The simmering summer of discontent

This summer, as the health care reform debate raged through town hall meetings with Congressmen and women during their August break, it seems as if the Democrats were asleep at the wheel. They allowed massive "swiftboating" lies to be generated about health care reform, like "death panels" and other outrageous and sensational accusations in order to generate enough fear mongering to sink any and all efforts at real and meaningful health care reform. What sickens me is that they almost got away with it because Democrats sat on their hands and did nothing and let the right wing take the offensive in the debate while doing absolutely nothing to counter what the right was doing. This kind of delayed response to attacks is what eventually sank the Kerry candidacy for President in 2004 and it shocks and amazes me that the Democrats didn't learn the lessons from that debacle. Now President Obama has been forced to play defense with his health care reform plan, but it may be too little, too late, because the Republicans have swiftboated health care reform so handily that they have now easily gained the upper hand to where the whole effort may well be doomed for good. Had the Democrats gone on the offensive when the attacks began instead of remaining silent until it became apparent that they were going to have to do some serious defensive work, they might have succeeded with real health care reform, but now, if we get anything at all, it will be a severely watered down plan that will do little to help people like me who have insurance but have such high deductibles that I end up paying for all of my own medical expenses out-of-pocket. I must say that I am extremely disappointed in the Democrats delayed response to the right wing attacks that went on all summer. Obama needs to abandon his attempts to make nice with the right wingnuts and instead, go on an all out offensive to put them in their place once and for all as a bunch of loonies bent on some bizarre strategy to create a fascist regime. If health care is going to happen at all - and I doubt that it will, because every President for the past 100 years has tried and failed - it's probably not going to be much of anything that will help anyone, because the problems that are causing costs to spiral out of control are many: a rampant and unchecked obesity epidemic, caused by overconsumption of overprocessed foods, cities that have gutted their downtowns and have sent all of their busineses to their outer fringes, forcing people to drive everywhere instead of walk, a decided lack of health and nutritional education in schools, a sharp reduction in physical education classes in America's schools, cities that are no longer pedestrian friendly and force people to use their cars more and more to get places, pop machines in our schools, there because schools face sharp reductions in state and federal funding and must make up that money somehow, so pop companies put machines in schools in trade for tons of money to subsidize everything from text books to sports....the list goes on and on. It's a multi-pronged problem that is going to need more than just health care specialists to solve. It's going to take an alliance of urban planners, educators, nutritionists, restaurant owners (who serve far too large portions), doctors, nurses, transportation specialists and more, to get together to figure out how to fix the multitude of problems contributing to America's poor health and spiraling medical costs. The mistake that the Obama administration is making is in not seeing the bigger picture of why things have gotten out of hand. The fact is, America is fat, overfed and does not get enough exercise, and there are a number of contributing factors to this that need to be addressed if we are going to get this country's health care costs under control. Nothing short of an all out war on our way of life is going to fix things once and for all. And that's not going to be at all easy for people to accept. It's going to take a major cultural shift in the way we think to get things turned around, but that's probably too big an order to ask for. So I guess we'll have to settle for whatever piecemeal reforms the government will allow, and I'm not optimistic that it will be near enough to fix all of the broken pieces in the puzzle.