....even though this was presented at John Hopkins in 2003, it is as true today as it was then...maybe even more so.........

The Inhuman State of U.S. Health Care
by Vicente Navarro


This essay was the opening address at a seminar sponsored by the medical and public health students of the Johns Hopkins University, held there in 2003.

The health sector of the United States is in profound disarray. Even though the United States spends more on health care (14 percent of its GNP) than any other country, we still have problems that no other developed capitalist country faces. Let me list some of them. The first and most overwhelming problem is that no less than forty-four million of our people have no form of health benefits coverage whatsoever. The majority of them are working people, and their children, who cannot afford to pay the health insurance premium that would enable them to get care in time of need. Many of them work for small companies that cannot or will not pay their part of the health insurance premium. Because these individuals cannot pay for insurance, they do not get needed care, and many die as a consequence. The most credible estimate of the number of people in the United States who have died because of lack of medical care was provided by a study carried out by Professors David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler (New England Journal of Medicine 336, no. 11 <1997>). They concluded that almost 100,000 people died in the United States each year because of lack of needed care—three times the number of people who died of AIDs. It is important to note here that while the media express concern about AIDs, they remain almost silent on the topic of deaths due to lack of medical care. Any decent person should be outraged by this situation. How can we call the United States a civilized nation when it denies the basic human right of access to medical care in time of need? No other major capitalist country faces such a horrendous situation.

........

You may well ask why this situation continues and is reproduced. The answer is, again, because of class power, that is, because the corporate class, such as insurance bosses and large employers, has enormous power in our political system. This class power manifests itself in many different forms. One of them is the class composition of the top decision-making bodies of our government: 84 percent of cabinet members, 78 percent of the Senate, and 62 percent of the House over the last forty-two years have been members of the corporate class. The remainder have been members of the upper-middle class. There are very few from the lower-middle class or from the working class. One of these is a senator for Maryland, Barbara Mikulski, who was a social worker before being elected to the U.S. Senate. Politicians of working class backgrounds tend to be the most progressive. But there are remarkably few of them in the U.S. Congress.

Let me stress that the same class composition we see in these decision-making bodies of our government also occurs in our health care institutions. For one example, look at who sits on the Board of Trustees of the Johns Hopkins University and of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. You will see that they are the CEOs of some of the most powerful insurance, banking, and manufacturing corporations in Maryland. Actually, there is not one hospital in the entire Baltimore region that has on its board a member of the working class—which happens to be the majority of the Baltimore population.

These points need to be made, because in our country you may have been encouraged to check for the presence of minorities and women in positions of power, and to denounce institutions as discriminatory when you see very few minorities and women in them. I encourage you to continue doing this. But I have to stress that if your concern is—as it should be—to improve the representativeness of our institutions, then class plays a key role. You should ask not only about the race and gender of the members of boards, but also about what class they belong to, pressing for changes in the class composition of those boards. If you press for that, you will soon encounter an enormous resistance—much, much larger than when you ask for an end to race or gender discrimination.

Another way that class power is reproduced in our political system is through the privatization of the electoral process. Here again, we in the United States are quite unique. In no other country does money play such a key role in the electoral process. As Senator Mikulski said recently, “money is the milk of politics.” And most of that money comes from the corporate class: in 2000, 92 percent of the soft money that went to the key members of Congress who make decisions about health care and financial matters came from large insurance, banking, and employers associations, hospital corporations, pharmaceutical firms, and professional associations, such as the AMA. Indeed, it is an alliance of corporate and upper-middle-class interests that pays for those politicians, paying with the aim—successfully achieved—of defending their corporate and professional interests. The profits of the medically related industries, such as the health insurance industries, have reached an all-time high during the administration of George W. Bush, the most class-conscious U.S. president since Hoover.

Let me stress here that this situation is often reproduced in the way progressive forces choose to operate. Indeed, we have the most divided progressive community in the developed capitalist world. We tend to focus on gender or on race or on age, or on specific groups or issues. The United States is indeed the country of social movements. I of course applaud this diversity, but it is dramatically insufficient. For example, the United States has a very powerful association of the elderly—the AARP—but our elderly are less taken care of than those in any other developed capitalist country. They don’t even have their medications included in their health benefits. We see the same with women. We have a very strong women’s association, NOW. But American women have very limited maternity leave: just four weeks without pay. Sweden, which does not have a very strong women’s organization, provides a year’s maternity leave with pay.

Why this difference? Class power is the explanation. If you establish a spectrum of capitalist countries, listing them from very “corporate friendly” (like the United States) to very “worker friendly” (like Sweden), you will find, where the capitalist class is very strong, very poor health benefits coverage (in the public as well as in the private sectors), highly unequal coverage, and very poor health indicators. This is, indeed, the U.S. case. But in countries where the working class is very strong, with a strong labor movement (as in Sweden, which has been governed by a labor party for forty-eight years since the end of the Second World War), you will find very comprehensive health benefits coverage, a more equal distribution of resources, and better health indicators. The lesson here is clear: it is important that we help to strengthen the labor movement in the United States, and in doing so we should also capitalize on the diversity of the social movements, helping those movements to see the basic commonality of their struggles to unite rather than divide working people. This is, indeed, the best thing you can do to improve the health of our people.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0903navarro.h...

A freelance cameraman’s appendix ruptured and by the time he was admitted to surgery, it was too late. A self-employed mother of two is found dead in bed from undiagnosed heart disease. A 26-year-old aspiring fashion designer collapsed in her bathroom after feeling unusually fatigued for days.

Paul Hannum’s family members say he probably would’ve gone to the hospital earlier if he had had health insurance.

What all three of these people have in common is that they experienced symptoms, but didn’t seek care because they were uninsured and they worried about the hospital expense, according to their families. All three died.

Research released this week in the American Journal of Public Health estimates that 45,000 deaths per year in the United States are associated with the lack of health insurance. If a person is uninsured, “it means you’re at mortal risk,” said one of the authors, Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

The researchers examined government health surveys from more than 9,000 people aged 17 to 64, taken from 1986-1994, and then followed up through 2000. They determined that the uninsured have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those with private health insurance as a result of being unable to obtain necessary medical care. The researchers then extrapolated the results to census data from 2005 and calculated there were 44,789 deaths associated with lack of health insurance.

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/september/45...

To judge the content of a nation’s character, look no further than its health-care system.
By T. R. Reid
NEWSWEEK
Published Sep 12, 2009

“Us Canadians, we’re kind of understated by nature,” Marcus Davies told me in his soft-spoken way. “We don’t go around chanting ‘We’re No. 1!’ But you know, there are two areas where we feel superior to the U.S.: hockey and health care.”

Davies is an official of the Saskatchewan Medical Society, so it’s not surprising that he would want to extol Canadian medicine. But that feeling of patriotic pride in the nation’s health-care system is something that just about all Canadians share. They love to point out that Canada provides coverage for everybody, usually with no copay and no deductible—while the U.S. leaves tens of millions of its citizens uninsured. They love to remind us that, while the U.S. lets some 700,000 people go bankrupt due to medical bills each year, the number of medical bankruptcies in Canada is precisely zero.

Yet I wasn’t inclined to let Davies go unchallenged. I agreed that Canada does an admirable job of providing free and prompt care to anybody with an acute medical condition. But for nonemergency cases, the system often provides nothing but a long wait. Last summer I tried to get an appointment with an orthopedist in Canada to treat my aching right shoulder; the waiting time, just for an initial consultation, was 10 months. How could you be proud of that?

“You’re right,” Davies said frankly. “We keep people waiting, to limit costs. But you have to understand something basic about Canadians. Canadians don’t mind waiting for elective care all that much, so long as the rich Canadian and the poor Canadian have to wait about the same amount of time.”

In that last sentence, Davies set forth the national ethic of health care in his country: medicine is not a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder, but a right that must be distributed equitably to one and all. In short, the Canadians have built a health-care system that neatly fits the Canadian character: ferociously egalitarian, but thrifty at the same time.

I found that same pattern—a health-care system that reflects a nation’s basic cultural values—everywhere I went when I traveled the world for a PBS documentary and a book about how other wealthy countries provide health care. “The fundamental truth about health care in every country,” notes Princeton professor Uwe Reinhardt, one of the world’s preeminent health-care economists, “is that national values, national character, determine how each system works.”

more......

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/september/no...

You Might Be a Redneck Gardener If ...
Posted by sylviatexas z8a Tx (My Page) on Mon, Jun 1, 09 at 14:02


you mow your lawn and find a wheelbarrow

you think a chain saw is a musical instrument

you know how many bags of fertilizer your car can hold

you've ever cleaned your house with a leaf blower

you empty the trash when you have enough to fill up the pickup

you can amuse yourself for more that an hour with a hose

you've been cited for reckless driving on a riding lawn mower

you move your weed-eater to take a bath.

after a day of yard work you close the garage door and get undressed before you go in the house

You ask for a riding lawn mower and your hubby gets you this:



.......I've been known to get undressed before going in the house since my clothes were so dirty from doing yardwork....many more laughs at the link below

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/tx...

In his book The Family, Jeff Sharlet has done a masterful job of exposing the machinations of the of shadowy evangelical group known variously as “The Fellowship,” or “The Family,” (or, most recently, “those nuts from Congress living in a far-right commune on C Street who counsel wayward congressmen regarding adultery.”)

Recently, Rachel Maddow has helped bring the whole issue of subversive far-right evangelical religion to a wider public (and gotten some flak for it). But in the light of the Obama presidency—and the rabid right-wing opposition to it—it’s worth noting that the majority of the lies being told about our president, his programs, and the Democratic Party are originating not just from the right wing but from the evangelical right wing in particular.

Destroying the Credibility of Faith

I grew up as the son of Francis Schaeffer, the spiritual father to just about all the people in the news connected with the evangelical right. My father is the man who inspired evangelicals to get involved in politics. Today’s leading anti-gay activists, Obama-haters like Charles Colson and Dobson, publications like World Magazine, and others like the late Jerry Falwell got into far-right evangelical-inspired politics because of Dad’s theology of “taking back” America for Jesus.

Without people like Dobson—remember his paranoid lie-filled “letter” warning his followers about an Obama presidency?—the lies now commonly circulated about Obama wouldn't have been given traction. When I check who’s sending me the most scurrilous email (Obama is the “next Hitler,” he’s the “Antichrist,” etc.), I find a lot of it comes from the evangelical right, now the bedrock of the anti-Obama camp. I’m a religious person, so they are my enemies too; the far-right evangelicals are doing more to destroy the credibility of faith than Hitchens and Dawkins could in a lifetime.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/...

see also.........

Rachel Maddow & Frank Schaeffer

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/8/7...

Last year, the Democratic Congress enthusiastically acquiesced to President George W. Bush’s insistence on carving out individualized suspicion and other privacy protections from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Democrats did so to preempt the charge of being weak on national security from the presidential campaign — didn’t work — and then-Sen. Barack Obama, who may have figured that selling out civil liberties was the better part of aspirational valor, voted for the bill. If there was any comfort to the civil libertarians, it was that what became the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 mandated that the inspectors general of the Departments of Defense, Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA and the National Security Agency had to launch a review of how the warrantless surveillance efforts actually worked, complete with an assessment of “legal reviews of the Program.” It was July 2008.

A year later, the report is complete, and I’ve just gotten a copy of it. What does it say? I’m still reading it, but one thing it says is that the CIA’s involvement in the program is deeper than has been reported. And one interesting bonus fact: the report calls the program the “President’s Surveillance Program,” rather than the manipulative “Terrorist Surveillance Program” handle the Bush administration gave the program when it became public in order to put critics in a tight spot. (”What? You oppose surveillance for dangerous terrorists who want to kill your grandchildren????”)

More as I read the report.

Update: Here’s the basis for switching up the nomenclature, and it comes with a point of pride. Two years ago, in July 2007, Paul Kiel and I tried to make sense of then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ congressional testimony about the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” and concluded that there must have been more than one secret surveillance program authorized by President Bush beginning in 2001. Today the IGs’ report bears us out:

The specific intelligence activities that were permitted by the Presidential Authorizations remain highly classified, except that beginning in December 2005 the President and other Administration officials acknowledged that these activities included the interception without a court order of certain international communications where there is “a reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of al-Qai’da, affiliated with al-Qai’da, or a member of an organization affiliated with al-Qai’da.” The President and other Administration officials referred to this publicly disclosed activity as the “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” a convention we follow in this unclassified report. We refer to other intelligence activities under the Presidential Authorizations as the “Other Intelligence Activities.” The specific details of the Other Intelligence Activities remain highly classified, although the Attorney General publicly acknowledged the existence of such activities in August 2007. Together, the Terrorist Surveillance Program and the Other Intelligence Activities comprise the PSP.

–

http://washingtonindependent.com/50374/lon...

...Jeff Sharlet wrote the book "The Family" ...this article is from Harpers and was written in 2003 and it deals with the right wing religious group called "The Family".

Jesus plus nothing:
Undercover among America's secret theocrats
By Jeffrey Sharlet


And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
—Matthew 10:36

This is how they pray: a dozen clear-eyed, smooth-skinned “brothers” gathered together in a huddle, arms crossing arms over shoulders like the weave of a cable, leaning in on one another and swaying like the long grass up the hill from the house they share. The house is a handsome, gray, two-story colonial that smells of new carpet and Pine-Sol and aftershave; the men who live there call it Ivanwald. At the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac, quiet but for the buzz of lawn mowers and kids playing foxes-and-hounds in the park across the road, Ivanwald sits as one house among many, clustered together like mushrooms, all devoted, like these men, to the service of Jesus Christ. The men tend every tulip in the cul-de-sac, trim every magnolia, seal every driveway smooth and black as boot leather. And they pray, assembled at the dining table or on their lawn or in the hallway or in the bunk room or on the basketball court, each man's head bowed in humility and swollen with pride (secretly, he thinks) at being counted among such a fine corps for Christ, among men to whom he will open his heart and whom he will remember when he returns to the world not born-again but remade, no longer an individual but part of the Lord's revolution, his will transformed into a weapon for what the young men call “spiritual war.”

“Jeff, will you lead us in prayer?”

Surely, brother. It is April 2002, and I have lived with these men for weeks now, not as a Christian—a term they deride as too narrow for the world they are building in Christ's honor—but as a “believer.” I have shared the brothers' meals and their work and their games. I have been numbered among them and have been given a part in their ministry. I have wrestled with them and showered with them and listened to their stories: I know which man resents his father's fortune and which man succumbed to the flesh of a woman not once but twice and which man dances so well he is afraid of being taken for a fag. I know what it means to be a “brother,” which is to say that I know what it means to be a soldier in the army of God.

“Heavenly Father,” I begin. Then, “O Lord,” but I worry that this doesn't sound intimate enough. I settle on, “Dear Jesus.” “Dear Jesus, just, please, Jesus, let us fight for Your name.”


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ivanwald, which sits at the end of Twenty-fourth Street North in Arlington, Virginia, is known only to its residents and to the members and friends of the organization that sponsors it, a group of believers who refer to themselves as “the Family.” The Family is, in its own words, an “invisible” association, though its membership has always consisted mostly of public men. Senators Don Nickles (R., Okla.), Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Pete Domenici (R., N.Mex.), John Ensign (R., Nev.), James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), and Conrad Burns (R., Mont.) are referred to as “members,” as are Representatives Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), Frank Wolf (R., Va.), Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.), Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.), and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.). Regular prayer groups have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries. The Family maintains a closely guarded database of its associates, but it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities.

much more.......

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/03/007...

By Jack Lohman
Posted on July 06, 2009 6:22 AM



Single-payer is the most cost efficient system for our nation and is the most humane. You get sick, you get care and the caregiver gets paid. Nothing could be simpler. And though Medicare is not perfect it is indeed the least costly system of all with full physician choice, no wait times and no rationing.

But our politicians have a problem. Both Democrats and Republicans have shared in the $46 million in campaign contributions from the insurance industry. Needless to say, what is in the best interest of the nation is exactly opposite to the best interest of the for-profit insurers. The 22-percent saved comes right out of their pocket.

The question is how do we pay for it as a universal program? But first let’s understand who’s paying for it now.

Everybody is. We pay in cost-shifting, bankruptcy costs, and lastly, when businesses add their employee health costs to their product price and we reimburse them at the cash register.

In the process we make our businesses highly uncompetitive with foreign products, which often forces employers to build their products in countries that do not burden them with health care. We make more cars in Canada than in Michigan because their health care costs are $800 per employee per year and ours is $6,500. That adds $1,500 per car.

Flat out, businesses should not be involved in providing employee health care at all, but that leaves either individual insurance or a public pool. Our politicians should create a single-payer Medicare-for-all system that is funded by our national infrastructure instead of the mish-mash of payments and non-payments. That’s what most advanced nations have done, and it works.

Over 31 percent of health care costs are consumed by the make-work insurance bureaucracy; as compared with the 9 percent needed for a single-payer. A huge savings to the public could be had.

With a single-payer system you see your same doctor and go to the same hospital as before. The only thing that changes is where they send the bill, and most people could care less about whose logo is on the invoice.

The beauty of Medicare is its simplicity. Everybody gets care, everybody pays into it through progressive taxation, companies are freed of the expense, jobs are increased, 100 percent of the public is covered, and consumers save $400 billion per year in reduced overhead.

The current for-profit system includes extra premiums to offset high CEO salaries and bonuses, broker sales commissions, shareholder profits, actuarial and gatekeeper costs, and even their lobbying and campaign contributions which are passed on to the patient.

Isn’t it nice to know that your politician is getting a piece of your private health care dollar? That’s why politicians always prefer private companies over government entities; one can give campaign cash and the other can’t. That’s why they choose to leave insurers in the loop.

Bottom line; most people would rather spend $500 per month in taxes to pay for an all-inclusive system than $700 per month for an exclusive system that doesn’t give better care and drives jobs out of the U.S.|

And all doctors and hospitals will be privately run and you’ll have 100-percent choice. What’s not to like about that?

But get this: our problem today is not health care, it’s political. Your politicians need to hear from you, and your voice must be loud if it is to drown out the moneyed interests. Your politicians work for you, not them.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Jack Lohman is a retired business owner from Wisconsin and publishes http://MoneyedPoliticians.net . He authored “Politicians - Owned and Operated by Corporate America.”

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/july/singlep...

.......and......

Familiar Players in Health Bill Lobbying (health-care industry spending $1.4 million/day on lobbyists)

The nation's largest insurers, hospitals and medical groups have hired more than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress in hopes of influencing their old bosses and colleagues, according to an analysis of lobbying disclosures and other records.

The tactic is so widespread that three of every four major health-care firms have at least one former insider on their lobbying payrolls, according to The Washington Post's analysis.

Nearly half of the insiders previously worked for the key committees and lawmakers, including Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), debating whether to adopt a public insurance option opposed by major industry groups. At least 10 others have been members of Congress, such as former House majority leaders Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) and Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), both of whom represent a New Jersey pharmaceutical firm.

The hirings are part of a record-breaking influence campaign by the health-care industry, which is spending more than $1.4 million a day on lobbying in the current fight, according to disclosure records. And even in a city where lobbying is a part of life, the scale of the effort has drawn attention. For example, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) doubled its spending to nearly $7 million in the first quarter of 2009, followed by Pfizer, with more than $6 million.

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

I am an orthopedic surgeon who has been practicing in this community over the past 16 years and may be familiar to many of your readers. As our Congress debates the future of our health-care system, I am writing to urge my fellow citizens to get involved in the process. The debate in Congress is being framed largely by the insurance companies. This is problematic because of the large sums of money donated by the insurance lobby to the same senators who are crafting the reform.

What is not being considered fairly is H.R. 676, a single-payer health-care system.

In the U.S. today we spend approximately two times as much as other industrialized nations, over $7,000 per person per year, yet have nearly 50 million uninsured residents. What causes this waste of health-care dollars? We are the only industrialized nation that does not have a single-payer system. Instead our system is based on privately owned for-profit insurance companies.

In the average private health insurance company, one-third of the money paid in premiums is used for “administrative costs.” That means that one-third of all the money you and I now pay for our insurance is used to pay for things like salaries, marketing, overhead and, of course, profits and bonuses. Not to provide health care.

In addition, hospitals, nursing homes and physicians need to employ large staffs just to negotiate the maze of rules and regulations from multiple insurance companies. By eliminating these multiple insurance companies, the cost savings to the system would be more than a staggering $350 billion each year.

Many people are scared to have a single-payer system run by the federal government for two main reasons. First, there is a general impression that the government is inefficient and will be unable to manage the system well, and second, people fear that the government would limit their choice of providers. Most people don’t realize that the government plan we all know best, Medicare, runs at about 3 percent overhead while most HMOs run 15 to 20 percent overhead, and the Canadian system has 1 percent overhead. The government, then, is more efficient than the private sector.

As to the second fear, lack of choice, in the single-payer plan being talked about for the United States, the majority of the health-care system would run just as it does today. That means that most people would have greater choice of providers because they would no longer have an HMO telling them who they could see. Unlike the VA or Army system where the doctors and hospitals are run directly by the government, in a single-payer system here in the United States there would be no change in the providers; only the payers would change.

What would happen is that we and our employers would all pay taxes instead of premiums. These taxes would amount to a fraction of what we used to pay in insurance premiums. For those taxes we would have insurance that would pay for literally all of our health needs, from glasses to dental care to medical and surgical care.

The large cost savings of a single-payer system would come in various ways. By buying in bulk and demanding volume discounts, the single-payer plan would greatly decrease the cost of medication. The VA system in the United States gets a 40 percent reduction in medicine costs over what we all pay. A single-payer system would also greatly increase the country’s access to preventative care. This in turn would reduce the inappropriate overuse of highly costly emergency rooms. Having diseases diagnosed earlier and treated appropriately vastly decreases the overall cost of treatment of that disease. For example, by treating high cholesterol early with medicine, you may well eliminate the need for a very costly coronary artery bypass later in life.

While doctors and hospitals would be paid somewhat less, their costs of doing business would be drastically reduced since there would be a very low cost to billing and administration, and providers would get paid more quickly and reliably.

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, there would be improvements to our actual patient care with a single-payer system. Having only one payer would allow us to use a unified computer system. With this single computer system, whenever you went for health care of any kind, the health-care provider would have all the information needed to treat you safely, such as the medications you take and the allergies you have. There would be fewer medical errors and a greater awareness of interrelated medical problems.

I strongly encourage you all to call, write, text or otherwise contact your congressmen and senators, and encourage them to strongly consider H.R. 676, the single-payer system that will fundamentally eliminate a huge waste of health-care dollars and restore our health-care system.

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/july/singlep...

Call me old fashioned, but a true conservative is someone who conserves, dislikes wasting money and is offended by endless corporate bailouts by hard-working taxpayers. A fiscal conservative like me. As a public health professional, I want to see health dollars used to keep people healthy through public health and wellness programs, as well as provide medical care when it’s needed.

We have a health care crisis in the United States. Nearly 50 million people do not have health insurance, and they are our family and neighbors.

There are 500,000 medical bankruptcies every year. Most of these half million families had health insurance; at least they thought they did because every month they paid for insurance. Millions of people have learned the hard way that for-profit sickness insurance does not prevent financial ruin during a health crisis.

One of the worst lies thrown around every time Congress debates health care is that the U.S. will end up with socialized medicine. Socialized medicine is when the government owns and operates health facilities as well as pays the salaries of the doctors, nurses and the rest of the healthcare work force.

Let me say as clearly as possible — President Obama and the Congress are not discussing, introducing or enacting socialized medicine.

Good old-fashioned U.S. socialized medicine

Today, the U.S. already has socialized medical systems serving more than 20 million people. The current U.S. socialized medicine systems are very popular. The largest in terms of numbers of people is the Military Health System. The largest in terms of numbers of facilities owned and operated is the Veterans Administration health system. Two additional smaller U.S. socialized medical systems are the Indian Health Service and the federal Bureau of Prisons.

Despite being socialized medicine, the VA is ranked the highest in a national survey of patient satisfaction by the University of Michigan. U.S. taxpayers own the 155 VA hospitals and 881 clinics; we employ 289,000 people working in the VA including 16,000 doctors and 42,000 nurses.

Even the bastion of capitalism, Fortune magazine, is impressed by VA health care, stating, “The seamless integration of science, information, and compassion is the dream of modern health care. Scenes like these are not fantasies, however, but daily realities at the Veterans Health Administration.” (Fortune, May 2006.)

Let me repeat, President Obama and the Congress are not discussing, introducing, or enacting socialized medicine. Unlike the socialized system military and veterans enjoy, most health care services are provided through a private delivery system. All reforms will build on the existing private delivery system.

2009 health reform debate

So now that we all agree that the President and Congress are not expanding socialized medicine in the U.S., what are they proposing? There are two basic options and neither creates a nationalized or socialized health care system.

Medicare for all: The first choice expands Medicare eligibility beyond its current limitation to elderly (over 65) and disabled individuals of any age. This is the most conservative, least-disruptive and cost-effective way to cover more people; it only takes a simple change to an existing, very popular program. Every time the Congressional Budget Office scores the cost of Medicare-for-all type programs, they pay for themselves through two key business principles, the power of bulk purchasing and administrative savings though the elimination of waste in the system.

Mandated insurance: The second choice forces taxpayers to buy for-profit insurance despite a wasteful administrative cost of $1 billion a day. Yes, a trillion dollars every two and a half years just for paperwork, not a penny of that for health care. As a fiscal conservative, I do not want to pay a secret corporate bailout so that greedy CEOs make bonuses based on how good they are at rationing care to sick people.

In this expansion of the current failed system, the U.S. spends more than twice as much per person than any other country and the excess cost does not result in better outcomes. The U.S. is about 37th in the world for life expectancy, infant mortality, and other indicators of health status.

We have to walk away from corporate rationing to create a seamless system with the highest quality services for the best price. The easiest way to hold down costs is to have the largest purchasing group possible to get bulk prices — this is the single-risk pool.

Especially in this economic downturn it is essential to help people get access to health care. Being creative now gives us the chance to create a brand-new system, an All-American plan.

False conservatives will parrot the corporate line and continue to bail out the failed sickness insurance system. True fiscal conservatives who want to eliminate waste, hold down costs and improve outcomes will support Senate Bill 703 and House Bill 676. All the other bills transfer tax dollars first into needless paperwork and corporate profits and then dole out whatever is left for medical bills.

The choice is clear. We keep our doctors and hospitals in the current private delivery system but let one public insurance plan handle the paperwork and pay the bills.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Carol Miller is a New Mexico public and rural health expert. She has public service in Washington, D.C., in both Republican and Democratic administrations, including the Clinton White House. In 1994 she was the health reform policy adviser for the National Rural Health Association and the New Mexico Secretary of Health. Miller, a former Commissioned Officer in the US Public Health Service, has used both the uniformed services and veterans health care systems.

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/july/why_fis...

Source: Washington Post

The nation's largest insurers, hospitals and medical groups have hired more than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress in hopes of influencing their old bosses and colleagues, according to an analysis of lobbying disclosures and other records.

The tactic is so widespread that three of every four major health-care firms have at least one former insider on their lobbying payrolls, according to The Washington Post's analysis.

Nearly half of the insiders previously worked for the key committees and lawmakers, including Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), debating whether to adopt a public insurance option opposed by major industry groups. At least 10 others have been members of Congress, such as former House majority leaders Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) and Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), both of whom represent a New Jersey pharmaceutical firm.

The hirings are part of a record-breaking influence campaign by the health-care industry, which is spending more than $1.4 million a day on lobbying in the current fight, according to disclosure records. And even in a city where lobbying is a part of life, the scale of the effort has drawn attention. For example, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) doubled its spending to nearly $7 million in the first quarter of 2009, followed by Pfizer, with more than $6 million.



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

From cell phones and computers to bicycle helmets and hospital IV bags, plastic has molded society in many ways that make life both easier and safer. But the synthetic material also has left harmful imprints on the environment and perhaps human health, according to a new compilation of articles authored by scientists from around the world.

More than 60 scientists contributed to the new report, which aims to present the first comprehensive review of the impact of plastics on the environment and human health, and offer possible solutions.

“One of the most ubiquitous and long-lasting recent changes to the surface of our planet is the accumulation and fragmentation of plastics,” wrote David Barnes, a lead author and researcher for the British Antarctic Survey. The report was published this month in a theme issue of Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B, a scientific journal.

As the scrutiny of the environmental toll of plastic increases, so has its usage, the scientists reported

Since its mass production began in the 1940s, plastic’s wide range of unique properties has propelled it to an essential status in society. Next year, more than 300 million tons will be produced worldwide. The amount of plastic manufactured in the first ten years of this century will approach the total produced in the entire last century, according to the report.

“Plastics are very long-lived products that could potentially have service over decades, and yet our main use of these lightweight, inexpensive materials are as single-use items that will go to the garbage dump within a year, where they’ll persist for centuries,” Richard Thompson, lead editor of the report, said in an interview.

Evidence is mounting that the chemical building blocks that make plastics so versatile are the same components that might harm people and the environment. And its production and disposal contribute to an array of environmental problems, too. For example:

http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs...

....from Climate Progress

In its May 2008 Corporate Citizenship Report, ExxonMobil promised:

In 2008, we will discontinue contributions to several public policy research groups whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.


Bullshit.

Okay, you’re not shocked. Still, it is worth publicizing their deceipt, as the UK’s Guardian did:

ExxonMobil continuing to fund climate denial groups, records show

The world’s largest oil company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change denial, a new analysis shows.

Company records show that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to such lobby groups in 2008. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000 (£45,500), and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.

According to Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics, both the NCPA and the Heritage Foundation have published “misleading and inaccurate information about climate change.”

… Ward said: “ExxonMobil has been briefing journalists for three years that they were going to stop funding these groups. The reality is that they are still doing it. If the world’s largest oil company wants to fund climate change denial then it should be upfront about it, and not tell people it has stopped.“

The oil giant’s full list of 2008 grantees is here. They also gave money to such purveyors of misinformation on climate change policy as American Council for Capital Formation Center for Policy Research and American Council on Science and Health and Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies and Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and National Black Chamber of Commerce, which recently released this doozy:


NBCC Study Finds Waxman-Markey Reduces GDP by $350 Billion

But apparently that utter nonsense doesn’t qualify as diverting attention from the important discussion of how to deal with climate change.

And the above is just a partial list of the “public policy research groups whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner” that ExxonMobil is still funding. For the full list, just cross-reference the oil giant’s 2008 grantee list with the list of misinformers from ExxonSecrets.

Here are more details from the Guardian:

http://climateprogress.org/2009/07/02/anot...

In 2007, the IPCC warned that “as global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5°C , model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe.” On our current emissions path, we will warm far more than that this century, which suggests we risk the high end of species loss.

A new study in Science study (subs. req’d) confirms this risk. It examines “the pace of diversity loss leading to the Triassic-Jurassic boundary (TJB).” It finds “the sudden diversity drop … coincided with a mere ~100 to ~350 ppmv rise in CO2 concentration,” and “CO2-induced global warming was likely an important contributory factor to plant species turnover at the TJB.”

The study notes “The abrupt plant diversity loss … is consistent with expected plant responses to a catastrophically rapid rather than gradual environmental change,” such as might be caused from a massive release of methane Good thing homo “sapiens” sapiens isn’t doing anything that might bring about catastrophically rapid climate change, like say 5°C warming in one century or a massive release of methane (see NOAA stunner: “Methane levels rose in 2008 for the second consecutive year after a 10-year lull”).

Worse, the study concludes:


An alternative explanation for the abrupt diversity loss is that it represents a threshold response of LT vegetation to relatively minor increases in CO2 concentration and/or global temperature.

Again, we are quite literally playing with fire here, risking massive species loss this century if we don’t sharply reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends soon.

And, of course, “When CO2 levels in the atmosphere reach about 500 parts per million, you put calcification out of business in the oceans.” There aren’t many studies of what happens to the oceans as we get toward 800 to 1000 ppm, but it appears likely that much of the world’s oceans, especially in the southern hemisphere, become inhospitable to many forms of marine life. A 2005 Nature study concluded these “detrimental” conditions “could develop within decades, not centuries as suggested previously.”

A 2009 study in Nature Geoscience warned that global warming may create “dead zones” in the ocean that would be devoid of fish and seafood and endure for up to two millennia (see Ocean dead zones to expand, “remain for thousands of years”).

Let me end with a long excerpt from a Physorg.com article on the new Science study, “Extinction risk to plant biodiversity may occur at lower levels of atmospheric CO2 than previously considered,” for those without a subscription:

.........more..........

http://climateprogress.org/2009/06/30/stud...