Just now I emailed the following to my Congressperson, Bill Pascrell, who represents the 8th District of New Jersey.
Dear Congressman:
It’s time to eliminate the private health insurance industry and cover everyone with Universal Single-Payer National Health Insurance (NHI).
Under a comprehensive National “Single-Payer” Health Insurance Program, every American would be covered for all necessary medical care. All citizens would receive a National Insurance Card entitling them to care at any hospital, doctor’s office or clinic, as well as coverage for prescription drugs and supplies. The United States National Health Insurance Act, HR 676, embodies these principles and I urge you to support it.
Under NHI, a single, public insurance plan would replace the current patchwork of thousands of private plans. Eliminating the existing complex and redundant insurance bureaucracy and the paperwork burden it inflicts on doctors, nurses and hospitals would generate massive administrative savings. Overall, NHI would save about $350 billion annually on bureaucracy and profits, more than enough to pay for covering the uninsured and improving coverage for the tens of millions who are currently under-insured. (But if you aren’t convinced, I would urge you to ask the CBO to do an analysis of HR 676).
Most hospitals and clinics would remain privately owned and operated, receiving a budget from the NHI to cover all operating costs. The NHI would pay for care in private doctors’ offices, as well as in group practices and clinics.
A National Health Insurance Program is the only affordable option for universal, comprehensive coverage. Lesser reforms that retain the private insurance industry cannot streamline bureaucracy; as a result, expanding coverage inevitably means increasing costs, and reducing costs inevitably means limiting coverage. But NHI could both expand coverage and reduce costs. It would squeeze out bureaucratic waste and eliminate the perverse incentives that threaten the quality of care and the ethical foundations of medicine and nursing. For patients, NHI would assure comprehensive coverage and a free choice of doctors and hospitals. For physicians and nurses, NHI would minimize bureaucratic hassles and costs, and nurture the best traditions of these honored professions.
The so-called public option, so dreaded by the right wing and the insurance lobby, would most likely not be able to compete with the private sector except by emulating its worst characteristics: denying care and shifting costs onto consumers. We don’t need any more of that. And such a scheme has no realistic chance of “bending the cost curve.”
Medicare, on the other hand, already is a successful and efficient single-payer program that operates with 4% overhead (some sources say 3%) — unlike the private insurance industry, which consumes 30 cents on every dollar in overhead and profits while contributing nothing to the actual delivery of health care.
I am a 51-year-old healthy male with an exemplary lifestyle and relatively good insurance: Blue Cross Blue Shield federal program, “Standard Option.” Still, I spend far too many hours dealing with BCBS bureaucrats who feed me an endless stream of lies and obfuscation as they try to maximize profits by delaying or withholding benefits. And I am among the lucky ones fortunate enough to have coverage. I have had enough of this.
I do not buy the argument that Single Payer is not politically feasible. The majority of the public wants real health insurance and despises the status quo. “Not politically feasible” is at best a self-defeating, self-fulfilling prophecy �?? for if enough politicians voted for it, you’d have the votes — and at worst, a cynical subterfuge meaning “I am up to my ears in pharmaceutical and health insurance industry money.”
Single Payer is the only rational and humane solution to the crisis afflicting our country. Please do the right thing: support HR 676.
Thank you.
Postscript: some of the above text is borrowed from http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/petition-congress-to-pass-single-payer-hr-676-national-health-insurance.html
Category: politics
Why MoveOn.org sucks
It all began way back in 2004 when MoveOn first posted a couple videos that compared Bush to Hitler, then gasped and groveled and aplogized and pulled them. Why so cowardly? War crimes are war crimes, fascism is fascism, disappearance and torture is… ok you get my point. It was a disappointment that showed their true (limber-dick, pussy-ass) colors.
Then came the Democratic primaries, and they endorsed Barack Obama even while Kucinich was still in it. Kucinich, the candidate who can get his mouth around those big tough words like single payer and impeachment. Why? There is no excuse — except possibly that they are good old neoliberals, and they suck.
Then I tried to get off their email list, and had to do the unsubscribe routine like five times. Very annoying. They send too damn many emails, as anyone who has been a subscriber or has read this piece in the Onion well knows.
Then, against our better judgement, my girlfriend and I decided to order like 20 Obama buttons from MoveOn. (Of course we support Obama now.) Four to six weeks for delivery, they say. Well, it’s been several weeks and still no buttons. Fuxup with that, dudes? When are we gonna see these buttons, December?
I’m sorry MoveOn, but let’s face facts: you suck.
A gmail ad re Palin: need we say more?
You know how gmail peeks at your email and pulls up ads targeted accordingly. Just now their ad-targeting algorithm came up with this gem for me:
Can Palin Lead America?
92% of America say Yes. Vote Now!
Get a DysonDC25 Vacuum with Email.
ThePopVote.com/Woman-President
Of course Sarah Palin is qualified, honey. Now here’s your free vacuum cleaner. And please don’t forget to iron my underwear and buy some more beer.
Fuckheads block my mail to my dad
My dad, a retired professor of musicology, is a DSL customer of the Ontario and Trumansburg Telephone Companies. We have carried on email correspondence for years, peppering our prose with F-bombs whenever the urge arises. One fine day he stopped receiving mail from my gmail account, so I suggested he contact his ISP to see if I was being blocked. It turns out that his provider had begun applying “decency filters” to his incoming mail without his knowledge or consent, and my messages had been quarantined. When he demanded that they stop inspecting his mail for “decency,” they replied with boilerplate instructions on how to whitelist my address. He got on the phone and explained that what he wanted was not to whitelist his correspondents one by one, but to have the decency filter disabled outright. The drone with whom he spoke appeared not to understand. He is escalating his case up to the telco’s CEO Paul Griswold, and copying his correspondence to the New York ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Grouchy old bastard that he is, my dad has little patience with mindlessness and stubborn stupidity of this sort. So in his latest round of correspondence, he busted their balls thus:
One of your people called me a short time ago, and astonished (and, I must admit) infuriated me by his real (or feigned) inability to understand what I was trying to say to him. So let me try to get at it in writing.
There is a world of difference between filtering spam as such and filtering for what you mistakenly take to be “decency.” The first is allowable; the second is abominable. And to do either or both without telling the subscriber what you are doing is detestable. If your technology is so crude that it cannot distinguish between spam and four letter words, you need new technology. But be that as it may, your minds should be capable of grasping the point.
So got it? It is really very simple.
Now, I am an old professor, so let me read you a lecture; please hold still for a few moments. The US Constitution of course has nothing directly to do with our dispute. It does, however, bear on it indirectly in a most profound way. The Constitution is not merely the legal basis of our country, it also has determined our ethos.
Now read it. You will see that it is profoundly mistrustful of the political judgments of what its authors thought of as “the mob,” a group to which you and I probably would have been thought to belong. That is why the Senate was originally elected by state legislatures; that is why even today with direct election, it remains profoundly unrepresentative. On the other hand, The Constitution in its first final form — that is with the Bill of Rights added to the original document — is deeply concerned about individual liberties. It is accordingly at once quite libertarian and somewhat undemocratic.
To leap to our little situation: not only are you not my censor, but your attempt to assume this dreadful role really does violate America’s basic ethos and is accordingly deeply offensive to people like me. Despite everything, we still believe in each citizen’s basic responsibility for himself. We refuse to turn this responsibility over to others. You have no right to take it away from for me on your own initiative. And in truth, I have no right to turn it over to you so long as I am sentient.
That your definition of “indecency” is idiotic and contrary to sound morality is another matter and could be explained to you only in the context of another little lecture. I fear you have had enough for now.
Please actually read and understand what I have written you. Do not reply with some canned nonsense from corporate headquarters or anything of that silly sort. There’s no point in that. If you cannot engage me in reasonable and intelligent discourse, do not engage me at all. But do turn off that thrice damned decency filter.
What do you make of that? What are the odds that anyone will understand what he’s saying and respond appropriately?
Obama, arugula-eating elitist
Now we’re told that according to the latest desperate right-wing smear campaign, Obama is an arugula-eating elitist. A celebrity intellectual, not in touch with common folk.
Let’s accept that for argument’s sake. So much the better. I am a well-paid, educated super-liberal white male who reads books and speaks a second language: an America-hating elitist snob if ever there was one. Therefore, I like Obama better than McCain because I have more in common with Obama. What a happy irony! Who would have imagined forty years ago that a white guy like me would end up voting for the black guy because we were in the same social class.
By the way, my gratitude to The Daily Show for keeping me informed about politics.
Car buyer’s dilemma
I have not owned a car since my aging Honda Civic was stolen eight years ago, when I banked the modest payout from the insurance company and never looked back. I had the use of my wife’s car up until September 2006 when we separated, so I have truly been carless for not quite two years — and loving it. I live two minutes from commuter trains that take me to downtown Manhattan in a matter of minutes, then it’s about a 15 minute walk to my workplace. If I need to get somewhere that isn’t reasonably accessible by public transportation or walking, then I take a taxi or someone gives me a ride. If the destination is not local, then I rent a car. You might be surprised how beautiful and liberating it is to live this way. No parking hassles, no insurance or maintenance expenses, no sitting in traffic wishing I were somewhere else.
Alas, my carless days are coming to an end, because my daughter and her mother are moving over 20 miles from where I live. I had long since decided that I wanted my next automobile to be a hybrid — fuel-efficient, environmentally friendly. The fact that I need a car now, as gasoline is up to $4.00 a gallon, is an unfortunate coincidence. Gas prices have driven demand for hybrids to the point where dealers can get away with a little gouging. Perhaps six months ago you could have negotiated and paid $200 over the dealer invoice price for a Toyota Prius. Now you will likely pay at least $2000 over the so-called MSRP, and you will wait anywhere from several weeks to three months for the privilege. Moreover, you will be forced to pay for leather seats, GPS and other luxuries that you might not need or want, because the more economical “packages” are sold out till fuck knows when.
Now, suppose you aren’t comfortable paying over $30,000 for a car equipped with stuff that you don’t want? Further suppose that you do have the money to do it anyway, although it will be a sacrifice. Further suppose that you might well not drive the car enough for the fuel savings to pay for the expense of the Prius relative to a less expensive car — in other words in pure financial terms you’d do better with something like a Honda Fit or Civic, Toyota Yaris or Corolla. That’s a purely selfish economic calculus that does not factor in the environmental impact. What to do?
Here’s what’s disturbing: in order for Americans to begin to wake up to reality and look for fuel efficiency, they have had to be struck hard on the head with the large, heavy club of $4/gallon gas. Capitalist market dynamics being what they are, consumers are forced to pay a premium — to put it politely — to do the right thing by getting a responsible car. This is the inverse of what should be. Government should be forcing auto manufacturers to adhere to a timetable for phasing out 100% gas-powered cars entirely, levy a surcharge on buyers of gas-powered cars, and use the revenue to provide rebates to consumers who buy hybrids. Environmentally friendly behavior should be encouraged and rewarded — but no. Instead they shove it up your ass so far your eyeballs pop out of your head.
MLK’s Mountaintop Speech
There was a good piece on NPR this morning about Martin Luther King’s last speech, in which he said he was not concerned about longevity because he had been to the mountaintop and looked over. Just the night before I had been pondering the koan from which the phrase “All is vast and boundless” is taken. While listening to King’s speaking voice coming out of the radio in my kitchen 40 years after the fact, it occurred to me that King himself must have realized that all is vast and boundless. It doesn’t matter what you call it.
Too Many Political TV Ads?
There was a soundbyte on NPR the other day in which an Iowa voter complained of being tired of so many political commercials on TV. The simplest solution — much simpler than campaign finance reform — apparently was beyond this person’s imagination: stop watching TV.
Colbert for President
I am immensely grateful and relieved that Stephen Colbert is running for the highest office in the land. Now, at long last, I have a viable alternative to holding my nose, getting on my knees and acquiescing yet again to that most revolting of compromises, the Lesser Evil. I can go into the voting booth, have an enlightenment experience, jettison all that foolish left-wing progressive delusion, and suddenly become a conservative. Then I’ll write in for Stephen Colbert.
Think I’m kidding? Yeah, I am kidding about the enlightenment part.
Is there something odd about this headline?
Blackwater Tops Firms in Iraq in Shooting Rate
Is it just me, or is there something a little weird and disturbing about that headline from today’s NY Times?