Want to Know Why Health Care Reform's in Critical Condition?

Look no further than the man in the Oval Office.

Wendell Potter unloads:

Former CIGNA PR chief Wendell Potter is very, very angry over Obama's movement away from true healthcare reform:

Not only is Obama clearly ready to throw the public option overboard, he is embracing the requirement that we all be forced to buy insurance from private insurers. That means your tax dollars and mine will be used to pay subsidies to the big insurers to provide coverage to people who can't afford to buy their policies, because the big insurers charge far more than they should because Wall Street investors demand that they do.

One of the people who undoubtedly talked Obama away from the public option and into supporting this mandate is his new BFF, Aetna CEO Ron Williams. Williams, who made $65 million off of Aetna's policyholders' premiums over the past two years and who was the mastermind behind Aetna's shedding of eight million members a few years ago to meet Wall Street's demands, is the insurance industry's leading champion of requiring us all to buy insurance. And, of course, without a public option, we'll all be forced to buy coverage from Aetna or one of the other private insurers.

According to a recent article in Forbes, Williams has been to the White House a half a dozen times recently to advise the president and his staff on health care reform. That same article quoted a Wall Street analyst as saying that Aetna likely will dump about 600,000 policyholders during the coming months to satisfy its investors' unrelenting profit demands.

There's more where that came from. Much, much more.

Jane Hamsher has the essential run-down of supposed allies of health care reform who are actually selling it up the river. And she reminds us who's responsible for seeing meaningful reform passed:

If a public plan gets into a final health care bill, it's going to be because of public pressure, because people who put Obama in office demand one.

My darlings, if you haven't already, it's time to get noisy.



Let's remind our political majority of who put them there, and why.