Health Insurance Companies Can Suck My Dick

After spending half a year working at the Center for Media Justice and basically deepening my distaste for the media to the point where saying FOX out loud is enough to make me projectile vomit down the nearest news anchor's open mouth, I have been reduced to scanning the headlines via Yahoo and watching CNN on the treadmill at the gym. I figure I can learn all of what I need to know in terms of distorted media biased issues reporting from one of those sources, in small spurts, without risking nausea or a brain tumor.

Today, though, I was reading an article on Yahoo that talked about the upcoming speech that Obama is planning to a joint session of Congress. First of all, joint sessions of Congress are extremely rare occurrences. The only time they happen regularly is during the State of the Union. Otherwise, they are generally reserved for things like announcing a formal declaration of war, the end of a war, the death of a someone of near God-like stature, or the annual Congress Christmas Party and Intern Rubdown.

In the aforementioned article, it happened to say, punnily, that one of the opposition points of the conservative lobby and GOPers is that they are worried about the health of private health insurance companies.

Excuse me? The HEALTH of private health insurance companies? Did United Healthcare come down with tuberculosis, AIDS, or malaria and I missed it? No? Until then shut the fuck up talking to me about some goddamn entity that exists on paper as having any health needs whatsoever. I have health needs...I need to be healthy; I need to be able to get sick and not have to worry about dying from a heart attack when I get the doctor bill; and I need to not have to decide whether or not I should spend money on electricity or Zoloft.

Health of health insurance companies. Nigga please.

This is the one time in all my life that I have heard Democrats advocating for a full on market system that will force private companies to play by the rules of capitalism by competing with a new and larger player that will force bloated, vampiric, profit mongering private health insurers to stop price gouging, price setting, and profiting from the illness, death, and misery of people and start looking at ways to keep people healthy, reduce costs and provide the most effective treatment for the lowest price. That is how the fuck you stay in business in any other damn industry...hey health care...suck my dick...I don't give a shit about the CEO of United Heath care raking in a salary of $124.8 million (and yes kiddies that is what former United Health Group CEO Bill McGuire made in 2005).

This is also the first time I have ever heard Republicans talk about protecting the market from competition. Excuse me...is Rush Limbaugh back on those pills? Is Trent Lott back to advocating for the return of the Dixiecrats? Is someone up in the Senate Office building smoking crack rock? I find it highly amusing the inviolate free market economy beliefs of Republicans are about as deeply held and inviolable as 13 year old boy at Neverland Ranch.

There is no health care reform without a public option. Period. Without a public option the health care reform becomes a minor tweak of the health care system where teeny changes will be made, that will save money in the short term, will not address the fundamental underlying problems with the system, will result in bloated health care premiums over the long term, and will inevitably lead to a return to the status quo or worse...the collapse of the U.S. economy under the burden of health care costs. States are already seeing this happen, for example, in Minnesota, the majority of every new tax dollar raised goes to offset state health care costs. When all of our money is going to pay for bloated programs that do not work and to premiums and systems that create poor care and massive numbers of underinsured or uninsured, why the hell wouldn't we do anything and everything possible to address the real issue: CREATING A HEALTH CARE PROGRAM AND SYSTEM ACCESSIBLE TO EVERYONE, AFFORDABLE TO EVERYONE, and SOLVENT!

Anticipating Obama's speech to Congress, I can feel the spirit of my Big Mama sitting with me. I am about to pull on my house coat, lube up my slippers, chew on some tobacco, and cut a switch. I am going to sit in the gallery in Congress, spitting in to my chaw bucket, and slappin' my switch menacingly on the bench...staring down at Obama and daring his narrow black ass to back off a public option. And the minute some cock-eyed, short dicked, Cadillac insurance carrying Republican member of Congress (or Blue Dog Democrat for that matter) opens his or her mouth to as much as yawn during or after the speech, I am going to lay into their asses like their Mama's should have and scream at the top of my lungs, "Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You...You Don't Like A Public Option? Then YOU PUT THE 40,000,000 uninsured on YOUR health care plan."

Don't worry GOPers and Blue Dogs...the ass whoopin' you got comin' is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.

No it ain't. Bend over and take it bitches. Cuz you have earned this whoopin', and I hope Obama tears your fat asses up.