By Denis Campbell
As US healthcare reform passage draws near, my mailbox fills with incoherent Right Wing hate screed and rage. Meanwhile the Obama Administration and Democratic controlled US Congress seem unwilling to buck the echo chamber and do the right thing.
The public located outside the 24 sq. miles of fantasy surrounded by reality known as [...]

by Charley James
It’s time for a truth-and-reality check on conservative crazies in Congress, on Fox and loose in the country who keep using the Canadian national health system as their example of why they object to making major reforms to America ’s medico-insurance complex.
I’ve experienced health care on both sides of the 49th parallel and [...]

by Robert Reich
I was just on the phone talking with a reporter for a national media outlet who referred to Senator Olympia Snowe’s idea for a public option “trigger” as the “centrist position.” Whoa. When the mainstream media start naming something as “centrist” the game is almost over because just about everyone with any authority [...]

by Denis Campbell
Living abroad these last 12-years, I said I did not recognise my country after its reaction to 9-11. Now that has been surpassed. The real threats to the American Empire are not 9-11, Afghanistan or Iraq. They are: polarisation, isolationism, greed and fear.
The blind anger, racism and lack of human compassion in the [...]

by Robert Reich
What we learned in August is something we’ve long known but keep forgetting: The most important difference between America’s Democratic left and Republican right is that the left has ideas and the right has discipline. Obama and progressive supporters of health care were outmaneuvered in August — not because the right had any [...]

UPDATED: The US healthcare debate is about cost. It should be about ensuring coverage for all. Commit, as the 22 other richest nations in the world have, to ensuring everyone is covered and you can then make tough “how-to” choices.
This is the real healthcare debate.
Not the big money ‘ginned’ death panels, pull the plug on Grandma, [...]

by Robert Reich
Last night, the so-called “gang of six” — three Republican and three Democratic senators on the Senate Finance Committee — met by conference call and, according to Senator Max Baucus, the committee’s chair, reaffirmed their commitment “toward a bipartisan health-care reform bill” (read: less coverage and no public insurance option). The Washington Post [...]

By Denis Campbell
Create a vacuum, be unclear, waffle, negotiate with soul-less bullies and you get gamed in Washington and across the USA. These NBC opinion poll graphics are chilling. The healthcare debate handed Republicans control of the US House in 1994. Now, because Congressional Democrats cannot determine what they stand for together, they will all [...]

By Denis Campbell
The healthcare debate rages across Capitol Hill with lobbyists fighting against a ‘single payer’ option as if it were the moral equivalent of the anti-Christ. Before you blindly accept any bill, please examine the very real (and ironic) face this debate has taken on for this journalist.
Paula Persichini-Petitti is a woman to whom [...]

by Robert Reich
Without a public option, the other parties that comprise America’s non-system of health care — private insurers, doctors, hospitals, drug companies, and medical suppliers — have little or no incentive to supply high-quality care at a lower cost than they do now.
Which is precisely why the public option has become such a lightening [...]