Hear that sound?

It's the sound of our chances of getting good, single-payer health care with a workable system for all Americans being sucked out of reach.

Have you heard about this yet?

The Obama Administration is doing the right thing--to an extent--in going along with the health care community's promis to cut 1 trillion dollars from their costs.

Actually, what happened is that the health care community--hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical and insurance companies--all got together when they realized the kind of clout President Obama has right now, due to his election and goodwill with the American public and said we'll cut our costs that much.

They are threatened.

They also know our health care system doesn't work and that President Obama was going to do something about it. They knew he had the backing of the American public to do something about it.

So instead of letting him do something, they pre-empted him and offered this "1 trillion dollar cost cut."

All well and good, sure.

But it's 2009.

What's to keep them from reneging on this deal?

Nothing.

What penalties are being set, to make sure they come through for us all?

None.

This buys all of them--the hospitals, the doctors, the pharmaceutical and insurance companies, all of them--time. They get time until this popularity and power the current President has blows away--as they know it will. It's inevitable.

Right now, President Obama is at the height of his popularity and power and they know it.

This gives them the ability to delay any meaningful cuts in our health care costs, all with the idea and promise that they'll do just that, until he's dragged down by W's war for oil and the financial mess the US and the world is in and everything else that's on our national plate.

But they won't follow through on this completely and effectively and this will all come to nothing.

If not forced--and right now, no one's talking force--nothing will happen. They'll hold down their cost increases for a while and then later go back to business as usual and we won't get the health care solutions we need.

Health care will continue to just be for the wealthier of us and it will grow worse.