http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/16/AR2009121601906.html

Howard Dean:

In Washington, when major bills near final passage, an inside-the-Beltway mentality takes hold. Any bill becomes a victory. Clear thinking is thrown out the window for political calculus. In the heat of battle, decisions are being made that set an irreversible course for how future health reform is done. The result is legislation that has been crafted to get votes, not to reform health care.

If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current health-care bill. Any measure that expands private insurers' monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform.

Dean stresses that there is no serious competition set up that would reduce the massive and unnecessary administrative costs. No serious lowering of costs for premiums. Not for drugs. The pre-existing conditions protection can now be worked around by raising costs to make insurance coverage out of range. Their policy says yes, but the premium price says NO! Older Americans can be charged 3 times as much as younger ones.

By the time serious benefits kick in in 2014, Dean projects premiums will have doubled.

Dean warns:

In short, the winners in this bill are insurance companies; the American taxpayer is about to be fleeced with a bailout in a situation that dwarfs even what happened at AIG.

Dean points out the American people needed and sought help from Congress to structure competition against abusive profiteering of health industries. The public option. The Medicare buy-in. Gone. No public plan. This is once again a Lose/Win situation. The citizens lose, the corporations win. But Harkin calls this Trojan horse bill for insurance profiteering a "starter house"? Axelrod condemns such rejection of the bill as "insane"?

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/december/better-to-start-over-than-to-pass-these-bills-0

In an article posted in the PNHP, Athena Godet-Calogeras, Peter Mott and Andrew Coates maintain the present health care bills in both houses should be scrapped and redrawn to seriously help the profound needs of the American citizenry.

Their listing of issues with the bills:

1) House bill won’t start until 2013 and Senate 2014. People need a bill that truly responds to their needs to start now, not over the next 4-10 years.

2) Healthcare will be mandatory for every person, every family, and not being insured will be a crime. It will be punishable by an annual fine of up to 2.5 percent of adjusted income under the House bill, lower under Senate bill, $95 per person in 2014 but rising to $750 per person in 2019.

3) Tax money will have to subsidize private insurance premiums for those who earn up to 400 percent of federal poverty level. Families between 200 and 400 percent of poverty level who are presently uninsured will have to spend 8-12 percent of their income to purchase insurance. They point out that as this oppressive financial burden hits lower income families, the insurance companies stand to improve their present economic status with tens of millions of new customers and a minimum of $447 billion in taxpayer subsidies.

4) Both bills offer no serious cost controls. The costs will be oppressive and unsustainable to the average person. The bills don’t begin to make health coverage universal. The House bill ignores 17 million citizens, leaving them uninsured. The Senate bill does less.

5) The bills don’t seriously challenge the high cost of drugs.

So big media is giving the non-teabagging protesters of the congressional faux health care reform a small window of attention. Corporate media can’t resist the titillation factor of political gamesmanship conflict, even if it relates to serious human values and well being. They will stomach it for those ratings. We just need to remember they never were, are or will be on our side.

Truth to power gets the mike for some sound bites, in competition with corporatism, cronyism, jingoism and the status quo big guns. The thumb will be on the media scale for "them", but this opportunity is something. Let’s hope the citizenry is reaching the critical mass tipping point of outrage, tea baggers included.

How many AIGs will it take, America?