Public Healthcare, Socialism ands Such.

There is a freakin' difference between Communism and Socialism!

There is a huge difference between Marxism/Communism and socialism; not to mention Capitalism.

Capitalism.....free markets....blah....blah....blah. What does free trade have to do with it.....have to do with it?

We do not have free trade, we haven't had for as long as I have lived; 60 years.

Free trade is not the same as fair trade.

Bigger is not better!

Clinton Urges Obama To Stand Firm On A Strong Public Option: Don’t ‘Give Up The Store’ To Get 60 Votes

Yesterday, ThinkProgress joined a group of other progressive bloggers for a meeting with President Clinton at his office in Harlem. Clinton opened the discussion with details about his foundation work on areas such as HIV/AIDS and global warming, and the struggles he is having attracting new donors during the economic downturn.

Topics ranged from women’s rights to bridging the digital divide to the Waxman-Markey climate change legislation. Clinton also praised President Obama’s choice of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, saying that he thought “it was a good thing.” “Not just because she’s a woman, and Puerto Rican, and I know her and like her, and appointed her to the court…but I think it says that we’re going forward,” he said.

But some of his most extensive comments came on the subject of health care. Clinton said that due to political and economic conditions, Obama has a far better chance of passing health care than he did in 1993:

They’ve got a much different psychological and political landscape on which to operate. [...] Second, because of the current economic conditions, they don’t have the budget constraints I did. Keep in mind, I had just passed a budget in which we raised taxes on the wealthy, cut taxes on the working poor, and were on track to reducing the deficit, and there was no – we couldn’t raise taxes again. So when I had an employer-mandate, that in effect, guaranteed that the health insurance companies would be joined by the small business community – at least the organized small business community – which made it harder to pass.

Thirdly, he does not have a Republican leader who’s running for president. Bill Kristol sent Bob Dole a letter saying, “I know you like health care and I know you want to compromise with Bill Clinton” — which he told me he would do – “but if you let him pass anything, Democrats will be a majority for a generation. You’ve got to beat it off.” [...]

And finally – and most important of all – everything is worse now. The difference – the spread – in our spending and other people’s spending in ‘93, ‘94, was 14 percent of GDP on health care for us, 10 percent for our next highest competitor, Canada. Now the spread is 16 ½ to 11.

Clinton said that he believes Obama will work with the Senate to achieve the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. But he urged Obama to be ready to use the budget reconciliation process — which would require just 51 votes to pass health care — if necessary to achieve a progressive bill:

If he can’t get a good bill, I wouldn’t give away the store on that. If he can’t get a bill that’s genuine universal coverage, that genuinely is going to cut costs and make health insurers give up some of these unbelievable administrative burdens that they’ve put on people, and that really gets to the guts of the delivery system and does more primary preventive care and actually measures things that work, then I would go for the 51. But I would spend a little time trying to get to 60.

Listen here:

Other bloggers at yesterday’s meeting were Chris Bowers of Open Left, who has a post up about Clinton’s climate change remarks; Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns and Money, who has a summary of the discussion; and nyceve of Daily Kos and Laurie Edwards of A Chronic Dose of Reality, both of whom reported on Clinton’s health care remarks.

Transcript:

CLINTON: First of all, one of the things I worry about with Congress is – You know that old parable about once a cat sits on a hot stove, the problem is it will never sit on a cold stove either? So you tend to assume that whatever the political landmines were in ‘93, ‘94 – when we were doing this – still exist.

Let me back up and say, when the Democrats won the Congress in 2006, the morning after the election I told Hillary – I said, “I don’t care what the mainstream, conventional wisdom is. You know, unless we nominate a bank robber, the nominee of the Democratic party will be the next president.” Because America has now – Mostly because starting in ‘98, we had heavy majority support for not only the performance of the administration, but basically for the philosophy of – it wasn’t necessarily more left, it was more communitarian, the idea that we had to go forward together. That we couldn’t stand this level of inequality, we couldn’t stand this level of social division.

SPEAKER: Common good.

CLINTON: Yeah. And that began to be the operative mode of America. It was truncated by 9/11. Even in 2002, you go back and look at the New York Times survey. … It was three weeks before the election. It said that undecided voters by a 20-something percent margin, other things being equal, would like to vote for a Democrat for Congress because they thought the Bush administration was going to far to the right. The only reason they won seats in 2002 was because they made up that homeland security issue. It was just made up out of whole cloth.

Then in 2004, President Bush won re-election, but it was the smallest victory margin of any president re-elected since Woodrow Wilson in 1916 before World War I, and no wartime president had ever been defeated. In 2006, when the Democrats won, we were out of this 9/11 straight-jacket – emotional straight-jacket. And finally, we had seen what the consequences of what had been advocated, in terms of cultural divisions, since Nixon’s election in ‘68; in terms of economic and social divisions since Reagan’s election in ‘80. Those guys all got a free ride because the Democrats in Congress blocked what they wanted to do. We never got to see how it would work until President Bush got a Republican Congress. So we then became more communitarian.

Therefore, President Obama and the Congress – they need to know this. They’ve got a much different psychological and political landscape on which to operate. It doesn’t mean that people still aren’t skeptical of government, it doesn’t mean that people still can’t buy into these other arguments. But it’s a different landscape. First.

Second, because of the current economic conditions, they don’t have the budget constraints I did. Keep in mind, I had just passed a budget in which we raised taxes on the wealthy, cut taxes on the working poor, and were on track to reducing the deficit, and there was no – we couldn’t raise taxes again. So when I had an employer-mandate, that in effect, guaranteed that the health insurance companies would be joined by the small business community – at least the organized small business community – which made it harder to pass.

Thirdly, he does not have a Republican leader who’s running for president. Bill Kristol sent Bob Dole a letter saying, “I know you like health care and I know you want to compromise with Bill Clinton” — which he told me he would do – “but if you let him pass anything, Democrats will be a majority for a generation. You’ve got to beat it off.” And then we just had an automatic filibuster for everything. So you don’t have any of that; all that stuff’s gone.

And finally – and most important of all – everything is worse now. The difference – the spread – in our spending and other people’s spending in ‘93, ‘94, was 14 percent of GDP on health care for us, 10 percent for our next highest competitor, Canada. Now the spread is 16 ½ to 11. That’s $800 billion a year that we’re just throwing away because we’re not getting – Nobody else insures less than 100 percent. We’ve got what, 45 million people uninsured?

SPEAKER: 50.

CLINTON: get worse health outcomes. So it’s all worse. [...]

Even the health insurance companies say they’ve got to try to [pass it], number one. Number two, the small business community is not a guaranteed opposition. Number three, the American Medical Association says they’re against a public plan, but that’s because they think they get underpaid for Medicare and Medicaid. We’ll come back to that. And number four, we’ve got a more modern, more supportive Congress. So I think all that argues that we could get u50. Whatever it is. Huge number. And we don’t get better health outcomes; we niversal coverage. But the problem is, they’ve got to change the delivery system enough to get costs down so that we’ll still have universal coverage five years from now.

Keep in mind we have to examine this health care thing in light of all – And let me just say, I strongly supported the President’s stimulus program and the general outlines of what they’re trying to do on housing, and financing, and automobiles, and everything else. But because President Bush – because of the recession and because President Bush passed all those tax cuts for upper-income people like me, which I opposed – we had to borrow the money to do all this. And that’s why you see – I don’t know if you’ve been watching this, but the interest rates are creeping back up now, and people may be more reluctant to buy our debt, so that’s why President Obama went to Green Bay, WI, which has a good health care delivery system and is getting better results at lower costs to do it. [...]

The other thing that people keep talking about is how complicated my bill was. You know, there’s a reason President Obama hasn’t presented a bill here. The fact is, my bill replaced hundreds of more pages of federal law than it added. It was a net simplification of the current system. The current system looks like Rube Goldberg on steroids. And so – But he’s not going to have to worry about – I think we’re going to get past the filibuster, and I think they’ll be tough enough to go to 51 votes. But they would prefer, for his long-term relationships with Congress, it would be better if we could get the 60 votes. So what I think they’ll do is go for the 60, but if it seems that people are just dug in taking positions that don’t make any sense, then I think they’ll go back to plan B. That would be my preference, because he’s got to think about what it’s going to be like next year, and the year after, and the year after, and all of that.

CHART: Wouldn’t it be nice to win one of these once in awhile?

CLINTON: What?

CHART: Wouldn’t it be nice to just win, instead of thinking about the 60 votes and the relationships?

CLINTON: No, no. I think he will win. If he can’t get a good bill, I wouldn’t give away the store on that. If he can’t get a bill that’s genuine universal coverage, that genuinely is going to cut costs and make health insurers give up some of these unbelievable administrative burdens that they’ve put on people, and that really gets to the guts of the delivery system and does more primary preventive care and actually measures things that work, then I would go for the 51. But I would spend a little time trying to get to 60.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Poor, Poor Billy Bob Scranton....and the rest of us.

As the news media hyperventilates about lapel pins, whether or not Obama's ex-preacher loves America and some guy who belonged to a "subversive group" 40 years ago, when Obama was 8 years of age, and tangentially knows Obama today, I've been thinking about some of those illusive real issues we all talk about daily in the blogosphere but which rarely make it onto the TeeVee news or into the printed page of the nation's newspapers, like domestic spying, the barely starting world-wide economic collapse, a planetary meltdown no one can any longer deny and not sound like an escapee from the flat earth society, domestic spying of ungodly proportions, war crimes of a particularly heinous nature, admitted to by the war-criminal-in-chief and done with our blood, treasure and, if we are all honest, our knowledge, at least after April 2004 and, of course, the wholesale shredding of what was left of our constitution.

Then, of course, there was the "bitter Pennsylvanians comment." I thought the flag would surely fall that day and for the week that followed. Sad thing is, I know exactly how I would feel if I were one of those people and bitter wouldn't come close to describing it.

Guess what! It's just gonna get worse, for our compatriots in Pennsylvania and for many, many others all across this country. It's gonna get worse all over this planet, but I shall try to stick to our country for the moment. It's about all I can handle for now and you shall soon see why.
The fact is, we all know what Obama meant about the bitterness and his reference to clinging to guns and religion. He was talking about wedge issues. He meant that some people will allow wedge issues to drive them to such distraction that they will vote against their own self interest and that of their progeny, year after election year. The Republicans, in particular have turned wedge issues into an art form. Me thinks that this year just might be different. Let us all hope that it will be different and that it's not to late.

But just in case, my fellow independents and all other visitors, let me spin out a scenario for you, after some reassurances and bad news for a few of my own known compatriots:

1) No one is going to take your guns away, unless you think you need a 50 caliber weapon, which could bring down an airplane, with which to go buck hunting and an automatic assault weapons for the shooting range. If that is the case, you are blind as a bat and probably should not be firing a gun, fools. No, it is not a slippery slope. Any knot-head knows that we do need hunters. Without them, herds of animal life grow to thick, many would become ill and die from some pretty horrible diseases. So, thank you, hunters. Were it not for the hunters who abide by the laws and show good common sense, our over-presence on this planet would bring more harm than it already is. I personally do not have a problem with guns for protection in many circumstances.

However, lets not be totally delusional here. If anyone actually thinks, as I have heard some say, that the second amendment right to bear arms is for the very good reason of protecting the people from a government gone mad, no longer functioning as the government of a Democratic Republic but, rather, as a tyrannical government, using the most efficient means available at the time, to oppress the people. While I agree with the sentiment, the whole idea is quite nuts today. I have a pistol which once belonged to my father, but I do not delude myself that it would protect me from my own government, should that become necessary, unless I plan to put a bullet in my own brain.

2) Josh and Ken will not be getting married anytime soon, no matter who is in the White House, though they may well gain their civil rights. Anyone who does not have a problem with other people being denied their civil rights is just begging to have their own taken away, and much sooner than they would ever guess.

3) Roe V. Wade may well be overturned by the Supremes, but I doubt it. The GOP will have a collective meltdown should that happen. Without abortion, they might not win another election for 7 generations. Even if Roe v. Wade is shot down, it will not stop abortion any more than outlawing plants made our kids safe from drugs. More people will die as a result of outlawing abortion, just as they have in the war on drugs. The poor will suffer to a far greater extent than the wealthy. That's what happens with, essentially, unenforceable laws; always has, always will.

4) No one is going to outlaw any nutty belief system, unless those who harbor such belief systems also begin amassing a medium to large arsenal and/or are suspected of physically or sexually abusing children. (It matters not how psychologically abusive such people and their belief systems are to adults and children. No one cares if they mess with your head as long as that's all they do.)

So, what is going to happen? Let's speculate based on the headlines of today and the recent past:

More human beings will die in Iraq, possibly Iran and the entire world if BushCo starts a nuclear conflagration and who would put it passed them?

The American economy will collapse, starting a worldwide collapse that will make the Great Depression look like a slight correction in the markets.

The U.S. will be a second rate country in about 5 years time, if not sooner as the dollar hits bottom and bounces. Visualize soup kitchens, people dying from the cold in winter and heat strokes in summer; numbers of people too big for the news media to ignore, as is their current practice, unless it happens in "old Europe," of course.

China will be the only remaining superpower. Russia will revert to some form of Communism and will be China's greatest ally. The U.S. will have no clout, thanks to the greedy, lustful idiots in the White House and their friends in Congress, as China and Russia make alliances with South and Central American countries.

Americans will be shocked to learn that government databases and corporate databases will be one and the same, for all practical purposes, as governmental agencies inform private corporations of questionable behavior on the part of their customers which has been gleaned from satellite photos, medical records, credit card information and such.

For example, let's take Billy Bob Scranton. Mr Scranton is a gun-toting, church-going, good old boy who is today's real kind of hero; one every child should have in his/her life, be it man or woman.

He takes very good care of his wife and child. They can afford to work schedules so that their kids do not have to spend huge chunks of time at home alone or running the streets. Everyone likes Billy. He coaches Little League baseball and soccer. He's the kind of man you know you can rely on in a pinch. He has no criminal record and is kind to the elderly, little children and the family dog. He's a nice guy and anyone who knows him will tell you that.

One day he finds out from his employer that his health insurance premiums have skyrocketed, over night. His health insurance company has learned that he routinely eats fast food for lunch, consistently drives 10 miles over the speed limit on a state highway near his home (never mind that he does this late at night when there is not another car in sight), drinks beer several times a week at a neighborhood bar. He also has a medical history of elevated blood pressure, high cholesterol levels and is 15 pounds over-weight. If he cares so little for his health, he is informed, why should other responsible people in the group have to pay higher premiums? Billy's habits are simply too expensive. He is going to have fun finding another insurance company that won't rob him forty ways from Sunday. Think it can't happen? It's already happened. All Kinds of insurance companies have done background searches, and worse, for years. Only the tools have have changed and become far more efficient

A week later he gets a letter from his car insurer. They have learned that he had several seizures of unknown origin when he was a teenager. They will no longer insure him at all, as it is against their policy to insure anyone who has ever had seizures that could possibly reoccur, but he can contact the good folks at highwayrobbery.com for a quote. They often insure folks who are risky. Of course, Billy will have to undergo an entire neurological workup at his own expense to be insured by them.

Our friend, Billy is in big trouble. No, he has committed no real crime. Of course, there is the speeding thing, but no one is threatening to put him in jail or anything like that. There are no scary judges, no judgmental jury; just the rest of his life without cost effective insurance.

There is no public transportation where Billy lives. There is a cab service. It Could be that the cab service is owned by the same people who own highwayrobbery.com. Their pricing is similar.

Naturally, his wife's insurance premiums go up as well. After all, she had the bad judgment to marry such an "irresponsible schmuck" in the first place. The kids can forget driving as long as Dad is still paying the bills.

(If you have teenage boys, you might as well move to a huge city the moment they are born and teach them all about subways and trams.)

Billy never worried about all the government and corporate data-mining, domestic spying nor even the satellites that were going to be used against Americans as law enforcement tools. "Hell," Billy said, "I don't break the law. I'm not worried about that stuff. I want 'em to get the terrorists, the drug dealers, illegal immigrants and all the other scum who are ruining this country."

What Billy didn't understand is that he was breaking the one major, while unspoken, law that simply must not be broken in a uniquely American fascist society: Thou shalt not cost thy corporate overlord one red cent more than necessary.

Two months later, his father and mother have lost their house to some reverse mortgage or other financial scheme and have no savings, as his father had been a pilot for an airline and his pension had suddenly ceased to exist several years before, but they hadn't told Billy as they didn't wish to worry him.

His brother had, however, burdened him with the knowledge that he had lost his good software-writing job to a guy from Saudi Arabia who had a work VISA for two or three years, would work for less and didn't need insurance, as his family has more money than god. Oil wealth, you know.

Poor Billy. His friends would love to help him out, as he has many of them so often, but the plant that keeps the town afloat has just closed and they are scrambling to move away from Billy's dying town, if they can afford to go.

As his father's car pulls into the driveway, pulling a small U-haul trailer behind it, Billy is reminded of what he used to say about Social Security and Medicare: "These are socialist programs that have no place in America. Everybody ought to take care of his own. That's how I feel about it!"

No criminal he, our Billy's life has gone, in less than three months, from a happy, ordinary life to a rapidly approaching nightmare. He has a wife, three kids, a mother, father, brother and a hound named Mulder. He is one accident or major illness away from ruin. So is his entire family.

How in God's name did this happen?

Quietly, Billy....oh so quietly.



The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

WTF Do We Do?

The Malign Magic of Misdirection
By Terry J. Allen
In These Times

Tuesday 04 March 2008

It’s the oldest trick in the book. The magician flashes the shiny object to misdirect the audience’s attention from the real action. In the theater of politics and economics, the magic consists in getting people to focus on poor options so as to shift their sight from wider, more fundamental possibilities for reform. Distracted by half-truths and seduced by shortsighted strategies, we squander time, energy and political capital.

Think of it as the plastic vs. paper bag choice at the grocery store checkout line. Forget about parsing the relative carbon footprints and recycling potentials. Even if one bag is marginally less worse for the environment, both paper and plastic are lousy solutions. Reusable bags are the way to go.

Misdirection proliferates: We are distracted by arguments over such fundamentally flawed propositions as whether it is unhealthy to drink milk from cows dosed with bovine growth hormones (BGH) or eat meat from cloned cows.

Or whether increasing gas mileage of cars, substituting alternative fuels and switching to hybrids are effective strategies for countering global warming.

Should we help the environment by consuming Midwest lamb rather than chops all the way from New Zealand?

How can we alter lifestyle choices to lower cancer risks?

Is irradiated food toxic?

Is Sen. Hillary Clinton’s or Sen. Barack Obama’s proposal the better solution to America’s healthcare crisis?

Although each of these misdirections glitters with argumentative allure, they give aid and comfort to sloppy thinking and relatively trivial positions. The wrong question is unlikely to yield the right answer.

The problem with cloned meat, BGH milk and irradiated food is not the danger to personal health. Even if real, these risks pale in comparison to economic and environmental effects.

Safe to eat or not, meat from cloned animals should be banned because the proliferation of such herds would strengthen the worst aspects of factory farming and weaken the genetic pool. Cloned herds would take enormous up-front costs and become a monoculture crop of genetically identical animals susceptible to the same stresses and diseases.

The key harm from treating a dairy herd with BGH is not to us, but to cows and independent farmers. The treated cows burn out quickly and get sick; the farmers become economically dependent on chemical companies for the next fix of the drug.

And the larger impact of irradiated food is to allow manufacturers to sell fecal matter-laced foods, create a market for nuclear waste, and endanger workers and the environment. The argument over whether irradiated food is safe to eat is largely a distraction.

While raising fuel economy for the family car is a good thing, it is no substitute for an extensive public transportation system. Nor is the switch to biofuels—which raises global food prices by diverting farms from food production, encourages clearing new land and, in the case of palm oil production, devastates communities and the environment. Rather than providing an economically and environmentally sound solution to the oil crisis and global warming, these short-sighted choices allow us to perpetuate an insane system.

As for the lamb chops: It turns out that the carbon foot (hoof?) print of New Zealand lamb, which graze in open pastures, is lower than that of Midwest sheep that rely on factory farming, drugs, and grain raised with pesticides and chemical fertilizers. But the distinction is tiny. The critical problem centers around the amount of meat we eat and the way we raise animals.

When it comes to cancer, until research money goes into examining the effects of carcinogens in the environment, and until we ban the poisons, lifestyle tinkering will do little to lower most cancer rates. (Smoking being the big exception.) But eliminating environmental carcinogens is less profitable than treatment—and far less attractive to pharmaceutical companies or to politicians reaping largess from polluting corporations.

And finally, neither the Obama nor the Clinton health insurance plan does the one thing essential to lowering costs and improving access to quality healthcare: Eliminate profit from the system by cutting out the insurance companies and for-profit hospitals. By shying away from fully funding healthcare with tax money, both plans diddle around the edges of the problem and create convoluted systems that diffuse demands for fundamental change.

When the magician is waving the shiny object, it is sometimes hard to focus on the other hand that is quietly picking our pockets and stealing our future.

---

Contact Terry J. Allen at tallen@igc.org.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Why Isn't Healthcare A National Security Matter?

Why I'm Suing the Bush Administration
By Governor Eliot Spitzer
The Huffington Post

Tuesday 02 October 2007

Somebody had to do it.

After months of negotiation and countless attempts at compromise, the Bush administration is still refusing to let New York and other states across the country expand their State Children's Health Insurance Programs (SCHIP). The president is refusing to back down from destructive new rules his Administration has imposed - the sole purpose of which are to curb bi-partisan state efforts to insure more of our nation's children.

The reason? As the president himself put it: "I mean, people have access to health care in America. They can just go to the emergency room."

It is this politics of "not my problem" that has led to the health crisis we have today.

The bureaucratic barriers to coverage the Bush administration has imposed are not only fundamentally misguided, but also illegal.

They conflict with the statute authorizing SCHIP. Moreover, they were issued without the opportunity for public comment, as required by federal law. Accordingly, I have joined Democratic and Republican governors from states across the country to bring a lawsuit challenging these new rules in court.

It didn't have to come to this. There is widespread bipartisan support for expanding SCHIP. Even many members of the president's own party have recognized how out-of-touch he is with the American people, and instead have chosen to support compromise legislation in Congress repealing these arbitrary rules.

Unfortunately, President Bush has repeatedly threatened to veto this bipartisan bill. In justifying his position, his administration has tapped into the politics of fear - branding the effort as "socialism."

Of course, SCHIP has nothing to do with socialism. The government would be the payer, not the provider of care, and families would have a range of private plans from which to choose. But instead of engaging on the merits, the right wing has pulled out socialism from their parade of horribles in order to frighten the public.

The president has also said that those children who already have insurance will choose to give up their coverage in order to join the program.

If you talk to doctors, health care professionals, and state leaders across the country like I have, they know the President is flat-out wrong.

These are the facts.

In New York, we want to expand coverage to every uninsured child in our state. And even though experience at the state level has shown that few children drop their existing coverage in favor of SCHIP, we have instituted some of the most stringent protections in the country in order to both prevent any potential problem and satisfy the White House.

The Bush administration, however, refuses to compromise and work with us to cover these children.

Ultimately, the president just doesn't get it. There is a health care crisis in this country, but he continues to ignore the problem while vulnerable children without insurance "just go to the emergency room."

We all know the statistics. There are 400,000 uninsured children in New York. There are 8 million uninsured children in the United States.

These staggering figures are intolerable. On both a moral and practical level, we cannot allow this to stand. The president, however, continues to say the status quo is acceptable.

Children should not have to wait until they get sick enough to go the emergency room to receive treatment. Rather, they need preventive and primary care. Ensuring that children with health problems are diagnosed and treated in a timely manner will save money and save lives.

It is imperative that we all come together to reverse the Bush administration's attempt to override the will of Congress, the will of the states, and the needs of our children.

We will continue to defend our nation's kids - even if the President will not.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

It's Your Turn, Senator Clinton

Something had damned well better be done about healthcare in this country and soon.

I have wondered from day one why national healthcare is not a national security issue. If there is even a moderate chance that a serious outbreak of some deadly virus or bacteria could be unleashed by terrorists in this country, national healthcare should have been priority the minute antrax began flying around the mail system.

That never seemed to occur to anyone, which makes me wonder about the level of smarts we have in Washington or about true nature of the anthrax attacks and all the horror stories the adminstration has waved around as a an excuse for an illegal war.

Obama in Second Place

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Monday 04 June 2007

One of the lessons journalists should have learned from the 2000 election campaign is that what a candidate says about policy isn't just a guide to his or her thinking about a specific issue - it's the best way to get a true sense of the candidate's character.

Do you remember all the up-close-and-personals about George W. Bush, and what a likeable guy he was? Well, reporters would have had a much better fix on who he was and how he would govern if they had ignored all that, and focused on the raw dishonesty and irresponsibility of his policy proposals.

That's why I'm not interested in what sports the candidates play or speculation about their marriages. I want to hear about their health care plans - not just for the substance, but to get a sense of what kind of president each would be. Would they hesitate and triangulate, or would they push hard for real change?

Now, back in February John Edwards put his rivals for the Democratic nomination on the spot, by coming out with a full-fledged plan to cover all the uninsured. Suddenly, vague expressions of support for universal health care weren't enough: candidates were under pressure to present their own specific plans.

And the question was whether those plans would be as bold and comprehensive as the Edwards proposal.

Four months have passed since then. So far, all Hillary Clinton has released are proposals to help reduce health care costs. It's worthy stuff, but it's hard to avoid the sense that she's putting off dealing with the hard part. The real test is how she proposes to cover the uninsured.

But last week Barack Obama, after getting considerable grief for having failed to offer policy specifics, finally delivered a comprehensive health care plan. So how is it?

First, the good news. The Obama plan is smart and serious, put together by people who know what they're doing.

It also passes one basic test of courage. You can't be serious about health care without proposing an injection of federal funds to help lower-income families pay for insurance, and that means advocating some kind of tax increase. Well, Mr. Obama is now on record calling for a partial rollback of the Bush tax cuts.

Also, in the Obama plan, insurance companies won't be allowed to deny people coverage or charge them higher premiums based on their medical history. Again, points for toughness.

Best of all, the Obama plan contains the same feature that makes the Edwards plan superior to, say, the Schwarzenegger proposal in California: it lets people choose between private plans and buying into a Medicare-type plan offered by the government.

Since Medicare has much lower overhead costs than private insurers, this competition would force the insurance industry to cut costs - making our health-care system more efficient. And if private insurers couldn't or wouldn't cut costs enough, the system would evolve into Medicare for all, which is actually the best solution.

So there's a lot to commend the Obama plan. In fact, it would have been considered daring if it had been announced last year.

Now for the bad news. Although Mr. Obama says he has a plan for universal health care, he actually doesn't - a point Mr. Edwards made in last night's debate. The Obama plan doesn't mandate insurance for adults. So some people would take their chances - and then end up receiving treatment at other people's expense when they ended up in emergency rooms. In that regard it's actually weaker than the Schwarzenegger plan.

I asked David Cutler, a Harvard economist who helped put together the Obama plan, about this omission. His answer was that Mr. Obama is reluctant to impose a mandate that might not be enforceable, and that he hopes - based, to be fair, on some estimates by Mr. Cutler and others - that a combination of subsidies and outreach can get all but a tiny fraction of the population insured without a mandate. Call it the timidity of hope.

On the whole, the Obama plan is better than I feared but not as comprehensive as I would have liked. It doesn't quell my worries that Mr. Obama's dislike of "bitter and partisan" politics makes him too cautious. But at least he's come out with a plan.

Senator Clinton, we're waiting to hear from you.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Healthcare may be what destroys Hillary

It's conventional wisdom that if Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign falters with Democratic activists in places like Iowa and New Hampshire, it will be over the issue of the Iraq war. And her vacillations on the war.

Yet the dividing-line issue in the upcoming primaries may turn out to be not Iraq, but health care. And just like on Iraq, the Democratic base is in no mood for timidity and half-way measures and vague rhetoric. Most rank-and-file Democrats support government-provided national health insurance: enhanced Medicare for All.

And that's no secret to the candidates. This is how the Washington Post described Hillary Clinton's recent, maiden voyage into Iowa as a candidate:

In keeping with her expressed desire to hold a "conversation with Iowans," Clinton asked at one point for a show of hands from the audience, asking them to declare whether they preferred an employer-based system of insurance, a system that mandates all individuals to purchase insurance, with help from the government if necessary, or one modeled on the Medicare system.

Overwhelmingly the audience favored moving toward a Medicare-like system for all Americans.

A show of hands in almost any roomful of Democratic activists will produce the same result: they want a single-payer "Medicare-like system for all Americans." According to the Post, Clinton told the Iowa group: "I'm not ready to be specific until I hear from people."

Pressure from the base on Clinton and other Democratic contenders to get specific will intensify in the early states -- mobilized by groups such as Progressive Democrats of America, Healthcare Now, National Nurses Organizing Committee and Physicians for a National Healthcare Program. So far, none of the sitting senators seeking the nomination are supporting Medicare for All, though former Sen. John Edwards may be coming close. Rep. Dennis Kucinich for years has been a leading supporter in the House.

That single-payer is the rational, cost-effective way to reform healthcare is an easy case to make -- and was eloquently argued last month by respected Democratic party activist and lawyer Guy T. Saperstein. Despite spending twice as much money on healthcare as other industrialized nations, our system fails to cover 47 million people and generally performs poorly. Experts point to the main cause of the failure -- a private insurance bureaucracy that soaks up nearly one-third of all healthcare dollars in waste, profits, paperwork, commissions and advertising.

Insurance companies don't treat or heal patients; they just suck the healthcare system dry of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Adding pressure on Democratic presidential candidates was last month's reintroduction of "The U.S. National Health Insurance Act," HR 676, authored by Rep. John Conyers and soon expected to have 80 congressional cosponsors. This Expanded & Improved Medicare for All Bill would fully cover every American, thanks to cost-savings. In its first year, single-payer would save over $150 billion on paperwork alone, and $50 billion though rational bulk order purchasing of medications. Care will be privately delivered by healers and hospitals, but publicly financed -- with no bills, co-pays, deductibles, denials or medically induced bankruptcies.
Every Democratic aspirant will be asked where they stand on HR 676, which is endorsed by 225 labor organizations. Over the years, a common-sense single-payer approach has been endorsed by Consumers Union, some corporate CEOs and 20,000 physicians. Only one force in society stands in the way: the insurance industry. And that sector donates heavily to many "top tier" Democrats.

As healthcare emerges as a dividing-line issue among Democratic candidates, expect mainstream media to tell us the story of Hillary Clinton's healthcare initiative as "First Lady" in 1993. And expect every fact in the retelling to be wrong. Why? Because they got almost every fact wrong at the time. Clinton did not support single-payer; she resolutely stood against popular legislation led by Sen. Paul Wellstone, Conyers and Rep. Jim McDermott, then one of two "doctors in the House."

Indeed, Clinton's proposal was aimed at "reforming" healthcare while keeping a handful of huge insurance companies in the center of the system. No surprise since those firms helped draw up her complicated and bureaucratic "managed competition" scheme, through the industry-dominated Jackson Hole Study Group. A Mother Jones writer in 1993 described the assignment given Hillary by the White House: Build us a better, leaner, cheaper mousetrap (healthcare system) -- but make sure you include a player piano (private insurance giants) in the middle of your contraption.

In late 1993, Hillary's plan came under attack by devious TV ads sponsored by an outfit called the Health Insurance Association of America, acting on behalf of smaller and medium-sized insurance companies. These smaller firms were furious that the Clinton plan would wipe them out and concentrate the industry in a handful of insurers like Aetna and Cigna. (Not unlike what happened to broadcasting under Clintonite media "reform.")

The November election has already changed the terms of the national debate on Iraq. If progressives mobilize, we can also use this moment (and the upcoming presidential primaries) to transform the healthcare debate.

And one day soon we may get what other advanced countries already have: a healthcare system that works, with nonprofit insurance for all.

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.