Last week the President of the United States gave an address on health care reform to both the House and the Senate, one of only fifteen times a president has done so since 1952. His message however, may very well have fallen on deaf ears.  The reason for this is the simple fact that we are currently so mired in partisan politics, Democrat versus Republican, liberal versus conservative, that the climate for rational discussion and level headedness needed to understand the complexities of the health care reform debate is lost on most folks: fear replaces reason, lines are drawn along party lines and words like socialism, Nazi Germany, communism, fascism take their place in what is already a complex debate: demagoguery rules the day.

Nowhere was this more clearly illustrated than Obama’s much anticipated presidential address to American students returning to school. Even before the contents of the speech were known, the Republican fringe and even the Republican mainstream latched onto the idea that the president’s message would amount to nothing more than a message of indoctrination. After the president’s speech children all over America would go to sleep and wake up as liberal democrats; zombies hell bent on promoting a liberal agenda which they would then force their parents to embrace, they themselves being too young to vote.

Which brings me back to the debate on health care and the possibility that what will become law, will be something so watered down from what some of us imagined and have fought for, for decades,  that it will be less than the sum of its parts. As I write, there is a bi partisan bill moving through Congress from which the public option is gone. I believe there can be no health care reform without a public option, what is being proposed currently is window dressing. It seems no one, not the President or his party has the stomach for a fight. It’s up to us to regain the momentum and to continue the push for a public option. What is currently before us is not what we were promised. I understand the need for bipartisan legislation, but on this one we need to go it alone. Some will call this progress,  but some of us feel betrayed and will continue to push for a public option although I fear that train may have already left the station.