While that's a great point, here's the Pièce de résistance: "Threatened white elites try to mask their own anxieties by patronizingly adopting working-class whites as their pet political surrogates: Joe the Plumber, New Haven firemen, a Cambridge police officer. Call it Village People populism."
More confounding to Americans than race is the teachable moment on class. The inner hope of so many of us to make it big on American Idol, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and YouTube... or whatever the modern equivalent for your particular ship coming in suddenly, if not unaccountably... it's a guilty pleasure that obliterates our sympathy for those who are unaccountably trampled in the ruthlessly Darwinist race to be voted the favorite.
Even those with little hope of ever making it are resentful of those who cry foul, and the haves use this enter-class hostility to their advantage againt the have-nots.
"I'm with that woman who wrote the president complaining about "socialized medicine" and added: "Now keep your hands off my Medicare." That's the spirit!"
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter sums up just about everything that's wrong with health insurance as is, and makes the case for keeping things just the way they are.
Alter is just joshing, but August will be rife with preposterous truthiness and regrettably factish horror stores about Canadians dying in droves as the Mounties gun them down at the border, while the Mounties, themselves, are trying to escape to America to get honest to goodness healthcare.
By the way, has anyone ever asked how you get treatment in the US with Canadian health insurance? That's pretty good health insurance, by US insurance standards, and let's keep in mind that it's the Americans who are being denied affordable Canadian pharmaceuticals... by the PhARMA suits lobbying our own governement.
The private insurance industry dosn't qualify for the public facts. The House bill caps premiums at 10% of income per household, per year, meaning you'd have to make, $100,000 a year to pay $1000 per month AND that's a cap, not a mandate, one preventing the insurance company from charging you MORE than 10%.
That's $250 a month for someone making $30,000 a year. Meanwhile... people are going bankrupt, today, with 30% premiums that were canceled when they got sick.
The truth people are telling is much more ruthless than the fictions you can make up.
"The White House meeting drew such media interest that press secretary Robert Gibbs said he looked forward to facing no more questions about what beers each man would drink. For the record, it was Bud Light for Obama, Sam Adams Light for Gates, Blue Moon for Crowley and nonalcoholic Buckler for Biden."
Instead, Obama was stuck choking down dishwater mixed with rubbing alcohol, just to avoid the Dijon mustard backlash from the arugula-phobes on the right.
If Obama had ordered a faux-Belgian brew with an orange slice on the side, he would have been pilloried on the right by the anti-endive police and the Chablis-and-brie-conspiracy crazies.
I would have expected Biden to go with vodka on the rocks, and I wonder if he doesn't drink or if the event planners hope to shift the center of the culture war by throwing in this not-so-obvious pick.
The POTUS does not need to involve himself in a low level city problem?
Tell that to Terri Schiavo, who got an act of the Republican congress and the GOP president's opinion all up in her business.
A GOP butt-in-ski is perfectly fine for the FOX-Limbaugh-Drudge echo-network when a wedge issue is just what is needed to get their guy reelected, but Obama's out of line for answering the question when he's asked about a friend to whom he had just spoken.
I see.
Obama was wrong for distracting the press from the healthcare debate, which he arguably may have intended to do, since negotiations were falling apart.
As long as the healthcare co-ops are allowed to be big enough to make a difference through bargaining power, the idea fits nicely with our idea to turn the Democratic Party into a massive national healthcare union that puts its money where its mouth is and provides healthcare for its members.
"They are the villains in this. They have been part of the problem in a major way," Pelosi said of the insurance industry after her weekly press conference. "It's almost immoral, what they are doing," she said, referring to industry lobbying against a public insurance plan option."
It's written on a napkin somewhere... we were brainstorming a couple of years ago about a private solution to the current mess. We were like, "Hey man. get this...no really... the political parties should stop fighting about healthcare, and just build the damn system each of them wants for themselves.
"Offer a healthcare policy as a benefit of party membership. Upwards of one hundred million democrats could solve the healthcare problem for its membership... a DYI co-op... a massive healthcare union with enormous bargaining power. Poor religious conservative Republicans without healthcare would go, 'Gawd damn! I want that!'"
We were inspired, ironically, by Hezbollah and Hamas, who attract members, not by blowing up Zionists, but by providing social services like medical care, school, food, and education. Even IF that's just their propaganda, it's a pretty good idea.
We support a fully funded public option and a federal-payer, too, but we're also DIY types who think the DNC could put up or shut up when it comes to this subject and organize what might be the largest pool the insurance industry has ever had to face in America.
Senator Kent Conrad's co-op plan is geographic, and we're leery of geographic pools, because insurance companies have been known to discriminate against particular zip codes, so Conrad's co-ops should not be rejected as a gateway, out of hand, but they should be rolled in with Obama's healthcare exchange, the fully-funded public option, the federal payer, and for-profit commercial offers.
Something from a reader:
"I have ALWAYS thought one of your most unfailingly brilliant of all unfailingly brilliant ideas was to have the DEMS do this. Maybe now is the time!!! HOWEVER, would their big corp fat cats ever let them? Or the blue dogs? Between fat cats and blue dogs what are we to do? What about having the Green Party or the Libertarians do it instead?
— Dr. S.
Isn't it about buying in bulk? The Greens and (to some extent) the Libertarian parties might be more philosophically inclined to do this... but does either party have enough members to have the impact that even a quarter of the Democratic Party would have?
Aside from that, isn't it a surprise that conservative Democrats, Blue Dogs and fat cats... the fat blue cats... are using the word co-op? It smacks of leftist cooperative grocers, checkers, stockers, and produce handlers who own the building, including the artists' live-work lofts up above the store. It's such ideologically loaded socialist term.
For those of you who may have received the VERY scary email insisting that the healthcare reform bill mandates euthanasia counseling for seniors every five years... sigh... such a horrible idea is obviously FALSE, according to snopes.com.
"She describes this term as 'code' for 'limiting care based on a patient’s age.'
In fact the term for that is 'age rating,' a practice used by insurance companies to discriminate against older Americans against which AARP is vigorously fighting, and we look forward to her next column to help the cause.
"Comparative effectiveness research, on the other hand, is a technical term that just means giving doctors and patients the ability to compare different kinds of treatments to find out which one works best for which patient."
What this Betsy McCaughey lady describes as forced euthanasia on Fred Thomson's radio show is really nothing more unusual than Medicare paying for a senior's consultation with their doctor about the usual stuff related to your end of life care, your DNR, medical power of attorney. This measure ensures that Medicare pays for consultations your family may have with your doctor when you're unable to do so.
AARP responds to McCaughey' healthcare reform scare tactics, calling her comments "rife with gross, cruel distortions".
The FOX-Limbaugh-Drudge set is trying to cast Obama as a character as bad as George Bush... a murderer... but they have no actual bodies to dig up, like the million or so that Bush killed, so they have to invent some instead. Some of them crave the comparison so strongly, because they know, deep down, that Bush's political supporters are certainly complicit in his most diabolical mortal sins, his war crimes.
To mischaracterize Obama is to mischaracterize those of us who support him, and that's what they really want. They want us to lower our moral estimation of ourselves, so that we have no higher standards to use in our judgment of them. None of this is conscious. Their sense of guilt has made lunatics of them.
Would you Rapture-ready birth certificate conspiracy nuts please Rapture already, and leave the rest of us the hell alone, so we can get on with building a civil, livable society once you're gone?
Wouldn't it be weirdly ironic if Republican's adopted single-payer just to thwart Obama? This backbiting interview with an Obama ally reminds me about how much stranger than fiction things can get in real life.
Strangerthat fiction: Obana's doc delivers teh poor diagnosis.
(HuffPo)
"I look at his program and I can't see how it's going to work," Scheiner told the Huffington Post.
"He has no cost control. There would be no effective cost control in his program. The CBO said it's going be incredibly expensive... and the thing that I really am worried about is, if it is the failure that I think it would be, then health reform will be set back a long, long time."
The current House amalgamation: an effort to give everyone the essence of what they want... the pseudo-single-payer insurance policy and a universal-ish public option, competing in a preexisting condition-blind exchange with private insurance products, ALL for a trillion dollars over a decade... $100 billion a year... about the cost of a year in Iraq... It would seem not to be the end of the debate, even if it's signed as legislation.
There's a fear among everyone that one of these options is going to prevail, and maybe not theirs.
Europe's various single-payer and public healthcare systems were devised in the wake of world war wreckage we haven't seen here. It was a shock-doctrine application of emergency aide at a time when people didn't have the luxury to argue ideological preferences that are more psychologically affordable now and before the war.
Indeed, it might be argued that this is what the war was all about in the first place, competing strains of various forms of social and capital interests emerging from that horrible bombardment as a mixed social-capital economy.
Europe fought and paid a heavy price to find the happy medium they seem to ejoy more than we enjoy being ourselves, and Canada benefited from the Queens apron strings, while Australia appears to have adopted, in 1984, something more similar to the collection of options we debate today.
The robust public option working alongside national and private payer insurance in a well-regulated market. Australia, which ranks seventh in life expectancy, even ahead of Canada, France, and Sweden, may be the over-looked comparison in most debates. Who would argue that they've become a trembling teacup brimming full with pampered effete milquetoast elites?
Obama's doctor is a single-payer purist, but there are examples of a successful hybrid approach that would neither befriend nor be-foe a particular option, exclusively, and why should we?
Contrary to Republican rhetoric that the US government can't do anything right and therefore should NOT be let anywhere near healthcare, Bill Kristol steps into a mess of his own making by saying the healthcare we afford to military personnel is top notch... but so-called ordinary American's simply don't deserve as good.
Meanwhile, Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) dogs Rahm Emanuel and his conservative Blue Dog recruits. She says that her conservative and centrist fellow House members say they're holding out for a lower price-tag on healthcare, while they argue for higher reimbursement to doctors in their rural districts.
"The chickens have come home to roost," declared the California Democrat.
"On the one hand, they don't want to spend money but, on the other hand, they want to spend money when they think it benefits them or their districts."
It struck me as poetic, too... but I realize too late, Palin's snarky, FOX-populist berate... in place of honest debate... that her jive didn't jibe with reality, because it's cold Yukon poetry, with white-rap asymmetry that only makes perfect sense when we say good-bye, when I listen with a smile.
Meanwhile... Jon Stewart... as usual... just doesn't get it, interpreting her more literally, instead of liberally... in which sense, she makes absolutely no sense.
And Huffington relays what "Charles Krauthammer said Monday on Fox News that her complaints have a 'whining quality'. Fred Barnes of the 'Weekly Standard' agreed:"
"There is a way to deal with the press. Look at the way Ronald Reagan did. He didn't attack the press. He teased them. He made fun of them. He jokes about them, embarrassed them. It was great. People loved it and it didn't have that edge, that whiny edge that you always want to avoid"
— Fred Barnes on FOX Noose
But FOX Noose largely lionized Sarah, calling her one of the greats... recasting each of her griping mistakes, now, as strategic tactics, comparing her siren to Richard Nixon in '62... hinting...
diabolically...
...no matter what we do... that Bill Kristol's media-elite creation, one we pretend is an authentically coarse grass-root manifestation... will be queen of the world some day.
Reich should have included the matter of making pre-existing conditions moot, but he rounds all the rest up nicely in one paragraph.
When we speak disparagingly of all of this in the near future, let's remember the July benchmark that people in office and the likes of Reich set as the point of no return. There IS an element within the political apparatus of the elected Democratic Party that wants robust public healthcare and universal coverage subsided by the rich, the top 1%, for individuals making up to $41,600 a year (400% of the national poverty line).
That's where our cannibalistic recriminations must feast if Democrats are unable to pass it.
That's the mainstream Democratic benchmark for argument, debate, discussion and wishful thinking, while the so-called centrist wish-list is comprised of little more than a mandate that we all purchase private insurance... for responsibility sake... maybe-maybe not in exchange for insurance corporations turning a blind eye to pre-existing conditions... while they sit back to enjoy their handy work.
The frustration in all of this is that a single-payer system is misunderstood by most of those who argue against it, believing the concept itself to be some specifically defined and monolithic thing and mistaking it for the public-run health care of Canada and the UK, while misunderstanding the success and popularity of those public-run institutions too.
At this point, we can fairly call the proposal on the table in the House Obama and Pelosi's hybrid of a robust public-run healthcare option for those who don't buy into a parallel gateway to subsidized coverage concomitant with federal employee healthcare plans.
To leftists, progressives, and liberals arguing over the public option vs. single-payer, this love-child between the two camps will seem like a luxury, just a year or two from now... even to the flimsy-minded centrists who respond nervously to simplistic fear-mongering about how much the current, cruel system of corporate healthcare rationing means to being a true American.
We hear from the swing-states: "Our 'con' column is a lot more than the 'pro,'" the aide to Sen. Mark Warner, (D-Va.) said. "There have been hundreds of people who are against the plan or any specific part of it compared to dozens for it. And that was only in the last week."
And THAT, my friends, is why healthcare reform will amount to little more than a mandate for purchasing private insurance.
If you live in one of these so-called centrist states or districts, if you care about healthcare reform, whether a public option or single-payer, if you haven't called your senators and representative, you're losing the battle for us.
What can you do if you don't live in a swing state? Again, if you know someone in Oregon, Connecticut, Maine, Louisiana, or Nebraska, now would be a good time to ask them to call or write one of these eight so-called centrists holding up the healthcare reform bill in the Senate.
