The Right Prescription for "Obama Care" at The Roberts' Supreme Court

It's the second day of arguments before the Supreme Court on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. All detractors and some proponents call this "Obama Care". It's a program passed by both Houses of Congress two years ago, designed to phase in a public-private health insurance reform estimated to cover 95 percent of all Americans in a few years.  It is neither a single-payer system many nations have, not is it a total free-market approach that would treat health care like an ordinary consumer item such as personal computers, cable or satellite television access or tangerines.

The latest  and most contentious part of the argument is the health insurance mandate that would require people to buy health insurance. The issue seems to have ignited a fervor on the parts of many conservatives that somehow being compelled to buy health insurance is an assault on basic liberty and is therefore unconstitutional. 

It is clear from the media analysis and audio transcript of this day's argument before the High Court that many of the conservative justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts,  are seemingly skeptical of a mandate.  To these justices, a physician may as well be a grocer.

"Liberty" is something most people covet;  conservatives especially prize the idea of living a life with as few barriers as possible.   Who wants to be needy? But when it comes to health services we are not sure when neediness arises; much as many would like to stand on liberties, the rights we covet  need to be tempered whenever we are in need of assistance from the larger community.    

 

Ironically, the individual mandate idea came from the conservative Heritage Foundation and was endorsed by both Mitt Romney (who implemented it during his stewardship of a health care law as governor of Massachusetts) and Newt Gingrich.  Both these men now repudiate it. It may be that the messenger now being a Democratic US President has caused them to choose fanning flames of division over common sense principles.   

The practical matter is that anyone who is human and not a spirit can fall ill or get hit by a bus or assaulted from behind  in the street or have a vehicular accident. A parent can have  a family member or child develop a cancer or some other terrible condition.  Right now anyone who comes to an emergency room with a serious condition that requires treatment has to be given medical assistance and that can be costly.   Having everyone covered by health insurance would help reduce the drain on public expenditures. 

  To live in a nation where a family doesn't lose insurance coverage when a breadwinner is laid off or or a small business fails we need to have a health system that recognizes  people are not invulnerable to disease.  

You can go to a gym or walk ten miles a day and just eat apples and water and, even then,  STILL get sick or hurt or have a child who contracts leukemia. Anyone might  be brought unconscious and hurt  to a hospital and if you don't have insurance and the bills are astronomical the tax payer sooner or later will have to pay what you can't.   

S**t sometimes just happens.  It's part of being human. 

Right now the feeling is the individual mandate for health insurance, the centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act, may be in trouble in the SCOTUS and no one knows how it will be ruled upon. But we all know, deep down, that life and health is not a ordinary consumer product.  It is unique. And, like it or not,all Americans, save a few very wealthy billionaires,  are all subject to the national health apparatus no matter what anyone's  philosophical qualms. 

 

The individual mandate isn't perfect but it's what we have and I hope it is retained.  It's not a total cure, but it's a rational and reasonable "treatment" than what has been "prescibed"  by any President  or session of Congress before recent times.  

"Warm Springs" (2005) The Trial and Reinvention of Franklin Roosevelt

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

President's Day in the USA was observed yesterday. It's an odd holiday to me, considering many of our past Presidents did little as Chief Executives to bother about now, unless you're a history professor or a masochist. (Take James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, the two who served between Abraham Lincoln, for instance. Those birds did little if nothing to help the nation avert or recover from the Civil War int heir respective terms ). Warren Harding and George W. Bush also could be added to the list of un-worthies in my book.

And then there are a few Presidents worth remembering.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt stands out to me as the greatest force for the general good who served in the White House in the 20th Century. (To those cynical of elected officials, this may be considered damning the guy with faint praise.) Born into privilege, and processed with the magic name of his distant cousin Theodore, Franklin Roosevelt was a quickly rising star in Democratic politics, a former New York state legislator and Assistant-Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson.

Before he was 38 he was nominated to serve as the Vice-Presidential candidate for the Democrats in 1920. He and his running mate ,James Cox, lost that race but it was just a bump in the road at the time for a young politico who could look forward to the governorship of New York and likely a direct run himself for the Presidency.

But two years later his political career seemed finished. After contracting polio while visiting a Boy Scout summer camp in upstate New York (near his family home at Hyde Park) FDR soon was unable to walk and the diagnosis left him not only physically handicapped but depressed. The naturally cheerful if elitist and somewhat snooby nature the man had carried through his life at prep school and Harvard and the halls of power was gone, a shell of a man with little to do but hide from the public on his yacht remained.

The film "Warm Springs" documents FDR's emotional resurrection at a rundown spa in rural Georgia, later to be called Warm Springs. The naturally heated water made it possible for Franklin to gain some ability to propel himself with his arms and even stand in the therapeutic pool. The experience of living near people afflicted like he was and with the rural poor of all races also deepened his empathy for ordinary people.
Once considered a "supercilious prig" by Frances Perkins (later his Labor Secretary) who couldn't abide boring people and thought of rural folks in places like Georgia as "hillbillies", FDR spend a good deal of the mid-1920's in the resort, eventually buying the facility outright with two-thirds of the money his father had left him. He turned it into a first-class treatment center that was designed exclusively to treat those afflicted with the scourge of polio (or infantile paralysis). Even today, Warm Springs exists as a center for those with mobility diseases.

Incredibly, as I found out recently, these are still places like Nigeria where new polio cases are still being diagnosed.

Although Roosevelt was originally drawn to the spa to get himself walking again, he stayed on after all hope fro that was gone and continued to support Warm Springs after he became President. Indeed, he died there of a stroke in April of 1945 while enjoying a working vacation at "The Little White House". The bulk of his life insurance policy--about 450,000 dollars--was bequeathed to the center.


The movie itself boasts an outstanding cast: Kenneth Branagh as Roosevelt, Cynthia Nixon as Eleanor, David Paymar as Louis Howe, FDR's friend and closest political advisor and Kathy Bates as Helen Mahoney, the first certified doctor at the new facility.


The film dramatizes Roosevelt not as a great figure of power, but as a man who overcomes self-pity and a physical malady to get himself back in the ring of elected office and help lead a nation in its darkest hour since the Civil War. He would not have been the leader he was without this personal trial and I believe he is one leader worth remembering on Presidents Day.

Distributed by HBO
Directed by Joseph Sargent
Produced by Chrisann Verges
Written by Margaret Nagle
Starring Kenneth Branagh
Cynthia Nixon
Kathy Bates
Tim Blake Nelson
Jane Alexander
David Paymer
Music by Bruce Broughton
Cinematography Robbie Greenberg
Editing by Michael Brown
Country United States

First Lady Attacked for Advocating Breast Feeding!

I was hoping I might not ever come to this but it did. First Lady Michelle Obama has been attacked, seriously attacked mind you,  for supporting  breast-feeding for mothers with young children! 

 

From an ABC News blog 2/15/11

Rep. Michele Bachmann spoke out Tuesday against First Lady Michelle Obama’s reported support of tax breaks for breast pumps.

On Laura Ingraham’s radio show Tuesday, the Tea Party favorite criticized Mrs. Obama for reportedly endorsing steps she warned could lead to a “nanny state.”

"I've given birth to five babies and I breast fed every single one of these babies," Bachmann, R-Minn., said. "To think that government has to go out and buy my breast pump for my babies. I mean, you want to talk about the nanny state? I think you just got a new definition -- a new definition of the nanny."

The IRS announced last week that breast pumps and supplies that assist lactation are medical care under Internal Revenue Code “because, like obstetric care, they are for the purpose of affecting a structure or function of the body of the lactating woman.”

Bachmann, who is in her third term and considering a challenge to President Obama in 2012, declined to elaborate on her comments through a spokesperson Tuesday evening. The Office of the First Lady also declined to comment.

This is not mind you a program to out and out buy breast-milk storage systems, no, just a tax break.  Yet this modest change in the tax laws has brought condemnation in the American far Right perennial campaign to condemn everything not controlled by their leadership as bad for the nation. 

 

It seems the First Lady has made speeches in the past suggesting it would be good for mothers to breast-feed children at least in the first six months after birth. Scientific studies have shown it reduces the likelihood that said babies will grow up to be obese.   

(above) From a April 10, 2010 CBS Evening News report with Harry Smith

Nobody could be against mothers breast-feeding their kids, right?  Surely there are some points in the health care spectrum which politicians and professional special- pleaders in America can agree on, right?        

 But this is not so. To some, like Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin--who snarled that Mrs. Obama was only advocating more mother's milk use because the price of store bought milk was getting higher-- and the usual cast of knee-jerk reactionaries, this is actually a step toward.....I don't know what...you tell me...I'm guessing they fear the spectre of centralized economic planning, all   centered around a nation of families who let breast pump tax breaks blind them to the loss of freedom as we know it...yeah, that sounds like the group I'm thinking about.  

Is there no end to this hysterical anti-government hyperbole?   Well no, as this selection from an article on the asinine imbroglio todays' Washington Post shows.   

"Her worldview on child rearing is totally oriented to institutionalizing children!" said Cathy Ruse, a senior legal fellow at the Family Research Council. "Giving tax breaks for breast pumps helps only those moms who are working outside the home and does nothing for us stay-at-home moms. This is consistent with President Obama's pledge to increase the childcare tax credit as opposed to the child tax credit, incentivizing putting your kids in daycare over any other childrearing arrangement."

  The far Right in the United States is so zeroed in on the track of disagreeing with anything government does to help working families that they attack even a small incentive to reduce childhood and adult illness.  

Color me gobsmacked.

 

It's come to this.  Good thing Mrs. Obama didn't come out for a heliocentric solar system or helmets for  high school  football players; then she'd really have kicked up a tempest!         

Reverse-Class War, American Style: Senator Bernie Sanders Explains How the GOP Does It

In a recent report released by the Presidential Commission on balancing the roughly 13 trillion dollar overall deficit, some conservative members of the group have taken the trouble to, once again, try to reduce taxes on the very rich (taking the highest tax rate from 35 percent down possibly to 23 percent) while making 2.2 trillion dollars in cuts to domestic programs over the coming years. While there would be some increases in dividend taxation (long overdue) the ultimate gains in taxation on the richest Americans would be offset by these income tax cuts.

President Obama himself has not commented on the proposals that may or may not be voted on by Congress, but it is clear that lowering taxes on the wealthiest income-earners right now is the direct opposite of any logical program to reduce the the Federal Budget.

The problem has been that over the last thirty years Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush and much of the Congress has engaged in too many untaxed programs, including most recently the 2008 Wall Street banking bailout and the two long wars in Irag and Afghanistan.


Too many politicians can't seem to get used to the idea that investment bankers, corporate honchos and their lobbyists agents who ring the capitol have to pay the piper like the rest of us.

One of the few who does get it is Bernie Sanders of the state of Vermont, the one true democratic social-progressive Senator in Washington. In this interview he correctly identifies what has caused the record-high deficits, and its NOT the Social Security system.

Piano Stairs at the Subway Station - TheFunTheory.com

Leave it to the hearty Swedes to come up with a way to encourage people to exercise more!

Random Thoughts on Health Care Reform

The one thing clear about the passage last night of the Obama-Democratic health care reform bill in the lower house of Congress is that a political Rubicon has been crossed.  It my have passed by only three votes but let me remind you that George W Bush was elected and served as President in the 2000 election by an even slimmer margin of electoral votes. And since the Democrats were going to be blamed anyway for trying to pass reform, they at least now have the advantage of actually having it signed into law.  

Now thing I know about the country I  am fortunate to live in: Americans in general  love people that can get a job done, and don't give up and make excuses and quit. The newest Gallup Poll shows that President Obama's approval ratings have done back up to 50 percent favor ability again and will likely increase. This is because Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi got something major they set out to do and got it passed. 

 Many people objected to Ronald Reagan draconian politics on welfare recipients, cutting school lunch programs  and practicing the politics of excessive-individuality,  but he always won grudging admiration for sticking to his guns.       

 This is nothing less than a new era in dealing with a private-treatment system that has put profits over caring for indigent sick people.  Health care insurers like Wellpoint and Blue Cross are now on notice---the days of desperate sick people showing up at a public clinic with few resources or a overcrowded emergency room  for care because they aren't good customers for their stock-holders and CEOs is soon going to be over. 

Yes, health care reform is controversial and the Democrats who voted for this are not all going to be reelected.  But many of these legislators were already targeted by the Republicans and conservative and right-radical groups because  they were in traditionally Republican districts anyway!  Elections matter as we in the  Democratic camp have been reminded over and over again by conservatives since Nixon's landslide victory in 1972 and all through the Reagan-Bush years.  We were told to give up and adapt to a new conservative mantra of less regulation and more  free markets as a way to solve everything from health care to banking regulations (or non-regulation)  of fighting foreign wars.  

Well, we've been taught  the lesson--and now it finally appears that our elected Representatives in the current Senate and House are finally ready to teach the class to the masters.    

Sure, there will be charges of unconstitutionally and all the usual back and forth of those who see change and are threatened by it. But I think in the end most of this bill will be set and standard law in a few years... and more and more of the public will accept this law not because its about bigger government but because its about a greater fairness and protections for working and middle-class families.  Over sixty percent of bankruptcies are now caused by excessive health care billings.  No other developed nation in the world allows parents to deal with a sick child, for instance, and also the loss of a family home.We Americans need to get with the modern world!    

Paul Krugman in the New York Times pointed out the latest part of this year-long battle and the Republican agony:  

" 'Yes, a few conservative policy intellectuals, after making a show of thinking hard about the issues, claimed to be disturbed by reform’s fiscal implications (but were strangely unmoved by the clean bill of fiscal health from the Congressional Budget Office) or to want stronger action on costs (even though this reform does more to tackle health care costs than any previous legislation). For the most part, however, opponents of reform didn’t even pretend to engage with the reality either of the existing health care system or of the moderate, centrist plan — very close in outline to the reform Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts — that Democrats were proposing.

"Instead, the emotional core of opposition to reform was blatant fear-mongering, unconstrained either by the facts or by any sense of decency.

"It wasn’t just the death panel smear. It was racial hate-mongering, like a piece in Investor’s Business Daily declaring that health reform is “affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color.” It was wild claims about abortion funding. It was the insistence that there is something tyrannical about giving young working Americans the assurance that health care will be available when they need it, an assurance that older Americans have enjoyed ever since Lyndon Johnson — whom Mr. Gingrich considers a failed president — pushed Medicare through over the howls of conservatives.' "

Medicare, passed in 1965, was supposed to be "the end of freedom", as Reagan put it when he was entering national politics. The same was said of Social Security thirty years earlier by the proto-Reagans like Herbert Hoover, William Randolph Hearst  and Father Coughlin (a radio pundit much like Rush Limbaugh). 

  Instead of the crack of doom happening, Medicare and Social Security are programs that has helped eliminate much of the poverty that haunted  older people.  They are settled programs that are seen as part and parcel of the structure of the political landscape.

There are many flaws to this bill of course---much of the paying for it has been put off and some of the benefits for 32 million uninsured people are not going into effect for three or four years.  But, what may I ask, was so good about the status quo?  How many more incremental and anemic changes were we going to make in health care without confronting the need to  reduce costs and bring more people into the preventive care system?       

 Unless you make $250,000 dollars a year or have a "Cadillac Health Plan" provided by a union or a corporation, this new bill will not add a significant increase to anyone's taxes. Far from being "socialism", this, for better or worse is simply American pragmatism---we have a problem that has lasted for decades.  We are finally on the first steps to correct the massive medical industry and put matters on a more humane track.     

Joe Liberman, Senator from Big Health Insurance

I would much rather be writing a happy holiday blog, but this won't be it. Alas, the United States government is on the precipice of proving again that our elected Representatives put the needs of their corporate money wranglers ahead of the public interest.

Now I know many of you out there already know this, and some live in countries where they too have big money impinging on "the dance of legislation" in their respective  lawmaking  bodies. And, honestly, I'm no idealist and I accept that a certain amount of this has been in the world  since Julius Caesar was a pup and all that. 

But there are times, ladies and gentlemen, when it gets so brazen that even I, a mild-mannered  and temperate sort who holds open doors for old ladies in shops and drives the speed limit most of the time, just wants to take a nail gun to my own hand and impale my left paw unto the desk I'm typing this on---just to be diverted for a few hours by the excruciating pain---anything, anything, to spare me the disappointment of seeing another small step for ordinary people in my country stamped out by a few special interests and their toadies in high office. 

Joe Liberman is the latest of these apparent toads--a Senator from Connecticut who once ran as the Vice President of the Democratic Party in the Year 2000.  He lost, as did Presidential Candidate Al Gore, thanks in part to Gore's lackluster campaign style during the three televised debates with Bush.   Fighting Joe then smelled a change in the wind and started becoming more conservative and hawkish on all wars, including the dubious affair in Iraq that was wildly destructive and apparently unnecessary. 

Fighting Joe renounced northern Democratic Party policies--like opposition to continuing the war in Iraq--so completely he was actually defeated in 2006 in the party primary by a real Democrat, Ned Lamont.  Joe held on by running to the right as an "independent" and managed to win over Lamont in the general election.  Since then he has endorsed John McCain for President  and become a human monkey-wrench in the fight to give the United States an actual health care plan. 

There are other human monkey wrenches on this bill,  like Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who see the health care legislation as a way to restrict public funding of abortions. But Nelson at least has an issue he cares about, and right or wrong its his concern.  But Liberman to me is the one just jockeying about to tick off liberals and his old party leaders like Harry Reid of Nevada who aren't as hot for unjust wars in the Middle East as he is. And then there's this item about Fighting Joe you might find interesting:    (from "The Talking Points Memo Website")

*********************       

Holiday treats came early this year for the health insurance industry—not from Santa Claus but from U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT). The stock prices of major insurers rose on Monday after Lieberman threatened to join Republicans and delay consideration of healthcare reform legislation until the New Year. Lieberman said he opposes a plan to allow Americans aged 55 and older to buy into Medicare coverage.

Market analysts said there has been a correlation this year between the value of health insurance shares and the chance of reform being adopted by Congress. “Every time the reform seems less likely that it will happen, the entire group trades higher,” Wells Fargo Securities analyst Matthew Perry told the Dow Jones Newswire.

 

Critics of Lieberman point to his campaign contributions and family ties for his opposition to the Democratic reforms. He has accepted more than $110,000 from Aetna in 2009, according to the Los Angeles Examiner, and his wife has been an employee of Hill and Knowlton  a firm that lobbies on behalf of the healthcare industry.

****************

 

Liberman of course bristles like an old society matron who catches her hired help knicking the family silverware if he finds someone pointing out this conflict of interest with his wife's employer and his own solemn duty to the public.  

 

Columnist Froma Harrop, an editor of the Provinceton Journal in Liberman's neighboring state of Rhode Island has speculated "Senator Fighting Joe" will looking for a golden job at one of these insurance companies when he leaves the Senate some day or is defeated for public office.  That seems plausible. How else to explain why he changed his mind in supporting a "buy in" for Medicare to Americans from ages 55-64 just three months ago.  Could it be that Fighting Joe had an abrupt change of heart in the middle of the night? A crisis of conscience perhaps?  Or did  that $110,000 plus all the other money he collects from Connecticut's huge insurance-based economy have anything to do with it?  I leave that to you, dear reader, to puzzle that one out.    

 

In the meantime, consider this--there are an estimated 40-45 million Americans without health insurance.  They either cannot afford it, or hope they are too young to need it.  That's like the entire population of Canada and Australia walking about just one car wreck or sudden illness  away from economic disaster. There are millions of these uninsured who are children. Millions more stay at jobs they hate just to keep their insurance.  Many more could retire and take care of sick parents or relatives--if only they could buy health insurance for themselves. But that doesn't matter to Senator Liberman, or the for-profit health care insurance racket.         

Public Option Is DOA in Health Care Debate

A bit of commentary by yours truly below:

 

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday rejected two amendments to include a government-run public health insurance option in the only compromise health care bill so far.

Sen. Max Baucus said the public option provision would "hold back meaningful reform this year."

The amendments by Democratic Sens. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Charles Schumer of New York were opposed by all 10 Republicans on the committee and a few Democrats, including committee Chairman Sen. Max Baucus of Montana.

Baucus explained that he liked much about the idea of a public option but that he knew a health care bill containing the provision would fail to win enough support in the full Senate to overcome a Republican filibuster.

"I fear if this provision is in the bill, it will hold back meaningful reform this year," Baucus said.

Rockefeller said that unfair practices by insurance companies required a not-for-profit alternative that would give consumers a lower-cost option and, in some cases, the only coverage they could get.

"They're getting away with banditry. They revel in it," Rockefeller said of tactics by insurance companies to avoid covering high-cost or high-risk consumers.

"I feel so strongly about it because it makes so much sense," he said. "The people I represent need this, because they're helpless" in terms of health insurance.

*****************************************************************************************

When I think about the Swiss Cheese health care insurance system in America, I don't think about Senator Max Baucus being able to count noses to pass a bill.  I think about 47 millions of Americans without health insurance; I think about the thousands of people who lined up in Los Angeles the other day to get free health screenings. (The lines went on forever.) I think about local people who have been hurt by a lack of health care, such as the families  which have to go around putting jars in convenience stores here to raise some money because their kid needs leukemia care and they have no insurance.

According to Oregon US Senator Jeff Merkley's office,  a mother of two died from  what she thought was bronchitis, but didn't go to a doctor because she wasn't insured,  having changed her job.  Turns out it was a lot worse than bronchitis, but she was self-medicating herself to save money on case her kids got sick. And she couldn't qualify for Medicaid, which his supposed to be for poor people, because she wasn't poor enough.   

I know there's other anecdotes out there, and some would might support no 
public-options and such.  I also  know that medical insurance has gone up a lot
faster than salaries. Three or four times as fast in some areas.
The thing is the right-wing pretty much has won this battle.  Despite polls
saying that people favor a public option, its the senior citizens in the USA (ironically some of then being "tea party" rowdies who show up at Congressional Town Meetings and jeer any talk of  a public option) who are by a 60-40 majority against the plan.  Why? 
Because, at the root of it, they are afraid that there won't be enough
government-sponsored medical protection to go around.  They deny the benefit they receive even to people in th work force now who pay for their coverage through their payroll tax.

 The irony is unalloyed.


Most seniors want to keep the benefits they are getting from the next generation. This is what American Individualism has sunk to--the government  can send grandpa's grandson to war, but don't even THINK about taking a second look at grandpa's medical benefits!  This is individualism? 
It's more like a mob beating people with oars who are trying to get into a
lifeboat after  a ship (the economy) has started to sink.  


Consider this:

No single-payer program.  Totally off the table.

No public option. They will still be some talk, but its done. Beaten. Obama
has been backing away, calling the public option "just a sliver" of his program. It was one hell of a sliver if you ask me.  

 

A Montana Senator named Baucus who has  written a bill so favorable to the
insurance industry they the industry is running  commercials for "reform". 

A lot of talk about "choices".  Let the big insurance companies compete and they will create more choices.  Choice is good, but the final good for me is affordability and security for Americans as citizens, not simply as wage-earners. This economy doesn't put
people right back into jobs.  14,000 thousand people a day were losing their jobs a while ago.  Most of them lost health care with that.

The American Constitution--which protected folks from big government-- was designed at a time when there was no Big Pharma, No Health
Care Insurance Oligopolies, no hospitals built like mini-Taj Mahals with
thousands of well-paid health care specialists, all on salary.  I think part of
this problem is that Americans are distracted with  fighting a 19th Century war about Big
Government. Mega-Businesses have a larger role in legislation through K-Street
lobbyists in Washington then the Founders could have dreamed!  
  Today over 60 percent of bankruptcies are caused by high medical bills,
according to a Harvard study.  I know my premiums  go up and up. I don't expect
a real universal health plan , but I do expect the end to people being denied
insurance for pre-existing conditions and see more people covered by some form
of public/private health care plan. And, for what it's worth, I think everyone
should have to buy health insurance if they can because if they don't and get
sick, its the public hospital that will pay for their care at the emergency
room. 

If you drive a car, you need car insurance; you have a body susceptible to
disease or accidents, you need medical insurance.  

If the French can do this, and the Swiss and the Brits (and not all their plans
are the same either) then The United States should  be able to
produce enough compassion and practicality to do it too. But I guess we're too busy beating back the folks who haven't got on  the lifeboat yet.

 

"You Lie!"--Angry Congressman Joe Wilson Goes Bonkers to Save Bankrupt Health Care Non-System

Sixty-two years old Republican Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina became the first elected Representative in the history of the US Congress to heckle a President while addressing a joint session of federal legislators.

Wilson's outburst was just another in the "proud" tradition of what the late, eminent political science scholar Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style in American politics".  It entails a faith that if you scare people enough with false claims about "killing grandma" with "death panels" or giving illegal aliens "cadillac health  care", they will forget that the politicians on your side of the aisle are in the pockets of the health care lobbyists and will not want to change the health care delivery system as long as its not so bad as to stop making profits. 

Both Republicans and Democrats are guilty of this "paranoid style", by the way, and both parties are quick to get help for their re-election from the medical establishment.  The difference really is that  Democrats in general have realized that the jig is up, and that something comparable to the European and Canadian models has to be done to reform medical care in this country, or the 16-18 percent of the gross domestic product already consumed by the drug/doctor/hospital/insurance leviathans will crash the economy.  President Obama tried yesterday to lay out a formula that will be ripped to shreds by detractors, but, as he said a couple days ago, what plan does the opposition have?

Nothing.  Just the status quo. A status quo that requires 14,000 Americans losing their health insurance every day, and over a million last year; where sixty-two percent of Americans who file bankruptcy do so for health care costs (source : Journal of American Medicine and Harvard University, 2007) ; where people lose their insurance in the middle of their cancer treatment when its found out they forgot to report they once had a bad case of acne; where families who have children with pre-existing medical conditions pay a couple thousand dollars for insurance EVERY MONTH just to get some care. Where 46-47 million legal Americans don't have health care and health care giants like Aetna and Blue Cross tell their private-sector bureaucrats to make more money for stockholders by searching for ways to deny patients care even after they paid premiums for years.  

Is this a system  worth saving?  Worth shouting about?  No, this is an abomination that needs reforming badly. No, Obama health care plans are not perfect and they will take years to get more millions covered while trying to hold down costs.  But what is worth saving in the old system?  Not much I think.

 

  

How Democrats Are Failing to Sell Health Care Reform - George Lakoff

"George Lakoff makes plain how the words used by politicians translate to the public support for various political issues. Language matters - especially when it comes to politics."

A founder of the field of cognitive science, Lakoff takes an in-depth look at the ways in which our brains understand politics, breaking down the politics of language. This is a recent speech he gave at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco.

George P. Lakoff, 68, is a professor of linguistics (in particular, cognitive linguistics) at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. A former disciple of Noam Chomsky, he studied under him at MIT and later broke with Chomsky over some matter of linguistics.

Lakoff is also a founder with the progressive think-tank, The Rockridge Institute, and the author of the successful "Don't Think of An Elephant", whic hmade the New York Times bestseller list.

His most recent work, "The Political Mind: How You Can't Understand 21st Century American Politics with an 18th Century Brain".

Health Care Reform-- Dropped Coverage

This short video high-lights how the Blue Cross Medical Insurance company dropped the coverage for Robin Beaton of Texas.

An estimated 40-45 millions don't have health coverage. The highest percentage of uninsured Americans for any state is Texas, with 22 percent of its population out of luck if they suffer a serious illness. (They could go to an emergency room, that's true, but try and get ongoing cancer treatment in an emergency room.)


Hers is just one of many situations that cry out for real reform of the American health care industry. Much of the fear and shouting you see from those who attend Congressional town meetings I believe come from peopel who are afraid they,too, will suffer the fate of this women when they need coverage the most. The irony of this is that many who blindly trust private health providers do not seem to appreciate that once they are a liability to the shareholders of a for-profit medical combine, they might be kicked to the curb as Ms. Beaton has been.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Health Care Fight and The "Immoral Society"

"...a 'laissez-faire' economic theory is maintained in an industrial era through the ignorant belief that the general welfare is best served by placing the least possible political constraints upon economic activity.   The history of the last hundred years is a refutation of this theory...It's survival is due to the ignorance of those who suffer  injustice from the application of this theory to modern industrial life but fail to attribute their difficulties to the social anarchy and political irresponsibility that the theory sanctions."

--Reinhold Niebuhr, "Moral Man and Immoral Society, A Study in Ethics and Politics" (1932).  

Reinhold Niebuhr (1891-1971), pictured on the left in a TIME magazine cover from the early 1950's, was considered the one of the foremost American Protestant theologians of pre and post World War II America. He wrote many books and articles about politics and ethics and was the Professor of Christian Ethics at the Union Theological Seminary in New York State from 1928 to 1960.  Prior to that he served as a pastor for thirteen years at a church in Detroit, Michigan.   Another important work of his is the book "The Irony of American History", a book that explores the conflicts between "the hopes of the founding fathers and the reality of the present situation" (i.e, America in the dawn of The Cold War.)  He has been cited as one of Barack Obama's favorite philosophers. 

After World War II, he co-founded the leftist but non-Marxist group "Americans For Democratic Action", which is still an active and leading independent progressive organization which, among other activities, watchdogs the voting records of Congressional members in both the House of Representatives and The Senate. 

Professor Niebuhr's book on morality in public life by groups and individuals seems relevant to me today not only because both Barack Obama and John Mccain cited him favorably during last year's Presidential Election, but because of the health care debate in the USA which is raging at the moment.    The current struggle can be summed up  in two competing philosophies. The first is the traditional view that nothing the government does in the domestic sphere can be of benefit to the average person.  Change from Washington or the State Houses is simply incompetence at best and a collectivist power grab at worst.  These views are all over the editorial pages of the "liberal media" newspapers, and there is a plethora of examples.  I will spare you the cacophony of those who feel the status quo in having 40-50 million uninsured Americans is only worthy of modest reform and cite just one advocate, Michael Tanner of the conservative Cato Institute, writing recently in The Los Angeles Times:

"Everyone agrees that far too many Americans lack health insurance. But covering the uninsured comes about as a byproduct of getting other things right. The real danger is that our national obsession with universal coverage will lead us to neglect reforms -- such as enacting a standard health insurance deduction, expanding health savings accounts and deregulating insurance markets -- that could truly expand coverage, improve quality and make care more affordable."

  

Herein is the usual argument: to Mr. Tanner, health care is a commodity like an automobile, dog food or a latte coffee creation for someone's morning caffeine fix.  Just let the "free market" take care of all this, add a tax cut to sweeten to pie, and all will be well.  

Such thinking did not serve the America that Professor Niebuhr's wrote about during The Great Depression.  Unregulated markets and speculation run wild had crashed the economy.  And now we face a similar era of recovery from the sins of ignorance. 

Health is most decidedly NOT simply a commodity. By it's nature it is often too expensive to purchase for those without the social protection of  decent job.  And the dangers of underinsured Americans means that 40-45 million Americans are not entitled to any primary care at all, unless it is under-borne by small-scale clinics which are underfunded.  In addition those who fail to get primary care have to resort to the emergency room to get treatment, often for conditions that are long neglected.  The result makes for sicker patients and higher bills. Today, more Americans file bankruptcy and lose their homes because of medical bills they can't pay than for any other reason.  

One of the things Niebuhr wrote about in "Moral Man..." was the need to go beyond appealing to moral principles to create a change.  Entrenched interests like the health care lobby will always try to show that their position of power is in the best interests of the country.  They will protect that.  Change can only come if enough people demand it, demand something that is so "radical" that all nations in Europe and Canada that elect governments already have some form of it--a public health care system with regulated costs and open access.  Otherwise, we will be left with the status quo, which traps people in jobs, and makes a mockery of a "free" society :