The White House and the Democratic majority on Capitol Hill created a Rube Goldberg monstrosity with their so called health care reform and their ineffective response to the financial and economic disaster created by corporate America.

There was no debate and no informative discussion.  Single payer, universal health care was strangled and dismissed early and no health care representatives from any of the industrialized nations that have successfully provided their people with affordable health care for all for decades were invited to offer their expert testimony. 

So with the less than stellar, full of holes, anti-women health care bill passed by the House, whose hypocritical members enjoy top-of-the-line, government provided health care coverage, members of that chamber have consigned the US to continue to miserably trail far behind Canada and most of Europe, for example, that have provided affordable health care for all as a human right for decades. 

These other industrialized nations put the US to shame.  This is a country in which the health care system is controlled by gargantuan, gazillionaire, unregulated health care industries that also cash in on government welfare...a failed, disastrous system that is a death sentence for tens of thousands every year who cannot afford health care coverage and those who still may have increasingly unaffordable employer coverage for which they often have to fight when they get sick even though they paid dearly or find it gone when their jobs disappear.

James Ridgeway over at Mother Jones echoes what I've been saying, preaching and emphasizing for a long time.

Ridgeway captures the essence of this bizarre health care reform fiasco by a DINO government.  "The Democratic legislation is a costly, futile mess because it refuses to rein in the industries that have been ripping off the American public year after year.

"Obama and the Democrats have no real vision for a transformed health care system, so they’ve gone for a slightly modified version of business as usual. They’ve cut backroom deals that win a few meager concessions toward the public good, while at the same time ensuring the profits of the insurance companies, Big Pharma, and other health care profiteers by entrenching their control of the health care system and rewarding them with larger markets and fatter profits. They’re doing what Democrats have done since at least the Clinton years—acting like kinder, gentler Republicans rather than the defenders of the common people.

"The Democrats are vulnerable to conservative attacks because they have no compelling message of their own to offer—certainly nothing that matches the soaring rhetoric of the Obama campaign. Instead, they tiptoe cautiously down the middle of the road, and wonder why no one feels terribly inspired to follow them."

As for the economy, I've inveighed against this administration and Dems' on the Hill refusal to reinstate Glass-Steagall as a minimum beginning to strongly regulating and changing this destructive financial system that the Repugs and Clintonites promoted for almost three decades.  But when you have a White House filled with ex-Wall Streeters and their protectors and a Congress of elected representatives and senators in the back and front pockets of the financial and other powerful industries, regular Americans get the shaft.

Ridgeway states: "Likewise, the Obama White House has yet to take any strong, principled action against the forces responsible for wrecking the economy. And how could it, since it is staffed by the old Clinton economic team that helped to set the financial debacle in motion a decade ago? The key to the economic mess was the decision to rip down Glass-Steagall, the act that separated Wall Street from commercial banking. One of the men at the center of that endeavor was Larry Summers. And where is Larry Summers today? Ensconsed in the White House, running the Obama economic program.

"There was a time, shortly after Obama took office, when a rising populist rage at Wall Street greed might have been harnassed to fuel some genuinely meaningful regulatory action. Instead, with men like Summers and Tim Geithner at the helm, we’ve seen Wall Street recover while Main Street continues to suffer. We’ve seen a large portion of the stimulus funds chanelled through the private sector, where they’ve yet to trickle down to the people who need help most. Obama says his goal is for every American who wants a job to have one. So why not start creating government-funded jobs, as FDR did in the early years of the Depression? Why not launch federal projects to create a new green energy industry, instead of waiting for the energy monopolies to come up with a way of making a killing off it?"