Can Anyone Define Hypocrisy

Lately we have seen a racheting up of nasty rhetoric concerning the healthcare debate, particularly from media figures including Rush Limbaugh. Rush has likened the idea of universal healthcare to policies enacted by Hitler during his reign as German head of state. Obama's attempts to bring about meaningful reform in healthcare are much closer to the New Deal programs of FDR or LBJ's Great Society than anything a fascist head of state would propose.

Some on that side would argue that all that is necessary for the system to funtion is less regulation, like we saw with the banks last year. They argue that allowing companies to sell their policies across state lines will help lower costs. All we will see is companies cherry pick the states that have the least oversite and allow them greater latitude in denying coverage. In short it will get worse long before it gets anybetter. I would point out that the same people who advocate this free market approach quickly change thier tune when say the subject is importing perscription drugs from Canada and Mexico, where they will oppose this since it would prevent the Pharmacutical companies from gouging the American consumers so that they can affort the big salaries and corporate jets.

Everyone in America wants to see our economy recover, jobs created, and prosperity to resume. This can not happen, over the long term, without significant changes in how we view and pay for healthcare. The argument for single-payer, is that in the long term it would do the best job of controlling healthcare costs and improving our healthcare system.

Some of the criticism of the proposals being debated in Congress are completely false. The idea of creating a panel of doctors to look into the statistical effectivness of various treatments. The idea is to see if one treatment regime is significanlty more effective than another, and if two are bot equally effective, compare for cost. In Obama's comaprison, we have two pills, each equally effective, the red pill is 10x the cost of the blue pill, anyone here would pick blue if they were buying the pills themselves.

Some would argue that taxes would go up, and they might, but you would end up with a bigger take-home paycheck. If we went to a universal single-payer system, costs could be shared over the widest possible pool of persons. A notional tax for this would be lower than the premiums now being charged by private plans. Some people pay more for health insurance than they do for a mortgage or rent.

Get out there, get vocal and make sure that those who profit from this broken system do not succeed in preventing meaningful change.