I was encouraged to watch the Affordable Health Care for America Act, or H.R. 3962, pass the House.
http://docs.house.gov/rules/health/111_ahcaa.pdf
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/66851-breaking-house-passes-healthcare-reform
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/11/08/health.care/index.html
It’s not over yet. Insurance company executives are pushing Democratic Senators and their staff to jettison this effort. The vote will be tighter on the Senate side. Money is being spent to protect current practices and future profits. Disinformation campaigns abound.
Progressives are doing what they can to combat the influence of big spending health insurance companies. Today my e-mail inbox had a fundraising appeal from Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee, asking for money to secure this bill in the Senate. Their words:
The final Senate bill hasn’t even been released yet, but the insurance companies are already pressing hard for a filibuster to bury it…the coming days will put our efforts to the ultimate test. Winning will require each of us to give everything we can, starting right now.
https://donate.barackobama.com/History
I’ve been receiving these emails for months. Individuals are pouring in their $5, $10, and $15 have swayed the debate. We may not have as much money as the insurance industry, but it can be well-directed with the right strategies and timeliness.
For example, Moveon.org sent a message a few days ago, asking me to pledge to oppose a certain political incumbent outside my district in the primaries next year, if that person chose to vote no. Lots of “ifs” there, but a clear and present danger for that politician. Within a few hours, over $5 mil was pledged from individuals.
Abortion rights were left in the dust at the last-minute. I support a woman’s right to choose if and when she has children, and yet I understand the feelings and views of the opposite side. My compassion to acknowledge both sides has been a long time coming. With the current power of anti-abortion politicians and their (primarily Christian) constituents, I can understand how this loss occurred. It is a huge loss to me.
At root, the abortion issue is about children. I believe abortion polemics obscures the real crisis, of real little people left day after day with no one to call their own. Regardless of your belief in a woman’s right to choose, please consider adopting, fostering, or mentoring a child. Children who are already here need love, guidance, and resources from adults. We may disagree on the issue of abortion, but perhaps we can agree that children need us, and when we get old, we need them.
For every child who is abandoned, forgotten, and institutionalized, I say this culture is sick. I want to live in a world where every single kid is happily adopted across the continents, and there are no foster agencies, and our culture can assure pregnant women who are unwilling or unable to care for a child to go ahead with their pregnancy because at the other end, that child will be adopted and have an excellent start in life.
Back to the Bill. Abortion rights were sacrificed by progressive Democrats in order to get the bill passed, to overhaul Medicare, extend health insurance coverage for uninsured Americans, create a public option to compete with private insurers, set up a health insurance exchange, and remove pre-existing conditions and recessions from the profit margins of health care insurance companies.
The practice of recessions and pre-existing condition exclusions is morally reprehensible. Health insurance companies carve huge profits by excluding people with pre-existing conditions they consider a risk to their profits and jerking coverage away from those who do get sick, leaving them to die. Is death for profit part of the capitalist model? These are not the efficiencies we need in health care.
The efficiencies we need are systematic and incremental improvements developed and measured by medical professionals and administrators. This article goes into what it means to be efficient, and is worth your time:
According to this article and others I have read, the fee-for-service model in health care traps providers into generating income from wasteful tests and procedures, and penalizes them for any systemic improvements they make. To the extent this fee-for-service model is protected by any entity, we will continue to experience increases in health care costs.
I have heard the term “Wall Street Investors” for those who benefit from health insurance industry profits. The irony is that we are the evil investors, to the extent that our broad 401(k) holdings preclude us from making investment choices for or against specific companies. The people who developed this mutual fund model would prefer your 401(k) investments delivered in gigantic chunks without any questions on your part. Do not pay attention to what your money is funding; think about your profits over time. As I consider the malfeasance of health insurance companies (and the banking and financial systems), this thought has come forward to gain my attention. Our retirement dollars turn out to be the “real money” in Wall Street that is being leveraged and gambled and recklessly frittered away, and I’m scrambling to figure out what to do about it.
I would like the ability to securely invest (pre-tax) in American small and micro-businesses, on decent terms for my fellow Americans, outside the aegis of a banking and investment system that has gone utterly corrupt. Small business is where I want my money to do its magic, to help small businesses succeed and to gain reasonable profits for my future retirement. Small business entrepreneurs cannot find decent loans, and are forced to secure their start-up funds from credit cards whose terms tip the scale toward usury. Tell me if you know of any investment models similar to the Grameen Foundation microcredit societies that could work for us. And by us I mean the American people who might want to have a choice in how their money is invested.
Illegal immigrant workers have been toasted in this health care debate. Illegal immigrant health care is a subject most progressives choose to ignore. We allow the Right to defame and lambast this voiceless community like whipping a donkey tied to a post. We are not the only country who tries to ignore the reality that illegals find work here, get sick or injured, and die without access to health care.
Ignoring illegal immigrants is like ignoring slavery. We benefit from the work of illegal immigrants. A few years ago, my daughter and I marched through the streets of Seattle with thousands of illegals, mostly Latinos from a dozen countries, yelling, “Si se puede,” “Yes we can!” with helicopters flying overhead. Why was I compelled to do this? I did not know a single person. My homemade sign read, “We Need You.” Some old latino men sprouted tears when they read that sign.
I believe a shadow economy of illegals makes our food and lives more affordable. I believe the least we can do for these fellow human beings is to provide a modicum of health care for them. If our lettuce, carrots, strawberries, pears, meat, poultry, construction costs, and restaurant meals are cheaper because of their excruciatingly hard work, we should at least help them in their physical need. There is also an economic imperative involved, because any trip to an emergency room is more expensive than preventative care.
I’m not against making it impossible to get here, through physical barriers and border patrols. I’m not against making our borders impermeable, if that is something we have decided is important. However, for decades we have looked the other way in a tacit agreement that we need people to do the jobs we don’t want to do.
Without saying anything, we incur costs in the form of schools and infrastructure, and agree by paying these costs that the costs are worth the influx of super-cheap labor. Then, in California, Texas, Arizona, Florida, and other states, we run out of infrastructure funding and blame the illegals for it. So easy to do. They have no right to be here or to have a voice. Until we recognize our two-tiered economy, and our unstated cultural agreements to these immigrants, we will not be able to agree upon what to do about the millions of human beings who are already on our soil, many of whom have American children.
If basic human rights and dignity was our clarion call around the World, we would have more jobs in this country. We would get paid more per hour. If we insisted that everything we bought was made by workers making a decent living wage relative to their own country, who had adequate health care and education for their children, the price of goods from China would go up, Mexicans would not risk life and limb to move here, manufacturing would again be competitive on American soil, and our trade deficit would balance out. It is in the discrepancy of how people are treated that we allow ourselves to be manipulated.
In other words, we would be more competitive if labor laws were consistently high around the world, including here. This is why I think people must be valued and have basic human rights, including the right to health care and education.
If I pay twice as much for strawberries because illegal immigrant workers get access to health clinics in central California, so be it. If I pay four times as much for a plastic toy from China because the workers get days off, sick days, proper ventilators, and other safety equipment on the job, so be it.
If we treat each other with respect, the immigrant worker’s child may someday grow up to become an immunologist who creates a new family of vaccines, and the Chinese worker’s child may someday grow up to devote their lives to clean energy in China, making the air we breathe cleaner. Always consider the next generation in every economic decision. Anyone who is alive on our soil deserves basic health care. Human rights and positive economic values go hand in hand.
I watched Senator Cantwell, late into the night, on Oct 1. It was 2:30 a.m. or so on the east coast. I saw the Republicans going on and on about pricing everything out so that their constituents could see what they would be voting against. I saw a tired and quiet Senator Cantwell off to one side. Then I switched off the t.v. and went to bed.
Apparently as I slept, Senator Cantwell managed to pass an amendment that would allow states the right to create a public option and negotiate for better costs, similar to the existing health plan that is available in Washington State.
http://cantwell.senate.gov/news/record.cfm?id=318550
I had been writing and calling and hoping that Senator Cantwell was a champion of a public option. She introduced a clear thinking amendment that opened up the door to reform, and it got passed. What gets passed gets considered in the combined bill.
Although state-level public options would introduce system redundancies, and many states are teetering financially and may have difficulty launching such an effort, at least it is a start.
Senator Cantwell is also championing a reform of fee for service, which rewards doctors and hospitals for churning through patients and introducing unnecessary procedures, because that is where the profit is in the current system. She is attempting to go for the jugular on costs, and she deserves your support for that.
“And if you think that things would be different if your party was in power, or that things will be different now that your side has won, think again. Both parties have betrayed our founding principles and we have lost sight of the fact that the only side that matters is one that is in step with the principles of the Republic.
CDOs and derivatives being discussed by Paul Volker as part of a panel discussion on regulating large financial institutions. I understand 75-90% of what they are discussing now. It’s amazing. And I have an opinion (and an attitude) about much of it. That’s what 1 year of study does–No longer lost but as concerned as day one. ”Say, buddies,” says FDIC to the banks, “could we borrow a few Bil? We don’t want to get it from the Fed, could cause a bit of a news item.”Yeah, sure, we’re leaving the “recession” in the rear view mirror. Tell me another one.
Scott Walsh
Yup, I remember. We formed discussion groups before dance. I was as clueless then about these arcane matters as I am now, other than having the niggling suspicion that this “economy” was never meant to be more stable than the practical ways and means of a vampire. In systems where the haves live off of the scarcity experienced by the have-nots, instability, I suppose, is never very far away.
Often, as I’m driving or walking around, I notice how unhappy so many people look. Some of these appear just plain sad but most by far have a kind of unchanging expression on their faces, as if they are wearing masks. It is often the look of stress I see, and as often again an apparent preoccupation with troubling thoughts. Many faces are simply unreadable; their owners just don’t seem to want to be engaged in the physical, public, world.Some day people may wonder why we squandered the chance to turn things around when all the signs were there that we needed to. I believe I know the reason, and it is in those faces. I know the reason: it is in my own life – how hard have I had to work, and still have to work, to learn to ignore the deep seated shame that arises by simply exercising my talents in the midst of this beautiful world – by just partaking of the enjoyment a day has to offer.This shame, really a species of fear, was instilled at an early age, and I think I can sum it up in the sentence: “You don’t get to do what you want to do”.Is this really the world we, who happen to live here, would by our own free will have chosen?Maybe you think it might be; an outcome of the majority rule of the crass over the hesitant opposition of a soulful minority. Yeah? Well funny how calendars and artwork featuring scenes of nature somehow manage to outsell pictures of garbage dumps and parking lots. And where are these engineers of our compromised reality, happy with the result of their calculations elevating ugliness and slavery over beauty and freedom? They’re there, but they’re not the faces I see in traffic or the grocery store.Joseph Campbell did us a great service in The Power of Myth, in a point he made about Darth Vader in Star Wars:“The monster masks that are put on people in Star Wars represent the real monster force in the modern world. When the mask of Darth Vader is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual. What you see is a strange and pitiful sort of undifferentiated face…Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. He’s a robot. He’s a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in terms of an imposed system. “
This is what I’m talking about.And if many of us find ourselves a long ways away from the state where we take restful comfort and joy in our own existence, then how much effort do we then expend, in the journey back to that place; and at what price does this healing voyage require – a price borne by society, as our priorities have shifted away from acting collectively to create a better future, to merely making it through the days.This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?
Sam Eliasen
Well said, thanks much Scott. I appreciate the “you don’t get to do what you want to do,” line. I heard that also. Of course with all the shortages~we’re short of resources, skilled people, good ideas and most importantly~money. We can’t have people getting the idea they can just do what they want! Times are tough. We got to tighten our belts for the good of the nation. It’s a recession. We’ve been on recess too long and we got to get back to it. Kids are going to have to let go of Summer break. Adults too. We’re collectively in debt in the multi trillions. We’ve been partying way too much.What a monstrous waste of a great planet.
When Sheila Barr, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or FDIC, wants to borrow money from banks to replentish the fund that covers us all in the event of bank failure, I sit up and take notice.
This New York Times article gives us the bones of the idea:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/business/22bailout.html?em
It is saying that the FDIC does not want to go to Treasury for extra money. I assume because it would cause panic in the markets, although this article is strangely citing interpersonal conflict between Barr and Timothy Geithner as reason for FDIC to go to banks for loans.
Interpersonal conflict is not the reason FDIC would not go to Treasury.
One big bank failure is all it would take to wipe out the fund at this point, which has been busy this past year.
With all the spin about the recession ending, and unemployment remaining high, I do not see this as a good sign.
