If you read nothing else today, read this amazing piece of work, a piece of work that will surely get its author branded a "Michael Moore-type" by knee-jerk, rightist ideologues in the mainstream press.
It's the story of how Time Magazine political reporter Karen Tumulty has found herself entangled in the dangerous maze of health insurance company bureaucracy, as she fights to help her desperately ill brother pay his bills and stay alive...
Karen writes a painfully true story:
When you've been strong and fit your whole life, it can be easy to discount your body's first whispers of sickness as merely the side effects of daily living. Looking back over the past three years, my older brother Patrick now understands the meaning of his increasingly frequent bouts of fatigue, his fluctuating appetite and the fact that his blood pressure had crept up to 150/90. But Pat had always put off going to the doctor until he had to...
Along the way, Karen Tumulty discovered what everybody who's every read a health care diary here --or seen the movie "Sicko"-- has known for a long time: that health care in the United States of America is completely broken.
None of this is big news to us, the people who screamed at our televisions when CNN ran Sanjay Gupta's ridiculous "fact check" of Michael Moore's claims --a piece the sole purpose of which seemed to be to create false equivalence between industry propaganda and reality-- but what is surprising is this:
Karen Tumulty's story is on the cover of Time Magazine.
I'm surprised to find nothing on today's recommended list about Karen Tumulty's brilliant, moving true story.
Let's not let this opportunity to show the power of the reality-based community go by; let's go to Swampland, Time's blog, and let Karen know how deeply we appreciate the courage it takes for mainstream reporters to fight "Fair and Balanced" reporting with reality-based reporting.