Category: Health Care

We Can’t Afford to Wait

copyright © 2009 Betsy L. Angert.  BeThink.org

Only today Cable News Network aired a report that suggests most of those who want a public option health care plan are African Americans,  Persons in this population are more likely to be uninsured.  Statistics show dark skinned individuals also seem  predisposed to poor health.  News broadcaster Kyra Phillips continues.  Black people, when surveyed, say they think Mister Obama has performed well in office.  In contrast, far fewer white Americans approve of what the Obama Administration has done on the job.  Subtly, Ms Phillips reminds the audience, the current President of the United States is the nation’s first Black Commander-In-Chief.  The implication is obvious.

Yet, the tale is not necessarily as told.  Witness the stories shared in a MoveOn.org video, study the faces, and consider the situation of those who say they cannot afford to wait for health care reform,  Mostly white faces fill the screen.  

This is a follow up to dday’s excellent diary, which talks about the Baucus bill and Trojan Horse of “allowing people to buy insurance across state lines”: http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

While they didn’t realize it, the Republicans and their Big Insurance enablers have actually given us a rhetorical sledge hammer. “Allowing people to buy insurance across state lines” is code for insurance deregulation, and what just happened the last time when an insurance company was allowed to do business in a deregulated environment?

So it’s the day of the big speech, Mr. President, and we got trouble with a capital “T” right here in Health Care City.

What are you gonna do? Do we follow the traditional Democratic Party legislative process of passing…something…at any cost, assuming the entire time that the Left and the Netroots will “go along with the program”, or is there a risk that the calculus doesn’t work as well today as it did in 1994 and 1996?

Well, lucky for you, I’m a fake consultant, and I know a few things about your “target market”, so before you answer that question…we need to talk.

I was dogged with a sinus infection for 2 weeks. Yesterday, I had to fight to get care for it because providers tell you most of the time it is virus based and they cannot do anything about it. But I knew I was so sick. I even called a nurse before going in. She didn’t take any notes of our conversation. She said to come in. Then I had to start all over, and I decided to write it all down.

See more after the jump

Bill Moyers ended last Friday’s hour with an impassioned plea to Barry Obama. Health care is not an option. It is a requirement. Bill suggested going witha an idea that Josh over at TPM put forward: Offer Medicare to evryone under 65. You’d have to pay for it. It wouldn’t be impossible to figure out a subsidy schedule for those who couldn’t afford to pay. Every American understands Medicare. The problem is most Americans are too dumb to understand that Medicare is government health care. And it works.

It’s almost too simple, too obvious and too effective to implement.

1-202-456-1111. That’d be the WH switchboard. Call it.

Call your rep at their district offices and their DC offices. You can google them. Same goes for your senators – or senator in my case; Teddy’s passed through the veil.

Fax them. The paper industry will love you for that one.

E-mail them and be sure to ask for a response.

If you have extra time then bombard the hold-outs not in your state or district. Google a business in their district and use that address and “Ima Madzhell”. We need a firestorm to cdounteract the August mind share the wingnuts got with their town halls and death panels.

Today is the first work day after the last big summer weekend. The elected people and the K St things will all be back in DC.

The real battle begins today. This is the only chance you will ever get in your lifetime for universal health care. It’s now or never and it begins today.

Dennis Kucinich is still in there trying, yelling, pushing, calling all of us to action.  Let’s make sure to answer his call.  Please take the actions he recommends:

Health Care or Insurance Care? It’s Time to Respond!

…below the fold…

The battle for Health Care is already over. It was over the minute the Democrats took single payer off the table. Now it’s just a tug of war between the lobbyists and the legislators to see how fake this fake reform will really be.

Did anyone really think that a political system as corrupt as ours could possibly produce anything but a corrupted product? Does anyone really believe another Obama speech is going to alter this fact?

Sometimes miracles do happen. So I’ve kept my mouth shut as this calamity has played out. But I accurately predicted all the way back in the campaign that a health care reform effort would, at best fail epically, and at worst actually make matters worse.

How did I know this? Am I an oracle from the netherworld? No. I predicted it because I am not insane. And by insane I mean doing the same thing over and over and over again while each time expecting different results. I mean WTF did people expect?

Progressives need to focus on one single issue for the rest of their lives if necessary: banning campaign contributions and other means to bribe politicians.

This is separate from campaign finance reform. There are a thousand ways we could finance elections. I’m sure we could come up with a few hundred that would be just, equitable and of benefit to the functioning of democracy.

The real issue is not how we finance elections. It is how we do not. We need a constitutional amendment to prohibit ever giving a penny to a public servant or candidate for office. It’s that simple.

This would be the second American Revolution and this country will continue to fail until it occurs. It will fail on health care reform, it will fail on climate change. It will fail on everything, just as it is failing now.

Removing the money from politics won’t solve all our problems. But it will at least eliminate the primary impediment that prevents us from solving those problems.  

Imagine politicians elected on the merit of their ideas instead of their ability to raise cash. George Bush would have never been governor, much less president.

Some day, historians will look back on this era as an absurdity – the way we look back on the days when monarchs enslaved the people or when we enslaved Africans.

Why wait?

Every other issue liberals and progressives care about, with the partial exception of civil rights, has one single source: the corruption of money. And yet we continue to attempt change without addressing this issue.

NOTHING WILL CHANGE until we get the money out of politics. There is no other issue that compares in importance. Not even close.

Over dinner at a Thai restaurant in Pittsburg during NN09, we were discussing the level of wing nuttery at town hall meetings.

I suggested that we should show Obama some patience because the screamers would increase their level of crazy and marginalize themselves, soon to be followed by the Republican base baiters and Blue Dogs.

I said that perhaps Obama would then step forward coolly an calmly and cut their nuts off.

Someone then aptly called this Obama’s Rope-a-Dope.  

Well, since The Big O enjoys his hoops, I have changed that tired sports metaphor to this new tired sports metaphor.

Obama at the buzzer for 3.  It’s good! Game over

Well according to this former HMO Medical Director, she traded Necessary Patients Care, for Career Advancement and a 6-figure Salary:

Linda Peeno MD, testifies



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

Question: Are the Patients, who are Denied Care, to save the Insurance Companies Money — DO those Patients have a RIGHT to their Health Care?

Or are Those Patients simply a Commodity — a “Cost Center” — that must be constantly constrained?  

This is a teaser. Read the whole thing here.

Sick and Wrong

How Washington is screwing up health care reform – and why it may take a revolt to fix it

By Matt Taibbi

Let’s start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It’s become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment – a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn’t be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn’t work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it’s a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they’re sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable – and that’s the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won’t get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.

It’s a situation that one would have thought would be sobering enough to snap Congress into real action for once. Instead, they did the exact opposite, doubling down on the same-old, same-old and laboring day and night in the halls of the Capitol to deliver us a tour de force of old thinking and legislative trickery, as if that’s what we really wanted. Almost every single one of the main players – from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog turncoat Max Baucus – found some unforeseeable, unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up. Even Ted Kennedy, for whom successful health care reform was to be the great vindicating achievement of his career, and Barack Obama, whose entire presidency will likely be judged by this bill, managed to come up small when the lights came on.

We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad.

This appears to be the delicate stage of negotiations for a health care bill.  As War On Error has shown so thoroughly today, the House bill as stands is a pure giveaway, because the “public option” it offers is only available to the self-employed, and then only by 2013, by which time the insurers will have (maybe) a bit firmer control of the Federal government than they do today.

We should understand, then, that we will have to be in this for the sake of building a historic bloc, a larger social movement with a political aim.  If we can do that, we can say that it’s not over when Congress decides to vote, and we will not have to wait another sixteen years to get what we want.  Voting down all sellout bills will, in this light, be our first victory as a historic-bloc-in-formation.  It is still early in the game — it is not “now or never.”

(Crossposted at Orange)