About this health care reform Republicans hate...

Facts:

"The Republicans have made the individual mandate the element most likely to undo the President’s health-care law. The irony is that the Democrats adopted it in the first place because they thought that it would help them secure conservative support. It had, after all, been at the heart of Republican health-care reforms for two decades.
The mandate made its political début in a 1989 Heritage Foundation brief titled “Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans,” as a counterpoint to the single-payer system and the employer mandate, which were favored in Democratic circles. In the brief, Stuart Butler, the foundation’s health-care expert, argued, “Many states now require passengers in automobiles to wear seat-belts for their own protection. Many others require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance. But neither the federal government nor any state requires all households to protect themselves from the potentially catastrophic costs of a serious accident or illness. Under the Heritage plan, there would be such a requirement.” The mandate made its first legislative appearance in 1993, in the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act—the Republicans’ alternative to President Clinton’s health-reform bill—which was sponsored by John Chafee, of Rhode Island, and co-sponsored by eighteen Republicans, including Bob Dole, who was then the Senate Minority Leader.

Link to original story: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/25/120625fa_fact_klein#ixzz1yDVrKXKX

Health care situation doesn't look good

To see and hear the conversations on different news media--newspapers, television and internet--it seems clear to me that the corporations and their lobbying dollars--millions of them--are winning this fight.

Whether it's The McGlaughlin Report or The Week with George Stephanopoulos or, God forbid, of course, Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck and the Fox Network,etc., the support of the corporations comes through.

George Will and Liz Cheney, naturally, spew the lines and sound eloquent, so people might think they're correct.

And of course they're not, plainly.

Our American health care system is badly, badly broken and is financially breaking American citizen's households because we have the most expensive health care system in the world and that story is, I think, completely lost.

All these people have to do is instill fear, ala' George W. Bush's techniques, which they've clearly learned so well, and health care reform, to benefit us all, seems unlikely to pass.

Sad.

Really sad.