Olbermann’s call to Action: a Photo Essay

( – promoted by On The Bus)

Hopefully you saw Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on the sorry state of the Health Insurance System in American. And hopefully, you were moved to action, like I was. There’s still time to pony up, if it slipped your mind. Let’s give Keith some ammo when he resumes the fight next week.

DONATE HERE: National Association of Free Clinics

as linked on Countdown’s home page

Time is a task-master, that waits for no one,

We can only heed its call, as it marches, inexorably forward …

Hopefully we will find compassion, as we turn its pages.

If you missed the Special Comment, read on for some of the highlights …

Olbermann Healthcare Special Comment

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Olbermann Healthcare Special Comment Part5

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? How fast would they rush their portable podiums to the driveways outside the emergency rooms?

How quickly would the money come?

Transcript

Photo Art by Stephen Hansen

Death panels? We have them now. They’re called WellPoint and Cigna and United Health Care and all the rest. Ask not for whom the insurance company’s cash register bell tolls. It tolls for thee. What you and I might able to do about all this, when my Special Comment continues.

Transcript

What do we do?

[…]

Afford to live? Are we at that point? Are we so heartless that we let the rich live and the poor die and everybody in between become wracked with fear – fear not of disease but of Deductibles?

Right now, right now, somebody’s father is dying because they don’t have that dollar to spend. And the means by which the playing field is leveled, and the costs that are just as inflated to me as they are to you are reduced, and the money that I don’t have to spend any more on saving my father can go instead to saving your father that’s called health care reform!

Death is the issue! How can we NOT be unified against death?

[…]

Spend our money, spend my money, first: on the chance to live!

Transcript

And we must be unanimous in this, not to achieve some political triumph for one side against the other, but to save the man or the woman or the child who will be dead by morning, in this country, in this century, on our watch, because we are not spending that money tonight. I will not settle for a compromise bill and I will extend my hand to those who are scared of the inevitability of death but have been told they are scared of reform, those who have been exploited by the others, paid, or forced, to defend the status quo.

And we must recognize the enemy here: an enemy capable of perverting reform meant for you and me, into its own ATM that mandates only that more of us become the slaves to the insurance companies.

Transcript

Ordinarily the solution would be obvious: we would have to do it for the government. We would have to bring the insurance companies to their knees to organize, to pick a date, to say enough to, at a given hour, on a given day, to stop paying the premiums. An Insurance Strike.

But the insurance companies’ stranglehold on us is so complete that lives would be risked, lives would be lost by the very act of protest. What parent could risk the cancellation of their child’s insurance? What adult could risk giving his insurer the chance to claim that everything wrong with him on the day of an Insurance Strike was suddenly a pre-existing condition?

Transcript

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.

I’ll donate. How much will you donate? We enable thousands of our neighbors to have just a portion of the bounty of good health, and we make a statement to the politicians

[…]

We are united in membership in the party that insists on the right of everyone to the startling, transcendent blessings of the technological advance of medical science. We are united in membership in the party that is for life, that is against death, that is for lower premiums, that is against higher deductibles, that is for the peace of mind that can be provided only by the elimination of the fear that cost will decide whether we live or we die!

Transcript

What a concept:

We are united in membership in the party that is for life, that is against death

Do we, do we as a Party, as a Country, “stand for Life”?

Who steps up, to help, when we are at our greatest need?

The Insurance Lobby, your Congress person, your Neighbor?

The pain, he said, “made me want to die.” And Dr. Albert Sabin suddenly remembered that the stopping of the Salk Vaccine experiments had led to death. Death of children. More immediately, it had led to pain, physical and emotional, for the children, and the parents.

He said it had not occurred to him that the first thing doctors must do, the first thing a health care system must do, is stop pain. He vowed to spend the rest of his life relieving pain.

Transcript