The White House and AHIP have a deal on health reform. I can’t see item on which the parties disagree. And if you look at what AHIP is saying in its protest adds, the basic message is: the deal is still on, and we want this bill to pass. Just stop blaming us.

In George Orwell’s 1984, the slogan “Freedom is Slavery” is one of the striking expressions in the book. But, we can see from the health care debates that the opponents of health care reform, have, from the beginning in the 1940s, and right up to the present, been trying, in effect, to persuade the American people that “Freedom is Tyranny.” They’ve been telling us that the freedom to choose insurance providers is the freedom that we should always fight for, when actually that freedom is the tyranny of minimal choice of providers. They’ve also been trying to tell us that the system that would provide us the maximum freedom of choice of providers, Medicare for All, is not freedom but tyranny, because it doesn’t allow us to choose insurers. But we can see that their success in this campaign, over many years, is due to a confusion between Government-run health care and Government-run health insurance. They never make the distinction. They try to tell us that one is the other. But that is not true. They are different, and the importance of this difference is that the freedom to choose insurers is not an important freedom. But the freedom to choose providers is. And it is Medicare for All that will maximize that freedom for us. So, it is Medicare for All that we should have. And when the President and other politicians and interest groups tell us that Medicare for All is off the table, we should be very angry, because that move subjects us to the tyranny of limited choice of health care providers. And we should sustain that anger until the tyranny of the private insurance system is replaced by the freedom of Medicare for All, the freedom to choose the provider(s) we need to get well and stay that way.