Pigs and Dogs

A presidential panel announced earlier this week expects anywhere from 60 million to 120 million Americans to contract swine flu this year and for the H1N1 virus to cause up to 90,000 deaths, possibly swamping intensive care units in certain areas of the country.

Considering the state of health care costs in this country - and the benighted efforts to do something about it - I don't feel well somehow.

Meanwhile, Representative Pete Stark, a California Democrat, started shooting off his mouth about the moderate "Blue Dog" Democrats, accusing them of causing trouble and being "brain dead" in an apparent effort to serve the interests of the insurance companies. Stark is known for this humiliating hyperbole; twenty years ago, when George Bush (the first one) was President, Stark complained about then-Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan, a black man, and how Sullivan's positions were a discredit to his race. Sullivan replied, "Tell Pete Stark I don't live on his plantation."

The Blue Dogs are hardly innocent, though. Stark referred to the public option, which Stark's subcommittee the House Ways and Means Committee approved with Medicare rate even as a subcommittee of the House Finance Committee successfully pushed for a provision to have any rates in a public plan negotiated by the Health and Human Services Secretary, effectively making it unlikely that a public plan could compete fairly with private insurers.

That's something to think about as a possible H1N1 epidemic of major proportions of the 1918 flu epidemic is upon us, and millions of people still lack health insurance.