Healthcare Reform Making Us Sick

By us I mean us progressives, us liberals, us whatever you want to call us. I mean people like Howard Dean, the former chairman of the National Democratic Party. What he contends is that what's left of healthcare reform after the White House bartered away the essentials that will prevent us from being raped by the insurance industry is not worth voting for. Here's part of what he had to say on MSNBC's "Countdown":

You can't vote for a bill like this in good conscience. It costs too much money. It isn't health care reform. It's not even insurance reform. Take, for example, this—there's a lot of talk about people who have pre-existing conditions can get health insurance. Well, not exactly. The fine print in the Senate says about health care industry—the health care industry gets to charge you three times as much if you're older than if you're younger. And they get to write the rules. That's in the Senate bill.

This bill is no longer reform...If it were me—I don't think this will happen, if it were me, I'd kill the bill all entirely and have the House start reconciliation, which is what they should have done in the first place. To be held up by four senators—a minority of 40 who are totally uncooperative, which are the Republicans and then four senators beholden to insurance industry I think is wrong. But that's what's happened.

Sounds like perfectly good sense to me. The White House is, as you would expect, telling us that it's too late to do anything about it now. "No rational person" would think about killing the bill now, they say. Well, I've got news. There are a lot of people who consider themselves rational who hate the hell out of what's happened to healthcare reform, and who don't want any part of it. But what has public opinion to do with this whole process anyway? This whole struggle is between various lackeys of corporations.  How can ordinary people win in this situation? Mark me well: Obama is going to get a bill. It's going to be a POS, but the liberals in the Senate will fold.

One of the most sickening aspects of this whole deal (no pun intended) is having to endure the likes of Joe Lieberman, that despicable little troll, who after drawing and quartering the bill—and the Democratic caucus, not to mention majority leader Harry Reid—is now preening before the TV cameras and calling the bleeding remnant of a once-plausible reform bill "progressive." The chutzpah of this guy! And in the next breath he's saying he won't foreclose the possibility of running as a Republican next time. Somebody needs to take this guy by the lapels of his smug suit and shake him till his dental plates fall out of his head. And then slap his jowls several times—very hard.