Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Kelly Cummings of Fletcher, who is a member of the Vermont Workers Center’s Healthcare is a Human Right Campaign.
OK, folks, here we go! Health care has made it to the big show. The United States Supreme Court.
The fear mongering is really going to ratchet up, so look out! I cannot implore you enough to stand firm. As Bruce Springsteen says in his new song, “Wrecking Ball,” “Hold tight to your anger. Don’t fall to your fear.”
The insurance companies are so sure if they and their minions keep coming at us with their fear mongering and misinformation, we will fall. They believe they can get us to crumble. I say they can’t. I say we are made of tougher stuff. And we are sick and tired of being manipulated, coerced, frightened, demeaned and lied to by them and their friends. We will no longer be the water-carriers for the insurance companies because we now know … it is the very water they intend to turn around and drown us with. We will not go back. No sir.
What I’ve come to think of as “The Fear Monger Five” have been working overtime to get us back in line so we will go along as usual. “The Five” are Darcie Johnston, who founded Vermonters for Health Care Freedom and is now the head of fundraising for Sen. Randy Brock’s gubernatorial campaign; Jeff Wennberg, who is the executive director of VHCF; Sen. Randy Brock; Wendy Wilton, who is the Rutland treasurer; and John McClaughry, who is the vice president of the conservative Ethan Allen Institute.
They are trying to convince us that the insurance companies’ profit-driven free-market version of health care is really good for us and anything otherwise, like actual “get better and not go bankrupt” health care, is socialism, government takeover, or the end of our freedom and perhaps the world forever. Oh please. I guess insurance company profits matter more to “The Five” than real health care for us.
Never forget insurance companies have a lot of money to lose in this fight. And not just here in Vermont, but nationwide if we are successful. The little state of Vermont is an awesome threat to the big insurance companies running this nation. It’s a real David and Goliath story and they need to shut us down as quickly as possible. We’re enemy number one and they’re coming to get us if they can. The insurance companies and “The Five” are really trying hard to demean us by calling us an experiment, lab rats and referring to our desire to improve the quality of our lives to being the nation’s petri dish. Funny but didn’t penicillin come from a petri dish? If my recollections are correct … that turned out pretty good for folks.
So with things ratcheting up it is more important than ever that Vermonters band together, stand firm, and be proud of what we are trying to do here. Support Gov. Shumlin and the Green Mountain Care Board in their efforts to accomplish what “The Fear Monger Five” and the insurance giants say “must not” be done.
When they say “How dare you reach for something better?”
We’ll say, “We dare. We dare. We dare.”
“Hold tight to your anger.
“Don’t fall to your fear.”
Our time is now.