Republicans Are Trying to Kill Me

Sorry about the snarky title to this post. Unfortunately, it's true. I don't mean that the average everyday Republican is trying to kill me. On the other hand, many very conservative Republicans who go to the polls every election aren't paying too much attention to facts these days. Nor do these same voters recognize how few good ideas their leaders have had for many years now.

Let's begin with a fact that came close to killing me: health care is broken and has been for twenty years. Republicans leaders in Congress could care less about this simple fact. For one thing, they have too many wealthy campaign contributors who work for the insurance companies and those contributors don't want their cash cow disturbed.

So what does this have to do with me? Simple. I work as a free lance writer and editor. It's never been easy to get health insurance even in the best of times. Sometimes I have lucked out simply because sometimes I have gotten health insurance through my wife's employer. She's in a profession where it's common to change employers from time to time. For technical reasons I can no longer get health insurance from her latest employer. So I tried to apply for health insurance through a company that had a deal with the AARP. I thought it was a straightforward application. Little did I know. A few weeks after I got the application, I got a letter from the insurance company that said I had to call such and such a person. The person was a nurse working for the insurance company. She asked some detailed questions about my health history. Two weeks later I received a letter denying me health insurance because of a preexisting condition that has now existed for over 30 years. That condition has probably cost me less than $3,000 over the 30 year span and most of the money was spent on periodic blood tests. I kept thinking back on the nurse and how little regard she seemed to have for her profession. She was working for bean counters instead of people who believe in providing a good service for their clients.

Nearly two years later—last month—my wife and I decided to move to a little larger rental. We decided to hire movers this time but there was still a lot of work to do. Being a writer, for example, it's natural that I have a lot of books. Boxes of books can get in the way during a move, so I rented a small storage space to store the books until after the move. Our last place has stairs and I found myself getting a bit winded after taking down a load to my car and going back up the stairs. Sometimes my left shoulder started getting sore. If I simply stopped, the shoulder pain went away. I tried to be more careful and started taking my time. I thought maybe I was beginning to show my age, but otherwise I was fine. Or so I thought. I was wrong.

At one in the morning, I finished an editing job and got ready for bed. I'm a night owl but normally I finish my jobs around midnight. But it had been a long day and I had been a bit sluggish. I got ready for bed and a bunch of acid suddenly erupted up my esophagus. I get acid reflux sometimes, though an over-the-counter medication I take usually does a good job of controlling the problem. My shoulder also started hurting a lot, particularly around the chest.

I couldn't sleep, so I went in the living room to sit in a chair, thinking that might help. It began to occur to me that maybe I had a bigger problem, that maybe more than acid reflux and a sore shoulder was going on. I didn't want to think about it. It was early Saturday morning and no place I could think of was going to be cheap. And besides, that pain I felt when I went up the stairs always went away. And I thought a glass of water and some Tums and a little patience is all I needed and I would be fine.

But after a couple of hours the chair grew uncomfortable. I went back to bed, lay there awhile, and broke out in a sweat. I threw off the blankets, sat up and finally my wife asked if something was wrong. I explained about the pain. She trusted my explanation since I usually know my body pretty well. But I wasn't being honest with myself. For one thing, I hate false alarms. For another, I couldn't even think where to go. I couldn't afford to go anywhere. I simply couldn't afford to have a problem. So I waited.

If Republicans had not stalled and played games on health care, if a few Democrats—behaving like Republicans— had not waffled for so long, I might have had insurance by now. I would be paying several thousands dollar a year for it, just like everybody else. Health care should have been passed a year ago. Insurance for preexisting conditions might have become available by this past January. Republicans literally might not have been trying to kill me on the night I had a heart attack and waited and waited because I had no insurance.

My wife finally drove me to the emergency room. Luckily, it was less than a mile away. Luckily, they have a first-rate heart clinic. Luckily, they got to me in time, pumped me with heparin and wheeled me into the heart clinic where I received a stent. I stayed in the hospital for three days. I was lucky, my new doctor thinks I'll heal, though it's not exactly going to happen in a hurry. But the bill? I don't want to even talk about the bill. It's big. I try to watch my money. I try to save. But I've never seen a bill like that. Actually, there are several bills and they haven't stopped coming.

I don't want to hear from Republicans that I'm fussing about nothing, that I just have to know how to manipulate the system. That's bullcrap. It's a full admission that health care in our nation is broken. Will the new health care program work? Maybe. It needs to be stronger than it is but Republicans and the few Democrats who behave like Republicans watered it down too much. They lied to the public too much. They are still lying to the public too much. These days Republican leaders are paid to lie. The theme of Republicans this year is that our country is failing. It's an insulting proposition, particularly given the games that have been played in the last thirty years. Think of it: they want President Obama to fail. They want our president to fail. That is tantamount to wanting our nation to fail.

I have Republican friends who are horrified by what happened to me. I have one friend who worried that an argument we had back in June might have contributed to my heart attack. I had to assure him that it didn't. But I don't know what to think. You can't keep sending jobs overseas, you can't keep buying oil from foreign companies, you can't keep letting American economic sectors run amok (think oil and coal), you can't ignore the paramount importance of developing renewable energy sources, you can't play one group off another, you can't shovel buckets of money into the hands of people who are already wealthy and expect a majority of Americans to do well. It isn't going to happen. But that's where we're headed if Republicans get back into power. They have no ideas except old ideas that have not worked.

A few days ago, I put my name on an email list to receive an application for insurance for those people with preexisting conditions. I guess I have two preexisting conditions now. Needless to say, I need the insurance. And today's Republican leaders have done nothing to assure me that they're not trying to kill me the next time I have a serious health issue.

I'll say it one last time: I know I was lucky. But I keep thinking of the ones who waited too long, the mothers and fathers, the hardworking people who had no insurance. This is not the way our country should be. We need to start moving forward again, not backwards.

America Enters the 21st Century at Last: Health Care Passes

I have a pre-existing condition but it's always been my firm belief that it's really nobody's business. Unfortunately, because I tried to get insurance on my own a few years back, the insurance industry knows more about my health than most of my friends and colleagues. That offends the hell of my me. These days I worry a lot more about big business than I do my government (that is, when it's not overly controlled by business interests and cronies, which happens every time the Republicans get elected).

For many reasons, I have not devoted as much time to the health care debate as I would have liked. For one reason, our nation faces some bigger issues that can't wait much longer such as jobs, revitalizing our economy, energy and climate change. But health care reform has passed and I rejoice. Despite the obstruction, the spin, the foot dragging, the lies, the stunts, the name calling and the 1001 shameful acts of the Grand Ostrich Party and its ridiculous leadership, America is moving forward again and we have a health bill.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has it right: the only thing everybody is going to remember ten years from now is that health care reform finally passed in March of 2010. Here's a bit of what he says:

Then the debate dragged on over many months. The pace slowed in the early summer. Then there was the town hall Crazy (tm) of August. And from there we know the rest -- the ugliness, close calls, the shuddering collapse of morale after January 19th. But the truth is, nothing matters but the final result. No one remembers the politicking in advance of Medicare or Social Security or really anything else. There's either a reform law or there's not. That's why, even though it's still a momentous event in political circles, the 1994 run at Health Care Reform might as well never have happened.

Even over the last two days you've seen a shifting of perspective as all the drama and angst of recent months recedes before the reality of final passage. There's no denying this is certainly the biggest and by almost any definition the first major social legislation in the United States in almost five decades. (Congress passed Medicare in 1965.)

Today, when David Frum wrote that this was turning out to be the GOP's Waterloo...

I don't know if this is the Republican Party's Waterloo or not. They have nothing to offer these days but games and tricks and lies and tons of money from their corporate friends. I still have Republican friends and I shake my head that they can't see what their leadership has become. They cannot accept that Bush and his cronies almost destroyed the economy out of sheer stupidity and greed. For twenty years, elected Republicans have been swinging further and further to the right. That is a fact. The obvious clue are the number of Republicans in the leadership who felt Reagan didn't go far enough. Some feel that Bush did not go far enough. A ridiculous few are sorry Dick Cheney wasn't president.

I root for Obama because if he fails, we're in for rough times. Even if Democrats remain in power in Congress, Republicans are hoping the Supreme Court can cause trouble. The Supreme Court has already shown its willingness to believe that corporations are more important than people.

Corporations are fictions designed to limit liability. There's nothing wrong with that in theory, as long as corporations act in the public interest. But the latest economic crisis that began in 2007 was a direct result of corporations who could care less about the public interest. They lied and bullied their way to wealth and many of them are unrepentant.

Any person who thinks the Republican Party is going to tackle the people who got bonus money is a fool. Republicanism has always been the same as big business. In recent years, they have incorporated and manipulated people on the far right while laughing all the way to the bank. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were two of them.

The United States does not need more corporatism and it does not need more from the American Taliban. We certainly did not and do not need an unholy alliance between the two.

What we need is to stop making excuses. Our economy has slipped. We have made mistakes. Now we have done this from time to time in the past. One of our great strengths is recognizing when we have made mistakes, correcting those mistakes and moving on again. We are in danger of losing that capacity to move forward. If we are not careful, we could start falling rather swiftly if we don't grab reality by the horns, with both hands, with our eyes open and our minds clear.

There's still work to do.

Taking On Right Wing Mythologies

Are there still rational conservatives? Yes, you can sometimes see them on TV: they have a look of astonishment, they chuckle as if they're not hearing right, then their jaw drops open followed by a bout of spluttering until they can't help themselves and say, "You can't be serious..." to some right wing talking head. Of course they then worry about getting a call from Rush Limbaugh or some other right wing enforcer. It is an unfortunate fact that rational conservatives have allowed themselves to be shoved aside by the right wingers who clearly are dominating the Republican Party these days.

I'm always astounded at the mythologies on the far right. Sarah Palin's admirers, for example, look at her as if she's some sort of savior. I noted some months ago that she probably quit her job as governor of Alaska in order to avoid ethics problems and otherwise cash in. And that's exactly what she's doing.

Why is it so hard for so many Americans to recognize that Sarah Palin likes two things: attention and money? For her, governing Alaska was obviously a bit of a bother. So she quit. Nevertheless, she is taken seriously by the far right as a potential candidate for president. Why? Largely because she effectively feeds their mythologies and is never particularly bothered by facts .

One of the more shameless charges made by Sarah Palin was the fiction that death panels would be the result of passing health care reform. The reality for some time has been that if you do not have health insurance and you have a health problem, the odds of your survival are already diminished without any panel of any sort being convened. Health insurance companies used to be focused on providing service. Now they're focused on money. That of course is something Sarah Palin can understand.

Given all the politics that has gone on, Sarah Palin is a mere sideshow compared to all the other mythology surrounding health care reform. And the right wingers conveniently ignore who is supplying much of that mythology: insurance companies and others making obscene profits. Naturally any number of lobbyists, pundits and political consultants are trotting out slick conservative arguments, many of which were used against Medicare in one form or another more than forty years ago. Fortunately those arguments did not succeed in the 1960s. We can only hope those arguments will not succeed in the current environment.

S.W. Anderson of Oh!Pinion does a terrific job of addressing some of this. Here's just one part of his response to a right wing commenter trotting out a familiar and misleading argument about moral hazard:

Did Social Security cause people to quit saving/investing on their own for retirement? If you think so, explain the explosive growth in mutual funds and 401k’s over the last 25 years. Has the fact Medicare gives most of the 65-and-older set a chance to buy health insurance they can begin to afford ruined insurance companies’ chances to make money off these people? Hardly, as all the supplementary and Medicare Advantage plans make clear.

Give his post a read.

Ronald Reagan Was Wrong about Health Care---in 1961

I can't help emphasizing that I've known honest Republicans all my life. But with people like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Rudy Giuliani and a hoard of Congressional Republicans in the back pocket of the health insurance industry, honest Republicans are a bit overwhelmed these days.

One of my favorite commentators on the national scene is Cynthia Tucker. She quotes Nicolas Kristoff today but she also added old video of Ronald Reagan railing against Medicare. Little do people remember.

I know Ronald Reagan was charismatic and many voters found him reassuring but the truth is that he often didn't know what he was talking about. America's economic decline can be traced to Reagan's first year in office.

The Need for Health Care Reform and Reality

I cringed when President Bush said there was no health care crisis and muttered inane nonsense about poor people going to the emergency room if they had a serious problem. President Bush, in many ways of course, did not invent the health care crisis. He merely stood by and did nothing as he has so often done during his presidency. For 27 years, our country has been drifting toward the lowest common denominator on issue after issue simply because powerful Republicans backed by wealthy donors have the money to buy the best pollsters, the best image and the best liars.

Kevin Sacks of The New York Times has an article on research that shows what so many of us already have the common sense to understand: the lack of insurance is dangerous to people's health:

A nationwide study has found that the uninsured and those covered by Medicaid are more likely than those with private insurance to receive a diagnosis of cancer in late stages, often diminishing their chances of survival.

(snip)

The widest disparities were noted in cancers that could be detected early through standard screening or assessment of symptoms, like breast cancer, lung cancer, colon cancer and melanoma. For each, uninsured patients were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed in Stage III or Stage IV rather than Stage I. ...

I'm going to make a confession: we need health care reform badly but so much damage has been done to our country in the last 27 years, and particularly in the last seven years, by the right wingers and their noise machine, I'm not even sure that health care reform is even going to be possible in the next ten years. Whoever becomes the next president will have an obligation to look at the real state of our nation as soon as Bush leaves. It could be ugly. We have problems that are not only coming but that have already arrived. If John McCain is elected, the problems will continue to get much worse. In front of the camera, McCain is a nice guy but he has no idea where we are and no idea what to do. If Obama or Clinton become president, there's a good chance either one can stop the bleeding, but it will take the involvement of millions of Americans and particularly the young to turn our country around.

***For the record, neither my wife nor myself have health insurance. At our age, the insurance premiums alone would drive us into bankruptcy.


Campaign Update: Hey, give me your ears. Four score and seven days ago, Hillary Clinton was the 'inevitable' nominee.

Being inevitable is not what one expects of a Democrat. If I'm being too sarcastic, I apologize. These are hard times. We need to be inspired. Hillary Clinton is very capable but she is now reduced to criticizing Barack Obama about the trivial such as borrowing lines from his friends. The irony is that if Hillary Clinton were to take the high ground starting now and inspire people and continue until November, she would have a good chance of taking the nomination and winning the election. She's capable of inspiring people but has chosen a different course thanks to some odd supporters, including Republican pollster, Mark Penn (Isn't it odd by the way that Republican pollsters urge Republican candidates to be more folksy but urge Democratic candidates to triangulate?).

A reader on TPMElection Central points out an article that Molly Ivins wrote in 2006 explaining why she would not vote for Hillary Clinton for the nomination. Here's an excerpt that talks about leadership:

What kind of courage does it take, for mercy's sake? The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) of the American people favor raising the minimum wage. The majority of the American people (60 percent) favor repealing Bush's tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) wants to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.

The majority (77 percent) thinks we should do "whatever it takes" to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) thinks big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?

If Hillary Clinton wins the nomination, I will support her but I don't pretend to understand her current campaign. Does she really understand where we are? We are at an historic crossroads. Does Hillary or Bill get it? I'm convinced that Barack Obama gets it. I'm convinced that young people supporting Barack Obama understand clearly that their future is on the line. From time to time our country has needed major reform. We are in such a time. The corruption and greed of the last 27 years has been hurting our country. We need change. So my support of Barack Obama remains clear and it remains strong.

Again, Bush's Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Bush has it exactly backwards. Backwards is exactly where President George W. Bush is taking our nation. Here's Bloomberg with the details of Bush's health cuts to pay for his fiasco in Iraq and his tax cut for the very wealthy:

President George W. Bush proposed cutting $78 billion from U.S. health spending over five years, setting up a potential fight with congressional Democrats.

The $701 billion budget for the Department of Health and Human Services that Bush sent to Congress today includes $66 billion in cuts over five years from Medicare, which provides health insurance for 43 million Americans. Bush also would cut $12 billion from Medicaid for the poor and from a program that provides health insurance for low-income children.

``On health care, rather than trying to solve the crisis by lowering costs and covering more people, the president's plan will make the crisis worse by raising costs and failing to cover those who need it most -- our nation's children,'' said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the Senate health committee, in a statement.

How do Republicans keep justifying this guy?

Bush at It Again

Bush never misses an opportunity to cut taxes for those most likely to vote Republican. The rest of America does not exist for him. Dan Froomkin of White House Briefing quotes from a Paul Krugman column:

Quoting from Bush's radio address, Krugman writes: "Those are the words of someone with no sense of what it's like to be uninsured.

"Going without health insurance isn't like deciding to rent an apartment instead of buying a house. It's a terrifying experience, which most people endure only if they have no alternative. The uninsured don't need an 'incentive' to buy insurance; they need something that makes getting insurance possible.

"Most people without health insurance have low incomes, and just can't afford the premiums. And making premiums tax-deductible is almost worthless to workers whose income puts them in a low tax bracket.

"Of those uninsured who aren't low-income, many can't get coverage because of pre-existing conditions -- everything from diabetes to a long-ago case of jock itch. Again, tax deductions won't solve their problem.

Unless they're paid for, new tax deductions are the equivalent of tax cuts and given Bush's financial house of cards that he's built over the last six years, they are likely to add to the nation's growing red ink without substantially accomplishing anything.

I live in a county where health care is increasingly broken. We have three large hospitals, one of which is about to close because of heavy financial losses and the other two are not prepared to handle all the new patients. Doctors are either moving out of the county because they can't make a living or they're working for a wage for someone like Kaiser which increasingly is forced to practice a kind of rationed medicine in order to remain financially solvent. In the last five years, my wife and I have had eight different primary care physicians because of the medical musical chairs caused by employers changing health insurance or doctors moving away. One of the biggest problems with the county is that Medicare considers our county a rural county despite a rapidly growing population and rising housing costs. We can't get the government to change our ratings on Medicare but the next county over gets the urban rate while we get the rural rate.

Medicare, when it is allowed to do what it's supposed to do, is very efficient with little overhead. Corporate health care, however, is burdened with bureaucracy, multiple insurance forms (with widely varying filing procedures and requirements), exclusions, contradictions and even built-in money schemes that denies money to doctors and care for patients (credit card companies are not much different these days when it comes to cute games).

I can remember years ago going to a doctor's office and seeing one nurse and one office worker. In a small office, there's now about a half dozen people just to handle paper work and that doesn't count the doctor's group for HMOs in a centralized location that amounts to another layer of bureaucracy. Health care in our country is broken and the best George W. Bush can do is offer a tiny band-aid? Shame on him and shame on the Republicans.