The Economic Hit Men are Knock, Knock, Knocking on our Health Care Door

Recently a group of doctors in the north announced they had rented a bus to start a tour to several states. They desperately want health care reform because they are sick and tired of being under-compensated by the insurance providers. The tour will end up in Washington, D.C. at which time they have appealed to supporters of health care reform to come out in support of their rebellion. Concurrently, the MSM constantly featured comments that Medicare will continue to deteriorate because of the low fees it pays to physicians, which apparently is resulting in more and more doctors refusing to accept it.

Simultaneously, Dick Armey materialized on Meet the Press to further scare the seniors about the proposed health care reform. He stated unequivocally that Medicare is in danger of being eliminated if some liberal national health care reformers have their way. What he conveniently forgot to mention was that it is Medicare Part D which will be reformed. That is the legislation passed during the Bush* administration which shored up so-called pharmaceutical assistance. You might recognize the term "doughnut hole" which is exactly what many seniors are railing about today, another reason Armey failed to mention the "D" part.

The Devil in Armey’s argument was in fact in the details -- as is often the case with Republicans seeking to kill health care reform.

The additional reform to Medicare itself revolves around saving money through eliminating duplicate lab tests, promoting electronic health records of patients, and cracking down on the abuse of the system by those seeking to defraud. But Armey, simply interested in the scare-the-sh*t-out-of-seniors-who love-their-Medicare part, apparently forgot to mention this as well. Armey is a promoter of the organization FreedomWorks which dispatches the professional angry protesters to town hall meetings. DLA Piper, where Armey has been working the last six years, promptly reached agreement with Armey to sever its relationship with him, which apparently puts Armey in the great ranks of the unemployed during this recession. Hope he can afford his COBRA payments.

Then there's Chuck Grassley, one of the few prominent Republicans signaling he will support President Obama's health care reform efforts stepping out last week in Iowa to a gathering of concerned citizens saying he cannot support any plan that condones throwing Grandma off the train. Speaking out of both sides of his mouth, a common Washington political phenomenon, is a maneuver Grassley exhibits with unabashed aplomb.

Elsewhere, Kathleen Sebelius stepped out to float an Obama trial balloon. The President is not opposed to co-ops she said, in lieu of a Private Plan. Most people following this debate know instantly many on the left will be outraged, and this represents a Democratic cave-in (all in the name of bipartisanship) both to the health insurers feeling threatened by competition and to the politicians who take hefty campaign contributions from those same insurers. Think Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus. The liberals responded by saying co-ops are to the Private Plan what the Boy Scouts are to the Marine Corps. The Obama Administration immediately issued a statement saying Sebelius misspoke.

The Economic Hit Men are among us.

We have read the plays in the book of the same name by John Perkins. These Economic Hit Men are silently crunching numbers (distorting and exaggerating same numbers -- read making them up as they go along) any way they can, the bottom line of which is suppose to convince the American citizen we must continue to support health care providers and the status quo or we will surely perish before the death panels. Hanging on to the perimeters are the jackals poised to step in should the economic hit men fail in their pitch to sway public opinion. So vital is winning the public relations war to the wealthiest of people in this Country -- read stockholders in the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies -- the jackals will assassinate any legitimate reform left standing at the so-called bipartisanship culmination of the reform effort, framing the White House for its failure. You will recall the failure to enact health care reform will be Obama's Waterloo (so the Republicans boast).

Morning in America is back from the days of Ronald Reagan -- the same Ronald Reagan who made the concept of greed is good simply swell to openly embrace. But the perceived sunshine actually radiating on Americans who obviously have the best health insurance in the world :sarcasm: apparently is resulting in a scorched earth health care reform.

The Ugly American has indeed grown uglier over the past few decades since that book was published, but in Washington, D.C. that man more often than not is simply the man in the political mirror.

And tomorrow it is expected the fight really starts to get ugly ....

Thank you for the 7 recs, but I would like to keep this thread on the front page of this forum for the next 24 hours. I was extremely angry last night (blood boiling) about the public option controversy, and I have been working very hard to write this and tweak it before posting.

If you have had an opportunity to read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, you too probably can see the plays the international corporations and private contractors utilize in developing countries in play here and now. The American public is ripe for the picking, and the Economic Hit Men have turned their attention to health care and pharmaceutical profits. How dare we think that actual health care should be not for profit when they have so many investors and bureaucrats reaping huge salaries and bonuses from our ever-increasing premiums and rapidly plunging payouts by the insurers themselves?

Let's call these politicians standing up and opposing health care reform what they are -- just another version of the Economic Hit Man loose within our domestic domain.

Please keep my thread kick for a few hours and comment if you are so inclined. I thank you for your help.

Sam