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Archive for December, 2009

Kill that damn “healthcare” bill. Kill it dead.

I’m as shocked as anyone else that I’m agreeing with morons who wear teabags on their hats and think that universal healthcare is some bizarre form of fascism, and that everyone is a Nazi. Not to fear, I’m not agreeing with them on *everything*, just on one thing: this “healthcare” bill sucks.

We saw a 100+ bump in the DJIA this morning after the Senate passed their bastardization of a health insurance industry subsidy bill. Of course, it had to do with the excise tax being delayed, supposedly. Not anything having to do with 25+ million new customers being forced into an industry with little or no regulation. Nope, not that.

Progressives are counting on the bill to be improved on its way back from the House, claiming that it will be better than the version that the Senate watered down. Y’know, because it makes so much sense that these cretins who tear every good measure out of a bill with the mere threat of a tantrum (without having to do the “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” thing) are just going to smile and say “I know we didn’t do this before, but of *course* we’ll do it, now that the House of Representatives said it was okay!” I can’t figure out who are the bigger morons, the Senate democratic leadership or the guys in the Progressive movement eating this up like Frosted Shit Flakes.

All our lame duck president had to do was push single payer, really. It might have been the end of his political career, but would have, much as the civil rights movement revolutionized America, drastically changed the way we live our lives in this country. No more would medical bankruptcy be something with which many families are familiar, and no longer would people fear financial ruin from attempting to seek medical care. I can’t condone mandated private insurance with no real caps on what they can charge or what horrible things they can do to you when you don’t play by their rules.

What happened to this guy? Who traded him out for this dud? With what? Oh yeah. Money. Power.

Give up the idea that you as a person can do anything. We’re peons, slaves to a country bought and paid for by large industries.

If you don’t believe single payer is not only superior in every imaginable way to the nightmare we have now and would also save us *billions* of dollars, please visit Physicians for a National Healthcare Plan. The huge list of studies, including CBO ones, are eye-opening.

Is it the best possible thing? No. I’m sure there are better systems, somewhere. It’s not socialized healthcare, just socializing the payment structure for it. And that’s not a dirty word, morons. We socialize a lot of things for the common good. Haven’t heard too many fiscal conservatives griping about that 636 *billion* dollar spending bill. Oh yeah. ‘Cause it helps us kill the Al-Qaedas that aren’t in Afghanistan and continue blowing holes in the sand to fill them with bundles of freshly printed dollars. Like that ever helped anything. Would you like a terrorist-repellent rock?

But we’re going to mouse and complain that the government wants to take away our liberty and little American flags. I’d be more concerned with ceding government power to corporations. Privatization doesn’t make things better, it just tacks on a profit “tax” to a social venture. Look at California… that shit is falling apart.

Not to worry. Your healthcare system will be following suit. Please try not to die on the sidewalk.

Yep, that’s it. It has been dead for quite some time now. Unfortunately, it’s not always apparent *why* that has been the case.

Warning: Political and healthcare-related opinions below, linked to various reputable sources.

Public Option, Single Payer, Medicare for All? The most contentious part of healthcare reform has been the concept of a government run health care plan. HR 676 refers to the idea of “Medicare for All”, extending our Medicare program for seniors to cover all Americans, effectively creating a single payer system in America. As expected, people who didn’t give a crap about running up deficits to blow holes in the sand halfway across the globe were outraged, *outraged* at the idea that we could possibly spend money on healthcare. So much, in fact, that they paraded around like morons, complaining about how large and awful government has gotten. (You know, after they didn’t say jack since the *last* Democrat was president.) A simple google search seems to show that the only places that are worried about Medicare deficits are right-wing thinktanks like the “Heritage Society” and Pravda-like news organizations like “Fox News”. Did I forget to mention that Kaiser and BCBS were up there as well? Trusting insurance companies to control costs in healthcare is like handing over a chicken farm to a drooling fox. No mention whatsoever that estimates of savings with single payer are in the hundreds of *billions* of dollars. And those estimates aren’t some cherry-picked thinktank garbage. It’s from the CBO. PNHP has a substantial list of studies which all seem to conclude that we’re flushing money into private insurance companies. Not to mention that 59% of doctors favor it.

Don’t let that fool you. The Insurance companies *love* this new bill. For all their hemming and hawing, the health insurance complex is almost giddy with this new bill, which would allow them to effectively dump the lowest income, highest risk people onto a publically subsidized but privately run healthcare system. All the profits, none of the risk. Sounds like Goldman Sachs 101 to me. In a related vein, one of the major reasons that the banking and financial industry has come out against HR 676 was that part of it . In case you didn’t see those numbers, those were a quarter to half of a percent. Twenty five to fifty cents from each hundred dollars.

“But the Free Market! Socialism! The Commies Are Coming!” Healthcare is an essential service in the same way that fire and police service is an essential service — serving everyone in the same capacity. We have created an artificial tier system valuing some peoples’ lives over others by allowing access to healthcare dependent on job and income level. We can blame Richard Nixon for the birth of the HMO, but we would have to thank FDR for valuing the idea of a public health plan. “Free markets” are also a really bankrupt idea, as every time we let the “market regulate itself” by deregulating, we end up with crap and more crap.

“Death Panels! Rationing!” If you believe either of those, you’re an idiot. I mean, really. Factcheck.org did an excellent job debunking the latest figures. (If you *still* believe that crap, go back to bitching about immigration. I’m sure *your* anscestors formed themselves out of ancient American clay, and had no need to come here.)

“Trillions! Trillions! Deficit! Deficit!” If you care that much, defund our wasteful military and use part of that for public works and the rest for tax refunds. In 2000, the Pentagon admitted they “lost” $2.3 trillion dollars. Almost 2 1/2 times the total cost for universal healthcare in the long haul. Even the Cato Institude reported this stuff, and those guys are right of the Pope.

Washington isn’t about to push any of this through, they’re too busy being bankrolled by the same fuckers who have us over a barrel. So, nothing is going to change. If the bill passes, we get some more efficiency and the insurance complex gets amazingly huge subsidies. If it fails, don’t worry, we’ll come up with something worse, while the rest of us are drowning in medical bills. HR 676 isn’t a panacea, and certainly doesn’t fix all of the problems in our system, but HR 3200 (or whatever it’s called now) is far worse. I’m almost at the point of hoping it fails miserably. Is something horrible with fringes of benefit better than nothing at all?

Sadly, I don’t think that any amount of reading is going to convince some people that the gub’mint isn’t going to take their freedoms and guns and bibles and heterosexuality in the interests of *gasp* treating their medical ailments.

It’s getting closer and closer to the big holiday of the winter season. Hell, let’s just call it the “Christmas Season” and get it over with; it’s the 900 pound gorilla in the figurative room.

Christmas, or to be more specific, Christmas *shopping* is the most important time of the year. Economically, that is. Small shops and large chain outlets alike rely on the boom of Christmas present sales to create the bulk of their sales figures for the year.

But what’s this? There’s a recession going on? People are getting laid off, salaries and benefits are being cut, premiums are rising (and affecting paychecks as well), foreclosures are through the roof, over 120 banks have failed this year while the FDIC is perilously close to being completely out of funds, inflation is getting out of hand, cost of consumer goods are going up while wages are going down.

Not to fear! The powers that be have devised a way to give all of us peons a little more cash, and in effect, artificially buoy sales figures by extending unemployment benefits until just after the “holiday season”. That way, you’re still screwed with no job in an economy that isn’t hiring, but at least you can buy some stuff you don’t need so that those Wall Street stocks don’t go down. Can’t upset that parasite investor class, now, can we? (Incidentally, Naomi Klein had a fantastic piece on the death of the ownership society and how the entire concept of haves and have nots is coming back into the public consciousness)

I remember remarking a few years back that the crappiness of the economy seemed to correlate with the earliness of Christmas (or to be PC, “Holiday”) sales. If that holds up, we’re in the toilet, as the sales started around Halloween this year.

I’ll end this on the thought that I’d rather the “Holiday season” be about spending time with family and charitable works than an ad-hyped spend-yourself-to-the-dole-queue orgy of greed and gift arms race. That’s what all these holidays are supposed to be about, right? Christmas is about a figurative birth of a way of life, Hannukah is about maintaining a way of life in the face of oppression, Kwanzaa (… is a made up holiday, as they all are), but is about culture and unity, and Yule is the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. Drop the greed, do a good deed, and have a happy new year!