Watch out for the brown acid!

It is the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, and I just learned that the promoters of the music festival/happening/love-in were bummed the performer they really wanted to close out the event turned down their invite.

Do you know this one?

It was Roy Rogers.

What a different world this might have been if Roy Rogers had crooned "Happy Trails" at the end of Woodstock!

It might have healed the generational divide permanently. Or ushered in the "hat act" cross-over country western musical genre decades before Tim McGraw.

Watching documentary after documentary, listening to Amy Goodman hawk the commemorative Pacifica Radio Woodstock edition complete with Roger Daltry-inspired leather fringe cover, I have to wonder about the half-million folks who are now 40 years older.

They're all on Medicare now.

You know what we need is another Woodstock where those 500,000 60+-year-olds have a peaceful love-in for universal healthcare! The lack of affordable, decent healthcare for so many in a nation so wealthy is really harshing our mellow, man.

Just swap bran muffins for the pot brownies and you're all set.

The doctor is in

I was intrigued with an interview I saw on Bill Maher's program this evening--the President's personal physician is also a member of Physicians for a National Health Program http://www.pnhp.org/ There are 16,000 doctors in this country who WANT a single-payor system. It is Medicare for everybody. Now, I know there are still plenty of nitwits out there polluting the atmosphere with babblings like, "Tell the government to keep its hands off my Medicare!" But there's still hope. We just need to keep encouraging our electeds to press on and not let the loud and ignorant derail this movement. We also need to shine a very bright light on abuses like the CEO of Cigna's compensation ">"falling" to a mere $11 million last year, 50% off his $22 million paycheck in 2007. And we should hold up to shame and ridicule anyone who buys into Sarah Palin's phantom of an Obama death panel determining to put her baby to death, because Trig has Down's syndrome (seriously. and Newt Gingrich defends this reprehensible load of crap) what is more likely in danger of death is the $22 million paycheck for an insurance company CEO.

Dear Mr. President, keep pushing

I support your efforts to reform health care. Please keep pushing. And please avoid watering down reforms to the point of making them irrelevant.

A country rich enough to kill Taliban with drone missiles in Afghanistan can deliver breast cancer treatment to an unemployed administrative assistant in Texas! It is time for America to set its skewed priorities straight.

I believe the discourse around health care reform should be a conversation about the right of every American to a basic level of care. Denying health care is a denial of civil rights. We accept the right of every child to attend school. And we pay for her education, even if her parents are in the country illegally, because all Americans have a stake in equipping the next generation to be productive members of society. It is the next logical step to apply that sense of shared responsibility to health care.

And please keep repeating the fact that health-care costs have skyrocketed at the same time that real wages have stagnated. Even if people will not support reform because it is right, they will do it out of self-interest, when they know the facts.

Our current system discriminates against people who make too much to qualify for government care, but don't make enough to pay for the basics of wellness, like preventive check-ups and routine tests. For them, serious illness compounds physical and emotional crisis with a financial setback they may never escape. Multiplied millions of times, their illnesses are creating a financial hole the U.S. may never climb out of. And may God help the growing numbers of the unemployed. There is a stark line segregating the health care haves from the have nots.

This is not the America we should be.

As the health reform debate festers into an increasingly acrimonious and unhelpful mess, "Astroturf" organizations are disrupting town hall meetings and spewing misinformation. This disturbing perversion of the town hall process should cause thoughtful Americans to recoil in distaste. And to take action. That is why I am finally writing today, after having these sentiments for months.

But I am hopeful intimidation tactics will backfire. Perhaps by embarrassing moderate opponents, fake Americans for Prosperity will tip the balance toward reform. Fistfights at a Tampa town hall, hand-lettered signs scrawled with swastikas, and a Congressman hung in effigy, recall scenes of angry, axe-wielding white men screaming at a little black girl trying to enter a desegregated school. That was not the America we wanted to be then. I am hopeful America can rise to the occasion again. We are better than this.


My qualifications to write this essay: None, really. But I have seen a dear friend lose health insurance half-way though breast cancer treatment and before reconstructive surgery. This upper middle-class professional's company declared bankruptcy and cancelled its policy, leaving her to come up with $11,000 per treatment to continue chemo. If she couldn't find a new job soon enough, her cancer would be considered a pre-existing condition and not be covered by a new employer's policy. All this was perfectly legal.