You Can’t Produce a Baby in One Month by Getting Nine Women Pregnant

Is this the best we can do? Forcing people to buy private health insurance, guaranteeing at least $50 billion in new business for the insurance companies? Is this the best we can do? Government negotiates rates which will drive up insurance costs, but the government won’t negotiate with the pharmaceutical companies which will drive up pharmaceutical costs. Is this the best we can do? Only 3% of Americans will go to a new public plan, while currently 33% of Americans are either uninsured or underinsured? Is this the best we can do? Eliminating the state single payer option, while forcing most people to buy private insurance. If this is the best we can do, then our best isn’t good enough and we have to ask some hard questions about our political system: such as Health Care or Insurance Care? Government of the people or a government of the corporations.

Only four in 10 whites say they support the health care reform legislation in Congress, compared with three-fourths of nonwhites. And just 30 percent of whites, compared with 45 percent of nonwhites, say that an Obama-like agenda of public investment in education and technology offers the nation its best chance at long-term prosperity. Far more whites than nonwhites would bet on a conservative approach of tax cuts and deregulation. The starkest finding of all is that three-fifths of nonwhites (including three-fourths of African-Americans) believe that Obama’s agenda will increase opportunities for people like them; but a plurality of whites — 38 percent — say his agenda will decrease their opportunities. College-educated white men believe, by 2-to-1, that Obama’s approach is reducing their prospects.