Rick Scott Claims a Victory.

There's no doubt that the health care bill, in either House or Senate form as it sits in limbo at the moment, is a stinker. It does little to cover all citizens, complicates and degrades women's reproductive rights, grants legitimacy to the profit-driven insurance industry, and patently avoids all the system overhauls that are necessary to make health care in this country non-discriminatory, affordable and accessible.

But whatever happens to the bill now - and the status of the Democratic party so desperately tied to its passing - one thing is sure: Rick Scott and his nasty, ironically named Citizens for Patients' Rights are not responsible to killing it. Yet they've taken an ad in the conservative Washington Post touting such a success.

From Crooks and Liars:

Remember Conservatives for Patients’ Rights (CPR)? It's run by the icky Rick Scott and represented by the public relations firm behind the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth. And boy, are they happy over the president's lack of leadership and the refusal by Congress to offer them an alternative to the insurance monopoly:

Today, CPR has a large, nearly full-page ad in the Washington Post cheering the public option’s death. The top of the ad has a tombstone reading, “PUBLIC OPTION PLAN R.I.P. January 27, 2010.” More text from the ad:

In his State of the Union Address, the President didn’t doom his Public Option health care plan with faint praise, he simply BURIED it with deafening silence. [...]

Finally, those of us who opposed your government-run Public Option plan can close this chapter.

By educating on the perils of your government-run Public Option plan, we achieved our goals to protect patients’ rights and stop a government takeover of our health care choices. Today, we join with our fellow Americans concerned with protecting patients’ rights to celebrate that our months of hard work finally paid off.

ThinkProgress spoke to CPR spokesman Brian Burgess of CRC Public Relations, who said that the ad was running only in the Washington Post.

CPR was not reflecting the views of most “fellow Americans” in its campaign. Over the summer, there was actually strong public support for the public option. Through an aggressive campaign, the health care industry spread misinformation to create opposition.