Yep, I Have Been Slacking Off

writing much on this blog. A lot depends on the news, but I get so depressed reading about our worsening economy and now the apparent attempt by so-called Democrats to basically scuttle true health care reform for decades I can hardly stand it.

Health care is a right, not a privilege, but tell that to our congresspeople who are bought and paid for by the medical-industrial complex of for-profit hospitals, Big Pharma, health insurance companies, and powerful medical associations.

While President Obama is trying, I guess, to reform health care or rather health insurance by promoting a public alternative ala John Edwards' plan from last election, there are piles of congressional opposition, including that from Joseph Lieberman, senator from Aetna, as Ralph Nader once wittily called him. You know anything Obama proposes will be watered down in the first place, but even a watered down public health care plan which isn't even single-payer, is too much for our cretins in Congress. They feel this would be the first step towards single-payer, and that can't be allowed to happen.

And of course we have interest groups like the American Medical Association, which no longer represents the vast majority of physicians in this country but is fully aligned with Big Pharma and the like, trying to flex its muscle just as it did when Medicare and Medicaid were put into place, but Obama is now saying this country can't wait for health care reform.

It's all about increasing profits for the health care industry, which shouldn't be an "industry" to begin with but a service. While all of this political gamesmanship goes on, more people are thrown out of work, more people cannot get health care except when they are practically dying and have to use expensive hospital emergency care, and more people's life expectancy in this country goes down the drain.

Health care is a major scandal in this country, and it never had to be this way in the first place.

Obama went to the heart of the lion's den today.