We have to do something right? The public is expecting some sort of compromise correct? If we do not get something passed, we will not really be doing our jobs now will we?

This is the crux of the problem in Congress today with the debate on health care.

Many Democrats want national health care, real national health care that is — – health care that includes a public option. Republicans have made it clear that they are going to block any public option with a filibuster.

It is really quite obscene.

Democrats require a 60 vote majority to cut off debate and end a filibuster. The only way they can get to 60 is if they include the vote of Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman who currently caucuses with the Democrats.

Lieberman has stated that he will oppose any healthcare bill that includes a public option. So, despite having over 50% of the seats in the United States Senate, Democrats can not get a healthcare bill passed that will actually help people. The compromise plan put forward will require everyone to have health insurance. This bill is little more than a big gift for the insurance industry.

What has happened is that the Democrats have given up on a public option. They have given up on the one plan that would actually help many Americans. Instead they sought a compromise that would effectively help and no one but the insurance industry — key contributors to the Republican Party.

This is a slap in the face to everyone who held out hope, to everyone who dared to think that things could get better, to everyone that collectively joined on election day in November 2008 and thought the same words that they been hearing on the campaign trail — yes we can.

Is this what keeping hope alive is? Are we supposed to say yes we can, when Congress continues to say, no we can’t.

Seniors are being scared out of their wits by this healthcare debate. They are being told that there will be death panels — a manufactured fallacy put forth by failed vice presidential hopeful, Sarah Palin. They are being told that health care for all will lead to rationing. They are being told that extending Medicare to people younger than 65 years old, is a horrible plan.

They are being told a lie.

Let us stop fooling ourselves into believing that we do not have healthcare rationing now. When health insurance companies deny claims for people who are seeking necessary and needed healthcare procedures, our health care is being rationed. Why would we pass a bill in Congress that would give the same people who have been rationing healthcare additional funding?

When I look back to when I was in my 20s, I went several years without health insurance. Yes, it was risky, but I had to make an ugly choice. I had to choose whether I would use my pay from my part-time job to pay for tuition, or to pay for health insurance. The irony was that at that time in my life I was working for a health insurance company. They did not offer health insurance to their part-time employees. I chose my education over feeding the health insurance industry.

For the most part my risk paid off. I earned my bachelor’s degree and lived through several years of not having health insurance. But it was not without incident. I was in my 20s and a drunken bar patron unexpectedly decided to punch me in the nose. It broke. I bled profusely. The next morning when I looked in my bathroom mirror, my nose was about a half-inch to the left of where it should have been. Overnight, my nose had set itself and I did not have the insurance to go into the doctor’s office and have it professionally set so I re-broke my own nose, moved it back to the center of my face, and it eventually healed.

It should not have been necessary.

Even today there are many people who have to tend to their own wounds, seek their own home remedies, and hope and pray that they will be okay. They do this because, like me back in my 20s, they cannot afford health care insurance. This is rationing in its worst form and yet congressional Republicans are telling us that somehow the system that we have no is better than a system where I could have gone in to see a doctor? Sadly, Democrats, who by the way are in the majority, are going along with it.

This new plan is flawed. It fails to address one of the key problems with healthcare — rationing as it exists today. To pass this plan is no service to the public. To pass this plan helps only the insurance industry. It forces people to buy health insurance — people like I was in my 20s. If this plan had been in effect in the 80s, I would not have had the opportunity to choose college tuition over what likely would have been a substandard insurance policy.