In 2009, the Democratic party under President Obama gave to the American people a superb, long overdue Christmas gift: an unyielding commitment to provide universal health care for every man, woman and child. And soon, legal codification of health care as a right, and not a wealth-based privilege.

The liberal goal of universal health care is a humanitarian necessity in our U.S. democracy which seeks to guarantee "life, liberty and the pursuit of happpiness" for each citizen.

While I heartily applaud the cohesive drive of Senate Democrats and President Obama to "make sure that people who didn't have health insurance could get health insurance," the 2,074-page Senate bill, which the public knows little about, may be too flawed and too vague to make a positive difference in the lives of most Americans.

My hunch is that the Senate/Obama version of health care reform legislation could have much the same economic impact on middle-class Americans as President Bill Clinton's 1993 NAFTA legislation: perhaps 10% of Americans will benefit significantly, while the remaining 90% will suffer a price. And most of all, the measure would greatly enrich corporate coffers.

Here's a partial list of what currently insured Americans don't know if the Senate health care "reform" bill becomes law:

• How much will my taxes go up if my employer generously pays for a high-quality health plan for employees?
• How much will my health coverage premiums and co-pay expenses be raised by private insurers to cover their new costs?
• Will my employer end providing health insurance because it's too expensive under these new regulations?
• If my employer ends providing health insurance, will I be able to independently purchase the same quality coverage for the same price? Or will it cost me more to obtain less?

Until Congress can clearly explain (or understand?) how the health care "reform" bill will affect the lives of all Americans, no such legislation should be passed!

The very last thing this great country needs right now is for the last vestiges of the U.S. middle-class, which is already reeling from record-high unemployment and foreclosure rates, to be saddled with more health care costs, especially for less health care benefits.

We know how it turned out after President Clinton glowingly exuded in 1993 as he signed portions of the NAFTA agreements:

"NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs... I believe that NAFTA will create 200,000 American jobs in the first two years of its effect... I believe that NAFTA will create a million jobs in the first five years of its impact. And I believe that that is many more jobs than will be lost."

NAFTA, of course, produced nothing near such U.S. job gains. And, as Ross Perot colorfully warned us, that "giant sucking sound" was the sound of millions of U.S. jobs, mainly "high-wage positions in manufacturing industries" being exported to other countries.

Washington Post columnist David Broder summed the Senate health reform bill well today:

"When implemented years from now, it promises to make as many as 30 million men and women who now live with the fear of illness or hospitalization leading straight to financial ruin eligible for the same care as their more fortunate, insured neighbors.

"Six decades after FDR's death, one of his Four Freedoms will, at long last, be guaranteed to almost all Americans. And the shame of this affluent society tolerating the denial of health care to its citizens will be largely lifted...

"But Lord, what a load of embarrassment accompanies this sense of satisfaction!... There is so much that is wrong with it -- and the way it was made -- and, at the same time, so much that is right that you just have to shake your head in despair and in wonder...

"The taint has rubbed off on the bill. This week's Quinnipiac University poll found a majority of Americans disapproving of the legislation by 53 to 36 percent and an overwhelming number -- 73 to 18 percent -- saying they do not believe it will, as promised, reduce future budget deficits. It now becomes President Obama's responsibility to strengthen the bill's cost-saving features... "

In 2010, financially beleaguered Americans would be staggered, perhaps mortally, by another giant sucking sound from their wallets for another starry-eyed Democratic president's much-ballyhooed but horribly misguided legislative mission.

While the goal of providing health care coverage to millions of uninsured Americans is worthy and admirable, the Obama-supported Senate health care "reform" bill is an abysmally undisciplined hodgepodge that richly rewards private insurers and their lobbyists... and levies mandates, back-breaking fees, and/or IRS penalties on most middle-class Americans. And yet, tens of millions will remain uninsured.

In short, "I thought I voted Democratic in the last election," as Dr. Drew Westen, Emory University psychology professor, penned today in his brilliant Huffington Post article "Leadership, Obama Style, and the Looming Losses in 2010: Pretty Speeches, Compromised Values, and the Quest for the Lowest Common Denominator."

Health care industry stocks soared to an unheard of 52-year high on Friday, December 18th, on news that insurance giants won their hard-fought battle to have all vestiges of a public plan option eliminated from Senate health care "reform" legislation. As a result of final Senate bill changes:

• All Americans are mandated to purchase health care insurance.
• There is no mandate for employers to provide health insurance for their employees.
• Said insurance will only be provided by private corporations.
• No effective controls are in place to prohibit insurers from raising prices at will.
• The health insurance industry maintains its across-the-board antitrust exemption.
• To largely pay for this "reform," the Senate bill taxes employees, many of them middle-class, whose employers have generously chosen to foot the bill for higher-quality insurance policies.
• For more reasons, see FireDogLake.com's 10 Reasons to Kill the Senate Bill .

BusinessWeek reporters warned us last summer this would happen, in their insightful article The Health Insurers Have Already Won:

"The likely victors are insurance giants such as UnitedHealth Group, Aetna, and WellPoint. The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge..., the insurance industry will emerge more profitable....

"The industry has already accomplished its main goal of at least curbing, and maybe blocking altogether, any new publicly administered insurance program that could grab market share from the corporations that dominate the business."

And the Washington Post amply warned us last August about the insidious health care "reform" role of hundreds of lobbyists devoted to Congressional Democrats:

"In a glum economy, the lobbying business feels kind of bubbly. Every new Obama proposal comes with acres of fine print for corporate powers, interests groups and lobbyists to haggle over, profitably...

"Major health-care interests alone are spending $1.4 million this year lobbying Congress . . . per day, according to Common Cause, a government watchdog group. A lobbyist's delight created, ironically, by the let's-solve-all-our-problems-RIGHT-NOW approach of a president who pooh-poohed the excesses of lobbyists."

After all our heartfelt campaigning in 2008, and after tens of millions of new voters were drawn to the polls because they fervently supported Obama's mantra of "Change We Can Believe In," it's incredibly difficult to stomach being thrown under the bus for the sake of greedy corporations and their lobbyists.

The irony is that when record numbers of Congressional Democrats are inevitably defeated in 2010, enough Republicans and wised-up Democrats will likely be in office to overturn the most egregious portions of this disastrous bill.

But I'm left wondering: How in the heck, after only one short year, did Obama manage to turn the Democratic party into the party of corporate bailouts and handouts (i.e. socialism for the rich), and levies, penalties, and mandates for every day Americans (i.e. capitalism for the non-rich)?

And like Dr. Westen, I am deeply disheartened to realize that President Obama is "going to set back the Democratic Party and the progressive movement by decades, because the average American is coming to believe that what they're seeing right now is 'liberalism,' and they don't like what they see. I don't, either."

The contrast on scientifically-based concerns over global warming couldn't be greater between Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, as President Obama illustrated today in his brief, bold speech at U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Obama may be stumbling on health care reform legislation, but he scored resoundingly in his landmark remarks on the urgent international need for a climate change treaty, when the President insisted:

"... all major economies must put forward decisive national actions that will reduce their emissions, and begin to turn the corner on climate change.

"I'm pleased that many of us have already done so, and I'm confident that America will fulfill the commitments that we have made: cutting our emissions in the range of 17 percent by 2020... "

And in great historical contrast to President Bush, whose administration alternatively denied and ignored climate change altogether, President Obama orated:

"This is not fiction, this is science. Unchecked, climate change will pose unacceptable risks to our security, our economies, and our planet. That much we know. So the question before us is no longer the nature of the challenge - the question is our capacity to meet it."

President Bush, of course, famously refused to allow the U.S. to sign on to the Kyoto international pact to stem global warming.

Take a few minutes to savor President Obama's Speech at U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, and to rejoice at the positive difference for our great country, and the world, that an election can make!

Quick Reading on Climate Change Basics

• What Is Global Warming?
• Global Warming Facts and Evidence
• The Causes of Global Warming
• The Effects of Global Warming
• Solutions to Stop or Slow Global Warming

(Photo taken on December 12, 2009 at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen: Miguel Villagren/Getty Images)

I fully agree with Dr. Howard Dean that the Senate health care "reform" bill, which President Obama has permitted to be neutered by Sen. Joe Lieberman, must be killed.

My logic is simple: without either a public plan option or buy-in to Medicare or a similar plan, the Senate bill does not reform the existing system. In fact, it clearly exacerbates the existing system. Hear me out:

• The sole purpose of a Medicare-like plan is to provide lower-cost competition to private insurers. Competition will naturally force them to lower their exorbitant costs to consumers.

• The Obama-Lieberman health care plan eliminates all proposed competition for private insurance corporations in what Dean calls "a bigger bailout for the insurance industry than AIG."

• It's unclear whether or not the Obama-Lieberman Health "Reform" Plan still contains a mandate that all Americans must buy health insurance coverage. But both stances have major conundrums.

• An Obama-Lieberman plan mandate that all Americans purchase health care coverage will translate into tens of billions more annually for private insurers, but with absolutely no measure to control costs charged to consumers.

  Thus, the same private insurers who caused our current unaffordable mess can (and will, according to history!) charge sky-high prices, and we have no choice but to pay.

• If the Obama-Lieberman plan does not mandate that all Americans purchase health care coverage, then only the sickest uninsured people are likely to purchase coverage... which, of course, will raise premiums prices charged to consumers by the private insurers.

It's easy to blame Joe Lieberman... which I do... but let's be honest: Joe's been a preening, obstructionist jerk for years now. We should have expected no less than this last-minute attention-getting stunt from him.

Besides, "Mr. Lieberman has taken more than $1 million from the industry over his Senate career... He doesn't seem to have forgotten that," per the New York Times.

The buck stops squarely with President Obama, who got himself elected by solemnly promising "a new national health plan to all Americans" that offers "quality, affordable and portable Coverage for all" and that "lowers costs for the U.S. health care system ." (Source: Obama Campaign Promises: Health Care.)

But President Obama rolled over and acquiesced to Sen. Lieberman's demands to neuter the bill, in order to eliminate reform of private insurance corporation practices.

I committed earlier this week that if Senators Russ Feingold and Sherrod Brown and Dr. Howard Dean expressed full-on support for the Senate health care bill, count me in.

Per The Hill, "Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation. 'This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don't think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth,' said Feingold."

About the fate of the Senate bill, Sen. Feingold said, "I am not making a judgment until I see the CBO numbers and that's only the beginning."

Per The Columbus Dispatch, "Sen. Sherrod Brown acknowledged last night that he is 'disappointed' that the compromise health-care package does not include a federal plan or expand Medicare, but he said he will support the current version because it would extend insurance to 30 million more Americans... it could be better. I think it's a good bill, but it's not a great bill."

This morning on ABC-TV, Howard Dean stated, ""You will be forced to buy insurance. If you don't, you'll pay a fine. It's an insurance company bailout... This is an insurance company's dream. This is the Washington scramble, and it's a shame."

Another rich bail-out of greedy corporations. More costs and fees foisted on the American people. And the benefits are quite questionable, at best.

I say kill the Obama-Lieberman health care "reform" bill, and let the Senate start over from scratch.

Essential Reading

• By Glenn Greenwald at Salon: White House as helpless victim on healthcare
• Liberal Comfort with Health Bill from Dean, Feingold, Brown
• Connection Between Afghan War Surge and Sputtering Health Care Prospects?