"Insurance companies aren't playing nice any more," read the HuffPost lead paragraph of Monday's story detailing the latest extortion threats of this disgraceful, thieving lot.
Since when have these thieves ever "played nice?"
They're the same crowd who sent busloads of drooling, misguided and uninformed flunkies out to town halls this summer to subvert democracy with their idiotic yammerings. It's the same racketeering industry that has attacked a good man, President Obama, ceaselessly since he began trying to keep his campaign promises about health care.
If the health insurance companies had been around during the Civil War, they would have sent goons out to heckle the Gettysburg Address. Goons with guns, probably.
For-profit health insurance companies are a national disgrace, and a uniquely American one.
They are also the most visible sign of the kind of rogue capitalism that has seen its high-water mark and exists nowhere else in the world today.
The insurance companies have overplayed their hand this time, one suspects. I wouldn't want to play poker against the Chicago pols now in the White House. The rapacious and desperate insurance companies will be sorry they pulled this latest stunt of making threats, even as predictable as they might be.
The other night, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, a guy I truly respect and admire, did an hour-long Special Comment/rant about health care. His central thesis is that the health care debate, above all, is about death, forestalling it or allowing it.
But it's about more than that. It's also about pain and suffering. Not every untreated injury results in death. Just suffering. And pain, sometimes of the intractable variety. E.g., broken bones, migraine headaches, wounds that won't heal.
These won't necessarily kill people. They'll just make humans suffer needlessly. Especially those with "pre-existing decisions."
So what if the Senate Finance Committee votes Tuesday NOT to slam the greedy, heartless bastards from the insurance companies and begin to put them out of business, where they surely are relegated?. Didn't four other Congressional committees approve a public option?
Why should Max "No Headroom" Baucus' committee, whose members represent less than seven percent of the U.S. population, have the final say? Why should insurance whores from small states easily bought off with insurance-company blood money have the final word on any of this?
And why should anyone believe -- or heed -- a single word of what the treacherous, greedy bastards from the organized-crime insurance rackets have to say?
The health-insurance companies will soon enough be relegated not to the ashheap of history, but to its sewage-treatment facility.