Take the time to read 538's most recent column on the effect of insurance money on killing the chances for a "public option" for reforming the American health care.
Nate's column is probably the closest thing we have to an autopsy of the impending death of health care reform, one more time. The health insurance industry has isolated likely 15 to 20 Democrats and has showered them with campaign money and the upshot is that roughly only 37 Democrats support real reform of the health care system.
This is appalling. I have seen way too much of this "death by Democrats" in my lifetime and, frankly, it's heartbreaking.
What is happening, in my opinion, is that the health care industry, and particularly the private insurers, are carefully spending a fortune on those senators---Democrats and Republicans---who still cling to the the sectional politics of the past. That is to say that many Democrats and all Republicans run against government and secure electoral victory by mobilizing political resentment instead of hope.
By sectional politics, I mean those members of the Senate (and sometimes the House) who are either from the South or from border states and the upper mid-west where the South's influence and its politics of political resentment and division has spread.
While these so-called Democrats argue that they want to solve the health care crisis, they consistently reject that increase in public power absolutely essential to solving the problem. They say they do so because they trust the private sector more than the public.
They, "dance at two weddings," as the old saying goes.
As a consequence this collapse of the Democrats give senators from progressive states, like Senator Dianne Feinstein (Dem., CA) to quietly undercut the public option so that so-called progressive senators can take the money anyway and run from helping the American people, blaming it all on someone else.
Senator Feinstein, who is older than even I am, now wants to be governor of California and she needs a lot of money to make the run. Do you want to guess how and where she is going to get a lot of it?
When am I going to face the truth about where we have finally wound up and start watching the Daily Show and start ignoring Keith and Rachel and the rest of those who rant with me?
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