The gale force of corporate America is bearing down on Capitol Hill against any meaningful reform of health care. Predictably, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is bending before the wind. The true champion of health care for all Americans is not yet cold in his grave, and the filibuster proof majority gone, as Democratic leaders of Congress back down in the face of corporate financial power See Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R. Co, 118 U.S. 394 (1886)[1]; Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976). When asked if he supported a public health insurance plan as one option in the proposed health insurance exchanges, he gave a weak-kneed response, saying he supported an option that had government participation, but not run by the Health and Human Services Department. Reid also said that he would give the obstructionists in the Finance Committee another two weeks of deliberations before considering the use of the Byrd Rule (budget reconciliation instruction) to pass a bill out of the Senate with 50 votes and send it to conference with the House. It is not a stretch of the Rule's intent to use it to pass a health reform bill since whatever bill emerges out of conference committee will include fiscal aspects, and there is an exception to the Rule for provisions not directly related to tax or spending measures. If any bill can be considered a fiscal matter, affecting one-sixth of our national economy, it is health care reform. In addition, the administration is considering using a surtax on the wealthy to help pay for the cost of universal care not made up in efficiencies and cuts. Simply put, the informed contention over the reform legislation has boiled down to an ideological struggle between the profit sector (insurance, drug and hospital companies) and the non-profit sector. The profit sector sees any government participation in its market as the beginning of the end to big profits, and is fighting tooth and nail to prevent it. The rest of the country can go to the emergency room.[1] this piece of obiter dicta inserted into a headnote by a former railroad president, then Clerk of the Supreme Court, was later explicitly upheld by the Court in Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining & Milling v. Pennsylvania, 125 U.S. 181 (1888). Thomas Jefferson wanted specific limitations on juridical persons written into the Constitution. He lost that argument.