For many years now, I've tried to describe, often in excruciating detail, a healthcare system which inflicts terrible hardships on the American people. We live in a country which accepts a neutered government, owned and paid for by lobbyists who lavish insurance industry campaign payola on compliant politicians.

In France, the European Union, the rest of the industrialized world (but not in the United States), healthcare is a right of citizenship. During an economic downturn, Americans face daunting odds, access to healthcare is one of the first luxuries to disappear.

Imagine if 435 member of Congress had to try to purchase for-profit, individual health insurance just like you and I?

Pre-existing conditions, exclusions, huge deductibles, skyrocketing premiums--the works.  Just imagine.

Senator Obama says we'll have universal health care by the end of his first term.

Keep the year 2012 planted firmly in your brain as you read what follows.

2012 is a lifetime away for millions of Americans.

We Democrats have waited SINCE PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN (the late 1940s!) for a chance at universal health care.  It's within reach.  Let's not blow it on a candidate whose plan is weaker and who's already making ill-considered policy shifts (see below for a sad description of Obama's illogical backpedaling on mandates by considering the imposition of penalties on those who don't sign up).

Here's the "money quote" from Paul Krugman's column in tomorrow's New York Times (February 4, 2008):

You've got to wonder, when you ask a simple question and no one seems to want to answer it.

We're being asked to buy a vision of a better tomorrow when we go to the polls and vote on Tuesday. But truth be told, as usual, we really don't know what we're buying and we certainly don't know the price. We've got a vague promise.

The headlines are positively scary.

Where is the moral shame of our so-called leaders?

Shame on Elliot Spitzer who I trusted and voted for.

In the richest country on the planet . . .

My once solidly middle class friend called to tell me she's going naked.

Shame on them.

Shame on every last one of them, except the few who have renounced their taxpayer-subsidized health benefits.

Hillary Clinton has now unveiled her health care proposal, and while it is very far from perfect, it is definitely better than anything the Republicans have offered.

Great issues raised in the last post and I do think these warrant more discussion. So I will ask more question and spout less statistics this time.

Wikipedia

Alright, I can see that 60 pages of boring are a little hard to take on a three day weekend. I hate to keep harping on this, but the reason I went to all the trouble to learn html and to study other countries health care was to write and enact this bill.

I truly do not believe that the federal government will give us anything that will be good for patients or doctors. If we rely on the federal government we will get what the insurance industry wants us to have. This is an attempt to take things into our own hands and give ourselves a system far better than what is planned for us.

Wanna really scare the establishment. Here is your chance. That’s right I am not going to just complain this time, I am going to ask you to take action. This is an experiment in democracy. It involves presenting the same or similar bill in multiple counties throughout the US to achieve the same end—health care for all.

A new ally has just joined the battle for healthcare reform.

The American Cancer Society announced today that it will devote its entire advertising budget to educating the American people about the collapse of our healthcare system.

The numbers boggle the mind.

Forty-seven million Americans went without health insurance in 2006, an increase of 2.2 million people from the year before, according to a report issued by the U.S. Census Bureau Tuesday (Aug. 28). It marks the sixth consecutive year the ranks of the uninsured have grown.

http://www.stateline.org/...