Health Care Reform a Bad Joke, So Far

Remember those embarrassing, unfunny sketches when Bob Hope put on a wig and pretended to be a hippie? That's what the "health care advocates" looked like who testified before Congress last week and pretended to care. The Business Roundtable was there. The Chamber of Commerce was there. The insurance companies were there, naturallement. Gods help us and save us, the Heritage Foundation showed up, still wanting revenge for Hoover's defeat and Reagan's canonization, or whatever it is they do besides peeing in everyone's soup.

There was not a single witness asked to testify in favor of a single payer system, although that seems to be what the majority of the American people-- including doctors and nurses-- want. The foxes who bought the hen house-- $512,042,660 it cost them in lobbying last year, and they own it goddamnit!-- voted in favor of fatter hens. Single payer advocates were treated as protesters, and removed from the chamber by police.
Bill Moyers' Journal has the best coverage of this I've seen, naming names and doing the math: there are thirty times more health care "administrators" than there are doctors and nurses in this country, for one instance. Drug and insurance companies profit from the current fragmentation, the fix is in so far as Congress is concerned, and the president is trying to do this without making the insurance companies mad.