Remember, set your alarms for tomorrow, when the Senate debates health care reform all day, leading to a Saturday night vote on a motion to proceed, at 8:00 pm ET. Till then…

UPDATE: I’ll be on Air America’s Nicole Sandler Show tonight talking about health care and that odd meeting between FDL’s Eve Gittleson and President Bill Clinton.

• Department of bad ideas: two polls show the public thinking that cutting taxes and stopping spending will create jobs, and that the government should balance the budget in the middle of the recession. These things are insane. The public: not very good at economics!

• Roland Burris got a slap on the wrist from the Senate Ethics Committee today, just like virtually everyone else they investigate. This probe related to his appointment to the seat.

• The “free rider” provision in the Senate health care bill has been improved. Even the CBPP, the ringleader in whipping up opposition to it, thinks so. But a better improvement would just be ditching it and moving to a real employer mandate, like the House bill.

• Good article from Suzy Khimm on women’s health and the Senate bill. Still a lot of confusion around this.

• Lots of reform advocacy groups are pushing hard around tomorrow’s Senate health care vote, among them HCAN, MoveOn.org (which had a nice ad regarding triggers), and the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, which robocalled voters in Nevada supporting Harry Reid’s efforts to put a public option in the bill.

• John Kerry writes a very, very stern letter about Blackwater offering bribes in Iraq. I don’t know what it will take to get that company fully off the government payroll.

• Mortgage delinquencies are at a record high, and they’re increasingly affecting prime loans. Until housing recovers, we’re not going to see much improvement in the economy.

• With the OPR Report on the torture memo authors due any day, Jay Bybee, one of those authors, has set up a legal defense fund. I hope he needs it.

• Neat site from the Economic Policy Institute tracking unemployment and the economy: Economy Track.

• Defeatocrat Fred Thompson says the war in Afghanistan is lost, spurs hundreds of blog posts decrying the unintended irony.

• The Attorney General of Ohio sued the credit rating agencies today, for their poor ratings of high-risk securities that may have led to the financial meltdown.

• This 32% rate hike on student fees in the University of California system is staggering. How the state of California expects to maintain an educated workforce is unclear. What a tragedy, although it may be waking some people up.

• Nancy Pelosi gave a qualified endorsement to a financial transaction tax, saying that all countries had to offer the same kind of rules to prevent outsourcing.

• And cosmetic surgeons are united against the “Botax”, that 5% tax on elective surgery. I prefer the term “nip/tuck tax.”

On the eve of a vote to move the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to the floor in the Senate, the Obama Administration has released a statement on the bill. Shockingly enough, they support it!

The one interesting bit is that the statement of Administration policy specifically cites the public option as an important piece of the bill:

The Administration is pleased that the bill includes a public health insurance option offered in an Exchange. As the President has said throughout this process, a public option that competes with private insurers is one of the best ways to provide the choice and competition that are so badly needed in today’s market.

I’ll add the entire statement of Administration policy on the flip.

Everyone’s talking about the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and their imposition into the legislative debate over health care, particularly abortion. The bishops sent a letter to Senators denouncing their compromise language on reproductive choice, saying they would oppose the legislation if that language became the final compromise. They would rather retain the Stupak amendment, which goes much further than the status quo and could be expected to effectively ban insurance coverage of reproductive choice services entirely.

What has been discussed less is the Catholic bishops’ opposition to a restrictive provision in the Senate bill that would ban undocumented immigrants from purchasing health insurance on the exchange with their own money. It was part of their letter:

“Undocumented immigrants should not be barred from purchasing a health insurance plan with their own money,” the bishops wrote. “Without access, many immigrant families would be unable to receive primary care and be compelled to rely on emergency room care.

“This would harm not only immigrants and their families, but also the general public health,” they continue. “Moreover, the financial burden on the American public would be higher, as Americans would pay for uncompensated medical care through the federal budget of higher insurance rates.”

The Catholic bishops may be distorting the debate on health care, and given church-state separation they should probably not be involved in this at all, but in this case, most progressives would actually agree with them, that the exchanges should not be limiting anyone from using their own money to purchase health insurance. Particularly because there will probably not be a very robust individual market outside the exchanges, this basically prevents immigrants from holding any insurance coverage at all, leading to unnecessary and expensive use of emergency rooms.

Robert Menendez has been vocal about getting this removed from the Senate bill, but it’s unclear whether or not he has the votes necessary to amend it.

It’s somewhat forgotten that the House had a conflagration over immigration restrictions in their version of health care reform. The Democratic leadership, trying to woo conservative Democrats, at one point toyed with adding the Senate language, which comes from the Senate Finance Committee, into their bill. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus vowed to vote down the bill if that happened, and as a result the leadership backed down.

However, this fight could spark up again once the conference committee reconciles the two bills. And given the Catholic bishops’ opposition to both the restrictive immigration language and the abortion provision in the Senate bill, one could see a trade-off possible.

Calls and emails to members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus have not yet been returned.