The health-care reform debate has taken on ugly undertones, and we're not talking about raucous town hall meetings in August. There has been an effort to enlist the arts community as a propaganda arm of the White House; a heavy-handed slapping down of dissent from the insurance industry; a refusal to post the final bill on the Internet before a crucial vote, and raw politics to preserve the Democrats' 60-seat majority in the Senate.

The attempt to recruit artists to create work supporting health-care reform and other parts of the Obama legislative agenda came in an August conference call by the National Endowment for the Arts. It turned out one of the participating artists holds conservative beliefs and blew the whistle on the scheme through Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood blog.

During that call, the NEA's communications director, Yosi Sergant, said, "I would encourage you to pick something, whether it's health care, education, the environment, you know, there's four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service. My ask would be to apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative communities' utilities and bring them to the table."

The NEA tried to portray this as informing artists of an opportunity to "become involved in volunteerism." Can you image the reaction if the Bush administration had asked NEA artists to create patriotic art to back the Iraq war? The NEA did say that "language" used by Sergant was "not appropriate" and demoted him.

But there was no backing down from the effort to silence insurers. Insurance companies are not sympathetic figures, but the point of the First Amendment is to allow for dissenting views, no matter how unpopular the dissenter.

At issue is Medicare Advantage, a Medicare-funded program paying private firms to cover seniors. Nearly one in four seniors have such plans, which offer extra benefits such as vision and dental care and a different approach to primary care. Because the program channels money to private enterprise, Medicare Advantage has never been popular with liberals. Its effectiveness is disputed with arguments on both sides.

Elimination of it would provide tens of billions of dollars to defray the cost of reform, a feature of all the Democratic plans. But it's hard to square that with President Obama's pledge that no one who likes his insurance will lose it.

Humana, with $13.8 billion in Medicare Advantage business last year, warned its customers they could lose benefits and services. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee accused Humana of "scare tactics." The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services ordered Humana to stop its campaign and issued a warning to other insurers. So much for free debate on an issue affecting millions of American seniors.

Then the Democrat majority on Baucus' committee rejected a Republican proposal to post the final language of the reform bill and its cost on the Internet for three days before a vote. Democrats called that a delaying tactic, but 72 hours doesn't seem like much of a delay. Sen. John Kerry said the bill would be full of arcane legal language that no one reads anyway. I guess it's too much to expect elected officials to read the laws they want to impose on us. It's hard to square that attitude with the transparency Obama promised to bring to government.

Obama also has deplored cynicism in politics. Well, we just got a heavy dose of it from Kerry's home state. When Kerry ran for president in 2004, Massachusetts had a GOP governor. So the Democrat-controlled legislature took the power of Senate appointment away from the governor and set a special election should the seat become vacant. Now that there is a Democratic governor and a vacant Senate seat after Ted Kennedy's death, the legislature has restored appointment power to the governor. The rationale: Gotta pass health-care reform.

The drive to push through a liberal version of health care at any cost looks uglier every day.