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Thursday, March 08, 2007
Today we're going to talk about the prospects for universal health care in America, in other words, making sure no one lacks health insurance. We'll focus less on the nuts and bolts, and more on the public attitude towards this issue. The conclusion will be, the public is solidly on our progressive side.
I talk a lot on Blast The Right about the moral imperative to reduce human misery, suffering, pain and death, which right-wing policies don't do. In fact, the rule of thumb is, right-wing policies increase human misery, suffering, pain and death.
For a couple of examples, check out my year-end podcast 74, where I review some of the worst things the right-wing did in 2006 as covered by Blast The Right. Included among their gifts to America in 2006 were increased poverty, mining deaths, cancer and lung disease.
As I discussed in podcast 79, George Bush's proposal to improve our health care system, which he still runs around shamelessly promoting, leaves 90% of the problem unsolved.
There are 47 million Americans without health care coverage. By the White House's own admission, George Bush's plan will at most cover about 1 in 10 of them.
How does the public feel about that?
We have some fresh data on this, from a New York Times, CBS News poll. It was conducted February 23-27.A majority of Americans say the federal government should guarantee health insurance to every American, especially children, and are willing to pay higher taxes to do it, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. Heartening, huh?
What you'll hear in the rest of this podcast will show how the right-wing is truly the loony fringe right, and we supposedly loony left progressives are not so loony after all, but supported by strong majority sentiment.
Please listen to the podcast for the details.
(PS: Right-wingers, if you want to write in to me, fine, but at least do me the courtesy of listening to the podcast first. Please don't respond just on the basis of the brief preview above. Thanks!)
For those who aren't familiar with podcasts, podcasts are a series of mp3 audio files that you download to your computer or portable music device (iPod or other) and then can listen to whenever you want.
You don't need an iPod to listen to podcasts.
Podcast software like iTunes will automatically check a podcast at intervals you specify, and download any new installments.
iTunes is free and very easy to use. http://www.apple.com/itunes/
In iTunes, if you want to subscribe to my podcast, just click on Advanced at the top right, then choose Subscribe to Podcast, and paste in the URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/blasttheright
That's the URL to use for other podcast-friendly software programs as well.
Alternatively, you can just manually download new episodes from my podcast home page as they become available. Here is a link to my podcast's home page: http://www.therationalradical.com/podcast.html
Enjoy!!
Jack Clark 10:28 PM [+]
Post #5386958030668017982
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