I haven't posted in a while. I've been trying to keep the insulation in the walls, I guess. I'm pissed off about the health care con job, and my furniture agrees with me. I wrote a rant today and decided to post it. I'm no Plutonium Jones or whatever, but I'm trying.

Contact your senator and congressional rep today, and tell them how you feel, unless you want to tell them they are a Nazi born in Kenya, in which case never mind.

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The issue of moving the goal posts in defining a reasonable compromise to get a health care bill passed—first it was giving up on single payer health care and now it is casting the public insurance option aside—has already been effectively refuted as an effective strategy by recent Republican obstructionist responses.

Let’s remember that single payer is demonstrably not some fringe utopian ideal, but a reasonable, valid method for reform of the American health care system. Every other civilized country has it already. Yet the Democrats in both houses took single payer off the table and compromised from the very beginning of the debate on a health care reform bill. Our legislators replaced single payer with a discussion of a public insurance alternative to compete with the megainsurance companies that are currently our only option, and thereby control skyrocketing costs.

For context, health insurance profits are up 1000 percent over the past five years- ONE_THOUSAND!-, partly from a 300-percent increase in average premiums, and the rest from denial of payment of normal fees for service. If you have frequently been refused payment for reasonable care by your insurance company, or reimbursed at far below your actual cost, you are far from alone. Now  the debate has passed to compromising on the public option and settling for health insurance co-ops.

Many pundits puts forth the option of co-ops as the definitive solution to the dilemma, but then later acknowledge—and this is significant—that the Republican senators and the Blue Dog Dems in fact and in the end oppose them too. For anyone fuzzy on what a co-op would be, here's an analogy: If the major insurance companies are Bank of America, the co-op would be your local credit union. As Bob Herbert said in his NY Times column "Forget about the nonprofit cooperatives. That’s like sending peewee footballers up against the Super Bowl champs."

The problem is that a co-op of sufficient size to negotiate effectively with the hospitals and drug companies for favorable rates would need to have so many enrollees that it would arguably and effectively be the public option; and any smaller would be laughed out of the room. We are in a sad state of affairs when Chuck Grassley, the lead negotiator for the Republicans on this issue from his seat on the Senate Finance Committee, acknowledges that even if he had the chance to write a bill to his specifications, he would have to vote against it because the Republican line is to oppose any reform measures at all. Their final answer is no to anything concrete, but they favor reform in the abstract. Whatever.

Wake up folkies: with a 60-seat majority in the Senate, an advantage of fifty seats in the House, and their president in the Oval Office, the Dems could pass any bill they wanted, including single payer. They could tell the obstructionist Republicans to go f**k themselves and push a bill through on their own. But they don't want to. Why? They're thinking about 2010. If they actually tried to pass such a bill, they know the insurance companies would punish them by donating to their opponents in local races. This is the problem with selling off the government to private industry and lobbyists: it's hard to get it back when you need it.

Call to Action: If you want the public option, you need to send an email or letter to your representatives in the Senate and the Congress TODAY. Tell them you are a voter in their district, and the public option is non-negotiable with you. Tell them that how they vote on this will affect how YOU vote in the next election. They are getting enormous pressure from lobbyists and even their own leadership—I’m looking at you Rahm Emmanuel, you Machiavellian prick—to compromise on the public option; make them feel the heat coming from the other direction to hold the line.