Truman's Conscience

A video the Clinton and Obama Campaigns need to see

As a former Edwards supporter my choice between the remaining two campaigns, Obama and Clinton, was made for purely academic reasons. The three most important issues for me right now are the Iraq war, health care, and civil rights issues which are directly related to future choices for the Supreme Court. We are only one elderly court member away from falling into a hard right wing court that sees civil rights as something to be tolerated as a necessary evil and to be circumvented at any cost. Based on these three issues my choice fell to Obama because I felt his position on Iraq and civil rights were superior.

Now that I've qualified my support for Senator Obama, I still have problems with his health care plan. Though Hillary's is only slightly better whereas the subsidies she supports have a heavier emphasis than his, both still rely largely on the tired old remedy of private insurers to be the mainstay of their plans. Even though both have introduced portability and bans on pre-existing condition exemptions, most of the insured are still exposed to the threat of a potential catastrophic illness that will tap their coverage dry and at worst bring down entire families financially and at best expose those families to undue financial risks and hardships that will take years to recover from.

What needs to change is our entire way of thinking about health care coverage and how it is offered. If we don't, the path all the candidates embrace, both Democratic and Republican, will put such a financial and economic strain on the middle class their fates will rest on the fortunes of a national economy and whether or not it will be subject to some future major economic downswing with the potential of gutting the middle class. IOW, it would be the subpirme crises tripled.

I am currently working on putting together a piece that will compare both Obama's and Clinton's health care plans side by side to see where one stands in contrast to the other. Meanwhile, during my research for this I ran across this video with a surprising voice from the past that sums up the exact mindset we need to take look at how we insure our nation's citizens:

There is no doubt corporate lobbyists representing both the pharmaceutial and privte insurers have a death grip on our nations political and social structure. That was one reason I was backing John Edwards. The Obama and Clinton campaigns, despite their emphatic denials of corporate influence are still subject to their agendas. Right now I can't imagine in my lifetime or my daughter's this mindset will change. But the video I provided is a good first step.