Today, Joe Lieberman decided to be a road block on the American people's way to the doctor. Lieberman said he would join Republicans in obstructing cancer patients treatment. This is surprising, because just two weeks ago, Lieberman was insisting that he would not be a road block on Americans' way to the doctor's office.
Just two weeks ago, the New Haven Register reported that Lieberman would allow an up or down vote on health care reform to occur, even if he opposed the underlying bill:
Lieberman said he was “inclined to let the motion to proceed” (or cloture) go forward, but “I haven’t decided yet.”
He said he and others would attempt to negotiate changes in the bill before there is a filibuster.
But today, Lieberman changed his mind, and joined Republican obstructionists who would rather hand a stinging defeat to the President of the United States than address the glaring problems of our time. A mere 20 hours after Harry Reid included a watered down, compromise version of a public option in the final health care bill, Joe Lieberman joined the Republicans in protecting the sordid status quo in the American health care system:
"I also told him that if the bill remains what it is now, I will not be able to support a cloture motion before final passage. Therefore I will try to stop the passage of the bill."
By joining the Republican health care road block, Joe Lieberman is standing up for a system which harms Americans. Joe Lieberman is standing up for a system where a cancer patient is prevented from having a life-saving surgery because she forgot to tell her insurance company about a previous case of acne. Joe Lieberman is standing up for a system where a teenage HIV patient can be wrongly denied life-saving medications by his insurer because he, not knowing of about his HIV status, committed the crime of donating blood. Joe Lieberman is standing up for a system where a Lupus patient can end up falling through the cracks before, after hundreds of thousands of dollars of preventable treatments billed to the government, she dies at the age of 32 of what her doctor called "complications secondary to a failed health care system." Joe Lieberman is defending a system where insurance bureaucrats in some cubicle overrule the world's foremost experts on organ transplants, and delay a procedure so long that the patient dies in surgery.
And Joe Lieberman is protecting a system that encourages--and rewards--the insurance bureaucrats responsible for such outrageous stories. Joe Lieberman is defending a health care system that allows a major insurer in California to link performance evaluations to the purging of policyholders with serious conditions. And Joe Lieberman is defending a health care system where an insurance bureaucrat who keeps the cancer patients out of the chemo ward is rewarded with five figure bonuses.
This is the moral issue of our lives. This is about taking power away from insurance bureaucrats who, in the words of fellow Senate moderate Diane Feinstein, "have no moral compass," and putting it into the hands of the people. It's about removing the road blocks that greedy insurance bureaucrats have put up to keep Americans from getting to the doctor. Simply put, it's about putting patients before profits.
To put it in words that Senator Lieberman can probably understand: you're either with us or against us on this.