Dear Friends, This is the best analysis of the DC Democrat’s health “reform” manoeuvering I’ve seen & needs to be posted as a link on the Show Me Progress blog & West Co. Democrats listserve. I’m not sure how to do this & hope someone will Please do it for me. This comes from the activist group The Pen at activist.thepen@gmail.com
I’m convinced that if the Democrats in Washington don’t stop sacraficing their campaign platform and their supporting voters demands for corporate big bucks on economic & healthcare policies, that we will have a resurgence of Republican gains in the mid-term elections. Since Obama can’t handle the Repub noise machine now with the strong Democratic majorities on Capital Hill, he will become a gutted lame duck in Jan 20, 2011.
Progressive Solidarity, Rick
Here is an action page that will send a message to all your members
of Congress with the message, “Any health bill without single payer
is no reform at all.” All you have to do is click a mouse one time
and submit it.
SINGLE PAYER ACTION PAGE:
http://www.peaceteam.net/actio…
And here is a Facebook action page that does the same thing
FACEBOOK SINGLE PAYER ACTION:
http://apps.facebook.com/fb_vo…
And here is a Twitter message you can send as a reply to the gateway
to do the same thing. Just enter the following in your Twitter
message sending box and send it as a reply
@cxs #p1003
And here is another resource, the new blog site in support of HR 676,
that was, is and has always been the REAL health reform bill, single
payer Medicare for all, where you can record notes of your phone
calls to members of Congress where other can read the kind of
responses we are getting, so we know where members of Congress are
really coming from. On this same page is a link to give you all the
phone numbers of your own members of Congress down to the local
district office level. And there is also an “Easy policy points” link
so you have the best arguments at your finger tips.
HR676 PHONE CALL BLOG: http://www.peaceteam.net/lobby…
So one way or another, send your message. The enemies of actual
change are counting on you NOT doing so. They are counting on you
being lulled by our charismatic new President of the United States
into thinking he stands for actual change of any kind, when in fact
he sold you out day one when we brought in the so-called stakeholders
and gave them an instant press conference to announce a chump change
deal, the constructive equivalent of getting a coupon for a medical
“happy exam”.
They are counting on your silence, out of politeness, out of a
willingness to give the ludicrous the benefit of the doubt, or if all
else fails out of defeatism and utter exasperated despair. Go to one
of the action sites, pick up the phone, and contact your members of
Congress. Tell them, “Get the medical industry leeches off my back.”
And THEN and ONLY then we will have real health care reform.
And we’re shipping out the single payer health care caps just as fast
as we can. No donation of any size is too small. We just want to
demonstrate our support for real reform. What other activist group
out there will do anything like that?
Single Payer Health Care Caps: http://www.peaceteam.net/all_g…
We just want you to win, folks. That’s why we talk to you the way we
do. It isn’t always pretty but it is always the truth, as these
latest developments demonstrate. Please take action now.
Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.
If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at
http://www.peaceteam.net/in.htm
Or if you want to cease receiving our messages, just use the function
at http://www.peaceteam.net/out.htm
usalone335b:297127
We are no happier with our take on President Obama’s health care
speech to Congress and the nation than maybe you will be. But it’s a
perspective the other advocacy groups you are hearing from may be too
wimpy to give you. And at the end of the day, that is why you are on
THIS distribution list, to hear the real scoop on what’s going on. So
it is still a call to action, and action is what we must always take
if we want something better..
Obama’s New “Improved” Leech Therapy
The sheer sappiness, even from progressives, of most of the
commentary we’ve heard in the aftermath of President Obama’s address
to Congress this week on health care is truly breathtaking. Now we
are going to tell you what really happened last Wednesday night.
The first thing we need to understand is that Obama HAS NO PLAN, at
least not one that he will publicly disclose, otherwise he would put
forward a particular bill and say, “This is what I want Congress to
pass.” Instead, what he did the other night was embrace a hodge podge
of half-baked congressional proposals, all of which have ONE purpose
and singular directive … to NOT curtail in any way the usurous
profit margins of the existing health care industry.
Worse yet, he went out of his way to SMEAR the one proposal that
would actually make a meaningful difference, to institute a single
payer system, like any of the ones which have been so successful in
every other major industrial country. Indeed, what was so incredibly
conspicuous by its absence was the fact that, while he dedicated a
large part of his speech to debunking the lies being told about
health care reform, there was not a word about the heinous and
slanderous lies being told about single payer, namely that it is not
working in all these other countries or that people there are not
happy with their single payer systems.
Instead he stabbed single payer in the back by trying to characterize
it as “radical change”. This is EXACTLY the same tactic that right
wing propagandists have deployed against any proposal Obama himself
might make that would be even slightly worthwhile. Remember last
month when every right wing Republican magically had the same
expression, “risky experiment”, coming out of their mouths all at the
same moment. Same tactic from Obama, same dishonestly slanted
demagoguery, and you’d have to be a serious hardcore Obama moonie not
to see it. Obama literally played single payer advocates in the
Congressional audience for suckers.
There was a mini uproar when a lunatic fringe Republican house member
committed the offense of being in contempt for yelling out, “You
lie,” when Obama asserted that bills in consideration would exclude
illegal aliens, even though that part was probably true. But what
about when Obama said that they would consider the best ideas for
reform? What kind of a lie was that, when the best idea of all,
single payer, the approach favored by a majority of the American
people when they are asked, the only change that would make an actual
meaningful difference, has been pushed so far off the table that it
is not even to be given serious consideration?
Funding of the health care system in America is the 21st century
counterpart of leech therapy. We have a massive medical insurance
“industry”, the function of which is to “manufacture” senseless and
unnecessary paperwork to generate outrageous profits for itself, in
excess of 30 percent of every health care dollar, sucking the very
life blood out of our economy. THAT is the problem, and yet all Obama
wants to talk about is building on “what works”.
NOTHING about the way we pay for our health care today works, except
maybe for medical mega-corporation CEOs reaping their obscene
salaries and bonuses. For THEM it works just fine, and they want to
keep it just like it is. For the rest of us it is an unmitigated
disaster, a veritable Katrina for our whole economy, and nothing
Obama said the other night was intended to change anything of
substance about it.
Remember in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina when George Bush got
up on TV with the misleading rap Karl Rove put in his mouth, talking
about how they were going to study “What went wrong, and what went
right”, complete with cute synchronized hand gestures, as if ANYTHING
went right. Nothing went right about the federal response to that
cataclysm. And there is nothing worth building on top of the way
insurance companies are currently gouging the American people.
So when Obama talks about the government creating an “insurance
market”, all he is really talking about is making the government the
COERCIVE SALES AGENT for the medical insurance leeches. What is the
need for creating such a thing? Don’t we already have a market where
people can shop for the plan they like? Isn’t it called the “free”
market? So the only difference they are talking about is creating a
compulsive mandate, backed by fines if you don’t buy one of the
provided choices, to FORCE you to buy essentially the same overpriced
insurance you couldn’t afford last week, or to have taxpayers
subsidize the difference.
Sure, the hideously egregious insurance industry practices of denying
coverage in every possible unjustified way needs to be outlawed. This
should have been done decades ago. But what Obama is talking about is
trading the one dollar we would get back in our pockets that way, for
license for the same corporate greed heads to take TWO dollars back
out with their other hand, by hooking up a catheter direct to the
U.S. public treasury, for hardship cases who cannot possibly cough up
the required insurance ransom. Net result, even more outrageous
profits, not less, for the same culprits we have now, and at taxpayer
expense!!
The reason why the Congressional Budget office predicts that only 5%
would participate in the so-called “public option” they are talking
about is because it would not save us any actual money, so it would
have minimal participation. This is even assuming it would ever kick
in at all, with them trying to trick it up with triggers and such, so
it would NOT provide any real “competition” day one or day 730. It is
being conceived of as the weakest possible alternative, a kind of
welfare option for those who can prove they are totally destitute
already, just the way the insurance industry wants us all to be
eventually.
A real single payer system would give we the people, we who need and
have a RIGHT as citizens to the health care we deserve, real power to
negotiate favorable prices for our health care services. And THAT is
the LAST thing those exploiting us now would ever voluntarily allow.
And Obama and too many members of Congress are in league with the
medical industry devils, bought off, paid off, or just naively
backing off, making deals behind our backs and then announcing them
as “done” deals, and giving speeches to try to bamboozle the American
people into thinking they are getting real substantive reform when in
fact they are not.
What Obama did more than anything else last Wednesday night was throw
down the gauntlet to US, standing in the way of real single payer
reform. He said as bluntly as possible, for those with ears to hear,
that if you want single payer you will have to fight HIM, to go
through HIM. For his real constituents in this are NOT YOU, they are
the medical industry special interests, in that way just like George
Bush served only the upper class, and we might as well face up to it
now. Because for him to even suggest that a silly new insurance
“market” would give you as a medical care consumer any negotiating
leverage comparable to single payer, with each of us out there still
forced to bargain all alone by ourselves, is absurdity on steroids.
Moreover, as weak as Obama’s proposals are, taken all together, the
medical mega-corporations are still on full press offense trying to
kill off anything that would help cure any part of the real problem,
which is THEM of course, at all. It is not enough that they have
their own people literally writing these bills word for word, like
ex-Wellpoint VP Liz Fowler, to ensure that the outrageous bottom line
profit margins of medical mafia are in no way threatened. They won’t
be satisfied until even the “public option” is literally killed off.
In short, the plan is to do nothing to remove the leeches sucking the
economic life blood out of our medical care system.
We agree with Brent Budowsky, with his longterm perspective and
insight into Capitol hill deal making, that Obama has absolutely NO
intention of letting a truly viable public option of any kind
survive. When Obama intimates that a public option is not a mandatory
provision, this is not “change we can believe in”, this is not even
“change we’d kinda like”, this is “maybe we won’t bother”. The only
reason even the words “public option” are being allowed to hang
around on the table is so they can be pushed off later.
And THAT is Obama’s REAL plan, the one he won’t talk about in a
public speech, to let the weakest possible “public option” hang
around for a little while as an illusory sop for the terminally
gullible, only to bleed it to death before it can actually go into
effect. Yes, THIS is Obama’s new “improved” leech therapy.
We would not have written all this if we were not also going to point
the way to the path of salvation. It’s just what it has always been.
You must speak out now, you must keep speaking out, and you must
never stop speaking out. There was a story the other day about how
certain special interest lobby groups were forging letters to members
of Congress as if they came from the public. Now, ask yourself, WHY
would they even BOTHER to do such a thing if writing letters, sending
emails, and making phone calls to members of Congress did NOT
constitute compelling pressure, and they KNEW it? Why would they do
such a thing if real activism did not work?
Here is an action page that will send a message to all your members
of Congress with the message, “Any health bill without single payer
is no reform at all.” All you have to do is click a mouse one time
and submit it.
SINGLE PAYER ACTION PAGE:
http://www.peaceteam.net/actio…
And here is a Facebook action page that does the same thing
FACEBOOK SINGLE PAYER ACTION:
http://apps.facebook.com/fb_vo…
And here is a Twitter message you can send as a reply to the gateway
to do the same thing. Just enter the following in your Twitter
message sending box and send it as a reply
@cxs #p1003
And here is another resource, the new blog site in support of HR 676,
that was, is and has always been the REAL health reform bill, single
payer Medicare for all, where you can record notes of your phone
calls to members of Co
ngress where other can read the kind of
responses we are getting, so we know where members of Congress are
really coming from. On this same page is a link to give you all the
phone numbers of your own members of Congress down to the local
district office level. And there is also an “Easy policy points” link
so you have the best arguments at your finger tips.
HR676 PHONE CALL BLOG: http://www.peaceteam.net/lobby…
So one way or another, send your message. The enemies of actual
change are counting on you NOT doing so. They are counting on you
being lulled by our charismatic new President of the United States
into thinking he stands for actual change of any kind, when in fact
he sold you out day one when we brought in the so-called stakeholders
and gave them an instant press conference to announce a chump change
deal, the constructive equivalent of getting a coupon for a medical
“happy exam”.
They are counting on your silence, out of politeness, out of a
willingness to give the ludicrous the benefit of the doubt, or if all
else fails out of defeatism and utter exasperated despair. Go to one
of the action sites, pick up the phone, and contact your members of
Congress. Tell them, “Get the medical industry leeches off my back.”
And THEN and ONLY then we will have real health care reform.
And we’re shipping out the single payer health care caps just as fast
as we can. No donation of any size is too small. We just want to
demonstrate our support for real reform. What other activist group
out there will do anything like that?
Single Payer Health Care Caps: http://www.peaceteam.net/all_g…
We just want you to win, folks. That’s why we talk to you the way we
do. It isn’t always pretty but it is always the truth, as these
latest developments demonstrate. Please take action now.
Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.
If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at
http://www.peaceteam.net/in.htm
Or if you want to cease receiving our messages, just use the function
at http://www.peaceteam.net/out.htm
usalone335b:297127
my primary objection to the administration’s endeavor is that some sickly watered down version of the current definition of reform (maybe option) will pass and will not go into effect until 2013, then we will need to wait until 2018 to establish that it doesn’t work, and then begin all over again. With 22,000 people dying every year that adds up to about 200,000 dead over the next 8-10 years. That seems to me like much too high a price to pay to maintain our “uniquely american” system, whatever that is.
when I said “22,000 dead every year” I should have added, “for lack of health care access”. And also “the 200,000 dead for lack of health care access”.