Tag Archives: medicare

Usual Rubbish

Inside August.

Posted another podcast, as you can see, and it’s chock full of whatever the hell we’ve been doing for the past three months. If after listening to it you can explain to me what that may have been, I’d be eternally grateful. Just contact me at:

Joe Perry of Big Green
Behind the hot water pipes
Cheney Hammer Mill
Somewhere in Upstate New York

I’ll get it.

Anyway, here’s what we have on the menu for August:

Ned Trek 19 – Careact
This episode is loosely based on “The Changeling”, an episode of classic Star Trek that features a killer space-probe named Nomad that thinks Captain Kirk is its long-lost mother. In our version, instead of killing everything in sight, the probe gives every living being it encounters single-payer health insurance. Hilarity ensues.

The episode includes six new Big Green songs that sort of drag the plot forward in a somewhat haphazard way. These include:

Spiro’s Song (Die-de-die) – A surprisingly introspective number for the android ex president, featuring android Spiro Agnew on backing vocals and a big beanfeast singalong.

Sick Poor Jerk in a Herd – Ned’s song about his assessment of health care in the good old U. S. of A. …. I mean, Confederacy of Planets.

Sonny who?Some Health Care – Mr. Welsh pulls it out again with a posthumous number about how crappy coverage hastened his untimely end. Perhaps the first song in the English language to use “Space Probe Machine” as a refrain.

Romneycare – A jazzy little number about just what it says, and what Mitt plans to do about it.

Well, Well, Well – Richard Pearle’s ode to profitability and health. A bit overproduced, but perhaps appropriately so, given the singer’s high opinion of himself.

Medicare – Doc Coburn rock out plaintively about the bane of his existence … that damned socialist menace, concocted by LBJ.

Put the Phone Down
Yeah, we talk about some stuff. Mostly disposable, but give it a listen. You never know what we’re likely to say, right? We read out of a 1991 recording magazine, Matt does some funny voices and threatens to sue the memory of Sonny Tufts. That sort of thing.

Political Rants

Bugs in the system.

So the government’s Affordable Care Act web site doesn’t work. Does that surprise anyone? It’s a big, honking, outsourced engineering project that has had the budget axe swinging over it for the past three years. It’s been under constant threat of being defunded or declared unconstitutional, subjected to incessant political attack in Washington and around the country by a party dedicated to disabling it anyway that they can.

The fact is, the most dysfunctional part of the Affordable Care Act is Medicaid expansion, not because it doesn’t work but because half of the states in the union have refused to participate, even with 100% funding from the federal government. We hear so much about the Web site being a piece of shit (and rightfully so), and yet I don’t see anyone on the right wringing their hands over the fact that something like 7 million people, the vast Four star general in war on healthmajority of whom are working poor, will have no access to health coverage simply because the governors and legislatures in their state capitals are intent on making a political point. Throw needy (working!) families under the bus, and that’s fine. But build a buggy Web site? Unforgiveable!

It’s pretty clear, in fact, why Republicans are pulling the rug out from under their needy constituents. Chris Hayes interviewed an Ohio state representative on Wednesday night, and while the fellow tried his best to conceal his objection to Medicaid behind some blather about legislative process, he eventually got around to saying that Medicaid was a program people would get “locked into” because they would enjoy the benefit so much, it would be a disincentive for them to raise their standard of living to the point where they wouldn’t receive it anymore. Health coverage makes you lazy. The same old G.O.P. and conservative Democrat trope about welfare, still with us after all these years. They don’t like owning up to it, but it’s still there.

I have to say that this nationwide refusal by Republicans to sign on to Medicaid expansion is certainly one of the most craven domestic policy decisions I have witnessed in my adult life. Hearing them complain about a Web site would be laughable … if this were a laughting matter.

Once again – they’re the reason our kids are ugly.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Samesville.

Back again, right? Every couple of months or so we are faced with a manufactured fiscal crisis. Again, this is by design, not by necessity. The Republican party – particularly the hard core of yargle-bargle types known as the “tea party” – has long pursued the practice of enormous deficit spending while they hold the White House and austerity when they are in the opposition. This time around, it’s austerity with a vengeance. Sure, the president signed on to this sequester deal, but it was in response to another manufactured fiscal crisis, brought on by the newly-installed G.O.P. Congress in 2011. In other words, if it wasn’t the sequester, it would be the debt ceiling, or the budget, or some key appropriations bill – anything to jam up the works.

Patron saint of the whiners. There is nothing surprising about this. Grover Norquist, patron saint of the cheapskates (and clearly someone who did not like eating his peas when he was 4), articulated it quite clearly when he said, in effect, when Democrats are in power, force them to rule like Republicans. Parse out the irony (as mentioned earlier, Republicans are much more generous with presidents of their own party) and you can see the sense in what they’re doing. Of course, it goes beyond that. I think most Republicans are smart enough to know that the kinds of cuts they’re advocating will result in a second recession. That works to their political benefit. Winning is paramount to them, even (and perhaps especially) when they lose. If they can discredit a Democratic president, so much the better.

The Democrats are enablers of this continuing train wreck. They were handed the reins in 2009, and instead of meeting the financial crisis with a response of an appropriate magnitude, they allowed conservatives to talk them down to a small-bore strategy that simply was not sufficient to pull us out. The stimulus worked to the extent that it was designed to work; when the money ran out, so did the steam. Now we are in what Krugman rightly calls a depression – an economy that is not shrinking, but not really gaining ground either – and all Washington can talk about is cutting the freaking deficit. The problem is unemployment, not short-term debt. Fix one, and the other will take care of itself. Want to solve long-term debt? Stop maintaining health insurance as the province of private profit-making industry; expand Medicare and you will make it solvent.

How do you get these people to do the right thing? To borrow a phrase from V.S. Naipaul, a million mutinies now. Tell your representative and your senators that you want them to invest in the economy, not starve it.

luv u,

jp