god bless Rick Sanchez because he's one of the only ones in corporate media who actually get some real journalism into the MSM, and that's saying a whole lot:
The only people i see covering this is on television is Bill Moyers and Wendel Potter, a health insurance industry whistleblower, and Rachel, Keith and Ed.
By the way, give Sanchez some praise on his twitter, maybe he'll pursue this more often: http://twitter.com/...
CNN's Joe Johns on a recent AC360 essentially claimed that the part of Obama's speech on illegal immigrants was "debatable" and no where did he correct Joe Wilson's statement, which both Politifact, and Factchecker.org called "FALSE". Today I watched Don Lemon defend the teabaggers saying that he, Lemon, went up to "black people" who would then proceed to tell him that Bush wasn't their president. Really Don Lemon? "Black people" said that? The sad thing is he's black and he is using an entire race in this country to make a tiny counterpoint to essentially give a complete pass on the teabaggers' racist behavior toward the president. Lemon should perhaps revisit the polls, Bush got one of the highest black turnout of any recent Republican in 2000.
But back to corruption in politics and the healthcare bill... Why exactly hasn't the question been asked: why should anyone profit off our health?
why should WE be FORCED to have private companies profit off our health? Yes, PhRMA and the Food lobby make us sick, but at least they produce something that sometimes saves a lot of lives and feeds people. But the Republicans, Snowe, Kent Conrad and all the rest of the Blue Dogs s and these teabag nutsos would rather have our money poured into the wallets of CEOs who do ... what exactly? They're worse than a bank! It really is just a giant ponzi scheme. But they call the Fed a ponzi scheme?!
Nick Kristof has a must read column at the NYT today (i suspect the wingnuts will willfully misinterpret this and claim he's equating healthcare crisis with 9/11...meaning the health insurance companies are GASP... al-qaida. you know that's what they're going to say):
"The Body Count at Home"
By then it was too late. In 2006, Nikki White died at age 32. “Nikki didn’t die from lupus,” her doctor, Amylyn Crawford, told Mr. Reid. “Nikki died from complications of the failing American health care system.”
“She fell through the cracks,” Nikki’s mother, Gail Deal, told me grimly. “When you bury a child, it’s the worst thing in the world. You never recover.”
We now have a chance to reform this cruel and capricious system. If we let that chance slip away, there will be another Nikki dying every half-hour.
That’s how often someone dies in America because of a lack of insurance, according to a study by a branch of the National Academy of Sciences. Over a year, that amounts to 18,000 American deaths.
After Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans, eight years ago on Friday, we went to war and spent hundreds of billions of dollars ensuring that this would not happen again. Yet every two months, that many people die because of our failure to provide universal insurance — and yet many members of Congress want us to do nothing?
Kristof offers what is actually a "solution" for some:
That’s a window into the flaws in our health care system: we offer titanium shoulder replacements for those who don’t really need them, but we let 32-year-old women die if they lose their health insurance. No wonder we spend so much on medical care, and yet have some health care statistics that are worse than Slovenia’s.
My suggestion for anyone in Nikki’s situation: commit a crime and get locked up. In Washington State, a 20-year-old inmate named Melissa Matthews chose to turn down parole and stay in prison because that was the only way she could get treatment for her cervical cancer. “If I’m out, I’m going to die from this cancer,” she told a television station.