Tag Archives: health insurance

Political Rants

Issues and non-answers.

A little more off the top of my head. One of these weeks I’m going to take some pains over this posting, but… not this time.

Don’t worry, Kyoto. Canada’s pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol (can you say “tar sands”?) and Durban was a bust. What’s it going to take, people? We had massive tornadic storms this past year. We don’t have the luxury of another decade of inaction and ignorance.  

See you in health. One of the issues that comes up in our perennial presidential campaign is that of health insurance, mostly in the context of so-called “Obama Care”. What doesn’t get discussed so much is, well, the only possible positive solution to the current situation, which is bankrupting individuals, bleeding businesses dry, and threatening to drown the government in red ink. The only constituency the current health insurance system benefits is private health insurers. Seems like we, as a nation, sacrifice a great deal to preserve their profitability. That has got to end. We need a national health insurance system – basically universal Medicare with some enhancements – that covers everybody.

When GOP strategist Ed Gillespie was on the Daily Show the other day, he seemed to suggest that he didn’t have a problem with the notion of insurance exchanges or the idea that veterans, for instance, should have government coverage because they deserve the best. And yet his – and I think most Republicans’ – solution to the ongoing health crisis is to throw everyone into the private market. I can tell you from experience – that is not a good place to be unless you’re very young, very healthy, and can afford very steep premiums. And the employer based system isn’t working either, partly because it’s based on the pool of employees covered by the plan. If there are a lot of illnesses in a given year, that sends the premiums through the roof. The only way to control costs is to a) get everyone in the freaking country into the same pool, and b) cut the profit out of it entirely so that, as with Medicare, practically all of the money goes to patient care. 

Private, employer-based health insurance is an anachronism that should go the way of the typewriter. It was designed for an age of close to full employment, when companies needed to incentivize people to come to work for them. If the GOP wants to reduce “uncertainty” for their friends in business, they might consider making it possible for them to get out of the health insurance business altogether. The only reasonable way to do that is through a national health plan administered by the federal government.

War’s end. The Iraq war is coming to a close, at least with respect to American troops (though many contractors remain). Of course, there are those amongst us who consider withdrawal a mistake, such as Cheney, McCain, and nearly all of the GOP presidential candidates. I know – who cares what Cheney thinks, right? Has a man ever been more consistently wrong (or despised) than he? Still, I don’t think we should be too dismissive of their views. If Cheney, McCain, Lindsey Graham, Michelle Bachman, and other foreign policy super-geniuses want us to stay in Iraq, we should ship them over there. Good place for them. And they can stay as long as they want.

Of course, we could never really allow that to happen. I mean, haven’t the Iraqi people have suffered enough?

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Weeks away.

Just a few hurried comments on the events of the day. (The events of the day are keeping me from the events of the day. Shall I say that a second time?)

Cain Mutiny. Presidential candidate Herman Cain has some more difficulties maintaining his myth of marital bliss, and this may be a game stopper for him. Naturally the death knell may come about over something that doesn’t matter a damn. Aside from his family, who the hell cares who he sleeps with, so long as it’s consensual and doesn’t involve minors, animals, etc.? Somehow this seems to bother people (and the mass media) more than the fact that the man has given zero thought to anything having to do with public affairs. He must be the first presidential candidate I’ve ever seen fail to give an opinion when someone asks him about something like the Libya intervention. He had to ask the interviewer what side Obama (i.e. the United States) was on. What the … ? Has the man been living in a pizza box? He is running for the G.O.P. nomination and apparently has no concept of what the pro-life and pro-choice positions actually mean.

Why the hell does this man want to be president? He smells to me like a cut-out for the Koch brothers, but what he says is that God encouraged him to run. Personally, I think God may have just been trying to order a pizza.

Deficit of Imagination. They’re sparring over the payroll tax cut – otherwise known as The Only Tax Cut That Needs To Be Paid For. With the Occupy movement receiving eviction notices from coast to coast, Congress is managing to turn the conversation back to debt with a good bit of help from the major news organizations. I heard Joe Scarborough sparring with Sherrod Brown about Medicare costs and showing “courage” by acknowledging that those costs were tantamount to a cancer on the body politic. His solution? Cut, cut, cut. Which is basically shift the burden onto the elderly, the ill, etc.

I didn’t hear Brown say this (he may have), but the courageous position to my mind would be to advocate expanding Medicare to cover everybody. The reason we have deficit Medicare spending projected for the next few decades is simple – we are subsidizing the profitability of private health insurers, who get to cover the least costly consumers while the government covers the most costly ones (i.e. the ones private insurers don’t want). The courageous thing to do would be to say, we can’t afford this model any longer.

I’m waiting to hear that from someone. Anyone?

luv u,

jp