This Fight Will Get Dirty

In case you thought the private insurance industry was going to sit back and let healthcare reform happen....well, check out this article in a local Massachusetts paper:

"I did not write a letter to the editor. It's not from me," said Gloria Gosselin, 75, of Lawrence.

Gosselin's name was on one of three strikingly similar letters touting the Medicare Advantage program that were sent to The Eagle-Tribune.

...

The letters were, in fact, composed and sent by the Boston office of [Dewey Square], a national political consulting firm, attempting to create the appearance of a "grass-roots" movement for Medicare Advantage.

America's Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group, hired Dewey Square to defend the Medicare Advantage program.

It gets worse:

The Eagle-Tribune received a call from a man who turned out to be an intern at the Boston office of the Dewey Square Group, a national political marketing and consulting firm.
The man, who identified himself as Noah, wanted to know if Gloria Gosselin's letter had been published. Asked what interest he had in the letter, Noah replied that he was Gosselin's grandson.

Gosselin does not have a grandson named Noah working in Boston. Her only grandson is a student at Central Catholic.

Got it? The fight will be dirty. AHIP knows that to block healthcare reform, they will have to get rough. And they're not going to sit back and let the groundswell of support for healthcare reform wash over them.

Conservative estimates are that AHIP has $100 million set aside to fight against healthcare reform. And they seem to have every intention of playing dirty with it.

So this is it. We've been warned. Consider this a shot across our bow. It's going to be a serious, heavy-duty fight.

And if we fail to reform the system because we don't fight back hard enough.... well, i was going to say we have no one to blame but ourselves. But we can always blame the big bad insurance industry. We can fail, and then we can comfort ourselves that they had more money, and they played dirty.

But I'd rather not comfort myself. I'd rather win. And we can. We have the truth on our side, and better arguments, and oh yeah, history is on our side too, both in the U.S. and around the world. Those are far more powerful than a willingness to play dirty.

Smears can always be defeated by the truth. But someone has to speak that truth. Unfortunately, the truth never speaks for itself.