the beginning of the end...,

TCBH | Give credit to Howard Dean. This still practicing physician, former governor of Vermont, former chair of the Democratic Party and former Democratic presidential candidate has called for progressive members of Congress in both houses to join their Republican colleagues in killing what he rightly says has become "an insurance company's dream."

Those namby-pamby, self-described "progressives" in the Democratic Party who claim that the health bill can still be saved with the inclusion of a fake, carefully circumscribed and thoroughly emasculated "public option" government insurance plan that at best would only be able to offer lousy coverage at high rates to a small number of self-employed poor people are wrong. This supposed attempt at reforming the US health care system--the costliest and least effective in the developed world--is simply past saving.

The only appropriate place for the bill at this point is a dumpster.

What could have been a transformational moment in American politics--an end to decades of corporate health care and the creation of a system in which all Americans were guaranteed affordable, quality care as a basic right of citizenship, the way people are in Canada, in all the countries of Europe, in Japan, in Taiwan, in Cuba and much of the rest of the world, has been squandered.

It has been squandered by President Obama, who was too gutless to take a leadership role, and left matters to Congress, and who then slithered up to the major players in the medical-industrial complex and cut secret deals with all of them--doctors, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and the hospital industry--in return for their "support."