It is kind of you to say so. I notice that you have a low post count, so welcome to DU. I do this at my own peril, because the last time I did it OP had been a long standing member who read a lot, but posted very little. It was embarrassing, but what the heck, no one dies of embarrassment and welcomes are good.

a magical transformation, but I do expect some type of movement in the direction that Obama said he was going to take. Have you ever tried to negotiate with Republicans to get anything done? Especially the ones Obama has chosen to negotiate with? Nothing moves them. They are aggressive and threatening of him and his person even though threats against the president are against the law, and he lets it go. After all of the nuts who have taken potshots at our various presidents, how can he know who is serious and who is not? He does not stand up to them. Like most two year olds they only push him harder as a result. They perceive him as caving and nothing gets done.

You're right it is ten months. Why should a discussion on health care have gone on for ten months? Why doesn't he discuss it with the Democratic majority and take a strong public stand for what he says he believes in. He has the numbers, he has the mandate. With public sentiment as strong as it it, he has the strength to push through a helpful and viable bill instead of letting us sink further and further into this morass which the Republicans seem to be in charge of.

I'm not trying to make an issue out of personalities here, either yours or mine. Say what you want, it doesn't change what I see. A man wasting his ability and intelligence by appearing to do nothing at all. Also, I have seen a lot of presidents and most of them accomplish much more in ten months than this administration. He may be getting bad advice. If he is, he needs to find new advisors and listen to his own voice. That was the voice which got him elected and it is the voice which would accomplish a lot if he only decided to use it.

It isn't important in the scheme of things whether I personally support him or not, so I wonder why so many posters keep trying to tell me to do so when it is obvious that I know my mind and form my own opinions and intend to keep doing so no matter what they say. I may be right or I may be wrong. Time will tell, but the same is true of those who keep telling me what to think. I prefer to trust myself and I will view this situation the way I view all situations; as an individual who has seen enough to form my own convictions and who intends to follow them. You are free to do the same and I would not dream of telling you to do otherwise. But if you express an opinion I disagree with, I will politely disagree with it and try to treat it with the respect you deserve as a thinking, reasoning person. We do not have to agree.

I have blisters on my fingers because I have typed this so often. I am thinking of taking a copy of what I write about this subject and keeping it in my journal and simply pasting it in as an answer every time the subject comes up. Kind of a Robo Post. I wonder if that might not be easier than thinking of a thousand different ways to keep saying the same thing.

with Obama's election, but then we hoped he would do more to stop it. And to OP who thinks that those of us who do not think Obama is doing enough and that we set him up to fail, you are mistaken. We are aware that no one is perfect, but we would like to see an effort on Obama's part, working with his fellow Democrats to turn things around instead of letting us descend further into Republican authored chaos.

FDR faced a very similar situation, but he realized that drastic action would be called for to restore the country to a livable place for its population. Against fervent opposition, he picked up the existing social order and shook it like a big pillow. He sold his programs. He created jobs. My father took a job in the WPA to support his family. It saved us. We were utterly poor before he had work. FDR created a retirement system for those who did not have one and devised a way to stop future bank failures which had wiped out the savings of so many families. There is so much more that he did that I cannot even list it.

I do not understand why Obama cannot be more dynamic. I agree with OP who started the thread. I did not sign on for what I am getting from this administration, and it is very simplistic for anyone to insist that being displeased with what we are getting means that we approved of Bush or want his administration back. If I had wanted a repeat of Bush, I would have voted for McCain, not Obama. I wanted the changes that Obama promised during his campaign, but which he has failed to pursue diligently.

I am also getting tired of the same old drum roll that I have to love Obama or I am somehow betraying the ideals of Democracy. The Democratic party is big enough to have room for a diversity of ideas and a diversity of people. To suggest otherwise diminishes us all, and I will not accept that, anymore than I accept that I have to unconditionally approve of a President who gives every indication of messing up big time. You are entitled to your opinion of Obama. You are entitled to state it without interference. Now isn't it time that those who feel differently have the same entitlement? As I remind all of you in every post like this that I write, this is a political board and not an Obama board. In my opinion the post which began this thread has it dead on, and I thank the writer for setting it down. That will not change until Obama ceases to be the Jimmy Carter of the 21st century. A good man, but seemingly with no capacity to be a strong and definite leader.

moratorium on foreclosures, and the banking industry as a whole needs to be much more tightly regulated.

Let me tell you what Chase Manhattan did to my husband and I. Last year my husband nearly died from MRSA, an antibiotic resistant bacterial disease. He was 14 weeks in the hospital with the trusty private insurance that Obama is touting and when he came out we owed literally thousands of dollars in co-payments, deductibles, and services that the the insurance company simply refused to pay for even though they were covered.

My husband came home with serious damage to his heart after two surgeries. One replaced a destroyed heart valve, and the other implanted an ICD, a device to keep his heart in rhythm and fibrillate it if it goes out of rhythm. He has to spend much of his day in a hospital bed and sleep in a semi sitting position wearing an oxygen mask in order to breathe while he is asleep.

His kidneys were damaged, his lungs, his liver and his bone marrow. His blood values have never returned to normal. His vision has changed radically and the MRSA took away his ability to walk as he used to. He can now walk only short distances even with a walker.

During this time Chase Manhattan acquired the banking chain where our accounts are held. We had been planning to pay the money we owed in medical costs by tapping our home equity, but like many others in this economy we found that the value of our home had plummeted. What had been a safe equity had evaporated and we were more or less paying rent to Chase Manhattan.

My husband had to take a whole galaxy of medication to deal with his new medical conditions. Inflation hit our area hard and we began struggling. We fell behind one month in our mortgage and sometimes had to hit one of our zero balance accounts and depend on the overdraft protection that the bank before Chase Manhattan had extended us. That was the only way we could get by.

Yesterday we attempted to pay our mortgage payment that way and found that Chase had cut off the overdraft protection without warning or explanation. When we called them they said they would be happy to reinstate it if we applied for a line of credit which had a rate of interest that could only be described as usurious. We had deliberately avoided credit cards or lines of credit because of the predatory lending practices of both the banks and the credit card industry. We explained that we couldn't afford what they were asking of us, that we had no money to deal with extra expense, and that our credit reports were probably not any good anymore because of unpaid medical bills. We told them we were desperate and begged for a one month payment holiday with the payment to be added to the end of the mortgage, a common practice in reputable banks. They refused and kept pushing the credit.

We were mouse trapped but good. I was finally able to beg enough money from a relative to catch the mortgage up and keep us above water this time, but I don't know how it is going to turn out. I thank you for taking the time to read this post, and please avoid Chase Manhattan. I always knew they were crooked, but this is so blatant I don't have words to describe it. It is like, "let's go force the customers to have credit they don't want and which will sink them for sure."

I'm calling the Senate Banking Committee to tell them about this and to point out that Chase lied in its news releases promising customer relief. Once again just when I thought I was free of him, George Bush's fingers are closing around my throat. He was the one who made the decision to close my former banking chain. They were struggling but they were solvent, and his banking commission ordered them to close so that his friend and contributor Chase Manhattan could step in and acquire their assets for pennies on the dollar. Unfortunately for me, my husband and I were a part of those assets.

the meaning of what I just posted? I think instead of "nuanced" difference this amounts to a semantic difference. Semantics is a fascinating subject. Two people can use the same words and mean two different things, based on their own perceptions and experiences. As everyone has different perceptions and experiences each word that they all use in common may have many different meanings to them. Did you ever see the movie Rashomon? Nine different people witness the same incident and each sees it in a different way, so there are nine different versions of what happened. Each one is true, it is simply a matter of perception.

This is what I think you are missing from my post. You are attaching different meanings to what I wrote than what I intended. After reading your last reply I am stumwatggled as to how I can make myself any more clear, except to say I want the same thing that you do. It doesn't matter if we "nuance" words fifty different ways for rest of the millennium, my meaning won't change. Those are all of the reasons I have always had for wanting health insurance available to everyone with parity for everyone. They do not change no matter how they are "nuanced." Now for a personal note which will not change no matter how it is "nuanced."

I'm for government run health care for all of the reasons I have given. I am also for government run health care for many personal reasons, because my husband barely survived a bout with MRSA last year, and I was a first hand witness to how his health insurance company mistreated him. MRSA is an antibiotic resistant strain of staph which began in hospitals, but has now spread out into the community. It is very contagious, aggressive and mutates constantly to defy treatment. People usually die from it.

My husband survived but the MRSA did the following:

1. Took from him the ability to walk and use his left arm. This functionality has returned but only just barely. He will never be able to walk normally again. He spends a large part of his day in a hospital bed. The doctors don't know why. No one has seen that many cases of MRSA where the patient has survived.

2. Caused my husband to have a heart attack and destroyed his aortic valve so that his blood could not oxygenate. They had to wait to do surgery until they cleared the MRSA out of his blood. Since his breathing, even with machines to help him, was becoming less and less efficient they had to operate sooner than it was safe to do so. He barely made it out of a 7 1/2 hour surgery which was only a partial success. They had to install an ICD later to control his heart beat and fibrillate his heart if it goes out of rhythm. One of the surgeons said he spent the whole surgery picking piles of dead MRSA bacteria off of, and out of my husband's heart. The MRSA had also given him Endocarditis, a severe inflammation of the heart. He now takes a galaxy of medications for his heart that he never had to take before. They are very expensive. He has to eat a salt and fat restricted diet. All fresh food. This is becoming more and more expensive, but he will have potentially fatal heart problems if he uses salt which is found in most prepared foods. He also is beginning to have congestive heart problems and fluids pooling his lungs. He has to clear his lungs daily.

3. Caused him to form blood clots in his lower extremities which took weeks to dissolve with Heparin in an IV. He went into heart surgery with blood clots which could have killed him if the surgeons had not been exceptionally skilled. But he would have died if they had not operated without taking the risk of dealing with the clots. He will have to take warfarin for the rest of his life to thin his blood and keep new clots from forming.

4. Damaged the lower portion of his lungs by collapsing the alveoli. The doctors tried to keep the alveoli from dying. They did not succeed. Between his heart and his lungs he is short of breath at the slightest exertion. The doctors do not know why the lung damage occurred. No one has seen that many cases of MRSA where the patient has survived.

5. Attacked my husbands bone marrow. His red blood counts dropped to the point where he was and is profoundly anemic. His white count dropped until he had virtually no immune system. We had to wear masks to protect him. His food had to be irradiated before he could eat it and he could only drink bottled water. The depression of his immune system caused a yeast overgrowth in his mouth and throat and sores which would not heal. Until the white blood counts came back of their own accord he was unable to chew food. He lived on his IVs, Cream of Wheat and Cream of Mushroom Soup. His platelet count fell so low that he cannot shave, because if he cuts himself it takes forever for him to stop bleeding. He can't use an electric razor because that would trigger his ICD. He was given at least five blood transfusions to try to equalize his blood count. They didn't work. His Hematologist took a bone marrow aspiration to try to see what was happening. It told him what was happening with my husbands bone marrow but not why, so there was very little the doctor was able to do. My husband was given injections of medications in the stomach daily first in the hospital, and then by me when he came home. I gave him the injections because his health insurance company would not pay for any home nursing visits even though they are contractually obliged to do so. They simply refused and nothing I could say or do would change their minds. They also tried to deny him the medication I injected, until his doctor threw a fit and threatened to admit him to the hospital again if my husband could not get the necessary medication for home use. The insurance company caved and we injected, carefully following the instructions that came with the medication and sweating the possibility of an air embolism. My husband read the instructions aloud and pinched up his own skin while I injected. Not an activity I would recommend for people if they have any other choice. My husband's blood is slowly returning to normal, but whether it will ever come back fully, the doctors don't know. No one has seen that many cases of MRSA where the patient has survived.

6. Caused my husband to have to take Vancomycin which is the antibiotic of last resort for resistant staph infections. The protocol to clear the MRSA was six weeks in the hospital under constant supervision. Vancomycin is very toxic and not easily tolerated. My husband made it less than four weeks before he had an anaphalactic reaction to the Vancomycin. His whole body swelled, his skin turned an orange tone and began to slough off. He developed a rash which was almost black in his lower extremities. It damaged his kidneys to the point where the doctors were discussing dialysis with us. Fortunately the elevated kidney functions dropped to the point where this was not necessary. However, my husband still has kidney damage. He will have some degree of impairment for the rest of his life. In this case though the doctors do know why. It is one of the things Vancomycin can do to patients who use it. That is why the patients must be so closely supervised.

7. Caused my husband to have liver damage. The liver damage resulted in the inability of the body to break down waste products efficiently. Ammonia is being released into my husbands bloodstream. This can cause lethargy, confusion, coma and death. Fortunately the doctors were able to diagnose what was happening and medicate him for it. This is also an expensive medication that he will have to take three times a day for the rest of his life. The doctors cannot say why this happened. No one has seen that many cases of MRSA where the patient has survived.

8. It "colonized" my husband's body so that any small infection or a cold or the flu can turn back into full blown MRSA which the doctors are able to tell us that he probably would not survive.

9. Because of the liver damage and the fact that the liver eliminates medications and other foreign substances from the body, my husband has a very narrow range of medications for other medical conditions that he can take without causing further harm. We have to check with a doctor each and every time before he takes any new medications. Even over the counter medications. We also have to be sure that the doctor we are talking to is familiar with MRSA, because many of them are not. No one has seen that many cases of MRSA where the patient has survived, or has seen that many cases of MRSA period. Unfortunately that is going to change. It was just my husband's terrible luck that he was one of the first cases from the community. They sent in an Epidemiologist to try to figure out where he got it, but that was not possible. It could have been anywhere.

Now to finally terminate this post, let me tell you that my husband was in an acute hospital, as he should have been for 16 weeks. All during this time his health insurance company kept trying to force an early discharge which would have killed him for sure. I could not move them; they would not discuss it with me. One insurance representative told me that in spite of the fact that they were denying covered services it was their right. They also told me that they never considered the actual coverage when they were making decisions on patient care. Fortunately he was in a non profit hospital and the head case worker, who has seen an awful lot of this crap did three or four successful appeals for us which overturned every one of the insurance company's decisions. She had the staff, she had the knowledge, she had the lawyers and she had the compassion to do so. She did a heck of a job. If it had not been for the excellent medical care by both my husband's nurses and doctors which was given in spite of the health insurance company he would not have survived. But how many people have access to staff people at hospitals who care so much. It was a fluke that we did. It just happened to be the closest hospital with a vacancy that the EMTs could take us to. Your life should not depend on dumb luck. Everyone should have access to this type of care, but they do not because of the health insurance companies.

After he got home, the insurance company as I have stated, denied home nursing ordered by my husband's doctors and which was pursued by the hospital case workers, denied him physical therapy which might have helped him to regain muscle tone and walk, and denied durable medical equipment such as a walker, again ordered by his doctors and pursued by hospital case workers. In short after paying high premiums for years, higher co payments every year for less, and much more for prescription coverage the insurance company was not there for us unless the hospital was standing on them and forcing them to do what little they ended up doing. All this stress and frustration and fear during what is one of the worst times of a person's life anyway, a serious illness that could kill them and is not easily cured or curable.

We are still here, still alive, but nearly bankrupt and living with my husband's severe illness which no one understands, and my severe autoimmune disorder which is understood but not easily treatable, especially when the health insurance company would rather not treat it. We have no safety nets because Bush and other mostly Republican politicians took them away. Utopia, as you seem to envision it isn't happening right now and may not happen because the ugly fact is that the rich control the purse strings and the purse strings control a lot of politicians who could help all of us, but won't. What should happen will not happen easily, or may not happen at all if things go badly. We will keep trying, we will help other people the best we can no matter what is happening in our own lives, and hopefully we can create change together. Sometimes the nuances are not as important as the reality. Especially when we are talking about the same goal and for the same reasons.

Our current system isn't up to it. My husband's mother has a rare form of cancer that is wrapping around her esophagus and metastasizing throughout her lungs, neck and eventually her brain. She has difficulty swallowing and is in constant pain. She has to measure her life expectancy in days, weeks and months. She can't count on more time than that.

What is her HMO doing? Not much. They said surgery to remove the tumor when it was initially discovered months ago was not possible. They said they could not use radiation. Instead they gave her an old chemotherapy drug that is not effective on the type of cancer she has, because they have to "cut costs". (Read increase profits.) The chemo drug was toxic to her. She nearly died from taking it. Her blood values dropped across the board and it took two weeks in the hospital to get her white count up to the point where she had an immune system. Now the HMO is putting off any more treatment for her at all. She is desperate. She is dying and she knows it.

I just want to ask while you are expressing concerns about "our own system," if you have ever sat across the table from a loved one and held her hand while she told you, "I'm afraid to die. Please don't let me die alone." There is nothing like it except for watching your husband almost die because he has a rare illness and his insurance company does not want to pay for a full recovery. In that case I was lucky because the non profit hospital intervened and helped him. Now, right off his own illness he is watching his mother die because her for profit HMO decided at some point that her life was not worth saving. This is our own system. We need something much better. I don't care who we emulate. I want people like my mother in law to have a chance.

As I sat and tried to comfort her, seeing all the while how emaciated she is, covered with bruises which appear spontaneously and with no hair from her botched chemo, I realized that aside from love and my promises that she will not die alone I don't have anything else to offer that will help her live. How did we get here? We are in a place where corporate entities are deciding who is fit to live and die based on their profit margins. It is time for something new and different, and really, what does it matter where it comes from if it gets us out of the mare's nest that greed stuck us into?

Last year my husband was hospitalized with MRSA. It was in his blood and all through his body. MRSA is a super bug, a Staph infection which used to be mostly contracted in hospitals and medical settings where the bacteria became antibiotic resistant. It is now "in the wild" as the hospital put it. This means that it is everywhere and as easy to catch as a cold by hand to hand contact or sneezing in someone's face. The doctors described it to me as aggressive and quick to mutate. In the meantime they were dumping every antibiotic they knew of into my husband that would possibly kill it. Each one would work for a short time and then they would have to try something new.

While they were attempting to help my husband he was running a fever of 105 or higher which they could not keep down no matter what they did, and they did try. The day he was taken to the hospital he lost his ability to walk and the use of his left arm. To this day no one knows why.

In the ER he began having a heart attack which they could do little to stop because any acute intervention would have introduced MRSA bacteria into other organs and they were afraid that would kill my husband outright. They happened to have a very good cardiologist on hand who was able to mitigate the severity of the attack while they kept trying to kill the bacteria in ICU. My husband lived, but barely and he has no memory of his time in the hospital. This is very long, I know, so please bear with me. There is a point I'm coming to.

While the MRSA raged unchecked the following happened:

1. It destroyed the heart valve below the Aorta rendering my husband virtually unable to breathe even with oxygen. It inflamed the heart muscle causing endocarditis. There was also an infarct at the apex of the heart itself. He had blood clots in his legs.

2. His lungs were damaged by the bacteria. There is an area at the base of each lung which is scarred and dead. No treatment was able to be given.

3. The doctors had to risk open heart surgery to save my husband's life. Without a valve replacement he would have died. There was a very good chance he could have died during surgery, but he did survive. The heart surgery was only a partial success. The valve was replaced, the infarct could not be bypassed because of its position and the heart rhythm was so out of sync that an ICD which is a combination pacemaker and defibrillator had to be installed to restore the rhythm and fibrillate the heart if it went severely out of rhythm. My husband has had to modify his life activities even more to accommodate the restrictions it brings with it, but he is grateful to be alive.

4. The MRSA attacked my husband's bone marrow. It reduced red counts, white count and platelet count. For a time his white count was so low that in addition to wearing contagion garments when we visited him, we had to wear masks to protect him. His food had to be irradiated before he could eat and he could not have raw food of any kind. His mouth filled with lesions and yeast overgrowth which could be treated only topically because the Hematologist had to protect the bone marrow so that it could return to normal one day. It has improved, but the counts are still low across the board after a year. He had five transfusions during this period in an attempt to restore at least part of his blood count, but they were not successful.

5. After the heart surgery, the pathologist who examined the destroyed heart valve which had been removed found "a few" live MRSA cells on it. The doctors explained that caution dictated that they put my husband on Vancomycin because the fact that the bacteria were not showing in the blood cultures did not guarantee that it would not return. Vancomycin for six weeks was the required and specific protocol. My husband was given Vancomycin.

6. After barely a month my husband had an anaphylactic reaction to the Vancomycin. His whole body swelled. His kidneys were damaged to the point that the doctors were discussing dialasis. Fortunately, the toxicity declined to the point where that was not necessary. There is still some residual kidney damage, but the doctors tell us it may resolve itself in time.

7. My husband's liver was damaged by either the Vancomycin or the MRSA. Some doctors say one thing, and some another. His reality is that ammonia from kidney wastes and liver function is not metabolized properly which resulted in a severe intoxication which resembled dementia. He will have to take medicine three times a day for this for the rest of his life. No one knows for sure if the damage to the liver will restore itself.

8. My husband can now walk a little, but barely. He needs the help of a walker and he can't get very far. He can't stand or sit very long and still spends many hours in a hospital bed. I'm just grateful that he is alive.

Now the point of this. He is a retired federal employee who is only 55 years old and who was robustly healthy before the MRSA. He has private health insurance through the Office of Personnel Management. Throughout this ordeal which lasted for months they kept refusing to pay for the acute care he needed. They wanted him to go to a convalescent hospital, even though they do not pay for that kind of facility, and the reduction of care probably would have resulted in his death. When I asked them if they had considered the lack of this coverage before making the decision their reply was, "We never consider the coverage when we make our decisions."

I was able to get the hospital which is a "non-profit" to help me with this. They appealed for us twice and won so that he was able to get most of the care that he needed and a hospital bed at home and a machine to help him breathe while he is asleep to keep some of the strain off his heart. His doctors wanted him to have home health care with a nurse to check on him once a week and physical therapy as needed. The insurance company has steadfastly refused to authorize this, even though these benefits are covered. Nothing I can do or say will change this, and I have been fighting them as hard as I can.

We have also been left with a huge residue of debt from deductibles and co-payments which we can't even begin to address. We were going to refinance our home under the existing 30 year mortgage which we thought had left us a tidy equity. Unfortunately the Bush economic polices have reduced the value of our home until there is no equity and no way even to sell it. In essence we are paying rent to the mortgage holder.

My husband has to take a lot of new and expensive medications and he has to eat a special diet to stay alive which is expensive, so we are incurring more debt. There seems to be no way out. All we can do is try to catch up, hope that we can continue to pay the mortgage so we don't lose our home because we have nowhere else to go, and let the people we owe money to ruin our credit or whatever they feel they have to do to sufficiently punish us because one of us got desperately ill.

That, I guess is my point. Under the present health care system even if you think you are protected you are not. We need universal health care. This is not a new revelation for me. I thought so even before this happened, but sometimes it is hard to get the people with the power to change things to listen, much less act. If you read with me through this whole post, thanks for your patience and kindness and please realize that you are vulnerable too. Even with the help of an epidemiologist the hospital could not determine where or how my husband was infected. Somewhere out there in "the wild" as the ICU nurse said, but no one knows exactly where or how.