Are you surprised that the Republicans are siding with the health insurance companies over the citizens?

Regarding health care reform....
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A cursory look at history shows that no one should be surprised. Every time the Republicans have had control of the government they have ignored health-care reform and the out-of-control cost of health care while putting our country in ever-greater debt because of spending that has yielded no returns to the public at large. Instead, they have borrowed to pay for hundreds of billions in agricultural subsidies that primarily benefit agribusinesses and at the expense of more efficient, less-polluting small farmers. They have cut taxes for people who invested their cuts not in this country but in China, India, Indonesia, etc. They have overseen polices that ensure the exportation of our industrial base. They have promoted policies that remove oversight over the kind of speculation that resulted in the half-trillion S&L crisis under Reagan and the mega-recession that has destroyed tens of millions of American lives--and still counting. They have opposed policies that would make business more competitive, instead fomenting competition-killing corporate mergers and takeovers (this is not conservatism, folks; it is corporatism). They opted to waste hundreds of billions, to say nothing of human life, in order to invade oil-rich Iraq rather than destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, a costly blunder that we are now having to pay for in Afghanistan. Only Iraqi Kurds (the only real good in the Iraqi invasion) and corrupt private defense contractors (including mercenaries) have benefited from the Iraq invasion. One is hard-put to think of any Republican-backed measure that has benefited the poor and middle classes of this country, but perhaps someone can--without getting into meaningless labeling and tiresome iteration of stale platitudes. All I can think of are measures and policies that have engorged the pockets of the wealthiest one percent of people in this country at the expense of everyone else.\ ***Edit: Anyone who disagrees should show me to be wrong with valid, credible facts from sources generally recognized as nonpartisan. Otherwise, your disagreement has no validity.
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