THIS TIME, IT'S FOR REAL!

"...it's hard to have a really intelligent conversation with a Republican."
- Dana DXallabetta, 54 year old breast cancer survivor now without health insurance -

"Tax the very wealthy to make everybody healthy!"
- Vigilante, Sozadee, CA -

"This is a vote for one thing - are you for the insurance companies or for the American people?"
- Howard Dean -

"I think they should just shove it through and f*** the Republicans!"
- Dana Dallabetta -

Dana Dallabetta, a breast cancer survivor who was booted off her health insurance plan for missing one COBRA payment, speaks for the no-longer-so-silent majority of Americans who want major health care reform enacted NOW. More than 1,000 of these Americans are protesting in Washington, D.C. in front of the swanky Ritz Carlton hotel, where the group America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) is holding its annual conference. These protesters are demonstrating against health insurance industry greed and unfair practices, and this blogger applauds their activism.

Poll after poll after poll have shown that a majority of our citizens support significant health care reform and an end to insurance company practices of exclusion for pre-existing conditions and booting others off insurance plans because their treatment costs have become high. A lesser number, but a majority nonetheless, favor a public option to compete with insurance companies, whereby the federal government would provide health care at a lower and more competitive rate than is currently done by these greedy private insurers who comprise AHIP's membership. Of course, lying Republicans like Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Representative John Boehner (R-OH) insist that the overwhelming majority of Americans feel otherwise. I don't know who these liars are talking to, to make a preposterous claim like that. They are clearly on the side of huge, for-profit insurance companies, and not looking out for the best interests of everyday citizens who are reeling under ever-jumping insurance costs and nearly 50 million (1 in every 6.5 of us!) who currently have NO health insurance coverage.

To be sure, the Senate bill which was passed that both McConnell, Boehner, and the rest of their conservative Republican cronies so vehemently oppose, and which must be voted on by the House, is indeed a very flawed bill. But it is a beginning, and the time to make this beginning is now. It will insure 30 million more people than are covered now, and that is a step in the proper direction. It will also provide some much needed and long overdue regulation over the greedy, loose-cannon insurance industry. Despite its flaws, this bill must pass, as a foot in the door to improvements and better legislation down the road. And that is what the protesters all believe.


Former Vermont Governor/DNC chair Howard Dean and AFL-CIO President Richard Trunlie got the crowd going with stirring speeches. Protesters were mass deputized and urged to make citizens' arrests of profiteering health insurance company CEOs within the conference. Inside the conference, a health insurance industry spokesman stated that they don't pay much attention to anti-industry bloggers or demonstrators. That's for damn sure, and the same holds true for our American public, who are used and abused and money-siphoned by these profiteers every day, and millions of others who are excluded from coverage. For this corrupt and bloated industry is obsessed with profit and cares for nothing else. They think nothing of spending $1 million per day on TV ads that lie and attempt to scare the public away from supporting regulation or a public option, even as they turn away millions of people so they can cherry-pick those who will be most profitable for them to cover.

I applaud these demonstrators, for, unlike the teabaggers, these people actually know the score and understand how badly we are being ripped off by insurance companies and their conservative Republican defenders. These people, unlike the teabaggers, haven't been fed talking points by huge corporate interests. Their demonstration is informed and genuine.

Unlike last summer's phony, orchestrated teabagger protests, this time, it's for real!

SNIPPETS

It was revealed earlier this week that war criminal and former Vice President DICK Cheney had suffered his fifth heart attack. Stress being a major contributor to heart attacks, I am not surprised that Cheney has had another one. One can only imagine the stress this man must be under every waking moment. After all, he and his cohort George W. Bush are indirectly responsible for the 3,000 deaths which occurred on 9/11, having been briefed on August 6, 2001, that Osama Bin Laden was planning some type of attack involving airplanes on our soil, and both having done nothing about this warning. And imagine the paranoia which has raised his blood pressure and terrorized him each day since! Consider, too, the stress and pangs of suppressed guilt that must be shooting through Cheney's veins knowing that he lied to get us into an unnecessary Iraq war which has now cost the lives of 4,000 of our soldiers and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. The aggravation he has undergone recently with a captured would-be underwear bomber singing like a canary with mounds of actionable intelligence as a result of normal interrogation methods rather than Cheney's preferred and now wholly discredited torture methods must be extreme, too. But the coup de grace in terms of stress must have happened when he heard former colleagues Colin Powell and Gen. David Petraeus shoot down his flimsy lie that President Obama is endangering the country by mishandling our "war on terror." Cheney's heart attack was described as "mild." But we all know once it finally dawns on him how badly he misjudged and misran our battle against Islamic fundamentalist extremism, how seriously his torture program damaged our Constitution and world standing, and how much innocent blood is really on his hands, Cheney's entire circulatory system will explode.



It will be interesting to see how congressional Republicans will conduct themselves in front of the C-SPAN cameras when they meet to discuss health care reform with President Obama tomorrow. Why? Because they don't want reform at all. They want to stall and eventually kill this legislation. Both that snide and mouthy House Minority "Leader" John Boehner and Senate Minority "Leader" Mitch McConnell are in no mood to compromise, and they instead want to rip up the existing, already-passed bills and start all over.But all they really want to do is attempt to weaken President Obama, the man they hate more than anything. First they're for transparency, then they're against having cameras present. First they're all for health care reform, then they're against it. These disgraceful saps, along with their conservative Republican buddies like Eric Cantor, Michele Bachmann, Pete Hoekstra, Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint, Richard Shelby, and all the rest of them, are attempting to stonewall our government to a grinding halt, simply to make the President look weak and ineffective so as to defeat him in two years. They have held up numerous judicial appointments without good reason; 290 bills await action but are languishing in an unneeded procedural-delay limbo, and they lie about and distort everything the President says or does. They hate government involvement in anything, so they are trying to strangle it to death for their own political advantage. In the process, these self-proclaimed "fiscal conservatives" are wasting everybody's time and millions of taxpayer dollars. Here's an idea: if these Republicans are truly against government waste, why don't they all just resign en masse and get the hell out? For if ever there was a perfect example of exorbitant government waste, it is surely today's totally unproductive congressional Republican caucus!

I saw CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta on the tube this morning, explaining why hospital costs are so out rageously high. We all know the score here:$25 packets of Kleenex, $800 biopsy needles, etc. Well, Dr. Gupta said something I found to be utterly unbelievable: that hospitals only get 4% of the amount they actually invoice for a product or service! His claim was that insurance companies and government negotiate away the rest and pay only about 4% of the amount invoiced. I found this figure to be rather suspicious, and I would love for any of you out there who may know the truth to lay it on me. Assuming for a moment that it IS true, then hospitals, just like doctors and technicians, are NOT the ones responsible for our ungodly high health care costs! Nope---sure, medical malpractice suits enter into the equation, but so do medical equipment manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and - yep, you guessed it - INSURANCE COMPANIES! So, once again, they can point all the fingers they want, but insurance company greed is STILL one of the most major causes of our unnecessarily high health care costs!