From Reform to DEform

From Alternet.org on the Administration's wavering stance on a public insurance option:

Startlingly, the clearest signal that the administration is preparing to jettison the public option came from Obama himself. Speaking at a town hall event in Colorado, the President referred to the public plan as merely a "sliver" of his reform agenda and said: "The public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of healthcare reform."

On this, Obama is right. The public option has already been so dumbed-down and neutered that it is little more than a sliver. The problem is that it may be the only sliver of real reform in his program.

[...]

That's because the "reforms" currently under consideration threaten to undermine Medicare and Medicaid -- with radical cost-cutting schemes -- while steering hundreds of billions in federal dollars into the accounts of for-profit insurers and the pharmaceutical industry.

This is not "change we can believe in." This is change that serious reformers will find "very difficult" to support, as Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, said Sunday on CNN. Johnson explained that progressives would have a tough time backing legislation that did not include a public option.

[...]

Congresswoman Johnson is exactly right. Without a robust public option, what the Obama administration and compromised Democrats in the House and Senate are talking about is not "health care reform."

It is "health care deform" that does not begin to address the crisis created by insurance industry profiteering -- and that could well make the "cure" worse than the disease.

Read it all right here.

The only reason why it appears that a substantial portion of the population is against a public option, and furthermore a nationalized health care system, is because just enough misinformed and dishonest people are so much louder and in-your-face than the rest of the people who disagree with them and know better.

Anyone who is really disgusted by the lack of progress that is thus far being made by this supposed "liberal" administration ought to GET LOUDER than our deranged counterparts at the town hall meetings. These people are not evil, they're not necessarily stupid, and they're not our enemies. It's not them we need to yell at, it's the Administration we need to reach. We've got to be louder than the people who are closest to Obama who have been keeping him corporate since his campaign started; we've got to be louder than the corporate owned pundits in the "liberal" media who are controlling the debate in such a dishonest fashion. We don't have to punch people at town hall meetings, but we may have to get punched. We ought to be yelling at Democrats as well, but we ought to be yelling the truth and telling them what the true majority of Americans want. We've got to be calling their offices every week and putting in our two progressive liberal cents just as much as the ditto heads are doing now with their chain email false-facts. They are an angry mob of people who have been lied to their whole lives; we can call them stupid all we want but we can't ignore the fact that they are actually having an impact on PUBLIC POLICY!

Let's GET LOUDER.