Excluding single-payer proponents from Senate roundtable.

A few bits of history to bring you up to the culminating moments in the latest debate of health care/health insurance reform. First let's look at the 2008 election: Obama took $38 million from the finance, insurance and real estate sector. Here's a breakdown:
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/indus.php?id=N00009638&cycle2=2008&goButt2.x=9&goButt2.y=7&goButt2=Submit
Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, which will have a major impact into how health coverage is funded, took $461,000 from the insurance industry alone, as cited here:
http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2007/12/03/news/local/news03.txt
When reps from insurance companies and big pharma met with Obama last, their pledge to reduce costs prompted this cynical/hopeful response from Paul Krugman in the NY Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/opinion/11krugman.html?_r=1&em
Which leads us to the latest development, wherein physicians and others advocating single-payer health care were not only excluded from the Finance Committee roundtable, but were arrested for trying to say anything during the meeting. This occurred twice, on the 5th of May and on the 12th. It gets major play on various secondary news sources and blogs, but rather little with the majors. Here is AP's treatment of the story.
http://www.wric.com/global/story.asp?s=10346693
The New York Times--you know, the paper of record--has exactly zero column inches devoted to either protest or the exclusion of single-payer advocates from the roundtable.
What are we to make of this? If one has the fortitude to listen through all nine or so hours of the roundtable discussions (full disclosure: I skipped through quite a bit of them) one can hear the various experts, some sincere and honest and some sleazy and venal, opining on the various ways of trimming costs and paying for it with new taxes on alcohol, etc. What is only given lip service, however, is consideration of a proven way to reduce costs: make the risk pool the entire population of the country and create a monopsony (the government) to pay for it. A good starting point which would not immediately disrupt the coverage people have is the option to purchase Medicare-style coverage at Medicare-level prices from the government. If given the choice, almost everybody would eventually choose that option, including employers, and the private insurance market would virtually disappear. That is what has them wetting their pants and shoveling cash toward their paid servants in the form of Sen. Baucus and the like. We shall see if Pres. Obama can rise above his obligations to their donations and promote any meaningful reform. Given that the meeting at the White House also only included the for-profit actors in our system, I'm not holding my breath.