While the health care bill's strongest defenders are bragging that they can save a hundred dollars or whatever, America continues to pay . . . continues to pay . . . CONTINUES to pay more than twice as much as any developed first world country in the world for their health care. These are chump corporate discounts, folks, for anyone with the integrity to admit it.

::::::::

(Article changed on October 5, 2013 at 04:19)

Republicans seem determined to scuttle the entire economy to try to stop a healthcare bill that a government shutdown would to absolutely nothing to stop. How stupid is that? The new health care exchanges are already operational and now are the responsibility of the individual states.

Give Us Our Government Back Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1138.php

Given that the Republicans have argued the health care bill would hurt the economy, no amount of slick tested talking points can disguise the fact that they are going out of their way to hurt the economy themselves, and for no productive reason.

We, the American people say, if the Republicans have a better health care bill to propose let them put it forward and at least have one vote on it, instead of umpteen grandstanding photo-op votes on killing the health care bill not only passed by Congress, but endorsed by the Supreme Court.

Otherwise, give us our government back now.

Give Us Our Government Back Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1138.php

Other than the fact that what the Republicans are doing is beyond reprehensible, frankly, we haven't got a single kind word to say about the so-called affordable care act itself. It's nothing at its heart but a giant privatization of our national health care, a huge government handout directly into the hands of the corporate health care industry that is itself the entire problem.

We said so when it was being passed over out strenuous objections, and we have the integrity to continue to speak the truth now.

We know there are a lot of "progressives" out there loudly and energetically trying to defend the health care bill, trying to brush over all this, and we see it as nothing but partisanship.

The problem the Republican's have is not that the bill isn't right wing enough for them. In fact, the bill tracks closely a proposal of that bastion of progressive political policy theory . . . the Heritage Foundation. And they lost the last presidential election mostly because they nominated the one guy, the father of Romney-Care, who was in no position to criticize the bill.

There is a case to be made against the health care bill, but it's the case that it is not only not progressive enough, its not progressive at all. Indeed, it expressly includes a provision to make it against the law for any state to institute a competing single payer plan for at least a couple more years, to allow the corporate health care industry time to establish a permanent and insurmountable institutional monopoly.

So despite the lame attempt of the right wing to turn the President's name into a pejorative description of the bill, what it is in fact instead is Humana-Care, it is Sigma-Care, it is special interest corporate health care and nothing else.

While the bill's strongest defenders are bragging that they can save a hundred dollars or whatever, America continues to pay . . . continues to pay . . . CONTINUES to pay more than twice as much as any other developed first world country in the world for their health care. These are chump corporate discounts, folks, for anyone with the integrity to admit it.

So when the political history of the last five years is accounted for, it will be written that Americans had a chance for true generational change. But too many were willing to settle for chump change. And that's all we got . . . chump change.

And so it will be until enough people stand up and demand more. And for our part, we'll be manning the barricades of internet activism until they do.

Authors Bio:

The Pen is a real person, and the creator of UTalk, a revolutionary new internet radio interface, to make advocacy messages as facile and easy as possible. With this goal in mind we pioneered one click action pages in the political realm, now imitated by virtually all other action sites on the internet.

The premise behind the resource has always been twofold. If people are speaking out to their members of Congress in sufficient numbers one of two things MUST happen. 1) Either our representatives will heed the voices of their constituents and we will have the policy change we want, or 2) People will personally experience being ignored by their members of Congress, and then we have a base of people motivated to seek their replacement.

Last year we also added to its resource options fax sending capability, so that messages can be sent by fax to recipients who might not be reachable by web input form or regular email.

Besides our own action alerts and pages, many other activist groups have been set up with their own action page creators, including building this capability into the writer article submission interface for OpEdNews itself, to empower them in their own policy missions. And all of these services are provided for absolutely no charge to anyone, supported only by whatever kind donations individuals choose to make from time to time.