What would it take to give us health care that isn't programmed by the medical-industrial complex?

Mad As Hell Doctors plans a Sept. 8 cross-country

caravan to DC for single-payer health care.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

-- Cassius (to Brutus), in Julius Caesar (Act I, Scene 2)

by Noah

Earlier today, I was listening to a broadcast of a town hall meeting that was held by Ed Schultz on Friday night in Portland, Oregon. Through a friend who recently moved there, and from listening to Thom Hartmann’s radio show, which is based there, I had heard that Portland was a pretty progressive city. Still, I was taken aback and very pleased to hear how much the sold-out crowd was so very in favor of single-payer health care, the concept of health care that dare not speak its name in Washington, DC. This support of single payer is also what the majority of people that I know here in New York are also expressing.

Many, many months ago, I asked my doctor what he felt about the health care issue. I was careful not to let on where I was coming from. If we were going to discuss this, he had to go first. I wasn’t about to irritate the man who has the box of latex gloves. To my pleasant surprise, he answered, “Single-payer is the only way out of the mess we’re all in, but I know that whatever we get from Washington won’t be that, and it will be a complete fiasco.”

My doctor is a prophetic man. Too bad that cretin from Montana Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, didn’t want to hear from him or anyone else who had the firsthand knowledge and war stories that my doctor, so many other doctors, and their patients have and will continue to have when the shit hits the fan like an asteroid hitting from space.

One of the people who attended Ed Schultz’s town hall in Portland was a doctor who announced to all present that he and four other Portland doctors had just formed an activist organization called Mad As Hell Doctors (www.madashelldoctors.com). To quote the website:

You CAN handle the truth.

There’s no nice way to say it. The financial cost of health care is killing our citizens, hobbling our economy, crushing small business, and threatening the solvency of our government. In the meantime, the health care industry is spending almost two million dollars a day lobbying Congress and manipulating public opinion to accept “reform” legislation that leaves a vicious, for profit system intact.

I recommend that you read the whole page at the site. It’s not long. The doctors also mention that, in a bit of activist theater, they are forming a caravan from Portland to Washington, DC, in September. They hope for a very long caravan, and I wish them well, but we seem to live in a very passive age. Perhaps we are just numb to it all by now. Still, I would love to see hoards of RVs, trucks, buses, and cars descend on the nation’s capital. My god, how would our government get to work and do the people’s business if the whole city was one big gridlocked traffic jam?

Not to worry, the people’s business, as we know all too well, is the last thing on the tiny little minds in DC (Dirtbag Central).

Mad As Hell goes on to call the so-called public option a trap. To some that may seem harsh. I personally never expected single-payer out of the inside the Beltway creeps, but I did, perhaps naively, hope for something that would soon lead to single-payer. I have always been realistic about how the people who are supposed to be our representatives don’t really give a damn, but if the whole health care debate has shown this country and the world anything, it is just how hugely corrupt and bribed up the lowlifes in Congress are, especially those in the Senate. Maybe long-term that will be a good thing, but right now we just might be getting that trap that Mad As Hell refers to.

For a long time I have worried that we were being sold one idea of a public option while the dirtbag crowd fully intended it to be a public option in name only. What really confirmed this for me was watching a senator from my state, one Chuck Schumer, sit on his increasingly fat ass and say nothing while Max Baucus got all hissy and furiously banged his woefully and pathetically undersized gavel and arrested those who showed up to contribute their experiences and knowledge to his precious hearings. Schumer just sat there with his smirk firmly in place. It was only when his constituents reacted and made it clear that they wanted a public option if they weren’t getting single-payer that Schumer belatedly said that of course he too wanted “the public option.” Not only that, he said, he had always wanted “the public option.”

Now why wouldn’t I trust this man? When the Mad As Hell doctors say the public option is a trap, they don’t mean what it could and should be, they mean the version that the totally corrupt Senate has in mind: a public option that is so tied up in such a maze of subsidies for the medical-industrial complex -- premium shell games, “flexible” deductibles, and the like -- that it is completely castrated.

I increasingly suspect that we have been rope-a-doped by the kings of sleaze. It started with the refusal to even mention single-payer. Yes, we were never going to get it out of these living, breathing turds, but it should have been our sacrifice in the war of compromise. We would have then reluctantly seen single-payer get watered down into a public option. Instead, the starting point was the public option, so what we now have is Obama’s anti-public-option consigliere, Rahm Emanuel, giving the secret hand signals to Congress which basically say, “It’s OK to collect money from the K Street bribery squads and stick the knife in the public option. We’ll end up with more money than the Vatican for the next four election cycles.” Think of the whole health care reform debate as one big ugly fund-raiser.

Right now the words “public option” get mentioned less and less. In their place is South Dakota Sen. Kent Conrad’s pull-the-wool-over-their-eyes scenario that goes by the name of "coops," a concept that not only has already proved disastrous in places like Oregon but calls for continued control by the insurance companies. Same thing, different name -- so what? Screw you, Conrad! But he knows and expects that too few will be paying attention.

Ideas like the single-payer caravan that Mad As Hell is attempting on September 8 represent a pushback against Washington’s business-as-usual. It’s coming in the form of an increased number of voices in favor of single-payer. Part of it is in anger and frustration. Part of it is, no doubt, the result of increased awareness of the definitions of terms and the details of what is going on and what could be if we had responsible government. But, as Mad As Hell says:

The “public option” is doomed.

First: We will have a dysfunctional health care system designed around insurance companies. Second: It will be impossible to cover everyone without raising taxes. The Obama administration is already saying it is acceptable to leave out 15 million people. Which 15 million? Will you be one of them? Who gets to decide? Third: In a “post-option” environment you can bet that the health insurance industry will manipulate the rules so that the sickest and most expensive patients will gravitate toward the public plan, which will cause it to fail. When it does, the opponents of real reform will point to the “public option” and scream: “See! Single Payer won’t work!”

Obviously, if we repeal the Bush tax cuts for the top two percent, we can pay for a real public option, one with teeth. Right now, however, the cost issue is being used as a prime scare tactic by opponents of reform both in Washington and in the media, and low-information voters are buying into it.

As for the medical-industrial complex manipulating the rules: Of course they will. They already do it. You think they will stop? You think there won’t be loopholes put in just for them? They already turn you down for all sorts of fine-print things, often under a euphemistic catchall called “preexisting conditions,” which amounts to a "get out of jail free-of-paying" card for insurance companies. You pay for years, and when you make a claim, only then do they investigate your entire medical history, looking for a reason to deny your claim. At that point they have years of your payments in their vault. With today’s data bases, seeing your complete history is getting easier for them every day. When you filled out that form years ago, did you mention that acne episode you had at age 14? The stitches in your knee at 15? The mild concussion from your first car accident? Technicalities-R-Us.

THE ANTI-REFORMERS ARE ON
THE OFFENSIVE. IT SHOULD BE US!

Those who want true reform are not being heard due to a willful disconnect between the bribe spongers who write our laws that dictate policy and the huge majority of the voters. I started this post with a quote from a play about a government that thought it was more important than its country and people. I’ve always liked to think of Julius Caesar as a morality play. “Beware the ides of March” and all that. Maybe we should put on a presentation of Julius Caesar on the mall in front of the Capitol building when the lowlifes return from their recess. My version, though, would substitute the name of a different senator every day in place of old dead Julius. And the guys who did the deed would be ordinary folks. You bunch of Caesar wannabes; This could be you! Come on out and watch. Naw, they wouldn’t get it anyway.

Remember when South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint boasted a couple of weeks ago that the members of the House and Senate would go home for the August recess and come back afraid to vote for health care reform after they received an earful from their constituents? I have to think that he knew what was coming and was referring to what I saw on the MSNBC shows this Monday night: Town halls held by members of Congress that were interrupted by crowds of thuggish, belligerent, shouting hooligans advised (programmed), supported, and transported there by arms of the medical-industrial complex.

Among these arms is former House Majority Leader Dick Armey’s lobbying firm, Freedom Works, which also organized those fab "tea party" demonstrations a couple of months ago. They want to make sure that our so-called representatives do not hear from the majority who want reform. They aim to stop health care reform, and even stop talk of health care reform. They are using mob intimidation, not unlike how a certain group got its start in Germany back in the late 1920s, or more recently a group assaulted election officials as they tried to recount the Florida votes in 2000.

While wimpy President Obama goes all Clintony on us and talks of bipartisanship in a misguided attempt to be liked by everyone, the anti-reform mob makes it clear just what folly any talk of bipartisanship and appeasement is. To say the least, there is no point in even trying to be bipartisan.

But, as we know, it’s not just Repugs. Plenty of Blue Dog Dems are involved. To our government, though, it is us who are lowly dogs. To them, we should just gratefully wag our tails for whatever crumbs they might give us. I see no mere coincidence that the mobs who are disrupting civil discourse are organized and paid for by the same people and kinds of lobbying firms that pay off our senators and congresscreeps. It’s all part and parcel of the same thing. It's the medical-industrial complex doubling up on its efforts to persuade the government that absolutely no one wants reform.

On top of all of this, please keep in mind that these Repugs and Blue Dogs are the same cretins who pocketed cash from corporate Amerika and then voted to have the jobs of so many Americans shipped overseas right out from under them. When that happened, Americans not only lost their jobs, they lost their health insurance. Many of those people were sentenced to death for lack of health care while our Congress, many of whose members won their seats and all the perks that came with them by running on a platform of "change," prefers the status quo of just keeping it like it is, with the cash rolling in for them.

They’ll even rail against government-run health care while they and their families enjoy the benefits of the government health program they themselves are enrolled in. If they don’t like it so much, maybe they should give it up. They won’t, of course. They intend on living way past age 62, the age at which they can go on an even better government-run health care system: the very-much-like-single-payer Medicare program.

“Thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a cause;
But, since I am a dog, beware my fangs."

-- Shylock (to Antonio), in The Merchant of Venice (III,3)

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