“I’m a blue dog. I want fiscal restraint and order.” -President Barack Obama
The year was 2008, and after 8 years of the rogue, war
mongering, illegitimate reign of terror brought on by the George W. Bush
Administration, the Democratic Party could have run a ham sandwich for
president and won. George W. Bush and
his right wing neocon Republicans couldn’t have accomplished any of their
agenda without the assistance of the Blue Dog Democrats also known as Reagan
Democrats. As a matter of fact, there
would have been no George W. Bush Administration without the aid and comfort
given Bush by the Blue Dog Democrats and Al Gore’s running mate Joe Lieberman;
Gore was sabotaged.
When William Jefferson Clinton was elected in 1992, he had
not only defeated George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, but he had defeated the
Democratic establishment or the Blue Dog Democrats. The Blue Dog Democrats were hell bent on the
total destruction of FDR’s New Deal and believed any government department,
whose purpose was to serve the needs of the American people should be
privatized for maximum private profits.
Bill and Hillary Clinton started their service in the White
House with the plan of offering a conservative universal healthcare plan that
they believed could garner support from Republicans as well as Democrats. The need for universal healthcare was great
after Ronald Reagan, with the help of the Blue Dog Democrats, had completely
destroyed the healthcare system in America.
So let’s take a look at a brief history of the fight for universal
healthcare in America. From Becker’sHospital Review:
Excerpt:
The Truman Administration (1945-1953)
The first attempt at healthcare
reform in the post-war era occurred during the administration of President
Harry S. Truman… President Truman
recommended to Congress a proposal for
universal health insurance coverage, administered and paid for by a
National Health Insurance Board. Opponents
of the proposal, including the
American Medical Association, decried it as "socialized medicine," and the bill died in Congress.
The Eisenhower Administration (1953-1961)
With its focus on the emerging Cold
War, the Eisenhower administration supported only limited healthcare reform
proposals. In 1956 the "Military
Medicare" program was enacted, providing payment for healthcare
services for military dependents.
The Kennedy Administration (1961-1963)
The Kennedy administration pursued
a more modest form of healthcare coverage than that proposed by President
Truman. The Kennedy administration
supported the King-Anderson bill, under
which health insurance coverage would be limited to those 65 years of age and
older and be part of the Social Security benefits package… President Kennedy took his case on the road
directly to the public. On May 20, 1962, a series of 33 public rallies were
simultaneously held in various parts of the country…
President Kennedy confidently
predicted the King-Anderson bill would pass Congress "this year, or as
inevitably as the tide comes in, next year." President Kennedy was wrong. Opposed by the powerful AMA and with help
from conservative Democrat Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways
and Means Committee, the bill was defeated
in Committee.
The Johnson Administration (1963-1969)
Lyndon B. Johnson won a landslide
victory to be elected to a full term as president in November, 1964. With a
Democratic super-majority in both houses, President Johnson had a receptive
body for the extensive social reforms he dubbed the Great Society. Despite
continued vocal opposition from the AMA and some conservative Republicans,
legislation establishing the Medicare and Medicaid programs steam-rolled
through Congress…
As originally enacted, the Social
Security Amendments of 1965 provided healthcare coverage to those 65 years of
age and older, and to the poor, blind and disabled.
The Nixon Administration (1969-1974)
In 1971, the Nixon administration
proposed the National Health Insurance Standard Act… While the NHISA did not pass, Nixon was
successful in gaining passage of the
Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, which laid some of the ground
work for managed care.
HMO’s are privately owned for profit Health Maintenance
Organizations which provided the spring board for Reagan’s expansion of HMO’s.
The Carter Administration (1977-1981)
Jimmy Carter campaigned for
president calling for national
healthcare insurance with universal coverage, and as president he went to
work to prepare a legislative proposal for the same. The American Hospital Association endorsed the concept in
principle, but had reservations about any system that took a universal,
"one-size-fits-all" approach…
President Carter later maintained he had strong support from the chairmen of
the House and Senate committees with responsibility for healthcare
legislation and could have succeeded in
passing his proposal had it not been for the abrupt withdrawal of
support by one of those chairmen. Ironically, the vacillating Senate
committee chairman was none other than Sen.
Edward M. Kennedy.
The Reagan Administration (1981-1989)
In his inaugural address, after
lamenting the consequences of excessive government borrowing and deficit
spending, President Reagan declared: "In this current crisis, government
is not the solution to our problem.
Government is the problem."
But the Reagan Administration also
advanced through Congress the first major expansion of Medicare benefits: the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988…
The program was to be funded entirely by Medicare beneficiaries
through increased premiums and a surtax on wealthier beneficiaries based on
income.
The George H.W. Bush Administration (1989-1993)
President George H.W. Bush inherited a political
catastrophe in the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988. Among
the elderly there was wide-spread disappointment over the level of expanded
benefits and strong resentment over having to pay higher premiums and taxes to
fund it.
The Clinton Administration (1993-2001)
Bill Clinton was the first Democrat
elected president in 12 years, and his administration wasted little time in
proposing major health care reforms. After the release of a report by a highly
controversial task force headed by First Lady Hillary Clinton, President
Clinton sent the American Health
Security Act of 1993 to Congress. It
proposed to provide affordable health insurance for all through a concept
called "managed competition."
The AHSA was opposed by much of the
healthcare industry and the health insurance industry… By
September 1994, the proposal was declared dead by Senate Majority Leader George
Mitchell.
Other important healthcare reform measures were enacted during
President Clinton's term of office. Among the notable reforms was The Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a significant expansion of the
Stark physician self-referral law (Stark II), and the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
By the time 2008 rolled around, the catastrophic condition
of for profit healthcare in America had reached a zenith. From The New York Times:
Excerpt:
When Insurers Put Profits Between Doctor and Patient
Late in 2007 I found myself riveted by a case playing out at the
University of California, Los Angeles, the medical center where I trained and
had once worked as a transplant surgeon. A 17-year-old girl named Nataline
Sarkisyan was in desperate need of a transplant after receiving aggressive
treatment that cured her recurrent leukemia but caused her liver to fail.
Without a new organ, she would die in a matter of a days; with one, she had a 65 percent chance of surviving. Her
doctors placed her on the liver transplant waiting list.
Nataline’s case was not all that
different from the more than 200 liver patients I had seen successfully
transplanted every year at that institution. She was critically ill, as close to death as one could possibly be while
technically still alive, and her fate was inextricably linked to another’s.
Somewhere, someone with a compatible organ had to die in time for Nataline to
live.
But even when the perfect liver became available a few days after she
was put on the list, doctors could not operate. What made Nataline different
from most transplant patients, and what eventually brought her case to the
attention of much of the country, was that her
survival did not depend on the availability of an organ or her clinicians
or even the quality of care she received. It
rested on her health insurance company.
Cigna had denied the initial request to cover the costs of the liver
transplant. And the insurer persisted in its refusal, claiming that the
treatment was “experimental” and unproven, and despite numerous pleas from
Nataline’s physicians to the contrary.
But as relatives and friends
organized campaigns to draw public attention to Nataline’s plight, the insurance conglomerate found itself
embroiled in a public relations nightmare, one that could jeopardize its
very existence. The company reversed its decision. But the change came too
late. Nataline died just a few hours
after Cigna authorized the transplant.
And where did those massive profits end up that health
insurance companies were making by denying expensive treatments to critically
ill patients? From Time Magazine:
Excerpt:
Biggest Golden Parachutes
William McGuire
During his 15-year tenure as CEO and chairman of UnitedHealth Group Inc.,
McGuire turned the regional health insurer into the second largest managed care
company in the U.S. He received his
thank yous in the form of stock options—$1.6 billion of them, to be
exact—but he took some of them on the days the company's stock price hit yearly
lows, profiting when the stocks went up again. McGuire was asked to leave in
October 2006 after federal prosecutors and the IRS requested documents
concerning his stock options and executive compensation. He later agreed to
return $600 million in various payback agreements, including one with the SEC. But McGuire retained about $800 million in
options.
The DNC in 2008 knew Hillary Clinton would win the primary
and would fulfill her campaign promise to open Medicare for all. The Democrats
are some of the largest recipients of campaign contributions from the
Healthcare Industry, so vowing to ensure there would be no universal
healthcare, Barack Obama was chosen and gifted the nomination through a corrupt
caucus system controlled by the DNC. From
Newsmax:
Excerpt:
Hillary Backers Decry Massive Obama Vote Fraud
With accusations of voter
registration fraud swirling as early voting begins in many states, some Hillary
Clinton supporters are saying: “I told you so.”
Already in Iowa, the Obama campaign
was breaking the rules, busing in
supporters from neighboring states to vote illegally in the first contest
in the primaries and physically intimidating Hillary supporters, they say. Obama’s surprisingly strong win in Iowa, which defied all the polls, propelled
his upstart candidacy to front-runner status. But Lynette Long, a Hillary
supporter from Bethesda, Md., who has a long and respected academic career,
believes Obama’s victory in Iowa and in
12 other caucus states was no miracle. “It was fraud,” she told
Newsmax.
Long has spent several months
studying the caucus and primary results.
“After studying the procedures and results from all 14 caucus states,
interviewing dozens of witnesses, and reviewing hundreds of personal stories,
my conclusion is that the Obama campaign
willfully and intentionally defrauded the American public by systematically
undermining the caucus process,” she said.
In Hawaii, for example, the caucus organizers ran out of ballots, so Obama operatives created more from
Post-its and scraps of paper and dumped them into ice cream buckets. “The
caucuses ended up with more ballots than participants, a sure sign of voter
fraud,” Long said…
In Texas, more than 2,000 Clinton and Edwards supporters filed
complaints with the state Democratic Party because of the massive fraud. The party acknowledged that the Obama campaign’s
actions “amount to criminal violations” and ordered them to be reported to
state and federal law enforcement, but nothing happened.
In caucus after caucus, Obama bused in supporters from out of state,
intimidated elderly voters and women, and stole election packets so Hillary
supporters couldn’t vote. Thanks to these and other strong-arm tactics, Obama won victories in all but one of the
caucuses, even in states such as Maine where
Hillary had been leading by double digits in the polls.
Obama’s win in the caucuses, which were smaller events than the
primaries and were run by the party,
not the states, gave him the margin of victory he needed to win
a razor-thin majority in the delegate count going into the Democratic National
Convention. Without these caucus
wins, which Long and others claim were based on fraud, Clinton would be the
Democrats’ nominee running against John McCain.
As Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama duked it out for the
Democratic nomination, both promised Medicare for all. Even with the corruption and fraud
perpetrated by the DNC in the caucuses in 2008, Barack Obama still lost the
primary. So the DNC at their rules
committee in June 2008 refused to count the votes cast by voters in the
primaries in Florida and Michigan for Clinton and gifted the nomination to
Barack Obama. Why would the DNC go to
such extreme measures to keep Clinton from claiming the nomination? From Common Dreams:
Excerpt:
Obama
Received $20 Million from Healthcare Industry in 2008 Campaign
While some sunlight has been shed
on the hefty sums shoveled into congressional
campaign coffers in an effort to influence the Democrats' massive healthcare
bill, little attention has been focused on the far larger sums received by
President Barack Obama while he was a candidate in 2008.
A new figure, based on an exclusive
analysis created for Raw Story by the Center for Responsive Politics, shows
that President Obama received a
staggering $20,175,303 from the healthcare industry during the 2008
election cycle, nearly three times the amount of his presidential rival John
McCain. McCain took in $7,758,289, the Center found…
"People want to be able to curry favor with those who are in
power," he added. "And one way to do that is by making donations
to candidates and officials who are represented by the party in power. Or who
look like they're going to win."
The White House did not respond to
a request for comment for this article.
And what did the health insurance industry get from Obama
and the Blue Dog Democrats after “hefty
sums were shoveled into congressional campaign coffers in an effort to
influence the Democrats' massive healthcare bill?” From Black Agenda Report:
Excerpt:
Who's Blocking Health Care Reform
Now? Blue Dogs? Senate Dems? House Progressives? Or the White House Itself?
The only obstacle to passage of the president's health care --- or
health insurance legislation is the White
House itself. By the summer of 2008,
Democrats had stopped pretending there was much difference between them and
Republicans on foreign policy... Where
the Party of Change would deliver for sure, they told voters, would be health
care. Voters listened, and delivered Democrats the White House, a crushing majority in the House and a
filibuster-proof Senate…
Anyone who can add knows
Republicans are not blocking universal health care. The performances of
Republican teabaggers at a few town halls notwithstanding, there are just not
enough Republicans in the House and Senate to block anything. The president and his party can roll over
Republican opposition any time they want to…
The political careers of many House blue dogs are the creation of White House
chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who as head of the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee dispensed them bags
of corporate cash to win primary elections against left leaning Democrats…
… The Senate Democrats with their
hands on the bill are all choices of the
White House, and all dependent on the
good will of that same White House for a percentage of their corporate campaign contributions. Senate
Democrats are keenly aware that a sitting president of their own party has
literally hundreds of ways to exert pressure on any single legislator. None of
them is crossing the White House either…
The dozens of Democrats who have declared they will vote against any health care
--- or health insurance --- bill that
does not contain what they call a “public option,” are only trying to insulate
themselves and protect President Obama from the worst consequences of his
own treachery in selling out the vision of universal health care to big pharma
and the insurance companies.
And universal healthcare wasn’t the only betrayal by Obama
and the Blue Dog Democrats, Obama is the only president to slash benefits for
Social Security, Medicare and Veterans. Cenk Yugur one of the biggest supporters of Obama over Clinton in 2008,
had a rude awakening.
Excerpt:
Cenk Uygur says President Obama will definitely cut the entitlements of
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid
Cenk Uygur: According to Bob
Woodward’s book, “The Price of Politics”, President Obama once called himself a “blue dog Democrat”. In fact, according
to Woodward, quote, President Obama said, “I’m a blue dog. I want fiscal
restraint and order.” There is nothing
wrong with the second half of that sentence….
But the fact that President Obama has called himself a blue dog is news:
blue dog Democrats are conservative Democrats; they are not progressive
Democrats…
“They
were doing several little things talking about the negotiations, like
increasing the Medicare age from 65, up to, eventually, 66 or 67.” -Bob Woodward…
Now that was not a Republican proposal; that was President
Obama’s proposal. So there it is. He has already proposed it, he will propose
it again to increase the retirement age for Medicare…
After the 2011 negotiations broke
down, he said this, and I quote: “We then offered an additional $650 billion in
cuts to entitlement programs – Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.” -President Barack Obama… “I am willing to move on entitlement reform –
even if my own party is resisting, and I will bring them along.” -President Barack Obama
Fast forward to 2016, Obama and the Blue Dog Democrats were
more than happy to turn over the reins of power to the next in line in the
Republican Party, Jeb Bush. Funny thing
happened, Donald Trump. No one in the
Democratic or Republican party had prepared for Hurricane Donald. Donald Trump blew up the carefully crafted
status quo engorged in campaign funds from special interests and spoke directly
to the people. Trump vowed to protect
Social Security and Medicare, vowed to work for the working person, vowed to
protect Veterans.
The Democratic Party of FDR and the Republican Party of
Theodore Roosevelt are no more, what is left is a fascistic, bought and paid
for duopoly that cares nothing for the American People. If the Republican party believes they are the
chosen ones, that the American people voted for them to slash Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans benefits, despoil the environment, pursue endless
wars and flood the country with illegal immigrants and refugees from our bombing
escapades in Middle Eastern countries, they are crazy.
While Chuck Schumer cries crocodile tears after President
Trump declared a temporary ban on immigration from the 7 countries where
America has invaded their lands, killed their leaders and bombed the shit out
of them, where are the tears for the American people? Where were the tears for Nataline Sarkisyan? She was left to die a horrible death after
Cigna put profits above life while filling the campaign coffers of Democrats
and Republicans alike?
Now those same Democrats want us to believe that they are
fighting for us, what a joke. Will
Donald Trump turn this Titanic around? I
don’t know, but I am willing to give him a chance. In the meantime we can all sing a Requiem for
the Democratic Party because the Blue Dog Democrats Barack Obama, Chuck
Schumer, Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden destroyed the Democratic Party forever.
By Patricia Baeten
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