BTC News: If It Says 'News,' It Must Be True » Weldon’s Page

Health Insurance Reform: How your precious bodily fluids got sapped

Weldon Berger — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:10:22 +0000

Anyone who takes health insurance reform seriously recognizes that universal government-funded health care is the only way to eliminate the abuses of the health insurance industry and control costs to the point that per capita spending on health care in the US falls more or less into line with other developed countries rather than running 50%-100% higher.

Call it single-payer, call it Medicare For All, whatever; it’s what will work in this country because it’s the most straightforward, most familiar, least complicated and most easily understood system. Barack Obama is on record supporting it; only before we get there, he said, “we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

But when it began to look as though those things were going to happen, candidate Obama backed way off, saying that while he still supported a single-payer plan in theory—“If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system”—in practice, he now supported massively subsidizing the health insurance industry, although he didn’t put it quite like that, because “a lot of people work for insurance companies, a lot of people work for HMOs … let’s build up the system we got, let’s make it more efficient, we may be over time—as we make the system more efficient and everybody’s covered—decide that there are other ways for us to provide care more effectively.”

The devolution of Obama’s fondness for single-payer isn’t surprising; it wasn’t so much foreshadowed as trumpeted. He announced in advance his intention to include the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries in the crafting of his insurance reform legislation—which has now nonsensically become “health reform”—and to exclude single-payer advocates. It’s one of the few campaign promises he has fought hard to keep.

Now we’re at a point where the president has resorted to classic doublespeak. In a mass email sent out last week by Organizing for America, the Obama campaign machine, the organization’s director, Mitch Stewart, says that “[t]he President does not believe we can address a problem this big incrementally,” while Obama said last week that the subject had been completely explored and now was the time to act.

We began our push to reform health insurance last March, in this room, with doctors and nurses who know the system best. And so it’s fitting to be joined by all of you as we bring this journey to a close.

Last Thursday, I spent seven hours at a summit where Democrats and Republicans engaged in a public and very substantive discussion about health care. This meeting capped off a debate that began with a similar summit nearly one year ago. And since then, every idea has been put on the table. Every argument has been made. Everything there is to say about health care has been said — (laughter) — and just about everybody has said it. (Laughter.) So now is the time to make a decision about how to finally reform health care so that it works, not just for the insurance companies, but for America’s families and America’s businesses.

[...]Now, some also believe that we should, instead of doing what I’m proposing [tinkering around the edges of this challenge], pursue a piecemeal approach to health insurance reform, where we tinker around the edges of this challenge for the next few years.

The (Laughter) is from the White House transcript. Haha! Of course every idea has not been on the table; although the president mentioned that “some” support a “government-run health care system”, in fact the concept of universal government-funded health care was never given a hearing. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised single-payer advocates in Congress the opportunity to bring existing single-payer legislation to the floor for debate (she graciously allocated 20 minutes), but the big moment never arrived.

So what we have at this moment is the mischaracterization and off-hand dismissal of an approach the president once supported but now says, without explanation, is “neither practical nor realistic” in the US, and the transformation of a proposal he once described as incremental to a much weaker version of the same proposal that he now offers as more or less the final resting place of health insurance reform. And even that probably won’t pass without further buggering, if at all. RIP.

Throughout the whole process, single-payer advocates have gotten the Bill O’Reilly approach from most supporters of the various incarnations of the “public option”—whether robust or microscopic or born without a brain—and the “pass anything” approach. “Shut up! Shut up!” We are alleged to have undermined the president and his allies in Congress by failing to support whatever they’re up to at any given moment, when in fact the president and his allies in Congress have repeatedly engaged in a dramatic reenactment of the famous Peanuts scenes in which Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown and he winds up flat on his back. And just like Charlie, supporters of that amorphous plan keep coming back for more. Or more accurately, coming back for less. And less.

The single-payer program can be explained in a sentence. “Everyone gets a comprehensive Medicare plan with no copays and no deductibles, and if there’s anything you want that isn’t covered you can buy supplemental private insurance for it, and it saves big, big money.” The details take a bit longer, but the proposal is about 2000 pages shorter than what’s circulating now, and it’s a whole hell of a lot easier to understand.

The current mishmash proposal takes a little longer to explain. “There’s some good stuff here and there in this bill but mostly it shovels about $50 billion a year in new revenue to health insurance and pharmaceutical firms, including a bucket of taxpayer money, by forcing millions of people to buy private insurance that will either strain their budgets or require government subsidies; it’s being paid for in part by taxes on the best employer-subsidized insurance plans, thereby providing incentives for employers to either scale back their plans or shift more of the cost to their employees; and it still leaves an estimated 10 million people uninsured.”

Let’s review. Obama plan: hideously complicated, doesn’t cover everybody, forces people to buy private insurance, further entrenches insurance companies, saves less, if any, money. Single-payer: Breathtakingly simple, covers everyone, saves very much money, breaks the insurance company stranglehold on health care delivery. But Americans are presumed to be so opposed to the simple solution that it’s not even worth explaining, let alone supporting.

And oh, yes: fixing the gaps in Medicare coverage and expanding it to cover everyone is a budget issue, which means it could be enacted through reconciliation. 51 votes in the Senate …

Bookmark and Share

ACORN-baiting whore solicits Washington Post’s Ezra Klein

Weldon Berger — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:23:05 +0000

If you’re not familiar with the back story, it’s this: James O’Keefe, a patently dishonest right-wing firebrand, if that’s not redundant, and Hannah Giles, a patently dishonest right-wing surf bunny took a hidden camera into various offices of ACORN, an umbrella operation for community organizing groups, and produced a patently dishonest video purporting to show ACORN staffers advising the pair how to obtain safely operate a prostitution ring while hiding the income from it. But in fact the video was a heavily edited pastiche designed to create the impression of wrongdoing that never actually occurred.

Well now Giles, the barely-legal pseudo-prostitute in the tale, is out to ensnare Ezra Klein, the liberal wunderkind Washington Post and Newsweek columnist.

As much as I don’t agree with his political views, I do get where he is coming from. I dig his new media expertise, and actually, I could learn a lot from him since I’m new to the internet news/political world. Also, once-upon-a-time I wanted be a nutritionist, so [Klein's reputation as a gourmet health food chef] scores extra points with me.

So here’s my challenge to Mr. Klein: how about it, Ezra? Will you make me dinner one evening? Let’s put our ideas to the test and see who wins.

One can only imagine what that hidden-camera video will look like.

Bookmark and Share

And the Oscar for post-primitive blue alien Tantric sex goes to …

Weldon Berger — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 07:22:40 +0000

Avatar will win a bunch of Oscars, although not enough to suit James Cameron. The first time I saw the film I thought it was a pretty faithful remake of Ferngully, a 1992 animated film about fairies whose forest is under assault by humans, one of whom winds up living among them and ultimately rescuing them. But of course there are other influences to be found as well.

When former Marine Jake Scully drapes his sinewy blue body around his Na’vi bride, Neytiri, the heroine of James Cameron’s Oscar-nominated epic Avatar, his neural tendrils fuse with hers, in the script, but off camera, in one of the most unusual sex scenes ever produced on film. Critics and commentators have been dissecting the themes of the Hollywood mega-blockbuster, from its just-war doctrine and environmental ethics. But there’s a philosophical dimension that this otherworldly sex scene captures that most folks have overlooked: the Tantra of Avatar.

A precursor to Hinduism and Buddhism, the ancient philosophy of Tantra dates back some 6,000 years to the Dravidian culture that flourished in the Indus Valley cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in modern-day Pakistan, seeping later into the religious traditions of India, Nepal, and other parts of the region. Its tenets of goddess worship, self-discovery, and spiritual liberation resonate in Avatar, from the Neytiri’s deity-like qualities to Jake’s journey of self-identity. Avatar’s climax is actually not the Tantric sex of their consummation, but a moment that comes later, when they do something modern-day Tantric sex experts call “soul gazing,” and racier sexperts call “sex gazing.”

So there’s that.

Bookmark and Share

Democrats keep Americans safe from democracy; odds and ends

Weldon Berger — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 06:46:03 +0000

The PATRIOT Act was up for renewal this week. Democrats wanted to add some civil liberties backstops to it, but were unable to get it done because, well, they’re Democrats, and the getting done of things just isn’t among their areas of expertise. So they compromised with themselves by kicking the can down the road for a year, leaving in place all the provisions documented to have been abused by every law enforcement and national security office with half a chance to do so. This is exclusive of all the abuses by people smart enough not to get caught at it, not that getting caught at it leads to any actual consequences. Remember that old saying about hindsight being 20/20? Well, not when you stick a hot poker in its eye …

Not all Nobel Peace Prize winners use their acceptance lectures as an opportunity to brand Martin Luther King and Ghandi as unrealistic saps who didn’t understand the heroic necessity of bombing the brown bejeebers out of impoverished peoples in far off lands. Mohammed ElBaradai, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency who was roundly hated by the Bush administration for advocating against blowing people up for stuff they weren’t doing, both in his capacity as the IAEA chief and in a Nobel acceptance speech that admittedly didn’t come close to Obama’s for sheer reluctant-cowboy-strapping-on-his-guns-and-riding-off-to-blow-some-bad-guy’s-shit-up-real-good drama but nevertheless had its moments, is now back home in Egypt stirring up trouble for America’s long-time Man in Cairo, Hosni Mubarak.

ElBaradai is a very smart man and an astute politician, and one hopes he isn’t setting himself up to get killed by the afore-mentioned Mubarak, something the US would no doubt find regrettable and requiring of the most stern recriminations.

I’m not a big fan of Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post’s “media” “critic”, but in this instance someone threw an acorn at him and when it glanced off his noggin and fell to the ground at his feet he recognized it for the seed of a story that it was, which is about how Ron Hubbard’s science fiction religion gone rogue hired some investigative journalists to investigate the St. Petersburg Times. The Church of Scientology commissioned the no-holds-barred, chips-fall-where-they-may report in response to many, many years of unfriendly press from the Times. Although actually it isn’t a chips-fall-where-they-may kind of thing, because if the chips fall somewhere the church doesn’t want them to fall, they’ve reserved the right to sweep them up and run them through the shredder.

I’m fond of the St. Pete Times because of its lineage, and of course any paper that can mess with Scientology for decades on end and live to tell the tale is inherently laudable.

If you want to shock and amaze your friends with your incredibly accurate predictions about the fate of financial industry regulation over the course of the Obama administration, here’s your secret decoder ring.

Megabank CEOs didn’t have time for President Barack Obama when he gave a major speech on Wall Street in September, but they had no trouble making it to Capitol Hill this morning to plead their case to the 20-something staffers who can help them stop reform in its tracks.

Kicking off a two-day event designed to “help” legislative aides who will be writing the rules designed to rein in and reform Wall Street, the CEOs made it clear that they would be there “anytime” a young, confused congressional aide needed help understanding a complex topic.

“Call us, say we met in Washington,” said Richard Davis, chairman, president and CEO of U.S. Bancorp. “We’d love to help.”

This regulatory climate is freezing! We’d better huddle together for warmth.

The number one reason I should have known that the Saints were going to beat the Colts, and if I’d seen this I would have changed my bet accordingly … remember Michael “Heck of a job, Brownie” Brown? The Federal Emergency Management Agency head who oversaw the homicidal Bush administration response to Hurricane Katrina? He’s now a talk radio host in Denver, and he picked the Colts. They were doomed from that moment forward. The only thing that could have saved them was if Brown had drawn up the Saints game plan.

Oh, and Brown’s classiest comment in the story? The former Bush administration official admits he has his fair share of callers bashing him, saying that some “can’t get over the whole Katrina thing.” Hmm. Imagine.

Mo betta latah …

Bookmark and Share

In which we learn that the law is now against the law

Weldon Berger — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:46:10 +0000

The United States, we are often told, is a nation bound by the rule of law. We hear that less and less as it becomes more and more risible but I guess it still officially is, unless you’re the president, or you’re operating an armed drone on behalf of the president, or torturing someone on behalf of the president, or providing legal justification for someone to torture someone on behalf of the president, or so on. Maybe you could even massacre a village on behalf of the president. Legally, that is; not that it hasn’t been done.

Those pesky Nuremberg precedents? Off with their heads!

Via IOZ, we learn that the Obama administration now claims the right to prosecute attorneys who have the temerity to provide legal counsel to anyone or any group that this administration, and presumably future administrations, and maybe past ones as well, given how solicitous this administration has been of that one’s feelings, says are terrorists.

In other words, the law is now against the law. Because the president says so. Hope and fucking change, indeed.

Bookmark and Share