US: Republican Senator tells wife of brain-damaged man who gets no insurance coverage, to suck it up 28/8 [EN]

Stop the ultraconservative smear campaign against health care reform in the US!

What is at stake?

In the USA, more than 46 million out of a population of 200+ million have NO health insurance at all. In terms of percentage of national income, the US health care system is nevertheless the most expensive in the world. Millions of people die, prematurely, as they cannot afford the medical charges to survive.

In 1992: Bill and Hillary Clinton failed in their campaign for a civilized health care system, because of massive opposition from vested interests (Insurance companies, pharma firms, private clinics, etc.). In 2009, Obama starts a new campaign for a 100% health care coverage in a mixed private-federal system. State intervention in health care is nothing unheard-of in the US. The Medicare system, that exists since Johnson's presidency, provides limited support for some (large) categories of people that are unable to take private insurance.

State money OK for Banks, not for health care?

Not unlike the state intervention that rescued last year some banks and insurance companies (think of AEI), Obamas proposal includes a federal organism that would be a player in the 'market' of health care, extending the existing Medicare system to everybody who is not covered by the existing private insurance. Employers would have to intervene, just as in most of the European national health care systems. Good insurance of their employees is in their interest, too.

Those proposals have provoked an upheaval of the traditional Right (Reagan-conservatives, neo-conservatives and the Christian Fundamentalists). Unsettling is also, that many Democrat representatives, who were financially supported in their campaigns by, for instance, pharma companies, have joined the opposition. But the foremost activists, supported by an Republican Party committee intrigue, are violent hecklers, sometimes armed, that disturb the "Town Hall Meetings" of representatives with their public, on this issue.

Europe-bashing

Apart of the incredible lies that are systematically proferred by the whole united lot of ultraconservative radio commentators, tha comprehensive Canadian and European health care systems are depicted as nothing short of Communism.

In this YouTube fragment from CNN, an American Senator, a medical Doctor himself (!), has only this answer to a woman who complains about the fact that her brain-damaghed husband gets no medication: "Ask your neighbours to help"!

Disgusting!