BartBlog

Questions, I Have Questions…

Your (Mostly) Obedient Tattlesnake is waiting for one of our Big Media professional interrogators, such as NBC’s David “We’ll Frame It Your Way!” Gregory, to ask one of these Congressional Republicans hyperventilating against the government paying for health care, why they accept health care paid for by government taxation. To my knowledge, not one member of Congress turns down this platinum perk of office preferring to pay for privatized health care themselves, as they think us average schmoes should do. If privatized for-profit health care is ‘the greatest system in the world,’ why don’t they avail themselves of it using their own money instead of Uncle Sucker’s, i.e. ours? (I won’t hold my breath.)

Speaking of which, when do the BM ‘journalists’ start questioning why the government ‘of, by and for the people’ should be in the business of protecting private for-profit corporations from competition? We know they’ve done this unofficially for generations, but now the merry free-marketeers of the Republican Party and Blue Dog Dem stripe are openly babbling we have to protect the health care industry from ‘unfair competition’ from a public option. Wasn’t their mantra, just a few years ago, that corporations could always do a better job at a lower price than the government? If so, what are they worried about in the realm of health care? Could it be that a public health care option would nakedly expose that lie, and the obscene rip-off that America’s for-profit health insurance system has been for the past forty years?

Beware, beware: Don’t be fooled by the retooled Harry and Louise ads featuring the loathsome couple updating their opposition to health care reform by announcing themselves now ‘for it’ as long as it is ‘bipartisan’ and not ‘political.’ This is wrong on so many levels, the Tattler’s thesaurus begs for new synonyms, but the fact that the health care industry is spending over a million dollars a day to stop health care reform, and Harry and Louise is a part of that effort, should give you a clue as to just how detrimental this industry is to the public health. When Big Medico and Big Pharma use the word ‘bipartisan’ it’s in the corporate Republican sense, as in ‘do it our way.’ What the health insurance industry wants is no public option, and a huge payday in that the taxpayers will foot the bill, at current exorbitant rates, for all of the cases the for-profits currently refuse, such as ‘pre-existing conditions.’ This means we’ll be paying for dollar-a-cap Tylenols and every expensive, unneeded procedure greedy industry types can conjure up, and they, and the hospitals and doctors in on this scam, will get their piece of the very profitable action. Without competition from a public option, health care in this country will be even more expensive, yet not work any better for most of us, it will just cost more. Under the industry no-competition plan, you’ll be able to see your terminally ill relative languish into the Great Beyond at ten times what it costs in civilized nations with single-payer universal health care coverage.

More to come after Obama’s press conference tonight.

Copyright 2009 R.S. Janes.