Why is the Democratic Party such a wuss on health care? The proposed party platform is resoundingly weak and lacking courage with its insipid, deferring to private health care for profit, while ignoring "Medicare for All" as proposed under H.R. 676.
Remaining decades behind health care as a right and single payer health care as available to all in industrialized nations, the Democratic party platform on health care is ignoring the will of the people and exhibiting ostrich like myopia about the reality that more and more employers are placing the increasing burdens of paying for health care on employees, or not offering any health care coverage.
This Democratic Party platform health care issue is proposing to solve nothing but simply put lipstick on the pig of private, for profit, unfair, unjust insurance coverage that is causing the health care debacle. What the hell is the matter with the Democratic Party?
Jonathan Tasini at Working Life agrees when he writes:
"Though I mentioned this yesterday in the posting of the newest, latest version of the Democratic Party platform, this bears repeating: you can't have the private insurance industry mucking around with health care. It is really painful to watch a kind of cognitive dissonance playing out here. Watch this, on page 22, in the context of the discussion about Fiscal Responsibility:'The real long-run fiscal challenge is rooted in the rising spending on health care, but we cannot address this in a way that puts our most vulnerable families in jeopardy.'
"It is the height of IRRESPONSIBILITY to pretend like you can really protect vulnerable families by keeping health care a for-profit business. It's phony and misleading.
'Instead, we must strengthen our public programs by bringing down the cost of health care and reducing waste while making strategic investments that emphasize quality, efficiency, and prevention.'
"This is utter nonsense. It is mumbo-jumbo, market-driven language that obscures the statement being made: we don't have the backbone to take on a fight with a powerful industry so we are going to embrace the idea of Market Fundamentalism and con the American people into believing that you can solve the health care crisis by letting the people, who actually created the inefficient model in the first place, try to fix it.
"But, obviously, I don't feel strongly about this. Sorry for being so wishy-washy."
This is wrong, wrong, wrong. Why are the Democrats content to place ice cream on cow pies? It's the 21st for pete's sake. It's been more than sixty years since Harry Truman proposed national health care insurance.
" In the November 19th address, President Truman called for the creation of a national health insurance fund, to be run by the federal government. This fund would be open to all Americans, but would remain optional. Participants would pay monthly fees into the plan, which would cover the cost of any and all medical expenses that arose in a time of need. The government would pay for the cost of services rendered by any doctor who chose to join the program. In addition, the insurance plan would give a cash balance to the policy holder to replace wages lost due to illness or injury.
"Harry S. Truman's health proposals finally came to Congress in the form of a Social Security expansion bill, co-sponsored in Congress by Democratic senators Robert Wagner (N.Y.) and James Murray (Mont.), along with Representative John Dingell (D.-Mich). For this reason, the bill was known popularly as the W-M-D bill. The American Medical Association (AMA) launched a spirited attack against the bill, capitalizing on fears of Communism in the public mind. The AMA characterized the bill as "socalized medicine", and in a forerunner to the rhetoric of the McCarthy era, called Truman White House staffers "followers of the Moscow party line".* Organized labor, the main public advocate of the bill, had lost much of it's goodwill from the American people in a series of unpopular strikes. Following the outbreak of the Korean War, President Truman was finally forced to abandon the W-M-D Bill."
There no longer is a Soviet Union or Eastern bloc countries. The map has changed. Although, fearmongering about communism by imbecilic Republicans and Blue Dog Dems continues. However, since the US is a debtor nation having borrowed so much money ($502 billion) from China, where Bush is presently ensconced at the Olympics, these hypocrites are careful about what they say. But bring up single payer health care and these sanctimonious elected officials---with government provided health care---scream about communism.
It's about time the Democratic Party gets its act together and pushed for single payer government administered health care for all, not just for the few, like J. Sid McSame who's had government health care his entire life and members of Congress who have top quality government health care coverage. Quit with the elitism. The Democratic Party needs to get back to its roots on single payer health care. Anything less, like this cowardly monstrosity on health care inserted into the platform, and the Democratic Party ceases to be the principled, traditional, truly of, by, and for the people Democratic Party but that of the wealthy and corporations, no different than the Republican Party.
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