PUBLIC OPTION IS THE ESSENCE OF HEALTH CARE REFORM

Conspiracy capitalism is alive and well. Not wishing to be outdone by the "banksters" who run the country, the health insurance companies have been flexing their muscles in order to maintain the stranglehold they have on their particular piece of the pie.

I first realized that Obama and the Democrats had caved on the public option issue when health insurance stocks went up on a day the stock market was down almost 200 points. After checking the news reports, the reason for their stocks' levitation in the face of gravity was clear. Obama was telling us that the public option was not the "entirety" of health reform, but merely a "sliver." Wrong.

The public option is the essence of health care reform. Without it, the authoritarians will not have to face the world they fear most: "competition."

Since the American people want the public option, it ought to be obvious to anyone with a living brain cell that most of our elected officials are bought, paid for and owned by Corporate America. The health insurance industry has hired six lobbyists for each elected official and is spending between one and two million dollars a day in order to kill health care reform.

And they work with the idiots of the far Right who turn up at presidential events with loaded weapons.

This is the same old Republican strategy of spreading fear among the masses  that has worked so well for them in the past. (There is the "moron factor," after all. You cannot underestimate the American people). The Republicans utilize insane, blatant lies, such as the proponents of health care reform want to "subsidize abortions" and "pull the plug on Grandma." That Americans can swallow this kind of B.S. is pathetic.

Obama's presidency and the direction of the country are all riding on the public option. To continue to try for a bipartisan agreement is a combination of naivety and self destruction. The Republicans are not interested. They are, after all, protecting their benefactors. Obama has to take a page out of Lyndon Johnson's playbook. There was a president who knew how to twist arms in his own party in order to get them aboard difficult legislation.

The rest of Western civilization has universal health care. If the Democrats fail to do what they were elected to do on behalf of the American people and do the bidding of the insurance companies instead, then they will become as irrelevant as the Republicans.

This is the moment. The people must regain consciousness, ceased to be treated as patsies by greedy self-interest corporations and demand representation by those they elected. Let them know that we can pull the plug, too. On them. To do otherwise is to remain the wimpy victims of the authoritarians and their co-conspiratorial friends in Washington.

09/03/2009