Will We Let The Gangsters Rob Us Of Good Health Care?

By James Donahue

California’s Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, last week warned her fellow Democrats that if they failed to pass health care reform this time around, they all would pay heavily in the polls as a consequence.

“If we don’t deliver, we’ve got a problem,” Feinstein said. “I think it has to be, look, this saves money, this saves lives, this saves Medicare. It is incremental.”

While Feinstein appears to be more worried about her job than delivering adequate health care to the American people, her statement that failing to deliver will create a problem is, by itself, an understatement.

From where we sit, the whole health care debate has triggered actions and reactions from insurance companies and health care providers that have set the stage for a national catastrophe if Congress fails to deliver an adequate health care bill, and do it soon.

Americans who have been enjoying some level of insurance through their employers, or digging into their pockets to pay for it themselves, may soon find themselves cut out of even these limited benefits.

Big insurance providers are announcing major increases in the cost of insurance prices. Aetna will be raising prices in January and says it expects to push up to 650,000 clients to give up their health coverage next year so the company can meet projected profit margins. That is a muted way of saying the company wants to boot out older and high-risk clients and reduce the money it might have to pay for the people who need medical care the most.

It is common knowledge that our legislators are drafting and arguing over a complex health care bill that will offer few benefits right away even if it wins passage by both the House and Senate. The earliest date when real benefits kick in will be 2014, a full five years down the road. How many people will die needless and painful deaths, or suffer the agony of untreated medical problems because they can’t afford health insurance between now and then?

It also is common knowledge that many of our legislators are putting up fierce resistance to this bill because they are being paid large sums of money from the insurance and health care lobbyists to do so.

To these elected “representatives of the people” we ask: Where is your compassion? Have you no decency? Does your love of money overpower your ability to give aid and comfort to the people you campaigned to serve? Is money the god you worship?

Those who may (honestly) answer “yes” to that final question should take a close look at their personal spiritual path as America, and the world, moves through what may be our final days. There is a major shift in world events occurring. We see it in the financial melt-down, the ecological calamities, the extreme climate changes, the deadly new epidemics and the exposed rot in the great world religions.

The wise spiritual teachers are warning that there is an extreme change ahead. People are separating now into two groups . . . those turning within to the heart chakra which emanates love for one another, and those forfeiting all for personal material wealth.

We are beginning to believe that the Christian myth of a “rapture of the saints” may be strangely close to what is going to really happen when the time comes for this looming change. But the final outcome might come as a terrible shock for those who thought confessing their sins to a dead Jesus was going to fix everything.