BlogHers Talk Health Care with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (AUDIO)

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With this week's release of the Senate's health care reform bill, the timing couldn't have been better for BlogHer's chat with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). Women bloggers discussed the new bill, as well as Stupak, breastfeeding, and even childhood obesity and food safety.

You can listen to the audio:

You can also read the transcript:
**start transcript**

Nancy Watzman: Welcome everyone. I'm Nancy Watzman of the Sunlight Foundation representing BlogHer Today and their Community Journalism Initiative on Healthcare Policy.

The sunlight foundation is a non-partisan, non-profit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency. As CEO, Lisa Stone announced BlogHer has been sponsoring a bipartisan series of telephone conference calls to connect women bloggers directly with their legislators.

Today on the call we have Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. And she'll give a brief introduction of herself and then we'll go straight to question and answers. I know that we have a lot of people on the line.

Kirsten Gillibrand: Hi everybody, can you hear me?

Nancy Watzman: Yes. There's a bit of an echo, for me.

Kirsten Gillibrand: Okay. I'll get closer to the phone. Well thank you all for being part of this call. I'm very appreciative of your time. And I'm appreciative of your advocacy. The work that you do on so many of the blogs throughout the Internet are so important to the advocacy that's important to me, so I'm very grateful for your outreach.

Today we're going to talk about healthcare. I'd like to give you a brief introduction about what happened in the bill. But before I start, I really want to thank the host, the Sunlight Foundation. And I want to thank you particularly Nancy for your leadership.

As you guys know, I was the first congress member to post all my earmark requests, my schedule and my financial disclosure on my Web site. I was the first member to do that in the history of congress. And interestingly, once I did it, a bunch of other freshman congress members did it. And within two years, Speaker Pelosi decided that everybody had to put their earmark requests online.

So, you know, sometimes you don't think that change happens, but it really can, through advocacy and hard work; and that's exactly what the Sunlight Foundation has demonstrated.

We got our bill last night from Senator Reid, and it's, you know, the bill's not perfect. It's got a lot of things that I think need improving. But it's got some important pieces that I think makes this bill passable by 60 votes. It's got the public option, and it's a small public option, and not what I would like. I would prefer a Medicare for all approach.

But it has a public option which means it'll pass the house, and it doesn't have the Stupak language in it, which would have made it very difficult for a number of senators to vote for it. So keeping that language out is great. It really just continues Hyde, meaning that no federal money can go for abortions.

Some of the things that were disappointing; I would have liked a robust public option; I would have liked a Medicare for all where anybody could buy into Medicare at 5% of income. Because I think that's a good framework, Medicare only has a 3% overhead. You'd have to fix some reimbursement rates in Medicare, because a lot of our doctors and hospitals suffer from low reimbursements. But for the most part, it's a - would have been a good framework. And 5% of income is always affordable.

The affordability provisions in this bill aren't bad. They basically say you don't have to buy insurance if nothing's available at 8% of your income. And that's very helpful because that number could have been as high as 12%, and I think that's unaffordable. So I think the 8% number's good.

Some of the large structural changes that are in, that are really important; no-one gets denied coverage because of preexisting condition, no one goes bankrupt because of one illness, and all preventive care is covered.

So we had a provision that would have better on preventive care that Senator Mikulski had that would have made all preventive care for women's health entirely free. But the CBO scored it as too expensive so,