Though I mentioned this yesterday in the posting of the newest, latest version of the Democratic Party platform, this bears repeating: you can’t have the private insurance industry mucking around with health care. It is really painful to watch a kind of cognitive dissonance playing out here. Watch this, on page 22, in the context of the discussion about Fiscal Responsibility:

The real long-run fiscal challenge is rooted in the rising spending on health care, but we cannot address this in a way that puts our most vulnerable families in jeopardy.

   It is the height of IRRESPONSIBILITY to pretend like you can really protect vulnerable families by keeping health care a for-profit business. It’s phony and misleading.

Instead, we must strengthen our public programs by bringing down the cost of health care and reducing waste while making strategic investments that emphasize quality, efficiency, and prevention.

   This is utter nonsense. It is mumbo-jumbo, market-driven language that obscures the statement being made: we don’t have the backbone to take on a fight with a powerful industry so we are going to embrace the idea of Market Fundamentalism and con the American people into believing that you can solve the health care crisis by letting the people, who actually created the inefficient model in the first place, try to fix it.

   But, obviously, I don’t feel strongly about this. Sorry for being so wishy-washy.