Guaranteed Healthcare

By Donna Smith

They arrived on May 26 to the DC courthouse in business dress and on time.  The single payer supporters now known as the Baucus 8 who were arrested on May 5, 2009, in your United States Senate hearing chambers came ready to be arraigned on Tuesday morning and to find out what the formal charges against them would be.  I witnessed the proceedings the day they were arrested, and I came this day to court to see the process through with these brave Americans who stood for all of us and demanded that a witness advocating for a single payer healthcare system be seated in at least one of the 41 witness chairs filled in recent Senate hearings on healthcare reform.

By Donna Smith

Wow.  America’s Health insurance Plan’s  (AHIP) czar -- and the woman our Congress and president have anointed as the nation’s architect of health reform -- has offered a gift to all of America’s moms and women.  The health insurance industry will stop charging you more – they’ll stop discriminating against you – so long as all of you are legally forced to buy their product.

It sounds to me a little like the old saw, “When did you stop beating your wife?” But then when I really thought about it, it made me sicker and sadder and more acutely aware of exactly what this nation’s leaders think of all of the mothers and daughters in the land this Mother’s Day 2009.