//Delete this later

“So, you kids think you should have something to hope for? THINK AGAIN, PUNKS!”

“Your leader isn’t going to do anything he pledged to do! Yeah, that’s right. Did you hear? Did you hear he didn’t say public option more than 2 times in his big health care speech? That means he’s not going to fight for it! Yeah, that’s right. You should just give up now. That’s what you get for not organizing and making Hillary Clinton the POTUS like we wanted you to. We want OUR OWN to be president, not some snotty little tweener/Gen X punk like Obama.”

“So what if the boat hasn’t even cleared the dock on this new administration? We’re jumping ship. Yeah, that’s right. We’re OUTTA HERE! You better bet that Obama loves the banks more than you! He’s sold out completely, just like we all did in the 80’s when we realized love and peace didn’t let us afford nice cars and pimp houses in nice neighborhoods. But we kept it real, man, we always smoked pot out in our BMW SUVs and in our perfectly manicured backyards, bought it from our buddy Gerrold from the health club after a furious game of squash.”

“You think he’s going to fight for you? THINK AGAIN! We know how things work. After all, we’re the epitome of selling our souls out. That’s just how things work now. We fought against the Vietnam War by smoking pot and drinking cheap wine in the park. Wearing flowers and dirty clothes. Pretending to be stereotypical Native Americans. Pretending how to play folk guitar. Yeah, we were keeping it real, and that’s why we could justify buying that SUV years later, complaining about capital gains taxes, and voting for Ronald Reagan. We set the rules, you silly little kids, and don’t you forget it.”

“Yeah, that’s right, college kids. You stay home, you shut up, and you better regret you did all that work for “that man” who wasn’t picked by us. We wanted to hold him up like an icon, like Jesse Jackson, so we could say “see? We have African-American heroes here on the left that ran for President! That justifies our WASPiness!” You get your heads back into the dirt and you think about what you did, because we didn’t approve of you turning some of us over and getting some of us to support your token leader. We wanted one of our types to promise us stuff and not deliver, just like we loved about Bill Clinton. But he sure could play a wicked sax!”

“You silly little kids with your “hope” and your “change”. We’re here to make sure that doesn’t happen. It offends us. We got rid of our “hope” in the 1970’s when Nixon lied to us, even though we knew he was a phony. We lost our “hope” in the late 1970’s when Jimmy Carter was the Pres because of the recession that occurred around his time, even though those of us who were sensible knew it wasn’t his fault (paying back that Vietnam War debt had to be steep). We sold out and voted for Reagan. And frankly, at this point in our lives, change offends us. We don’t want that. We understand our parents now. We want to make this thing work for us as long as it can so that we can die comfortably. Whatever happens to you, well, ehhh, you can just cope.”

“So you stupid kids stay the hell home and don’t you DARE turn out and try to recreate that movement that you did last year. Don’t you DARE create a movement to push Obama to spend more money to try and right the ship. We’ve got ours. It’s not our problem if you don’t. What, you didn’t make a fortune off the dot coms? OOOH, so sorry. Well, these things happen. You stay the hell home and deal with it and stop risking what we’ve got. We want to live our golden days comfortably. We deserve it. After all, WE protested VIETNAM. That gives us the RIGHT.”

With all the recent outages, it’s hard not to be at least a little suspicious.

After all, every social networking technology wants to be tight with Twitter. They want their updates pumped out over everything because everyone is clamoring to be that central hub of the social network on the Internet. They know full well that there is potentially Google-class money in being that hub. The truth is that Facebook is “close”, but they remind me a lot of how Yahoo was right before Google hit the ground…and Myspace…well, it reminds me a lot of AOL, Lycos, or Infoseek. Kludgy, but serves a specific purpose well (music vs. people lookup). Twitter is a very simple, non-cluttered-up technology that does a particular thing really well, and is easy to integrate with…so everyone will want to be the guy who lets you pump your updates over Twitter as well as display them on your own page.

The problem is, with all these “friends” wanting to flood Twitter, which is already fairly well flooded with various people’s meal updates, whether they tripped on a curb or not, or possibly a bit about the weather, it makes you wonder if the total income is enough to support the increases needed in infrastructure. Perhaps they need to find a way to be more decentralized, to offload more of the work to sites that integrate with Twitter…but on the other hand, that may skew their greatest potential economic strength, which is their ability to search through their messages and find people with similar interests.

Chances are, they’ll end up having to hook up with a wealthy sugar daddy. If they want to commit suicide, they’ll let that company be an Apple or a Microsoft closed shop. If they want to continue to roll, they’ll want to hook up with an outside partnership group that acts silently…but then again, there’s not a lot of value there if you do it like that. They definitely don’t want to make the same mistake as Myspace and let themselves be bought up by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Google might be a good choice, or Facebook (though that would render it a closed shop too, most likely). It’s possible, too, that being bought by one of these well-known (and in many cases, notorious) companies to the typical Twitter user, a competing technology might be right there to suck up all the people who ditch it because they don’t trust that new ownership (as it was with Myspace).

Maybe they’ll be able to keep this thing up privately. Optimally, that would be the best for their success…and people will just have to deal with the occasional outage.

I think we can agree that Conservatives have shown up to this fight with guns. That’s what they always do. They take shots, personal, political, and oftentimes, downright insane. The progressives, as usual, have shown up with baseball bats. And they don’t even have a good strategy for how to use those bats effectively.

And in reality, the progressives could still win this fight…they’ve got a powerful leader who can really distract their opponents most effectively. However, they’ve decided that the best strategy is to turn those bats on that leader and pound him on the shins, demanding him to pull out his gun and fire back.

Now, a winning strategy would really be for that leader to distract those conservatives with guns while progressives sneak up behind them and club them with baseball bats. But that doesn’t apparently appeal to some of their very simplistic sensibilities, and I suppose that’s okay…but that renders them effectively useless in the battle to get our health insurance system right, to get our environment cleaned up, and to get some freaking jobs for all these unemployed people.

The real problem is that there is a small group, maybe 5% of the overall population, of people who identify themselves as “real progressives”. Ideologues…not to say that’s a bad word, but they’ve decided to stake out their position consistently to the left of the President, and they figure that will somehow make him “move to their direction”. They use their influence over left wing radio and the netroots to try to “gin up” the liberal base, and figure that if enough liberals get mad, it would “scare” the President into doing what they want.

That’s an utter and complete misunderstanding of the typical liberal psyche.

People don’t become liberals because they’re like conservatives. Scaring them into doing what they want doesn’t work. Fear is something that drives people to be conservatives. Liberals become liberals because idealism makes them feel good. The majority of the people out there look for a leader that can embody those ideals, because they don’t feel that they, themselves, can make their ideals a reality themselves. When they don’t have that leader, they shrink back, identify with a wide variety of different people, and generally climb back into their shells and give up. When you kick that leader down, all you end up doing is deflating the base when you should be INFLATING that base.

The key for those “real progressives”, which in truth, are typically alpha personalities that think they, themselves, can solve everything with their own ideas and really don’t truly understand why people wouldn’t always agree with them. They are very, very different than the people they’re trying to motivate. There’s a couple ways to do this…you can facilitate the organization of individual people by making them feel that their leader is right…and from there, help them take more progressive stances. If a leader has an army of people behind them that are cheering them on to do the right thing instead of jeering at them for doing the wrong thing, there’s a better chance that leader will be stuck doing the right thing regardless of the influence around them. A mob generally can overwhelm the barricades, so to speak…if they’re willing to work together to push them aside.

And THAT is how, when your idealistic leader is negotiating with the other side to keep them from firing…you sneak up behind the other side and club them over the heads. The battle is won with no shots fired, and no one dying needlessly. You get in a firefight with ideals built on fear and try to fight fire with fire, positive ideals die.

It might be okay, I guess, and it might be useful for some people who want to improve their email responsiveness but don’t want to utilize instant messaging…I guess. If they have laptops or a phone that doesn’t deal well with email. I don’t know…email oddly enough works surprisingly well for what it does, and that’s to allow a person some time to craft a response that involves more thoughtfulness than an instant message, comment, or tweet. There is certainly a place for that in our dialogue. I see Wave as kind of a tweener technology that will probably have to give up some of its instant messaging features in favor of more conventional email features…and probably will eventually be incorporated as Gmail’s “optional” email client.

It’s just that it’s a johnny come lately to a crowded social networking field that doesn’t really bring anything spectacularly different and necessary to the game. Like Google hit the sweet spot with search, Facebook seems to have hit the sweet spot with social media. Twitter kind of is its own niche altogether…even though Twitter and Facebook “want” to compete with each other, they really don’t. They’re complementary technologies that really would be best served working closely together to deliver an even better product. Twitter does status updates far, far better than Facebook. Facebook does the whole “me webpage in a can with a photo gallery” better than anyone else.

LinkedIn, though, is an entirely different animal. I think most people would rather like for their LinkedIn to be separate from their personal stuff…even though all that personal stuff can be surfed up if you want to read it. I know full well that my employers can do that, and honestly, if I knew I wasn’t hired because they didn’t respect my political or technical opinions even if they disagreed, I think I’d kind of hate working for people like that anyway. In that regard, if social networking websites REALLY wanted to own the market, they’d do a better job of letting their users track the people who visit their sites, and block anonymous services that let them snoop on prospective employees without those employees knowing. I’d also like to see labor laws written that absolutely require employers to disclose whether or not they’ve been snooping on employees or prospective hires. It IS technically an invasion of privacy…if your boss intentionally followed you home from work and looked through your garbage to see if you were buying a competitor’s product, wouldn’t you find that just the least bit creepy?

Anyway, I just don’t see Google Wave, as it is now, really breaking the market open. Google has been desperate for something to really blow everyone away since they got their search out there. They have shareholders that they have to trick into thinking that their stock is worthwhile keeping there. That’s kind of the peril of letting your company go public…if Google were a private company, they could just settle with being the biggest search player out there, and having a sizable chunk of the web mail market. They wouldn’t have to overstaff in an attempt to churn out new ideas and try and branch out into crowded markets with products that just can’t improve on what’s there.

Bottom line, it’s just an example of why corporations need to de-merge, break up, buy up their own stock, and become private. If more companies did that, they’d be able to operate far more efficiently (though they’d have less of an ability to offshore jobs effectively…that’s not so bad too) and overall, you’d probably be pretty impressed with the overall monetary outcome of all of those spun off businesses.

Bill Clinton came out recently in an interview and said there’d be no repeat of 1994 in 2010 as far as the Republicans kicking the Democrats out of power in Congress, because the Republicans are much “weaker” now. I presume it’s really saying that the Republicans can’t stand on a soapbox and say that the Democrats had 40 years of control over Congress, and had become corrupt…since the Democrats have only held it for about 4 years when 2010 rolls around. That’s just one Presidential term (took FDR 3.6 terms, by the way, to get the New Deal through…and that’s with a system that was infinitely less bureaucratic, lobbyist controlled, contentious, and media corrupted than today’s government). Not a lot of high ground to stand on yet for the GOP.

The twist is that the Democrats will do anything and everything they can think of to lose in the process. You need to understand that there is an entire generation or two of Democrats that are used to being the minority party. When you’re in the minority and the country is going down the drain, you are allowed to be self-righteous. When you’re in the majority and you’re dependent on being self-righteous, you do silly things like start third parties to protest your old party, decide to stay home on election day in disgust, and do many other things that end up putting you right back in the minority, where you can be comfortable feeling self-righteous while the country slips down the tubes. That’s precisely how the Democrats can lose…because both parties are full of crazy people. Unfortunately, the type of crazy that pervades the left is the type of crazy that causes people to become passive-aggressive and check out of the system. It’s good crazy, mainly, but it’s not that great in terms of getting things done.

Now the right, that’s scary bad crazy. That’s marching in line, violent, uncomfortable, repressive crazy. But that IS crazy that gets things done. They use hate and fear to get united and motivated, instead of self-righteousness and idealism. Self-righteousness and idealism might be annoying to most folks, but hate and fear is far worse to surround yourself with.

While the influentials on the right will lie, cheat, steal, and scare their way into getting their sad, damaged people in line, the left wing influentials will, if they do not get what they want or do not feel good enough about what they’re getting, will intentionally demotivate theirs. They know what they’re doing…they’ll rationalize is any way they can, but then they will undoubtedly flog themselves and curse when they let the organized mass of fear driven righties run them over and run ramshod over the system in a thinly veiled smash and grab by people would couldn’t care less about the people who follow them or the country they live in. The bottom line is, if the left wants this experiment in Democracy to succeed, it’s got to do a whole lot better job of keeping their people motivated, marching, and voting.

People have been blogging repeatedly about “what happened to the Obama online campaign machine” that was so effective in 2008…it’s not gone. The organizers are still out there, still sending emails, still holding phone bankings, still trying to get good policy that helps everyone in place. Unfortunately, the left wing influentials have pushed a message of discontent that has deflated so many supporters of the Obama presidential campaign from last year that the online organization just doesn’t have enough people to remain effective. Every time you read a comment, hear a caller on some talk show, or hear someone on the street say “I don’t know about this Obama. I think I’m giving up. I don’t think he’s going to do what he promised. I don’t think he’s going to deliver good health care policy, I don’t think he’s going to end the wars, I don’t think he’s going to end extreme renditions…”, you’re hearing another person who probably has heard so much negative opinion that they’re going to give up, back down, stay at home, and let their chance that they voted for last year pass them by. They might figure “we’ll have another chance in 3 years, it’ll be fine.” Then they discover that they won’t have another chance for 16 years…but that whole time, they’re sure pissed at and self-righteous about the right wing government as it perpetuates a smash-and-grab by a handful of wealthy corporate slobs who just want to take the money and run before the whole thing falls apart.

What this is about is about the latest craze sweeping up all the beaten dogs that comprise the remnants of the “Republican Revolution”. That’s right, “Czars”. They’re crazy about this and think they have something they can hit back at the President with. I’ll say one thing…they’re crazy stupid.

Czars in this sense aren’t Russian dictators. They’re not autocrats. What is a “Czar” in the sense that that what are these people they’re so fired up about?

The term “czar” is an invention of the “media” and a term of “branding” that has been used in place of a person hired reflexively to deal with a particular problem that requires the attention and focus that an elected official or an official that has to undergo congressional approval doesn’t have the time or focus to deal with.

Corporations hire these people all the time. Their job is to come in as a specialist when a team is underhanded, overworked, or underqualified to do a particular task and get that work done. Most companies have budget room for these people. In fact, I happen to be this sort of employee, hired to help facilitate the release of a product or to tackle a difficult part of a project where I can bring more expertise to the game.

A “czar” is, essentially, an undersecretary to an undersecretary. They do a very focused task, such as coordinate with the police about drug policy, work with corporations in regards to air or water pollution policy, and other things like that. In short, they’re gophers. They’re underlings to underlings to underlings. They don’t have a lot of ultimate power. Their job is to sit in an office and do paperwork, occasionally make some face time in a meeting, and generally deal with the sort of crap that has to be dealt with, but is too important to risk slinging at an intern or some other unqualified staffer. In that sense, they’re a GOOD thing. Many leaders would just throw that work to interns, and the results can be disastrous for everyone involved if this is just some kid trying to play suck up to his politician boss. Instead of getting in that situation, they find some guy or lady whose written books about the subject, who clearly has a passion about the subject to handle that work with the utmost care, thus probably getting better quality government for everyone and a better bang for your tax dollar.

Do you honestly think Congress has enough time to stop everything they’re doing every day and approve some assistant to an assistant in some branch of the Federal Government? Absolutely not. Every session, there are piles upon piles of unfinished work because of ridiculous nonsense like this. The position is a reflexive one, requiring that you need to be able to put someone in charge of that work and get it done with the least amount of disruption to everyone else. But if you enjoy paying more for less government, then feel free to make Congress vet every single peon that the Administration hires. They never suggested nor considered doing it during the entire 8 years of the Bush Presidency where he was appointing people who gave him a “whole hell of a lot of money” to these jobs, but hey, you can’t count on a Republican to ever bring up the issue if there’s a Republican President. That’s why they’re out of power right now, by the way, and why they keep losing elections. The American people have them figured out, but right now, they’re pissed because the Democratic Party couldn’t ride right in and clean everything right up for them because the Republicans continued to make a big stink in the room like they do with a new non-issue every week.

For articles like this one which I found through there. I’m not the type to normally read GQ.

Even though the writer is totally historically wrong about Carter on page 6. Those long lines at the pump, unemployment, inflation? Brought to you by the folks who brought you the Vietnam War and those who set up a puppet dictator in Iran so that the auto industry could build Cadillacs that burned 10 miles to the gallon. We were paying back for the Vietnam war, when we got sucker punched in our major industrial cash cow industry of the day…the auto industry. How did Reagan solve that problem? Switch over to another puppet dictator named Saddam Hussain to get his oil, and fund Hussain’s war against the guys who overthrew the old puppet dictator. That set up the first Gulf War that killed the economy in 1992, which drove Osama Bin Laden to start Al-Qaeda and use brainwashed kids to blow themselves up by crashing planes and killing thousands of innocent bystanders, and start the Afghanistan war. Which we’re still in and still paying for, which set up the second Iraq War which has doubled the size of our debt. That was Ronald Reagan’s solution to the problems that Jimmy Carter faced. Compound the problem by about a zillion. The debt was nothing in comparison to what it is today, and that debt isn’t just going to “go away”. They freaking set up the whole economic mess we’re in today. ALL of it. And it started with Reagan.

Anyway, that bit aside, it’s one of the most believable insider views of the Bush White House I’ve ever read. For those who still think Bush was secretly a genius, read that article and it’ll change your mind. That said, it’s especially hilarious when he knocks Sarah Palin. It’s like the second stupidest kid in the class calling the stupidest kid an idiot. That said, in that moment, the second stupidest kid in the class had a sudden moment of brilliance in comparison to the smart kids turned idiots around him. Smart people can spot a smart person. Idiots can spot an idiot when smart people sometimes cannot.

So yeah, most people who know me know I’m prettly liberal/progressive/whatever. I don’t march in lock step, and frequently veer in strange directions (does that make me a drunk liberal? I think it does)…but I’m not above the time honored liberal tradition of kicking other liberals in the shins.

I go to Huffington Post at least once a day. There are a few people who blog there that I’m interested in who write interesting stuff. Robert Reich, Johann Hari, and a few others off the top of my head.

That said, Arianna has made a website for famous people with big soapboxes to have yet bigger soapboxes. Occasionally her people “deign” to allow “little people” a say in things, but typically, those posts get cleared away fast in favor of her favorite socialites’ ramblings. And very few of them seem to paint a picture that is different from her own, which has always made me suspicious of their vetting process.

Not to say that her own posts that get highlighted repeatedly aren’t self-indulgent ramblings. They are. Frequently.

Arriana Huffington is a person who has built a career on complaining about things. It’s how she connects with people who have similar complaints. Unless its HER or one of “her people’s” ideas. Obama gives a tremendous speech about health care, takes ownership of the public option, makes it perfectly clear that this thing is his and he wants it to work…and this is what her response is. She waits for some people to start nitpicking it because they didn’t hear exactly all the bullet points they wanted to hear, and she opens up by saying “the public option is dead” and as usual, infers that Obama is no better than George W. Bush. That’s just what she does. If she doesn’t get exactly what she wants, she throws a little online tantrum and throws stones from her glass house. It’s no surprise, given that she’s essentially built a big chunk of her life on complaining about things. Whether it was Bill Clinton back in her old conservative-independent days, or George W. Bush when she had a “change of heart” and became a progressive, and now Obama because he isn’t “progressive enough” or “doing enough”.

That’s a common complaint. After all, we’re just a bunch of little kids hoping daddy can make everything all right, right? Some of us are just less mature about it than others, I suppose. Of course, daddy’s trying to make things better while there are rifles pointed at him from every direction, poor folks running around with signs who were spun around by deceitful corporations with the intent to cause “disruption” by astroturfing a pseudo-libertarian “movement” with the ultimate goal of causing the “change” to be “good change” for their bottom lines. And what does Arianna do with her big soapbox? Kick daddy in the shins for not getting her that triple scoop ice cream and only getting her the single scoop because that was the most he could get out of the store. The problem isn’t “daddy”, the problem is those people making daddy’s job pretty much impossible.

Arianna could be using her soapbox to consistently push for getting everyone in this country who works independently, the self-employed, the unemployed, to join up with a union or unions. The reason why corporations were held in check in the old days was because there were big, tough unions that could take down any politician who veered too far into the corporate mass. That said, they balanced each other out because the corporations could donate to campaigns. That balance is what kept this country going for decades…it’s no surprise that politicians became totally corrupt when the unions went from having 30% of the workforce unionized to 8%…where they hardly even matter anymore. It’s really that simple. If a union could offer group health care plans through its own union based health care co-op, you could afford health care as part of your union dues. But Arianna has decided that co-op is a bad word, so there. I’d love single-payer too, unfortunately, because we disrupted the balance between the democratic institution of unions and the autocratic institution of corporations, we basically made that impossible in this political climate.

There has been a lot of change, it’s just that a whole lot of Arianna’s people wanted a whole lot more and didn’t get it instantaneously. A lot of that is predicated on irrational fear of problems so complex that you really can’t wrap your brain around them. That fear leads to two different points of view, typically…change everything, or touch nothing. The result of that causes extreme polarization, with one side thinking the other side is trying to destroy everything. It’s a problem as old as humanity itself, and it rears its head every so often in times of crises such as this one.

We could go out and take everything back from the people who caused this mess by force. We could demand that no fossil fuel burning cars be sold in the US. We could demand a single-payer health care option. The other side sees it like this: If you try and take the cash that was stolen by all these mortgage brokers back by force, where will it end? Will we be robbing guys who didn’t realize it was part of their salaries? If you take every fossil fuel burning car off the market and I total my car…but have to get to work at this place that is not on mass transit, and the auto companies are charging a fortune for first generation electric cars…does this mean I have to quit my job? If we kill all the health insurance companies in favor of a single payer system, does this mean that my brother who has sold health insurance for 20 years and has no other skills is going to be on the street?

That’s why we make compromises. And maybe they aren’t enough. Maybe we have to work towards a more progressive goal over time. But even a compromise, at this point, IS change. Because we weren’t even discussing any of these things in the last administration. The Bush Administration had an agenda and they rammed it down our throats, whether we liked it or not. The fact that we can discuss and compromise and work things out IS change. It’s a hell of a lot of change from the virtual autocracy we had been living under for the past 8 years. These guys could go to war and they didn’t even care if they could get congressional support for it or not. They just would go and do it and to hell with the consequences. If they wanted to force some corporate giveaway on us, they just did it. If they wanted to make rich people who inherited wealth even richer, they just did it. They didn’t even care. Their right wing radio guys apologized for it, but they didn’t have to, really…except in a weak attempt to try and keep “everyone cool” for the next election.

We got plenty of change already. And if you’re too blind to see it, then I certainly can’t help ya.

I got an idea, and personally, I like it. You can keep your insurance companies happy and get people who are uninsured in one step (well, okay, maybe you’ll need to slap a little regulation on top, but you won’t need a public option here). But it’s going to scare the pants off righties.

Unionize everyone who is self-employed or unemployed. Everyone who isn’t getting health care should be a member of a union. While in said union, which would provide group plans that would reduce health care costs by roughly 66%, they would also qualify for placement services through the union, and would be able to join an affiliated credit union. Those members of the union who are unemployed would be provided with temporary coverage that would be paid out from union dues collected by everyone. Think of it as a big placement company. You’d want that union to be as big as possible in order to maximize the dues and the size of the pot, but you’d want it to have specialists that take care of employees on an industry basis.

That would effectively enable everyone to buy into the insurance system without the need for a public option. But it scares the hell out of righties. It would effectively put true headhunters out of business, help to prevent the big banks from screwing as many people over, and would most likely take a stand against the right wing’s long lasting anti-union policies. The members of the union vote for the union leadership, so it’s a democratic institution…just like unions are right now. You’d just need to consolidate the leadership of the various unions. It would, effectively, enable all the people who are getting crapped on in this country to gain enough power to be on equal standing with various corporate lobbies in regards to political influence…and possibly create a balance in a very unbalanced system.

So, you think government run health care would have a lot of “bureaucratic overhead”? Think it would surpass some of these jokers who have been ripping YOU off? These guys don’t even have the shame to stop dropping people from HEALTH INSURANCE for getting SICK…just so they can do more of the following.

Health Insurance Industry CEOs

You can look all the information up on Google finance. They have to disclose their earnings under the law. Aside, it also proves there is still wage inequality. Why is the only woman on that list making so much less than those other guys? Like that stock trick Hemsley pulled? Made everyone think he took a big paycut, but he slipped 3/4s of a billion into stock options. Sneaky.

That crazy money is coming out of your health premiums. They’re getting it because they…uh…do stuff? In an office? Sometimes?

Here’s a new one: Blue Cross Blue Shield Party bonuses

That money, right there, is money you pay into that company for your policy. If they drop your policy, if they change your coverage, if they make you go to a different hospital…if the reason for all that is to save money, it certainly looks like they’re not doing it by skimming less off the top like most companies do when times get tough.

They stay in business by keeping a stranglehold on the medical system. Our hospitals aren’t as good as many overseas in countries with single payer. I know that firsthand having worked in with medical technology, and knowing that the target markets weren’t always US hospitals…but rather, Dutch, English, German, French, and Canadian hospitals because they had the money to put down for more advanced equipment that could save them money in the long run. US hospitals are years behind everyone else. Years behind, far more expensive, and a mess. The overhead caused by the association between private insurance companies and hospitals is ridiculous, but the people on top are skimming off so much money that they couldn’t care less.

THAT’s why we’re having this conversation. Health care costs are going to be the major cost this country has in a few years. Take that, and add to the fact that we are NOT prepared to defend against a terrorist spread pandemic, and we are SCREWED if we do not do something about it right now. Even those health insurance CEOs can get sick and die. They have kids who know kids who might be carrying the swine flu. Or ebola. Or whatever new mutated supervirus might be out next. But they’re too rich, too wealthy, to see the mistake they’re making. These people are driving a bus while blindfolded. That bus is our country, and if the riders don’t get up and do something about it, it’s going to hit a wall.