Intro. An excellent question


From “Fewer Jobs, Slower Growth: Military Spending Drains the Economy” by David Gold

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Military...



I. “War Is Good Business, Invest Your Son”



Remember the antiwar button which carried the above slogan and a picture of LBJ, the president from Brown & Root? The Military Industrial Complex learned a lesson during the Vietnam War. If you ask people to squander their tax dollars fighting over a cause they do not quite understand, a fair number of them will say “Hell, why not? I’m a patriotic American!” If you ask them to sacrifice their flesh and blood for the same cause, they will vote you out of office.

Now, our wars are fought by volunteers, career men and women whose deaths can be portrayed as noble rather than tragic. It was their choice. They decided to put their lives on the line---

But guess what. We are still demanding that our children sacrifice themselves, whether they want to or not. Only now, our sons and daughters do not have to go off to die in another country in order to make that sacrifice. Now, they do it right here at home, where they grow up without decent health care, decent education, decent jobs, and all the other things we could have if our government did not rob us in order to enrich itself and a few very powerful friends through senseless war spending.

II. Tax and Spend Conservatives

The same folks who throw “Tea Parties” and who call universal health care a greater threat than Al Qaeda (I heard it on CNN!), get all excited when you talk about increasing military spending. Take this piece from the Wall Street Journal from late 2008.



http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1230082805...

You know, I used to think that the Wall Street Journal understood the economy, even if they did have their heads up their asses when it came to social matters. Looks like that is no longer the case.

More from Tax and Spend Conservative Feldstein from this January 2009’s Washington Post .


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...

Makes you wonder what kind of stock this guy has in his portfolio.

He is not alone. Even the “let’s drown the federal government in a bath tub” types at the Heritage Foundation want us to spend more on war. Here is an article entitled More Long-Term Defense Spending Needed.


http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/...

Wow! Sounds like everybody on the right thinks that increased war spending will rescue our economy.

Well, almost everyone. DoD Buzz, a magazine aimed at the military, has a different opinion.



http://www.dodbuzz.com/2009/02/05/defense-... /

Hmmm. So the people who actually do the military spending do not expect it to jump start the economy, but a whole bunch of conservatives want to increase war funding anyway. This bring me back to the question in the introduction.

Why?

III. War Spending: Robbing the People to Enrich a Few



Military spending is, by its very nature, ideal for those who favor an oligarchy, because it enriches a few businesses (and the folks who own and manage them), creates a handful of relatively high paying jobs in a few parts of the country---while reducing the federal tax money that might otherwise be spent in a more fair and equitable way to improve the lives of all citizens. If your goal is to get rich quick and keep the rest of America poor and kneeling at your feet, you want to see lots of military spending.

In the 1960s, in his book Input-Output Economics Wassily Leontief speculated on the results of redirecting federal money spent on the military. In Chapter 10, “The Economic Impact—Industrial and Regional---of an Arms Cut” he concludes that a shift in federal spending away from the military would result in a loss of jobs in some states and an increase in jobs in others. Specifically, California would stand to lose more jobs than any other state, followed by the southwestern states, including Texas, and southern states including Alabama, Georgia and Florida. In contrast, Midwestern and New England states would see an increase in jobs. This is because a few industries would have less work if military spending were cut, but many industries would see an increase in production if that same money were spent on something else.

http://books.google.com/books?id=hBDEXblq6...

I especially like this part.



Nowadays, experts talk about how strong our economy is even as unemployment rates rise over 10%. Talk about diminished expectations!

While the relative economic impact of reduced military expenditures on various states and industries may have changed since 1965, the general principle still applies. Military spending is very good for a few parts of the country and a few industries. The folks who benefit from this type of spending have a financial interest in seeing that the U.S. does not cut the money it invests in war.

In 2003, Seymour Melman spelled it out even more clearly in “How George Bush, His Congress and Pentagon are Looting Our Cities, Robbing Our People and Stealing from Our Children”. He gives a list of the sums needed to accomplish various goals, such as the cost to fix our aging roads and bridges ($42 billion) and expand Medicare to everyone in the U.S. ($41 billion) and then shows how quickly the Pentagon is able to spend that money on new weapons and equipment. Consider the relative value to society of universal health care---which will save millions of lives and prevent disability and increase worker productivity---versus the non benefit of a new military helicopter that may never even get used. In the first case everyone gains. In the second, Bell Helicopter and a few industries which supply them with goods will get rich.

http://globalmakeover.com/sites/economicre...

In another essay from 2003 “In the Grip of a Permanent War Economy,” Melman writes about the economic deterioration of the United States brought about by over fifty years of intensive military spending. Capital and innovation have been diverted towards war, while the production of nonmilitary goods has been outsourced to other countries, resulting in a loss of jobs and wealth for the average U.S. citizen. Meanwhile, vast sums are concentrated into the hands of a few who participate in the Military Industrial Complex. He credits rising unemployment to this misappropriation of federal funds and its negative impact on the U.S. economy. The economic prosperity of Japan and Germany are a direct result of their relative low levels of war spending since WWII.



http://globalmakeover.com/sites/economicre...

So true. Talk about how we need to immunize more kids and you are treated as a freak, a member of a radical fringe by the corporate media. More dangerous than Al Qaeda. Say we need to throw $50 billion at a new submarine, and you are a patriot.

Speaking about patriots and military spending, once upon a time, back when the Founders of Our Country were battling King George and Great Britain, they understood the real use of war spending. Rather than protecting the people, it was meant to enslave them. In The Rights of Man Thomas Paine asks why the nations of Europe did not follow through with a proposal to end war made by Henry IV of France. He concludes:



http://www.ushistory.org/Paine/rights/sing...

Two hundred years later, Melman said much the same thing:



http://globalmakeover.com/sites/economicre...


IV. All We Are Saying is Give (a) Peace(time Economy) a Chance



In their 2007 paper, The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities, Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier study the effects of war spending versus other types of federal spending on the economy, particularly on jobs. They compare spending on education, health care, mass transit, home improvement construction, tax cuts and the military to see how they rate in terms of job production and overall economic benefit using the input-output method of Leontief. Their conclusions may surprise you.

Of the six types of spending considered, only tax cuts do a worse job of creating jobs than military spending. Education spending is the best bet for your money if you want to increase the number of people making a real living wage. Spend more on health care, mass transit and home improvement and you will create jobs that do not pay as well as in the education sector----but they still generate more money for the economy than the relatively small number of high paying defense jobs and the service industry minimum wage jobs that you get with tax cuts.

http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/071001-jobcr...


Pop quiz. Which political group is always demanding tax cuts to stimulate the economy? Which one claims that an increase in “entitlements” ( you know, health care for your kids, early education programs, Social Security) will bankrupt the country, but military spending can never hurt you? Hint, here is the Heritage Foundation from 1982 telling us that the way to increase employment is to cut taxes on the rich and eliminate or tax unemployment benefits.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Labor/bg2...

Great thinking---if you drive a Mercedes and want to hire someone at minimum wage to wash it daily. Or if you need underpaid people to cut your grass, do your laundry and wipe your (over privileged ) butt after you take a dump on the American working class.

And here is the Heritage Foundation from this year, explaining that when they talked about wanting to decrease the size of the federal government and deficit, they were not talking about cutting war spending.

http://blog.heritage.org/2009/03/09/mornin... /

If you are a crypto-fascist of the Mussolini school who believes that the government exists to make the rich wealthier and bust unions, then tax cuts and war funding are you keys to increased wealth disparity.

If you are an elected leader who actually cares about the people who sent you to Washington, then you ought to be thinking of ways to redirect some of those military billions towards education. Since we need good health in order to fully benefit from educational programs, you should also be thinking of ways to improve the public health. Universal access to preventive care is one way. Improving the environment by building mass transit and taking cars off the road is another. Cutting down on fossil fuel use by making our homes more efficient will also give healthier air, so our kids spend less time at home having asthma attacks and more time in school.


V.Books, Not Bombs: If You Don’t Believe Me, Then Will You Believe Alan Greenspan?

Alan Greenspan understands the importance of education spending to help the economy grow. Here is his speech to the Federal Reserve Board in 2000.



http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/sp...

Did Bush and the Republican Congress follow Greenspan’s advice? Hell no! These were the same guys whining about how 4% unemployment was harmful to the economy. They were not about to do anything that might put more people to work (even as they increased the need for taxpaying workers by raising federal spending to record levels).

From 2006, a list of things the “Do Nothing” Republicans did not do. Right at the top of the list:



http://edlabor.house.gov/publications/DoNo...

Seems to me that the GOP with their all bombs, no textbook attitude towards running the country are the main reason we are in the mess we are now.

But you know, we should not need economists to tell us this. Anyone remember why the Soviet Union fell? They bankrupted themselves on military spending during the Afghanistan War. War is never good for the economy. It is only good for the pocketbooks of the merchants of death---and for those who want to see the average American reduced to a state of serfdom. Al Qaeda does not want us to invest our money sensibly in education and health care. No, Bin Laden wants us to follow in the footsteps of the U.S.S.R. and waste our resources on war.

Sad, the way that the national dialogue has degenerated. Not so long ago, we were debating the relative merits of single payer versus our current patchwork insurance system---the one will all the holes. Now, the press has us convinced that we will have scored a major victory if we create another insurer to add to the 1001 we already have. The so called public option is supposed to be Congress’s gift to the American voters, to sugar coat insurance industry friendly legislation which will likely give private insurers a massive windfall, while leaving half of the nation’s uninsured still uninsured.

Congress, the corporate media and the nation’s private insurers have conveniently forgotten the real issue. How do we reform a broken health care system that spends twice as much person as it should and gives results that would make Eastern Europe blush? We all know the answer. We have known the answer for years. We either adopt a western European style single payer model----or we go bankrupt.



I. Albatross

The health insurance industry is spending a lot of time and money this year telling Americans that they do not make money. Google “health insurance industry profit margin” and you will see a list of industry generated pr pieces which describe the precarious financial status of our nation’s private insurers. Articles like this one:

http://www.healthinsurancecolorado.net/blo... /



Health insurers hope that if we hear this message often enough, we will start to think: Oh my! Who knew that running a health care plan could be such a miserable job? Guess we don't want taxpayers burdened with the financial responsibility....

But wait! If administering the nation's health care is such a money sink, Why the hell are private insurers spending so much money trying to keep things the way they are? Don’t they want to get rid of that great, big fat financial albatross that is hanging around their neck?

II. The Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs

In fact, a whole lot of people are making a whole lot of money from our health care dollars. They just don’t call it profit. Instead, hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted each year in inflated overhead and administrative costs. A 2004 New England Journal Medicine article estimated that if the U.S. switched to a Canadian style single payer system, we would be able to cover all the nation’s uninsured with the money that would be trimmed from overhead.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/8...



Look at that second dollar total closely. In 2003, almost $1,400 was spent per person in this country to pay for overhead. Now look at this Common Wealth Fund report from 2003 about per capita health spending in different countries.

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Content/Pu...

Note that in most industrialized countries with universal coverage, total expenditures per person were around $2,500. That means that we spend over half as much as sensible countries do just to pay overhead . You know, the salaries of the people whose job is to find sneaky ways to deny coverage for legitimate medical expenses. And the multimillion dollar bonuses that insurance company CEOs are paid. People who would be on Douglas Adams’ B Ark, along with the telephone sanitizers. Then there are the computers, software, extra employees that medical providers must have if they are going to get paid by the nation’s private insurers, each of which has a different system and a different set of hoops that must be jumped through before they will pay out claims or authorize services.

Or, look at it another way. For those Americans who can not afford any health care at all, that $1,400 could mean the difference between life and death, if it were spent to control high blood pressure and diabetes in order to prevent a heart attack.

III. Let’s Talk Turkey

Here is more from the NEJM story above:



$6,940 is more than enough to buy every uninsured American health care---which should not be confused with a private health insurance policy. These savings can only be generated if we switch from a patchwork of private plans to a single payer. The good news is that in countries which have adopted single payer, universal coverage average health care costs tend to go down while medical outcomes tend to improve, as more people get timely, preventive care.

It is our choice. We can have a Thanksgiving celebration in which everyone is invited to enjoy a nutritious, satisfying new single payer health care model----or we can suffer the fate of the Ancient Mariner, who is saddled with hundreds of billions of dollars of health insurance industry overhead and waste each year.

This is a Texas sized thread about a Texas sized problem---the possibility that the GOP might call upon Governor Rick Perry to run for president.

Intro.

Greetings from the bizarro state of Texas, which voted out popular governor Ann Richards in order to replace her with George H. W. Bush’s profligate---and dumb as a bag of rocks---son. W. Some folks say he got the job, because Rove called Richards a lesbian. I think a bunch of voters mistook the son for the father and decided that the job of governor would be a nice consolation prize for the one term ex-president. W. maintained that he was not interested in being president. But that did not stop him from waging one of the dirtiest campaigns ever in 2000, when he used the Supreme Court of the United States to keep lawfully cast votes from being counted in Florida.

There is a new sheriff in Texas, known by the name of Rick “Goodhair” Perry. He says he does not want to be president. Now, where have I heard that before?

W. was able to steal the election in 2000, in part, because he carefully scrubbed his Texas record. For instance, he boasted during a debate that he helped pass the Texas Patients Protection Act, a law that prevented managed care abuses. In fact, he vetoed the law the first time around, after the legislature was out of session, so it was dead for two years. He got a lot of flak over this veto. So much flak that the next time the bill came around, two years later, he grudgingly allowed it to become law. Then he claimed credit for it. Then , after he stole the election, he had Attorney General Ashcroft attack (and kill) the law in federal court.

I mention this, because the story teaches us a lesson. Do not listen to what the candidate says. Look at what he has done. If he is promising to be the new Teddy Roosevelt, but during his term as governor he was Ebenezer Scrooge, you can safely predict that the poor houses will be full to bursting under his administration.

Now, to the matter at hand. Let’s talk turkey. A great big fat turkey with a really nice head of hair.



I. Rick Perry Protects Pedophiles

Texas Governor Rick Perry has done a lot of shameful things during his excessively long term. If people were actually forced to wear their Badges of Shame, he would look like an Eagle Scout or a four star general. His biggest, baddest medal is the one that says I (Heart) Child Molesters .

Now, I could quote a bunch of liberal journalists, but folks would just say that they are biased. So, I will rely upon the reporting of a bone fide conservative writer, Jerome Corsi, from World Daily Net to show you all just how big and bad this story was.

Here is a link which outlines the basics of the case.

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICL...

Briefly, in 2005 Texas Ranger, Brian Burzynski discovered that employees of the Texas Youth Commission had been engaging in sexual activities with their (underage) charges. This made them guilty of both rape and abuse of power. In a solidly red state like Texas, sexual shenanigans are not tolerated, right? State and local prosecutors should have jumped on the case. But they did not. Instead, two years passed, during which time the pedophiles were allowed to continue their child molesting ways. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbot and U.S. Attorney General Al Gonzales both threw up their hands and said “It’s not my problem, man.”

Here is a link about Rick Perry’s involvement in the scandal---which might have jeopardized his changes in the 2006 election. You see, he was facing a challenge from the right in the form of third party candidate Carole Strayhorn. Perry was afraid that the if folks in Texas found out that he had overseen and made appointments to a Texas Youth Commission that was crawling with pedophiles, he might earn the reputation as someone who protects pedophiles. In order to keep the story under wraps, he decided to….protect the pedophiles.

http://70.85.195.205/news/printer-friendly...



The cabal of Texas Republicans in DC and Austin carefully avoided doing anything about the case until after Perry was safely re-elected (by less than a plurality) in the fall of 2006. Then, they sprang into action----pointing fingers at the local Democratic prosecutor in the case to explain why they decided to do nothing for two years.

More on Perry’s complicity in the Texas Youth Commission Scandal here:
http://www.lonestarproject.net/archive/200...

Note that when Perry was finally forced to appoint someone to (stonewall the) investigat(ion) of the pedophiles, he chose a staunch Republican, Jay Kimbrough, whose other claim to fame is that he is the one who demanded that federal law enforcement officials arrest Texas Democratic legislators who fled the state in an effort to keep Tom Delay from doing an illegal, minority-vote-splitting redistricting in 2003. Note that Rick Perry was involved, too. He called for three special legislative sessions that year in order to force lawmakers to pass that redistricting plan, which the Supreme Court later said violated federal voting rights protection laws.

II. Rick is Opposed to Private Property

Sometimes, I think that Rick Perry is W. with an extra poofy wig. Recall that after a series of failed businesses, Bush finally made some real money by having the City of Alrington, Texas steal private citizens’ land for him so that he could build a ballpark. He then turned around and sold the ballpark to the city for millions. Now, if the city had used its powers of eminent domain to seize the land to build a city owned ballpark, that would have been one thing. However, they allowed one private developer (W.) to take land from other private citizens, presumably on the grounds that the son of an ex-president was more equal before the law than a bunch of nobody property owners.

Given the controversy that this case caused, you would think that aspiring Republican politician, Rick Perry would run, not walk, from any eminent domain scandal. However, in 2007, he vetoed the very popular bill that would have protected Texas property owners from eminent domain claims by private developers. He said that he was doing it, because of provisions involving road access. However, no one bothered to say a word about the road access provisions when they were being considered by the legislature. That was because they provided Perry with a convenient excuse to veto the entire bill after the legislature was out of session (and yes, it is a wonder that anything ever gets done in this state when all you have to do is bribe the governor if you want to kill a progressive law for two years).

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/regi...

Note in the above article that Perry is trying to undo the political damage he suffered in 2007, because he is scared that Se. Kay Bailey Hutchison (who has better hair than Perry) will use the issue in the 2010 gubernatorial election. Shades of W.’s Patient Protection Act veto.

III. Rick Perry Panders to the Confederate Flag Constituency



I want to make one thing clear, here. There are some that claim that they wave a Confederate Flag out of sense of pride in their southern heritage. This is bullshit. Even in the south, everyone knows that the flag is the banner under which states committed the ultimate act of treason in order to protect their right to deprive Blacks of their rights as human beings and United States citizens. Waving a Confederate Flag around while claiming that you are not a racist is like getting a swastika tattooed on your forehead while protesting that you love Jewish people. The Confederate flag symbolizes the south’s hatred of federal laws which have required equal treatment for all, regardless of race. If you believe that special schools should be built for whites and that Blacks should not make the same wages as other workers and mostly importantly that no Black man should ever be president of your country , then you express your displeasure by waving around one of these things.



http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dw...

Note that Perry has assumed the role of modern day Jefferson Davis in order to pander to extreme right wing voters in Texas who might consider voting for Hutchinson. He hopes to make the Confederate Flag constituency associate her with Obama. Can “Call me, Barrack” ads featuring the former UT cheerleader turned U.S. senator be far behind?

IV. Some of Rick Perry’s More Memorable Vetoes

Perry vetoed a bill that would have informed ex-felons of their right to vote in Texas, because



http://www.pegasusnews.com/news/2007/may/2... -/

Rick Perry also vetoed a bill that would have required drivers to give cyclist three feet of space when passing around them. (???)

http://austinontwowheels.org/2009/06/20/up... /

Getting arrested for something you did not do sucks, right? Well, in Texas, that unpleasant situation gets even worse, because the Republican State Supreme Court has ruled that the police can keep a record of every arrest ---even if charges were later dropped because you did not do it----until the statute of limitations of the crime in question passes. That means two years for a misdemeanor and forever for an offense like murder. The state legislature tried to correct this problem, by passing a law that would have required law enforcement to wipe records clean if charges were dropped. But guess who vetoed it?

http://blog.austindefense.com/2009/06/arti... /

His reasoning?



Because hey, what about the rights of cops to sully your reputation permanently by making bogus arrests?

One way in which Perry does not resemble W.? His wife is not an ex-school teacher. That probably explains why he vetoed a bill that would have provided $25 million to pre-K programs. Early childhood education is the great equalizer in our society, and anyone who is courting the Confederate Flag vote knows that “equality” is a four letter word.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/...

Note in the above article that Perry has used (abused?) his veto power more than any other Texas governor. This does not bode well for our Democratic Congress were he to get into the White House.
Here is another head scratcher. Texas tried to pass a law to keep buses from idling while waiting for students. Anyone who has ever been forced to hold his breath while wading through the chemical soup mixture which a fleet of idling buses can pump into the air understands this one. It is bad for asthmatic children and it’s bad for the environment. However, Rick Perry (who is the number one recipient of oil and gas money in the state) wants to see those buses sitting there burning up fuel.

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/regi...

Now, if you read section I. of this thread, you will understand the reason for Perry’s next veto. Sometimes young folks get convicted of sex offenses for the relatively innocuous crime of having sex with their girlfriends or boyfriends. Say, the guy is a high school senior age 19 and the girl is a senior age 16, and things got out of hand after the prom. The way things are now, even if the two are engaged and get married, he can still be labeled a sex offender for the rest of his life. That means he may not be allowed to have contact with the children he will have with his wife. His kids definitely will not be allowed to have friends over---just because his parents got hot and heavy at the prom.

Lawmakers in Texas attempted to fix this problem by giving courts the option of removing some people’s sex offender status. The bill had widespread public support---and Perry vetoed it. Because hey, he would not want voters to get the idea that he is soft on pedophiles.

http://startelegram.typepad.com/politex/20...

Another bill that passed with unanimous support was one designed to give consumer protections to people buying annuities. Apparently, the people who sell annuities did not like it, because they got Perry to veto it.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dw...
/DN-aarp_24tex.ART.State.Edition1.4ab6d16.html

Perry’s vetoes are so controversial in Texas that the Texas Monthly wrote an article about them entitled “No! No! No!



http://www.texasmonthly.com/2001-08-01/btl...

One of the bills which roused the ire of the Texas Monthly was a veto of a bill that would have allowed the execution of mentally retarded criminals. In most states, you have to know what you did wrong and why you are being punished for it before you can die. In Texas, you just have to possess a pulse and a vein through which lethal drugs can be injected.

Speaking of executions…

V. Rick Perry Believes in Executing Innocent People

Perry’s most recent controversy involved the case of a man who was almost certainly arrested for an arson/murder that did not happen. Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004 (during Perry’s watch) for setting a fire in his house and killing his own children. The problem with the case---there were no witnesses, there was no confession. All the prosecution had was some flawed science.

Last week, five years after the (almost certainly wrongful) death of Willingham, the Texas Forensic Science Commission tried to right this wrong by considering new evidence in the case. Perry put a stop to this by firing three members of the commission on the eve of their meeting.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/A...

I guess he is worried that the combination of his veto of the bill protecting the mentally retarded plus a finding that he allowed an innocent man to die might make voters in other states a little bit leery of electing him their president. Texas was unique in a national survey as the only state where a majority of voters said they would be fine allowing innocent people to be put to death if it meant that no guilty folks evaded execution. The other United States put a greater value on human life than Texas and its Republican governor.

VI. Remember What Don Seigelman was Prosecuted for Doing?

Selective prosecution of Democrats for things that all politicians do is one of the major scandals of the Bush DOJ. Alberto Gonzales even announced publicly in 2006 that he planned to start a lot of investigations and prosecutions of Democratic elected officials in the wake of the Democrats’ sweep of Congress. In the process, he painted a great big read Kick me (out of office) sign on his own back that lead to him being the first (and last) Bush administration official to be forced out of office by Congress.

The case of Don Seigelman who was charged and convicted of appointing someone to a board in exchange for a contribution was one example of the way the Bush administration used the DOJ like a Mafia enforcement squad. Funny thing is that Gov. Rick Perry of Texas (and his predecessor, W.) is notorious for playing quid pro quo with appointments.

The University of Texas is a huge system that is swimming in cash. The ability of a few VIPs to make a lot of money off UT has been protected in Texas, first by W. and then by his separated at birth successor, Perry.



http://www.utwatch.org/utimco/perry.html

Here is more on the cash for appointments policy of Perry.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/...



Meritocracy? You have got to be kidding. Right now, Texas is an oligarchy, and Rick Perry is the bought and paid for aspiring Mussolini of the state’s corporate elite.

Intro. Back to the (Reactionary) Past



http://www.americanlynching.com/infamous-o...

The majority of Americans are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. Whether we were triaged through Ellis Island or brought over on British slave ships or imported to work on the railroads, we all came to this country for a reason----to fill the need for workers in the rapidly expanding United States. Our ancestors worked and paid taxes and sent their children to schools where they could be acculturated. With every new wave of immigrants, there was a new backlash. Irish, Italians, Chinese---they all had their storms to weather in the New World. But eventually, they were all accepted.

You would think that we would learn from history how to avoid the mistakes of the past. Mistakes like the massively popular anti-Black, anti-Catholic immigrant movement that was at the core of the KKK of the 1920s. The Great Depression and the war against fascism (aka WWII) soured Americans against right wing hate groups…for a while. But now the country has taken a sharp turns towards the most intolerant, ugly kind of reactionary thinking. Thinking that once lead our ancestors to pose proudly beside the corpses of lynching victims.




http://www.americanlynching.com/infamous-o...

We All Agree That It is Wrong to Lynch, and Yet Many of Us, Even Democrats….


…think nothing of denying immigrants in this country necessary medical care, even when that care is needed to save lives.



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/health/p...

In recent years, southern states like Georgia have welcomed undocumented workers from south of the border. They have replaced the poor Black workers of the past in low paying, no benefit jobs. They pick the crops. The pluck the chickens. And, when they or their parents get sick, they are kicked to the curb----or to another state.

Where is the Democratic Party outrage on behalf of the largest minority group in the U.S., people who traditionally vote Democratic? Where is the compassion for the crippled child of the man who cuts our grass? What about the aged mother of the woman who sews our clothes? This country has tacitly welcomed the young, healthy workers who keep our factories in the black. But we have no qualms about letting the family members of our most cost effective workers die like animals.


http://apnews.myway.com//article/20090912/...

Undocumented workers benefited the federal government to the tune of $5 billion in federal income taxes in 2005.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/16/nyregion...

And that is not counting sales taxes and state taxes. But it is considered politically correct to say that we do not want a single cent of federal dollars to benefit our undocumented workers. Seems to me that the relationship between immigrants and the rest of us is all take, take, take and no give.

I am not going to go into the public health disaster that is just waiting to happen if a huge portion of our workforce is denied necessary health care for themselves and their (legal U.S. citizen) children. I am not going to talk dollars and cents---even though it makes sense to keep our workers healthy so that they can stay of their jobs. I am not even going to discuss the possible ramifications for legal American workers if employers are forced to pay for health insurance for their documented workers but not for illegals.

I am going to talk justice. Is it just to create a porous border with Mexico that encourages workers to move north so that they can fill industry and agriculture’s low paying jobs without providing those workers with the basics necessary for living? Is it right to keep these workers in legal limbo, deliberately so that they will continue to work for less? Is it moral to tell them “The Wife and Husband can stay, but the child with the heart defect---he has to go”? In what way is that last scenario different from Nazi attempts to weed out illness in the German workforce by killing those with disabilities? You know, the Final Solution was the not the solution of choice for Nazi Germany. First, they tried to exile their “undesirables” to other countries---only no one else would take them.

Go ahead. Tell me that undocumented immigrants aka illegal aliens are not like us . They do not have the same values, the same hopes, the same needs. That is the excuse our country has uses time and again when it kills people from other cultures----

And make no mistake. What Grady Hospital in Atlanta and what the nation’s elected lawmakers (including Democrats) plan to do is murder . 51 dialysis patients who can die for all the state of Georgia cares, even as it exploits cheap immigrant labor for the profit of its businessmen. A generation of U.S. citizens will grow up suffering from obesity, hypertension and diabetes that will kill them at an early age, because their “illegal” (but oh so economically valuable) parents were not allowed to participate in our supposedly public health insurance.

And why the hell not? Immigrants can purchase private insurance right now, regardless of their immigration status. How does it hurt our country if they are allowed to contribute money towards a public health insurance program, the same way that any other American worker can? Keep in mind that immigrant workers tend to be younger and healthier than the average American. It is not as if they will break the bank. And they pay taxes, both on their salaries and in the form of sale tax. They buy homes and cars. Why can’t they pool a portion of their wages with the rest of us in a huge public health insurance program? Does anyone here think that immigrants will flock to our country for health care that they can already get in their countries of origins for a fraction of the cost? Hell, white Americans head south to Mexico to get medical treatment all the time.

Morally, feeding industry’s need for low wage workers while denying necessary care to immigrants who get sick is no different from culling livestock of the weak and frail to keep the herd healthy. It is eugenics. It is wrong.

What My Eyes Have Seen

Forget the abstracts for a moment. Let’s talk specifics. Take the woman with the (probably) malignant breast mass who can not find anyone to biopsy and remove it, because she is not a citizen and does not have private insurance. She has raised children who are productive workers in this country. If any of them got a cancerous breast mass, it would be in a specimen jar tomorrow, thanks to their employer sponsored health insurance. But they have to scramble to find the care their mother needs. Sending her back to her “own country” is not an option. She is a political refugee. This is her country, love it or leave it---but we do not show much love for her.

What about the young woman with a gallbladder full of stones? Health care reform, as it is currently envisioned, will not give her the surgery she needs to live. Sooner or later, she will end up in a hospital emergency room in need of a stat cholecystectomy, ten times sicker than she is now. She might even die, leaving her children orphaned.

And then there is the middle aged worker, healthy except for a pair of cataracts that have made him almost blind. He can not get a job, because he can not see. He has no money, so he can not get the cataract surgery that would allow him to see (and work) again. The nation’s public health safety network slams the door in his face. It was set up to take care of the medical needs of native born poor folks. He built our roads and schools and we repay him by kicking him out onto the street when he can no longer do the work that he was invited into this country to do. Like a warn out horse carted off to the glue factory.

Right now, there is a very fragile safety net of private charities which attempt to meet the medical needs of immigrants like these. However, with the economy floundering, their resources are stretched thin. And, once we have the illusion of “health care for all”, will there be any public support for programs designed specifically for those left out of the solution, the nation’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants?

http://www.gcir.org/immigration/facts/stat...

It gets worse. We pay private contractors a bundle to jail detained "illegals" into for-profit prisons (hey, it's another way to make money off immigrants). But we deny them the health care that every citizen criminal--rapist, mass murderer, you name it--- in this country is entitled to.



http://www.medindia.net/news/Family-of-Ill...



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/natio...



http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/... /

Eugenics is Eugenics is Eugenics



http://www1.assumption.edu/ahc/1920s/eugen...

Those determined to place immigrant workers in the role of bogey-man will say that policies which lead to the premature death of noncitizens are good for our safety and our economic well being. They could not be more wrong. When you teach your children that one group of human beings does not have to be treated with respect or dignity, you tell them that they can abuse any human being---as long as it profits them in some way. All they have to do is declare something about those people---say, for instance, their sexual orientation--"illegal". You spread the message that we are not one human family. Once this fallacy is firmly implanted into a young mind, it is very easy to decide that anyone who is slightly different----say a member of a different religion----can be exploited. Because they are not one of us . And therefore, we can treat them like animals—who get put down when they are sick---- rather than people, who get treated with care.

Oh, and the answer to my title question is easy. You call that country “The United States of America.”

I. AMA Hypocrisy: "We Like Our Government Sponsored Health Program The Way It Is"



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/us/polit...

Now, where have I heard this before? Ah, I remember. Back in 1964, the AMA objected to the creation of a government sponsored insurance plan. That plan? We know it by the name of Medicare. According to this document, Medicare and Medicaid are close to accounting for half of all health care spending in this country.


Those who are fighting against a government financed health care system ignore the fact that the United States already has a huge, government financed health care system. Dollar for dollar, the federal government matches the spending by private health insurance companies. And states match the dollars that people spend out of their own pockets.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_i...

More numbers are available at the next site, including this fun fact:



http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml

The U.S. public health care program (this excludes self pay and private insurance) is as large as the whole health care system of France---which covers everyone in the country.

So, the question is not whether or not we will get a government run and financed program---we already have one of those. We need to decide how we will spend all those tax dollars. The U.S. has a poorly designed health care system which discourages preventive care in early life. Children, young adults and even a fair number of middle aged Americans have limited access to care. Therefore, their chronic medical problems go untreated. By the time these folks reach 65---and qualify for membership in our massive, federally funded Medicare program---they are much sicker than their counterparts in Western Europe. This keeps Medicare costs high---and leads to poor outcomes since disease treatment never produces results as good as disease prevention.

The bad news for seniors is good news for the folks in the Medical Industrial Complex who make a whole lot of money providing overpriced and often futile rescue care at the end of life. Cardiologists now average half a million dollars a year performing cardiac catheterizations on hearts that could have been kept healthy if people watched their cholesterol and blood pressure. Orthopedists insert artificial knees in seniors who would be able to walk just fine if someone had helped them control their weight when they were young.

So, it is no wonder the AMA does not want to see things change. However, I think they should rephrase their objections. They do not want another government sponsored insurance plan, one that might make Medicare less profitable for them.


II. Red State Hypocrisy: “More Free Federal Money, Please”



As I have pointed out before, the Republican states use up more than their share of federal funds. In particular, they are much more likely than Blue states to get federal funds to cover their health care related expenses. This is why they do not want the current system to change. If you were getting more than your fair share, you might want to keep things the same, too.

Take the case of Medicaid. Medicaid is a unique public health program in that states decide how much money they will spend and how they will spend it. Programs vary from state to state. But one thing remains the same. If you live in a Republican state, you are likely to collect federal funds adding up to three times as much as you pay yourself to help cover the care of your poor.

This document will give you an idea of the size of the Medicaid program.

http://www.cms.hhs.gov/apps/media/press/re...



And this was before the recession and the mass lay offs.

This Kaiser document breaks down Medicaid state and federal spending by state for 2007. Note that the hard Red or Republican states tend to have a high percentage of their Medicaid costs paid for by the federal government.

http://statehealthfacts.kff.org/comparebar...

Since seeing is not always believing, I decided to do the math. Using Wiki’s Blue state/Red state map (based upon Congressional representation), I analyzed the ratio of federal dollars to state dollars spent by each Red and each Blue state. Here are the numbers:

Red states

Alabama 6:1
Arizona 3:1
Georgia 2:1
Idaho 2:1
Kansas 1.5:1
Kentucky 3:1
Louisiana 5.3:1
Maine 2:1
Mississippi 8:1
Oklahoma 2.5:1
South Carolina 4:1
Tennessee 2:1
Texas 2:1
Utah 3:1
Wyoming 1:1
Total 3.17:1



Blue states
Arkansas 3:1
California 1.5:1
Colorado 1:1
Connecticut 0
Delaware 1:1
Hawaii 1:1
Illinois 1.4:1
Maryland 1:1
Mass 0
Michigan 2:1
Minnesota 1:1
New Hampshire 1:1
New Jersey 1:1
New Mexico 2.5:1
New York 2:1
North Dakota 2:1
Oregon 2:1
Pennsylvania 1.5:1
Virginia 1:1
Washington 1:1
West Virginia 4:1
Wisconsin 1.5:1
Total 1.47:1

Note that Red states spend an average of over 3 times as many federal dollars as state dollars to provide health care to Medicaid beneficiaries. Blue states, in contrast, only get 1.5 times as much from the feds in matching funds. This means that Red states are twice as dependent upon federal government medical spending for Medicaid. No wonder they do not want to change the current system.

III. Christian Coalition Hypocrisy: "We Hate Abortion and Therefore, We Want to Protect Private Insurers....Because They Cover Abortion?"



http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/1...

Uh…say what? Earth to the right wing Christians. Private health insurers cover abortion. Because it is cheaper to flush out the fetus than to pay for a woman’s obstetric care and delivery.

http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/...

Right now, the only major insurers that do not cover abortion are federal government sponsored programs. You know, Medicaid. If Right to Life really wanted to restrict women’s financial access to pregnancy termination, they would rally behind the public option, since they would have a much better chance of persuading Congress to exclude abortion coverage than they will ever have with the number crunchers at Blue Cross and United.

But we have already figured out that the leaders of the Christian Coalition represent Joe Business, not Jesus Christ.

IV. The Ultimate Hypocrisy: "Jesus Only Loves You If You are Unborn or in a Permanent Vegetative State...And Have Health Insurance"



http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/cat...

One of the biggest, most hypocritical public scams being run by the Medical Industrial Complex is the lie that under health care reform, people will be left on the streets to die. The truth is that we are letting people die right at this very moment ...if they do not have health insurance.

Take the case of Sun Hudson, a 6 month old boy who was being kept alive in a ventilator. Turns out that Texas Governor George W. Bush signed into law a bill that would allow hospitals to pull the plug on folks with no insurance--over the objections of the family--hastening their deaths.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Texas_baby_rem...



Would it surprise anyone here to know that George Bush Sr. signed the Patient Self-Determination Act in 1990? And that this law requires medical facilities to inform all patients of their right to have a living will? And that the Republicans who controlled Congress from 1995 to 2006 never bothered to change the law?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Self-...

That is because self determination is valued in the United States. People want to have a say in how they will be treated by their doctors. Republicans know that, and they know that any law that seeks to restrict the use of living wills would be massively unpopular. Plus, hospitals do not like providing expensive care to people without insurance. They want a way out of their obligation. So, instead of acting upon the conscience (of the Pope) the GOP gives lip service to the notion that advance directives are a form of "death panel". And meanwhile, the reddest of red states will toss you out in the street to die, if you can not pay for your care or find another hospital to accept you. Keep in mind that the Catholic Church runs some very profitable hospital chains, which raises the question "If they are so bound and determined to keep us all alive against our wishes, why aren't they willing to suck up the cost of an uninsured baby's terminal medical care?"

If that is not hypocrisy, I don't know what it.

Here is another fact to add to your list of health care talking points.

Today, I received this alarming email from Physicians For a National Health Plan:



Keep in mind that Massachusetts has a relatively low percent uninsured. I live in Texas, which has the highest rate of uninsured in the nation (25%!) despite being the country’s second richest state and the world’s 15th largest economy. If Mass was unable to make mandatory private insurance work, how on earth are the states that really need help going to get by?

Answer: they won’t. Mandatory private insurance is nothing but a scam being run against the American people by private insurers who stand to make a fortune writing policies for healthy young people who will not use their insurance and older, sick folks who will be sold paper only policies that do nothing but save them from paying the fine for being uninsured.

But insurance is insurance.

Ha! An insurance policy with a two to three thousand dollar deductible sold to working class Americans will only be used in the event of a major emergency. People will not seek care for chronic problems like hypertension and diabetes, and they will not get preventive care like check ups and Pap smears. Indeed, if forced to pay a thousand dollars or more for a policy like this, folks will be even less likely to get necessary care since they will be $1000 poorer.

Universal healthcare in countries like France and Canada work--i.e. they do not break the national budget---because they are designed to encourage folks to get necessary preventive care. That makes them healthier so they are less likely to require expensive emergency care. Most of the world's industrialized countries pay less than half per person for health care (compared to the U.S.) and achieve better results in measures of public health like life expectancy and infant mortality. That is the benefit of prevention. A sane universal health plan emphasizes prevention. In contrast, our insane Congress's health plan emphasizes insurance company profits.

What about managed care plans? HMOs have to pay for well care.

Technically, managed care plans are required to accept all comer and pay for every type of care, including preventive services (Pap smears, immunizations). In fact, these plans have made an art of denying members promised care. They do this by contracting with a tiny numbers of health care providers. An insurance policy written by a company with an “exclusive provider network” will not be used if the insurer has no doctors in your area. Note that some plans are trying to get Congress to allow them to sell across state lines. Again, these are likely to be “affordable” (if you have an extra one to two thousand dollars floating around) but worthless, since the out of state company may have no doctors, hospitals and ancillary medical facilities signed up in your area. And even if there are a handful of local providers, they are likely to be swamped---which leads to the "not accepting new ___members" problem. Or, there may be one specialist to cover a three hundred mile area (and how many of us can take a day off work and travel to another city to see a doctor?).

But Joe’s Fly By Night HMO swears that I will be able to see my own doctor!

Yeah, and I know a bridge I can sell you. Cheap. Insurers are notorious for promising folks the sun and the moon to get them to sign up. They will lie and say that doctors who do not accept their insurance accept it. They will tell you that you can always get a referral out of network for emergencies, without telling you that their definition of an emergency is not the same as yours. These roadblocks are thrown up in order to encourage the people who actually need health care to seek insurance elsewhere, while the insurer keeps collecting premiums from those who never require medical care. Reverse cherry picking, if you will.

But at least the mandatory private insurance plan will net a lot of revenue for the federal government from the folks who elect to pay the fine rather than purchasing insurance.

As I documented in a recent journal, Congress is actually counting upon millions of Americans remaining uninsured to cover the premiums which the federal government will have to pay for those who decide they do want coverage and who happen to be poor enough that the feds will have to supply that coverage. Now, what kind of “universal” health plan depends upon lack of universal coverage in order to stay solvent? Answer: the Mass plan. And boy, were they shocked in Massachusetts to discover that people were not kidding when they said that they wanted health insurance coverage.



http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080407/lieb...

If "universal health care" bankrupts the federal government (while filling the coffers of private insurers), it will fail. Sane cost containment has to be part of a successful program. Disease prevention is one way to keep costs down. But that takes time. The fastest way to reduce expenses is to cut the inflated overhead associated with private plans. Government run insurance like Medicare operates with a tiny overhead. And when you are talking about health care expenses of $7000/person (on average) for a total of 15% of the GNP, trimming overhead costs by ten to 20% can make a real difference. Which is better? Covering 750 people while paying the private insurers a whopping 25% extra for their CEO salaries? Or covering 1000 people while keeping overhead at the low rate of government programs like Medicare? Before you answer, remember that there is a hidden cost associated with the first option. Since those 250 uninsured folks will eventually get sick and go on Medicare or Medicaid, one way or another we are going to provide them health care. Our choice is give everyone relatively inexpensive care to keep them healthy or wait and give some people extremely costly care to keep them from dying.

I know that people who have been unable to get insurance for pre-existing conditions think that their problems will be solved if the feds just force Blue Cross or United to write then a policy. But Mass, where private insurers have had to cover everyone who was willing to pay for a policy since 1977, proves that this just is not true.



http://www.progressivestates.org/journalis...

How many Americans will be better off if they get sick (and can not work) and have to pay $10,000 out of pocket on top of the premiums they already pay? It is not wonder that sickness is the number one cause of individual bankruptcy in this country.

Even if you are lucky (or unlucky) enough to qualify for federal subsides (meaning you are poor), you may still find health care costs are too high. From the Nation article about Massachusetts above:



Copayments are designed to keep people from misusing their insurance. The theory is that if you have to pay $15 a visit, you will not go to the doctor just to get your kid free Tylenol. Copayments were not supposed to be high enough to keep people from seeing the doctor for necessary services. But that is how private insurance has used them. Some folks pay as much as $30 just to see their family doctor. Prescriptions also have hefty copayments. So do hospital stays. Mental health benefits are notorious for their whopping patient share. Do the math, and you will see that few people who make less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level ($10,000 for one, $22,000 for a family of four) have extra cash to pay towards copayments. These are folks who can barely afford the $4 prescription service at Wall Mart. And remember that those who live in poverty are more likely to suffer from a whole host of disparity related diseases. If you have a family of four and make $33,000 a year, you may be required to pay an additional $100/month per person to get your "free government healthcare." Old math, new math, no matter what system you use, that adds up to "break the family budget".

Here is a nice summary of the problem which Massachusetts faces:



http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/... /

Rising costs. Lowered commitment to cover everyone. Those are Massachusetts problems now...and they will be problems for all of us if Congress goes through with its plans to design health care reform to benefit insurance companies rather than citizens.

The last time I tried to alert DUers about some of the problems that those of us who live in Texas face, I was told in no uncertain terms that I could not criticize the state in which I live. However, two bits of news today are so entirely typical of Texas, that I have to comment on them.

First, the Arlington Independent School District refused to allow its students to watch President Obama's address to children. Now, keep in mind that Arlington is no rural community or lily white suburban school district. The city is located between Dallas and Fort Worth, and it is the 7th largest city in Texas and the 50th largest in the country. According to wiki, their demographics are as follows:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington,_Te...

That is a pretty racial diverse population---but that did not stop the schools in the city from censoring the presidents speech. Why did they do it? Some schools have claimed that "politics" have no place in public schools. However, the Arlington School District was planning to bus children to see former president George W. Bush at the same time that it was boycotting our current president.



http://www.star-telegram.com/804/story/160...

What does their decision tell us? The Arlington School District either 1) made a political decision to promote Republican politics and discourage Democratic politics (best case scenario) or 2) wants its student to think that only white presidents count. Racism or political bias, take your pick. This is not atypical in Texas. A whole host of suburban schools in this area decided not to let kids see their president.

Obviously, all of Texas does not feel this way. The kids in Fort Worth ISD got to see the president.Bud Kennedy, columnist for the Star Telegram had this feature today.



http://www.star-telegram.com/news/columnis...

As a long time resident of Texas, I want to say that what happened in Arlington is not atypical for this state. A sizable proportion of the population has always been---there is no nice way to put it, so I will just say it---- red neck . Keep in mind that this is the state whose police departments funded their Christmas parties by illegally preying on out of state black motorists. (See my journal "Driving While Black in Small Southern Towns" at http://journals.democraticunderground.com/... )

This is the state whose governor is attempting to win re-election on a platform of secession. And don't let anyone fool you. Whenever anyone down in Dixie uses the "s" word, there is always racial politics involved---

But I mentioned two disturbing bits of news. Today's newspaper also featured this grim statistic about the very wealthy Lone Star State.



Mississippi I could believe. That state is poor . Alabama---sure. But Texas? Texas is filthy rich.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Te...

When a state has this much money---and still allows a quarter of its citizens to go without healthcare, it is not a case of can not so much as will not .

All is not reactionary in Texas. Remember the gay bar that was raided and the patron who was beaten not too long ago in Fort Worth?



http://www.chicagopride.com/news/article.c...

But why is it that the things which have to be apologized for seem to happen so often in this state? Stonewall happened 40 years ago in another, more progressive state. Why did Texas wait to have its "Stonewall" moment in 2009? Why was James Byrd Jr. dragged to death in this state? Why was a Black girl in Texas sent to juvenile detention for "shoving" a teacher but a white girl got probation for arson? Why were 47 African-Americans in the small town of Tulia railroaded for crimes they did not commit? Why was an Hispanic youth beaten and raped by white kids in the Houston suburb of Spring so severely that he spent a month in the hospital and eventually committed suicide? Why



http://uhurunews.com/story?resource_name=w...

In a dirt poor state you could blame the racial tension on the effects of poverty, which tends to divide working class ethnic groups. But Texas is swimming in cash. There is no reason that any one group has to believe that something given to another group is something taken away from them---

Unless political forces are hard at work attempting to make them believe just that.


RIP

It is quite fashionable nowadays to say that Republicans have firm resolve that allows them to weather any scandal with their ideals and goals more or less intact. In contrast, Democrats run screaming like a bunch of teenaged girls anytime they are attacked. This is true, but not quite accurate. The Democrats are scared. You would be pretty nervous too if the nation’s newspapers, airwaves and television screens were full of zombies who want to tear out your heart and have it for a snack.

Whatever Fox Has Must Be Contagious: The CBS Story

It is true. Watching CBS News will rot your brain. These guys serve a slightly dressed up version of the same corporate bullshit you get over at Fox.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ira-forman/c...

This, in a nutshell, is why the Democrats have no spine. The same breed of corporate cannibals that I wrote about in “The Carlyle Group is Run By Zombies That Want to Eat Your Brains”

(link here http://journals.democraticunderground.com/... )

have infested the Fourth Estate, turning it into one great big housing project for the GOP---and a zombie infested horror house for Democrats, progressives, union activists and those of us who believe that the almighty dollar does not trump common decency.

CBS was the worst offender (after Fox ) during the Bush years. Recall how they tossed Dan Rather to the monsters in the wake of the Bush AWOL 60 Minutes story as documented by me in “The Scoop on CBS: Why Redstone Sold Dan Rather for 20 Pieces of Silver”

(link here http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu... )

all for the sake of their precious television holdings.

When CBS chose Bush-o-phile Bob Scheiffer to moderate their debate between Obama and McCain, they were showing their bias once again. Note that Viacom’s lobbyists was one of McCain’s favorites. I am sure that the feelings were mutual. McCain never met a telecommunications lobbyist that he was not ready to fall into bed with.

(link here http://journals.democraticunderground.com/... )

And the loud mouth whiners on the right continue to scream about the “liberal bias” of CBS. Makes you wonder if they ever watch CBS.

Now, when a supposedly respectable news network flaunts its bias so openly, and none of their competitors call them on it---you know that something is wrong with the whole industry, not just the portion that Rupert Murdoch controls.

Things have only gotten worse since Obama took office. Here is a Media Matters report about how CBS is goose stepping right along with Fox when it comes to reporting on the disrupters at Congressional Town Halls. Katie Couric describes these self proclaimed terrorists as average citizens who represent a true grassroots movement.





http://mediamatters.org/research/200908050...

Note that when media lackeys of corporate America talk about “getting an earful”, they mean a big mouthful of some Democrat’s ear. Or maybe his nose or his jaw. Watch how CBS reporters leave no lie untold in their efforts to tear President Obama apart.


http://mediamatters.org/research/200901230...

Some Zombies Know How to Read and Write: The Washington Post



This is the kind of treatment that our elected Democrats can expect from the print media. Case in point, Drudge creates a suggestive photo that supposedly shows Obama checking out a girl’s butt. The nation’s major newspapers run with the story. Even the Washington Post---which might surprise you at first, if you do not remember that the Post was the first paper to tear into “Hillary’s Cleavage”.

Here is the photo:

http://mediamatters.org/blog/200907180009

And here is link to video showing that the president was helping his wife down the stairs.

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907120003

How on earth do the nation’s major newspapers justify this blatant lie? They don’t have to justify it. Their corporate masters want them to tear down Democrats and prop up Republicans. They are rewarded for calling every accused Democrat guilty until proven innocent. Witness Eliot Spitzer who was forced to resign as governor though he was never charged with anything. The same zombie journalists win praise for insisting that every guilty Republican was railroaded (What exactly happened to the Republican senator who paid for sex? Viter. Oh, I remember! He is the Senate). And it is not just the politicians. The constituents get mauled, too. Ever notice how much attention the press pays to minority on white crime? And how little focus there is on minorities as victims? If you believe the papers, every DWI is an illegal alien and every rape-murder is committed by someone named Tyrone. In a climate like this, if I were an African-American politician, I would be looking over my shoulder too. But note that no one wants to do on record agreeing with Gov. Patterson that he might be the victim of media racial bias. That would be like painting a great big red "Eat Me" sign in blood for all the media zombies to see. You can practically smell the fear.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/nyregion...

Back to the Washington Post. Ceci Connelly was the writer who lead the “Al Gore is a Liar” campaign back in 2000 for Bush/Rove. She got demoted to medical news for her troubles. But guess what? This year medical news is the place to be for any ambition zombie journalist who wants to rip the flesh from Democrats. Media Matters describes how she asked a Democratic Congressman one question about health care reform (specifically the public option) but then pretended that his answer was in response to a different question. Journalism with a bloody chainsaw.

http://mediamatters.org/research/200906280...

Here is another Washington Post atrocity. Everyone knows about the psychiatrist turned journalist, Charles Krauthammer, right? If there is a media feeding frenzy going on, he is there, ripping out Democratic intestines and splashing them against the page in a modern version of the ancient art of haruspicy(divination through the inspection of entrails). His favorite trick is diagnosing Democrats with psychiatric disorders. Krauthammer got into a fight with Dan Froomkin, who criticized the doctor for endorsing torture in the pages of the Washington Post. You know, most of us would be a little worried by a doctor who advocates water boarding and electric shocks. That kind of stuff will get you stripped of your medical license (and it raises interesting questions about why Dr. Krauthammer chose to pursue an alternative career in later life). Here is Fromkin’s piece:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/white-hou...

In a better world, the newspaper would have let its two writers have their say. Debate being intellectually stimulating and all. But like CBS, the Washington Post wants to eat your brains, not feed them. So, they fired Froomkin for taking a stand against torture. Because, hey, torture is so zombie .

http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/wha...



Now, when a newspaper takes a stand like “Torture is good” and says that no one who refuses to torture should ever be Commander-in-Chief, basically they are calling the Democrats who want to investigate Bush era torture dickless and un-American. I could see that kind of talk from Drudge, but the Washington Post??? I do not need to stare at the Post’s entrails to know that they are seriously sick and twisted. If I were a Democrat, I would want to stay out of their radar, too.



You know what needs to be done. The zombies that have infested the nation's corporate media---the Katie Courics and the Charles Krauthammers---are there to do just one thing. Their corporate masters have unleashed them upon the nation in order to eat our brains and turn us into Stepford Citizens who will vote as we are told and spend as we are told and lay down in the street and die as we are told. They attack any elected Democrat who tries to make things better, because if it does not lead to chaos and bloodshed and the death of innocents and hell on earth for the common man, then it is not the mainstream media news.

The only lasting cure for the news zombies is a real, public network, like Britain's BBC. When the U.S. taxpayers are their boss, the journalists will think twice about biting off the hand that feeds them.

You have been warned. This is a really long thread. It is about the American way of greed, which is a monstrously large topic.

Lipstick on a Pig



We hear this one over and over. Any healthcare reform is better than nothing. Or Incremental change is better than no change. .

This is simply not true. Here is an example. Current resident felon and former Congressman Bob Ney promised to hold hearings to reform Ohio’s broken election system in the wake of Grand Theft Election Ohio 2004. And yes, he kept his promise. He held hearings. Hearings in which people like Sen. Bill Frist’s attorney came forward to claim that the NAACP had handed out crack cocaine before the 2004 vote. The Ohio state legislature took advantage of the popular demand for election reform to make their system even more draconian and easy to corrupt. In other words, they put lipstick on a pig .

We are witnessing the same thing now with healthcare reform. Congress is getting ready to compile a package made up of the stuff health insurance executive wet dreams are made of---and sell it to us as “reform.” This, even though health insurance company profits are high and health insurance executive CEO salaries are obscene. This, even though Big Pharm is the biggest game in town. This, even though the businesses and providers who make up the Medical Industrial Complex rake in over 15% of our GMP annually. These folks already benefit from laws that have been specially tailored to help them make money. And now they are going to change the laws for the express purpose of letting a bunch of fat cats make even more money.

As someone said not so long ago, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it is still a pig.


http://www.nypost.com/seven/09092008/news/...

He said that, didn’t he? About how phony change is not really change at all.

Hmmm. I wonder how the "reform" healthcare package which Congress and the President are wrapping up is going to smell in 2016.

“All Your Premium Are Belong to Us”



The private health insurance industry has made their wishes clear. The support universal health insurance---as long as they are the ones who will get to collect the benefits (but not pay the claims.)



http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...

You know, if the greedy blood suckers at the nation's private health insurance companies are jumping for joy, maybe we should take a look at what kind of legislation Congress is working on...

There is more. Congress is going to add a sweetener to this already sugary deal. Currently, most health plans cover 80-90% of their policy holder’s medical bills.



I wonder how many Tea Baggers who are yelling their heads off at Town Hall meetings about how they want to protect their private insurance realize that after next year, their private insurance may be worth a whole lot less. There is a big difference between paying $1,000 of a surgery bill and paying $3500 of a surgery bill. The difference could well be enough to discourage people from getting necessary health care---which will make the health insurance industry even more money. This will offset the losses they may incur from accepting people with pre-existing conditions. Plus, people with severe health problems will be even more likely to apply for Medicare or Medicaid, since they will be unable to afford the higher deductibles. In other words, even though the privates will agree to accept all comers, in fact, the sickest Americans will continue to be on government sponsored insurance.

Wait! It gets better---or worse, if you are not an health insurance industry executive. But first , a quick quiz? Who pledged that he would never require folks to buy health insurance and who mocked his opponent for even suggesting that a fine might be used to encourage compliance?

That’s right. Congress is ready to level fines starting at a $1000 per person (more on families) against people who do not purchase crappy private health insurance that only pays 65 cents on the dollar.



http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/07/02... /

You do not need to be a health care analyst to know where this one is going. Health insurers will offer bare bones, fly by night coverage that is designed to keep people from paying the fine. These plans will have ridiculously large deductibles, they will exclude many necessary services, they will have few providers---and they will allow Blue Cross, United and the others to extort money from the people who currently can not afford health insurance without actually giving them access to healthcare.

Another loophole sure to make money for insurers: Congress brags that it will make insurance affordable by getting rid of pre-existing conditions clauses. Congress lies through its teeth. In fact, it is thinking about allowing Blue Cross and United to charge older folks a whole lot more for these mandatory policies. And age is the most significant pre-existing condition there is.



http://cbs2.com/consumer/health.care.consu...

Remember how the article above suggested that the feds would collect about $3.6 billion a year in fines with which to help pay for the subsidies? That's a lot of money for a program that is supposed to make insurance affordable for everyone. Will that money come from the rich who can not need to buy insurance? Hell no! Will it be paid by young people who can not be bothered to buy insurance? For a thousand bucks, they will be able to buy a policy that covers them in case of a catastrophe. Those billions are going to come from the nation's middle aged low income workers, who will be forced to pay the thousand buck fines because they can not pay the $10,000 per year or more that insurers will demand in premiums. That’s right, the nation’s 40 and 50 year olds, whom insurers hate because they are old enough to develop significant health problems but too young for Medicare. These are the ones who are hurting the most. And under our brand spanking “new” lipstick on a pig health care reform, they are going to be out $1000 a year---and still have no insurance.

When reviewing that last link, be sure not to miss the final line.



But…but…state insurance boards regulate the practices of insurers, the same way that they regulate nurses and doctors. Why would we want to take the job of regulating health insurance companies out of the hands of locally elected officials and hand it over to a federal government run by a Congress that has proven that it can easily be bribed?

Because that is the way the health insurers want it.



http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/1...

Here is a translation:

Br’er Insurance Company CEO "Oh please, pleeease, whatever you do, don’t throw me in that their federal regulation briar patch. But if you will scrap the public option, I’ll let you throw me into the federal regulation briar patch…"

In fact, the health insurance industry desperately wants to get out from under the very real control which some state insurance boards exert and instead allow a panel of industry insiders to pretend to regulate them. Think the FDA.

Would it surprise you to find out that the health insurance industry friendly Bush administration already tried to strip away state regulation and replace it with federal “oversight”? From 2008:



http://www.progressivestates.org/content/8...

So when health insurers act like they are making a big concession in agreeing to federal oversight, do not be fooled. This is exactly what they have been angling for for a long time.

To sum it up, our “better than nothing” health care reform is shaping up to be a set of laws that will 1) require all of us to buy a policy from a private insurer 2) will reduce the amount that our private insurers actually pay out in claims 3) will put health insurance under federal regulation, making it all but impossible for consumers to file claims or seek legal action (you ever tried to wade through the federal court system?) 4) will allow insurers to discriminate against people based on age 5) will fine us if we are not living in abject poverty but we still can not afford the crappy private plans which we are offered and (drum roll) 6) will increasingly fragment the working class in this country by telling one low income group “You are paying a thousand bucks a year fine so that a _____can get a tummy tuck at federal government expense.”

And that is just the health insurance industry wish list.

The Drug Business



The world’s pharmaceutical giants know what they want. They want to continue to have Christmas every day with Medicare Part D, the Republican Congress enacted, Bush sponsored law that gave Big Pharm the right to charge whatever it likes to Medicare beneficiaries and their insurance provider (the U.S. government).

Right now, the feds are prevented from doing any kind of collective bargaining for reduced prices for seniors. This means that when grandma hits her “donut hole”, she is going to pay an arm and a leg for her drugs for the rest of the year. Or maybe lose an arm and a leg when she finds that she can not afford her blood thinner. Sounds bad, but it gets worse. After Medicare Part D was enacted, the prices of the drugs most commonly used by seniors increased in cost. Almost as if the industry was conspiring to defraud the U.S. government. Industry profits went up, too. This site estimates that Big Pharm makes $2 billion a year just from Medicaid patients who have been switched to Medicare (because Medicaid negotiates for lower prices).

http://theruralpatriot.wordpress.com/2006/... /

This site estimates that the drug industry made a windfall $ 8 billion in the first six months , a 27% increase in their usual profits.

http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20060...

Ok, let’s do some math. Obama got tough and talked Big Pharm into trimming $ 80 billion over the next decade from the amount they would charge seniors. Sounds like a start.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31464689/ns/po... /

However, a couple of months later, we find out that the White House has cut another deal with the drug manufacturers. In exchange for a promise of $80 billion in savings, Obama will do nothing to change Medicare Part D and especially the clause that allows Big Pharm to set the rates that Medicare (i.e. we) pay.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/health/p...

Now, even if drug company profits do not rise (and I can already tell you that with the aging of the U.S. population, more and more people will be on Medicare, which will give the companies more clients) and they continue to make excess profits of only $16 billion a year, as they did the first year, they still stand to make an excess $160 billion over the next decade. Minus the $80 billion that is a cool $80 billion in profits.

And that is assuming that they keep their part of the bargain---which they won’t. This is just another stalling measure. In the last Congress, they paid the Republicans to filibuster a popular bill that would have allowed Medicare to bargain for reduced rates. This time around, with the Dems holding a sizable majority, they have bribed the White House. They will do what they can to make the health care package that comes out of Congress look doable and affordable by agreeing to hold down costs—at least until Obama is sworn in for a second term on a platform of “See, I gave you some healthcare reform. And some reform is better than none.”

At that point, they will expect payback.

Hospitals: The Machines that Go “Ca-ching!”



Just like the Drug Companies, the nation’s hospitals have cut a deal with Obama. They are going to trim a whopping $155 billion over the next decade. In exchange, they will see more profits as the ratio of insured to uninsured increased. Since some hospitals have written off as much as $300 million or more a year in care to the uninsured, I think that it is safe to say that they will get a good return on their investment.

However, the hospitals want more. John Geymen sums up their demands in The Huffington Post. In particular, they want Congress to scrap proposed regulation of so called “Specialty Hospitals”---doctor owned facilities that do nothing but elective surgery for well insured patients and which avoid treating the indigent by having no emergency room. The problem with these hospitals is obvious. If a physician owns a chunk of the profits, then he will be tempted to send people for unnecessary surgery. Better yet, if he is a surgeon, he can bill for the unnecessary procedure and make extra profit from his hospital investment.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-geyman/...

Anyone with an ounce of sense can see that a bargain like that is no bargain for the U.S. taxpayer. Our public expenditures for health care are as high as the total health care spending in Western European countries like France. One thing that keeps medical costs high is our disproportionate number of surgeons and other specialists compared to primary care docs. The surgeons choose their specialties, because they can make a lot of money doing procedures like lumbar disc surgery which has never been proven to be any more beneficial than conservative, low cost treatment. They convince American consumers that a quick, surgical cure---paid for by the government---is the best treatment for what ails them. They attack European style health care models as taking away people’s choice. However, who would choose to have an unnecessary possibly dangerous and certainly debilitating and painful surgery if he knew that it was not going to do him any good?

More Doctors Smoke Camels….



The nation’s physicians killed the first attempts to pass universal health insurance under Truman. They almost killed Medicare (and in the process, they got Ronald Reagan into politics). They hemmed and hawed over Hillary Care. Now that they have had to deal with a couple of decades of managed care, a little more government intervention does not sound as bad as it used to---especially if the “new” lipstick on a pig health care reform increases the nation’s pool of insured patients.

However, they are not about to give up their support for nothing. Like all the others, doctors have an agenda. They want higher pay. They want to be able to recommend unnecessary surgery without being vetoed by an insurer. Most important of all, they want to see federal limits on malpractice. From the AMA:



http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/health-sys...

Because lord knows, no cardiologist can survive on the $400,000 annual average salary that they make. You can check out salary ranges for a variety of specialists here:

http://www.studentdoc.com/salaries.html

The Brave New World of Health Care Reform



Industry insiders have been invited to the table, while health care consumers have been left out in the cold. If every member of the Medical Industrial Complex has his way, we will see a bill which requires all of us to purchase health insurance policies, some of which may be exorbitantly priced (if we are older than 40) and all of which will offer reduced benefits in order to discourage us from using them. The Medicare Part D drug company rip off bonanza will continue as is for another decade. Specialty hospitals will proliferate---and the number of medical students choosing to become specialists will increase. That will leave fewer doctors to do preventive medicine, so our nation will continue to become increasingly disease ridden (compared to the world’s other industrialized nations) and our health care costs will skyrocket, with most of the payments coming out of federal tax coffers at the same time that health insurers are collecting a whole lot of money for doing nothing. Medicare and Medicaid will continue to exist as the federally funded parallel health insurer which provides care for most of the nation’s medically needy, while the rest of us will make do with crappy private policies that insure against nothing except paying the fine for not having insurance. Bankruptcies for medical bills will increase in number, since 35% of most hospital bills will be too much for the average American to pay. Drug prices will rise. Profits will sore. As the medical industries see their coffers full to overflowing, they will have even more money with which to bribe federal officials—laws that allow the feds to pre-empt state regulation will save them a lot of money on local campaign contributions and make it easier for them to solidify their power. Since the government will be close to bankrupt subsidizing all those powerful companies and paying inflated medical costs for Medicare beneficiaries, there will be no federal money left over to spend on the type of public health disease prevention programs they have in Europe---

Under this scenario, I see no reason why expenditures for health care could not top 20% of the GNP by the end of Obama’s term of office. And our already abysmally low health standards could fall even more.

No change at all would be better than this kind of change. At least with no change at all, people would know that their will has been thwarted by a bunch of lying sack of shit politicians who care more about keeping medical industry players happy than in keeping their campaign promises.

Intro

There are many different participants in the ongoing battle for (and against) universal health care. Each special interest has its own needs. For instance, if you manufacture stents for diseased coronary arteries, you want a lot of money set aside to treat folks who develop heart disease, but you are ambivalent about public health expenditures to reduce obesity, smoking and the other risk factors of preventable heart disease. If you are a private insurance company, you want the law to require that everyone buy a private insurance policy---everyone except those with certain expensive chronic diseases. They should be covered by the federal government. A law which requires everyone not on Medicaid or Medicare to buy insurance is your cup of tea. If you own a chain of hospitals with intensive care units, you will be especially concerned about any federal initiative to encourage people to write living wills, since care at the end of life can be very lucrative.

If you think that Big Pharm does not want the current U.S. health care system to change, you are wrong. They would love to see more of us have access to physicians who can diagnose and prescribe even more medications. There are fifty million people out there who are currently uninsured who could have high cholesterol---which is money in the pocket of any company that manufactures one of the red rice yeast clones known as statins . Companies like Pfizer, which I will discuss in a few moments.

The Republican authored Medicare Part D is the model of what the world’s drug companies desire. Universal insurance coverage that includes drug coverage but forbids any type of collective bargaining to lower drug prices . Oh, and they do not want anyone comparing various treatments for relative cost and efficacy, either. That means no formulary of approved drugs. Instead, they want to continue direct to patient advertising and (especially) their lucrative practice of bribing health care providers—mostly doctors---to prescribe their product, often for diseases it was not intended to treat.

Pfizer Gets a Hand Slap

Today the federal government announced that Pfizer, the biggest drug company in the world, will have to pay over $2 billion in fines for bribing doctors to recommend its products and for other practices designed to increase their revenue at the expense of the public well being.



http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Pfizer-to-pa...

Note that Pfizer was not tripped up by some loophole in some new law. They have been doing this---and getting their hand slapped---for years. There is only one reason why a company would continue to break the law, when they know that they will be punished for it. Someone at Pfizer did a cost analysis and decided that there is more money to be made in doing the crime than there would be money lost in paying the fine. If you refer to the link about Neurotin lower on this page, you will see an estimate of $1 billion/year profits from a drug that would have brought in only $50 million/year without the illegal marketing practices. Add this up over a few years and multiply it by the number of Pfizer's top selling drugs and you will see that even $2 billion is just a wrist slap.

Now, I want you to consider the following scenario. How would you feel if you found out your doctor had you on Lipitor, because he got an all expense paid trip from the drug company? How would you feel if you developed liver disease, one of the more common side effects of the medication, and you found out that there were alternatives that did not harm the liver? But your doctor did not consider them because he just got back from an all expense paid vacation, courtesy of Pfizer?

Note that one of Pfizer’s crimes was making recommendations to its (bribed) doctors to use its products for non approved uses.



The number of people with arthritis is relatively small. The number of people who have surgery or pain is much larger. Drugs companies will commonly test a product for one disease only, get an FDA clearance and then start promoting it for everything from male sexual dysfunction to baldness. This is illegal, but that does not stop them from doing it, since so called “off label” use of a drug can net them more money than its use for the problem it was intended to treat. For instance, Neurontin is indicated for 1) post herpetic neuralgia and 2) seizures. However, it is commonly prescribed for people with migraine headaches, painful diabetic neuropathy, pain from pinched or damaged nerves as well as any other kind of chronic painful condition. Now, how many people do you know with the first two problems? And how many folks do you know who suffer from one of the last four?

Here is what a Pfizer employee had to say about his company’s off label marketing strategy:



http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/623/9 /

The problem with handing Neurotin out like candy is its side effects. Like many seizure medications, it can increase the risk of suicide. So, if there is a medication available that is indicated for the treatment of pain that does not cause suicide, that would be the safer choice. And there are lots of pain medications, many of them not on patent.

In Europe, They Control Drug Costs

It is clear that federal legal action, like that described above, will not affect how companies like Pfizer do business. On the other hand, a public option/federally run single payer insurance program has the potential to stop all the drug company shenanigans. For proof, we need only look across the water to Europe. Charged with the mission to keep the public healthy but costs down, the boards which regulate medicine in Western European countries create lists of effective and affordable therapy and instructs doctors to use these medications. So, for instance the National Health Service in the U.K generally does not cover the mega-expensive Tarceva that might give some lung cancer patients eight more weeks of life.



http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p...

In the United States this would be decried as “rationing healthcare”. Pretty big talk coming from a country where many millions of Americans can not even get a bronchoscopy to diagnose their lung cancer…because they have no insurance.

Note that while the British are quick to ridicule us for our broken health care system which leaves out millions, they object to efforts being made to rein in the costs of our (world’s most expensive) health care system. From the Guardian:



http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ci...

Yes, I know this sounds pretty funny coming from a country which carefully regulates its own drug costs so that it can afford to provide universal coverage. But as I documented in my last journal, Great Britain is the home of Glaxo-Smith-Kline, the world's third largest drug company, and GSK makes most of its money in the U.S.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/...

What is up with the British press, which wants us to expand the number of people who have insurance but which does not want us to fund this expansion by reining in runaway drug costs? They want to have their cake and eat it, too.

Do not be surprised if Big Pharm quietly joins with the nation's private ensurers to back a law which will require all Americans to purchase private health insurance. They secretly want those 50 million uninsured Americans as their customers. Publicly, they will express intense disapproval of even the most watered down health care reform---while indicating that they might be willing to change their minds if Congress decriminalizes bribes paid to doctors, off-label marketing and other scams to increase sales. Oh, and any effort to cut the costs paid out through Medicare Part D will be attacked, too, as genocide against the elderly. Never mind that the drug companies are waging their own kind of war against the American people by forcing the wrong medications down our throats.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...

That is a lot of money. It is almost a bank bailout every year. Of course, we know where this money is going. It is being recycled right back into the U.S. economy, unlike the cash that the banks refuse to loan. That is good for America, right? Even if our drugs are overpriced, and our pharmaceutical industry is waging a quiet war against healthcare reform, at least we can say that the dollars we spend on expensive designer copycat drugs like Nexium help pay for our roads and schools. And the companies that make them have a personal interest in seeing Americans and their communities prosper, because they are our neighbors….

There is just one problem with this rosy picture. It is not true. Did you know that six out of the world’s top ten pharmaceutical companies are European owned? And even though they are headquartered in countries that boast of having the best healthcare systems in the world, these companies have no qualms about ripping off the American healthcare consumer. And interfering in our political process. Because, hey, money makes the world go round, and there is a lot of cash to be made from the wasteful, inefficient, expensive U.S. way of doing medicine.

Even corporate bosses sometimes have qualms about hurting people whom they consider their own kind, aka "shitting in your own yard". It is much easier to run a scam in another country. If the people who are tricked, defrauded, poisoned live someplace far away and if you can convince yourself that they are not nice people at all, then any profit you reap from their misfortune comes without guilty strings attached. Monsanto plays this game across the globe with its so called designer seeds (as if a company can patent nature). U.S. gun manufacturers ship tragedy and death to as many foreign lands as possible. And the big pharmaceutical companies of Europe have a vested interest in seeing nothing change about the U.S. healthcare system, which spends twice as much as any western European system per person (much of that on drugs) to achieve results which are much worse.

Here is a list of the top European drug companies. Note that their ranking is based upon worldwide sales. These folks do not get rich peddling drugs to the National Health.

GlaxoSmithKline based in the United Kingdom, with total revenue of $45 billion, is the world’s third largest pharmaceutical company. According to Sourcewatch, GSK was fined by the U.S. government for overcharging Medicaid for Flonase and Paxil. They have also gotten into trouble for marketing the anti-depressant for children, even though it has not been safety tested on this population. The IRS has sued them several times to collect over $10 billion in taxes owed to the U.S. government for domestic sales. They make Avandia. Be sure to read about how they hired front groups to attack the researcher who discovered the link between the diabetes drug and heart problems.

In terms of lobbying, they gave almost a million dollars to U.S. federal candidates in 2006—the year that Medicare Part D aka the Drug Company Giveaway was put into effect. Most of that money went to Republicans. They also hire U.S. lobbyists to push their interests here and have even engaged in public relations work to improve their image in the U.S.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title...

According to the Guardian U.K. story, we the people of the United States are GSK’s biggest market.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/ju...

Bayer from Germany, is essentially tied with GSK. Since Bayer is a German company that was part of I G Farben during WWII, they were supporters of Nazi Germany and produced, among other things, the gas used at Auschwitz. Makes you wonder about that cross on their logo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer

In 2006, Bayer was caught misleading the FDA about the safety of Trasylol, a drug used to control bleeding during heart surgery.



The FDA learned the truth from a researcher, after the German Company “forgot” to mention the problem. As a result, the FDA launched an investigation, which a German banker called “heavy handed” as he predicted decreased profits for the company.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14...

Though Bayer only gave away a quarter of million to federal candidates in 2006 (mostly to Republicans), they spent over $3 million that same year on U.S. lobbying.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title...

Bayer is also noteworthy for being the creator of the statin that kills you, Baycol. One of the dirty little secrets of the pharmaceutical industry is that they do not invest money looking for new ways to treat disease. Instead, they invest money in altering the chemical formula of their competitor’s best seller---in this case Mevacor, which was a direct rip off of the ancient Chinese herbal red rice yeast---so that they can patent a “new” drug. Sometimes the new product is better, sometimes it is the same, and in the case of Baycol, it was worse. However, the point is not to make a better drug, it is to create a new patent and gain a spot in the top ten drugs prescribed in the United States.

Hoffmann–La Roche of Switzerland is fifth with a hefty $40 billion in revenues. The company made the record books with its half a billion dollar fine in the U.S. for illegal price fixing for vitamins. They bought Donald Rumsfeld’s Gilead Sciences along with Tamiflu, a patent which they guarded jealously, even as bird flu swept across Asia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoffmann%E2%8...

Sanofi-Aventis of France also makes about $40 billion a year. They spent $5 million of that lobbying in the U.S. in 2006. Their claim to infamy was Ketek, an antibiotic associated with liver failure and death in children.



In 2009, the company was fined almost $100 million for “scamming the poor” in the United States, by inflating the costs of drugs sold via Medicaid.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title...

Which proves my point. When you do business across the ocean, it is easy to compromise your morals. So what if some poor people found their healthcare funding source, Medicaid, depleted because of drug company greed? The poor folks in question are just foreigners.


Novartis of Switzerland comes in at number seven out of the top ten, again with sales of almost $40 billion. The company has sought to challenge a law in India, which



At stake are thousands of dollars per dose of vital chemotherapy, money that Novartis wants to squeeze from the citizens of India.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14...

You can read more about Novartis’ plans for financial success in the lucrative U.S. market in the Bloomberg link at the top.

AstraZeneca of Sweden and the UK comes in at number eight with $30 billion in revenues. Like some of the companies above, AstraZeneca likes to take old drugs that are ready to lose their patent and stick a new name (and patent on them).



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AstraZeneca

Did you know that Nexium is the second most profitable drug sold in the U.S. after the cholesterol lowering agent, Lipitor? We spent almost $6 billion in 2008 for a drug that is essentially the same as Prilosec.

http://www.prlog.org/10238024-lipitor-nexi...

A 28 day supply of Prilosec 20 mg will set you back about $20. That is less than a dollar a pill. According to this author's calculation, someone on Medicare D who takes Nexium 40 mg a day will save almost $600 a year taking 2 Prilosecs a day OTC.

http://onthepharm.net/2007/12/how-much-doe...

As a side note, be sure to check out the top sellers in the link above. The only strictly "American" drug is Lipitor, from Pfizar. As I mentioned above, Lipitor and the other statins are copies of the much cheaper (and possibly safer) Chinese herbal red rice yeast, which has been used for centuries in the east. The next four drugs are all brought to you by foreign companies. Plavix is actually from sanofi-aventis. There has been a huge push within the medical community, almost certainly fueled by the makers of Plavix, to discredit aspirin for the prevention of heart attack in men and stroke in women. Doctors are being inundated by research that shows that aspirin is dangerous and ineffective. Meanwhile, the much more expensive and less effective Plavix has booming sales. Advair-Diskus from GSK is actually a pretty nifty drug and probably deserves a spot on the most popular list, because it is easy to use and increases compliance. However, the same medications can be obtained more cheaply in other forms. The final drug in the top five, the atypical antipsychotic Seroquel, from AstraZenaca is also the subject on an intense marketing campaign, with its company pushing it for everything from depression to anxiety disorder. The problem? There are plenty of other, safer, cheaper ways to treat anxiety and depression, methods that do not carry the risk of massive weight gain which can lead to diabetes. Maybe antipsychotics should be reserved for the folks who really need them, the schizophrenics, whose risk-benefit ratio is a little better. However, there are a whole lot more depressed and anxious people in the U.S. than their are schizophrenics. Note that a favorite drug company ploy to increase sales is to get FDA approval for one use and then tell doctors (and patients) to use it for something else.

Once again, most of the money donated to U.S. federal candidates by AstraZeneca went to Republicans in 2006. The company also spent almost $3 million on U.S. lobbying.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title...

Astra-Zeneca was recently found guilty (along with two other companies) of fixing the prices of its Medicare drugs.

http://www.naturalnews.com/022835.html

Note that while the United States spends almost twice as much per person per year on health care, only four of the top ten pharmaceutical manufacturers are U.S. companies. That means that a lot of folks in Europe make a lot of money from our broken, bloated, ineffective health care system. Also note that drug manufacturers got a good return on their investment to Republican politicians who reined in efforts to control spending under Medicare D by allowing the federal government to negotiate prices. Congressional Republicans filibustered the bill in 2007.

http://bobgeiger.blogspot.com/2007/04/demo...

If Medicare D has been a gift to the pharmaceutical companies, healthcare reform, especially the public option is their worst nightmare. European drug manufacturers in particular have good reason to know that once a single, large entity starts paying the bills in this country, inevitably it will begin to bargain for the best and cheapest drugs. In Europe, drug companies have to court public officials to get their drugs on formulary. In the U.S., they can market directly to doctors and---especially---the public.



http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/06/pu...

Now, I have nothing against products that are made by foreign companies---if the products are safe, effective and reasonably priced. However, I do have a problem with companies based in countries which have decent, affordable, mostly universal (except for immigrants) health care coming to our country and trying to keep us from getting some decent healthcare, too. And I worry when I see them donating large sums of money to the Republicans in order to keep healthcare reform from happening.

I would like to think that the average citizens of Europe are in favor of good health for all and that they object to their corporation's fraudulent practices as well as their massive lobbying against U.S. health care reform. But then I run across articles like this one, a piece in the British press which calmly discusses how the election of John Kerry would be bad for the business of the pharmaceutical giant, AstraZeneca.




http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business...

Funny, I would have expected the oh so much more compassionate and civilized British press to criticize AstraZeneca for its political machinations in another country struggling to improve its healthcare system. However, the story is presented as a business piece. Heathcare reform in the U.S--especially attempts to control run away prices charged to Medicare patients--is treated a matter of dollars and cents. What would the same publication say if American business interests interfered in British elections, in order to improve their profit margin, at the expense of British citizens? I think we know.

And, what might the British press have to say about U.S. health care reform if it began to look like changes will be made that cut the profits of drug companies, several of which happen to be British? We do not have to guess. The Guardian has already had its say. Alongside articles about how unethical it is to deny healthcare to citizens, they have a piece about how wrong it would be to do anything to rein in the use of expensive sometimes worthless and sometimes deadly pharmaceuticals.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ci...

Short sighted? Only if your eyes are fixed firmly on the accounting ledgers of Europe's big pharmaceutical companies.

Whenever there is a disconnect between what the people of a country envision for themselves and what their elected officials are offering them, it is a good idea to look to see if the forces of economic colonialism are at work. The people of the Congo live in a state of constant war because countries like Israel, the U.S. and France make money from their misery.

Are we, the people of the United States, forced to swallow poor quality, overpriced healthcare, because some folks far, far away are making money from it?

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comme...

So, American’s have a “mean streak” which prevents us from wanting what is best for our neighbors. And that is why we can not get healthcare reform passed! Silly me. I thought it had something to do with all the money special interests have poured into the hands of a few politicians. I thought that the angry mobs who showed up to threaten Congressmen were a tiny fringe, bought and paid for by the insurance companies and the medical industrial complex. Who knew that when Americans told pollsters that they wanted healthcare reform and a public option they were all lying! And when they elected Obama with a mandate to reform health care, those mean spirited Americans did not really mean it. No, they were just having a good laugh at the expense of those less fortunate than themselves.

Thank God our relatives across the Atlantic have enlightened us. Hmm. Maybe I should do the neighborly thing and return the favor. It is always a good thing to know yourself.



http://www.newsweek.com/id/139019

The Newsweek piece goes on to describe violence against the Roma (Gypsies), Jews, Tunisians. And it includes this alarming statistic:



Compare this to a Wall Street Journal article written during the Bush administration which described a poll in which the majority of Americans wanted to see immigration continue---and only a conservative minority were distressed at the thought of “foreigners” in “their” country.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115...

Yes, there are people living in the U.S. who despise people of other races or ethnicity. (If you review my journals, you can read more about them.) And yes, there are people living in Europe who welcome new ideas and cultures. However, the majority here is comfortable with the melting pot. The majority over there wants to kick the foreigners out.

Here is more about the fate of immigrants in Europe. Amnesty International put out a report in 2005 about police violence against immigrants in France :



http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/eu...

Here is an article about Germany:



http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satelli...

Maybe you thought that the only country on earth which persecutes those of African descent is the United States? Read this piece, from 2008 about the alarming high rate of violence against Africans living on Europe. The next atrocity occurred in Switzerland:



http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/discrimina...

Be sure to scroll down to read more disturbing instances of violence against immigrants----violence which is often condoned by political leaders.



For example, Italy’s Berlusconi declared “increase neighbourhood police forces who would place themselves between the people of Italy and the army of evil.”

http://www.thehindu.com/2008/04/17/stories...

Let’s see. What are the warning signs of fascism again? From Robert Paxton:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_o...

“Obsessive preoccupation with community decline” Check.

“Nationalist militants”. Check.

“Working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites” Check.

“Violence.” Check.

“Internal cleansing.” Check.

I hope folks in Europe are familiar with the words of George Santayana.



But at least Europeans are willing to overcome their prejudice against immigrants and provide healthcare for all….



http://www.mdm-international.org/spip.php?...

Um…what the fuck? We are being lectured to about how “mean” we are because we do not have universal healthcare by people do not have universal healthcare?!

Here is a report about Sweden. You know, progressive socialized Sweden.



http://moderntribalist.blogspot.com/2005/1...

Here is Doctors Without Borders on Belgium:



http://www.msf.org.au/media-room/press-rel...

Some of the countries are proud to provide (emergency only) care to immigrants. Italy is one of them. I know another country that provides emergency care to any immigrant (or anyone else) that asks for it. The United States. Seems to me that the European and the United States healthcare systems are not so different after all. The group in power in each country has taken care of itself. It is just that in Europe they spread the power around a little bit more liberally. But don’t be fooled. On the far side of the Atlantic, the Little Match Girl is still on the outside looking in. It is just that now she wears a headscarf and would abstain from pork----if she could afford meat.

I. Association is Not Causality

This headline caught my eye in the DU’s Latest section:



http://www.thestar.com/mindmood/mentalheal...

The article goes on to quote a self proclaimed expert:



We see this kind of bullshit news reporting of science all the time. Someone notices that people with X also have Y. If you are in the business of studying/selling/stamping out X, then you proclaim (via the lay press) that “X causes Y!”. If, on the other hand, you want to sell/study/ban Y, then it is clearly a case of “Y causes X!’.

The problem with the Canadian government’s anti pot pr is obvious. How do we know that schizophrenics do not choose to light up more often? Many lack jobs, social support networks, friends. Drugs are one the ways that people living on the edge self medicate. To proclaim that marijuana causes schizophrenia is a bit like saying “Wearing big shoes makes people tall.” If I studied height and compared it to shoe size, I would find a correlation. But that does not mean that you can buy a pair of size 13 shoes and grow to be six foot four.

“Association is not causality” is the term used to remind us that just because two things seem to go hand in hand, that does not mean that one of them causes the other. They could both be caused by a third factor that has not been identified yet. For instance, in the early days of AIDS, when the virus had not been discovered, homophobes could look at statistics of AIDS incidence among gays and declare “Gay sex causes AIDS! God is punishing the sinners!” By the same logic, they could later proclaim “New Orleans was struck by Katrina, and New Orleans has lots of gay folks. Therefore, hurricanes strike where gays and lesbians live.”

II. Science Does Not Have to Be “Fair and Balanced.”

You see this one whenever a scientific finding or study might cost some business some money. For instance, global warming. There is a huge body of evidence that confirms climate change which has occurred as we have become dependent upon fossil fuels. However, fossil fuels are Big Business. Therefore, supposedly responsible journalists will seek an opposing point of view when they write about the topic. They find their “Counterpoint” in bogus scientific institutes which are funded by industry. If you look hard enough, you can find doctors who will tell you that soft drinks are weight loss aids, sugared cereals make your kids smarter, ozone reduces infant mortality---hey, industrialized countries have better health care and more smog, so smog must improve the public health (see I. above), right?

This kind of scientific bullshitting is based upon the premise that any time a bit of news which might inconvenience someone is printed, the someone should have a chance to rebut it. Now, if your newspaper prints a story about how Politician X is a Godless Communist, then that is an opinion piece, and Politician X is probably entitled to his say. But, when you report on a scientific study or finding, if you do it in a responsible, unbiased way, you are not obligated to print an opposing opinion. Research is supposed to take into account all the possible confounding factors----the things which could interfere with the study and taint the results---which means that it does its own Point/Counterpoint.

A word of caution. Even scientific journals do not always screen what they print. Or, they may include a piece with a title that is deliberately misleading to the public, like a recent article which proclaimed that aspirin did not prevent as many heart attacks as previously supposed---without mentioning in the title that the study was done in Japan, where people have diets and lifestyles very different from our own. So, if you think the results sound fishy, go read the article yourself. Do not rely upon some Associated Press reporter to do it for you.

III. Jack the Ripper Was a Case Study, Not a Trend

There is a tremendous body of literature---some nonfiction, some fiction---about the British serial killer, Jack the Ripper. If you count up the number of pages spent discussing him versus the number of pages written about any other figure out of Edwardian England, you might decide that Edwardians tended to be mass murderers. This shows how the mind can amplify some particularly memorable event or story, transforming it from an isolated incident to a much larger reality.

Beware of journalists who write about a scientific topic (such as a controversial medical issue) by beginning or closing their piece with an anecdote about one person. I recently wrote a journal about the Associate Press reporter, Marilynn Marchione

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/...

who likes to include vignettes about 1) how wonderful a patent medication or treatment was for one particular individual or 2) how dangerous an alternative (i.e. non patent) medication or treatment was for one particular individual . It does not matter how factual the statistical information which follows is. If you “show” a reader something, it seems more “real” than something he is “told.” This is the meaning behind the old adage for writers “show, don’t tell.” Fiction writers have the task of making the unreal seem real. They do this by providing names, descriptions, dialogue, emotions. Journalists can do the same thing. So, for example, take a hypothetical story about how Drug Company Best Seller X has just been shown to be no more useful than water in a big, reputable study. If the piece concludes with a poignant tale about a young mother who took Drug Company Best Seller X and therefore she was alive to see her child’s piano recital---you will walk away with the impression that Drug Company Best Seller X is some pretty good shit.

IV. Extra Credit: The Only Good Study is a Double Blinded Prospective Study

This is not necessarily true, but I am trying to make a point. Some forms of research provide more valuable information than others. For instance, if you want to find evidence to suggest that X leads to Y, you do not sit down with a bunch of people who have Y and ask them "Did you ever X?" Because the chances are, people who are sick or have other problems will have spent a lot of time reflecting upon things that might have caused their problems. So, they may have better recall than some one else. Or, they may answer more honestly than someone else. Or, as in the case of schizophrenics, their underlying health problem may have caused them to do Y.

That kind of study is called a "retrospective" study, and there is a place for it. Sometimes, for ethical reasons, this is the only type of study that is possible, say when you want to learn about the natural history of an untreated disease. Remember Tuskegee, the prospective study in which Black men with syphilis were not treated. That study was unethical. A retrospective study of the health problems suffered by people before the invention of penicillin would have been ethical.

A "prospective" study is one in which you take a bunch of people/subjects which are all pretty much the same and give them two or more different treatments. Since the only thing different about the two groups is the treatment, you can make a good guess that any differences in the outcome of the two groups will be caused by your treatment. Prospective studies are best when they are "double blinded". i.e. the researchers do not know who is getting what treatment and the subjects do not know either. That way no one is inclined to see good results (where they do not exist) because they just know that X is better than Y. Some things, like surgical procedures, are hard to double blind. Some subjects will attempt to find out if they are getting treatment (as opposed to placebo), and if they discover they are on placebo, they drop out. This happened a lot in the early days of AIDS drug research. Some prospective studies have to be stopped early, for ethical reasons, if it becomes clear that the people getting X are doing much better than the people getting Y. Prospective studies tend to take a long time and consume a lot of money, too. This is why all the plant remedies remain "unproven" in this country.

It is important to look at who the subjects are. Japanese men who do not respond to aspirin may have diets high in natural anti-oxidants, fish oil, tea, soy and other things which we do not get in the U.S. A study done on men may not be relevant for women or children. A good study will discuss whether or not its findings are applicable to other groups. However, news reports are not likely to go into this kind of depth. So, when in doubt, read the original paper. Beware of "studies" which have such a small number of subjects that the researchers draw conclusions "which are not statistically significant." If you roll a die three times, you might get six each time. That does not mean the die only rolls sixes, i.e. if you roll it one hundred times, you will get six every time. The same thing applies to research. If someone rushes something to print claiming "Drug X cured more people than drug Y", but the outcomes between the two groups is only slightly different, maybe there is really no difference. Studies become more significant with a larger number of subjects and a smaller number of different factors (or treatments).

Remember, the almighty dollar rules this country and our news media. Lots of what passes for "science" is just snake oil.

I Mission Impossible

We knew it would be tough. Americans voted in the 111th Congress with a clear mandate to make health care universally accessible and affordable in this country. As late as this summer, a whopping three-quarters of us still wanted a Medicare style public option.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/health/p...

However, history has taught us that the American health care industry (which likes to call itself the best in all the world) is capable of performing miracles. No, not medical miracles. The dramatic improvements in our quality of life which we have witnessed over the last century have come from various (government funded) public health initiatives which have reduced the rate of infectious diseases and maternal and infant mortality. The U.S. Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) concentrates on performing financial miracles. Through sleight of hand, they manage to consume $5000/person per year or 15% of our GNP, even though most industrialized countries spend less than half this amount to keep their citizens much more healthy that we are. The MIC does this, in part, by emphasizing the treatment of chronic disease over the prevention of disease. If you doubt me, just look at the some of the payment formulas that the AMA has devised in order to make primary care specialties like pediatrics and family practice financially unattractive, while subspecialty care is kept lucrative.

But we can not fail! We told Congress in no uncertain terms what we wanted! We are their bosses, damn it!

Time for a little history lesson. Seventeen years ago, Bill and Hillary Clinton went to Washington with the clearest of mandates to reform health care. And look where we are now, thanks to the “Harry and Louise” ads and Bill Kristol’s make-the-Democratic-Party-look-ineffectual strategy and a political campaign contribution system that gives all the power to those with the deepest pocketbooks.

Obama and the 111th Congress went to Washington with the clearest of mandates to reform health care. And look at them now:



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/09/a...

Sorry, Sen. Durbin, but your definition of “failure” and mine differ. To me, “failure” does not mean failing to do “something.” Failure means failing to provide affordable, comprehensive health care access to all Americans. The experts agree that the best way to accomplish this is to allow We the People to fashion our own insurance plan, one that will be tailored to our needs and budgets. And if any private insurers want to stay in business, they can offer us something better, sort of like the private school industry that exists in parallel with our public schools.

When I read about folks like Durbin insisting that “something” is better than nothing, I get worried. Maybe it is because I can remember some of the ways we have gotten screwed by our elected officials as they attempted to do something about other problems that plagued us. Problems like rising energy costs and tight credit.

II. Enron and the Banksters or They “Privatized their profit and socialized their risks”


Here is a link to remind us of what went wrong for the consumer and right for predators like Enron in the energy deregulation fiasco of the late 1990s.

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0130-0...

Everyone remembers that energy producers used changes in the law to price gouge consumers, first in California and now, in Texas. When your electricity bill goes from $50 a month to $500, you sit up and notice. Fewer remember that utilities and power producers used the changes in the law to bilk the tax payers of California out of billions.



These bailouts were used by the companies to purchase interests in other companies. And for campaign contributions so that the power companies could continue to control legislation. And to line their pockets. The only thing these bailout were not used for was to improve service to the consumers of California, who paid higher than market values for their electricity, until the inflated figure arrived at in the mid 1990s was deemed insufficient to fill Enron’s coffers. And then we saw what deregulation was all about, as it enabled the energy industry to conspire to inflate costs, with no risk of government oversight.

Being the kind of people who think that history is “more or less bunk” (to quote Henry Ford), we did it all over again last year, handing the banks hundreds of billions of dollars so that they would loosen up credit by loaning it back to us. I am sure the members of Congress were just as surprised as they could be when the banks turned around and refused to loan that money back to us.

Why, the nerve of them! Do they take us for fools? Do they think we were born yesterday….

Yeah, actually they do. And with good reason. As long as they can make credit card loans with 20 plus percent interest which we can never clear, even through bankruptcy, why would any bankster want to write a legitimate loan?

III. Sometimes Something is Not Better Than Nothing

Everyone agrees that something has to be done. Medical expenses are the biggest cause of bankruptcy in the United States. People forgo necessary care for lack of access. Insurance premiums are costing the nation’s employers an arm and a leg.

But what if their idea of something and our idea of something are not the same? What if by “something”, they mean the energy deregulation nightmares of the 1990s and the banking deregulation nightmares of the 2000s? Remember, we did not get Enron, because we felt the pain of Ken Lay who could not make money fast enough the old fashioned way. Energy deregulation was sold to us a solution to rising energy costs. Banking deregulation was not supposed to make Wall Street act like a bunch of idiots with their heads stuck up their asses. It was meant to increase the amount our 401Ks could earn.

If we strip away the public option from health care reform, what are we left with? What is on the Christmas Wish Lists of the various players in the MIC and health insurance industry?

IV. Republicans Go to Bat for Big (Medical) Business, As Usual

Pop quiz. Where is the real money in health care? If you said In the hands of the health insurance industry go to the back of the class. The big bucks are in the hands of the members of the Medical Industrial Complex. Right now, they have a sweet deal. No one in the country does anything meaningful to keep us healthy, and then, when we get sick, the government gives us all Cadillac grade medical care. Make that a Cadillac without wheels, since they never seem to put us back the way we were.

With this in mind, what I am about to tell you should come as no surprise. Where ever there is a large accumulation of cash in this country, the GOP is there, kissing some fat cat’s ass.

The PATIENTS Act of 2009 from Kyl and McConnell would prevent Medicare and Medicaid from refusing to cover medical treatments which are ineffective. Your doctor wants to do psychic surgery and bill the government as if he performed a real procedure? Why not? Sometimes a placebo is better than the real thing. And it sure saves money on overhead.

From Paul Krugman

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/1... /



Number three is important. The Medical Industrial Complex and the health care industry seem to have come to some sort of agreement. The MIC---hospitals, doctors, medical providers---can get even richer by bilking the tax payers for sham therapy. In exchange, they agree not to argue with the private health insurers right to deny necessary care. Since the people who can not get necessary services through their private insurance will eventually get too sick to work at which point they will go on medical disability and gain Medicare coverage, basically the privates are punting their sickest members to our public health care plan

Yes, Virginia, our country really does have a public health plan. We call it Medicare and Medicaid, and we use it for all the sick people, and pregnant people and poor people (who suffer an increased rate of many diseases) and children (they need all those expensive shots) that the privates do not want to cover. Some will be surprised to learn that our current “public option” (which is not really optional) spends as much per capita per year as the entire health care outlays of a place like Canada or France.

And the GOP wants to make us spend even more. Damn, those don’t-tax-and-spend Republicans are going to be the death of us.


V. The AMA Weighs In

Thank God we have doctors who are looking out for the nation’s public health. I am sure that they have other things on their minds, besides money….



http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationw...

Oh my! I will translate this for the non medical public. Basically, doctors are asking for more money, because they just can not get by on the $200 to $500 thousand they make each year (depending upon their specialty).

http://www.cejkasearch.com/compensation/am...

They want to get paid more by the government, for doing medically unnecessary things (See Kyl/McConnell), and they want to get paid a bonus if the things they do turn out to be medically necessary. If their lucrative but medically unnecessary treatments end up causing a complication, they do not want to suffer any financial loss. This will allow them to do pretty much anything they want to anyone, without any risk---to their pocket books.

Anyone want to guess what will happen to the rate of elective procedures such as lumbar disc surgery (which is less effective than placebo and fraught with complications)? Pretty soon we will have to hire guard dogs to protect Grandma and Grandpa from the medical predators.


VI. Would You Be Surprised to Learn that the Health Insurance Industry Also Supports Doing “Something”?

The private health insurance industry is suffering. The rate at which folks buy private insurance has been dropping for almost a decade. They want Congress to fix their business woes, and the easiest way to do that is to require that everyone buy private insurance.



The “something” which private insurers have in mind is really very simple. The federal government will force all of us to purchase health insurance. And it will prohibit us from forming our own taxpayer supported health insurance program. That means that all of us who are too “well” to qualify for Medicare will end up on the rosters of BlueCross, United Health and the rest, until their denials of care make us sick enough to qualify for the public plan.

VII. Blue Dogs Blues

Then we have the so called Blue Dog Democrats. Fox New recently praised them for obstructing health care reform. Among the demands of those Congressional Democrats who are most beholden to the health care industry:



Let’s see, employers—check. Health insurance industry---check. Health care industry---check. Looks like they have all the potential donor bases covered. Too bad they can not buy themselves out of the requirement that they run for re-election. The only people they do not seem to care about are the voters.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/07/29... /

VIII. Put It All Together and What Have You Got?

Seems to me that Sen. Durbin’s something is shaping up to be a federal requirement that all of us who are not dirt poor or dying of cancer buy private insurance. I have heard talk that the private insurance industry is even willing to waive its pre-existing conditions clauses, in exchange for tens of millions of new customers. Of course, insurers know ways to cherry pick after you sign up for coverage. They do it by limiting the care options for serious disease while making frivolous, low cost care for the healthy easy to come by. You know, having six podiatrists in your area but no nephrologists. That way anyone sick enough to qualify for Medicare drops their UnitedHealth policy and signs up for Medicare.

And of course, we can expect the private insurance plans to use the JP Morgan strategy. No matter how much money they make from their tens of millions of new members, the nation's health insurers---all of them---will post a paper loss . And they will bitch and moan that the Democratic Congress ruined their businesses with health care reform, and something has to be done now or they will stop paying the bills. With American's healthcare held hostage, they should have no trouble robbing taxpayers of even more than the banksters got.

Since few are talking about what qualifies as “health insurance” we can expect to see a lot of cheap policies designed for the working poor that protect against only one thing---the fine you have to pay if you do not buy insurance.

Something will almost certainly include policy changes that will encourage unnecessary surgeries and treatments for the nation’s elderly and disabled. It will cut medical liability, enabling the Medical Industrial Complex to ignore patient safety and get back to what they do best---making money. It will not include anything that might make us healthier and cut down on the incidence of disease. That would be bad for business.

The result will be accelerated health care spending combined with an increased rate of preventable chronic disease--the exact opposite of what we sent all those Democrats to Washington to do. After ten or so years of this, the nation will cry Enough! But by then, we will all be Medicare age or morbidly obese, so it will be the federal government's problem to take care of us---

Assuming that there is still anyone healthy enough to work in the United States. Thank God for immigrants!

I. "If we allow this, America will no longer be a noble nation."



Q: Who said this and why?

A: Ok, I gave it away with the photo. Bill O’Reilly said it about Dr. George Tiller of Kansas, who had been acquitted in court of criminal activity in his role as abortion provider. O’Reilly said a lot of other inflammatory things, too. He called the man a murderer and baby killer over and over again.

http://mediamatters.org/columns/2009060900...

Eventually, someone followed O’Reilly’s orders and murdered the doctor. That is how fascists gain control of a democracy. They use their thugs to intimidate, obstruct and finally cow into subservience the majority of the citizens.

There is another important thing that fascists have to do if they want to take over your country. They have to make sure that no one dares to call it fascism.

II. Sturmabteilung: The Thugs that Propelled Hitler to Power and How He Repaid Them



The SA, Hitler’s Stormtroopers, started slowly. They did not spring up over night in all their brown shirted glory with a mandate from Nazi Party leaders to burn down the Reichstaag. The group began



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilun...

Eventually, Hitler decided to rein in the working class members of the SA and give their power to the bourgeois SS, after the leaders of the Brown Shirts attempted to take over the powers traditionally afforded to Germany’s military. The same thing would have happened had this group of working class activists demanded that certain corporations be nationalized. Or if they had asked for the same rights given to the rich----food, education, health care.

Fascists often use members of the working class to do their dirty work. This gives orchestrated acts of violence a spontaneous populist veneer, which is supposed to make them acceptable in a democracy. However, fascists do not exist to serve or promote the interests of the working class. They represent the elite---rich individuals, powerful corporations and the military---all of whom are united by the fact that they prosper when ordinary men and women suffer.

I mention the fate of the SA, because it is the same fate that modern American fascist thugs will suffer if the economic and political forces who are pulling their strings ever succeed in replacing democracy with full fledged fascism. Angry, poor, frustrated workers are useful if they are killing or intimidating the political opposition. They are a pain in the butt if you finally obtain power and are expected to meet their needs.

However, in the short run fascist thugs can be very, very useful.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fir...

Remind you of anything? Maybe a certain group of "Brooks Brothers Rioters" who staged a phony spontaneous protest to (illegally) halt the counting of the votes?

I will repeat the key points of this history lesson. German went from a democracy to a fascist totalitarian state, after a group of thugs under the control of Nazi Party leaders attacked elected representatives of the opposition party. I think maybe that George Santayana was thinking about acts like this when he said



It is almost certainly what Henry Ford (dead fascist and Nazi Party promoter) was thinking when he said



In your dreams, Henry. In your dreams.

III. Fascism is Fascism is Fascism



Nothing gets modern American fascists more upset than being called fascists . We even have an American Nazi Party so that the most dangerous fascists can point and say “They are the fascists, not us.”

However, fascism is as fascism does. And when the spokespeople for the right issue calls for violence against their political enemies, and when a group of “ordinary citizens” answers that call---well, by any definition that is a fascist coup in progress.

Some folks get confused. They think that as long as a democratic process is still in place, then fascism can not exist. That is not true. There is no requirement that the coup be successful before it is called fascist. Plenty of would be Hitlers have failed in their quests for absolute power, and history has not hesitated to call them exactly what they were. So, why are so many in the United States---land of free speech—so afraid of using the word?

Maybe they are scared that some (fascist) thug will attack?

IV. When Fascists Attack



Today we learn that a freshman Democratic Congressman was physically attacked by right wing extremists. Not called ugly names (like baby killer). Not subject to vague (or sometimes not so vague) threats. A Democrat was actually assaulted for being a Democrat. The way the SA kept members of opposition parties from attending a meeting of the Reichstag where they might have objected to giving Hitler total control of Germany.

We also learned



http://thinkprogress.org/2009/08/05/freshm... /

I want to make mention of the so called “Tea Party” protests. As I have written before, these Astroturf operations have been financed by large corporations in the United States, such as Koch Industries.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/...

They are promoted by folks like Dick Armey, who represents tobacco venders, alcohol salesmen, the gaming industry, makers of military weapons and (drum roll) members of the Medical Industrial complex who make money from the deaths of people who were denied preventive health care.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/...

These supposedly grassroots organizations with their supposedly spontaneous outbursts of violence have actually been bought and paid for by the corporations which make money from human misery. Note: I am not saying that alcohol and gambling always make us miserable. Rather, if Americans can be made to suffer more, they will consume more spirits and waste more money on internet poker. Just as in Nazi Germany, the modern American fascist movement is primarily an anti-working class movement designed to consolidate all power in the hands of a few rich folks. Do not be fooled by the ideology that is repeated by the various right wing spokes people. Stuff about “values” and the “sanctity of human life. “The bottom line for this bunch is money. The proof is apparent in their actions. If they gave a damn about human life, they would not be out there threatening---and sometimes inflicting---so much violence.

V. By Their (Fascist) Acts You Will Know Them (to be Fascists)

Yes, I am using the F word a lot. Some people here at DU will probably rate this journal down, because of the word. However, if your house is on fire, you do call out “Oxidation reduction reaction!”



Here are some acts of (fascist) violence that have occurred in the land of the free and the home of the brave in the last decade since the coup by stolen votes in Florida. Read these before you conclude that I am crying “Fire” in a crowded theater.

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport...




This is from a Southern Poverty Law center document from 2001 . Anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence has accelerated since then, thanks to our corporate media which now hires people like Glenn Beck, who use issues like immigration to fan the flames.




http://forums.qrz.com/showthread.php?t=194...

A war between “the bubbas” and the “government”? Now, where have we seen that happen before? And what was the outcome again?