If there is ANYONE More Cynical Than I, It Is Chris Hedges.

Not to put TOO fine a point on it, but:

Capitalists, as my friend Father Michael Doyle says, should never be allowed near a health care system.

They hold sick children hostage as they force parents to bankrupt themselves in the desperate scramble to pay for medical care.

The sick do not have a choice. Medical care is not a consumable good. We can choose to buy a used car or a new car, shop at a boutique or a thrift store, but there is no choice between illness and health.

And any debate about health care must acknowledge that the for-profit health care industry is the problem and must be destroyed.

This is an industry that hires doctors and analysts to deny care to patients in order to increase profits.

It is an industry that causes half of all bankruptcies.

And the 20,000 Americans who died last year because they did not receive adequate care condemn these corporations as complicit in murder.

The foregoing was originally published as a single paragraph, but the litany of abuse deserves more attention than that. The REAL issue, as I and others have remarked is who will get their greasy, blood-drenched fingers on the MONEY. That's the4 argument now. It has NOTHING whatsoever to do with heatlth care. coverage, or medicine of any kind.

The Democrats are collaborating with lobbyists for the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and for-profit health care providers to craft the current health care reform legislation. “Corporate and industry players are inside the tent this time,” says David Merritt, project director at Newt Gingrich’s Center for Health Transformation, “so there is a vacuum on the outside.” And these lobbyists have already killed a viable public option and made sure nothing in the bills will impede their growing profits and capacity for abuse.

“It will basically be a government law that says you have to buy their defective product,” says Dr. David Himmelstein, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a founder of Physicians for a National Health Plan. “Next the government will tell us a Pinto in every garage, a lead-coated toy to every child and melamine-laced puppy chow for every dog.”

“Health insurance is not a race to the top; it is a race to the bottom,” he told me from Cambridge, Mass. “The way you make money is by abusing people. And if a public-option plan is not ready and willing to abuse patients it is stuck with the expensive patients. The premiums will go up until it is noncompetitive. The conditions that have now been set for the plans include a hobbled public option. Under the best-case scenario there will be tens of millions [who] will remain uninsured at the outset, and the number will climb as more and more people are priced out of the insurance market.”

The whole piece is much longer, much bleaker, much more "real" than anything you'll read from the Obama Kool-Aid Korps. As anyone with a scintilla of gray matter more than a sea anenome has known since 'jump street,' there has NEVER been ANY chance that Obama would actually CHANGE the balance of power in Health Care...