By The River

I woke up this morning and rushed to my computer and called up the New York Times website. There it was. We have national healthcare at last, and every American should rejoice.

I couldn't help but think back to stories I had written over the years about people without health insurance or who had problems with health insurers denying care. This type of story was a staple for American journalists for the past 30 years, pushing many of our hot buttons.

I remember in particular Danny Appleton, a 12-year-old boy in the Bloomsburg area. His was the very first story I wrote on my very first day at the Harrisburg Patriot-News in June 1987, and I wrote several follow-up stories later. He had severe medical problems growing out of brain surgery. That was one part of the story, but the other was the battle of his parents, Miles and Sherry Appleton, to pay for the care that was keeping him alive. They were bumping up against a lifetime care cap in their policy, something that will be eliminated by the Obama bill passed last night.

More recently, I think of a story I blogged about, how the employees of Turbine Airfoyle Division on Cameron Street in Harrisburg lost their health coverage when their employer stopped making payments to the health insurance company. One worker had his chemotherapy cut off and died.

We aren't out of the woods completely. The immediate backlash from the Tea Party thugs will be severe. Anyone who can yell "Nigger" and "Faggot" at Democratic Congressmen arriving for the vote won't go quietly into the night. Republicans have vowed to repeal the bill.

I think they will fail. Actually, I'm quite sure they will fail. President Obama has promised a quick and intensive campaign to sell the bill--the real bill, not the Republican myth--to the American people. We will have national healthcare.

Posted by David at 06:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The biggest story of the week, at least since Wednesday, was buried on the inside of Saturday's Patriot-News. "Pennsylvania Medical Society finds support for universal healthcare" was the story, and David Wenner, an old friend, was the reporter.

What it said--ready for a surprise?--is that nearly 66 percent of state residents want universal healthcare. That's up from a similar poll in July 2008, when 64.4 percent of state residents said they wanted everyone to receive the healthcare they need.

Republicans have been shouting and screaming all week, pointing to the upset victory of Republican Scott Brown over Democrat Martha Coakley in Massachusetts on Tuesday as evidence that "America" has turned against the Obama healthcare plan. Heck, all it really showed was that Coakley was a terrible candidate and Brown was a skillful one. And I have a gut feeling Kennedy fatigue may have set in after nearly 60 years, even though Coakley didn't ask for Kennedy help until it was too late.

Like Michael Dukakis, the former Massachusetts Governor who was the failed Democratic presidential candidate in 1988, Coakley punched all the right tickets on her way up, endorsed all the right causes. This Boston Globe story from before the election is a good summation of her pros and cons. Unlike Dukakis, her career centered around prosecutions of people for alleged sex crimes or crimes against children, notably nanny Louise Woodward. She also fought clemency for Gerald Amirault in the Fells Acre Day Care Case long after the "evidence" against him had been discredited as largely nonsensical. Coakley came off as a descendant of the Puritan prosecutors in Massachusetts.

Looking at her admittedly from the outside, Coakley seemed like a cold professional woman who knew little about Massachusetts outside her own wealthy enclave and circle of elite friends. Yet despite all that, she still got 47 percent of the vote to 52 percent for Scott Brown, who was a George W. Bush type of candidate, the one you'd want to have a beer with. And as we know all too well from eight years of Bush, that's a bad reason to vote for a candidate.

So Democrats in Pennsylvania, man up. Stay the course on universal healhcare--the people want it. You've got a reputable poll telling you so.

Posted by David at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

All of America scored a major victory Saturday when the U.S. House of Representatives voted 220-215 to approve the Obama healthcare bill, which will eventually provide health insurance for Americans and eliminate the insurance industry's most pernicious practices. The bill must still be approved by the U.S. Senate, which seems more and more likely.

Yet we in Harrisburg are surrounded by "No." All of the midstate congressmen, including the "Blue Dog" Democrat Tim Holden, who is my congressman, voted against the bill. The others were the Republicans Todd R. Platts, Bill Shuster, and Joe Pitts. Only one Republican in the nation dared to vote for the bill, so tight is their party discipline.

Holden makes it harder and harder for liberal Democrats to support him. I'm sure he thinks that the choice between "me or the Republican" will force us to suppress our gag reflex and vote for him so, like Connecticut voters and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, we can get his vote on other issues near and dear to Democrats. Holden was one of only two Democrats in the Pennsylvania delegation to vote against the healthcare bill.

I just don't get it. Holden has to know that no other bill that will come before him this year or indeed in his lifetime will help more of his constituents than this one. Patriot-News reporter Dave Wenner had a shocking story in the paper today about a local man who will die of cancer because he didn't have health insurance when his cancer was still treatable. Now it has spread to his brain. Doctors told him to come back right away if he got insurance. So much for the myth that anyone without health insurance can get treated by walking into the emergency room.

We need national health insurance and we need it now. And perhaps it is time for Holden to face a primary challenge from the left.

Posted by David at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

President Obama took back the initiative in the debate over national healthcare last night. His speech was as good as it gets, explaining why national healthcare is needed, which of the critics' claims were pure balderdash, and how it would be paid for.

Still, the nutjobs on the right just couldn't contain themselves. Associated Press has identified Rep. Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, as the person in the audience who yelled, "It's a lie!" when Obama said it wasn't true that illegal immigrants would get free healthcare under his bill. Believe it or not, that was a new low for the Republicans. And this from a representative of the Southern state that introduced slavery to America and started the Civil War.

I'm sure there are many good people in South Carolina, but Wilson isn't one of them. He seems to be the spiritual descendant of South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks, who (literally) on the floor of the Congress beat a Northern senator bloody and senseless with his cane in 1856 for saying things about slavery he didn't like. Time for Wilson and his kind to go hiking on the Appalachian Trail.

(I looked at the story on the speech in The State, South Carolina's largest newspaper, and comments from locals are running nearly 100 percent against Wilson. They are embarrassed that someone like Wilson represents their state.)

I felt certain for the first time tonight that Obama will win and we will get national healthcare. Along with many on the liberal left, I would prefer single-payer national healthcare such as France has. But this is a good compromise that will end the tyranny of the insurance companies. People have long underestimated and written off Obama to their later chagrin. It happened during the 2008 campaign--remember how his candidacy was supposedly doomed by his friendship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright?--and it's happening now. He will win, and so will we.

Posted by David at 09:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Not convinced we need national healthcare? If you want to read a well-reasoned, rational essay debunking the main myths about healthcare around the world, read this article by T.R. Reid of the Washington Post. Read it, especially his concluding argument--that the United States really doesn't have the best healthcare system in the world. Not by far. You've been misled.

If you still aren't convinced we need national healthcare, go to the web page of Channel 21 in Harrisburg, Pa., and listen to their investigative stories about a true outrage, a local company, Turbine Airfoil Division, that allegedly was taking employee health insurance payments and spending them on something else. One employee's cancer treatment was cancelled as a result, and he's dead now. The comments on the Channel 21 story are heart-rending. If even half of this is true, the Texas-based owner of this company should go to prison. Texas...why am I not surprised?

This story may come as a surprise to Harrisburg residents, depending on what their usual source of news is. I commend Channel 21 for digging into this story and sticking with it.

Posted by David at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When the national Republican Party goes so far as to urge its followers to disrupt Congressional townhall meetings on national healthcare, and these thugs actually do so, we have moved one more step toward the sort of governments we went to war with in World War II. That was a hallmark of the Nazis and Italy's Fascists. Don't just say you oppose what the liberals say. Shout them down! Get into scuffles! Make honest debate over national healthcare impossible, because the thugs know they'll lose that debate.

That's really the point. This is happening because the Republican thugs know they represent a minority of Americans, just as the Nazis and Fascists knew they represented a minority of Germans and Italians. Only through lies, fear and intimidation can the vast majority of Americans who dearly want national healthcare (the polls consistently show this) be kept in check.

We are in a battle for the soul of America. In 2000, the Gore campaign let the Republican thugs, the so-called Brooks Brothers riots, stop the recount of the Florida vote before the vote total could tip to Gore over Bush, to give the right wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court time to permanently award the election to George W. Bush. I'm heartened to see that the unions, among them the Service Employees International Union, are strongly encouraging members to go to the townhall meetings to counter the Republican thugs. It's a shame it's come to this, but unless our side fights back against the Republican thugs we will lose this debate.

Posted by David at 07:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday night agreed to allow a debate and vote on single-payer national health insurance in the House at some point in the relevant future. Single-payer, for those of you not familiar with all the terminology of the national healthcare debate, refers to a system such as that in Canada, Britain, or France--or Medicare in the United States--in which the federal government uses tax revenues to pay all or the vast majority of your doctor, hospitalization, and medication bills. These systems eliminate financial worry from the healthcare equation, allow you to choose your own doctor, and deliver longer national life expectancy than our bloated, costly system does here. More than 40 million Americans have no coverage at all under the current system, either because they can't afford it or because the insurance companies deny them coverage because of "pre-existing conditions."

i've become much more optimistic about the U.S. achieving national healthcare over the last few days, ever since the House Energy and Commerce Committee reported out the Obama health care plan, which while not single-payer would still be a great improvement on the mess we have now. I don't downplay the difficulty of the road to final passage by both houses of Congress, but the Clinton national healthcare plan in 1994 never even got out of that committee.

Posted by David at 07:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)