Comedian and Stephanie Miller regular John Fugelsang has been filling in for Current TV's Eliot Spitzer this week, and he did a nice job during this short segment of reminding us of the struggles we've seen with attempts to get some sort of universal health care coverage passed and how far we still have to go after yesterday' s Supreme Court ruling.
As long as we've still got overpaid CEOs extrecting wealth from the system which is supposed to make sure our medical and health care needs are provided for, the system is still badly broken.
FUGELSANG: It's the year the Titanic sank, Woody Guthrie was born and Theodore Roosevelt quit the Republican Party and ran for president as a third party progressive, calling for universal health care. It's also our number of the day, 1912.
Now the past 100 years have seen a diversity of presidents attempt to promote the general welfare through universal coverage. FDR tried and ended up focusing on Social Security, which I now call FDR-care. LBJ got as far as Medicare and Medicaid. Richard Nixon did try, but things got a little complicated in his life.
Bill Clinton made a bold play and a conservative Heritage Foundation countered his play by proposing a mandate for Americans to buy insurance. Gov. Romney even used that mandate in Massachusetts, that same mandate he now so despises.
And today the Supreme Court voted to uphold the Constitutionality of the American care act. A hundred years since Teddy ran, Republicans are furious that the Republican Supreme Court appointee just upheld a Republican designed health plan which will save Republican lives.
They wanted this thing to die before it could actually help anybody. Now there are things I don't like Obamacare, but I'll take it over the alternative, Republican-can't-care-less, and it's important to remember my friends, the long, slow march for Americans taking care of their own, of having the kind of universal coverage that typically gets called Socialist.
The kind of system all of our capitalist allies have still continues and there's a lot more at stake in this struggle than one man's presidency.
One day we'll have an America where insurance companies executives can't get rich off of somebody else's disease.
