My reaction to the health care “summit” yesterday was that everyone involved was trying to manipulate, if not con, the onlookers and innocent bystanders.  I struggle with serious illness every day, being an 11-year cancer survivor, and I know only too well what needs “fixing” in our health care system.  What is happening in Washington has very little to do with improving health care.

Particularly galling are the crocodile-tears accounts — letters from this or that medically-ill constituent pleading for his representative to press forward on the party-line path.  To recount any truly ill citizen’s adventures in the American health care system would take at least an hour and maybe a full day.  Actual concern for patient care — and isn’t that the point??? — is lacking in all but a very few cases, a notable exception being Dr. Tom Coeburn, Senator from Oklahoma.

But the assembled summittees will not (I predict) listen to Coeburn, because this farce is not about patient care, or empathy for the ill and dying, or any of that. It is about maintaining political power and winning the next election, regardless of cost.  Those of us who depend on the American health care system for our lives are merely pawns in their game.