The health care debate-4: What the public thinks

(For previous posts on the issue of health care, see here.)

The fact that the current US system is broken and needs a complete overhaul with government involvement is becoming increasingly apparent to almost anyone except for those who have some kind of visceral reaction to the government being involved in anything. It is because of the stark reality faced by ordinary people that, despite the incessant propaganda against single payer public plans by the health industry and its allies in Congress and the media, the polls are pretty clear that people favor a greater government involvement in the health care system.
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The health care debate-3: Why profits should not be a factor in health care

(For previous posts on the issue of health care, see here.)

It is important to realize that in the single payer or socialized systems, everyone is covered and no one is denied coverage for lack of employment, pre-existing conditions and the like. Does that mean that one will be able to have any treatment that one desires whenever one desires it? Of course not. Whenever there is greater demand than resources available, there will always have to be decisions made as to how those resources are to be utilized, and invariably some treatments may be denied or delayed for some people.

The point is that this occurs even now in the private health insurance system that we have in the US. The difference, and it is a huge one, is that the private health insurance decisions about whom and what to treat are made by bean counters who are driven by the insatiable drive to make profits for their companies and who seek every means to deny treatment. There is almost nothing that ordinary people can do when they get shafted by the companies, because they are expert at giving you the run-around.

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In single-payer and socialized medicine, decisions about how to allocate resources are made by collectively by physicians, other health professionals, and public policy makers who try to maximize the benefits of the system with the resources they have. There is usually some kind of board that is responsible for the workings of the system, but unlike the boards of directors of private, profit-seeking health insurance companies, they do not personally benefit financially by limiting treatment. And if we do not like how the system is run, then we have power to change things in that we can either vote to give the system more resources (the way we vote levies for schools and libraries) or we can vote for a government that will make the changes we desire. The public ultimately controls the health care system, which is as it should be.

It is also important to realize that in both single payer and socialized systems that are in existence in other countries, people still have the option to buy private health insurance if they want extra services, so those people who want premium services can still have them.

Those who think that they have good insurance now in the US from the profit-seeking private health insurance companies and resist change towards a single-payer or socialized system might be in for a nasty shock when they actually get ill because the health insurance industry has entire teams of people whose sole job is to find ingenious ways to deny coverage. The US health care system is truly wonderful as long as you do not get sick. Reporter Lisa Girion of the Los Angeles Times of June 17, 2009 reports on how the insurance companies cancel the medical coverage of sick people after they are diagnosed, a practice known as ‘rescission’.

An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations showed that health insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period.

It also found that policyholders with breast cancer, lymphoma and more than 1,000 other conditions were targeted for rescission and that employees were praised in performance reviews for terminating the policies of customers with expensive illnesses.

Denial of coverage is mostly done by using the infamous ‘pre-existing conditions’ loophole. Insurance companies will go to great lengths to dig up something, anything, that can be used to deny claims and cancel coverage altogether. “A Texas nurse said she lost her coverage, after she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, for failing to disclose a visit to a dermatologist for acne… One employee, for instance, received a perfect 5 for “exceptional performance” on an evaluation that noted the employee’s role in dropping thousands of policyholders and avoiding nearly $10 million worth of medical care.”

Michael Moore’s film Sicko (see my review) interviewed people whose job was to do this and get rewarded for it by the insurance companies. This should be no surprise. After all, then president Richard Nixon approved of setting up the present employment based private health insurance system only after he was assured by his aide that “Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit… All the incentives are toward less medical care… the less care they give them, the more money they make… the incentives run the right way.” The present system is running exactly as they envisaged.

In May 2008 my younger daughter graduated from college so she immediately ceased to be on our health plan. But her job started only in August 2008 so we had to go through the dreary business of shopping around to get temporary coverage for the months of June and July before she got on her new company’s plan. That kind of irritation alone should be enough for people to want to ditch the present system in favor of one where coverage is decoupled from one’s employment status. For most people, the biggest nightmare about losing their job, or even changing it, is how to ensure health care for them and their families.

But that’s not all. When my daughter later went to the doctor for some minor treatment, the insurance company would not pay unless she could prove that it was not a ‘pre-existing condition’, which meant that we had to go back and get all the documentation about her two month temporary coverage. Even that was not enough and we had to get the paperwork of the coverage she had before that and submit that too. All this took a lot of time and the matter still has not been resolved. In the meantime she left that job and got a new one, so we don’t know what will happen now. But if she had not taken the precaution of getting temporary coverage for the two-month period of June and July 2008 (which happens to many people between jobs), and if we had not been conscientious about keeping all the paperwork, they would have simply denied her claims and she would have been on the hook for the entire amount. And there is nothing that we could have done about it.

Suzie Madrak relates an awful story about the hassle she went through when she injured her ankle. Because the injury occurred when she fell while getting down from a truck, her health insurance and auto insurance companies kept passing the buck to each other as being the party responsible for paying for treatment. This kind of thing simply would not happen in a single-payer or socialized system.

Anyone who has had to deal with the health insurance companies knows the aggravation that occurs routinely. The funny thing is that most Americans think this is normal because they have never known anything better. People in countries that have single-payer or socialized health systems never have to deal with an profit-making insurance bureaucracy that seeks to make money by denying treatment.

It is important to always bear in mind one undeniable fact: In the current system, it is that the primary mission of the private health insurance industry is to maximize the profits of their shareholders, not to provide good service to sick people.

The fact that finding ways to deny coverage is an important part of their profit-making strategy emerged once again when during congressional hearings last month, Rep. Bart Stupak, the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations asked each of the heads of the major health insurance companies whether he would at least commit his company to immediately stop rescissions except in cases where they could show intentional fraud. All of them said “No”, thus confirming that denying coverage to sick people by any means possible is a deliberate profit-seeking policy of these companies.

Unbelievable.

POST SCRIPT: Bill Maher makes a commercial for the American Medical Association

Wafergate

Some readers may remember my post on the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation where it is believed that during the communion service, the wafer and wine become the actual body and blood of Jesus. I took that idea to its logical conclusion and argued that if true it could be used to clone god.

I also wrote about the huge ruckus that a college student in Florida caused when he did not immediately consume the communion wafer and instead tried to take it back with him to his seat. He got into a scuffle with a woman who wanted him to return it and the student was threatened with violence, comparisons were made to a hostage taking, and there were threats to break into his dorm room and rescue the wafer being held ‘hostage’ by him.

The university even sent in armed guards to be present at future services to prevent any more hostages being taken. The Catholic diocese also sent in a team of nuns as added protection for the wafers, though no mention was made as to whether they too were packing heat.

Well, it turns out that when the Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper recently attended a memorial service in a Catholic church for a deceased dignitary, he may committed the same religious offense as the college student. Watch and see for yourself.

I can guess what happened. Non-Catholics are not supposed to receive communion in the Catholic Church. The prime minister is a Protestant and probably realized at the last minute, when he was in a line where everyone was about to be given the wafer by the priest, that he did not know what the proper protocol was to deal with it. Eating it may have been sacrilegious and refusing it or giving it back might have been seen as rude. As a non-Catholic he realized he was in danger of committing a religious faux pas and poor sap, like all politicians faced with a tricky decision, he decided to punt. He probably felt that the safe thing to do was to put it in his pocket and deal with it later, not realizing that what he did was worse than the other options. As one news report on what is being called Wafergate says:

[T]he handling of the host is no trivial matter. As a non-Catholic, the prime minister should probably have refused communion, and church officials should have been advised of this in advance. But once the communion wafer, considered the body of Jesus, was in the prime minister’s hand, it should have been consumed promptly or returned.

Of course, what he should have done when he was called on this was to admit that he had pocketed the wafer out of uncertainty about what to do and simply returned it. Even very religious people realize that their Byzantine rules are not understood by outsiders and would have forgiven him. But again, Harper’s political instincts to never admit a mistake kicked in and he denied pocketing it, deciding to brazen it out.

So he either still has the wafer or he has destroyed it in some way and removed the evidence. There is no word on whether the Mounties or an elite swat team of nuns are going to try and stage a rescue of the hostage wafer from the pockets of this infidel.

The were fears that the allegations that Harper pocketed the wafer may have caused some embarrassment for him when he later went to meet with the Pope.

If I were Harper’s advisor, I would have suggested that he give the Pope the pocketed wafer and say that he took it because he wanted to give the Pope a special gift, something with more meaning than a typical head of state gift like a painting or vase or an iPod. What could be more special to the Pope than getting a piece of the body of Christ?

POST SCRIPT: The real rulers

Government of Goldman-Sachs, by Goldman-Sachs, and for Goldman-Sachs.

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The health care debate-2: Combating the health industry propaganda

(For previous posts on the issue of health care, see here.)

In order to effectively combat the health industry propaganda that seeks to preserve the current terrible system, people need to have a clear idea of what the main issues are and get clear on what the various terms mean.

First of all, ‘universal’ coverage, by which is meant that everyone has access to some health care is not enough. It is possible to achieve this by demanding that everyone must purchase private health insurance (the way all drivers must purchase auto insurance) and then providing aid for those who cannot afford it. All this would do is put more victims in the clutches of the rapacious and inefficient private health insurance companies and increase their profits while not improving the system.
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God is everywhere

There is a famous and funny old sketch called the Five Minute University in which comedian Don Novello acts in his character of Father Guido Sarducci.

As he says, when the students study theology at his university, all they will learn are the answers to the two questions “Where is god?” (Answer: God is everywhere) and “Why?” (Answer: Because he likes you). I am beginning to think that the answer to the first question is absolutely correct.

Take a look at this picture of a cut tree stump that is in a churchyard in Ireland. What do you see?

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Nothing? Just a tree stump that someone has cut in an odd way? Oh ye of little faith! To the devout this looks like the Virgin Mary and they think its appearance is (what else?) a miracle. People are making pilgrimages to pray around it. Over 2,000 have signed a petition objecting to plans to uproot the stump, and want to convert it into a permanent shrine of some sort.

The thing that strikes me is that recently Jesus and Mary seem to be showing up all over the place, in slices of toast, grilled cheese sandwiches, womb ultrasounds, Marmite jar lid, Kit Kat bar, shower curtain, cheese curl, dental x-rays, mugs of hot chocolate, even on the backside of a dog or in bird droppings. Here are yet more sightings.

Such stories, apart from revealing religious people to be hopelessly credulous, also demonstrate how weak some people’s faith is, not how strong. It is only people who are really desperate for a sign to bolster their beliefs that will seize on such pathetic things as validating their faith. The woman who saw the Marmite Jesus ‘took comfort from the image’ saying, “I’m not particularly religious but I like to think it’s Jesus looking out for us.”

This kind of thing puts religious authorities in a quandary. On the one hand, they realize that if you have too many such sightings, religion begins to look more and more ridiculous. After all, if people start worshipping tree stumps, how can you distinguish so-called mainstream religion from more allegedly primitive religions, such as paganism. Some religions actually do involve tree-worship and the Christmas tree symbol itself likely began as one.

On the other hand, religious authorities cannot categorically debunk all of them as nonsense because their bread and butter depends on people believing that god can reveal himself to people on occasion even if it in this weird way. The problem for the church is that it wants to discourage freelancers and keep a monopoly on what qualifies as a revelation of god and what doesn’t as this is the source of their power and money. They tried to walk that fine line on this occasion too.

Local parish priest Fr Willie Russell said on radio station Limerick Live 95FM yesterday that people should not worship the tree. “There’s nothing there . . . it’s just a tree . . . you can’t worship a tree.”

A spokesman for the Limerick diocesan office said the “church’s response to phenomena of this type is one of great scepticism”.

“While we do not wish in any way to detract from devotion to Our Lady, we would also wish to avoid anything which might lead to superstition,” he said.

Fortunately for the spokesman, he was not asked what distinguishes this particular “superstition” from all the superstitions that the church expects people to believe, such as that the wafer and wine become transformed into the actual body and blood of Jesus when the priest mumbles some words over it. Mary-in-a-tree-stump is nothing compared to that.

Fortunately for the spokesman, he could depend on the ‘respect for religion’ nonsense to deter ‘polite’ reporters from asking such obvious questions.

That Mitchell and Webb Look reports on another miraculous sighting.

All these Jesus and Mary sightings and the comment in the above clip that the melon message blew his tomato message out of the water gave me an idea for a new reality TV series, because what the nation really needs is another reality show. This one would consist of people bringing their candidates for an authentic god appearance and making the case for it. Then a panel of theologians would give their comments, and the audience votes for which artifact is an actual miracle of god and then worship the ultimate winner.

I think a good title for the show would be “American Idol”. I hope no one has used it already.

UPDATE: Commenter Chris sent me this compilation of a huge number of Jesus sightings. There seems to be an epidemic.

POST SCRIPT: You mean the Earth isn’t 6,000 years old?

Watch this statement by Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen (R).

What is amazing is that her statement that the Earth is 6,000 years old is said so casually during a discussion of environmental concerns over uranium mining, as if it was the most commonplace fact in the world and not at all something idiotic and controversial. These people live in their own bubble world.

The health care debate-1: Clarifying the issues

(For previous posts on the issue of health care, see here.)

The late Walter Cronkite said, “America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.” And he was right. It is a rotten structure that has continued purely on the basis of its ability to fool people using smoke and mirrors into thinking it is better than it is. But the structure is so bad that the façade is crumbling and the need for reform cannot be hidden anymore.

As the health care reform debate gathers steam, those who benefit greatly from the current system (drug and health insurance companies, hospitals, and doctors) by making large amounts of money while delivering less than adequate care, and the members of Congress whom they effectively bribe to protect their interests, and the mainstream media which is always obsequious in advancing the interests of the business and political elite, are going flat out to preserve as much of their interests by either lying or fear-mongering or creating confusion. As all the various plans are debated, with their details, it is important to keep clear what the issues are, and the next series of posts will try to do that.
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The pernicious anti-tax attitude

The news is full of stories about the budget problems faced by the federal and state governments. But unlike the federal government which has ways to pay its bills without raising taxes, state governments have to balance their books the old fashioned way, by either reducing expenses or raising revenue or both.

But thanks to the anti-tax sentiment unleashed in 1978 by California’s passage of Proposition 13, we are now witnessing the fruits of the relentless propaganda over the past three decades that said that taxes are intrinsically evil and that lower taxes are always better.

When times are good and tax revenues are high, people demand that taxes be cut because it is ‘their’ money. When things turn sour, as they now have, people argue that to raise taxes would be to deepen the recession and that taxes should be cut even more to ‘stimulate the economy’, a phrase I have come to detest since it usually precedes some scam to siphon off wealth even more to the rich and to destroy the common good. So we have reached the stage when it has become an act of faith that it is always good to lower taxes and it is never good to raise them.
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The state of the Republican party

Immediately after the last election, I wrote a series of posts on the future of the Republican Party and said that where it ends up depends on the relative fortunes of the four elements within the party and which group or groups gain the ascendancy.

One bloc consists of old-style conservative Republicans, the ones who used to be known as ‘Rockefeller Republicans’. They consist of people who are pragmatic, technocratic, more managerial and less ideological in their outlook, people who want smaller government, fiscal restraint, balanced budgets, rule of law, respect for personal liberties, and a non-interventionist foreign policy.

The second group is the rank-and-file social values base for whom guns, gays, abortion, stem-cell research, flag, religion, homosexuality, and immigration are the main concerns. Many of these people belong to the lower and middle economic classes. These people were always the rank and file of the party, the ones who existed in large numbers in parts of the country and gave it voting clout, but they were never the leaders.

The third group is the Christianist leadership, people like Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and John Hagee, who claim to speak for the social values base but, as I argued in an earlier post, whose overriding allegiance is to a low-tax ideology (especially for the rich) at whatever cost, and who oppose any government programs that provide assistance to the poor.

The fourth group is the neoconservatives. The neoconservatives are the wild card in American politics, wreaking havoc wherever they go. Their interests lie less in domestic policies and more in creating a muscular foreign policy. They dream of America exercising hegemony over the world, using its might to destroy its enemies. They are firmly convinced that America is a force for good in the world and should not be shy about using its military, political, and economic muscle to dominate it. They see the interests of the US as almost identical to the interests of the hard-line right-wing segments of Israeli politics.

So what has happened since I wrote this? The situation has evolved but not clarified yet, but one interesting feature is how the four groups have started relating to Sarah Palin.

The old-style conservatives seem to have been routed and are even more marginalized than before. At this stage, they look like people unhappy with what the Republican Party has become and not sure if they can bring it back to what they see as sanity or whether it is hopelessly under the control of nutcases and they need to look for a new home. This group hates Palin with a passion, seeing her as perfectly symbolizing the depths to which their party has sunk. They despise her ignorance on the issues, her lack of competence, her fractured logic and syntax, her pride in despising learning, and her anti-intellectualism.

The second group has not grown larger but has grown more militant. It is digging in its heels and demanding to be in the party leadership and will not go back to their former role as mere foot soldiers. This group has always been made use of by their party leaders but never given a real shot at leadership. McCain’s choice of Palin changed that. For the first time, they felt that one of their own was close to the driver’s seat and they are not returning to the back of the bus. This group loves Sarah Palin and will not tolerate anyone who disparages her, which put them at direct loggerheads with the old-style conservative Republicans. Her abrupt resignation as governor of Alaska has not cooled their ardor. They see that, as they see everything she does, as a clever strategy. Whatever her next wacky stunt may be, it will be trumpeted as another example of her mavericky credentials and her policy of not practicing ‘politics as usual’. They fervently hope that she stays in politics and runs for president so that they can rally round her, although such an action probably dooms the party to a massive defeat and gives all the other potential Republican candidates the heebie-jeebies.

Jackie Broyles from Red State Update captures the views of this group precisely:

As for the third group, the Christianists, one does not hear much these days from Pat Robertson and John Hagee and the like. The Christianist leaders seem to be either on the wane or more likely are simply biding their time, waiting to see which of the candidates is most committed to their pro-rich/anti-poor/no-tax policies. They may simply be reeling from the string of sex-related scandals hitting their party and a little wary of aligning themselves too early with someone who may later taint them with scandal. They are political opportunists and although they may like Palin a lot, they love power more and would be quite willing to dump her and align themselves with someone who can win, even if that person is not completely aligned with their religion-based agenda.

The neo-conservatives within the party seem to be lying low too, licking their wounds after they lost the deep access to the high levels of the administration that they had under Bush/Cheney. But one can never write them off. They are always seeking to pursue their war-like agenda. This group is split on Palin. Since they love war and want the US to invade Iran and start fights with practically the entire Muslim world and renew the cold war with Russia, they are attracted to Palin because her own apocalyptic religious views make her sympathetic to these crazy ideas. On the other hand, they are also urbane intellectuals and Palin is simply not one of them. Some are uneasy that she could be a loose cannon they cannot control. Right now the neoconservatives are mostly a media presence on Fox News and other sites. If they think the Republicans are going to be losers for the foreseeable future, watch for them to make overtures to the Democratic Party, where they have some allies.

Probably the best barometer as to the fortunes of these groups is Fox News. The people and views that are given the most prominence on Fox are likely the ones on the upswing. So far, it seems to have dismissed the first group of old-style conservative Republicans and has tried to be the umbrella support group for the other three. It tried to drum up some enthusiasm for teabag parties, opposition to Sonia Sotomayor, and the like but those efforts seem to have fizzled, and so they seem to be resorting to even more extreme scare-mongering to raise the energy level of their supporters.

POST SCRIPT: The Daily Show on the Palin resignation

If Sarah Palin thought that she could avoid The Daily Show treatment by resigning just as they went on vacation, she misjudged them.

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A Friedman Prize?

As a childhood fan of the Peanuts comic strip, I enjoyed the running gag of Snoopy always beginning his novels with the line “It was a dark and stormy night.” It was only much later that I learned that this was a actual opening sentence of an 1830 novel Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

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Science fiction and futurism

While I was completely absorbed in reading Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, someone else saw me reading it and said that she had started it and had given up. When I asked why, she said that she did not like science fiction in general. But Atwood herself in some interviews has rejected the label of science fiction for her work, saying that she prefers to call it ‘futuristic’. She says that she is merely extrapolating from today’s science to see what the future might be like and that she does not postulate any radical new scientific ideas.
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