libbyliberal

http://www.prosperityagenda.us/node/831

from govegan's blog

We’ve bought your Reps. in Congress, we write the words they parrot on T.V.
Revolving door from government and back to us, their staff’s our staff, you see.
Ten mill. a week to grease the works, we write your legislation
Go back to work, leave this to us, Elites control this Nation!

Bend over, you can trust us, we’re the Health Care Industry
Bend over, you can trust us, we’re the Health Care Industry
…Pay to play, Pay to play............

I had to make that statement. I had to ask that question.

http://datelineojorojo.blogspot.com/2009/11/we-need-health-care-not-health.html

From Carol Miller (We Need Health Care, Not Health Insurance - Albuquerque Journal North)

1) actual coverage doesn't even begin until 2013, opportunistically after the next presidential election, in 2012. Run on having accomplished "historic reform" but before anyone actually experiences how bad it is? How cynical is that?

2) some good provisions. The best relate to improving existing programs like the Indian Health Service, community health centers, and health professionals education and training; all are important for New Mexico.

3) institutionalizes permanent inequality in health care. ... this bill further divides the U.S. system into tiers based on ability to pay. It creates basic, enhanced, premium and premium-plus plans. ... The bill doesn't even mention coverage for essential services like vision and adult dental care except in the most costly premium-plus plan.

4) Out-of-pocket costs remain sky high. Everyone will be required to pay monthly insurance premiums.

http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/conyers-derides-white-house-health-care-strategy/ Rep. John Conyers, Jr., D-MI, Chmn of the Judiciary Committee, was on the radio this morning, “The Bill Press Show,” doing some venting about health care reform (as reported by NYT reporter Katharine Q. Sellye):

"I’m getting tired of saving Obama’s can in the White House." “I mean, he only won by five votes in the House, and this bill wasn’t anything to write home about. The public option is only available — which is the only way you manage cost and give some competition to 1,300 other health insurance companies — the only way he could have got that through is that progressives held their nose and voted for the plan anyway.”

http://www.truthout.org/1028095 Jim Hightower sums up the stunning hypocrisy of Congress over what they themselves enjoy and what they withhold from the rest of us in terms of healh care:

Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats who have risen up on their hind legs in recent weeks to snarl and howl at any mention of a government role in meeting America's health care needs. "Socialism," they bark -- we won't allow Barack Obama and the liberals to create a Washington-run, big-government intrusion into the hallowed private market. Sen. Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican, even pledged to fight so ferociously that the health care battle would be Obama's "Waterloo." [snip] What these bellicose market-purists hope you don't discover is that they are closet socialists. As members of the congressional elite, they and their families are governmentally blessed with their very own gold-plated, taxpayer-financed, Washington-run health care system. And, they loooove it. Theirs is such an effective system that not a single member of the hypocongress has been willing to give it up -- even though they surely realize the political peril of being exposed as rank hypocrites for enjoying the very program they so adamantly reject for you. Actually, they happily take a double dip in the soothing waters of public health care. First, they enroll their entire families in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program -- and you probably would, too, if it were available to you, for it's the Rolls Royce of health plans.

[FWIW, this is an extended comment I made to Selise in my last diary.] Selise, why am I the only person in America wearing a black arm band? A woman, an acquaintance, yesterday asked me if I had a death in my family. I said the arm band was for my country. I put it on back in mid-May for the illegal torture travesty, vowing as soon as the Obama administration cleaned up that travesty I would take it off. I told her I also keep it on now for the travesties of the wars. So many deaths of Americans and Middle Eastern peoples for power and money. Not for helping humanity. I told her I am also now wearing it for the 45,000 premature American deaths each year for lack of health care.

Peter Galbraith, son of the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, was a very influential “liberal hawk” in promoting the War in Iraq. This brought him much acclaim among the neocons as well as the media, and thus a power player within the Democratic party, as well. The analyses of Peter Galbraith have been frequently quoted by the Washington Post. Mr. Galbraith has written a series of op-ed pieces for the NYT. He has been a frequent guest on NPR, CNN and Fox. He was Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Croatia. He was 2002 adviser to Paul Wolfowitz on Kurdistan. He has influenced the Middle Eastern policy perspectives of Vice President Joseph Biden and Sen. John Kerry. He was mentored by foreign policy power player Richard Holbrook, who during the first stage of the Obama administration successfully pushed the U.N. to assign Galbraith to be second in command of its mission in Afghanistan (he has since been fired because of his strong stance against Karzai election fraud).

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/november/squandered_a_golden_.php Dr. Carol Paris, in an irate letter to a Maryland newspaper editor, writes of the new House bill:

I agree with Wendell Potter, the former head of public relations for CIGNA, that this legislation could more accurately be titled “The Private Health Insurance Profit Protection and Enhancement Act.” The readers should know that this legislation was written by the insurance industry, for the insurance industry. We are being mandated to purchase a defective product from an industry that has demonstrated for the past 60 years that it puts profits before patients. Even the so-called public option will be administered by the private insurance industry and will enroll, at most, 6 million people in a multitude of anemic markets; it will not be a robust Medicare-like market at all. This public option is like sending in a peewee football team to compete with the NFL. It will not compete with the private insurance industry; it will become the default insurer for our sickest, least profitable citizens, leaving the younger, mandated, profitable citizens to enroll in the private plans provided in the exchange.

http://www.alternet.org/politics/143790/10_of_the_nuttiest_statements_elected_officials_have_made_in_the_health_care_battle/ Here are a few amusing as well as horrifying quotes from Joshua Holland's Alternet article "10 of the Nuttiest Statements Elected Officials Have Made in the Health Care Battle". Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla.

"I DON'T HAVE TO READ IT OR KNOW WHAT'S IN IT. I'M GOING TO OPPOSE IT ANYWAYS," he told Grady County Express Star. According to the report, "information provided by news media have helped [Inhofe] become a staunch non-supporter of the bill." In other words, his opposition is firmly grounded in whatever he's picked up from the fair-and-balanced conservative media.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23342.htm James Petras doesn’t mince words in the concluding paragraphs of his chilling article entitled “The Destruction of a Civilization”:

The US imperial conquest of Iraq is built on the destruction of a modern secular republic. The cultural desert that remains (a Biblical ‘howling wilderness’ soaked in the blood of Iraq’s precious scholars) is controlled by mega-swindlers, mercenary thugs posing as ‘Iraqi officers’, tribal and ethnic cultural illiterates and medieval religious figures. They operate under the guidance and direction of West Point graduates holding ‘blue-prints for empire’, formulated by graduates of Princeton, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Yale and Chicago, eager to serve the interests of American and European multi-national corporations. This is called ‘combined and uneven development’: The marriage of fundamentalist mullahs with Ivy League Zionists at the service of the US.