Category: Health Care

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    The ONE Senator that I can safely say is NOT bought off, the one Senator that we can be certain is NOT owned by the banks is Bernie Sanders (I-VT). It looks like good ole Bernie is putting his left foot down on the public option and threatening a filibuster of his own if there isn’t a ROBUST public option that is available to everyone in the Senate version of the health care bill.

    I think this is GREAT news, and I’ll explain why below the fold, where you can find a full transcript of this video as well.

There has been a great wailing and gnashing of teeth over the past day or so as those who follow the healthcare debate react to the Stupak/Some Creepy Republican Guy Amendment.

The Amendment, which is apparently intended to respond to conservative Democrats’ concerns that too many women were voting for the Party in recent elections, was attached to the House’s version of healthcare reform legislation that was voted out of the House this weekend.

The goal is to limit women’s access to reproductive medicine services, particularly abortions; this based on the concept that citizens of good conscience shouldn’t have their tax dollars used to fund activities they find morally repugnant.

At first blush, I was on the mild end of the wailing and gnashing spectrum myself…but having taken a day to mull the thing over, I’m starting to think that maybe we should take a look at the thinking behind this…and I’m also starting to think that, properly applied, Stupak’s logic deserves a more important place in our own vision of how a progressive government might work.

It’s Political Judo Day today, Gentle Reader, and by the time we’re done here it’s entirely possible that you’ll see Stupak’s logic in a whole new light.

Thousands of years ago a very technologically advanced society on earth went by the name Atlantis.  The theories of advanced alien extraterrestrial races guiding or even making humans in their own image or rather more important to us lowly earth dwellers is that we have never been alone.  Ancient writings, pyramids, seemingly advanced celestial knowledge and pyramid structures on earth in diverse geographically removed locations.  The Bermuda triangle, ley lines, sacred geometry, the fibonacci series, the golden ratio, Stonehedge, Easter Island, the Mayan calendar, Nostradamus, Buddha,Christ,Princess Diana and the Three Stooges.  You have to say you are living in “interesting” times.

What does all this have to do with politics?  Everything.

Instead of real health care reform (Medicare for all, everyone in and everyone pays), the health care bills in the House and the Senate are just expanded Medicaid with a public option that isn’t an option to the public at all.  Thanks to Stupak, the taxpayers will pay for prayer therapy and Viagra while restricting payments for abortions.  Apparently Stupak has no problem with killing 45,000 born babies and their parents each year.

Like the bank bailouts and Medicare Part D, Democratic health care reform is just another corporate rip off of the middle class; and for this privilege, they cut Medicare benefits and raised Medicare’s monthly premiums.  So much for no increases to people who make fewer than 250K a year.  

With Democrats like Stupak in Washington, it really doesn’t matter which party wins election because Republicans and religious zealots like Stupak win either way.  The Democratic health care reform bills are “like putting whip cream on a turd”, to quote a local official in the newspaper on a totally different subject,.  

The do nothing Democrats will pass anything, declare victory, and expect applause.   Maybe if we clap hard enough, we can make them all disappear.  

Muriel Kane had the story at RawStory Friday night:

Former Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo attempted to argue against Democratic plans for health care reform on Friday by claiming veterans were dissatisfied with their government-run health care. He was confronted by blogger Markos Moutlitsas, who unlike Tancredo is a veteran himself, and reacted by stalking off the set of MSNBC’s The Ed Show where both men were guests.

Tancredo had begun by pointing to what he sees as problems with the Medicare system when host David Schuster interrupted him to ask, “So how about the Veterans Administration? The Veterans Administration is a single-payer system. … That’s also a threat to our freedom?”

“Every veterans groups I ever went and talked to complained about the Veterans Administration and the way it was a bureaucratically-run program that didn’t serve their needs,” Tancredo told Schuster. “They would much rather have vouchers that would allow them to go out and buy their insurance in a private marketplace.”

Moulitsas, founder of The Daily Kos, began laughing as Tancredo was speaking. “Tom, I’m a veteran,” he told Tancredo. “I did not get a deferment because I was too depressed to fight in a war that I supported in Vietnam.”

This was a slightly garbled reference to Tancredo’s having obtained 1-Y status in 1970, after his student deferments ran out, on the grounds that he had been “diagnosed with depression when he was 16 or 17 and received medication for five years for panic attacks and bouts of anxiety and depression.” Tancredo was 24 at the time.

Moulitsas and Tancredo then began speaking over one another, but Tancredo finally managed to say, “You’re not going to try to insult me that way and then pretend like we’re just going on and talking about that. You either apologize or I’m off.”

“I’m not pretending anything,” Moulitsas replied. “I told you straight up.” At that point, Tancredo ripped off his earpiece and microphone and left the set.

“This is a threat to Republicans,” Markos commented after Tancredo was gone. “They’ve built an entire ideology predicated on telling people that government does not work. They are terrified of government programs that work, because then people will realize that government’s not the enemy.”

Tancredo, who left Congress last winter after a failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination, is best known for his opposition to immigration, but he has also been identified with conservative causes in general.

Prior to his confrontation with Moutlitsas, Tancredo had agreed with House Minority Leader John Boehner’s claims that health care reform is a “very scary threat” and had insisted to Schuster that it was perfectly appropriate for health reform protesters to use an image of concentration camp victims at Dachau because when it comes to protests, “It’s all ugly.”

This video is from MSNBC’s The Ed Show, November 6, 2009.

Once upon a time, way back at Forest Hills Elementary School in Lake Oswego, Oregon, we were taught about the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest.  Included in that was the Whitman Massacre by members of the Cayuse and Umatilla tribes, who blamed the Whitmans for bringing measles to them along with their religion.  I remember going to the library and reading, among other things, about the Nez Perce and how they were treated by our government.  They now have a reservation in Idaho and who usually call themselves the Nimiipuu.

Out of such things are activists born.

I became, at that moment a firm believer that people should have equal rights in the eyes of the government, that nobody should be treated as second-class citizens, or worse.

According to a post on Pennsylvania blog, House speaker Nancy Pelosi will allow a mere twenty minutes of debate on single-payer, albeit indirectly.

The debate will actually be on an amendment put forth by Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York’s 9th District, which would effectively transform the corporate giveaway that is HR 3200 into something very close to the single-payer form offered by Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers’s HR 676.  According to David Swanson, the debate on the Weiner amendment is being used as cover for dropping Kucinich’s amendment, which would allow states to create their own single-payer health insurance systems.

This is probably our last, best chance to improve what is shaping up to be a disastrously bad bill that will force Americans into buying unaffordable insurance.  Click on the House Telephone Directory link, call as many representatives as you can, and demand that they pass the Weiner amendment.  This may be our only shot at getting something that will work for all Americans, instead of simply further enriching Big Insurance.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich made the following statement today:

“Before we celebrate the new health care legislation, keep in mind that the American people will be required by law to buy private insurance and that they will pay a penalty if they don’t.  

That insurance companies will be subsidized by the government.

That insurance companies have had double digit increases in premiums in the past four years.

That we are locking in a for profit structure.

This is the result of a health care debate of which the flawed premise is that health care reform can not happen without the cooperation of the insurance companies, which make money by not providing health care.  

The truth is that reform can not happen with them. The insurance companies are the problem not the solution. This legislation, no matter how well intended, will likely not be able to deliver, cost too much and be another bail out for big business at the expense of the American people.”

    –Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-OH

This is one of those horrible stories which seem to illustrate vividly the problem with the whole “profit in healthcare” system that is now in place in the United States.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/256…

On Saturday, 10 days after Scott Hawkins was beaten to death inside his dormitory at California State University, Sacramento, his parents got a letter in the mail.

It contained a bill from the UC Davis Medical Center for $29,186.50 along with a form letter addressed “Dear Patient” that implied they were indigent and stated that the hospital no longer could provide them services.

“UC Davis can no longer provide follow-up care or any other non-emergency care to you,” it read. “Please go to a County clinic for all non-emergency care or to get a referral to another doctor.”

For Gerald and Elizabeth Hawkins, it was just too much to bear.

“It was just devastating and insulting,” Gerald Hawkins said Monday. “It’s just hard to grasp for words. My wife and I were near collapse.”

The couple said the mailing tore at the wounds opened by the loss of their 23-year-old son.

“We were just very upset on Saturday, it just all spiraled downward,” Elizabeth Hawkins said. “We called a crisis counselor and he came over and spent several hours over here.”

As a means of coping, the family made a copy of the letter, took it into the backyard of their Santa Clara home and burned it.

Monday morning, they picked up the phone to straighten things out.

Gerald Hawkins said he first called the UC Davis billing department, but was so distraught he lost his voice and handed the phone to his wife.

“It was just one more unpleasant process,” she said. “I was crying through the whole thing.”

The parents also sent a note to the billing department noting that their son was not indigent and that he carried full medical coverage through a Kaiser Permanente plan.

Contacted by The Bee on Monday, Carole Gan, a hospital spokeswoman, called the mailing “a mistake.”

A “mistake”.   Yeah, I’ll say.   Having a for-profit healthcare system is, indeed, a “mistake”.

Sorry!   We made a mistake!    You’ll just have to get over it!    Now have a nice day!

The current squabbling over whether or not abortion would be government funded in some kind of back door fashion accentuates how conflicted we are as a nation regarding the procedure.  When many private plans cover the procedure, I find most unfair to expect somehow that government coverage would not include the same provision in the spirit of strict parity.   If some are holding government to some kind of moral higher standard than the sainted private sector, then I guess I can’t understand why anti-choice legislators are attempting to impose their will upon a supposedly evil, fallen entity whose name is government in ways that they are unwilling to extend to business, whose radiant goodness is known to all.  This discrepancy continues to show how much of a shill certain politicians have become for the rich, the powerful, and the well connected at the expense of sense and even their own stated convictions.  

It’s an honest question.  First I look at the legacy of historical progressivism at the beginning of the 20th century.  There will be an interlude to question the progressive credentials as regards the desire for power.  I will conclude by casting a brief glance at the situation with health care reform.  The argument will be pervaded through-and-through by a class analysis, in which progressives ignore class struggle at their peril while the rich accumulate power through their wealth.

No, this is not about “patience.”  It’s about whether or not you all have the nerve to ask for what you want, and to continue to ask for it (while building your power base around those demands) until you get it.

(Crossposted at Orange)

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    Senate negotiators have decided not to include a provision revoking the insurance industry’s anti-trust exemption in the bill leadership sends to the floor, said a Democratic aide close to the merger talks. Instead, the measure will be offered as an amendment on the Senate floor.

HuffingtonPost.com

Bold and italics added by the diarist

    The House bill will have language ending the Insurance cartels anti-trust exemption. Why won’t the Senate bill have similar language in it before it is brought to the floor for debate?

    More below the fold