This is the diary I didn't want to write. But I've received several emails wondering why I had disappeared.
I am feeling very bleak, very pessimistic, very disturbed about our collective future.
I didn't think it was fair to transmit all this negative energy. But maybe, you're feeling what I'm feeling.
I was in Washington last week for the Families USA annual meeting. I returned home in despair and then got sick with the flu.
Here's what I started to write about being in Washington and participating in the Families USA event.
I had called the diary Let down and left out in Washington, D.C.
unpublished draft: will be deleted 21 days after Jan 25, 2007 if left unpublished.
This was once a city of hope. This was once of city of dreamers Barack Obama reminded us yesterday during his stirring keynote address at Families USA Health Action 2007.
This was once a city that placed the needs of the American people at the head of the agenda. Once upon a time the American people had a seat at the table. On July 30th, 1965 Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law, one of the greatest legislative achievements of the last fifty years.
I'm happy to be leaving this awful city, we are all pawns. I wish the political class would read my emails. There is so much pain in the land.
The American people are barely an afterthought in Washington now.
If we're lucky, we get a few pitiful crumbs just to keep us docile. They don't want millions of Americans storming the gates.
More than anything else, the American people must remain docile.
Then I received just such an email from someone. Here's a piece:
Every week I write him to tell him to at least touch
base with you and thank you for your help. He doesn't seem to be doing it,
so I'm stepping in to let you know he is grateful.
. . .I would love to talk to you about how you keep renewing your energy for health care
blogging.
Today, my answer is, my energy is depleted. How long can you push a bolder up a mountain coated with grease.
My despair, I am sure, is largely based on being in Washington and hearing quiet whispers about the new direction of Families USA. People saying things like, "this is what happens when you live for too long inside the beltway".
I wrote a few additional sad impressions of Washington.
No longer. Washington has morphed into city of depravity, greed and corruption. The cynics will say, it's always been this way, save your tears, now it's simply in the open.
I've been in Washington for the past couple of days. I haven't been here for many long years.
As a child, this beautiful city was a favorite destination for my family.
I'm here attending the Families USA meeting. Last night Ron Pollack the kind-hearted and well-meaning executive director convened a meeting to explain the unholy alliance between Families USA and a consortium of powerful special interests including our friends from AHIP.
I am the guest of Families USA, so I will be respectful and polite, but I will tell you I was deeply depressed after listening to Ron Pollack speak for over two hours.
He faced a hostile audience as he tried to explain the involvement of Families USA in the Health Coverage Coalition for the Uninsured.
http://www.coalitionfortheuninsured....
I'm going to write more about this coalition in future diaries, if you want to read about who they are and what they have planned, go to the link.
Ron Pollack has been waging a heroic fight on behalf of the American people for most of his adult life. He is a legend in the movement for universal and affordable healthcare in America. He says he is being pragmatic, yet he strikes me almost as a defeated warrior.
He says he has only one goal, to get affordable health care to as many Americans as possible as quickly as possible. But the only way to do this is to hop into bed with some of the most evil and anti-progress groups around. He publically refers to the unseemly coalition as "strange bedfellows."
The for-profit insurance industry is here to stay. They are not going to go gentle into the good night and relinguish their stranglehold on our 3 trillion dollar a year healthcare industry.
You and I are whistling dixie past the graveyard if we think, we're getting rid of an industry that accounts for 16% of U.S. GDP.
I believe that Pollack is one of the most well-intentioned human beings in Washington, and there are very few indeed like him, but I also believe his strange new "friends" will bite and bite him hard.
I hope Pollack, as the executive director of perhaps the numer one healthcare advocacy organization in the United States, will be able to attend YearlyKos and be on the Health Policy Panel. As a major player in health policy reform in the United States, he is entitled to make his case.
So things appear bleak right now.
But tomorrow is a new day.
My mind is all over the place, what if Pollack correct?
Does this mean the American people concede their healthcare and the healthcare of their children and their grandchildren, to the Murder by Spreadsheet industry?
And if we do, what does it say about our future and the future of our once great nation?