I did not see the Keith Olbermann Special Comment sermon on Healthcare Reform last night when it was first aired.  I admire Olbermann and agree with many of his positions but had grown tired of the “worst person” segments and just started watching Rachel Maddow and Ed instead.  I know Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are idiot blowhards so I don’t listen to them.  I did not need Olbermann to tell me what I already knew night after night.  He was preaching to the choir.

 Rachel Maddow recommended the special comment so I set the DVR to record it at 2 a.m. when infomercials rule.

Thus the version I watched this morning was anchored by the Lee Majors Bionical Rechargable Hearing Aid infomercial.  Elderly frightened people who would buy Lee Majors’ bullshit product are also buying into anti-public-option scare tactics.

Here is a link to that special comment.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33213245/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann/

I have not been to church in awhile so this was the first sermon I have listened to in awhile.  It is a good sermon based on hard facts and sad experience.  And it is quite definitely intended to be a sermon since elderly people afraid of death tend to fill those front pews of the church.

Olbermann nails it when he declares that the hysteria around healthcare reform is not really about healthcare reform but about fear of death.

I get that. Sorry to keep pulling out this cancer card but I am writing from bed this morning.   If one believes in statistics I probably won’t be here five years from now. But some people beat the odds.  I saw signs saying that could happen when I was in Vegas.

The very successful cancer treatment I had to save my life seems to have weakened my immune system—dumping poison into the body every week for a year killed cancer but other stuff as well. Thus in three days allergies produced bronchitis which brought on asthma.  So I have to lie here and rest until I can move and breathe again. Does not mean I can’t sit here and type and think.  If I forget about the fear of death all I have to do is get up and walk around 10 minutes until I can’t breathe. That makes you think about death right quick.

Not changing the healthcare system is not going to keep us from dying.  Not changing the healthcare system will mean we all die in more expensive ways.

Here are some points Olbermann made that I appreciated.

Do those other people in this country have meaning to you, or are they just extras in your movie, backgrounds in your painting, choruses in your solo?

Olbermann closes with these recommendations.

So I propose tonight one act with two purposes. I propose we, all of us, embrace the selfless individuals at the National Association of Free Clinics. You know them, they conducted the mass health care free clinic in Houston that served 1,500 people. I want a mass health care free clinic every week in the principle cities of the states of the six senators key to defeating a filibuster against health care reform in the Senate. 

I want Sens. Lincoln and Pryor to see what health care poverty is really like in Little Rock. I want Sen. Baucus to see it in Butte. I want Sen. Ben Nelson to see it in Lincoln. I want Sen. Landro to see it in Baton Rouge. I want Sen. Reid to see it in Las Vegas.

What movie are you starring in Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor and the other Senators holding up health reform?  How would the mentors who preceded Lincoln and Pryor in those jobs have voted on this issue?   I believe Dale Bumpers and David Pryor are still alive.  Call them up and ask for some advice.  Surely you have your father’s phone number Mark? As I remember he had a soft heart for the elderly and the poor and the immigrants when he was in office.

Olbermann has more faith in politicians than me and that was rather surprising.

How would our politicians react if there were millions Americans in pain, getting insufficient care to relieve that pain, because of interference from insurance corporations and those millions had just been injured in a natural disaster, or an attack on this country?

That happened already.  It was called Hurricane Katrina and many of those politicians did not react at all just as they are not reacting at all to this healthcare crisis.

Why?  The New Orleans residents who died as a result of Hurricane Katrina were overwhelmingly poor, old, and black.

Who needs trifling people like that anyway? 

The more things change the more they stay the same.

I spent a lot of time in a cancer hospital with people one of my friends described as “not needing masks for Halloween.”  Olbermann saw something similar when he was in a cancer hospital.

A man walking out of another hospital, casual, purposeful, in control. The red stitches on the left side of his shaved head outlining a space as big as a large potato and at least an inch higher than the rest of his skull. I don't know if he was getting better or he was getting worse. I don't know if he had gotten good news or bad. I don't know if tonight he's healthy, or he's dead.

Such sights are a dime a dozen in such hospitals.  Just hang around the waiting room of the radiology ward.  I used to.

Olbermann ran into someone at the hospital.

And it's a man, roughly my age, and he looks worried to death. And I haven't seen him in 32 years. He was the nephew of the two brothers from Brooklyn who used to run the baseball card shows when we were both kids, and his uncles were the businessmen but he, like me, collected mostly for the fun of it, and it's amazing to see him again, joyous almost, for the sake of the continuity that the accident of us running into each other provides to us both. And he asks what I'm doing there and I tell him and he smiles because my father used to go to those card shows with me and Mike remembers him. And then I ask Mike why he's there.

"My daughter's in ICU," he says. "Three weeks now." The worried look returns to his face. "Lyme Disease. It's one thing, they knock it down, then it's another." There's a brief pause.

"Tomorrow I have to sell my farm. Did you know I had a farm?" I don't have to ask him why he's selling it. He then goes the next step. "Hey, you wanna buy my card collection? I've got some great stuff."

We must reform a system that lets my father get better care than yours does, or better care than Mike's daughter does, because by the accident of life, I make more money than he does, or my checkbook can hold out longer than his does, or yours does, as the bills come endlessly like some evil version of the enchanted water buckets in Fantasia.

I will get out of bed soon and go to the kitchen for a Vanilla Coke.  Just for today I will call that kitchen table Fantasia because there were at least three bills related to medical expenses there before I went to bed.

This is the rhetorical question I have to close my sermon.

What do you have to sell to pay for health coverage if you lose insurance or your coverage is denied?

Apparently Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor are willing to sell their souls.

Yeah.  I said it.

Give bionical Lee a call.