This recent election was not about Americans’ understanding of recent legislation. It was about their misunderstanding of recent legislation.
That may be deliberate. We know that Glenn Beck has a million or so listeners and viewers. Rush Limbaugh supposedly has more than ten million listeners a day. That is largely because for many years…perhaps still…his was the only voice that could be heard during the day in many areas. His radio contracts extend to hundreds of stations.
Is it any wonder that Americans have no idea how much the Obama Adminstration has done for them, when the Right Wing Neocon political talk shows are committed to destroying a Liberal agenda? In other words, they try to discourage any government services for average Americans. When you see the number of shows and their audiences, you can quickly calculate how much these people make each year, serving their billionaire masters.
The damage they do to society in the guise of entertainment and information is disastrous. They extend the misery of the poor and create uncertainty in the lives of the Middle Class. Of course, all these Right Wing propagandists were culpable in the creation of the Great Bush Recession. They all encouraged privatization of Social Security, defeat of health care reform, repeal of health care for children of poor families, reduction in the minimum wage, the war on Iraq, tax cuts for the rich and the elimination of all regulations on Wall Street.
Why would they do this? Money. Limbaugh the failed executive, failed everything, failed disc jockey does it purely for money. Limbaugh makes $40 million a year to do it. Hannity and Beck make $20 million and $10 million respectively. Each of the other Right Wing Neocon talk show hosts has income in the millions each year. Here they are, the list of top radio stooges for the international corporations and the billionaires.
The Rush Limbaugh Show Audience: 15 million
The Sean Hannity Show Audience: 14 million
The Glenn Beck Program Audience: 10 million
The Mark Levin Show 8.5 million
The Savage Nation 8 million
The Dave Ramsey Show 8 million
The Dr. Laura Program 8 million
The Neal Boortz Show 6 million
The Laura Ingraham Show 6 million
And there are many others. Is it any wonder that half the people walking out of the polling booth, most of whom need more security in their health care plan…which the health care reform bill will give them…said that they approved of repealing health care reform. If they listen to these nitwits, they think that they will be reduced to serfs from a program that in reality will give them the best medical care in the world eventually.
If these talk show hosts came out directly and said that they were paid to lie and didn’t believe in health care or other things because they are rich and they don’t really care about their fellow man…except to exploit them for money…that would be OK. Of course no one would listen to them in that scenario. But they don’t. They lie to the public to get them to do what they did last Tuesday…vote against themselves.
The people who listen to these radio propagandists are unknowingly voting for giant international corporations to move jobs offshore and to attack labor unions that have helped the average man get better wages and a safer workplace. They are voting for Neocons who will allow health insurance companies to kill health care for the sake of higher corporate profits and the average annual salaries of their CEOs, who make $14 million a year. That is an outrageous amount of money for a CEO of what should be a non-profit business, which it is in the rest of the world.
Fox News Channel and CNBC are just as guilty of trying to ruin the U.S. economy and the lives of the average citizen. When people say that commentators like Bill O’Reilly caused the murder of a physician in Kansas by constantly referring to him as a “baby killer” and when Glenn Beck can set someone off to go on a trip to kill executives of the Tides Foundation, a charitable educational group and ends up shooting at police officers…then you know something is wrong with this picture. Or when a news channel gives a million dollars to one political party…then it is pretty clear that they are probably not delivering the news impartially, which they are supposed to do.
Now let’s see what they are saying about Health Care Reform. Could it be that they have some kind of agenda…maybe working on behalf of the health insurance industry? Could it be that they are after more of the $400 million that the health care industry spent unsuccessfully to try to stop health care reform?
Well , Rush Limbaugh said that he would leave the country if health care reform passed. But he didn’t. He did,however, lie and say that the government was going to outlaw private health insurance coverage. He lied and said that the government was taking over health care. Limbaugh continued to lie about death panels long after everyone involved knew that they did not and do not exist.
Glenn Beck has compared health car reform, based on nothing in particular, to Pearl Harbor! He dismissed the $130 billion savings that the Congressional Budget Office says is important to our economy from health care reform and says that health care reform will result in slavery and oppression. He doesn’t explain how of course. So Beck is really pushing hard for the health insurance industry.
The insurance industry itself is pushing hard, raising rates all over the place from the 15 to 20 percent that has been routine for the last 20 years and moving up to as much as 41 to 47 percent increases. Some of the increases are quite dubious and many attorneys general are looking at those increases often passed by the often more friendly state insurance regulators. (Who often end up employed by the same companies that they regulate.)
Many insurance companies have been making very substantial increases in anticipation of the new provision of continuing to insure children up to age 26 on the parents plan. And they are adding big premium increases for eliminating lifetime limits on coverage. What good is a policy if it only goes to a certain fixed amount and you have to pay everything over that?
Insurance companies are now adding charges for preventative examinations that can only benefit the companies in the long run by reducing the number of serious illnesses. Because the new laws will not allow them to simply deny coverage any longer, these preventative screenings will actually lower their costs–while they are adding the cost of these tests…which is ultimately to their benefit…to your premiums. That is, until health care reform fully kicks in.
So if they can increase their prices now, why are insurance companies so worried? They are worried because they know that when competition from the multi-state insurance cooperatives and pools kick in, their current monopolistic control of prices on your insurance will go away. Prices will fall and so will those CEO and top executive salaries.
It could quite possibly lead to European-style universal care where anyone can simply walk in to a hospital or a clinic with an ID card and get great care. If that happens, the health insurance industry will become a caretaker, non-profit entity and the people will have outstanding medical care for about half what we pay now.
Private enterprise is a great thing. We simply don’t have free enterprise in the health care industry right now. Health care reform will start the process of seeing to it that we eventually get a good, competitive private system.
