A Time To Kill the Killers, A Time for Outrage

http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-Time-To-Kill-the-Killers-by-Rob-Kall-091022-197.html

October 22, 2009
A Time To Kill the Killers, A Time for Outrage
By Rob Kall

It's time to kill the most horrific mass murderers and family destroyers in America of the last decades-- health insurance companies.

Alan Grayson calls it a holocaust. You can argue with his use of words, but 45,000+ Americans are DYING every year because of the health care system we have in the US now. Hundreds of thousands of families are going bankrupt because of the health care system-- and most of them have health insurance.

At a recent townhall I moderated, an audience member asked former Cigna healthcare communications director Wendell Potter what he thought about charging insurance company executives with murder. "Good luck," he replied.

The system won't let such an idea happen. It's time to kill the health insurance companies-- the private and the pseudo public ones. FOrget about competing with them with a weakened, delayed with a trigger, state-level opt-out public plan. That public plan is an insult to Americans that the Democrats in congress are trying to sell us-- an insult that is not even plan to START phasing in until 2013. It is time to make them extinct.

The right wingers in both parties are opposing creating a public option that would compete with health insurance companies. They are protecting these cancers on the american economy. Yes, health insurers are cancers, sucking up hundreds of billions out of the economy while making our other industries less internationally competitive.

It's time to treat corporations like heroin and make them illegal. It's time to start looking at the very real death panels and policies of health insurers as murder policies which intentionally kill real humans.

It's time to pull the plug on the protection of these massive monsters that are strangling our economy and causing misery in the homes of millions and millions of Americans.

It will not be easy. The multi-trillion dollar industry will fight like a cornered animal, lashing out, attacking politicians, probably blackmailing them, buying them, pushing them to speak out in opposition to the public option.

It is time to dump the public option and pass single payer health care. It is time to characterize politicians who don't get it that single payer is what is best for Americans and American industry as sold out or stupid.

It is time to raise the bar. Democrats were given more power than they've had in a long time and they must use it or they will surely lose it.

Call your senator and tell him or her you don't want the public option because you know it is a fraud that is being unacceptably delayed for four years and more.

Call your congressperson and tell him or her to sign on to support HR676, the single payer health care bill. Tell her that failure to do anything less is a sell out to killer corporations that are destroying lives and families and killing tens of thousands.

On Tuesday, 1200 supporters of single payer health care came from all over the Northeastern US to attend a rally in podunk Harrisburg, 100 miles from anywhere. Across the US, Americans are protesting at health insurer corporate high rises, engaging in the same kind of civil disobedience on behalf of the fight for the civil right of health care that marchers and Freedom Riders and restaurant sitters engaged in when they fought for racial equality in the south in the sixties. Yes, people are getting arrested as they protest the murderous, family destroying health care system we have in the US.

I say that getting arrested for the civil disobedience of standing in the ground floor lobby is a start. But we need to hit harder if we are going to kill these evil corporations. Yes, they are evil. Their executives set evil policies that deny treatment, deny insurance to children who are too fat, too thin. The executives declare that women must be sterilized to be eligible for insurance. They say that rape victims have pre-existing conditions. The executives set the policies and workers carry them out. They are evil. Protesters should be protesting the murderers.

When protesters go to health insurer high rises, they should be carrying signs accusing company executives AND workers of murder, of being killers. They should have signs calling for the execution and termination of the companies, the prosecution of the executives.

When anti-abortion protesters protest at abortion and family planning clinics, they assail the workers as they enter the buildings. Health reform advocates should be doing the same thing to health insurer workers at all levels. These people are working for killers, for people who make death-panel-like policies. There should be no violence but there should be a whole lot of outrage.

That outrage should certainly be vented at the insurance companies and their employees, but it should also be shown to the legislators who are selling out their constituents. It is disgusting to watch them lie and dissemble, saying they are protecting health consumers by really protecting health insurer profits. Protesters can target legislator offices. Let their staffs know that you are furious and outraged that they would try to sell you a bogus "public option" solution that has its start delayed four years and full implementation even further out. Do what it takes to let them know. Find the people in the community who are victims. Bring them to the offices. Force the staffers and the legislators to look them in their eyes and lie to them.

The Democrats were handed massive power. They are betraying the american people. If they don't use it to literally re-invent health care, in the process, eliminating, killing, like poison ivy in a garden, the health insurers, then the incumbent Democrats won't deserve to hold their power or their jobs. Harry Reid is looking like he deserves to lose his job. Obama has been cowardly in his failure to take a strong stand. Sure he did not call for single payer as a candidate. But he didn't expect to have a 60 vote majority in the senate either. The people gave him and Reid and Pelosi the power to do the right thing. It is not enough to throw us the bare, sterile, inadequate bone that is currently on the table. It is time for the american people to get outraged and angry and raise their voice loudly, to engage in the kind of strategies that brought civil rights to racial inequality. It is time for Americans to find the courage and strength to raise their voices louder than the pandering media pundits, like Chris Matthews, who call single payer a liberal policy, when every conservative leader in Europe has kept single payer when they were in power. It is time for YOU the reader to demand that the corpstream media to put more single payer option spokespeople on the air and to educate the public about single payer much better.

America is at risk. The finance companies have demonstrated that their leaders are totally out of control, taking raises at every chance they can get. The health insurers are parasites, killing americans, deeply damaging families and weakening our industries' ability to compete. It is time to kill them. Period.