Aloha ~
I wonder what has happened to Americans for we no longer strive for greatness. How come we are so afraid? Every major government in the world provides medical care for ALL their citizens. We do not - WE CANNOT???

Yet Americans pay TWICE as much for medical care as do citizens of major countries. Knowing how price conscious you all are, I thought this fact alone would make you MAD AS HELL!

Insurance and pharma corporations are scared to death of reform. It will cost them trillions! They are afraid of competition. So they tell us to be afraid of government - millions are fooled into believing this. Are you?

A brief history of the U.S.
Your government pulled your grandparents from the Great Depression after the private sector failed the world.

Your government, Uncle Sam, led the world to defeat Nazism in WWII after all major nations had collapsed.

Post war, your government created the foundation for the greatest financial and cultural expansion in world history. People have prospered; business has flourished.

Your government put the first human being the moon ... no corporation even dreams that today - forty years ago after that initial landing.

Your government designs the best military in the world - EVAH! It provides a safety net for your retirement as well as efficient MEDICAL CARE for our KUPUNA and KEIKI in need.

There is no competition in medical care today. Prices are fixed. Deals about your care are made in backrooms by CEOs and boards of directors. They make tens of millions a year. You don't! Force corporate medicine to compete. Demand a public option ~ let's call it KennedyCare in honor of the Lion of the Senate ...

What would KennedyCare Look Like?
Here is what the proposed legislation in the House of Representatives will actually mean for America's middle class families:

GUARANTEED COVERAGE - The days of being denied coverage because of a preexisting condition - or being forced to pay higher premiums because of it - would be over thanks to the House bill. Insurance companies will also be prohibited from other discriminatory practices like charging higher rates because of gender, health status, or other factors.

GREATER CHOICE - If you like your doctor, your local hospital, or your current insurance plan, you can keep it under the House bill. It also sets up a health insurance exchange to act as a marketplace where individuals and small employers will be able to comparison-shop among private and public insurers.

LOWER COSTS FOR EVERYONE - The House bill would lower health care costs for all Americans. It ends co-pays and deductibles for preventative care and puts an end to rate increases for preexisting conditions. It will give you access to the lower group rates from a national pool if you buy your own plan. It also includes a public option to compete with private insurers and caps annual out-of-pocket spending to prevent bankruptcy from medical expenses.

HIGHER QUALITY - The House bill makes sure that you and your doctor make health care decisions, not insurance companies. It provides new incentives, scholarships, and training to encourage the very best and brightest to become doctors and nurses.

PREVENTION AND WELLNESS - The House bill also expands community health centers, strengthens wellness and prevention services, provides oral, hearing, and vision care for children, and ensures that mental health care is covered.

Frequently Asked Questions:
Will this raise my taxes? Research by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, FactCheck.org, found that less than 1.4 pecent of all U.S. households would face higher taxes under the proposal. The surtax for those upper-income folks would start at 1 percent and go up to 5.4 percent with top incomes over $1 million.

Will illegal immigrants be covered? Research by FactCheck.org found this claim to be, "Not True." H.R. 3200 includes a provision that specifically says there will be no federal funds spent to cover illegal immigrants.

The Kennedy story on health care is well known. From the beginning of his Senate career when he helped enact the landmark Medicare and Medicaid statutes, to his role as the founder of CHIP, to his efforts in the Nineties and this decade to ensure coverage for all Americans, Ted Kennedy was at the forefront of humanistic health reform.

It simply is not possible to truly honor Ted Kennedy's memory and at the same time oppose genuine health reform that guarantees universal, quality coverage. Jake McIntyre

The Boston Globe
He staked his career to the highest goals of liberalism, and defended those goals through decades when his views were not shared by most, or even that many, of his fellow citizens. While he could have simply chosen to be the liberal movement’s spiritual leader, he opted instead to spend most of his life in the legislative trenches, fighting, bill by bill, to provide government aid to people in need of health care, education, and a road out of poverty. The programs he championed may not have solved those problems, but they brought tangible assistance to millions whose lives would have been far more difficult if not for Kennedy’s exertions on their behalf.

Now is a time to think, too, of the millions of people with cancer whose treatments were developed with billions of research dollars for which Kennedy was the leading - and most relentless - advocate. Of the people with the AIDS virus for whom Kennedy was instrumental in securing government funding that now covers half of all Americans living with HIV. Of the millions of people with disabilities whose lives were transformed by his advocacy for the Americans with Disabilities Act. And of the tens of millions of Americans whose immigration to the United States from continents other than Europe would not have been possible without the Immigration Act of 1965 that Kennedy sponsored.

E.J. Dionne
Ted Kennedy managed to be esteemed by almost everyone without ever becoming all things to all people. He stood for large purposes, unequivocally and unapologetically, and took hard stands. Yet he made it his business to get work done with anyone who would toil along with him. He was a friend, colleague and human being before he was an ideologue or partisan, even though he was a joyful liberal and an implacable Democrat.

He suffered profoundly, made large mistakes and was, to say the least, imperfect. But the suffering and the failures fed a humane humility that led him to reach out to others who fell, to empathize with those burdened by pain, to understand human folly and to appreciate the quest for redemption.

Derrick Z. Jackson
As one African-American woman, a former educator, said to me yesterday , “I’m not so sure that the other Kennedy brothers ‘got it’ right here’’ - she pointed to her heart - “about civil rights. Ted Kennedy did. I cannot think of a single vote on a single issue that I disagreed with.’’

Nor can I, come to think of it. Like no other senator, Kennedy sought to weave the legal gains of the 1960s into the working fabric of American life. He helped make a reality not just of civil rights and voting rights for African-Americans, but also of rights for women, the poor, people with disabilities, and people who need health care.

He was an overdog for the underdog. Without him, how much more would the Democrats have teetered in the face of Ronald Reagan’s anti-welfare campaign of the 1980s? Without him, how much more of an identity crisis would the party have had when President Clinton steered the Democrats to the center, finishing off Reagan’s anti-welfare work?

His work could not close the still-growing chasm between rich and poor, between CEOs and grunt workers. But he was a leader in recognizing the gaps. In law after law, he converted the heat from the torch of the 1960s into a warmer embrace by America of all its people.

David Broder
When writing about Kennedy earlier, at the onset of his fatal illness, I talked about the many personal kindnesses that endeared him to people. In response to that column, I heard so many more examples from colleagues and residents of Massachusetts.

I retell one of them. A man in Malden said that he wrote Kennedy's office saying that he had been trying to buy two Red Sox tickets so he could take his father, who had lost his legs to diabetes and now was dying, to a game. Because of the illness, he needed seats down low, close to the field, and had not been able to get them. The next week, he had the tickets.

New York Times
The record Mr. Kennedy leaves after 46 years can only be envied by his peers as they join the nation in mourning his passing after a 15-month fight against brain cancer — a record firmly anchored in Mr. Kennedy’s insistence that politics be grasped and administered through the prism of human needs.

Together with a hard-won mastery of parliamentary intricacies, and a willingness to reach across party lines to win crucial votes, Mr. Kennedy’s unwavering taproot liberalism left a robust legacy: signature laws and reforms on civil rights, the judiciary, refugees, social welfare, foreign policy (he was one of 23 senators to vote against authorizing the Iraq invasion), voting rights, job training, public education and the minimum wage.