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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!

For those who don’t know much about my life or daily habits, I have to commute into Framingham, Massachussets most days for work, which is about an hour drive from Northeast Connecticut, where I live. Unfortunately, this means spending a fair amount of time in traffic, as well as on the Mass Pike, which is the sorry excuse for mass transit across Massachussets. Americans think of mass transit as highways instead of rail and its compatriots, for one reason or another.

Getting on or off that road is a little dangerous — drivers in Massachussetts, less-than affectionately referred to as ‘Massholes‘ by drivers in other states, seem to have some hideous mental block which keeps them from being able to merge into traffic. A single lane merge on the Mass Pike can backup traffic for miles on some days. Instead of following the customary turn-taking merge technique which has become so commonplace in other parts of the country, drivers in the “Make it yours” state just slam their heavy feet down on the accelerator and attempt to cut off every other driver on the road.

It struck me that this is a pretty decent metaphor for the issues with the illusion of “pure capitalism” mentality that has become so prevalent in this country. Common sense dictates that by not being rude to your countrymen and displaying common courtesy, everyone does better. You may get to work a few minutes later, or possibly everyone could get to work on time. People don’t need to step on other people to get ahead — they can still get where they’re going, but it’s far better for everyone involved to not be such a dick about it.

And the second part of the metaphor is that if we just went with mass transit, we’d probably be better off, but no one is going to do it because we can’t show anyone our large shiny chrome and plastic wangs. Sadly, that might be the more apropos part of the metaphor.

I think one of the biggest things that keeps America from moving forward is the intellecually bankrupt notion that people exist independently of one another, and that each person is independently financially responsible for their entire life. It’s a horrible concept, which was promulgated, at least in part, by Ayn Rand and her followers. I quote:

In answer to the question: “If a morality is not based on the common good, what is it then based on?”: on a definition of the moral individual and on that which is good for him. The moral individual is the best and highest possible to man. By what standard? By the essence of man’s nature. The man living in accordance with his nature is the moral man and the “surviving” man — he carries the life force, the life principle, he is the self-renewing “energy” and the fountainhead. What is man’s nature? Man is a reasoning being.

And since morality is a matter of free will, open to all but the insane — the good of the moral man is good for all, i.e., for all those who wish to be moral.

What is good? That which is in accordance with the life principle of man. The independent, the self-reverent, the self-sufficient.

Do I set myself up as an arbitrary elite and formulate a morality for my own kind of elite, at the expense of others? No, because it is not to be enforced upon “others” or anyone. “Others” are free not to accept it and not to subscribe to it; they may have their own kind of collectivism, altruism or whatever they wish. But they are not free to enforce it upon me and my “elite” — they are not free to arrange their collectivism at our expense. The objective dividing line is: no man exists for the sake of another man. [...]

This point — no man exists for the sake of another man — must be established very early in my system. It is one of the main cornerstones — and perhaps even the basic axiom.

Quoted from the Journals of Ayn Rand

Where do I start with where this goes wrong? I guess I could start with “What is good? That which is in accordance with the life principal of man. The independent, the self-reverent, the self-sufficient.” It’s a very narcissistic point of view, assuming that people exist solely for themselves. Wikipedia refers to a community as a “group that is organized around common values and social cohesion within a shared geographical location, generally in social units larger than a household”. Common values and social cohesion infer interdependencies between the persons involved, ostensibly in the aspiration toward a higher common good. Whereas no person exists solely for the sake of another person, a web of interdependency links all of us, and what is good for one person in particlar is rarely good for society in general.

Now we can move on to the rich, or the “parasite class”. I tend to think of money as a claim on human labor, as per Chris Martenson. The issue with the incredible wage disparity that we see in our system of “pure capitalism” (which is quite debatable, as we have been injecting public funds for private gain as of late), is that the labors of the highest paid echelon of society could not possibly be justified over the laborers of the lowest.

Lawyers, for example, have no cap on the amount of money they can charge (I prefer to use the more fitting word “extort”) their clients, mainly because they not only control rich and powerful lobbys, but also because the majority of lawmakers are lawyers. You not only can’t trust rich people to regulate crookery, you really can’t trust people to regulate themselves. I swear, it really doesn’t work. I’m sure that for the lawyer involved in a case, charging 500 dollars an hour seems like it makes a great deal of sense from a personal standpoint, as he or she can advance their lifestyle through the acquisition of enormous piles of cash-money, but society as a whole does not benefit from this behavior. For example, people filing for bankruptcy generally don’t have a few thousand dollars laying around to hand to some lawyer who is just going to have his lowly paralegal do the majority of the work, then bill it at his normal rate. Did I forget to mention that profit-sharing of legal fees with non-bar certified professionals (non-lawyers) isn’t legal, as the lawyers in Congress have written laws to ensure that? Must be nice to make your own rules…

Back to individualism, and why it’s such a crock. The majority of the services that an average American uses during the day are in some way, shape or form at least somewhat community owned or controlled. Roads and sewers are owned and operated by the communities in which they are located. Police, fire and ambulance servers are, in all but the most far-fetched cases, owned and operated by municipalities. Public power infrastructure is maintained by states and to a lesser degree municipalities. Healthcare over a certain age, at least in theory, is spread out over the community as a whole, as a way of supporting our elderly citizens.

Calling all of this “socialism” is probably right. The greater issue is “what is wrong with socialism?” The answer lies in the inability for a small percentage (which would otherwise be a statistical anomaly) of people to claw their way into an utterly lavish lifestyle by using the labor of less fortunate (or most likely, more scrupulous) people to get there.

Then there is the moral premise of the entire Randian argument — whatever is good for you, is obviously better than what is good for everyone, because you’re more important than everyone else. People who are rich generally get that way by making profit on some sort of labor or time investment (discounting the parasite “investor class”, which makes money solely by leveraging existing money in a corrupt system which leans towards investment over labor). The issue with that is that draining an inordinate amount of money out of the economy as a whole, for the sole purpose of greed and self-aggrandizement, is detrimental to the people who are actually performing the labor and consuming the services in question. A healthy income can still be derived from personal labors without the upward motion of wealth from the actual laborers working underneath the person or people in question. Therefore, being rich implies being greedy.

When I say “rich”, I don’t mean those people who have gone to school for ten years to get a degree and earn 100,000 dollars a year or more. I mean the people who are dragging in 200,000 or even 500,000 dollars a year. I can’t conscionably see how anyone can produce labor that is worth that kind of money (at least in 2009 dollars).

The bottom line is that rich people are different from pretty much everyone else. Hoping you’re going to be the asshole on top raining golden showers of delight on the happy plebes below is a terrible reason to push destructive policies and strip back social measures designed to keep people safe and healthy. Taxing the rich at a higher percentage isn’t unfair, it’s just evening the playing field, restoring community “wealth” back to the community and the people who actually produced the wealth. Go socialism?

I was flipping through radio stations on my way to one of the colocation centers I have to visit for work, and chanced upon a Worcester-area right wing talk radio station. I got fed up about 60 seconds into the broadcast, listening to a man with very poor English asking why the government wants to take small business’s hard earned money away from them and give it to people who don’t deserve it.

Randian masturbation aside, it made me a little angry to hear. I think some of it has to do with the notion that some people “deserve” well paying jobs (and the intellectually bankrupt notion that everyone could have well paying jobs if only they weren’t so not white and lazy). “Why does the government want to force me to pay for poor people to see the doctor,” these people ask, “when it costs us so much money?”

Then I remember that Americans pay the people who do the actual work very little. Minimum wage in the United States is being raised to 7.25 this month. This effectively means that a day laborer earning minimum wage can look forward to a fat paycheck of 290 dollars a week before taxes, and about 15,000 dollars a year, also before taxes. That’s a monthly gross income of 1,160 dollars. How exactly are these people, who are the “cogs” who push production in this country, supposed to afford anything? Our growing wage disparity isn’t exactly helping, as the money which would be going to allow equitable pay and healthcare for workers is padding executive level bonuses.

Again, we see the spectre of forced capitalism rising above the common sense of single payer (or at least somewhat publically funded and run) healthcare. The same small business owners who are kvetching and crying about how they will have to fund healthcare, would effectively be paying the same or more likely *less* money, as government run healthcare would have substantially lower administrative costs. The crusty top of the US income earners, who suck in millions (if not billions) without actually *producing* anything would have to pay a greater share, to compensate for the gigantic overabundance of money they have siphoned out of our financial system over the last thirty or forty years or so of reduced regulation and non-existant watchdogging.

Then I thought of sharecropping. You get the ability to eek out a living from someone who actually *owns* things, but you never own anything. You rent your house, you lease a car (if your credit is any good), and you never really are able to afford much. If you are lucky enough to get married, your kids are either looked after by family or grow up as latch-key kids so that you can afford to buy them food and clothes. Which part of this sounds like the America espoused in all of those flag-waving campaign-time commercials? If we actually treated our people well and paid them an actual living wage, socialized the healthcare and benefits systems, and put some (oh noes! not teh capitalism!) caps on executive pay, we’d probably be better off.

But I know how this goes — we’ll hem and haw about everything, Congress will pass a meaningless law giving subsidies to insurance companies, and we’ll all get sicker and die poorer. Yay pure capitalism!

(Upon a bit more reading, I think that tenant farming might be a little more apropos for a comparison, since it involves forced evictions.)

“Everybody here sells his time for money. It’s like taking a mortgage against your life.” – Dr Dick Solomon (3rd Rock from the Sun, “I Enjoy Being A Dick”)

Although the quote “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil” is an oft-malighed, often quoted Biblical “New Testament” passage which is used by quite a few bible-thumping born-agains, I started thinking about the reason why money would be such a powerful motivating force.

A quick search on “money” comes up with a history on how money is to be exchanged for goods and services. Chris Martenson’s “Crash Course” says that money is a claim on human labor. We can then infer that human labor is indirectly exchanged for goods and services, but know from experience that the value of peoples’ labor varies greatly, even among the people in a single country. It can then be deduced that the value of all peoples’ labor, and therefore time, is not equal.

Is it not exceedingly possible that money is an indicator that your time is more valuable than your neighbor’s time? Is it not also possible that it implies that your *life* is more valuable?

This is the prevailing sentiment in our Capitalist society, which places a greater emphasis on the acquisition of money than the health and welfare of its own people, usually by arguing that the government *they* elected can’t work properly because it’s full of the incompetant people *they* elected, and that in the face of every feasability and critical analysis, that the “free market will solve everything”. And I quote: “Just because Americans are uninsured doesn’t mean they can’t receive health care; nonprofits and government-run hospitals provide services to those who don’t have insurance, and it is illegal to refuse emergency medical service because of a lack of insurance.” (from the previous link) Apparently people who have less money than you are perfectly entitled … to clog up emergency services rather than being able to seek preventative medicine, which is far more of a solution than creating clusterfucks in emergency rooms, not strictly for saving money, but for keeping people off gurneys.

Getting back to the point… is one person more valuable than another based solely on their earning potential? I seriously doubt that the CEO of Bear Stearns, who destroyed the equivalent of millions of hours of human labor, is somehow a more valuable human being than a bricklayer who works for an hourly paycheck, yet we place far more importance on the CEO by compensating his time with more equivalent labor.

And “European Socialism” is *so* horrible…

I think that after reading things like this about taxpayer outrage at executive level bankers raking in performance bonuses for apparently tanking the world financial system, I’m starting to think that we’re wrong about the outrage.

Not that we shouldn’t be outraged about funnelling money to jackholes who buy and sell people like me during lunch … more that they really should get performance bonuses if it’s based on *performance*.

Look at what they’ve done: the upward motion of wealth from retirement funds and other previously untouchable funding sources, along with the end of the ownership society, yet their stockholders are still seeing money thanks to wheelbarrow loads of cash money straight from your grandkids’ future earnings. They’re raiding the *federal* coffers, eating tax money previously only available for bombing dark people and educating children, and moving that money into their vaults. I mean, if that isn’t an amazing performance, what is?

They tank the system, then get our money. Take a bow, you fat greedy pig fuckers. Hopefully a few more of you get cold-cocked before this thing blows over.

There has been, for some time, debate in the United States regarding healthcare “reform”, as our current system does not serve a fair percent of the population, and out of those served, many are “underinsured”. From Michael Moore’s Sicko to Howard Dean’s offer to present the issue in front of Congress, there is no doubt that the system is horribly, horribly broken.

I believe the issue is a systemic one, hinging on the broken premise that “private insurance”, that is, pay-for-play insurance funded by either direct periodic payments or employer contributions, is a far superior method of providing healthcare. A publically traded company has a primary obligation to its shareholders and their dividends. This is a bit of an issue with health insurance, as the “proven way” of increasing margins is denying coverage to people.

Health insurance (otherwise known as “coverage”) is meant to provide healthcare without substantial out of pocket expenses, in an effort to keep your average worker from going bankrupt in the case of a medical emergency. Unfortunately, ever since Dick Nixon handed us over to the HMOs with the “HMO Act”, we as a people have been at the mercy of an industry whose sole purpose is to deny the majority of claims for coverage. There have even been deaths reported when insurers have failed to cover life-saving procedures. Many, many more slip through the cracks in the form of people who cannot received preventative maintenance through regular checkups, instead using emergency rooms and clogging that part of the healthcare system when their problems have reached a critical point.

Unlike other civilized countries, the United States says that it supports the “free market”… except when it doesn’t. Supports fiscal responsibility … except when it doesn’t. The “free market” and government administered health care are not mutually excusive — just that private insurance has much higher cost due to its profit margins. Of course, the jackholes at the CATO institute would like you to believe that it’s oh-so-much-more-expensive … because “Private insurers incur administrative costs to make sure they (and their customers) aren’t getting ripped off.”. Sure does sound like you’re going to get *way* more false positives, as if you weren’t dealing with a “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” situation to begin with.

The fact of the matter is that as long as private insurance companies have to make a profit, their best interests are simply not to make you healthy or pay for anything to help you get healthier. Anything to that effect is purely coincidental. Their primary motivation is to juice you for money to feed their shareholders, not to make you healthier. Don’t listen to them, they’ll do their best to speak in reassuring tones and tell you about the “social good” and the “free market”. But trust me, they’ll step over your rotting corpse on the way to the bank, and won’t even give it a second thought.

Single payer insurance. Say it with me …

After an actor, a CIA spook, a Republican in Democrat’s clothing and a moron, we finally have a President willing to let us become an *adult* nation. President Obama just announced that he wanted to create a high speed rail system in the United States. Hell, even the cheese-eating surrender monkeys in France have had one of those for *years* … I’m sure that the trucking lobby, oil lobby, or some other lobby I haven’t though of, will stymie this and kill it somehow, but at least we’re trying, finally.

All we need now is a distributed energy generation system and electric vehicles for short transport, and we’ll finally be ready to kick the greasy black dragon.