Payday lobbied hard, she writes, “as it had done against financial reform in both houses all year, spending $6.1 million on lobbying in 2009, more than double what it did in 2008.” The industry also tricked and bullied its clients into rallying against reform. David Lazarus of the LA Times got hold of an industry email to its workers. It’s pretty… sickening, even among the jaded.

The lobbying effort employed everyone from the grassroots — individual customers — to the highest-powered lawyers. David Lazarus of the Los Angeles Times reported that as Hagan’s amendment came up for a vote in Congress last week, one payday lender instructed his employees, “After a customer repays their loan, the customer then asks for a new loan. TELL YOUR CUSTOMER THAT YOU CAN’T LOAN TO THEM BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT HAS PUT US OUT OF BUSINESS. That will get their attention. Then ask them to write letters or call their senator/congressman.” A flurry of letters written at check cashers or payday loan shops showed up in Congress.

Predictably, lawmakers– many of them on the dole from the industry– opposed reforms. For example:

On May 20, Hagan’s amendment came up in the Senate. Durbin stood up in support, calling payday lenders the “bottom feeders” of the financial industry. Then, as Dodd moved to proceed, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) — who in 2009 received more campaign donations from payday lenders than any other Senator — blocked unanimous consent to vote on the popular provision. (Shelby’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) It died on the floor.

Hagan’s was the last of many such payday-lender-specific provisions to come up in the regulatory reform process. And it was the last to fail. There are no interest-rate or rollover caps in the Senate bill. And there are none in the House either.

Yet, as Lowery puts it, payday spent and spent and won every battle only, perhaps, to lose the war.

“In the end, it doesn’t matter much that Congress didn’t specifically regulate payday lenders,” Ed Mierzwinski, the consumer program director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group explains. “For the payday lenders to call the defeat of the Hagan a win for them is a Pyrrhic victory — because both both the House and Senate bills include a strong new consumer financial protection agency and it will regulate them.”

And payday will be regulated on the ground in Colorado, too, thanks to Ferrandino’s bill and despite the hard and defiant push against it by the industry here. Colorado’s new law puts in place the longer time to repay that many advocated for reform like Hagan were asking for in Washington and failed to get, at least specifically.

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“I’m quite sad that a public option isn’t in there,” Pelosi added. “But it isn’t a case of it’s not in there because the Senate is whipping against it. It’s not in there because they don’t have the votes to have it in there.”

What is she thinking? asked Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, in a just-released statement.

“When the Senate Whip says he will aggressively whip the House reconciliation bill through the Senate unamended and onto the President’s desk, the Speaker doesn’t get to say the Senate lacks the votes,” Green has been drumming up support for the pubic option, getting 41 senators in the Democratic caucus to commit to the proposal.

We have 41 yes votes on the record — and it’s ridiculous to think Tom Harkin, Jay Rockefeller, Herb Kohl, Claire McCaskill, Kay Hagan, Robert Byrd, and other undeclared senators are going to vote against the president’s top domestic priority on the final vote. If Speaker Pelosi refuses to even allow a vote on the public option, than she killed the public option. It’s time for her to step up.

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In Colorado, it’s worse yet.

As the Colorado Independent’s Katie Redding has been reporting, healthy women in this state pay much more than men who are unhealthy pay, including smokers. As much as 50 percent more. As Redding put it on Colorado’s Progressive Talk radio this Monday, “Women are being penalized for doing what they’re supposed to do– for going for regular checkups” — that is, for practicing the kind of preventative care everyone knows saves money, as well as lives.

“We have the opportunity here to change the law and to change health care,” said Mikulski.

California’s Barbara Boxer argued that health reform is about saving money, not spending it. She is making a point that time and again gets lost in a debate where splashy headlines emphasize the cost of the legislation over a decade or more– headlines like the blaring one above the fold at the Denver Post that announced the arrival of the Senate bill. The cost, hundreds of billions, seems huge floating in space unencumbered by context. Where is the corresponding tally running next to that figure of the amount we will all spend on health insurance and health care should reform fail and the industry continue along as it has been doing? In other words, how does the cost of the bill compare with the cost of doing nothing?

In her speech Boxer alludes to the fact that we’re all spending money now– at an enormous and increasing rate in a system that analysts on all sides of the political spectrum, including those paid by the health care industry, agree now fails utterly to contain costs.

“We can sit here and do nothing. We can scare people. That’s the easy thing to do.”

The Senate bill, Boxer said, will save Medicare. Republicans fought Medicare. Bob Dole bragged that he fought against it. Newt Gingrich said Let it wither on the vine.

“Well, if you ask our seniors, I think they’re the group most pleased with their coverage. It’s not perfect. But it’s critical. And we save it here. We extend the life of Medicare.”

And North Carolina’s Sen. Kay Hagan tells the harrowing story of a constituent who died of breast cancer after waiting to get a lump checked, paying in cash at last for a checkup and then being diagnosed with cancer. The woman had no coverage and no access to insurance, especially once she was diagnosed.

Anyone who has ever gone through stretches of noncoverage knows the horror of suspecting you might be sick while also dreadfully aware of the fact that no insurance company will cover you and no doctor will work on you outside an emergency room, which is no place to find a cure for a disease like cancer.

Hagan’s constituent’s story played out as a round-the-clock nightmare. She died of the cancer that was caught too late and that was insufficiently treated. Her sister emailed the story to Hagan.

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