Individual mandate constitutional?

Unconstitutional or not, the individual mandate is outrageous and offensive. Not because of asking people to take responsibility and pull their own weight, but because it mandates that everyone buys an over-priced and disgusting product from one or another giant financial corporation.

The Senate version is worse: it levies fines for not having insurance but tax breaks for the cost of insurance, while the House version subsidizes the cost of insurance for people with modest incomes, and imposes a tax penalty for no insurance.

The Senate version includes no restraint on their price-fixing and market-monopolization practices, and no public insurance option to restrain prices through competition. But either version would force some 20 or 30 million new customers into the maws of the giant insurance-company vacuum-cleaner, which sucks up and pockets or wastes our hard earned money, and employs armies of clerks and lawyers to haggle over what care we will be allowed in return.

In return we get some rules limiting their discriminatory practices, but they're still allowed to charge up to twice as much for older patients and four times as much for "pre-existing conditions". So older, sicker citizens will be priced out of the market, and will be fined (and maybe prosecuted) for it!

This is reform? Constitutional or not, it is a scandal and must be stopped.

Kerry, Coakley and McGovern, are you listening? This rising tide of protest is not a Republican or a Democratic thing - it's bigger than that. Your system is cracking at the base. Who will speak for us on the inside?

Reid's Manager's Amendment to the Senate Health Care Bill contains

a. no public option,
b. no Medicare buy-in - and
c. a back-door version of the House's Stupak Amendment - that would effectively block abortion coverage in the health insurance exchanges and would probably result in its being dropped from most private plans as well.

(See NOW's bulletin: http://www.now.org/lists/now-action-list/msg00416.html)

If the liberals and progressives who elected Obama are to have any credibility, we must act to block this deeply flawed bill unless it meets bare minimum standards of doing more good than harm.

I am calling Kerry and Kirk (866-338-1015)and urging them to make clear that they will vote against this bill unless either a. or b. (or both) is included, and unless c. is removed. They must make it clear to the leadership that either no public option and no buy-in or removing abortion coverage is a deal-breaker.

The Blue Dogs need to understand that they will be running next time as candidates of the party that couldn't pass the health-care bill we promised - because of them - unless they back down. They've been playing "chicken" with us long enough; it's time to call them on it.