Prepare for war on the Middle Class. It is coming from the Right and the entrenched special interests in the lucrative health care market. It will most likely come in the guise of a faux-sympathetic campaign that will tell you that universal health care, even designed by the brightest minds attracted to Washington in three-quarters of a century, will cause a catastrophic failure of the health care system. You will be told repeatedly that you will become part of a Socialist or a Communist society if you “give up your rights” by enabling universal health care. It will be billed as a monumental intrusion into your private life.
The current leader of the Neocon-Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, is already calling President Obama a Socialist and a Communist. He blames Obama because we have had to spend another trillion dollars over the $700 billion Bush spent to get the country out of the economic disaster Bush and Cheney created. The next move will be to hang the Socialism tag on health care.
Here is why. The same people who brought you the disastrous policies of the Bush Administration, supported war in Iraq, fought against any attempt to put regulations on banking and the mortgage industry, and spent us into an $11 trillion deficit, are the same Neocon-Republicans who said this:
Bill Kristol, the leading Neconservative in a 1994 memo to the members of the Republican Party:
“The first step in this process must be the unqualified political defeat of the Clinton healthcare proposal.”
“A more ambitious agenda of free-market reforms (edit. – the Republican ideas) remains open for the future: medical IRAs, tax credits and vouchers for insurance and the like. ”
And here’s the kicker:
“…the Clinton proposal is also a serious threat to the Republican Party. Republicans must therefore…adopt an aggressive and uncompromising counterstrategy designed to delegitimize the proposal and defeat its partisan purpose.”
You see, it is not about health care for the people. It’s about politics. It is about Neocon-Republican politics. It is about getting elected and putting their friends into office and paying off their rich, Right-wing lobbyist friends, including some of the biggest, the healthcare industry.
Nothing has changed with the Republicans on health care since 1994, when that memo was written. They had 8 years of total control, the Presidency and Congress to do something…anything about healthcare. They did nothing and fought everything that the Democrats tried to do.
Now, every piece of legislation offered by the Obama administration–health insurance options for children of poor working families, veteran’s healthcare, a stimulus to put laid-off American citizens back to work–they filibuster–97 filibusters in the Senate since the Democrats gained control in 2007-8. The Neocon-Republicans who now run the Senate have filibustered every piece of legislation for the middle class and insisted on MORE tax breaks for the rich and for big corporations. They have literally held legislation for the people hostage–before they would allow it to pass. Even then, only a small handful of Right Wing, oligarchic Neocon-Republicans voted for any legislation that would help the middle class.
When the healthcare debate comes up, expect to find Senators like Grassley, Sessions, Craig, Enzi, Crespo, Hatch, Graham, Vitter, Burr, DeMint, Shelby, Cornyn, Gregg, McCain, Thune, Hutchison and others try to filibuster. They will try everything to stop it.
And why? Because in order for health care to work in this country, we have to do what every other country that has successful health care has done. Most of them never allowed the looting of their citizens pockets in the first place. What they did and we must do is remove the profits for the middle men, the insurance companies and the HMOs who are making a bonanza of between $100 and $300 billion a year from the pain of American citizens.
The pharmaceutical companies, the AMA, the American Association of Health Plans, the American Hospital Association, the National Federation of Independent Business (Yes. They sell expensive health insurance), the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA. Remember the $50 million they spent to bring you “Harry and Louise”? You can count on it. They’ll be back. Harry should have been drawn and quartered. Louise, for her part in preventing reasonable, universal healthcare, causing millions of deaths, bankrupting literally millions of Americans, should have been hanged in the public square.)
And good old randy Newt Gingrich is back. Suddenly all is wrong with the world. Obama is doing it all wrong, even though the things “Newt” (McPherson) complains about are the things for which he praised George W. Bush. “Newt” told us that HMOs would solve the problem. He told us that we would all be saved by the very people who eventually picked our pockets clean. But remember–“Newt” ran the Party that picked their pockets.
The war is just getting started. If you want affordable, reasonable healthcare, you’d better find out who is the enemy and who is leading the forces on your side. D-day is coming. And you’d better get out your check book. Because that is your ammunition. If the HIAA spent $50 million last time to convince the ignorati that they should vote against their own best interests, they will spend even more this time.
And they’ve got it to spend. Hundreds of billions of dollars of our money.