher CO2 levels than we have today would help the Earth's ecosystems." The ads urge voters to contact their Senators and Representative, "and remind them CO2 is not pollution." The ads are meant to stoke opposition to climate change legislation. Not surprisingly, the man behind the ads, the lobbying group CO2 Is Green and a related "educational" group called Plants Need CO2 is "a veteran oil industry executive." H. Leighton Steward was a director at EOG Resources, which was previously named the Enron Oil and Gas Company, and is an honorary director of the American Petroleum Institute. "Now retired, [Steward] says he wants to 'get the message out there' that carbon dioxide, which the Supreme Court has ruled a pollutant and which most [sic] scientists regard as a dangerous greenhouse gas, 'is a net benefit for the planet.'" Steward co-founded the new groups with Corbin J. Robertson Jr., the "chief executive of and leading shareholder in Natural Resource Partners, a Houston-based owner of coal resources."