Howard Dean will be doing vacation duty for Keith Olbermann on Countdown this week. I hope he does as good of a job filling in for Keith as he did during this interview with CNBC's Maria Bartiromo on Morning Joe.

From Think Progress:

This morning, Dean sparred with CNBC’s business anchor Maria Bartiromo, who tried to defend the job that private sector has done on health care. Dean stood his ground, arguing, “The insurance companies do a terrible job.” He added: If you do a survey of Medicare, most people are happy with Medicare. There are no bureaucrats interfering between doctors and patients in Medicare. But there are a lot of bureaucrats interfering between private health insurance companies and patients and doctors. … It’s time that the special interests in Congress stopped influencing folks to make their choices for them, and let the American people choose.

He also stopped her in her tracks whe she tried to conflate the pharmaceutical industry with the health insurance industry, and reminded her that they are not the same thing. You'd think she would have known better since her full time job is supposed to be reporting on the earnings of these same companies.