If you read this story from the detestable Politico, you might get a few wrong ideas.
First, you may believe that the fight to get real health care reform is all about the Democrats vs. the Republicans. But one look at the "moderate" "independent" "Blue Dog" showboats dragging down the Democrats will open anyone's eyes on that score. The real battle lines are easier to understand than party lines. This fight is between people invested in the corporate status quo and people who want to fix our health care system so that the various industry strangleholds are weakened enough so that some semblance of competition, universality, quality, efficiency and affordability is allowed to take root. That's not going to happen without a public health insurance plan option and strict federal regulation of (at the very least) the insurance industry. And low and behold, the article that's all about how the Republicans are "stumbling" makes the following point clear:
Nobody on the GOP side is waving a white flag. They think some of
Obama’s ideas, including a government-run health insurance plan, will
be such non-starters with the American people that they can recover in
time to stop them.
"Recover in time." Right. That brings us to the second wrong idea you may get from the story, which is that the GOP doesn't have a plan to obstruct health care reform. Of course they do - you're living it as you wonder if your coverage will actually cover you, or if you'll be able to afford next month's premium, or how you can afford the bills that your plan didn't cover, or a million other tribulations that are built into our failed market system. You're watching the corporatist, obstructionist plan unfold with every word you read in that Politico story and others like it.
The plan is to do nothing until the last minute and then derail the process by ginning up fear - fear of losing coverage, fear of dark-skinned people getting something for nothing, fear of the poor getting something for nothing, fear of realizing that we are all in the same boat with the poor and the dark-skinned, fear of loss of "freedom," fear of cancer and heart disease, fear of the unknown, fear of change .... It goes on and on because when you're talking about fear, you really are talking about a bottomless pit in the human psyche. The plan is evil and cowardly and the people who push it will be recorded in our history as leaders of an evil and cowardly obstructionist movement but it is a Plan. It's silly to pretend otherwise and doing so helps the obstructionists, which, probably, is the point of the story in the first place.
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