Pelosi: Health Insurance Companies The Real "Villains"

[Joanne98]

Forget the Blue Dogs, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Thursday. The real "villains" in the fight for health care reform are insurance companies.

Work on the legislation resumed Thursday morning after more than a week of delays to accommodate conservative Blue Dog Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

The Blue Dogs won significant concessions and also forced delay of a full House floor vote on the final bill until after Congress returns from its upcoming month-long recess.

But Pelosi on Thursday cast the blown deadline as a positive, arguing that the process is further along than it would have been with no date set. Meanwhile, her blistering attacks against health insurers offered a good preview of what to expect from Democrats trying to rally support for reform back at home.

"They are the villains in this. They have been part of the problem in a major way," Pelosi said of the insurance industry after her weekly press conference. "It's almost immoral, what they are doing," she said, referring to industry lobbying against a public insurance plan option. "Of course, they've been immoral all along. They are doing everything in their power to stop a public option from happening, and the public has to know about it."

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/30/pelosi-health-insurance-c_n_247924.html

Yeah. They're immoral and evil and that's why the conservatives support them.

Birds of a feather.

[timeforpeace]

1. Her guarantee of a vote before recess? What about that? Any word from her?

[Daveparts still]

2. Guns and Margarine

You can list the villains in any order you wish but somewhere near the top must be Congress and democracy. The insurance companies for sure, bounty hunters of misery but its not their job to represent us. Harry Truman introduced single payer healthcare in 1948 and the first Republican controlled congress since Hoover crushed it.

Since that time it has been tinkering at the edges, Johnson passed Medicare but only for the elderly. We get a hodge podge of programs trying to fix a situation that’s root cause is a flawed democracy. A government that works on bartering and negotiations and tit for tat trade offs rather than doing what’s right for the people.

Imagine if after December 7th 1941 our government responded in the same way it behaves on healthcare or on many issues. You’d get and aid bill for Hawaii, a study group to study the cause and how to guarantee it never happened again. Contractors lining up for the rebuilding contracts. Billions in defense appropriations to upgrade defense facilities.

Then you would have four caucus groups Senate Democrats and Republicans along with House Democrats and Republicans to debate among themselves before meeting as a select committee with each chamber publishing its findings then to meet again to hammer out the differences between the House and Senate versions.

Senators in states that had trade with Japan would favor sanctions, New York banking interests would favor negosiation so as not to lose Asian banking accounts. Hawaii would probably favor war seeing as how it was the state bombed. But with only two Senators and ten house members those resolutions wouldn’t get very far.

There are times when the answer is obvious, where the calling is obvious a straight line path to sundown instead of a mouse maze where in the end we get only a piece of cheese. So it’s no wonder Pelosi wants to point fingers and call all the others rats. Its only been fifty years and our democracy hasn’t been able to supply for the health needs of it’s people