Who gives a s**t?

Our deplorable Congress both Dems and Repubs have sunk to depths heretofore unknown.

Add the White House to the audacity it takes to turn back decades of progress regarding women's reproductive rights.  The hubris and devious cunning do not escape us ladies.

Obama and Pelosi did NOTHING.  Stupak shows the weakness and willingness to use a major moral issue into a political bargaining tool.

I submit that this humiliating and reactionary Amendment will go down hard against the Democrats and the Party.  The final bill has to be a piece of garbage as everything important to holding costs down [PO, Drug Negotiation] is gone.

It's as if no one in the Democratic party, or in Congress - save for a precious few who have been trying to get single-payer some attention for years -  had even given more than a passing thought to formulating a plan to reform the health care system until their eyes popped open on January 20, 2009.  Here we've been waiting for a majority and for the WH for years, and one would think that we would have been prepared, would have known, exactly what it was we wanted to do.  And how we would do it, how we would sell it, how we would make it happen.

And when you combine that with the oft-cited comments of Illinois legislator Barack Obama that once we took the House and took the Senate and took the Oval Office we could initiate a single-payer plan in this country, what you have is absolutely no excuse and no reason why we have spent the last eleven months engaged in Olympic-quality dithering, pandering, posturing, capitulating and obfuscating.

Would I accept Stupak if it was attached to single-payer?  That's like asking if I would accept a winning lottery ticket if it meant someone I loved or cared about would suffer a terrible calamity.

A bad bill is a bill that penalizes any group and removes their rights.

A real single payer bill cannot happen at this point if you read the current House Bill and are aware of Obama's deal with Drug Monopoly.  I am not even discussing what the Senate Dems and Repubs have sliced and diced out of it so far.

No bill should infringe on women's constitutional rights with regard to having access to equal protection under the law.  Roe v Wade decided ths.  If a healthcare reform bill that adopts restrictive measures against women we will see thousands of backroom abortions, late stage abortion deaths due to  not addressing maternal health issuues, and needless suffering and death on many many levels.

In fact any amendment that would deny men of their rights to prostate tests, circumcision,etc.,
and other equal protections should nullify any healthcare bill.

Single Payer or Healthcare Option are only worth the morality it takes to shape a really good bill that affords everyone good Healthcare.  In most of the civilized world Healthcare is a given right and bartering for or against anyone's rights to that equal protection is unthinkable.

We remain a country torn to pieces by corporate greed that allows our body parts to be bartered as political objects.  We remain a country that cannot create a program that protects its citizens as all other countries do.

The EXCHANGE certainly is not reform in the way single payer is so it really is an easy call isn't it Steve?

Single payer would make you think about it no? Hell, the public option does if you want to be REAL about it.

But if you want top play silly games, single payer works so much better.

Back in the real world where we are having tis discussion - it is the EXCHANGES which cause the problem.