Today, people stood up and said they’re sick of big insurance.

In West Virginia, a crowd gathered outside of Coventry’s office:

In New Hampshire, more ordinary people protested Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield’s bad practices like denying care for pre-existing conditions and using our premiums to pay for lobbyists intent on killing health care reform and a public health insurance option:

In Chicago, more people came out to protest Blue Cross:

In Indianapolis, hundreds marched against WellPoint (click here for video), and WellPoint lashed out:

Earlier today advocates for government-run health care staged a "National Day of Action" with public demonstrations at WellPoint’s headquarters. The demonstrations were a coordinated effort by Health Care for American Now, and only serve to further polarize the debate over health care reform.

As was made clear by news reports throughout the weekend, the demonstrations were not a spontaneous reaction by Americans to the health care reform debate, but instead were part of a heavily scripted campaign with pre-approved talking points, slogans and tactics. This runs opposite to WellPoint’s goal of participating in a constructive, open dialogue about how to improve our health care system and counter to the Administration’s call for civil discussion of health care reform.

The people gathered in Indianapolis were WellPoint’s customers, customers who are sick of their lies. WellPoint is using their premiums to lobby Congress against health care reform and these people are mad about it. WellPoint is going to have to deal with that reality. Today in DC, this ad ran in newspapers:

Insurance companies are using your money to kill reform that will hurt their bottom line. Today, people are speaking out about it. Tomorrow, they will still be speaking out about it. This issue is not going away. If anything, it’s going to escalate.

Why? Because we need real health care reform, reform with the choice of a public health insurance option to keep the insurance companies honest. We’ll settle for nothing less, and we’ll keep attacking the enemies of reform – the insurance companies – until we get what we want.

(also posted at the NOW! blog)

I’m proud to work for Health Care for America Now