One certain prediction in health care debate

November 23, 2009

 If I were to say I knew every­thing there was to know about the Demo­c­ra­tic health reform plan, then I think you could pretty eas­ily say that I was lying about such a statement.

 The  truth is that I, like prob­a­bly mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, know lit­tle about the plan which orig­i­nally tar­geted health insur­ance of some kind for all our citizens.

 But I think deduc­tive rea­son­ing will get one toward some pretty good sup­po­si­tions about some of the pro­posed fea­tures of the plan float­ing around out there. I say “sup­po­si­tions,” not “sup­pos­i­to­ries,” although I am sure the lat­ter would be an apt word to help describe what Repub­li­cans would like the Democ­rats to do with the plan.

 With respect to the so-called “pub­lic plan” that polls show Amer­i­cans favor, it should be easy to see that the only way any kind of pos­i­tive change will hap­pen is through some kind of a pub­lic options. Perhaps the major­ity of those polled like a pub­lic plan because they want health care avail­able to all Amer­i­cans and the pub­lic plan will be the only way such a plan would fly. If  you have no pub­lic plan, you have the sta­tus quo, which is nada.

 Another non-starter is the abil­ity for states to opt out. In red states such as Texas, where I live, the  state leg­is­la­ture would never pass  a pub­lic plan no mat­ter how much the vot­ing pub­lic wanted it. Why some state lead­ers, like our screw­ball gov­er­nor, think the state should pull out of the whole United States. Pub­lic health insur­ance in Texas if it is not man­dated? You got to be jivin’ me.

 I may not know a lot about the health reform pack­age but I know if you let states skate on major issues those states will never capit­u­late until the greater repub­lic decides enough is enough and some form of carrot-stick approach is used to bring the states into line. When I talk about carrot-stick, I refer to exam­ples such as the fed­eral gov­ern­ment with­hold­ing high­way funds until states pass stricter auto or pub­lic safety laws. The seat belt and 18-year-old drink­ing laws come to mind. Pick your own con­gres­sional blackmail.

 So we shall see what we shall see in the next month or so. I can’t see too far off in the future but I do have one pre­dic­tion that will prob­a­bly hit with near-perfect accu­racy. That is, I pre­dict every­one will not be happy when the health reform debate is done. How’s that for stick­ing my neck on the line?

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Has the right propaganda machine won?

September 3, 2009

It is a lit­tle dif­fi­cult for me to believe. It is even harder for me to stom­ach. But it seems the Repub­li­cans have won or are win­ning the pro­pa­ganda war in their fight against health care reform. What really upsets me is that the national media, not all, but specif­i­cally the cable news net­works, have helped deliver the pub­lic opin­ion against the Obama administration’s attempts.

The cable news man­agers and other media jump­ing like trained dogs when­ever a dis­rup­tive town hall is near will repeat that old jour­nal­is­tic saw: “If we piss off the right and the left, we must be doing some­thing right.”

Well in this par­tic­u­lar instance, you aren’t really piss­ing off the right.

The “Wash­ing­ton Post’s” E.J. Dionne, a lib­eral lean­ing colum­nist, reports a par­tic­u­larly telling encounter with a net­work TV stringer at a recent town hall. The free­lancer tells Dionne quite frankly that if the meet­ing doesn’t “blow up,” then their piece doesn’t see the air.

So, if the Repub­li­can minor­ity defeats health care reform or forces a “reform lite,” then the party can sit back and cel­e­brate. Per­haps the GOP can then go for­ward with a bit more con­fi­dence and calmly plan a takeover of Con­gress dur­ing the midterms. Right?

Oh they will go for­ward. But calm doesn’t seem like the strategy.

One goes with what works. The scream­ing and anger and inco­her­ence which makes peo­ple hate the thought of gov­ern­ment health care while lov­ing their Medicare, all of which has been accom­plished through mil­lions in Repub­li­can money and clever brain­wash­ing will not stop.

And as long as the media — cable news espe­cially — have what they believe to be a sim­ple crowd pleaser such as scream­ing, angry, inco­her­ent and often igno­rant cit­i­zens riled up against a cause, that too will con­tinue. Remem­ber car chases cov­ered by helicopters?

Where will it all end or will it end? Maybe it won’t. Per­haps it is just begin­ning or has been under way for some time. Think back to the pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tion and some of the tech­niques used today by those pulling strings behind the health care oppo­si­tion.
One may see cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics which were sim­i­lar in style to those of a infa­mous auto­cratic leader. That leader’s psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­file by an early U.S. intel­li­gence agency reported:

“His pri­mary rules were: never allow the pub­lic to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never con­cede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alter­na­tives; never accept blame; con­cen­trate on one enemy at a time and blame him for every­thing that goes wrong; peo­ple will believe a big lie sooner than a lit­tle one; and if you repeat it fre­quently enough peo­ple will sooner or later believe it.”

The leader, of course, was Adolf Hitler. Yes, say the right-wingers, it always comes down to Hitler. Well, yes, or Joseph Goebbels. Remem­ber the book burn­ing, or Kristall­nacht? Such incred­i­ble media manip­u­la­tion by very infe­rior lit­tle men.

What one sees in all the scream­ing and hate, besides the igno­rance and the fail­ure of some the Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion sys­tem, is peo­ple with gigan­tic chips on their shoul­ders. Some may have mate­r­ial wealth. Some may even claim spir­i­tual wealth.  But some­where in that same Amer­i­can sys­tem that many of us so cher­ish, that is so cher­ish­able, is left a gap.

It is a gap where humil­ity is miss­ing as is under­stand­ing. Sure, we help our neigh­bor when their house burns down. But if that neigh­bor looks a lit­tle dif­fer­erent or has a lit­tle dif­fer­ent lifestyle, well, sorry we have things to do this week­end. We can’t rebuild your house.

Wealth has made our nation great. But pros­per­ity has also poi­soned some with greed.

In the end, what do we have? We have igno­rance, anger, a lack of humil­ity and greed. We don’t want to pay taxes. We want a strong mil­i­tary that will nuke every lit­tle tin­horn coun­try at the drop of a hat. We don’t want to pay taxes. We have com­pas­sion, unless it is for some­one whom we think based on a whim doesn’t deserve it. We don’t want to pay taxes. We hate gov­ern­ment, espe­cially the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. But we want our mil­i­tary march­ing down the street look­ing sharp, shoot­ing at any ille­gal com­ing across the bor­der. We hate the gov­ern­ment. We like our mil­i­tary pen­sions and VA pen­sions and ben­e­fits. We don’t want to pay taxes.

So per­haps I have strayed from my orig­i­nal the­sis that the Repub­li­cans have devel­oped a well-oiled pro­pa­ganda machine that in some respects reflect those from Ger­many in the 1940s.

More impor­tant is to rec­og­nize that some of our quirks and char­ac­ter­is­tics are ripe for car­ry­ing that pro­pa­ganda machine way beyond defeat­ing “Obama Care.”

If that hap­pens, can any­one say: Goebbels?

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VA to open care to about 250,000 new vets

August 24, 2009

If you are a mil­i­tary vet­eran who has thought about sign­ing up for vet­er­ans health care but couldn’t, and if you don’t mind social­ized med­i­cine, then you just might be eli­gi­ble now for VA care.

The Depart­ment of Vet­er­ans Affairs sus­pended open­ing up health care to so-called “rich” vet­er­ans in 2003 because of bud­get con­straints. These are the vets who do not have dis­abling ill­nesses or injuries that are related to mil­i­tary ser­vice but whose income is above a set thresh­old. The income lev­els are geographically-based and an enroll­ment cal­cu­la­tor for ben­e­fits can be found here. Don’t let the word “rich” fool you. It’s cer­tainly not a $100,000-$200,000 level.

Dr. Blase Cara­bello, act­ing direc­tor of the Michael E. DeBakey VA Med­ical Cen­ter in Hous­ton, said the rule allow­ing the addi­tion of about 250,000 addi­tional vet­er­ans for health care should take effect June 30 “if the reg­u­la­tory process pro­ceeds smoothly.” That is always a big “if” when deal­ing with the VA or most any other fed­eral branch.

Con­gress opened the VA health sys­tem in 1996 to vet­er­ans other than those with service-related dis­abil­i­ties or the indi­gent. Poor fund­ing and an explo­sion of vet­er­ans seek­ing health care closed the sys­tem to new enrollees under the Bush admin­is­tra­tion in 2003. Those, such as yours truly, who were already enrolled were grandfathered.

It is true I bitch about the VA health care sys­tem some­times. It is cer­tainly not a per­fect sys­tem and it isn’t the best model for a social­ized health care. But to be fair, it does pretty well  in most places with the fund­ing it receives. Each VA regional sys­tem is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from the other, although they have indi­cated that they want to fix that. If you are dead-set on one type of med­ica­tion, you aren’t always going to get it in one VA sys­tem but might in another. Some sys­tems, hos­pi­tals and out­pa­tient clin­ics are excep­tional. Some are dreadful.

But when the VA is all that you’ve got then, well, it’s all you got. Like just about any ser­vice of any kind in the United States, if things aren’t work­ing well for you then you need to raise 10 kinds of hell and you might just get your feel­ings across. The same goes for deal­ing with the VA.

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Time to leave the right behind in hc reform?

August 19, 2009

It appears Team Obama is study­ing the aban­don­ment of a bipar­ti­san approach to health care reform. That is prob­a­bly the wise choice although one wishes such a deci­sion would have popped up before Con­gress recessed for the month which would have spared us all the right-wing histri­on­ics and flat-out lies.

What also seems a step behind by the Obama camp is a con­cen­trated effort to refute many of the more out­ra­geous lies which have been spread such as that of Sarah Palin’s “death pan­els.” One has to won­der, though, whether efforts to set the record straight are just preach­ing to the choir no mat­ter that the Oba­man­istas want their fol­low­ers to spread the word. The fact that the answers to the numer­ous lies are doc­u­mented on the pro-healthcare reform Web site and are pretty well spelled cor­rectly would make one won­der if the folks who believe these lies would find such expla­na­tions as suspicious.

Many who buy the lies about pro­posed health care reform also accept some of the most out­ra­geous and unfounded state­ments which the high-powered spe­cial inter­ests are try­ing to foist upon the pub­lic. Such state­ments are what bring peo­ple to shrilly exclaim at town­hall meet­ings before the TV cam­eras that: “I want my coun­try back the way it was before it changed!”

Before it changed? Per­haps you want it back the way it was before a black guy was elected pres­i­dent. Or what about the way it was before white women was allowed the vote?

And social­ism. Hell’s bells. Are those who are say­ing our nation is turn­ing social­ist the ones who sup­port Medicare for them­selves or their par­ents? Are they the ones who want jail sen­tences for those who are caught dri­ving with no lia­bil­ity insur­ance? That is the state mak­ing one buy insur­ance for cars. But the nation will turn social­ist if health care becomes uni­ver­sal. Go figure.

The Democ­rats of the House and Sen­ate should go it alone on insur­ance reform. They will never be sup­ported by their Repub­li­can oppo­nents and the more the right does their bid­ding for the pow­er­ful spe­cial inter­ests our civil dis­course will even more be endan­gered of becom­ing a relic of bygone days.

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