BY KAREN WEBB

I think the Blue Dogs deserve something, don’t you?

We could have a Blue Heart Medal for those willing to commit political suicide to protect the profits of Big Parma and Big HMO’s. Then we can have a Blue Cross Medal for those willing to die to protect the profit margins and CEO bonuses for Blue Cross and all those other Health Insurance giants.

I nominate Rep. Dan Boren, DINO-Oklahoma, for the first one.

He says he wants to have us walk over his dead body to get affordable health care for our loved ones.

Someday I hope someone will tell me how all those fine Christians took all those verses commanding them to take care of the widows, orphans, poor, old and the sick and turned them into a Wall Street feeding frenzy. I know we are a capitalist nation, but there should be a couple things that are not for sale, like our lives.

It isn’t like we don’t already have government run health care. You can be born into a really poor family and you can get it until you are 18, but then you have to wait until you are 65 to get it again, with a few exceptions.

You can get a government job, you can be an overworked Department of Human Services’ employee, with low pay, or you can join the military. The last one entails you having to be willing to die for any old thing Congress or the president wants to declare war over.

You know that vast Military Industrial Complex that former General and President Dwight Eisenhower warned against.

Like when they go to war because they thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction [WMDs]. In a rare flourish of truthfulness Saddam said he didn’t have any. The only thing the Cheney Administration knew, without a doubt, was that Saddam did have the second largest oil reserves in the world.

If you don’t want to get shot at or stand in long lines at the Veterans Administration while someone tells you that your post-traumatic stress disorder was a pre-existing condition that they failed to pick up at your enlistment physical, then you can run for Congress or some other government office, like President. But to do that you have to own the mint or you have to suck up to Big Health, Big Oil, Big Wall Street, Big Banks or any of those other corporate citizens.

Dan Boren and the rest of them are not even willing to use the tiniest regulation or control on the profits of Wall Street, even after they collapsed the entire world around us.

They keep saying – and Danny Boy is one of the loudest – that we can’t saddle our children and grandchildren with the cost of everyone having health care, but they don’t seem to mind slapping the bill for this war that may never end, since there will always be terrorists.

There is a list of earmarks on Dan’s webpage that could gag a maggot, but health care is not one of them.

You have to put your health and your life on a profit margin. I keep wondering which wealth-crazed Christian thought of that one. The GOP claims to have lots of ideas and I think I heard they have 58 bills in Congress.

I agree with the President – why did they not do health care when they were in control? The only thing they were willing to do is cut the cost of malpractice insurance and put a low dollar value on the life of a loved one in case someone gives you the wrong medication or leaves something foreign in you during surgery.

They did not have time between their sending other people’s children off to wars for whatever reason they could think of, with gear that would not protect them, having them electrocuted by Haliburton in the shower, ripping to shreds the Geneva accords and destroying our moral fabric, making government so small it can fit right into my OB-GYN examining room, keeping gays single, and last, but not least, using budget reconciliation to pass two huge tax cuts aimed at the wealthy. They were supposed to create jobs and they did overseas at slave wages and then they wreaked havoc in the banking industry and collapsed everything.

Who would have thought cutting revenue in time of war would create such a mess? Who, indeed – everyone with a brain, that’s who?

I am sure I am tired of them playing with my health and my life to protect their seats in Congress. I don’t need Rep. Bart Stupak playing nurse’s assistant during my vaginal exam. Neither do I need him to forbid me using my own money to buy insurance for anything I want.

I don’t want Rep. Boren to die to keep anyone from having affordable healthcare and I don’t want anyone to die because Dan puts profits or his congressional seat before lives.

I really don’t like the idea of the GOP going line by line through this bill when not one of them is going to vote for it no matter what.

– Karen Webb lives in Moore, OK and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer