Although Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter may tell you that health insurance companies can do the job much better, offer cheap health insurance, offer guarantees….the answer is simple…look at what they’ve done so far and look at what they are doing now.
Why should you believe health insurance companies who have cheated you in the past, have failed to keep promises, have failed to hold rates down while giving huge bonuses, who have given huge campaign contributions to Republicans who will vote the way they insurance companies tell them to and who will lie to you about the unfulfilled promises of the health care industry?
Listen to what Governor Howard Dean, a physician himself, whose wife is still a practicing family physician, has to say about health care. You have to trust someone. Dr. Howard Dean actually set up a wonderful health care plan in Vermont when he was governor.
Forget about the details of health care reform. Whom can you trust? Dr. Dean, who has proved that he cares about his fellow citizens or the Neocon Republicans who have never tried to deliver any kind of affordable health insurance? Furthermore, Neocon-Republicans:
1. Gave huge contracts to the pharmaceutical industry and pretended that it was a health care benefit to Medicare recipients. $26 billion dollars in guaranteed contracts and a guarantee that Medicare would not be allowed to negotiate better prices for seniors.
2 Fought off health care for children of poor working families at every turn, only losing when Democrats came to power in 2006 and THEY introduced and passed SCHIPS extensions.
3. Fought against Medicare all the way. And their leader, Ronald Reagan, called Medicare the first step to Socialism. Has it been? Are you socialized? Do you live in a socialist state? If you do then we all already have medical care and it is free!
4. Offer no plan of their own. Senate Republicans have come out recently and flatly said that they do not want universal health care, and they will not help Americans who need it, making a mockery of President Obama’s attempts to bring them into the national discussion on improving health care for tens of millions of Americans.
If the past is prologue an affordable health care plan, like the ones being discussed and legislated by Democrats, will be something almost all Americans–including those now with good health care insurance–will be needing soon. Health care costs have already started to skyrocket and they will continue up now, until a public option and insurance exchanges are put into place. Even Starbucks has said that it cannot afford to shoulder the biggest share of health care costs. Not even Starbucks can negotiate with the health insurance companies.
All the town hall crazies have been stirred up and many bussed in by people like Rick Scott, who cheated Medicare out of hundreds of millions of dollars and Dick Armey, an arch-conservative Texan, head of the violently anti-healthcare reform, FreedomWorks, funded to stop health care reform by the health insurance companies. Their game is simple. Call those who want to help the People as many bad names as you can, create visual effects that say exactly the opposite of what is true. Distract. Disrupt. Lie, lie again, and again. Do not let the truth get out because it cannot be denied.
The truth is that President Obama, a man who started his career as a community organizer in a small, poor community, has a very good heart. Those who are calling him a nazi don’t know what a nazi is. Those showing signs with a Hitler moustache are despicable fascists themselves hoping that their desperate attempts to shut down discourse will work if they can only hold up the right sign. Brain-dead fools who think that by simply calling a good man evil they will prevent him from becoming great. That will not happen. President Obama has long advised anyone who would listen during his presidential campaign that he wants to have health care reform for the People. And, like the honorable Christian that he is, he has followed through on that promise.
We need one more thing. One of the insurance plans offered at any of the new insurance exchanges where you will find reasonably priced insurance must be a public insurance plan. The people need a fall-back plan in case some how the insurance industries find a way around the new regulations, which will in fact make them take more customers, stop denying coverages, stop refusing to pay customers hospital and doctor bills. If a person may simply opt for the Medicare-like plan if all else fails, then this health care reform will make U.S. citizens as well cared for as many of the other leading countries of the world.