Governing Against One's Campaign Promises

Health care reform was one of the reasons I was happy to help candidate Obama's campaign in 2008. It was at the top of my list of needed reforms then and, it seems, it will still be in the same spot come the next election cycle, due to the corrupt electoral process that rewards not the most honest candidates, those who really want to improve things for 99% of Americans, but those with the best fundraising ability, aided and abetted by the most entrenched special interests.

And I don't think the United States deserves to be called all nice the things Americans call it (uh, I don't know... "number one", "the best country in the world", and all such bombastic things) until it does what... oh, I don't know... the rest of the civilized world? has already done. Which is to say, give its citizens universal, affordable health care, and stop rewarding the special interests (PhRMA, insurance companies, greedy doctors, etc.) that have led the nation into the ridiculous predicament it finds itself in after decades of near unfettered free-market bullshit. What predicament? We spend almost twice as much as the next country in the world and, unlike any other CIVILIZED country in the world, cannot insure everybody. To what end? So that smug people can say that we have the best medicine money can buy in the world. For that matter,we also make the best Space Shuttle money can buy. Do you own one?

Where we stand is that we have 45 million uninsured and, even worse, an even higher number of underinsured (read people who have been ass-raped into paying premiums and who do not get the coverage they think they were paying for or who, in order to get it, need to pay unaffordable, bank-breaking amounts of money out of their own pocket, after which they get dumped by the insurance companies that happily collected their premiums while they were healthy.) The solution concocted by special interest representatives in Congress? Individual mandates and no alternative for those who are sick, literally, and sick, figuratively--of insurance companies. In other words? You think insurance is the problem? Here's our solution: buy it or... buy it! What a special country this is. "Number one!", really.

And this is the best our "change president" can do?



I want to puke.