We must do something to protect the souls of all those working in the insurance industry.
Can you imagine getting a promotion at work because you were the employee who managed to cancel the most people's health insurance?
Nicholas Kristof has a piece today about Wendell Potter, a recovering insurance industry hack. He was on the Diane Rehm show a while back. His story is pretty convincing.
When people start going on and on about the 'threat' of rationing health care, I wish they would take a moment to think about what the insurance industry actually does. Not what it wants us to believe it does, which is spread out risk and take care of us when we have needs, but what it REALLY does, which is take our money and then kick us to the curb if we have needs.
We have to take better control of this debate. It's crazy to me that somehow we've not managed to get all Americans up in arms about how crazy and exploitative and immoral our current system is.
But since that's not working, maybe we need a new strategy. Perhaps we could shift things by talking about the emotional, psychological and spiritual toll screwing over so many Americans is taking on the soul of so many insurance industry employees. We oughtn't to demand that sort of heartlessness from anyone. It's too destructive to their humanity. I wonder if Wendell Potter is being treated for PTSD. Oh right, his policy probably doesn't cover that.
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I agree that health care is a moral issue. As is income inequality and global climate meltdown and many of the other issues that well-funded interests spend countless dollars trying to confuse us about with often bizarre counterpoints that nonetheless wind up controlling the debate. Even when the executive branch and the legislative branch are controlled by Democrats, conservatives set the terms of discussion, and the Democrats do not assert the basic morality of the issue because they think/know they will lose reelection if they do.
Bill Moyers was on Bill Maher last night, and he spoke about the morality of health care. He also had a spot-on critique of the Obama administration. He mentioned Grover Cleveland, a "good man" who nonetheless became a conservative Democrat because he was too afraid to stand up to the moneyed interests.
It's tough to watch Real Time if you don't have HBO, it seems, and as soon as clips of it get on the Net, HBO comes around and asserts copyright. But for now, here it is, in 3 segments:
http://ow.ly/nfFI - http://ow.ly/nfGI - http://ow.ly/nfGD
Also it can be listened to via podcast.
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