madfloridian

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Wed Dec-23-09 01:23 PM
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Robert Scheer: Demonizing Dean Won’t Absolve This Health Care Sham

Edited on Wed Dec-23-09 01:48 PM by madfloridian

Thanks to Robert Scheer for pointing out the obvious.

Demonizing Dean Won’t Absolve This Health Care Sham

How dare a progressive suggest a vote against the Senate health bill? When Howard Dean did just that last week he was roundly condemned for casting aspersions on what even many of its more ardent supporters admit is an obviously flawed bill. Instead of focusing their wrath on the few obstructionists in the Senate who blackmailed the majority into dropping a much-needed public option in order to avoid a filibuster, they made Dean the villain for daring to suggest that passage of this deeply compromised legislation might make the nation’s health care system worse.

Dean deserves much better, and his concerns as a physician and a progressive politician are worthy of serious attention. As the former governor noted in a Washington Post Op-Ed article last week: “I have worked for health-care reform all my political life. In my home state of Vermont, we have accomplished universal health care for children younger than 18 and real insurance reform—which not only bans discrimination against preexisting conditions but also prevents insurers from charging outrageous sums for policies as a way of keeping out high-risk people. I know health reform when I see it, and there isn’t much left in the Senate bill. I reluctantly conclude that, as it stands, this bill would do more harm than good to the future of America.”

There is more, and it is nice to see a defense of Dean when even sites like Truth Out and Buzzflash are coming out against him for speaking out about health care.

The devil is in the details, and the devil’s scribe here is Joe Lieberman—and, by extension, the insurance companies he so faithfully represents. Lieberman was responsible for striking a public option and Medicare buy-in from the Senate legislation that now includes no effective restraints on the power of the big insurers that have created our health care monstrosity. The insurance companies know they have won big, as reflected in the dramatic increase in their stock valuations in recent weeks as the Senate bill came to exclude all forms of the public option.

The likelihood that even the anemic public option will not appear in the final bill was made clear Tuesday when President Barack Obama dismissed the option provision, which the House bill still includes, as nothing more than “a source of ideological contention between the left and right,” adding in an interview with The Washington Post, “I didn’t campaign on the public option.” True, but he did campaign against Hillary Clinton’s plan to mandate insurance coverage as the Senate bill does. As Obama put it in Wisconsin in February 2008: “I believe the reason people don’t have health care isn’t because no one’s forced them to buy it. It’s because no one’s made it affordable.”

The biggest problem is that the legislation passed by the Senate forces Americans, under penalty of law, to make a decision about an expenditure of their own funds that they may not feel is in their interest. The carrot of a publicly financed option has been eliminated, and thus tens of millions of Americans are left with the stick of an expensive insurance obligation that they may not be able to afford.

There is an ad that I tried to post in the video section. Yet it says You Tube says it is not available.

Here is a post about the ad from Salon.com.

Liberal group goes after Obama in new ad

With liberals getting progressively more upset with President Obama, it was only a matter of time before someone started running ads about it. One group, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, is doing just that, hitting him for earlier statements he'd made about healthcare reform: Specifically, promising a public option and opposing a mandate that would force people to buy insurance.

The ad's going to be running in Washington, D.C., as well as in Wisconsin -- the latter is an attempt to change liberal Sen. Russ Feingold's vote, Sam Stein reports. Notably, it goes right at the heart of Obama's appeal during the presidential campaign, saying at the end, "A bill without a public option is not change we can believe in."

I can't post the ad from You Tube. It says not available. Yet here is the ad running right now at You Tube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acc6Wn_BWlk

I think it is wrong for the president not to tell the truth about his promises last year.

Yet they had the nerve to demonize someone who spoke out honestly against the bill.

Robert Scheer: Demonizing Dean Won’t Absolve This Health Care Sham

Kill the bill.