TV sources are owned or controlled by not-leftwing not-liberal powerful wealthy people. They are also not-stupid. They did not go to the trouble of gaining control of the propaganda apparatus in order to turn it over to their enemies.

Americans live in their TVs. Your voice isn’t in there. Your outrage is impotent.

…and could thus compel a given insurance company to compete by rewriting their existing classifications of health coverage, and re-focus statistical concerns of RISK towards dealing exclusively with situations that don’t happen all the time.

Thus the health insurance companies will fight tooth and nail (dollar and cent) to defeat even a hint of a public option. They will do anything in their power (as they have shown) to keep making obscene profits from the suffering of other human beings.

How do we “de-fang” the insurance companies, or at least get a muzzle for them while the debate is made?

Secondly, about the debate itself. I think we are trying to re invent the wheel here. For one thing everyday health care is not the same thing as catastrophic health care or special condition health care (homeless, uninsured, mentally ill).
Policy wise, we could greatly reduce overall cost if:
1) there was a federal law initiating and giving teeth to state or regional health care exchanges who could, by law, negotiate on behalf of their shareholders John and Mary Q Public for equitable and affordable coverage for everyday or routine concerns.
2)A Federally mandated public option package exclusively for catastrophic disease, disability or injury requiring lengthy hospital stays or extraordinary medical intervention. This package could be made available to the consumer and could thus compel a given insurance company to compete by rewriting their existing classifications of health coverage, and re focus statistical concerns of RISK towards dealing exclusively with situations that don’t happen all the time.
3) And finally, both by law and appropriation, expand the powers of the existing Department of Health and Human Services, coordinating that expansion of authority with a new health privacy provision targeted towards effectively reducing the ranks of the homeless and the uninsured whle developing more effective local and state initiatives for making sure the mentally ill receive the care they will always need.

Many of these things already exist. But the sad fact remains is that there are not enough system wide structural initiatives in place to effectively keep the cost of health care down. These kinds of initiatives don’t have to cost a lot money. But they do require some ingenuity and guess what, that’s also very affordable.

Thanks
Tom K Ann Arbor

The response I’ve received (on the occassion when a response was actually given) usually was along the lines of “It’s that man in the White House!” No policy changes, no legal status changes, no changes in how many wars we happen to be in: simply because of the person who happened to win the Presidential election.

Yes, But it still wasn’t as bad, and it didn’t leech so far into the mainstream as the current nonsense has.

Do I think just as much hate would have been spewed had someone named Skip Johnson or, say, John Kerry, been elected president? Absolutely.

You know racism is present, but you don’t think it adds to the paranoia and vitriol? Yes, there were people who hated Clinton because of his politics, but there are people who feel some inherent level of discomfort or even outright hatred towards Obama because of his race. You honestly think that hasn’t caused more people to hop on board the stupidity wagon?

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1917525,00.html

But it’s not really nihilism, either. It’s making everything else secondary to ideology.

Racism was present also in some of the voting patterns for Clinton during the primary. Does that mean Clinton’s campaign was about racism? Absolutely not. Does it mean the Democrats who supported Clinton were racist? Some, maybe. But not most. It just means that racism is present in the US and will raise its ugly head in a lot of issues.

There are people who are genuinely afraid of Obama, on a gut-level that is irrational to the point of, perhaps, not being curable. There are people who despise Obama only because he is biracial. There are others who despise him for his policies. And there are those who are happily pushing the paranoia because it suits their ideology.

This is a conversation we should have had last year. But most of us, I think, were wary of being the first to say: “Yup, he’s black, now what does that mean, and let’s rip the bandage off all at once.”

Cyberlizard is spot-on: Some of us have nuanced ourselves into incoherence, because we don’t want to offend.

Birthers, deathers, whatever — at their core, they’re bigots. And we have to acknowledge it, even though we’re afraid what that might teach us about ourselves.