Sick and Tired

OK, just for those of you who might be flagging a bit in support of the President. 

Do you remember 2009?  The President began the effort to reform Health Care Insurance.  The Democrats had a solid majority in the House and Senate.  The Single Payer was in the working bill, that was moving briskly through the House and Senate. 

Then Teddy Kennedy died.  The archaic and manipulated filibuster rule,  already was allowing the Republicans to block much of what the President was trying to do from 2008 to 2009.  But when Kennedy died, this played right into their hands, giving them with Scott Brown's unfortunate election to the Senate, 41 votes, that could stop Democrats from getting the 60 needed to end the filibusters in the Senate.

Remember?  Remember how we all could not believe that a Party with only 41 votes out of 100 could virtually stop much needed reform.

And they did.  A version of the bill had been passed earlier in both the House and the Senate, without the Single Payer option in it.  So, in desperation to save the Bill, Democrats reconciled the two bills, legally avoiding the certain Senate filibuster that would have killed it, and succeeded in getting the Affordable Care Act into law.

This was without the single payer option, which would have set up the federal government as a virtual insurance company, who could have offered health insurance plans similar to Medicare, that definitely would have kept private insurance companies honest, spurred competition, and more that likely, made the law an easy  success.

But, it had been almost a hundred years trying, for a "universal health care law" to be passed into law in the United States; so Democrats gambled that the ACA without the single payer would work.  After all, it worked in Massachusetts. 

Our country was and is being bankrupted by greedy insurance companies, a health care industry out of control, resulting in sky high costs, 50 million uninsured, and a mess of health care; ranking as the most expensive in the world, and the least effective among all the industrialized nations.

And, the law that finally was signed, was almost exactly like the plan in Massachusetts, that ironically the 2012 Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, had compromised into existence in a liberal state.  In fact, Teddy Kennedy had worked with Romney in accomplishing the feat of the first comprehensive health care reform in history in the United States.

Then, the Republican Party went nuts.  Greedy insurance companies, who for once had actually failed to lobby universal health care coverage away, fought back, with a publicity campaign oriented around the "Tea Party", a quasi-grass roots organization, that fought to repeal the ACA.

This has been going on now for two years, BEFORE the law goes into effect in January 2014. 

And it has been a excruciating battle, with the Republican Party losing the 2012 presidential election in a kamikaze effort to repeal the law, costing Mitt Romney any chance to win the Presidency.

Recently we have witnessed a governmental shutdown, in a desperate attempt to stop the law.  And now, as the law in implemented, EVERY bump in the road is seized up as proof that it is a "disaster" and "train wreck"; etc.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, who has virtually the same law, 97 percent of the state's population now are  covered by affordable health care insurance, using the private enterprise system as the delivery modality, with no public option.

In short, it works. 

Now, will it work in the long run, under constant attack from greedy insurance companies who fight governmental regulation at every turn?  This remains to be seen.

What is certain, is  a political party has staked its future on repealing the federal law, at all costs. 

The Republican Party will not quit until it is either destroyed, or destroys the  ACA; and may destroy the nation in the process.   

This is Civil War type obsession, and I am sick and tired of it.  So sick and tired that I find myself saying, thinking selfishly since I am now covered by Medicare, the hell with it. 

But then I think of my daughter's family, who will be covered under the ACA and right now do not have health insurance.  This is a young family of four, who are rolling the dice every day that nobody gets sick. This is a family, whose grandmother died early of breast cancer.

This ends my sick and tired feeling.  This makes me willing to fight, even physically if need be, to get a universal health care system either kept, and certainly improved in this country.

I have and will in the future lose friends over this; I don't care.  The greedy, selfishness of my fellow Americans that the endless ACA debate uncovers, makes me sick. 

Our country is ill.  It is afflicted with a me first attitude, crystallized in the Republican Party disaster of non-leadership, that supports the fat cat insurance industry, who does not care if people live or die.

So I will continue fighting the bastards who are working so hard to destroy our country.