A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health provided us with a useful portrait of the true cost of our current health care system. The study found that uninsured Americans have a 40% higher risk of death than those who have health insurance. Based on current levels of uninsured – somewhere around 45 million people – they estimate the annual death toll of our profit-focused system at around 45,000 lives lost. Lack of insurance is now one of the most deadly medical conditions in this country, ahead of kidney disease in the number killed. That is to say nothing of the number sickened, disabled, and bankrupted in addition – many of the last category, I’m certain, immediate kin to the dead. I would imagine this would be shocking news anywhere else in the world. Here, it merits perhaps a brief reference on the evening news… then it’s time to move on. Yep, 45,000 dead from lack of health insurance. Man, that’s a lot of bodies, Ken! Up next, here’s Brad with tonight’s sports, then it’s over to Kristen for our weather forecast.  Only in America.  

Imagine for a moment what would happen if, instead of lack of health care, a terror attack took 45,000 American lives. Think about it. We lost 3,000 lives in the September 11, 2001 attacks, and it nearly cost us our constitution. (In fact, I’m not certain it didn’t… the jury is still out on that one.) Much as political pundits seem to recall this time of unity and mutual support, it was in fact a time of public panic and governmental authoritarianism. And just as the attacks opened a sickening hole in lower Manhattan, they also created an opening through which some of our worst tendencies as a people crept on all fours. I heard people openly discussing the use of nuclear weapons on… well, on just about anybody. (Some of that came from Franklin Graham, purported “man of God”.) We curtailed civil liberties for whole classes of people, we invaded and occupied two countries, and we made torture an integral part of our military culture, instead of something done only in the shadows. It was a shocking and terrible time, and it resulted from the murder of 3,000. Now… imagine if such an attack killed 45,000.  And if that attack took place every year.

What would happen? As a nation, we’d turn ourselves inside out to respond. We’d transform ourselves into a police state, no doubt, completing the terrifying odyssey we began eight years ago when those planes struck the twin towers. And yet, think about it – that magnitude of loss, and all the additional pain that proceeds from that, is occurring right now. Not as the consequence of some catastrophic terror attack, but of something much more easily prevented. To my mind, that makes this all the more insidious. We are allowing tens of thousands to die, hundreds of thousands to suffer, and millions to lose their shred of prosperity just to preserve the profitability of the health insurance industry. We are allowing a narrow segment of corporate shills to shut out the interests of our entire nation by preventing us from having the kind of public health system that every other industrialized nation enjoys. What the hell does that say about us? Much as I hate to channel Bob Dole, where is the fucking outrage? 

Bin Laden doesn’t need planes, suicide belts, or truck bombs. All he needs to do is stand back and let our dysfunctional privatized health insurance do the job for him. 

luv u,

jp 

As I write, the G-20 is gathering in Pittsburgh, ostensibly to discuss what measures they can all agree on that will prevent another global financial meltdown from happening (i.e. at least the kind that threatens the G 20). Money and power will be well-represented, and as much as the gathering is described as an expanded club of economic powers, there is one global economic power that is not on the guest list. Which one? To borrow a time-worn phrase, the workers of the world – all those folks in all those countries who make the whole thing run; workers that are paid, underpaid, and unpaid…. everyone from the office drone to the subsistence farmer to the domestic slave-spouse. The folks that carry all those wealthy people on their shoulders – they will be severely underrepresented in Pittsburgh, and with good reason. If they start informing global economic policy, well then…. that would be a different game altogether.

You’ll see some of these non-participants out on the streets, carrying signs. But the vast, vast majority won’t come anywhere near the place. Frankly, nearly all of them are too busy making ends meet to do a road trip, even if to confront the sprawling international power-elite that immiserates them. Let’s face it – life is exhausting, especially for the poor, the overworked, the sat-upon, spat-upon. Many of them lined up for the 9/12 march on Washington a couple of weeks ago, goaded by cheap-seat demagogues like Glenn Beck to rally against even the vague hope of a slightly more equitable order. You have to ask yourself, why would anyone who has a lousy job with no benefits stand in a crowd that’s shouting down universal health coverage? I could see them complaining about the way it’s configured (a half-assed, public-private “solution”), but when the poor march against social democracy in any shape or form – even their own medicare benefits! – you know they’ve been hoodwinked. Whatever protocol emerges from the G-20 summit, it is unlikely to bring greater security to the un-rich because they are so disconnected from one another by circumstance, by distance, by distrust, and by cynicism born of generations of hard living.

It’s hard to imagine world political leaders – let alone the obscenely overpaid heads of global financial institutions – having any grasp of what it’s like to scrape by. I’ve had more than one taste of it, though always with a kind of familial safety net (crucial difference). Still, making the bills on $500 a month or less tends to focus the mind a bit, even if you’ve got generous kin who invite you over for dinner on the weekends. You’re always gambling on nothing going wrong, and something always does. If the car breaks down, you’re basically fucked – better luck next month. I had one credit card that kept me rolling for a few years – that was my rainy day, in essence. And I had no kids (cats, though). Can’t imagine what people do with dependents in a situation like that. What energy is left for organizing? I’m always amazed by the poor in countries like Haiti, where people have organized and faced down very powerful forces, decade after decade, setback after setback… and yet still they link arms and try again.

I think of those folks when I hear our leaders lecturing the third world on their behavior, and I am ashamed, frankly. We should follow the “global south’s” example and learn to fight for our own interests, even if it seems hopeless sometimes.  Call it G 2.0 – the other globalization.

luv u,

jp

Just a few short takes in the waning days of summer. Here goes…

Color blind. This week former president Jimmy Carter gave voice to another inconvenient truth; namely that racism is still a force in the United States and that it is a factor in some of the more vitriolic opposition to Obama’s presidency. I would think that this might seem obvious to anyone who’s lived on this planet for more than five minutes and is not a member of the Glenn Beck army of morons. The specious claim about Obama’s non-U.S. birth, his secret life as a Muslim, his resemblance to Hitler or the “antichrist”, and similar bile is apparently rooted in the desire to portray the president as “the other”, the ultimate expression of which, in America, has always been the person of color. Of course, people from the center to the right are jumping all over Carter, accusing him of introducing race into this incredibly high-minded national conversation we’ve been having (ed. note: irony). As always, we’re all supposed to pretend that racism doesn’t exist, except for the black-on-white variety. Carter got the same for his observations on Palestine, which were pretty solid in my view, so I say good on him for sticking his neck out once again instead of resting on his Nobel laurels like most of his colleagues tend to do.

Missile offense. I was glad to see Obama scuttle the ludicrous missile defense plan for Poland and the Czech Republic. The whole M.D. boondoggle has been mostly about profit defense for military contractors anyway, but this intiative to build batteries in Eastern Europe was beyond stupid. The freak chorus of neoconservatives is howling about how this is a cave to mother Russia, but if they say it’s a bad idea, it almost has to be a good one. (One wonders what their reaction would be if Russia were to base ABM batteries in, say, Cuba to protect Venezuela from attack by Israel, which really does have a nuclear capability.) Unfortunately the administration appears determined to place more interceptor missiles in the vicinity of Iran, something that smells to me like a back door build-up in support of a future attack against Tehran. Obama (and likely folks like Dennis Ross) have a clock ticking on Iran that will run out at the end of the year. What then?  

Shocked, shocked! I see the House (including an overwhelming majority of Democrats) wasted no time in cutting ACORN off from federal funds, punishing the organization for the shocking revelation that some of their low-level employees didn’t follow the script when dealing with abysmally poor people. I’m not sure how they think a lot of inner city poor people manage to support themselves. Earth to Congress: there is an underground economy in America. It’s there because the overground one doesn’t work for the poor. Inner city counseling is not an easy job – it’s mostly triage.  Still, I’m glad Congress is holding someone accountable for a change. I imagine next we will bar Halliburton from any federal contracts because their shoddy workmanship electrocuted 18 U.S. soldiers overseas. (Oh, wait – they got $30 million in bonuses.) Or that they’ll cut off Blackwater (now Xe) because they killed a bunch of folks in Nisour square in Baghdad (whoops – still working for us). Or that they’ll bar that firm guarding U.S. facilities in Afghanistan – the one manned by those dudes drinking gin off of each other’s asses. Or that they’ll take back all of the countless billions we gave to major banks and AIG because they were patently irresponsible in every imaginable way and nearly brought the financial system down.

Don’t hold your breath.

luv u,

jp