Like Gene Autry once sung, I'm "Back In The Saddle Again."
After a few days of battling the fever (I was at 102 degrees at one point Thursday night) I'm back up and around following a much needed day of rest to bring my body back to normal.
And after watching as much of the tributes to Ted Kennedy as I could to go along with my doses of Texas (St)Rangers baseball and tonight's (Sorry)Boy game against the 49ers, I'm as loaded for bear as I could be.
To start with, one cannot discuss Ted Kennedy without discussing what he said was "the cause of his life," namely national health insurance. Contrary to what naysaying Democrats, Republicans, and their friends in the Washington pundit class are saying, healthcare reform is not subject to compromise-- especially when it comes to the public option.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid is out of his tree when he says that a public option can be privately run, and another Democratic senator, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, needs a strong dose of reality juice for continue to press for the total watering down of any reform by pushing weak co-ops to stand in the place of a public option.
What is there to be afraid of about the public option? There are already two single-payer government-run healthcare systems in this country, namely Medicare (for seniors) and the Veterans Administration, and both have been strong in delivering quality benefits for their participants.
And how about this poppycock about a public option driving private insurers out of business? Have these people ever heard of FedEx and UPS?
Both FedEx and UPS are privately-run delivery companies that have garnered large chunks of the national and international delivery businesses even with the availability of a strong public option, namely the U.S. Postal Service. If FedEx and UPS can win large chunks of the package delivery market by delivering quality service to their customers, why can't private insurers become just as inventive in producing quality products against a Medicare-like public option?
Are these private for-profit insurance companies so lazy about becoming more inventive and customer-friendly that they'd rather spend millions to defeat healthcare reform instead of doing what it takes to provide better services even in the face of competition from a robust Medicare-like public option?
America cannot afford anything less than robust healthcare reform with a real Medicare-style public option, and if lazy politicians like Harry Reid, Kent Conrad, and their ilk don't want to deliver it, they should step aside and allow those who really want to honor the memory of Ted Kennedy to step forward and ram this legislation directly to President Obama's desk even if it gets no Republican support.
