Greetings. There's a phrase that's often incorrectly considered to be an ethnic slur these days: "Calling a spade a spade." Look it up -- you'll find it has nothing whatever to do with race, and dates to at least the 16th century. I now invoke that phrase in relation to the ongoing U.S. health care debate.

I've been sitting here for weeks, watching the drama of "politics as usual" as the boys and girls in power play their usual political games with our health care -- or rather, for so many of us, our lack of health care. And the more I watch, the more I see a parade of lies that should cause every American to feel ashamed.

Let's start with Big Lie #1 -- the claim that the U.S. has the best health care system in the world, so we don't dare "break" it. Falsehood. Lie. If we had the best health care system, we wouldn't rank so low globally in so many measures -- infant mortality, average age at death, and so on. And we'd hover somewhere around 100% medical coverage for all citizens and legal residents. By all of these measures, we're little more than third-world wannabees.

Oh sure, if you've got the money, you can get top rate care -- whether you need it or not, and whether or not it makes financial sense. For the rest of us, it's too damn bad, screw you, get the hell out of my waiting room!

Almost as bad in key respects are the various lobbyists for the elderly. Medicare is a wonderful program, but let's be honest -- according to current statistics, related expenses for this age group are eating up an enormous percentage of health care dollars. And, I'm sorry, what I see coming from many of these groups is nothing but unmitigated greed. Don't you dare touch our government funded health care Medicare system! Who cares how much it costs? Who cares about unfunded drug benefits and unnecessary tests and all the rest? Let everyone else just die already! Protect us, let everyone else go to hell. Greed. Plain and simple.

And the insurance companies. Ah yes, the insurance companies. All the crying from both sides of the aisle about how we need to protect the insurance companies, how a public option would destroy them and how horrible such an outcome would be.

Here's my opinion. Do to the insurance companies what they've been doing to us for decades. Four letter word -- starts with F. Especially for those of us without employer sponsored health care -- a larger and larger percentage of the population. The medical insurance companies have been telling us to go to hell for years.

More than that, they kill people. Kill. Just like with a gun. They deny coverage when it's most needed, refuse payments, order doctors not to perform needed procedures, retroactively cancel coverage, and basically have most people who are stuck with lousy coverage in perpetual terror of even using what they're paying for, in fear that they'll be cancelled or their rates raised even catastrophically higher.

What the blazes have these companies done for us that couldn't be done better, with more accountability, by a government program operating in the sunlight? Medicare sure seems to keep the elderly pretty happy, overall.

Yes, without infinite resources, there does need to be some form of health care rationing. And no, computerized medical records aren't going to solve the problem, and they bring their own complex risks to the table as well But I'll take a public plan operating under clear rules and regulations any day, over a few uber-powerful private firms scheming in darkness like feudal lords -- complete with the power to garrote their serfs on a whim.

If a public health insurance option causes the private insurance companies to whither and die, so be it. Good riddance. If we can't get a public option on a bipartisan basis, that's OK by me -- Obama should stand firm for a public option no matter what it takes. If the GOP leadership wants to hang out with Palin and similarly deluded opportunists that's their choice, just don't drag the rest of us down into your hallucinatory, lying hell with you.

Just two more points for now. First, the politicians and others spreading lies suggesting that there are "Obama death panels" in the health care legislation are beneath contempt. Rush Limbaugh tries to draw parallels between health care reform and the Nazis. You want to invoke Nazi comparisons? Fine, let's see who is in bed with Rush and his ilk. Let's quote the well-known philosopher and murderer Joseph Goebbels - "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."

We're Americans. We deserve better than Rush Limbaugh, greedy insurance companies, and Sarah Palin's supplicants. Now is the time to call a spade a spade, to call out the lying bastards for what they really are, and to start caring about more than winning the next election. Every day many of our fellows drop dead from a lack of medical services that make the U.S. a humiliated laughingstock when it comes to caring about its population.

Enough is enough.

--Lauren--