An American Cry for Help

I make no attempt to hide my admiration for the eloquent and passionate diatribes of Keith Olbermann as he rails against the Party of No and their obstructionist and (when you get right down to it) un-American ideologies. I forget the Congressional rep who called out the Republicans last week as being wholly owned by the insurance industry but he is right. Lobbyists for the insurance companies are spending billions of dollars to buy Republican obstructionism to try and save their profits at the expense of our people and our economy. We have a desperate need to reduce the black hole of health insurance in America. The insurance companies are the de facto death panels that Sarah Palin has talked about, they make decisions about care based on their profit margins, not on customer service, not on taking care of their customers, not on anything but trying fatten out their profits. Its despicable and wrong. The quoted bit below is the very end of Keith Olbermann's Special Comment from Wednesday before the Blair House health care reform summit. Please take the time to read the whole thing through and then tell me that we don't need universal health care. I dare you. Emphasis is mine.

And to the politicians who go into Blair House tomorrow for the summit: I have some requests as well. Leave your egos at the door. I want, I demand, that you give everybody in this country a chance at the care my father has gotten. And I demand, that you enact this most generous and most kind aspect of the reform proposed: the right to bill the damned insurance company for the conversation about what to do when the time comes, the Life Panel.

And I want all of you to think of somebody lying in a hospital bed tonight who needed that care and needed that conversation, and imagine that that is your father, or mother, or son, or daughter, or wife, or husband, or partner. If you cannot do that, if you cannot put aside the meaninglessness of your political careers for this, my request to you then, is that you not come back out of that meeting for you would not be worthy of being with the real people of this country who suffer, and suffer again because you have acted on behalf of the corporations and not the people.

If you cannot do this, go into that room and stay there and we'll get new ones to replace your worthless roles in the life of our country. My father cannot speak for himself. He appointed me to do so for him and I haven't the slightest doubt he wants me to say this tonight, right now. He mouthed the words to me and I will now give them such voice as I have to you going into that summit tomorrow. Help. Help. Help. Help.

If you have read the entire comment and you are unmoved then I honestly do not have anything further to say to you, perhaps ever. Our nation is in crisis and we have one side trying to do something and the other side doing nothing and worse, trying to prevent anything from changing. All in the name of goddamned profit margins and shareholder dividends while families go bankrupt, families members are allowed to die while awaiting permission from their insurance companies to get medical treatments and those same insurance companies try to cook up new ways to screw over their customers to add even more money to their profits.

It would make me sick but I can't get sick because I can't afford to.