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Donna Edwards tells her story of being a young mother without health insurance and how she is paying America back with her vote for health care reform.

Edwards: I collapsed and was taken to an emergency room. Without health care I was treated as one of those uncompensated and now it's time for me to pay the American people back with a vote for comprehensive health care reform. This bill will take the burden off of providers and Americans for paying the costs of uncompensated care and safeguards for the health of all Americans.

She's been a solid progressive voice in Congress. We need more like her. I watched the endless insanity of the Republicans in the House on full display all day and night Saturday. It made me sick, watching them line up like replicants, making sure they used the same talking points over and over again. When they talk about "freedom," all they do is smear what that word means to the world. C&L Annette emailed me and said we should start calling them the Republick Party. I like that.

You won't read much about their behavior during a crucial time in our history because the media shields the nuts who are loose in the halls of Congress.

Howie Klein writes:

I love Donna Edwards. Her short speech about why she was voting for health care reform made me cry last night-- and not fake Glenn Beck tears. Like Donna, there was a time in my life when I couldn't afford health insurance-- or health care-- either. Americans deserve better than predatory insurance companies thriving on misery. This is why America needs more members of Congress like Donna Edwards and less like Paul Ryan, Suzanne Kosmas and John Barrow

We're not even in flu season yet, and already hospitals are overloaded. I have to wonder how many cities are ready for this:

BALTIMORE — To Mitchell Goldstein, the flood of sick children seemed endless. Day after day, nearly three times as many kids as usual streamed into the rainbow-colored pediatric emergency room at Johns Hopkins Hospital, sniffling and feverish, worried parents hovering.

The press of children with swine flu was so relentless that doctors opened an annex in a hospital dining room to handle the overflow. "Our worst day" was Sunday, Oct. 11, says Goldstein, one of the ER doctors. "We had 15 to 20 patients an hour. It was 24/7. There wasn't a lull."

Last week, the epidemic of ailing children let up somewhat. But doctors here are expecting a new run of flu patients — the children's parents. "What we see first in (children) we see two to three weeks later in adults," says Trish Perl, the hospital's director of infection control.

The scenes at Johns Hopkins are being repeated at hospitals in Denver and Duluth, Seattle and San Diego, as waves of flu patients arrive at their doors, doubling their emergency room volume. Just as significant is the effect on intensive care units: A relatively small number of flu patients are requiring intensive care, but some are so ill they will need round-the-clock care for weeks.

Doctors at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere expect the number of patients needing hospitalization and intensive care to rise. Such an influx of intensive care patients eventually could force some hospitals to cancel services such as elective surgery, they say.

"Why did President Obama declare a national emergency? Because what's going on at Hopkins is happening across the country," Perl says. "An infection that generally doesn't appear to be severe is pushing hospitals to their limit."

The White House declaration, announced Saturday, was designed to give hospitals the flexibility to move patients to satellite facilities if they are overwhelmed in dealing with an outbreak that is now widespread in 46 states and afflicting millions of people, says Reid Cherlin, an administration spokesman.

"H1N1 is moving rapidly, as expected," Cherlin says. "By the time regions or health care systems recognize they are becoming overburdened, they need to implement disaster plans quickly."

[...] To many analysts, swine flu appears to be two overlapping epidemics: one a cascade of mild to moderate cases that is stressing hospital emergency rooms, and the second a narrow stream of unusually young patients who need intensive care.

[...] Connie Price, chief of infectious diseases at Denver Health, the city's public hospital, says, "I've been living this" since Aug. 28, when the hospital's lab reported 12 positive tests for swine flu.

"Since then we've been inundated," she says. "In a typical flu season, we may hospitalize 15 patients. With H1N1, we've hospitalized 10 times that many. We're not even in flu season yet."

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Countdown's Worst Persons segment for Oct. 5, 2009 with winner Rep. Paul Broun. Runners up George Will and Rush Limbaugh.

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From AC360 Sept. 10, 2009. While discussing Rep. Wilson's outburst during the President's speech, Tea Party oganizer Mark Williams says this about illegal immigrants receiving health care benefits:

WILLIAMS: Everybody seems to be leaving one very important thing out of this. And that is, the federal courts have spoken with regard to illegal immigrants or illegal aliens getting benefits, especially health benefits. We tried to bar them from doing that in California back in the '90s, and the federal courts slapped us down.

Even language specifically excluding them is not going to stand a court battle. So, whatever Obama believes -- and, for that matter, I don't even know what bill he was talking about. Does he have a proposal? Does he have a plan? What's he even talking about?

He and Roland Martin get into it in the above segment after the commercial break where Williams reiterates what he said about the courts, and Martin insists that there are no provisions for illegal immigrants to receive benefits in any of the proposed health care legislation.

Dave Neiwert gave me his slant on this:

Illegal immigrants entering an emergency room for treatment will be covered under any health-reform plan – because they are already. It’s a basic legal matter that emergency rooms cannot turn away anyone in need of emergency care. The courts have indeed decided this. The question is, does Mark Williams want it otherwise? Does he want emergency rooms deciding who lives and who dies depending on their ability to prove their citizenship? Does he want people to die on emergency-room doorsteps because they are undocumented?

Undocumented immigrants get no insurance benefits under the Obama plan, but the costs of their care will be covered under a more sane system. The taxpayers will wind up covering the costs, as they do now, but the costs should be less because the payment system will be more direct.

Those are the questions Roland Martin or anyone on that panel should have been asking Williams, but I guess that's expecting too much of CNN. I also would have liked for one of them to ask Williams if he thinks going to an emergency room is the equivalent of having health care coverage as I've heard one too many Republican member of Congress assert.

BLITZER: Let's get back to our panel talking strategy on health care reform and Congressman Joe Wilson's outburst, CNN's Candy Crowley joining us, political contributor Roland Martin, and Tea Party Express organizer Mark Williams.

We're going to get what Dana just reported. But, Mark, I want to give you a chance to respond to what Roland said, that John McCain himself agrees with the president that nothing in this legislation would give illegal immigrants in the United States the opportunity to gain from this proposed legislation.

WILLIAMS: Well, Wolf, it doesn't have to, because the courts have already spoken on. And that they will speak again if -- if -- if it happens.

But this bitterness that supposedly is directed toward Obama, if I have learned anything in my work with OurCountryPAC.org, it's that it's not bitterness. It's outrage at the socialist policies being embraced by this administration.

MARTIN: Nonsense. It's bitterness.

WILLIAMS: And that goes -- that goes double for W., by the way.

And, as far as the Republican Party goes, it's no surprise to any of us working stiffs out here that they allow themselves to be a doormat for what is happening in Washington, D.C.

The fact of the matter is, the Republican Party, as a whole, is absent without leave from this debate. And our representatives, our elected representatives, are falling down on the job of upholding and protecting the Constitution. And that's why the American people are rising.

That's why I had almost 10,000 people outside Chicago at our tea party the other day. People are sick and tired of being abused and then being called a mob of Nazis because they object to that.

BLITZER: All right.

WILLIAMS: We're the people who pay the bills.

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As someone who spent two hours on the phone talking to six different insurance reps Monday, trying to find out why my insurer was trying to stick me with a $12,000 emergency room bill, I can only repeat what has become my personal mantra: The only people who are really satisfied with their health coverage are those who have never had to use it.

The industry that helped scuttle health reform 15 years ago with its "Harry and Louise" ads is back, voicing support for a central element of the Obama administration's plans: making sure everyone is covered.

That does not mean the industry is backing the administration. Indeed, the leader of the insurance lobby has sent lawmakers a message: Be careful what you change, because "77 percent of Americans are satisfied with their existing health insurance coverage."

Karen Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), invoked the statistic to argue against the creation of a government-run insurance option. But the polls are not that simple, and her assertion reveals how the industry's effort to defend its turf has led it to cherry-pick the facts.

The poll Ignagni was citing actually undercuts her position: By 72 to 20 percent, Americans favor the creation of a public plan, the June survey by the New York Times and CBS News found. People also said that they thought government would do a better job than private insurers of holding down health-care costs and providing coverage.

In addition, data from a Kaiser Family Foundation poll last year, compiled at the request of The Washington Post, suggest that the people who like their health plans the most are the people who use them the least.

Those who described their health as "excellent" -- people who presumably had relatively little experience pursuing medical care or submitting claims -- were almost twice as likely as those in good, fair or poor health to rate their private health insurance as excellent.

The level of satisfaction expressed with private insurance was essentially the same as that with Medicare, the government program for the elderly and disabled.

The industry's stance against a public health plan revives shades of 1994, when it was instrumental in blocking President Bill Clinton's health-care proposals.

"A government-run plan would turn back the clock on efforts to improve the quality and safety of patient care," AHIP has argued. Such a plan "will ultimately limit choices and access," the big insurer WellPoint contends.

But systemic problems have persisted for 15 years, and it is not clear how much private insurers have done, or can do, to solve them.

"Insurers promise choice, they promise innovation, they promise a lot of things, but I think they've delivered very little," said Alan Sager, professor of health policy and management at Boston University. "I think net they give us very bad value for the 10 to 20 percent share of the health dollar they skim off the top."

Instead of choice, they offer "the illusion of choice," he said.

Let's follow one minor injury (mine) through the American health care system, shall we? It started in September 2007, when I fell out of a tow truck.

I fell out of a tow truck after a long, hard week at work because while I was
driving home from New Jersey across the Betsy Ross bridge, a tire blew out. My auto club sent out a crew but they couldn't change the tire - it needed a special tool, one I didn't have. (Used car.) So I trudge back to the police station at the foot of the bridge, where someone was nice enough to let me use their phone. (Dead cell battery! Oh lucky day!) But then the red-faced shift commander came in and started screaming at me: "GET. THAT. CAR. OFF. MY. BRIDGE!!" He also yelled at me for "tying up our line" and insisted I fork up $300 to get my car towed off the bridge.

I'd just started the job after several months of unemployment and was broke. I told him; he didn't care. I finally made another call and got my auto club to authorize a purchase order to get me towed.

It was a Very Big Truck, a shiny black tractor-trailer with a flatbed. We unloaded the car at my mechanic's, and the driver dropped me off in front of my house. Did I mention the truck was black, and that it was late at night and dark outside? Because here's where I tried to step out of the truck onto one of the decks (black, with no reflective safety strip) and dropped three feet to the sidewalk, onto my ankle.

Much crying and a trip to the emergency room later, I discovered another little oddity of the American Way of Insurance: Since the accident involved a vehicle, all treatment had to go through my no-fault car insurance until it was tapped out. The local hospital did an x-ray and told me it was a minor sprain.

After three months of physical therapy, it wasn't getting better. The physical therapist told me she thought maybe I'd chipped a bone and it was tearing at the ligament. "You should get an MRI," she said.

This, as they say, is where the fun begins.

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From Washington Journal April 29, 2009. Rep. Paul Broun while responding to a caller about the Mexican child that has died from swine flu. He says that it's not true that all Americans don't have access to healthcare. Apparently the Representative thinks that not being turned away from the emergency room is somehow an equivalent to healthcare.

This is the same person who compared President Obama to Hitler-- Editorial: 'Hitler' remark makes Broun irrelevant in D.C.:

Well, it's the fact that Obama has proposed an expansion of this country's national service effort, a call to community service aimed at boosting this country's security by working to improve its infrastructure, do a better job educating its citizens, and help those citizens stay healthy. An Obama campaign document readily available on the Web, "The Blueprint for Change: Barack Obama's Plan for America," offers up additional details on the president-elect's community service proposal.

For Broun, that plan somehow translates into, as he noted in a Tuesday story from the Associated Press, "exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany, and ... exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he's (Obama) proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that's as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."

Our congressman went on to say, "We can't be lulled into complacency. You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I'm not comparing him (Obama) to Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying is there is the potential of going down that road."

Congressman Broun was of course comparing Obama to Hitler, a comparison that his denial only served to reinforce. And then, Broun compounded his non-denial denial by subsequently offering a non-apology apology on an Augusta radio station, using the smarmy and ultimately meaningless line, "I apologize to anyone who has taken offense at that."