The "chained CPI" proposal in President Obama's budget continues to draw much-deserved fire, which is only likely to increase as more information about it becomes known. Here are nine embarrassing facts about the chained CPI which the White House and its defenders would prefer to see overlooked.

VIDEO--"Kaiser's a great model of cutting costs," Bonnie Castillo, legislative director of the California Nurses Association told GRITtv. If current trends at Kaiser are any indication, she says, the future includes fewer, more overworked nurses with less time with patients and more robotic doctors, taking vital signs via remote.

Under the federal law, starting Jan. 1 health plans must include certain benefits, such as hospital care and drug coverage, and must cap the amount consumers can be charged through deductibles, co-payments and co-insurance. That out-of-pocket cap next year is estimated to be about $6,250 for an individual.

Results from a survey out Tuesday are underscoring the repercussions lack of healthcare insurance and high drug costs have on adults in the US.

The battle over the tar sands pipeline among unions has been XL on drama. "For too long we have allowed some corporations to hold a gun to our heads and demand that we choose jobs or choose the earth.” That’s what Terry O’Sullivan, the general president of the Laborers International Union of North America, told green groups and fellow unions at a green-jobs conference in February 2009, just a few months after the union—one of the largest in the country—joined the Blue-Green Alliance, a group organized to advocate for a “clean economy.”