Kerry’s Historic 1971 Testimony Against the Vietnam War
I’ve revised the last five paragraphs of John Kerry’s Winter Soldier Speech from being about The Vietnam War, to instead be about Healthcare Insurance.
This is the end of that speech...
Each day, to maximize the profits by which the Healthcare Insurance Companies wash their hands of sick Americans, many families have to give up the life of a family member, because Congress refuses to admit something that the entire world already knows, we let sick people die without having to. Someone has to die so that The Republicans will be able to, and these are their words, "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."
We are asking The President and Congress to think about that because how do you ask any person to be the last one to die because of Health Insurance Profits? How do you ask any person to be the last one to die by Rescission or Red-Flaging? We are here in Washington to say that the problem of people dying is not just a question of healthcare and public option. It is part and parcel of everything that we are trying, as human beings to communicate to people in this country - the question of denial of claims, which is rampant by Healthcare Insurance Companies and so many other questions such as the use of rescission; the hypocrisy of our members of Congress who take umbrage at the citizens they represent and using that as justification for a continuation of this denial of health insurance when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of the Health Insurance Industry; by getting big contributions from high paid Lobbyists, allowing harassment by claims representatives, prior patient history searched and red-flagging of their claims, the strong-armed bill collectors, the torture allowed to sick people trying to be cured, all accepted policy by many units in The Healthcare Industry this country faces. That is what we are trying to say. It is part and parcel of everything.
A former CIGNA worker who worked on rescissions of claims and has now retired from his job, put it to me very succinctly. He told me how as a former employee at CIGNA, he would look at claims coming in and decide if they should be be paid or rescinded. Management would cheer with each denial of claim, as it meant more in their pockets from higher earnings. Then suddenly one day he stopped at a Healthcare Fairgrounds and had his eyes opened by what he saw. He said, "my God, It’s because of people like me and my doings that these people had to come to the fairgrounds to get free health treatment, treatment they could not have gotten elsewhere on their budgets. And that is what we are trying to say to Congress, that we think this thing has to end.
We are here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We're here to ask where are President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Joe Lieberman, every Blue Dog Democrat, and every Republican? Where are they now, that we, the people they allowed to go into bankruptcy and get their healthcare denied, have returned? These are the politicians who have deserted their sick people. And there is no more serious crime in Healthcare than the denial of care. The Healthcare Industry says they never leave their policyholders. Congress says they never even leave their voters. Yet these politicians and health insurance companies have left all their ill citizens and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country....
We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of our illnesses as easily as Republicans have wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done, and all that they can do by their support of healthcare denial, is to make it more clear than ever that it is our own determination to undertake one last mission: To search out and destroy, the last vestige of these barbaric politicians; to pacify our own hearts; to conquer the denial of healthcare and insurance payoffs to politicians, that have driven this country these last sixty years and more. And more. And so, when, thirty years from now, when our family members go down the street with a cured leg, a fixed arm, or plastic surgery on a face, and small boys ask why, will we be saying “2009 Healthcare Reform” and not mean a teabag blog, not a filthy obscene memory of Washington Politics, but mean instead where America finally turned, and where people like us helped it in the turning.