C'mon! Admit It! You Knew All Along They'd Screw Us!

Obamanistic "Hopery/Changery" aside, you KNEW it, didn't you, down in the dark little places in your heart? You knew it: The only reason they started talking about health care reform at all was to pave the way for reductions in services, increases in costs, and preservation of profits for the Health Insurance parasites.

Move-On sent me an e-mail appeal for more "activism." They want me to call my Senators (and send money) to appeal for their votes to support a plan which is already inadequate, too expensive, incomplete, and a 'betrayal' of the (admittedly implicit) promise to make health care available, more universally (oxymoron?), and less expensively. Here's the plaintive text of the Move-On missive:

How could they?

Senate Democrats have just announced a tentative health care deal that doesn't appear to include a real public health insurance option.

Instead of pulling out all the stops, they've bargained away the heart of health care reform—allowing conservative senators like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson to hold the process hostage and protect Big Insurance.

And sure enough, the insurance companies are reportedly thrilled with these terms. "We WIN," one industry insider said during the negotiations. "No government insurance competitor."2

If the health care bill doesn't include a public option, it'll be a huge giveaway to the insurance companies. But the deal isn't final yet, so we need to send an immediate message to Congress and President Obama that any health care bill without a real public health insurance option is simply unacceptable.
(...)
Details are still emerging about this new deal. According to The Washington Post, "the government plan preferred by liberals would be replaced with a program that would create several national insurance policies administered by private companies."

But half-measures simply won't cut it: we desperately need a real public option in order to hold private insurance companies accountable. That's far more important than appeasing Joe Lieberman and his friends in the insurance industry.

And this fight isn't over yet, no matter how many times the media tries to declare the death of the public option. It'd only take one or two senators to unravel this deal, and progressive senators Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders both indicated last night that their support can't be taken for granted.4

So to win, we've got to send a powerful message to congressional Democrats and President Obama that we won't accept this deal. Instead of giving up on the public option, they ought to show real leadership and ratchet up the pressure on Lieberman and any Democratic senators who are threatening to filibuster.

There follows the phone numbers of my two senators, the amazingly disappointingly silent, invisible Tom Udall, and the predictably compromised Jesse F "Jeff" Bingaman, whose wife, Ann, is a self-interested, corpoRat-compromised lobbyistwho once served as head of the Anti-Trust dept of the Clinton DoJ. Using that experience, she then went to work DEFEATING anti-trust measures after leaving Govt. Jeff, a southern NM boy (Silver City, just about the whitest, most conservative little burg in the State) still dances to those folks' tunes.

All of which is to say: We Are ALL SOOOOOOOOOOO Fucked.