Bye Bye Norma Rae

You remember Norma Rae, although her name was Crystal Lee. Sally Field played the Union Organizer from Burlington North Carolina in 1979 and won an academy award for the performance. Ms. Field who presumably is financially secure, is still with us but Crystal Lee, who wasn't, isn't. She got brain cancer she couldn't afford to treat, she had to battle her insurance company to live up to its contractual obligation, they stalled and she died Last Friday.

Sarah Palin is right, Death Panels are real and the Health Insurance companies all have them, practicing 'delay and deny' tactics that resulted -- intentionally -- in the death of the 68 year old Crystal Lee Sutton. Her insurance company interfered between her and her doctor, she couldn't afford Chemo on her own and some employee likely got a bonus for saving the company money.

Like Most Republican arguments, the Death Panel idea illustrates the principle of projective accusation. if your president was guilty of more lies than any other in history, you start accusing the opposition of lying and if you're lucky you can find a mote in his eye and gleefully use it to deny the giant sequoia in your own. Thus to protect the insurance companies that profit by interfering in the doctor-patient relationship, dictate and deny treatment and let people die unnecessarily they accuse a system designed to stop it of doing the same thing. Americans are stupid enough to buy it.

Death Panels are real and death panels are inevitable because corporations are beholden to their stockholders, not to their insured clients. Actual panels of actual people get salaries and bonuses for obfuscating and delaying claims until it's too late, or for scouring your life for some unreported case of acne or the flu to justify denying your cancer claim. A large part of your premiums go, in fact, to pay for these Death Panels and to keep the stockholders happy.

Perhaps someone will chime in here and deny it. I hope so because I'm dying to say You Lie! I can't wait to tell the inevitable troll who will insist that just like Public Schools, Public Libraries, National parks and the National Guard, Government claims administration is Socialism! You lie!

Heck of a job

"Which patients should get a share of limited resources, and who decides? What does it mean to do the greatest good for the greatest number, and does that end justify all means? Where is the line between appropriate comfort care and mercy killing? How, if at all, should doctors and nurses be held accountable for their actions in the most desperate of circumstances, especially when their government fails them?"

These are the questions asked in the New York Times Magazine article about New Orleans' Memorial Hospital. You'll remember that, abandoned and without power with high winds and rising water making evacuation impossible, some patients, perhaps as many as 17 were given lethal doses of morphine and sedatives as an alternative to letting them suffer and die of heat, dehydration, starvation, drowning or from the failure of the machines keeping them alive. While the times appears to be asking questions about personal responsibility, the timing makes it vulnerable to being boarded and looted.

Rightly suspecting the imminent hijacking of this story by anti-health care propagandists, Hanna Rosin writes "pre-emptively" at Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish that

"this story shows the opposite of what would happen under government mandated health care reform. The reason the hospital staff got stuck having to make all these terrible decisions is because they were abandoned, and on their own. There were no established procedures, no regulations, no guidelines. There was just them, exhausted and overwhelmed, and a few dozen very ill patients unhooked from their respirators."

Would an HMO or a privately owned, for-profit facility have been better prepared or better able to get National Guard helicopters to the scene ipso facto? We can expect to hear that this is a logical conclusion. It's not.

I'm sure Rosin is right and that this, like any other pieces of flotsam that can be dragged out of the flood and into the argument will be used to show that the Government is poison and corporations are the antidote. In fact, that the government was unable to help in this circumstance owes much to the lack of planning and disdain for taking responsibility that has followed upon decades of Reagan-inspired sabotage of our institutions. Since there never really has been real evidence for the Reagan theorem that Government is the problem because it is the government and Government has no solutions and Government should give way to private, for profit management, the Republican controlled administrations have been forced to manufacture a scenario by insuring impotence, corruption and incompetence in almost all areas, including most obviously FEMA.

The Dish quotes an unidentified staff member as saying:

"This was totally against every fiber in my body.” But “we were abandoned by the government, we were abandoned by Tenet, and clearly nobody was going to take care of these people in their dying moments.”

and I'm sure this will be picked up on as though the failure is intrinsic to government itself and not to a government that was Rightie-rigged and Brownie led against adequate response.

Regardless of whether the euthanized patients could have been evacuated or should have been left "in God's hands" none of this makes a valid argument against public health care, but we're not used to validity or even honesty in this fight and this struggle to make us believe that the government of the people, by the people should be sold off and all decisions about individual life, liberty and pursuit of happiness be determined by how much profit it makes for someone else.

Dead man walking -- tall

The man can't be much warmer than room temperature, but the demons are howling farleftliberalsocialist like some inbred glossolalian hysterics at a backwoods revival meeting where the devil is being denounced. Even those of us who dress more like civilized people and give University lectures are out there making false equivalences between how poor old milk-of-human-kindness Robert Novak was treated by farleftliberalsocialists like Crooks and Liars as compared to the way they're trashing the memory of the last of the Kennedy Brothers -- although the more adroit like William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection says he "wont go there" -- while he's coming back from just having been there.

Rush Was Right! Exclaims the Professor. People are using Ted Kennedy's death to their political advantage and the people who would like to put Ronald Reagan on Mount Rushmore and name airports and highways after him are very disdainful of that sort of thing, aren't they? Can you imagine that - those laughable liberals want to name a health care bill after a man who tried most of his life to reform health care and have the audacity to trash a man who only committed treason and lied about it.

" Democrats are desperate to do anything to overcome public opposition on the merits."

says the Associate professor. He doesn't tell us whether those merits include "death panels" or other outright lies so beloved of Republican saboteurs. He doesn't mention that the public opposition is the minority opinion and that's it's costing News Corp and the Insurance Industry and the Drug Companies billions to do anything and everything to overcome majority opinion; anything including lies and fabrications.

Face it, they're delighted that one more impediment to the will of the minority is down and so sure are they of public stupidity and gullibility they don't even bother to cover their tracks or hide their fallacies.

"Strange, when Rush Limbaugh used the phrase "Kennedy Memorial Health Bill," [in predicting how Democrats would use Kennedy's death] he was harshly criticized.. . . Now that passage of Democratic health care restructuring seems much less likely, I guess it is okay to invoke Kennedy's name."

That's just what I mean. No Perfessor, the objection to Rush calling a sickly old man a dead man was what the anger was about. Laughing about a brain tumor: it's not the same thing as calling a dead man a dead man: even a dead man who tried to do some good in this world instead of shilling for pirates.

Boycot Whole Foods

My liberal butt just got whacked, my liberal brain ransacked. John Mackey, president of Whole Foods, is pushing against public options in health care reform. He thinks that private programs, which currently leave 46 million people uninsured, are the way to go. He thinks that high health care deductibles for people, regardless of their income, will go a long way to solving the health care crisis.

Sorry Mr. Mackey. How many employees working for Whole Foods can afford a $2,500 deductible?

Thirty years ago, as a young mother, I had to leave a job because the inadequate health insurance at my job failed to pay for necessary services for my three year old disabled daughter. A public option would have enabled me to continue employment uninterrupted.

Now, I am fortunate to be more comfortable financially. I would be willing to pay more in taxes to support a public option health care plan. What truly bothers me is paying more to a private plan that has high deductibles, low coverages and uses MY MONEY to pay a few people at the top.

I can speak with my food store choices, and until you and your company can gain empathy for the 46 million uninsured Americans and the many more underinsured Americans whose insurance premiums pad the pockets of wealthy health insurance execs my food dollars will go elsewhere.

Bully for Teddy

It's a funny thing, the conservative American mind. Talk about quotidian things, work, the weather, and they can be charming, witty, companionable and seem intelligent, but stay away from politics if you don't want to have to discard many friendships. Beneath the mask can lie a morass of anger and ignorance as deep and foetid as hell itself.

I've very often had people express nostalgic longing for a president like Teddy Roosevelt - a hunter, fisherman, outdoorsman, soldier, adventurer and writer of books; a man not afraid to conquer and not likely to apologize for it. A conservative's conservative. Someone who stood, square jawed and well armed astride the American horizon in a time of unlimited freedom, opportunity and prosperity when the lower orders knew their place. Thus are the dreams.

Of course Teddy was often denounced as a Communist Agitator. Today his opinions would have the Sarah Palins and Joe who isn't a plumber flapping in a frenzy like decapitated chickens. He espoused a graduated income tax and more government regulation of financial markets. He advocated more government social programs such as housing for immigrants. Of course there were no Nazis then to be falsely associated with American progressivism and no way to compare him to Hitler as today he inevitably would be.

Roosevelt's time had seen the effects of economic booms, panics and busts in rapid and relentless quick step. Economic inequality was growing, monopolies were tightening their grip on free markets and massive accumulations of private wealth were threatening democracy. His vision didn't include doing nothing or faith in the power of doing nothing or blind trust of the altruism of the very, very wealthy.

"Those who oppose reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism "

said Roosevelt in a famous 1910 speech calling for a "New Nationalism" One wonders what bizarre grotesqueries of accusation would emerge had it been given today. Would people be carrying weapons to his speeches, would he be called a tyrant, would there be hysteria over the way he was "dismantling freedom?" Would they question his citizenship, his patriotism; accuse him of murder? It's hard to tell but surely Barack Obama has suffered worse for less radical statements.

Of course Teddy had to remind his audience after he said

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration"

that he was quoting Abraham Lincoln because he was regularly being called a totalitarian himself - as well as a Communist. Perhaps such things never change, but the perception of an America that's sliding irretrievably down a slope toward the antithetical perdition of communism and fascism because sentiments such as those of Lincoln and Roosevelt are essentially "far-left" and "liberal" and we're being assured of it daily by mindless maggots with megaphones.

It seems that the Niebelungs of negativity have been crying wolf for a very long time, but look at how well the average man lives today compared to how he lived a hundred years ago when poverty consumed most of us and faith based laws restricted huge numbers to certain neighborhoods, certain jobs, certain levels of education, certain expectations of justice in an essentially Hobbsian society.

Somehow I cannot believe that a hundred years of progress toward more liberal goals have made us justifiably disgruntled. We live longer, live better, cleaner, healthier and have far more freedom to alter our circumstances for the better. The slope has not been slippery, the slope never existed. Progressive income tax has not stifled entrepreneurship which has thrived even in times of over 80% top brackets and in fact it seems to dampen economic cycles. It seems the only wolves that have shown up were wearing conservative clothing and warning us of wolves.

Isn't a new nationalism what we need today? The old kind and the old attitude and the old maxims and the old and vicious, dishonest and hate-filled rhetoric has never done us any good and have now brought us to the brink.

The Public Option.

In Grand Junction Colorado yesterday, a student asked Barack Obama if the "public option" wouldn't be unfair competition to insurance companies that need to make a profit. The presumption behind the question is that making a profit from any enterprise is a fundamental right and that the government needs somehow to insure that profit -- and insure that nothing interferes with maximizing that profit.

This is not the first time such questions have come up in our history. There was a time when fire departments were independent and could choose whether or not to put out the fire in your house depending on whether or not they had an agreement with your insurer, if you had one at all.

Sometimes competing departments would engage in disputes over who had the right to fight the fire while buildings burnt to the ground. Sometimes there were arguments between homeowners and competing fire departments as to what the bill would be before one bucket of water was thrown. Sometimes less honest firefighting companies would loot and pillage while they worked. Some were accused of arson.

Then came the public option, and for the most part it works better than anything else. Everyone is covered, the insurance companies are doing fine and whole towns rarely burn to the ground any more. Moreover the argument that forming a municipal fire department to be funded by the public is unfair to the private sector's right to profit or is "socialism" has faded away in the light of experience. It's simply been far more economical and efficient than allowing multiple private companies to compete with each other and able to decide which fires they will fight and which they will not.

Is this an apt analogy? That's the question we need to ask of people like Zach Lahn, the student who questioned the President. Instead of looking for guidance only to our own unexamined credos, or to the plastic wrapped opinions handed out by insurance companies and the politicians they own, we need to look at history for examples. I think there is insight to be derived here. Perhaps he would agree.

Sometimes the public good and the public safety is best served by a public agency rather than multiple agencies who by definition and nature are motivated to ration services and keep prices as high as possible.

Rationing, Death Panels and Takeovers, Oh my!

Is it a lack of determination that keeps me at this? There are times I just want to sail away into the sunset and forget about our idiot's Republic that seems hell bent to destroy itself in an orgy of irrational anger -- but I don't. Sometimes it takes only a word to start me off again and this time the word was "rationing."

On thing that's consistent about American politics is the practice of hiding your worst vices by preemptively accusing your opposition of it. If your practice of rationing health care to maximize profits hangs around your neck like a decomposing albatross, if you let people die because your top executives need their 20 million dollar salaries and the lobbyists and Congressmen need to be kept rich and happy, you make up a story about Obama and rationing and you stage public events where people pretend to be furious at it until eventually people do become furious enough that they stop thinking and start screaming.

Ask Wendell Potter, former vice president of CIGNA quit his job at Corporate Communications because of the company's decision that the life of 17 year old Nataline Sarkisyan was not worth saving: the liver transplant cost too much so the CIGNA Death Panel refused, calling it "experimental." Although outcry from the public and organizations such as the California Nurses Association caused CIGNA to re-focus on how much the bad publicity was costing them and relented, it was too late and the girl died.

Now rationing is the thing with transplants. The supply is severely limited and systems are in place that attempt to make distribution equitable, but it's not based on the cost. That's not the case at CIGNA nor is it indeed in American health care. Our "system" if you can call it that, will decide how much your life is worth to them and whether or not you've paid your premiums, they will refuse treatment if it will eat into profitability. They will do so even though profitability is growing rapidly. Rationing of health care: it's nothing personal, it's just business and it's just about profits.

"I know from personal experience that members of Congress and the public have good reason to question the honesty and trustworthiness of the insurance industry."

testified Potter to the Senate Commerce Committee last month. He related how unprofitable companies were purged, to maximize profits and he's now telling CNN that the buzz words and hackneyed phrases being shouted at Town Hall meetings come straight from the wordsmiths of the Insurers.

"People talk about the government takeover of the system ... that's a buzz term that comes straight out of the insurance industry," says Potter.

Rationing of treatment is not new, nor has it anything to do with who's providing it. When resources are limited, it has to occur, whether it's because there aren't enough organs or operating rooms or surgeons or equipment. Indeed when kidney dialysis was developed in the early 1960's, a committee was set up in Seattle's Artificial Kidney Center for instance, to ration the use of their machinery. I hesitate to call it a death panel, but if you needed time on the machines, a group consisting of a minister, a banker, a labor leader and a housewife picked by the Center would ration it based on such criteria as your record of Church attendance, net worth and marital status. In other words private parties could decide what your life was worth and factor their profit into the equation. It wasn't until the "government takeover" which was Medicare that opened up access to almost everyone in need and perhaps lessened the ability of insurers to indulge in profit based rationing. They sure as hell don't want much more of that at CIGNA.

A great deal of thought goes into choosing words like "death panel" and "rationing" and "takeover." They are chosen with surgical precision so that using by them as accusations, the corporate death panels, the corporate rationing of health care and the monopolistic trusts that indulge in them are protected from the truth.

Now contemplating just how dumb are the people plugged into the corporate matrix, I'm back to wanting to give it all up and let the country sell itself deeper into slavery and dependency on those who see the American People as sheep to be fleeced.

Enough is Enough

Years ago my mother was convinced that Medicare would turn the USA into a communist country. Now, at 91, she uses it gratefully. My recently deceased father-in-law was the same; swore Medicare would make us all communists, but then swore by it when it helped extend his life to 90.

I, on the other hand, spent one year with minimal health care. Fortunately, I was able to change jobs in 1984 to obtain adequate health insurance for my family. I had a disabled daughter and flimsy medical coverage that paid for little of her care at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Luckily, I was able to find a job with a good private health care plan. Millions, however, are unable to obtain any health care and are sick or dying as a result. They would be well served to have a national health program as an option.

Where are the outcries about deaths caused by a society unwilling to see that everyone has health care? Where is the outrage about the needless suffering of so many fellow Americans?

Why aren’t the radicals out there screaming “murder” when a young uninsured woman dies of cancer? Or when a middle aged uninsured man dies of kidney disease? Where is the hype to stop “murdering” so many of our uninsured citizens? The private sector insurance business has failed these people miserably while some private insurance executives have rolled big time in the money we pay as premiums. It is time to try something different.

We spend more on health care now than any nation in the world, yet rank 37th out of 191 countries in health care according to the World Health Organization. Canadians outlive Americans by two years, despite all of the American criticisms about socialized medicine. True, we are better service providers and insurers for certain specialty diseases than any other country. But then, aren’t we smart enough to overhaul the system so it is accessible to all, yet retain our excellent specialty care? Aren’t we obligated to do just that if we are, as we claim, the most moral country on Earth?

The time is now to act outrageously indignant that any American anywhere would shout out against giving another American a fair chance at life saving health care. I am fed up with ignorant people rudely interrupting health care town hall meetings geared to helping tweak the President’s health care plan. Those of us in favor of the plan, including myself, are screaming back: “Haters, move out of the way. We want good health care now for all Americans. We will not be stopped by your ignorance.”

Rounding up the righteous.

Glenn Beck, that bottomless sack of snake shit, is trying to make you forget that the last administration set new highs in illegal surveillance of private citizens by referencing a small item at the Whitehouse.gov web page which asks that the endless stream of e-mail lies be forwarded. The site, if you care to look, has information and videos that attempt to disprove the mostly baseless claims. The professional liars are alarmed and so they want you to be alarmed -- and so they break out the swastikas again and try to pin them on the Democrats. "They're rounding up the conservatives, they cry, while trying not to snicker. "they've created a new 'Information Czar'" says the bullshit Czar, Glenn Beck.

People who invent psychotic scenarios and dress them up as dire warnings are "conservatives" you see and only trying to help you see that Obama is a fascistcomministmuslim and illegal alien -- conservatively speaking.

If you're like me, you've had enough of the Palin "death panel" fraud and a great many others and forwarding them to Snopes or Factcheck simply doesn't help much. Returning them with comment to the people who sent them to you doesn't help either. Depending on the Media to refute the obvious and childish fabrications is a lost hope, but it seems that Mr. Beck and Senator Cornyn and the other professional traitors and haters of honesty are afraid someone will get to the bottom of it all and trace the sabotage, the lies and the psychotic ravings back to the RNC and into their own hard drives from whence it originates.

Behold, we're now all being asked to "squeal on our neighbors" say the folks who wanted to have postal letter carriers peek in our basement windows a few years ago and encouraged librarians to spy on those of us who read. Obama is making up a list, just like Santa and he's going to put all those people who tried to warn you that Obama is Hitler into camps.

Did I mention that Poland invaded Germany? The Liberals don't want you to know.

Humbling The Privileged

There's an old saying, that I'm sure most everyone has heard, that goes something like this -

Don't presume to judge someone or to understand someone (something) until you've walked in their shoes.

The philosophical spirit behind this saying, it would seem, is to encourage sympathy and understanding - maybe even empathy - for the plights, the realities of others. It cautions against "being holier then thou" and echoes the sentiments of "there but for the grace of God go I."

Taking a cue, then, from these good ole axioms, I would like to suggest (insist) the following. That every single member of the House and of the Senate and health care lobbying groups and their employers - irrespective of party affiliation - be forced to spend a year living WITHOUT health insurance if they fail to do the right thing, the compassionate thing, the moral thing in a timely fashion and pass health care legislation that gives the god almighty PRIVILEGE of health care to all.

Yes you out-of-touch individuals in Washington and you sanctimoniously greedy health care lobbyists and those health care executives you work for - it is that simple. Wear the shoes of the uninsured and underinsured and find out how it feels. How it REALLY feels. How it impacts your quality of life.

Then sit back, folks, and watch how fast they come up with legislation when it suddenly becomes about THEM.

He must be wrong -- he's Obama.

It seems to me that if one is dedicated to thwarting president Obama's health care reform before one knows what it is, then one has to admit that either he's out to thwart anything Obama does, or any kind of health care reform.

Multimillionaire Rick Scott is one of those people who can't wait to hear what the plan actually entails before putting on the Drum Major costume and strutting about the streets twirling his baton in ostentatious outrage and ornate opposition. He has put together a group he predictably calls Conservatives for Patient's Rights rather than a more honest "The I've Got Mine and F*ck You Club."

"Before government rushes to overhaul health care, listen to those who already have government-run health care,"

says Scott as quoted in today's Washington Post. Of course since we don't know that Obama is actually talking about Government run health care, at least not in the same sense that Scott would like us to fear he is, the mendacity begins with the first words. Then too, he doesn't want you to ask Americans who have government run health care either. By all accounts our politicians have it pretty good and the VA system was a model of efficiency, at least until the privatization pirates attempted to board that ship. He doesn't want you to listen to countries with successful and popular health care plans, he wants you to listen to a carefully selected and edited group of Canadians and Brits and their anecdotal horror stories and so enter CRC Public Relations and another round of captious TV ads.

Did I mention that Scott made his money as CEO of a private hospital business?

Scott is contributing $5 million from his own piggy bank and has, according to WaPo, got $15 million more from other people who support the status quo most Americans feel is in need of reform. The funds will be put to good use by CRC Public Relations, the same firm that gave us the "swift Boat Veterans" campaign that convinced the weak minded and no-minded that John Kerry was not where he was, didn't do what he did and proved it with testimony from people who didn't know him and were never near him.

Did I mention that CEO Scott was ousted from Columbia/HCA, the largest private U.S. health-care company at the time, that pleaded guilty to fraud? He defends this by telling us that other private hospitals were committing fraud too. Think about that when the argument comes around to the part where private is always better than public.

If you took logic 101 in college, you probably remember it being called the Slippery Slope Fallacy, but Scott's target audience didn't go and doesn't remember and so Scott can employ the argument that any step toward reform will accelerate down hill without evidence. He can tell us he isn't necessarily opposed to Obama's plan, even before he knows what it is, but that

"The bottom line is that this is happening fast, and there is not much of a debate going on about what will happen if we go down this path"

but what he means by "debate" is to obfuscate -- and that's obvious. We have had decades of debate; decades of millions spent on sleazy ads and slimy lies and distractions and Scott thinks we need to continue the gravy train he's on as long as he can keep it going.