The numbers for 2009 are out, and they aren’t pretty. For all the fuss over the ten-year, $1 trillion health reform price tag, well, one year’s worth of our current healthcare costs 250% of that. Ouch.

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Remember Massachusetts’ groundbreaking universal healthcare mandate, and its accompanying lessons learned? We previously talked about the irony of national healthcare reform efforts mirroring MA. After all, MA took our ‘uniquely American healthcare solution’ of private insurance coverage with a public safety net, expanded it to its entire population without actually fixing anything that was broken, and now finds itself drowning in escalating costs. THAT’S the strategy our vaunted lawmakers pursued in their roundabout political games and ‘compromises’? Yup.

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You now know what we’re up against. Those 278 lobbyists (179 of them former lawmakers and aides), representing 338 healthcare special interests, spent nearly 2/3 of a billion dollars – $635 million – to great effect. You also know the organizations you trust are telling you to break the law, revolt, and block and kill the Senate bill at all costs. Stunned though I was last Friday, I didn’t do that. I called Obama to task for his lack of strong healthcare leadership, but I told you we needed to pass this bill anyway. Why?

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We may have reached the point where it’s necessary to dump the “representative” part of our representative democracy. That is, if we want healthcare reform that in any way resembles actual, meaningful, reform. Word got out last night that now the Senate is backing off the early Medicare buy-in because of predictable pushback from providers (I was going to write about the buy-in; now, not so much.) Medicare expansion was the only meaningful reform left in the ongoing Senate slaughter of HR 3590. Providers, insurers, other special interests – they are all represented in Congress. We, however, are not.

For a timely reminder from Kaiser Family Foundation and Freeclinics.us on why we need healthcare reform, read more here.                                 blogsurfer.us

Next time you run into a teabagger fear-mongering about government healthcare rationing, why not get to the heart of the issue? Ask a simple question: who would s/he rather have rationing healthcare services, the government or well-meaning neighbors?  The “well-meaning” part saves it from being a trick question, where the neighbor is actually a private health plan employee. Even removing a well-known villain from the equation, evidence supporting this rationing choice may surprise you.

Learn more about the God Committee, and how it relates to government-run healthcare, here.                     blogsurfer.us