Tonight, my loving and lovely wife of close to 43 years told me she was angry. She said it had become just too much for her that both Houses of Congress had “taken single payer off the table.” She knows, of course, that a majority of Americans favor single payer. And she also knows that many centrist Democrats and the Republican Party in Congress have been bought and paid for by Health Insurance industry campaign contributions. She’s furious at that. She doesn’t care about the nuances of a public option. She doesn’t care about insurance company profits, or even about their continued existence, and she doesn’t see why any real Democrats should care about that either, after all the years they’ve been denying coverage and claims, and driving people into bankruptcy. And she doesn’t see why the Democratic Party should continue to exist if it can’t, out of concern for the insurance companies, or the Republicans, or the conservative Democrats, pass a single payer plan this year.
She and I will be watching closely to see how our two Democratic Senators Jim Webb and Mark Warner and our Congressmen, Jim Moran behave on health care reform legislation. We want them to take a pledge to vote “no” on any health care reform legislation that doesn’t contain at least a strong public option. If they don’t take this pledge, we’ve had it with them. We’ll vote for anyone who primaries them in the next election, and we’ll vote for any progressive third party that runs a candidate against them. We’ll not vote anymore for people who run as Democrats, and then refuse to vote for legislation favored by the heavy majority of the Democratic Party they’re supposed to represent.
A footnote to this, and another reason for my wife’s anger, is that Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana) recently admitted That the Administration is against single payer and that’s why it’s “off the table.” We knew this, but the bald confirmation from Baucus underlined the role of Obama’s misplaced strategy in creating a situation where there isn’t even an official CBO estimate of the projected cost of a single payer plan compared with the other major alternatives. In effect, Obama has excluded discussion of single payer from the health care reform debate even though a majority of the American people favor it. The Congress is proceeding to jettison the public option alternative by sacrificing it on the altar of bipartisanship and the worship of centrist Democrats. Transparency? Democracy? This nation was far more democratic 60 years ago than it is today.