Just as Obama is controlled by Wall Street...how else to explain his GOP-like economic team and its actions in continuing the bailout and protection of a corrupt financial system, so too, his protection of the health care and insurance industry shows that his campaign promises were empty words.

And his performance last evening regarding health care reform was a study in spin, tap dancing, and tying himself in knots....a performance that gave many who were watching whiplash.

As Norman Solomon writes at CommonDreams: " 'I want to cover everybody,' President Obama said at his news conference Wednesday night. 'Now, the truth is that unless you have a -- what's called a single-payer system, in which everybody's automatically covered, then you're probably not going to reach every single individual. . .'

"The same conventional wisdom keeping single payer off Washington's table has been spinning for various 'reform' plans with such accelerated RPMs that at this point the nation's 'healthcare debate' is suffering from a severe case of vertigo.

" 'The overwhelming majority of Americans want healthcare, but millions of them can't afford it,' Obama told the assembled journalists. 'So the plan that has been -- that I've put forward and that -- what we're seeing in Congress would cover, the estimates are, at least 97 to 98 percent of Americans. There might still be people left out there who, even though there's an individual mandate, even though they are required to purchase health insurance, might still not get it, or despite a lot of subsidies, are still in such dire straits that it's still hard for them to afford it. And we may end up giving them some sort of hardship exemption.'

"That may sound good. But it's in the service of an agenda for "healthcare reform" that's seriously flawed.

"Today, the kind of arguments heard during the early '60s against guaranteed healthcare for the elderly can now be heard against establishing a comprehensive single-payer system -- also known as Medicare for all. But now, the healthcare debate is trapped between a political establishment that doesn't want a single-payer system and news media that insist on ignoring its real potential."

As Ruth Conniff at The Progressive writes: "As we know, the Clinton health care initiative collapsed. And much of Clinton's progressive speech-making turned out to be window dressing for micro-initiatives that made little impact on the big problems he spoke about so stirringly.

"Unfortunately, that may also means that a health care plan that passes this year turns out to be less than meets the eye."

Meanwhile, more Americans die needlessly in the US, as Americans pay more and receive less than other industrialized.

An illuminating piece with fact filled charts by Paul Rosenberg at OpenLef drives the point home: "One of the favorite new rightwing memes on health care is that one out five Canadian patients dies because of their evil Stalinist system.  The reality, of course, is quite the opposite.  The broadest international health measure one can use to reflect this sort of claim is "potential years of life lost", which is one of a large number of indicators tracked by the 30-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).  As can be seen, the US started out about average in 1960, but quickly fell behind, both for men and women.  While we've improved significantly over the years, others have improved significantly more--so much so that for women the years of life lost approaches the maximum of OECD coutries, excluding Turkey and Mexico.

"Taken all together, these charts paint a picture of reality that's not at all surprising to those in the liberal blogosphere.  The fact that it's so different from the picture painted in the traditional corporate media is, I think, far more significant than the fact that it contradicts the rightwing crazies' view.  We know the rightwing crazies are... well, crazy.  But the so-called "moderate", once-upon-a-time-supposed-to-be-objective media are almost equally out of touch with the reality these figures reveal."