Enough!

There is a life-and-death struggle to obtain meaningful healthinsurance reform in this country as the Senate Finance Committee is poised to vote today on the Health Care Bill proposed by Committee Chairman Sen. Max Baucus (D/MT).

The debate on the bill intensified over the weekend after some insurance industry analysts (lobbyists) released a frightening report that alleges everyone's insurance premiums would go through the roof if Congress passed the legislation.It is reminiscent of the Bush Administration's dire warnings that America would face deadlier terror attacks if we did not invade Iraq. Or if we stopped torturing detainees. Or if we stopped detaining them indefinitely.Or if we did not pass the Patriot Act. Or if we failed to escalate the "terror wars" by throwing more of our troops into the meat grinder.

Scare tactics that go for the gut and/or the malleable brainstem of your average Fox "News" fanatic:It's what the NeoCons do best, whether in the insurance industry or the Bush Crime Family. It wasn't enough to fill our fertile imaginations with images of our frail grandmas being death-marched to suicide centers, or tiny babies being slaughtered by the dozens because they were born with minor genetic defects. That wasn't sufficiently scary.

Not even batty Michele Bachmann's wild-eyed call to action to "slit our wrists" to stop health care reform, or Glenn Beck's frantic white-board scribbling and mad-man ravings that the "Nazi" Obama wanted to "take your arteries, your valves and your pancreas" effectively convinced us that we needed to continue to suffer and die under the current system. Despite their best efforts, many Americans-- even the addled and patheticFox "News" viewers-- realized we needed a better plan.

So they called out the Big Dogs. The A-Team of fearmongering. The Insurance Industry. They called their pals at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and posted this report . . .

The insurance industry group, which represents Aetna Inc, Cigna Corp, UnitedHealth Group Inc, WellPoint Inc and others, defended the report, saying lawmakers have abandoned any effort to slow healthcare costs.

Instead, the bill looks to raise money from insurance companies and, ultimately consumers and employers, to help pay for healthcare costs that outpace wages each year, the group's president Karen Ignagni told reporters.

A Finance Committee aide called the report "blatantly false and misleading."

A spokesman for Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus said the report "excludes all the provisions that will actually lower the cost of coverage," including tax credits and an increased enrollment. "This is a self-serving analysis from the insurance industry, one of the major opponents of health insurance reform," White House spokesman Reid Cherlin said. "It comes on the eve of a vote that will reduce the industry's profits. It is hard to take it seriously," he added.

Sadly, the current crop of timid Democrats seem ill-prepared for this battle, despite their majority in Congress and a Democratic President in the White House. What kind of majority do they need to stop trembling in the corners and come out and fight for the right of all Americans to have affordable access to health careinsurance? President Obama has debunked the lies and called out their scare tactics over and over again; what are they waiting for now?

Haven't we suffered this nonsense enough? Have we not been scared enough over the years by these various goons? So many of us live in fear that we-- or our children, or our parents-- will die from an illness, injury, or disease simply because we cannot afford the treatment necessary for survival.

The monstrous insurance industry has reaped billions upon billions of our dollars keeping us in this fear state, forcing us to accept a system based on illness rather than health, where the worth of every human life is measured by the crooked red-line on their profit-and-loss flow charts. We are not human beings to these ghouls; we are financial liabilities-- or assets. And for far too long they have determined whether we live or die based on their cold little calculators.

The insurance companiesthemselves have becomea monumentalthreat to the health and well-being of average Americans.

This threat must be ended.