Political Theatre category archive

Via Bartcop.

Read the whole thing:

After years of battling crippling premiums and agonizing deductibles, local resident Michael Haige finally succumbed this week to the health insurance policy that had ravaged his adult life.

While family members refused to look at Haige’s insurance plan as a death sentence, it soon became clear that their loved one was facing the biggest fight of his life. Countless visits to doctors, claims adjusters, and loan officers proved futile, with Haige being told at every turn that his case was hopeless.

“They said there was nothing they could do for him, that modern medicine was powerless against this monster,” Sheila Haige said. “Still, Michael never gave up. He kept saying that he was going to beat the odds, that he was going to find some way to get coverage.”

Except when it’s not.

I said at the time that the best thing about Tom Ridge’s being named Secretary of Homeland Security was that it got him out of Pennsylvania.

Via Bartcop.

Read it here.

T. R. Reid demolishes Five Myths About Health Care in the Rest of the World. (I recently highlighted a radio interview with him.)

A nugget:

In some ways, health care is less “socialized” overseas than in the United States. Almost all Americans sign up for government insurance (Medicare) at age 65. In Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, seniors stick with private insurance plans for life. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the planet’s purest examples of government-run health care.

It occurs to me that, for all the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans provides a buffer of physical security, they also provide a buffer for ignorance of what the rest of the big wide world is actually about.

Then, again, that may be irrelevant. Americans seem able to believe all kinds of lies about Canadian health care, and there is no ocean between Canada and the U. S., except, apparently, one of USAian ignorance.

Frankly, returning to a theme I mentioned earlier, the issue for most of my leftie buddies as regards health care is something that works in a cost effective and equitable way. The current system doesn’t; it’s not cost effective and it’s not equitable. Indeed, those whom the right revile as “leftist” tend to be remarkably non-ideological. I haven’t stumbled across anyone who gets any notice who is arguing, say, for nationalizing the railroads or airlines or grocery stores (now that would be socialism).*

The ideology is on the right, which has convinced itself that “for profit” is always a better way.

And it’s not always the better way. It’s just most of the time the better way. Health care is not part of the most of the time. Nor is the army nor police work (imagine a speed trap run by Swampwater).

And while we are on the subject, take time to visit Kiko’s House and read this description of the effects of extracting profit from the sick and the helpless.

T. R. Reid story via Will Bunch.

__________________

*Perhaps the lack of ideology is why the American “left” is such a notoriously disunited bunch.

More here.

Addendum, the Next Wednesday:

Fact Check dot org questions the stats.

Read the analysis. They did not question the larger meaning.

Some Guy with a Website explains health care rationing.

Statistics here.

Warning: It’s pretty brutal, in a brutally accurate sort of way.

Andrew Sullivan describes Chris Wallace’s interview with Dick Cheney:

Now look: there are softball interviews; and then there are interviews like this. It cannot be described as journalism in any fashion. Even as propaganda, which is its point, it doesn’t work – because it’s far too cloying and supportive of Cheney to be convincing to anyone outside the true-believers. When it comes to Cheney, one of the most incompetent vice-presidents in the country’s history, with a record of two grotesquely botched wars, war crimes and a crippling debt, Chris Wallace sounds like a teenage girl interviewing the Jonas Brothers.

Harry Shearer had background on the interview was like in yesterday’s Le Show (29 minutes in–there’s a 13 second commercial before the show if you listen to the audio stream).

Full disclosure: I did not watch the interview. I don’t do television news and I know far more about Cheney than I want to.

Wingnuts are throwing around charges of socialism quite freely these days.

It’s safe to say they pretty much don’t know what “socialism” is, other than a nice scare word. It is “state ownership of the means of production,” that is, of everything. Public health insurance is not “the means of production”; it is health insurance.

Some might argue that the current attempts to bail out Wall Street and GM amount to state ownership; they ignore that those industries ruined themselves (as well as a goodly number of the citizenry), then came begging for help.

They were, in fact, begging for help from us, the taxpayers. It is only right that our help comes with strings attached (frankly, I don’t think enough strings were attached: strings should have included reasonable pay scales; full public disclosure of balance sheets; and, for the zombie banksters, “mark to market,” but that’s just me–for some screwy reason, I like to know where my money is going).

Several days ago, Noz described liberalism as well as anyone I have ever read.

Ownership is not the issue; effectiveness is.

it’s also interesting that while much of the american right subscribes to the cult of private industry, the opposite cult doesn’t really exist on the opposite side of the political spectrum. at least not in any significant way. i personally believe that there are things that government does better than the private sector and things that the private sector does better than government. decided (sic) which is better for a particular problem involves looking at the evidence, how other governments have dealt with it and whether they have been more or less successful. that seems to be how most lefties that i know think. it’s more pragmatism than ideology. no doubt there is someone out there who believes that liberalism means the end of all things private, but whoever they are they are so marginal to debate on any issue they’ll all but invisible.

The only persons who benefit from the current health insurance system in this country are the insurance companies. It is their teat and they suck on it.

What they do to the rest of us just rhymes with suck.

Via Jamie Sanderson.

Wait a minute. It is broke.

Very broke.

Judith Stein at Neiman Watchdog:

Before Medicare, 50 percent of everyone 65 or older had NO health insurance. Now, as a result of Medicare, almost all older people are insured. Medicare, which is national, government-run health insurance, succeeded in insuring older people where private insurance failed. Further, until the Bush Administration privatized Medicare with huge subsidies to private “Medicare Advantage” and Part D plans, Medicare was also remarkably cost-effective. It’s private Medicare, not the traditional, public program, that’s bleeding taxpayers of billions of dollars.

Traditional Medicare has been a success, fiscally and morally. It took on the job of insuring health coverage and care to people that private insurance had abandoned. Since 2003, on the other hand, private Medicare plans have cost tens of billions of dollars that have gone to support the private insurance industry, not to providing health care. In addition, private Medicare plans have too often engaged in marketing abuses and restrictive coverage practices.

Christopher Swann at Retuters. Read the whole thing.

The genius of the U.S. healthcare (system) is in providing the illusion of value and security. For their own sake, Americans must be encouraged to set aside jingoistic claims about having the best care system in the world and look more honestly at its short-comings.

Terrance Heath at the Huffington Post:

What we’re seeing from the health care town halls, what we’ve seen from the “birthers” and what we saw during the campaign is essentially what I call “Tyranny of the Tantrum,” which many parents encounter at the onset of the “terrible twos.”

(snip)

That’s what the town halls have devolved into — the tyranny of the tantrum. The behavior we’re seeing is basically the extreme of the Republican base kicking and screaming because they believe that if they throw a big enough tantrum, they can hold off change, turn back the transition period already begun, and keep things the way they are — or go back to the way they were.

(snip)

Neither can we turn back the clock (nor should we) to a time when the president and most of the Supreme Court (to name two seats of power), were guaranteed to be white — something many townhall screamers, birthers, and McCain/Palin rally attendees would like to return to, whether they say as much or not.

He’s right, you know.

In words and pictures:

In other news, Terry Gross interviews an American who lived in Europe and has first-hand experience with European health insurance. Follow the links below to listen or read the transcript:

Journalist and author T.R. Reid set out on a global tour of hospitals and doctors’ offices, all in the hopes of understanding how other industrialized nations provide affordable, effective universal health care. The result: his book The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.

Reid is a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post — in whose pages he recently addressed five major myths about other countries’ health-care systems — and the former chief of the paper’s London and Tokyo bureaus.

A nugget from the transcript:

Turns out we have them all right here in the United States. If you’re a Native American or a veteran you live in Britain. They get government health care and government hospitals from government doctors and they never get a bill.

If you’re an employed person sharing your health insurance premium with your employer, you live in Germany. That’s the Bismarck model that was invented in Germany and used in many countries.

If you’re a senior and you buy Medicare insurance from the government and go to private doctors, you live in Canada. That’s the Canadian model. As a matter of fact, the Canadian health care system is called Medicare, and when Lyndon Johnson provided it for our seniors in 1965 he borrowed both the model and the name from Canada.

And if you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who can’t get health insurance, well, you live in Malawi or Madagascar or Mali or something, because if you can pay for health insurance you get it, or maybe you can line up at the free hospital sometime.

Story here.

Even public-option witch-doctors would be better than what we’ve got.

More here.