Health Care Reform: It's The Same Old Song -- Different Singers

The health care debate is slowly coming to an end and what do we really have to show for it? The way that I see it – not a whole lot. What could have been a shining moment for our country only produced a lot of heated noise and rhetoric; and the end result is a reinforced feeling of powerlessness mixed and the knowledge that the “change we could believe in” promise is never going to come true.

I have to admit that on the night that Barack Obama was elected President of the United States – I got sucked into that whirlwind of belief that we were finally going to see some change in this country. I jumped onboard the Obama Change Train and was beginning to feel positive about this country after eight years of the politics of George W. Bush. I was looking forward to seeing policies made in Washington that would benefit the working class man and woman and not just the corporate fat cats and Wall Street manipulators. With Obama in our corner and a Democratic majority in both the house and the senate – there should not have been anything to stop our elected representatives from turning this country around and changing things for the better. Or so we thought.

Looking back at the past twelve months – Who won this health care battle? It wasn’t the “gang that couldn’t shoot straight” bunch from the Republican Party. The Republicans idea of leadership was to make up things like “death panels” or to try and convince people that there was nothing wrong with the health care system as our nation’s health care costs continued to rise and the people’s ability to pay for it increased.

The health care debate felt like a replay of the McCain presidential campaign – full of lies and fear mongering. People who wanted change to our health care system were branded as socialists. The opposition to health care reform could only equate change with big government, which in turn gave birth to the tea bag protest movement that fueled the health care debate with images of Obama as Hitler and comparisons of “Obama Care” to Nazi death camps.

The Democrats are not walking away from the health care debate looking much better than their Republican counterparts. In January – we were to believe that with the Obama’s change team in office things were finally going to be different only to find out in December that it’s politics as usual in Washington. It’s hard for me to look at the Democrats passing the health care bill in the Senate as a victory when two Democratic Senators were given a sweetheart deal for their states that has the other 48 states shouldering the cost of health care reform. That’s not a victory – it’s the same kind of old backroom politics that got us into this health care miss to begin with.

Now that we have seen how the Obama team has handled health care reform – what do you think the odds are for them to reform the banking system that will prevent another economic meltdown from happening again? I’ll be honest with you – it doesn’t look good – but he wanted to job – but don’t try to sell us on “Change we can believe in”, Mr. President – because we know that that’s one promise you can't deliver on.

I Got A Few Things I Want To Get Off My Mind

The Election: If you’re like me – you can’t wait for the presidential election to over with. Don’t you think that it’s a little strange how the McCain campaign has kept Sarah Palin away from doing interviews on such shows as “Face the Nation” and “Meet The Press” and then say that the press is bias against her? Well, if you don’t give her a chance to speak with media organizations that are going to ask her some tough questions how can you say that they are biased. Hey, Katie Couric didn’t ask Palin any real tough questions in that interview with her, but she sure did stumble and kind of looked like a beauty pageant contestant telling the judges that she loves kittens and wants to work for world peace. Let’s get real!

The Election #2: The news this last past Friday emanating from the McCain campaign was interesting. First there was the report from that bi-partisan committee in Alaska that said that Governor Palin abused her powers in firing the public service commissioner who wouldn’t fire her ex-brother-in-law. And while the McCain campaign tried to whitewash the conclusion of this report with some lame excuse – they also had to put out the fire at what happened at a McCain town hall.

It was sad watching Ol’ John having to back off on his smear campaign of trying to paint Barack Obama has a terrorist when one of the people in the audience said that they couldn’t trust Obama and another person called Obama “an Arab”. Hey, McCain when you stir up the voters with hatemongering it’s going to come back and bite you in the ass and this last past Friday – those two people in your town hall demonstrated how hate turns into bigotry and how lies about Obama only fueled the racism that still exists in this country.

Senator McCain -- You should fire the people in your campaign management who recommended that you take the low road smearing Obama with lies. When you agree to go out with them and go out and fuel the flames of racism with these lies it only shows the voters how you would deal with the problems this country faces should you get elected. But the odds are pretty good that you're going to be watching Senator Obama get sworn in on January 20th on television and one of the reasons why that is going to happen is because of the way you campaigned for the highest office in the land.

The Wall Street Mess: Hey, I know nothing about Wall Street and the stock market – which puts me right up there with all of the people who work on Wall Street – and I won’t even go into how screwed up this bailout package was on the American taxpayer – but I have noticed something interesting. Isn’t it strange that American corporations are going for a retro look for their packages when, to some, the economy feels like were heading for a depression.

For example: Notice how this innocent looking seventy-nine cent Snickers bar has a wrapper on it that reminds people of those days when they could buy a Snickers bar for a nickel?

I don’t know how you feel about these things – but I just had a few things I wanted to get off my mind.