Interest in insurance exchange shows how much the current health care system has failed millions of Americans

Opening Day for small businesses and individuals to sign on to the insurance exchange programs established by the Affordable Care Act can be—despite many glitches, freezes and crash-landings—viewed as a “success” insofar as the level of traffic government websites offering application services received. So many at once, it seems, that computer servers were unable to handle so much traffic, leading to slow, delayed and otherwise difficult access to the application pages. Shouldn’t this send a message to those partisan boneheads in Washington, DC? Even polls show that despite the fact that a majority may dislike “Obamacare,” a closer reading suggests that if you add those who oppose it because it is not “liberal” enough to those who support it as is, the numbers are a 50-50 split. As I mentioned before, those who oppose any form of health care reform are those people who already have good insurance and have allowed themselves to be persuaded that they might lose it. 

The apparent widespread interest in acquiring affordable health care insurance without concern of being rejected by for-profit private insurers should have the Tea Party on its tail, if the media chooses to report the story from that angle. It is absolutely appalling that a relative handful of narrow-minded bigots elected by other narrow-minded bigots have the audacity to deny other people needed health care coverage; after all, 36 states have signed on to the exchange program, and one can only feel sympathy for those denied merely because their states are controlled by the hard-hearted whose only “point” is to make a partisan political one. While opponents of “Obamacare” predictably claim that first day snafus indicate “disaster,” the real “disaster” is that so many millions of people feel that they have been failed by the health care system in this country as it is currently constructed.

Supposedly a there is a majority of Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives to pass a funding bill to end the current government shutdown without the anti-health care reform amendments demanded by Tea Party fanatics, if only the Republican leadership has the gonads to stand up to them.  This country, after all, is supposed to serve all people—not just those who already have “theirs.”