We Must Demand The Medicare Option Be Put Back In Health Care Bill

Don't you think it's time we started DEMANDING what we the people
want, instead of meekly and mutely rolling over while corporate
special interests have their way with us? The only thing that would
make the health care so-called reform bill more of a cruel farce
would be for the NRA to slip in a provision permitting loaded assault
weapons in hospitals.

Anything that might have actually made a real difference has been
systematically excluded or stripped out of the bill, killed off by a
lethal combination of weak-minded liberals too timid to fight for
their constituents and stubbornly corrupt industry quislings on the
other side. And those are just the Democrats (not that the
Republicans are any better). In early December they were talking for
a moment about allowing people younger than 65 to buy into Medicare.
That was before they moved with breathtaking speed to try to kill off
any hope of that either.

The Medicare buy-in option must be put back in the bill. This is
non-negotiable. This is our demand and we're sticking to it. When
will we have more votes? If not now, when?

Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1025.php

For almost an entire year Congress has been lulling us with the
promise that in the end there would be a robust public option. And
for just as long we have been telling you that it was all a knowing
willful LIE. With every alert we told you the so-called public option
was never anything more than a languaging trick, to get people to
stop talking about single payer, a way to get progressives to
preemptively compromise, only to be cheated out of even a feeble
public option in the end.

That's exactly what Nancy Pelosi said today. The senior House
leadership is prepared to surrender any public option of any kind in
exchange for a handful of legislative mumbles, some OTHER way to hold
insurance companies accountable. Oh, please, slap us on the wrist
with a wet noodle. Except that the one and ONLY thing that would
actually hold them to account would be real competition from a
righteous, low overhead public program, just like we have in Medicare
right now!!

To all of those who wrote and argued to us, "No, we have to
compromise our principles, we can't stand up for what we believe in,
we have to surrender now and hope to make it better later," that's
what you said. What has your capitulation got you? What are we left
with now but a total corporate takeover of our public health care
system, every American forced to buy corporate insurance or pay a
federal penalty. NOW do you believe us?

Well, believe us now also when we tell you that the game is not only
not over, it has not yet even BEGUN. This bill is destined to be the
most DESPISED piece of legislation in American political history, and
woe unto the political future of any member of Congress who does not
jump up howling about this bill. But in the first instance, that is
what we must do ourselves. Jump up howling and keep howling.

Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1025.php

Our singular message is this: Put the Medicare buy in back in the
bill. We will be pumping out the alerts on this as fast as we can all
this month. But somehow YOU folks have got to find a way to generate
at least a million messages to Congress, by mobilizing everyone you
know to speak out like never before. And that's just for openers.

Please take careful note, BOTH of the Action Page links above lead to
the regular, standard action page. But at the same time we recognize
that to win we must ALSO engage the social media infrastructure that
already exists. For those of you who are not on Facebook and under no
circumstances could ever be persuaded to look at Facebook, please
STOP reading now.

For Facebook Participants ONLY:

For the rest of you, we told you two years ago, when we developed
Voices, our action page application for Facebook, that we could
change the world with Facebook alone. At that time they had about 50
million participants. That number is now up to 350 million, and they
are now the biggest social media network there is, 3 times bigger
than MySpace. There are totally frivolous GAME applications on
Facebook now with 75 million users. That's more people than it takes
to elect a president of the United States.

We have gigantic mobilization plans for Facebook, but the first thing
we need all of you to do, if you are on Facebook already, is to get
your OWN Voices application tab on your own profile page, a new
capability they just made possible. This is what will enable you to
watch and submit action pages over there and to mobilize and alert
all your friends to do the same. You can even create your own action
pages on any issue you care about. You can put the Voices application
tab right on your own personal profile page, just as Democrats.com
has already done.

http://www.facebook.com/democratscom?v=app_2370152746

So if you are already on Facebook, go to the link above, check out
what the application does, and most importantly, click on "Get
Application Tab" in the menu at the top for quick and easy
instructions on getting your own Voices tab for your profile page.
Three simple steps. Do it now. When you submit an action you can
automatically alert all your friends. Why aren't we taking more
advantage of this built in mobilization engine?? Now we are.

And lastly, if you are a PC Game designer or especially an artist who
can do that kind of graphics, we need to hear from you immediately.
We have a vision of a way to make policy activism a fun and
irresistably engaging obsession for the average person, not just the
usual activist suspects. This could be really magical. If you have
such talents, we need to hear from you now.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at
http://www.millionfaxmarch.com/in.htm

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Mahatma Gandhi quotes (Indian Philosopher, internationally esteemed for his doctrine of nonviolent protest, 1869-1948)

we are going to win. Failure is impossible.

Lots of people are demanding lots of things. Demanding ain't getting.

gathering info from all of my friends, etc. How intrusive is this? I'm not quite sure what I would be agreeing to.

you can just sign on without doing anything else.

at the bottom of the page. They're collecting email addresses, even if you don't submit a form. What are they doing with them, I wonder?

"You are hereby advised and put on express notice that any input in the form of individual email addresses, lists of email addresses, or raw text, may be transmitted immediately to THE PEN for parsing and database storage, whether the form containing those input elements is finally submitted by you or not. "

My emphasis.


Now, what is that but an email collection scam? Seriously. I had to dig through the terms of service to discover that the site is simply collecting emails. What are they doing with those? That doesn't seem to appear in the document. And even if you don't submit the form? Wow!

Sorry...not a chance. I already get plenty of spam.