Health Care Desperation

(9 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Recently, with what is seemingly the whole political world anxiously awaiting the outcome of the so-called reform of health care in America, I’ve started to feel desperate, lonely, and hopeless.  And I’m as far from a teabagger as you can get!

If you’ve got two eyes and a brain, it’s impossible not to see that the corporate domination of our government is ruining any chance of true universal health care coming out of the “Obamacare” bill.  Pharmaceutical companies, the insurance industry, and their partners-in-crime shoved single-payer off the table and now they’re trying to do the same with the public option, a kind of single-payer-lite that is the last hope of many progressives for decent reform.  Obama and a majority of the Democrats in Congress have not been able to stand up to special interests enough to really protect the interests of the American people.  And perhaps they don’t want to.

Originally posted at Greenchange.org

According to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone,

The reason a real health-care bill is not going to get passed is simple: because nobody in Washington really wants it. There is insufficient political will to get it done. It doesn’t matter that it’s an urgent national calamity, that it is plainly obvious to anyone with an IQ over 8 that our system could not possibly be worse and needs to be fixed very soon, and that, moreover, the only people opposing a real reform bill are a pitifully small number of executives in the insurance industry who stand to lose the chance for a fifth summer house if this thing passes.

It won’t get done, because that’s not the way our government works. Our government doesn’t exist to protect voters from interests, it exists to protect interests from voters. The situation we have here is an angry and desperate population that at long last has voted in a majority that it believes should be able to pass a health care bill. It expects something to be done. The task of the lawmakers on the Hill, at least as they see things, is to create the appearance of having done something. And that’s what they’re doing.

After weeks of being enveloped by the words of either inane Beltway pundits or more reality-based yet pessimistic journalists like Taibbi, I’ve been getting overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness.  Look at the control that corporations exert over our politics.  It’s not just health care, it’s any situation in which there’s a profit to be made.  Congress’ agreement to cancel new orders for dysfunctional (and already over-produced) F-22 bombers was hailed as a huge success by politicians who went head on against the military industrial complex, yet this year’s military budget still increased from last year.  On the banking front, one just needs to look to Democratic Senator Dick Durbin’s comments that they “own the place” when he was working against them.  Especially when you consider that Durbin is a mainstream Democrat and far from the most anti-corporate member of Congress, it becomes clear that our government is owned not just by the banks, but by all the various industries that can afford lobbyists.

And so I’ve started to feel alone and distressed in my political endeavors.  But then I realized that during the time I was feeling that way, I hadn’t really undertaken any significant political efforts.  Sure, I had been browsing blogs and perusing print media, but I hadn’t gone out into the real world and done any hands-on work to loosen the iron grip of business on our government and lives.

I was driving myself to desperation by not taking control of the situation, and I decided to change that.  I got an email today announcing that the Green Party of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania will be meeting on September 10th.  If you live near Montgomery County I hope to see you there, and maybe I can tell you about how this year I’m helping to start a community garden and a recycling program at my school.  Maybe I’ll be able to tell you about how I helped myself out of a political stupor by helping others.