For the first Goddamn time in eight years.

I may be a little older than some of you.

I remember November 1963.

I remember Martin Luther King Jr.

I remember Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy.

Now we'll all remember Denver, August 27th, 2008.

Some--just a tiny few of the millions and millions of shoulders upon whom Barack Obama stands.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Still Crying.

Who wouldn't walk to the end of the earth linked arm-in-arm with this great American?

The Toledo Blade (that's Battleground Ohio) has done a truly remarkable eight month investigation of the health insurance industry. This is one of the most damning, if not the most damning series on healthcare in America I've seen to date.

Thanks go to devtob for bringing this series to my attention.

Every last voter in Ohio should hear over and over and over, day after day after day, that a vote for McSame is a vote for Murder By Spreadsheet. It is a vote to condemn yourself and your loved ones to death by insurance.

This is what the Toledo Blade investigation concluded.

"People with  health insurance were harmed because insurers interfered."

Please watch this introductory video.

Biden's not perfect, but he's got huge ones and that counts for a lot.

He's going to be a great vice president of the United States.

And the next vice president really takes it to Republicans the enemy.  

Here are some beautiful and memorable Joe Biden moments. Let's hope we'll see Joe Biden unleashed in the weeks, months and years ahead.

Since you can count on the traditional media to play endless loops of Biden's occasional gaffes, let's use our little megaphone to highlight what so many of us love about him.

On the Iraq War:

"Saddam is dead, there were no weapons. . ."

The next time McSame smears Medicare, would someone ask him about the prescription drugs his 96 year-old mother is taking? You might ask McSame whether his mother has to break her pills in half, and does she fear the doughnut hole like so many in her age bracket?

There is a new alarming report from the Kaiser Family Foundation which describe a veritable epidemic of senior citizens falling through the infamous Medicare D doughnut hole.

What do they do when they hit the hole? Many of America's most vulnerable, our elderly, simply stop taking their medications.

This is particularly disquieting because as the world now knows, we have a candidate running for president who is fully out of touch with the realities of middle class Americans. Those of us who earn under 5 million a year.

This is the oral cavity of an angry American.

This American can't afford routine dental care much less those shining white veneers sported by the blowviator class.

So they listen to John McMoron wax eloquent on who's rich in America--the five million dollar a year and over class, and they get even angrier.

This American quite frankly doesn't give a rat's ass about what's-his-name and his eight Olympic gold medals.

This is a middle class American, in the nation's largest city, New York. This is an American who needs to see a dentist, but hey, he can't afford to do so.

This is an American for whom dental care is a long forgotten luxury.

This, "my friends" is America.

This morning a variety of single-payer healthcare advocacy organizations including
Progressive Democrats  of America, Healthcare Now, PNHP and All Unions Committee For Single Payer Health Care are petitioning MoveOn.

I've been asked to explain to Daily Kos readers what's happening and ask you to support single-payer healthcare in the United States by signing the petition to MoveOn.

Here's a link to the MoveOn petition we hope you will sign.

 Please visit Guaranteed Healthcare and write about your healthcare and insurance horror stories.

This morning Paul Krugman writes about health care in the New York Times.

He asks: Can it happen here?

That he must pose such a question is chilling.

That we as a nation continue to have a discussion which revolves around the concept of whether a human being in pain is entitled to be relieved of his suffering is horrifying.

Do we really require additional verification or another study to further substantiate our national shame?

Well like it or not, here it is. This time from the august Annals of Internal Medicine.

Millions With Chronic Disease Get Little to No Treatment

Millions of Americans with chronic disease like diabetes or high blood pressure are not getting adequate treatment because they are among the nation’s growing ranks of uninsured.

A National Study of Chronic Disease Prevalence and Access to Care in Uninsured U.S. Adults (Annals of Internal Medicine)That is the central finding of a new study to be published Tuesday in the medical journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

http://www.nytimes.com/...

Where indeed is the shame?

Cross posted on Guaranteed Healthcare

What follows will help you understand how and why your health insurance claims are routinely and regularly denied, and why they must be denied for our for-profit system to thrive.

I'm going to take you inside one company, TC3 Total Claims Capture and Control which functions solely to deny and underpay health insurance claims.  Remember a denied claim goes right to the bottom line.

The insurance industry in the United States has a single purpose, to provide a stream of profits to shareholders who own the stock of healthcare companies. Guaranteeing the healthcare needs of the American people is not even an afterthought.  Our private, for-profit insurance industry is a huge, sophisticated and dangerous denial machine.

The first concept you need to understand is the Medical loss ratio.  You and I are losses in insurance industry lingo.

Today is the 45th anniversary of Medicare. Don't take Medicare for granted, there are forces in this country determined to destroy it.

Now glance at your mother or your aging father or your grandmother or grandfather and imagine a world without Medicare.

If you're lucky, you too will get old . . .

On July 30 1965, with Harry Truman by his side, Lyndon Johnson signed the legislation creating Medicare.

Johnson told the nation that it had "all started with the man from Independence." Harry S. Truman, Johnson said, had "planted the seeds of compassion and duty" that led to the enactment of Medicare, a national health insurance for the aged through an expanded Social Security system.

Medicare, provides low-cost hospitalization and medical insurance for the nation's elderly. The legislation remains a a landmark legacy of LBJ’s "Great Society" initiative.

"I've seen people die because of co-payments and deductibles"

This is not idle chatter. This is real. This is a stunning and profound indictment of the U.S. healthcare system. These are the words of Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a doctor who treats patients every day.

Some of us less diplomatic than Dr. Woolhandler, call what she's describing, pay or die.

In June, Dr. Woolhandler, a Harvard Medical School physician and one of the great heroes of the single-payer movement in the United States, was invited to appear before The President's Council on Bioethics.

The Council was created in 2001 to "advise" the President "on bioethical issues that may emerge as a consequence of advances in biomedical science and technology".

We can hope that President Obama will listen to those like Dr. Woolhandler--the people on the front lines of the tattered remains of our healthcare system.

Cross posted on Guaranteed Healthcare

No wonder we call this guy, McSame. How about McEvenWorse?

I spent the morning reviewing some video clips of McSame's appearance at the Lance Armstrong Cancer Summit.

It's a treasure trove. The entire event should inspire fear in the hearts of all Americans. The one I selected shows just how absolutely clueless this man is.

It's a huge blooper, could be another senior moment, I don't know:

But this time, he was alone, there was no Joe Lieberman to whisper in his ear. McSame doesn't have a clue about the economy, Iraq, Sunni, Shia, the Anbar Awakening--now add to the McSame catalogue of cluelessness, the collapse of the U.S. healthcare system.

In his own words.

Just McSame with a microphone.

 

Things are not going well on the AHIP - America's Health Insurance Plans (we feel your pain) tour of our battered nation.

Karen Ignagni the CEO of the health insurance lobbyist AHIP was taped yesterday in Ohio.

Ms. Ignagni carefuly explained that profit is the guiding principle of AHIP, the for-profit insurance industry, and tragically, the entire U.S. healthcare system.  

She says, "no margin, no mission".

This is a bad day for AHIP, because their leader/CEO, Karen Ignagni, told the truth, probably for the first time in her life.

Isn't the first rule of politics, don't tell the truth? Well, she fumbled, badly.

Take a listen. I've provided a decent transcript of some of the tape.

In a couple of hours, the insurance industry will roll out its shameless campaign of deceit in Columbus, Ohio.

And what exactly does bold faced deceit look like? Like this.

How do these liars sleep at night?

It is delivered to the American people courtesy of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). I haven't a clue why they've selected Columbus, but this is the venue where the despicable conning of America circa 2008 will begin. Think of this as Harry and Louise 2.0

This is a very dangerous con job--Al Capone would blush. Even he couldn't cook up something this atrocious. We should gawk, hiss, scream and not allow a second of their deliberate deceit to go unchallenged. That said, we underestimate the survival instinct of the insurance industry at our own peril.  The message for today though is AHIP is literally off and rolling. The battle has begun.

Though many of us respectfully disagree with the overarching philosophy of Healthcare for America Now (HCAN), to their credit, they will be out in force protesting the parasites. This is good.

Hello from Netroots Nation in the Lone Star State, Austin Texas.

I'm sitting in the beautifully air conditioned lobby of the Austin Hilton.  The lobby here is a sea of bloggers and computers. There's free internet access and clusters of very comfortable arm chairs, so as you might imagine, we've turned it into one huge living room.

But despite all the noise and activity, lots of us are hard at work.

Here's the big news on the healthcare front.  I just received an email from Mike Dundas the chief health care deputy city attorney in Rocky Delgadillo's office. Mike wanted to let me know that Rocky's office (The Los Angeles City Attorney), has filed a lawsuit against Blue Shield of California as part of the ongoing investigation regarding retroactive recission of health insurance policies.

And the great news is that Rocky Delgadillo will be at Netroots Nation on the health policy panel.  Please join us, Saturday, July 19 Ballroom G at 10:30.

And doesn't it feel good to fight these bastards.

If you can join us on Saturday, July 19. 10:30 - 11:45 - Ballroom G, a warning:  when it's over, you're going to be as angry as you've ever been. We're going to rattle your cages. You'll hear from people who won't shield you from the grim realities of our hopelessly broken healthcare system.

You'll also hear about what we, the netroots, will have to do going forward to get the authentic healthcare reform we so desperately need. If there's one take home message it's this, electing Obama is just the beginning.

You know me, I've been sounding the alarm for years, now  others who have been touched, or harmed, or professionally horrified by our healthcare system in one way or the other, will talk and bear witness.

To say I'm honored to be involved with making this happen is the understatement of all time.

Here's the line up.

1. Hilda Sarkisyan, yes, Nataline's mother. I've met this courageous woman. Her pain is raw, her anguish is  unbearable, yet she is determined to take this terrible tragedy and turn it into a means of exposing the terrible brutality of the for-profit health insurance industry.

The insurance industry is celebrating today.

How could so many good people be so wrong?

Has MoveOn lost its mind?

Why is a group of top notch, progressive Americans waving the white flag of surrender before the first shot is fired in what will be a take-no-prisoners battle of historic dimension?

We're talking about the looming healthcare battle.

We're talking about a very simple concept. Bringing healthcare in the United States up to the same standard as the rest of the civilized world.

Healthcare for all. Guaranteed and affordable healthcare. Single-payer healthcare. Call it what you want.

Our friends at HCAN, and they are our friends, should know better. But I guess they don't.

Oh, and before I go any further, dear friends at HCAN and MoveOn, you don't go into battle with one arm tied behind your back.

You fight fire with fire.