Simple

by digby

There’s an awful lot of frustration out here, and everyone keeps telling us that the teabaggers and the “Scott Brown” Republicans are somehow speaking to it. But offering the same old “free market” theology that got us into this mess. Unfortunately, the Democrats aren’t offering anything better.

Darcy Burner says it’s time to pick a fight:

If there’s a silver lining to what’s happened over the last several months with healthcare reform, the Citizens United decision, the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat, and discussions about the need to reform the filibuster, that silver lining is this: it’s ripped the mask off of the real problem we’ve been struggling with. It’s made it obvious that we are suffering from the degree to which our government institutions have been captured by corporations. We are dealing with a problem in which too many elected officials on both sides of the aisle serve the interests of those corporations more than the people they’re supposed to be representing.

[…]

Next week, there’s going to be a test in Congress. A real litmus test about whose side various Representatives and Senators are on. It’s a stunningly straightforward bill – only two pages long – that would simply remove the antitrust exemption for health insurers. It would keep insurers from being able to collude and price fix, requiring them to compete in the marketplace for business.

Unlike nearly everything else that’s been done in the last year, this bill is completely uncompromised – no deals have been cut to water down the bill in favor of health insurance companies. It is an unambiguously populist bill, and a clean cut against corporatism. It’s building off of work that key progressives in the House, including Reps. DeFazio, Slaughter, and DeGette, have been teeing up for years.

Yesterday, Reps. Tom Perriello and Betsy Markey, the lead sponsors of the bill, had a press conference in the snow in DC. And the insurance industry was scared enough to show up and start passing out information indicating that if they had to compete with each other and stop colluding, that would somehow result in insurance prices going up. I kid you not.

So here’s the deal: we need to watch the bill, and see who’s on which side. And then, I think, we need to make a really big deal of it. Because this is the first unambiguous litmus test we’ve had, and it’s so straightforward that even my Republican dad will agree. Vote against this bill, and it means you’re in the pocket of the insurance companies. Very, very simple.

The campaign ads write themselves, don’t they?

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