Enough is Enough!

Left Blogistan is alive with the sounds of open dissent. I can only say, it’s about time. Here’s a good example from TheHill.com aptly headed Obama picks fight with left on Health Reform. The news, however, is this fact. A public option is not a liberal option. It’s the option that every advanced economy in the world has chosen in some form. We already have a public option for seniors. We’re the majority, in every sense of the word, on this issue. This fight is not with the Left. This fight is with our babies who die in bigger numbers than most countries, our families bankrupted by inadequate insurance, and the many many ill people who are simply numbers on a spreadsheet that provide a mark-up of 30 percent or more for a industry based on always saying no!

Even in the real Socialized medicine haven of the. U.K., former Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher knew she had an unassailable object because it makes peoples lives much improved and they wouldn’t give it up once they had it. Here in the U.S., we’re not even talking socialized medicine despite the bleating of the right wing media machine. We’re talking about extending something we already have–Medicare– reformatting it so it benefits doctors, hospitals and patients rather than a superfluous, bonus paying, extraordinary profit making, third party payer. How can you lose the high ground on an issue that’s been so easily solved in nearly every other country that’s not an economic or political basket case? How can you lose momentum on an issue that polls showed people supported until you botched the policy so badly?

Liberal Democrats have insisted a public insurance option is necessary to ensure competition for private insurers. Just this week, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean predicted there could be Democratic primary challenges if a healthcare bill without a public option is approved by Congress.

Dean also told liberal bloggers gathered last week at the “Netroots Nation” convention that the only piece of reform left in the House bill that is worth doing is the public option.

The left wing of the Democratic party already has been irritated by concessions its leaders have made on healthcare to centrists in the House and Senate.

Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) told CNN on Sunday it would be “very difficult” for her and other liberals to support legislation that does not include a public option.

“The only way we can be sure that very low-income people and persons who work for companies that don’t offer insurance have access to it, is through an option that would give the private insurance companies a little competition,” she said.

The last word in the Sunday TV Spin Zone was given to North Dakota Senator DINO Kent Conrad. This man has fewer folks in his entire state than do most neighborhoods in any major city in America. Why does he get to frame the debate?

In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, said the president remained convinced that a public plan was “the best way to go.” But Mr. Axelrod said the nuances of how to develop a nonprofit competitor to private industry had never been “carved in stone.”

On Capitol Hill, the Senate Finance Committee is expected to produce a bill that features a nonprofit co-op. The author of the idea, Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Budget Committee, predicted Sunday that Mr. Obama would have no choice but to drop the public option.

“The fact of the matter is, there are not the votes in the United States Senate for the public option,” Mr. Conrad said on “Fox News Sunday.” “There never have been. So to continue to chase that rabbit, I think, is just a wasted effort.”

So, that’s it. The high rate of infant mortality we have here in the U.S. (worse than many developing nations), the appalling number of personal bankruptcies due to folks with either no insurance or underinsurance, and the number of people that have no access to even the most basic services other than the emergency rooms are simply Axelrovian ‘nuances’. TheHill.com continues to describe the back pedal, the sell-out, the cave-in, or what ever pejorative metaphor for the big Obama cop-out.

A short time later, Gibbs stopped far short of earlier calls insisting on a public plan.

“What the president has said is in order to inject choice and competition. . . people ought to be able to have some competition in that market,” Gibbs said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Asked if he was hedging on support for a public plan, Gibbs said, “The president has thus far sided with the notion that that can best be done with a public option.”

Gibbs and Sebelius seemed to be making clear what President Barack Obama had hinted at on Sunday during a town hall event in Colorado broadcast across the country on cable television.

Obama, who has fielded questions at town halls from people worried about the public plan, described it as only a “sliver” or “aspect” of reform.

“The public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of healthcare reform,” Obama said at the town hall event in Colorado. “This is just one sliver of it. One aspect of it. And by the way, it’s both the right and the left that have become so fixated on this that they forget everything else.”

Is there any public policy issue that this administration deems too important to ditch when faced with an uphill battle? It is certainly a good thing there’s nothing like the decision to make about D-Day or we’d all be saluting Hitler’s progeny now. No political sacrifice is worth a few more dead infants, a few more cancer patients who can’t receive treatment, and a few more families facing ejection from their homes because Mom got sicker than her private health insurance provider deemed profitable. Those town hall meetings need to be offset with the number of folks with private insurance whose lives were turned upside down by just one major illness. Every one needs to know they are one major illness away from the homeless shelter and a life of indentured servitude to bill collectors.

Dr. Paul Krugman has stepped back into the health care fray, and hopefully, back to holding this administration accountable for its continual backsliding on democratic policies. Even the Brits have now joined the ranks of those defending their version of health care that we’re not even considering! No one is talking about making doctors and nurses federal employees and hospitals national assets. We’re not talking socialized medicine. Finally, Krugman uses his platform to explain, that at best, we’re going to emulate the Swiss. The Swiss model is not the cheapest or the best performing model in the world, but it’s a far better system than we have. It’s not about WHO delivers your health care, it’s about how we spread the risk and pay for your health care!!! This is not a Marxist health care system so can some one please strangle Glen Beck? Obama is not even suggesting the French or Canadian route, which is basically a system of Medicare for all. It’s a third, blended route with a generic plan available to every one and bells and whistles plans available to those who want them or can afford them still mostly monopolized by inefficient, costly, mega paper pushing, naysaying insurance bureaucrats!

Finally, the third route to universal coverage relies on private insurance companies, using a combination of regulation and subsidies to ensure that everyone is covered. Switzerland offers the clearest example: everyone is required to buy insurance, insurers can’t discriminate based on medical history or pre-existing conditions, and lower-income citizens get government help in paying for their policies.

Again, if you read the actual literature on health care economics (even leaving the WHO study aside), no one calls our current system the best in the world but Right Wing News Sources, Right Wing Politicians, and the uniformed who listen to them. Most people are not aware of how much they pay and how other alternatives are not death traps of long waits and refusal of service. Krugman recalls the now infamous Hawkins example set up by Investor’s Business Daily, a group of folks that just love extraordinary investment returns made by denying sick people health care.

It was the blooper heard round the world. In an editorial denouncing Democratic health reform plans, Investor’s Business Daily tried to frighten its readers by declaring that in Britain, where the government runs health care, the handicapped physicist Stephen Hawking “wouldn’t have a chance,” because the National Health Service would consider his life “essentially worthless.”

Professor Hawking, who was born in Britain, has lived there all his life, and has been well cared for by the National Health Service, was not amused.

Besides being vile and stupid, however, the editorial was beside the point. Investor’s Business Daily would like you to believe that Obamacare would turn America into Britain — or, rather, a dystopian fantasy version of Britain. The screamers on talk radio and Fox News would have you believe that the plan is to turn America into the Soviet Union. But the truth is that the plans on the table would, roughly speaking, turn America into Switzerland — which may be occupied by lederhosen-wearing holey-cheese eaters, but wasn’t a socialist hellhole the last time I looked.

The Press, the Blogosphere, the People, and the Democratic Politicians need to clearly define what they mean by Health Care Reform. I still have yet to figure out WHAT exactly they’re going for other than saying “well, that’s not it”. The Krugman piece is the first cogent explanation I’ve seen since during this entire debacle and he doesn’t even have a place at the policy table.

We have many good resources here as well as citizens who have good resources because real health care reform is an important issue to them. Please use them to start your on viral email! Write, email, or call your own Congress critter!!! Let them know there are a few of us out here that do know what we want and why we want it. We need to demand room on the platform. Also, ask the media to provide information on health care options from around the world. Tell them to stop airing town hall hysteria and focus on the issues for once! We need to reclaim the high and popular ground!

Former President Clinton, in his speech to Netroots Nation, was right on one thing. We can’t let another 40 years go by without solving this important issue. Our businesses are less competitive around the world because of the way we connect paying for health care to employment. Our people are dying from health care denial. Don’t let this administration turn yet another crisis into a windfall profits plan for insurance and drug companies! We cannot live with enhanced status quo when the status quo was the Bush-Cheney Nightmare. We all deserve something much better! Add your voice to those trying to bring facts and reason to what should be a national conversation!

Please Digg!!! Share!!! Tweet!! and Make Real Health Care Reform VIRAL!!!!

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