Read this and read it now

Even though Matthew mentioned Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece on health care in yesterday's Cheap Blogging Crutch, I wanted to dedicate an entire post to the thing because, well, it's that good and important of a read. Especially in light of last night's shenanigans.

From Sick and Wrong, RS, 9/3/09:

To recap, here's what ended up happening with health care. First, they gave away single-payer before a single gavel had fallen, apparently as a bargaining chip to the very insurers mostly responsible for creating the crisis in the first place. Then they watered down the public option so as to make it almost meaningless, while simultaneously beefing up the individual mandate, which would force millions of people now uninsured to buy a product that is no longer certain to be either cheaper or more likely to prevent them from going bankrupt. The bill won't make drugs cheaper, and it might make paperwork for doctors even more unwieldy and complex than it is now. In fact, the various reform measures suck so badly that PhRMA, the notorious mouthpiece for the pharmaceutical industry which last year spent more than $20 million lobbying against health care reform, is now gratefully spending more than seven times that much on a marketing campaign to help the president get what he wants.

When finished, you may go back to your Facebook yes-we-canning.