Cry Havoc

If there's anything being shoved down our throats these days, it's the claim that health care reform is being shoved down our throats. It's all part of the game the minority party is playing by trying to make you think the Democrats won the White House by some sort of fluke and that the desire for health care reform wasn't what Obama's majority of voters were hoping for.

It's been a year now and the screaming hasn't let up for a moment, but a recent poll shows that half the country favors the Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act, whether or not you call it ObamaCare and only 43% think it's "too liberal."

It would be amusing of course if the bumper sticker bumpkins did get their "end of an error" by electing Mitt Romney who like the rest of them is giving us that old soft shoe about just how terrible the new law is because as the unimpaired remember, Mitt only a few years ago was hoping his new Massachusetts health care reform would go nationwide. It's easy to call a politician like that a whore, but it's unfair to whores and I don't want to distract from his fellow streetwalker who has been spending a fortune with TV ads warning us of the holocaust, the disaster, the calamity, the apocalypse sure to wipe us from the earth if we have to have health insurance rather than hope the emergency room can cure our cancer or heart disease -- at public expense. I mean never mind the war, conquest, famine and death -- this is health care!

An Unholy Alliance: Health Care and Insurance Companies

I just read an interesting post about a new book by Wendell Potter, a former communications director for Humana and then CIGNA, two of the nation's largest health insurers. Potter's book has a very long title: Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans.  I haven't read the book (I plan to do so) but I have read the transcript from Potter's interview on Democracy Now about his book.  It's a fascinating interview and the following assessment by Potter of the health care reform legislation really caught my attention.

WENDELL POTTER: They do. And that’s why this will not be repealed. They like a lot about it. This legislation, we call it "healthcare reform," but it doesn’t really reform the system. There are a lot of good things in there that does make some of the practices of the insurance industry illegal, things that should have been made illegal a long time ago, so that—

AMY GOODMAN: Like?

WENDELL POTTER:—for that matter, there are good things here. But it doesn’t reform the system. It is built around our health insurance system, as the President said. And they want to keep it in place, because it also guarantees that they will have a lot of new members and billions of dollars in new revenue in the years to come.

The Health Care Reform Act (HCR) didn't go far enough but it certainly moved forward. Potter's key point is that the legislation didn't reform the health care system. Of course it didn't. The climate in this country wasn't conducive to totally throwing out the health care system and building a new one from scratch. Anyone who honestly believes that such a massive overhaul was  possible in one fell swoop is terribly naive. Congress was never going to pass such a bill in 2010. Change is a process and the more intensive the change, the longer the process. The 13th amendment ended slavery in 1865 but 90 years later Jim Crow laws were the norm. The Brown decisions in 1954 and 1955 said that separate but equal was inherently unequal but my local school system was among those that did not fully integrate until 1971. I don't advocate that change should occur slowly but experience has taught me that it generally does. The question now is what do we do next? There is little to be gained from decrying what wasn't done as we cannot time travel backwards and change anything.


Our most significant problem is that health care is a for profit industry in this country. In spite of the right's constant assertion that the HCR act is socialized medicine, it is far from such. A major obstacle to reform is that Americans have an exceptional fear of anything that even smells of socialism, which most wrongly equate with communism. I don't think that Obama ever stood a realistic chance of getting HCR passed that included a single payer plan or the loosely defined public option.


I don't disagree with the many disappointed progressives who assert that there is an unholy alliance between government and business. I do disagree that nothing has been gained via the current HCR. It's far from perfect but I think that our focus needs to be on generating specific ideas for how we advance the movement to a single payer plan or at minimum a plan that includes a public option. I think that it's important that we, the citizens, develop specifics as to what we want rather than continuing to engage in bemoaning what we do not have. I think that we all need to share ideas and engage in some useful dialog.


From my perspective we have a public that has a significant number of members who continue to believe lunatic ideas such as there are death panels as a result of HCR. There is a general public suspicion that HCR is a socialist plan that will destroy "the greatest health care system in the world." The politicians are playing on those fears. It seems that a key component is mounting a PR campaign to dispel myths and fallacies about what HCR does. I don't think that our side has done PR particularly well in the past and we need to change that


There is also a need to disseminate powerful and clearly stated information about the reality of our health care system; certainly we have highly skilled medical professionals and excellent are in or medical facilities. However, a lot of Americans don't have access to that great health care which I contend makes declaring ourselves to have the greatest health care system in the world meaningless. We have to work on showing the people who are in deep denial that the health care system is broken. We have to redefine what health care is. Ideally the focus of health care should not be profit but providing preventive care and treatment as necessary. It sounds simple, but the opposition to the moderate level of reform of HCR demonstrates that there are a lot of Americans who do not adopt this belief.


We have to deal with the reality of the current beliefs regarding health care reform. We have to take seriously the ongoing opposition expressed against HCR as passed because it's not just elected officials with a vested interest in maintaining their relationships with the insurance industry who oppose HCR, it's also a lot of the people who stand to benefit from health care reform. People who are acting against their own best interests.


By the way, when I say "we" I mean anyone who believes that our health care system does not serve the needs of all of the people and is need of a major overhaul. We have to become the public voices advocating for change. We have to become a public force that can be pointed to as representing a counterpoint to the very loud voices who decried health care reform as President Obama struggled to push through some level of reform. The Republicans continue to insist that the public doesn't want health care reform and they point to the Tea Party and other voices from the right who loudly protest any government input into health care. We are also the public and we need to make our voices heard and not siphon our energies off to engage in supporting third party candidates and sulking in the corner because the road to reform has more curves than we expected.

Thanks but no thanks, and I'll take it, but I didn't.

Got another e-mail this morning about how the Supreme Court is "quietly reviewing" those claims that Obama wasn't born in Hawaii. "This may have some discrepancies" but it's "still interesting." says the serial offender who forwarded it to me.

Is it time to leave the country? Because we have no real way of returning America to a body of informed and rational citizens. Still, as a lover of understated humor, I have to enjoy the way a libelous fabrication "may have some discrepancies," including the discrepancy of not having any basis in fact. It does seem to me that the flat Earth some on the right believe in is floating on a huge sea of malicious lies and has an atmosphere of pure hypocrisy.

Take Senator John Ensign, Senator from the Silver State and one of those dedicated public servants who thinks we can change our "reckless spending" by curbing Federal earmarks, which constitute a rather tiny fraction of what the government actually spends or as I see it; whittling at the whiskers and calling it a close shave. But that's just the basic background hypocrisy of the GOP. Ensign has his own to account for, because while railing at "Obamacare" and promising to undo the health care reform bill we elected a president to promote, he's out there actively soliciting - and getting - a million taxpayer dollars from that Affordable Care Act he so despises to spend on health care in his state. Perhaps there's a discrepancy there somewhere too, but it's still interesting.

Is this another "thanks but no thanks" moment for Republicans? I mean one where you take the money and say you didn't and blame the other party while you pose as a cost cutter? Maybe, I can call it the Palin Precedent, maybe it's better to call them liars and greedy little power hungry bastards.

Oh and please spare me an example of where some Democrat did the same thing. That's not the point and it isn't the Democrats trying to assert dogmatic policies that have failed each and every time to bring prosperity and have each and every time produced recessions -- as if we could keep repeating the past until it becomes a better future. The question of whether to leave the country is the point and that question is fast becoming moot because the country is leaving us.

Stupid lefty me

Hey, I'm a stupid lefty. I must be, since so many obviously intelligent people tell me so. After all, I don't think the health insurance reform bill is any worse than what's already been done by prominent Republican presidential candidates and neither does Mitt Romney so he must be a stupid lefty too.

The Cato Institute, obviously a bunch of lefties as well, has pointed out that Mitsky (let's give him his due as a Trotskyite) enacted a health care plan identical to Obama's while he was Governor of Massachusetts in 2006. Of course that Maoist/Islamofascist radical Romney won't admit to it and he was only trying to hide his Marxist/Maoist sympathies when he called the identical Democratic plan all those nasty names. Hell, he's probably right to do so since 2006 was so long ago we didn't even have Twitter and nobody remembers.

The Cato Institute remembers, stupid lefties that they are.

"As President Obama himself has pointed out, Romney is the guy who created the prototype for ObamaCare. How can he lead the charge against a health care plan that is modeled on his own?" said Cato's executive vice president David Boaz.

Well hell, he's a lefty and lefties do that and the Cato "cel"l is probably a front for North Korea. But the concept of "its only wrong when they do it" really requires more intelligence than I have so I'll just never cut it as a right wing "patriot." I really am not smart enough to get angry at the President for raising taxes when he lowered them or furious at his forcing his predecessor to put us into crushing debt, so the Tea Bag patriots won't accept me either. Who can blame them for suspecting a wealthy investor and fund manager of loving Stalin and longing for the worker's paradise?

So Mea Culpa -- I'm a stupid lefty and I'll go say ten Hail Reagans and pray for understanding.

Freedom's just another word

Somehow I've never been able to understand why preventing enormous and hugely profitable insurance corporations from dropping you because you kid was born with a heart defect or not covering your leukemia treatments because you forgot to tell them you had acne in high school makes us no longer a free country -- or perhaps only a "mostly free" country according to the Heritage Foundation.

But more confusing and more difficult to reconcile than quantum mechanics and relativity is the idea that allowing warrantless wiretaps and other unconstitutional government abuses don't have the same effect. Seems that President Ford was comfortable with giving the FBI discretion on whether or not to seek a warrant for probable cause for wiretapping on the advice of his Attorney General William B. Saxbe. That's a long time before the Patriot act that cemented the "almost free" condition into law - a law that the Democrats haven't yet repudiated. Silly of me that this might have interfered with my freedom nearly as much as an extra 2% on what I might make over a net $375,000. Freedom's just another word for profit.

Is it the threat to monopolistic and feudalistic aberrations of free-market Capitalism that make us almost free or is it things like restrictions on civil rights? I think the answer is obvious. Freedom isn't at stake when Exxon-Mobil payed less in income tax last year than a minimum wage worker did, but the minimum wage itself is a threat to freedom and a harbinger of a Communist takeover. But don't ask me to explain. Ask some other millionaire from the kind of "think-tank" funded by the oil cartel.

Because that's exactly who is telling us what freedom means. That's who would rather you didn't think of it in terms of freedom from want, fear, privation - or the FBI rummaging through your life looking for anything they like. There's little profit in privacy -- in your privacy anyway. There is big profit in usury so our freedom hasn't suffered by finance companies that can charge 200% and ask for more, but it's damn near communist tyranny to ask Exxon to pay what my gardener pays.

No, Obama is a tyrant and he's made us less free, not for the things he's done or hasn't done to force responsibility on Wall Street, not for failing to undo constitutional infractions or abuses of executive power, not for actually give most of us a tax cut, but for giving some of the protection we've been asking for against financial ruin, against having to choose between feeding our kids or dying of a curable disease.

I'm glad we have people like the Heritage Foundation around to explain things like freedom to us. We might have gone on thinking that being able to vote, to use public facilities, to be served in restaurants and hotels, to buy property wherever we can afford it, to get a job if we're not white or protestant or male or young or to send our kids to school had something to do with being free -- all those things that such grand sounding patriotic spokesmen like the Heritage foundation assure us are nothing of the sort. Without them we might have forgotten how free we were years ago when we had slavery, segregation, race laws, male suffrage, restricted housing, poll taxes and lynching parties. I'm glad they continue to keep up the good fight.

And who is my neighbor?

Look out your window, baby, there's a scene you'd like to catch
The band is playing "Dixie", a man got his hand outstretched
Could be the Führer
Could be the local priest
You know sometimes Satan, you know he comes as a man of peace.

-Bob Dylan-

It hard not to think of the parable of the good Samaritan when you read about the anti-health care reform protesters in Columbus Ohio. Seems that Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH) is still undecided and so competing groups showed up outside her office Tuesday last to express their opinions as loudly as possible.

A wrinkled, kneeling man holding a stick crawled up to a group opposing the effort with a sign saying he has "got Parkinson's" and needs help, say Raw Story's David Edwards and Sahil Kapur. Will any of us be surprised at the reaction?

"If you're looking for a handout you're in the wrong end of town," one man yelled at him.

"Nothing for free over here, you have to work for everything you get."

Something smells bad in Columbus and I don't think that stench is called Christian values.

Of course the health care reform under consideration isn't about handouts, it's that some people's greatest fear is that not only will someone get something he himself isn't getting, but that it might cost him some money. Insurance, by nature is about dividing risk amongst participants and so those who suffer losses will be covered while others pay a smaller amount. This seems to be fine with Republicans as long as some third party is skimming off 40% while keeping those at greatest risk out of the pool. This seems to them perversely to be Communism when individual risk is minimized by maximizing the pool and cost minimized by self administration by public ownership.

Is it a coincidence that people who don't seem to get this are the same people so mean spirited that they will mock someone with a terminal and debilitating disease and tell him to "work?" Is it that such people fear someone who could challenge their own self-pity that they must hate those really deserving of it? God knows who the Christians in Columbus are, but no one else seems to.

Even so, health care reform isn't about being a good Samaritan, it's about the most economical and efficient method of minimizing the burden on any individual participant by making us all participants, so whether there is a God who punishes nasty, malicious, selfish greedy bastards or some other principle of Nature that punishes the intellectually unfit and self defeating Conservative, it may be time to get out of Columbus and not look back.

The more we lie, the truer it gets

What happened never happened and the election that ousted the Republicans from office all around the country had nothing to do with public sentiment and even if it did, that sentiment did not include a desire for sweeping reform of health care in America. Or so says Sarah Palin, trying to emulate the rest of the Republican flim-flam artists and voodoo historians like Karl Rove and the dynamic Cheney Family Circus. True to American form, being the worst of them at this game, she may have the most followers.

Please ask yourself: who will be left behind? And who will decide – what kind of panel will decide – who receives the health care that government will obviously have to ration?

Yes, although every reputable source including this one insists that there is nothing in any way suggestive of rationing or "death Panels" as she used to call it, in the House or Senate health care reform bills, she goes on as though there obviously are and as though nobody ever asked for reform in the first place and as though all we ever needed is protection for doctors against malpractice suits.

Palin reveals in her Facebook page, which after all is a fine place to self-publish things no reputable source will touch, that yes, America is wildly against reform and the "Democrat" cabal is forcing it all into one orifice or another against our collective will -- and of course there are death panels and rationing and all kinds of other evil things lurking in that huge document she hasn't got round to reading yet. It takes so long to sound out all those words, you know.

Alan Grayson's Public Option/Medicare Buy-In Bill

This is important, fellow Zoners. Please add your signatures to the petition and call your congresspeople. Thanks.

HR 4789 and The Public Option: The Way Forward

By Alan Grayson via HuffPo:

Health care reform -- here's where we are. The House of Representatives is about to vote on a Senate bill without a public option. It looks like the reconciliation amendment will not have a public option. The House bill had a public option, but once the House passes the Senate bill, that's history.

Which is why I introduced H.R. 4789, the Public Option Act. This simple four-page bill lets any American buy into Medicare at cost. You want it, you pay for it, you're in. It adds nothing to the deficit; you pay what it costs.

Let's face it. Health insurance companies charge as much money as possible, and they provide as little care as possible. The difference is called profit. You can't blame them for it; that's what a corporation does. Birds got to fly, fish got to swim, health insurers got to rip you off. And if you get really expensive, they've got to pull the plug on you. So for those of us who would like to stay alive, we need a public option.

In many areas of the country, one or two insurers have over 80% of the market. They can charge anything they want. And when you get sick, they can flip the bird at you. So we need a public option.

And they face no real competition because it costs billions of dollars just to set up a national health care network. In fact, the only one that's nationwide is . . . Medicare. And we limit that to one-eight of the population. It's like saying that only seniors can drive on federal highways. We really need a public option.

And to the right-wing loons who call it socialism, we say, "if you want to be a slave to the insurance companies, that's fine. If you want 30% of your premiums to go to 'administrative costs' and billion-dollar bonuses for insurance CEOs who figure out new and creative ways to deny you the care you need to stay healthy and alive, that's fine. But don't you try to dictate to me that I can't have a public option!"

And there is a way left to get it. By insisting on a vote on H.R. 4789. Three votes on health care, not two. The Senate bill, the reconciliation amendments, and the Public Option Act.
We got 50 co-sponsors for this bill in two days. Including five powerful committee chairman. But we need more.

Sign our Petition at WeWantMedicare.com.

Call. Write. Visit. Do whatever you can do to get you Congressman to co-sponsor this bill, and push it to a vote. Right now, before it's too late.

Let's do it!

Update (4:30 pm): We're up to 65 cosponsors on HR 4789! Call your member of Congress NOW at (202) 225-3121.

P.S. While at it, go to Whip Congress for Public Option site and do your thing. Thanks.

1,000,000 Voices Virtual March for Health Care Reform

On Feb. 23rd -- that's tomorrow! -- and 24th. More information at DailyKos. Please join. You don't have to wait till tomorrow. Do it now.

Rush lives

Whatever the cause of Rush Limbaugh's chest pains, they haven't been as fatal as some have reported but whether or not angina is involved, we can be sure they weren't pangs of conscience. His web site thanks us for our prayers ( if only he could hear mine) and is, as always, jam packed and bloated with fear mongering, dire predictions and apocalyptic warnings that if we don't "fight like hell" our country will be changed forever.Let's hope.

I recently read that only about 5% of those admitted to hospitals with chest pains die within a year, so one important and very needed change is probably not going to happen -- all the more so since most billionaires can not only afford health insurance but can afford to do without it. If you or I had rendered ourselves uninsurable through a lifetime of belly bustin' burgers, cigars, uppers, downers, pain killers and beer we might have a rather different experience and a bit less cause for optimism.

Yes, we have to fight like hell to stop this "buffoonery" says Rush about Bob Menendez' call to set aside ideology, turn off Limbaugh and pass the legislation that most Americans want. But Congress is ignoring the will of the people -- or at least the minority of the people he represents, says Rush. Public health insurance will change America forever -- forever! Government will "take over" health care just the way it took over all those plans you made for retirement. ( huh?)
Just the way Veteran's benefits took over - well whatever they took over and medicare helped keep exploding profits from eating up every last dime retired people have set aside.

It's a tenet of Buddhism, and a nice bit of wisdom, that change is constant and suffering is universal when we refuse to accept it. It's too bad in this case that Rush's refusal to let go of failed 19th century ideas will cause more suffering for everyone else than it will for him. We have been changing from the outset in terms of making the US a better place to live for more of its people and Rush has been a major clot in the artery of truth and justice and decency.

No, I'm not going to descend to his level and wish him an immediate death, in fact I hope he lives long enough to see that not one dire thing he has predicted has materialized and that he's been pretty much wrong about every thing he's said -- and until that happens, I hope those pains continue to hurt like hell.

Would You Vote For This Bill?

That's the question Bill Moyers poses to Matt Taibbi and Robert Kuttner on his "Journal."

Taibbi answers "No." Kuttner says, "I would hold my nose and pass it."

Watch the video (and weep -- and/or bang your head against the wall).

The Bill

If you haven't seen Keith Olbermann's recent interview with Wendell Potter, discussing the benefits for the medical-insurance industry coming from the current Senate health care bill, here it is.

Informative and worth watching:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Only in America -- or, "I Told You So!"

On PBS News last night, Mr. The-Strangest-Name-Outside-of-Porn-Business Axelrod (and doesn't he look the part, too?) waxed semi-poetic on the virtues of the health care reform bill that is going to be (i.e., may be) voted on before Christmas. Axelrod assured us so.

And he added, causing a massive jaw drop in yours truly, that this is the most progressive piece of legislation -- I'm not sure if he said in a long time, or ever, because at that very moment the downward pull of my jaw created an unbearable pressure in my ears, which resulted in a deafening POP! Thus I missed the Axelrod's qualifer for his self-serving assertion.

As I was picking my jaw off the floor and trying to jump on one foot to restore my hearing (an old Polish folk remedy), I pondered, as it's customary during such complex acrobatics, the sad absurdity of his statement.

Only in America this colossal transfer of the poor, huddled masses to the greedy paws of the private insurance cartel could be called the most progressive piece of legislation, whether in the recent years, or ever.

Only in this world, where rabid capitalism defines who we are and how we treat each other, we can have a presidential adviser state with a straight face that this is something we should all look forward to and be proud of.

Only in this strange country of ours, up is down and black is white. I thought I've seen everything under the communism, where the propagandist double-speak ruled the day and we learned early on to make fun of anything coming out of the politicians' mouths (because whatever it was, it had zero resemblance to reality). That was before I moved to USA where the wonders of absurdity never cease to amaze me. Commies had nothing on the corporatist propaganda -- the pinkos' attempts at shaping the minds and hearts, that was a child's play. This, here, in the US, this is the real mind-boggling (literally) deal.

But back to the miracle at hand, a.k.a. this most progressive piece of propag... I mean, legislation. Let's take a quick stroll down the memory lane.

First, Barack Obama said that a single-payer health care is the best solution to our health care woes. He was right, of course, but that was years ago, before he ran for President and he could afford to both say the truth and be right. Then, as the candidate-Obama, he insisted that a robust public option and drug price controls would be necessary to introduce any meaningful changes to this broken system.

Next, he started to remind us not to get our panties in a bunch over such an insignificant sliver of the health care reform as the public option, and he struck a quiet, behind closed doors deal with PhRMA promising them not to touch their God-given right to super duper profits garnered from the Americans' suffering. That was when he was already President. At the same time, he and his people told us that things will be just fine, not to worry. He said that we will have a uniquely American health care system.

Little we knew then what he meant, but, as I (and others) frantically kept pointing out, the signs of things to come were already there, for all to see (should all wanted to keep their eyes open). One of the sure giveaways about the real scope of this "reform" was the change of language: some time in the summer, the White House talk switched from discussing health care reform to health insurance reform. Yes, we've noticed and we told you so. (I told you so is the phrase my husband uses with abandon when I rant about the "reform." I'm just passing it on, is all. Call it the giving spirit of Christmas, or something.)

(BTW, if you'd like to take a moment to bang your head against the wall at any time, please feel free to do so. It is the only thing any rational person would be expected to do in these circumstances.)

As of today, there is no public option, the Medicare expansion plan was killed (thanks, pouty Joe), no drug price controls in sight, no cost controls to speak of, and, of course, no competition for the private insurance companies who are also exempt from antitrust laws. And as if that was not enough, there is an extra slap in the progressive faces coming in the form of the scrapped abortion provision in the bill. So is this the most progressive piece of legislation or what?

Sorry, Mr. Axelrod, it's not even close -- unless you redefine progressive ASAP (preferably while jumping on one foot and banging your head against the wall; harder, please).

But not all is grim news. There is a bright side: Christmas arrived early for the medical-insurance cartel this year. Can you hear the bells ringing? It's Santa Claus coming to Cigna, Wellpoint, United Healthcare and all the naughty boys and girls from The Outfit, bearing things glittery and nice -- and lots of them, too, something like 30+ million. Oh, and the insurance stocks are soaring.

So rejoice, all ye faithful -- joyful and triumphant, The Outfit will show us the way, first to servitude, and then to bankruptcy, or maybe the other way around, not that it matters.

Merry... whatever.

Cross-posted at The Middle of Nowhere.

A day in the life of Ivan Cornysovitch

I guess Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) is trying to cornhole us again. I imagine that he woke up early one morning and realized there was another absurd, extreme, preposterous, shameful, ridiculous and grotesque simile he hadn't used yet to vilify any health care reform that doesn't appeal to the corporate overlords he serves. We've already heard about 'death panels' and how extending the program that Cornyn benefits from to the rest of us, is just like Pol Pot's Killing fields and Hitler's death camps. Somehow he'd overlooked Stalin's Gulag Archipelago and it's important we hear about it right away.

You see, the problem is that the Democrats aren't accepting "input" from the Republicans although it's pretty clear that the only "input" he or they have offered is to drop the damn subject. Still it's hard to understand why Tex himself isn't trying to escape from that death camp of Federal Employee insurance that just might kill him at any time now.

Deep in the Cornyn hole of Texas

I got an e-mail from Texas Senator John Cornyn this morning. Somehow I had the urge to take another shower. In the relentless crusade to mock, rebuke, deride, insult, sneer at and taunt the "opposition"Cornyn is an endless cornucopia of crepuscular reasoning and shady opinions, such as his assertion that the "delays" in supplying Texas and the United States with hundreds of millions of H1N1 vaccinations argue against the public option in health care reform.

"These delays and limited access make me question whether the government, which cannot run existing public health programs competently, should be trusted with even more responsibility – such as running a new government health plan. " [italics mine]

Of course Cornyn doesn't give examples of how the government can't run health care, either from Medicare, the Veteran's Administration or indeed from the Government health careCornyn and his cronies enjoy. Of course he doesn't have to, he's preaching to Republicans -- a faith-based group who never seem to question thetenebrous tenets of that faith. The Government just can't do anything right: Reagan said so and the Republicans are hell bent for leather to make sure it's self-fulfilling.

Perhaps John can explain what the failure of the oil industry that supports him to end oil shortages and give us 29 cents a gallon gasoline again argues for or against, or why we shouldn't say that Exxon can't run anything properly, including keeping tanker captains sober. One offensively stupid argument deserves another, I should think, and the argument that the Government can't do anything and so shouldn't be allowed to do anything is a stupid argument and an annoying one coming from someone who is part of the government and is stalling, obfuscating and sabotaging health care reform -- right after having supported Bush's massive increases of unaccountable executive power and failed wars for 8 years.

No, A public option for health care is a

"Trojan horse that will ultimately lead to a government takeover of our health care system. "

says John Cornyn: another way of invoking the slippery slope fallacy. If we allow A we'll allow A+B and if we allow A+B, we'll allow A+B+C. . . Of course any truth to this is no more than accidental because none of these steps compel the other, That's why we call it a fallacy, but again, he's arguing to Republicans and Lone Star Republicans at that, not exactly a constellation bright enough to light up the sky. Funny that he didn't argue that an invasion of Iraq would lead to a "government takeover" of the world or that warrantless surveillance and the end of Habeas Corpus would lead to a police state.

No, we're not on a slippery slope toward invading Ireland, the US Postal Service isn't going to take over DHL or UPS or FedEx and none of those could handle a minute fraction of the envelopes, post cards, advertising fliers or periodicals the USPS delivers. No, the public schools aren't going to take over the private schools and the Social Security Administration isn't going to take over your pension. The County Hospital or the VA hospital isn't going to take over the private hospitals. It isn't the "Government" producing the vaccines and if we had to depend on the profitability of doing that to induce the pharmaceutical industry to do it, we'd have far greater shortages and tens of millions who wouldn't get any and couldn't afford it and would help the disease spread because of it. Of course I'm sure Tex Cornyn will get his vaccination, one way or another. He'll get it for free. He gets all his health care for free, so why should he give a Texas damn about you?

Not All Protests Are Created Equal

Background.

Democratic Hall of Shame

Two amendments proposing a public option were shot down in the Senate Finance Committee today: the first amendment was crafted by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and rejected in a 15-8 vote (five Democrats joined all the Republicans), and the second one, by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), was killed by a vote of 13-10, with three Democrats joining the Republicans.

Here they are, the Infamous Five (really GOPers in sheep's clothing):

Sen. Max Bupkus Baucus (D-Mont.):



Sens. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.):


Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.):


Sen. Kent Clueless Conrad (D-N.D.):



and Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.):


As HuffPo reports, there were predictable eruptions of idiocy during SFC's deliberations:

Republican senators argued that the public option would bankrupt the country and lead to a single-payer system.* "Government is not a competitor. Government is a predator," said Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa).

Yet the GOP also defended Medicare, which Democrats took pains to point out was a government-run plan.

Sen. Rockefeller is not daunted by today's defeat. As he told HuffPo, "The public option is on the march," a view echoed by Robert Reich in his recent blog post.

So let's do our civic duty and deluge our representatives' offices, again, with e-mails, phone calls and faxes, to make sure that PO stays alive and we won't have to resort to a single prayer option for our health care needs.

*And it's a bad thing...?

Cross-posted at The Middle of Nowhere.

With some whores, at least you get sex

From others you get beat up and robbed blind by the pimp and you thank them for it all the way to the emergency room.

You remember Betsy McCaughey, the blond gun for hire who went on the Daily show with a huge bound volume purporting to be HR3200, the proposed health care reform bill. She's the one who thought she was smart enough to shut Jon Stewart up by referring to a mysterious clause on page 418 and was stupid enough not to realize that Stewart had read it and had a copy right there.

She all but slunk out of the studio to a chorus of jeers and allegations that she had received a good deal of money from Cantel Medical Corporation for lying about older people needing to face a "death panel" soon surfaced. She resigned her board of directors position within hours of her humiliation on the Daily Show. ABC News credited McCaughey with launching this lie about death panels on the Fred Thompson radio last July and Stewart is not Thompson. He can, and bothers to read and has more than enough wit to skewer a media whore likeMcCaughey.

I still hear a lot of echoes from the brainless who pick their opinions up from the pavement with a shovel like the guys who used to follow horses, of her earlier article "Deadly Doctors" in the New York Post. It lies about Ezekiel Emmanuel, Rahm Emmanuels's brother the doctor, claiming he wants physicians to forget the Hippocratic oath and focus on “social justice” rather than healing patients. That's code for Communism of course and of course it's another lie and another dollar for Betsy.

She has a long history of lying about health care. Back in 1994 she wrote an article for The New Republic that did a lot to kill the Clinton health care reform effort and which was later retracted by the magazine as being full of lies. The The Atlantic magazine ran a story further debunking her statements. Crooks and Liars yesterday reported that Rolling Stone will soon report her torpedoing of the Clinton plan was bought and paid for by Philip Morris, the Tobacco corporation along with Republican think tanks and the right wing medial.

Of course the people who need to hear this don't hear anything but Beck and the Fat man and like most victories over ignorance and falsehood, it's Pyrrhic, still it makes good reading while you wait for the charity doctors to fly in to treat your pancreatic cancer.

Shame

Palm Beach County, unlike counties in some other places, exhibits a huge disparity amongst residents and the bottom of the barrel is more visible and more in contrast with the upper strata. Stark poverty exists, sometimes within a short walk from breathtaking wealth. The Byzantine palaces of Boca Raton, the Hilton sized seaside abode of Rush Limbaugh can remind the viewer of Monopoly houses dumped at random on the board. Some residents have the chauffeur drive the house keeper to the drug store to pick up their drugs under assumed names, others can't afford medicine without which they have a short time left to live.

Like many third world countries where the mega-rich watch medical relief teams treat the poor from their comfortable adn beautiful estates, Palm Beach County will soon host Remote Area Medical caregivers to treat an estimated treat 4,000 to 5,000 people who don't have medical insurance. According to the Palm Beach Post, RAM's Stan Brock

"will travel to South Florida in a World War II era C-47 cargo plane. It will contain at least 40 dental chairs and the equipment necessary for several dozen Florida-licensed ophthalmologists, optometrists and opticians to examine hundreds of patients and make glasses on the spot. "

Things like dental extractions, fillings, prostate tests mammograms, pediatric exams and H1N1 flu shots and other essential things not available in Emergency Rooms will offered for free, no questions asked. Of course it's embarrassing, or should be, to patriots fond of calling any criticism or negative assessment of our proud country to be so easily compared to Haiti or Honduras. It's also far from being enough to occasionally offer relief from pain and disease to the peasants on an occasional basis, but as long as we're talking about shame, isn't it time to heap some of it on those who are too afraid that the most profitable corporations on Earth might have to operate with profit margins of less than 35% unless we maintain a sick and suffering underclass? What about politicians that can look at the will of three quarters of the population and dismiss it in favor of the corporations that pump billions into their bank accounts?

I'm embarrassed for my country when I see that this is the best we can do and more so when I listen to the excuses: that complete government withdrawal will fix it without leaving millions and millions to die, that a government administered guarantee of insurance coverage will lead to Socialism or Communism aren't more credible fears than the bogus Death Panels when we already have real ones at Cigna and Fortis and Humana. Will some illegal be able to scam the system? Sure, people scam any system, some people buy booze with food stamps, but that doesn't argue that we let a million children starve. The fear that someone will get something for free when we have to pay for it seems all out of proportion to the risk and the risk can be controlled.

No, there is no guaranteed right to health care in the constitution, nor is there to police protection, free public education, public libraries, national parks or municipal fire departments. Certainly no right to Social Security, unemployment or disability insurance. None of those things turned us into Communists, none of them destroyed capitalism, made us less competitive in the world market, stifled entrepreneurship or made any of the hackneyed warnings into a reality. All of them are tokens of civilization and have made us a better country. Single payer health insurance won't do those things either. If we had had it a few decades ago, you might still be driving a Chevy or Chrysler instead of something from the Pacific rim where workers have government health insurance.

He lied -- no he didn't

As though on cue, the South Carolina courts have upheld a $10 million dollar award to Jerome Mitchell who purchased health insurance from Fortis in 2001 when he was 18. A year later, when trying to donate blood, he was told he had HIV. Fortis decided he had lied on the application where it asked if he'd been diagnosed with immune deficiency and rescinded his policy.

As we know, although some won't admit it, Insurance companies pay bonuses to their death panels who reject claims and rescind policies, but I'm sure whatever they paid was a drop in the bucket in comparison. The court didn't mince words in upholding Mitchell's claim and upheld $10 million in punitive damages plus the amount he had spent on staying alive.

"We find ample support in the record that Fortis' conduct was reprehensible ... Fortis demonstrated an indifference to Mitchell's life and a reckless disregard to his health and safety"

and Mitchell was fortunate enough to be young enough to survive long enough to be vindicated. His life expectancy without very expensive treatment would have been 4 years, according to his suit. Older patients often die before they can get their day in court or before the inevitable appeals process winds down. The death panels love it when that happens. I think it happens rather frequently.

Do we need a public option to tame this kind of swashbuckling? Not necessarily, but we need something and we needed it a long time ago. Remember that that ten million isn't going to come out of the executive salaries, the multi-million dollar non-executive board members' salaries or anyplace but the hides of the insured.