Another Great Swindle: Doctors, Hospitals, Pharma As Much To Blame As Insurers

Six months ago, in a long-forgotten article, I quoted a Cleveland physician complaining that health care reform will cut his income so sharply he will be forced to curb his lush standard of living.

… a physician acquaintance in Ohio who is a highly regarded specialist with a seven figure income … complains to me that any of the current health reform proposals will cut his income in half, at least, as if his life would disintegrate if he had to live on only five or six hundred thousand dollars a year. Better 47-million people not have access to his training, skills and expertise than he drops one of his two country club memberships because of personal financial hardship.

While the health insurance industry’s immoral, amoral and, sometimes, illegal treatment of policyholders is an appropriate prime culprit and target in the current push for reform, the fact is that physicians, hospitals and drug companies are getting an undeserved pass by much of the media. They are as much to blame for health care problems and out-of-control costs as Aetna, the Blues, Wellpoint and other insurance companies.

Trouble is, not only is the media letting them off the hook, so is Congress.

One of the original key goals of health care reform was to lower the obscene cost of getting sick and recovering in America, whose citizens pay far more for everything from a simple visit to the doctor to complicated tests to prescription drugs than anyone else in the civilised world. Yet neither the likely House version nor the current Senate version of reform give cost cutting more than a flicker of attention.

So Kaiser Permanente chief executive George Halvorson showed Ezra Klein of the Washington Post a series of revealing and extremely disturbing charts, comparing the cost of similar medical services in the US and five other Western countries plus US Medicare.

Kaiser is the largest managed care organisation in the US, founded in 1945 by industrialist Henry Kaiser, and consists of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and regional Permanente Medical Groups.

Since it insures some nine million people as well as operating not-for-profit hospitals and clinics, Halvorson has horses running in the race – but on both ends of the betting line. So while he is in a unique position to see the issue two ways.

Office Visits

According to Halvorson’s charts, it costs the typical patient in the US anywhere from $59 to $151 to see a doctor. In countries with a national health plan, the price is a fraction of what it is here. In Spain, the cost to see a doctor is $15; Germany $22; France $31; the Netherlands $32; and Canada $30. Under Medicare, it is $72. In Canada, for example, the fee for a doctor’s visit is negotiated between the government and the College of Physicians and Surgeons in each province; in the US rates are whatever the doctor can get away with charging, except when treating Medicare and Medicaid paitents.


Yet Congress is backing off trying to control even a portion of the cost of an office visit by refusing to roll back scheduled increases in what Medicare pays physicians to see each patient. No wonder the AMA gave its full-throated endorsement of the House bill – and reform generally – yesterday: Its member’s income won’t be affected one bit so my physician friend in Ohio will be able to keep both of his country club memberships.

Complex Exams

Nothing in the human body is more complex than the brain yet there are enormous spreads in the cost of a CT head scan between the US and other countries. In America, with “the greatest health care system in the world,” a CT head scan cost ranges from $950 to $1,800. In Canada, where I’ve had such a scan, the cost to the system ranges between $41 – really! – and $530. Germany is the most expensive of the six countries compared yet its cost per scan is one-third of the low end of the US range.


Prescription Meds

It’s just as bad in the US after the tests are done and a patient walks from the doctor’s office to a pharmacy across the street to fill a prescription.

Lipitor is a widely-advertised and often-prescribed medication for lowering cholesterol. In America, the pharmacist will collect anywhere from $125 to $334 before handing over the prescription bottle because drug prices are not regulated.

In one of Congresses most disgraceful sell-outs, in 2005 it prohibited Medicare from negotiating with Pfizer for what will be charged patients for the drug. Yet in each of the five other nations surveyed – where government negotiates the price of all prescription medications – patients pay a tiny fraction of what Americans must shell out.

What happens when the price of Lipitor is negotiated? It plunges. I mean plunges: In each of the other five countries, the cost per prescription is anywhere from one-quarter to one-half of what Americans shell out for the exact same medicine treating the identical ailment.


Yet Big Pharma got Congress and the Obama administration to agree to not set up a system to negotiate drug prices. So, every time any American needs to have a prescription filled, the pharmaceutical industry and member of Congress will make them wish they lived somewhere else. No wonder so many people in the US buy medicine in Canada.

As WaPo’s Klein notes, “There is a thudding consistency to the (charts): A series of crude bars, with the block representing the prices paid by American health-insurance plans looming over the others like a New York skyscraper that got lost in downtown Des Moines.”

There is a reason why American health care costs so much more than in any other country: We pay so much more for each unit of care. As Halvorson explained to Klein, and both university studies and consulting companies confirm repeatedly, if you leave everything the same – number of procedures, days spent in hospital, number of operations done – but plug in prices Canadians pay, America’s health care spending falls by 50%.

This is more than enough to cover every uninsured person in the US.

UPDATED: Humana Trolls College Campuses For Whores

Here’s good news for college and university students desperate for a part-time job that won’t even require leaving a dorm room.

Humana, Inc., the fine and good corporate citizen that spends millions of its customer’s premium dollars to fight health care reform and a public option rather than using them to pay claims, now wants to use even more premium bucks to pay students willing to sneak on-line at places such as Facebook and Twitter to tout the horrors of any change to America’s superb health care delivery and financing system.

In other words, Humana is trolling college campuses looking for whores willing to accept money to be on-line promoters of an anti-reform policy that’s against the student’s own, best interests – or will be, once they leave school and are on their own. Given the state of the economy, no doubt Humana will be overwhelmed with applications.

On Monday morning, blogger Molly Horan reports that Humana is actively recruiting students to develop and implement viral media strategies designed to undermine support for health care reform among their unsuspecting peers, making the whole thing appear as if it’s coming from just another tea party protester who can use a computer.

Fortunately, the Federal Trade Commission is one step ahead of Humana.

New Disclosure Rules

Beginning Dec. 1, bloggers and TV shows alike will have to disclose if they’re getting cash for mentioning or touting a product or idea. Clearly, Humana’s paid corps of anti-reform student zealots will have to mention they’re getting more than a penny for their thoughts.

As N.E. Marsden wrote Friday in an Op-Ed piece at the Washington Post, “bloggers and, more important, stealth corporate marketers (must) post ‘clear and conspicuous’ disclosures when they receive payment for endorsing online. … The principle is sound: People have a right to know when someone is trying to sell them something.”

While I’m all in favour of the free marketplace of ideas, when the ideas are being slipped to a writer in exchange for cash, I’d like to know who’s footing the bill. This is on a par with George Bush secretly paying Iraqi journalists in 2005 to write glowing articles on the glorious wonders of the American invasion and occupation.

Humana’s strategy gives a new and broader meaning to its slogan, “Guidance when you need it most.” Under the circumstances, it might be more appropriate as “Guidance we pay for when we need you to shill for us.”

Is Everyone A Fraud?

Look, I know times are tough. Jobs scarce. The future scary. Real health care and insurance reform a toss-up. So, having been one once, I can’t really blame journalism students for trying to grab a bit of spare change where they can – although, hopefully, some will have the integrity to see the offer for what it is, and reject the idea of applying out-of-hand.

Still, I can’t help but shudder when I read the job posting:

Humana – Guidance when you need it most
Role: Political Communications Specialist (part-time, limited-term)
Location: Chicago, Ill. or work-at-home

Are you interested in politics and political communication? Have a way with words? Know your way around Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere? Put your skills to work where politics, communication and public relations intersect. You will:
• Help manage and track a variety of online (“Web 2.0”) channels
• Build a strategic new media and social media presence
• Contribute content for both traditional and new media
• Get a “foot in the door” and gain valuable experience in one of today’s most challenging and fast-paced public policy arenas – health care

This is PR flackery, pure and simple, and of the worst kind. Humana is trying to lure virgin minds onto the rocks of whoredom by singing a siren song promising money and “valuable experience” in exchange for selling out America.

It’s ethical fraud; not illegal but definitely immoral.

Of course, it turns out there’s as much ethical fraud being committed by mainstream and highly respected journalists, as well.

A week ago, the lead story on CBS’ 60 Minutes covered the supposed $60-billion fraud in Medicare payments. I sat watching it dumbfounded, wondering if this might pound a huge nail in the coffin of the public option. Pierre Tristam had the same reaction. But then, he decided to confirm the 60 Minutes reporting.

Tristam is an editorial writer for the Daytona News Journal. He started by calling the show’s producers who referred him to the person at the Justice Dept. who worked with 60 Minutes which, he eventually admitted, used a high figure in the “range” of “possible” and “believed to be” Medicare fraud.

So Tristam kept digging, finally publishing a remarkable Sunday piece titled “Loose With Numbers: Medicare Fraud Report A Fiction.”

Steve Kroft and his producers never bothered to trace their facts to the source for viewers, relying instead on the slob-journalist's cheapest cop-out: Attribution by estimates. Nor did they make the equally important point: Insurance fraud isn't unique to Medicare or government-run programs. If anything, it affects the private sector more. Shame on "60 Minutes" and the Justice Department for throwing around wild numbers. Those are the numbers – the fictions – shaping public opinion across the country and public policy in Washington.

Medicare fraud is a serious problem. But singling it out and exaggerating it beyond credibility won't fix it, although it may help doom any government expansion of health care. In that regard, the 60 Minutes segment did its death-panel best.

I feel as if the whole world has turned into the 1919 Chicago Black Sox, sneaking around behind everyone’s back, putting in the fix, winking and nodding at the rubes, and damning the consequences – as well as the rest of us.

UPDATE – Nov 3, 2009

It’s not just Humana that’s looking for students to be on-line trollers. Israel is also looking for people, according to the website Desert Peace:

“The Foreign Ministry unveiled a new plan this week: Paying talkbackers to post pro-Israel responses on websites worldwide. A total of NIS 600,000 (roughly $150,000) will be earmarked to the establishment of an "Internet warfare" squad.

“The Foreign Ministry intends to hire young people who speak at least one language and who study communication, political science, or law – or alternately, Israelis with military experience gained at units dealing with information analysis.”

And so it goes.

A special h/t to Breandan Healy

Plamegate Rides Again: Early Peek At New Film

Thanks to the movie website Corona Coming Attractions, there’s an advance review of the new film Fair Game, based on the book by Valerie Plame, the CIA case officer who was “outed” by the Bush Administration when her husband called the president a liar in The New York Times in July, 2003, for claiming Iraq was acquiring nuclear weapons material.

Wilson’s Op-Ed piece led to a firestorm in Washington, an admission by the White House that it had exaggerated the claim in Bush’s State of the Union address during the run-up to the war, and a series of investigations that resulted in convicted felon Scooter Libby not going to jail thanks to his pal Dick Cheney.

The rest is history – and now a movie.

A test screening for Fair Game, which stars Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, was held a few days ago and someone at Coming Attraction caught an early cut of the film:

"Fair Game is really a tremendous, thought provoking film. It's based on the same titled memoir by former CIA Agent Valerie Plame, who of course worked for the agency as an undercover spy until her husband wrote an op-ed piece declaring that the Bush White House lied about Sadaam Hussein's efforts to buy yellow-cake uranium from Niger. Naomi Watts plays Plame (and as shown at the ending, really looks a lot like her), and plays her wonderfully. The story is set up through a sequence at the beginning showing her in action in the field, and in the CIA headquarters being completely dedicated to her job. She loves what she does for her country even at the price the travel and the secrecy puts on her family life.

"She's married to former Ambassador Joe Wilson, played by Sean Penn in what very easily could (and should) be his next Oscar nomination. Wilson is a man in turmoil almost from his opening scene, dining with friends who think they know everything about the world. They don't, Wilson doesn't, but he certainly knows more about the Iraq situation than they do and is glad to tell anybody about it who will listen. His expertise gets him looked at (through no suggestion of his wife) and requested of by the CIA to take a trip to Niger to investigate reports that Hussein was looking to buy uranium from that country, which Wilson was a leading expert on. He agreed, made the trip, found that there was no possible way that a purchase of yellowcake was made, and reported that back to the government. The administration, as we now know, chose to ignore this report, and used the incorrect intelligence as a key basis in its case for war.

"This destroys Wilson, who starts to speak up in the press, and the leak of his wife's identity was made. We're led to believe that the order of the leak was made by Karl Rove to Scooter Libby (played by a hilariously serious David Andrews), and the rest is history. Plame's career is destroyed, her marriage (and life) nearly go along with it, and a major investigation into corruption in the Bush White House is launched, ultimately leading to the fall of Libby.

"The film clocked in at roughly 1:50, and paced tremendously well. There was a side-plot they spent a bit too much time on involving an Iraqi family and Plame's valiant efforts to save them from the invasion, but that was really the only downfall of the film. Watts is excellent, at least as good as she was in Eastern Promises, and Penn is as good here as I've seen him. It's directed by Doug Liman who did an excellent job of it, and I believe he also served as DP, so kudos to him as I often forgot the camera was even rolling. Truly a wonderful human drama with political suspense that should interest anybody no matter how they vote. 9/10 (stars)."

Fair Game does not have a scheduled release date and often films are edited heavily based on audience comments at advanced screenings.

Confessions Of A Techno-Luddite

As the weekend arrived, The New York Times carried a semi-sneering piece on the tiny and ever-dwindling number of people who still refuse to have a cell phone. It cites a study done by the Pew Internet and American Life Project that finds more than 85% of all Americans now have a mobile; the Federal Communications Commission says cell phones caught on faster than either cable TV or home computers.

While Pew concludes that cell “refuseniks” generally are less educated and poorer than people who have them, it concedes grudgingly there is “a subset of adults who resist cell phones simply because they do not want them. They resent the way (cells) disrupt face-to-face conversation. They savour their moments alone and prize the fact that no one knows how to reach them.”

Exactly. Roughly 5% of Americans without cells simply don’t want one. People like me, and Gregory Han.

“It’s a luxury not to be reached when I’m out and about,” Han, a 34-year-old Los Angeles-based writer-editor, tells the Times.

D'accord!

The paper has a Toronto bureau but no one called me for the story. If they had, I would have been delighted to explain why I am a complete techno-Luddite: Not only do I not have a cell phone, I don’t own a BlackBerry, pager, PDA, laptop, digital camera, Webcam, iPod, iBook or, for that matter, iAnything, cordless phone, home network, WiFi, Wii, Skype, Kindle and whatever else took the world by storm yesterday. I don’t download music, movies or porn from the intertubes. I don’t bank, direct deposit or buy on-line, and avoid ATMs. My e-mail includes an instant message feature but I never activated it. For that matter, I’ve never sent a text message, visited a chat room, had a Facebook page or Twittered; no one cares that I’m leaving for lunch now or that I’ve just returned.

Who could possibly care whether anyone is leaving for lunch? And I don’t want people to interrupt me when I’m eating.

“Cell refuseniks are making a statement that they control their availability,” John Horrigan, research director at the National Broadband Task Force, speculates.

Precisely.

Little Protest

Maybe Horrigan is right, but I’m also making a different statement, a tiny protest that’s probably as effective as telling Lou Dobbs that immigrants are good for America: Just because technology lets you do something doesn’t mean you should or that it’s even a good idea.

Apparently, people like me are such an oddity that the on-line edition of the otherwise august and totally sober Columbia Journalism Review made note of the Times’ article.

It’s true, we are an oddity. When people ask for my cell number, they’re aghast when I explain I don’t have one, offering my old fashioned land line instead.

“No cell phone?” comes the incredulous reply. “Seriously? How do you survive without one?”

I survive just fine but Sheila Shirazi admits discarding friends who go without, telling the Times, “I don’t have the time and energy … to coordinate with somebody who isn’t mobile.”

Ms. Shirazi isn’t unique.

A few years back, a woman I was mildly interested in seeing dumped me during our first dinner together because I don’t have a cell. Over the decades, I’ve been rejected by women for countless reasons, good and goofy, but never because I refused to tote around a small piece of gadgetry. On Seinfeld, Jerry once stopped dating a woman because she ate peas one at a time; my fledgling romance was nipped-in-the-bud and died for about as rational a reason.

Get Serious

OK, I admit snatching at technology when it’s useful. I never grasped Dewey’s decimal system for library research at school but I mastered the art of crafty searching and rummage around on Google numerous times every day.

And I do see value in having a stand-by cell phone for some people: Those travelling lonely roads by themselves. Kids, so they can reach a parent quickly. The sick and disabled to get help quickly. Critical care doctors.

But come on.

I’ve followed tweeners through malls who were on cell phones the entire time. What could they be talking about? The Gap has a sale? Joey likes Deirdre? The math test was really hard?

I’ve eaten in spiffy boittes where everyone at a table was “celling” so why did they bother eating together? Hong Kong has it right: Most restaurants demand mobiles be turned off and checked with the maitre d’ before being seated.

I’ve ridden trains where cell phone users were forced to shout over the track noise, making everyone else in the car unwilling participants in the call.

I’ve sat in offices where the person across the desk wore an earpiece cell phone so I never knew if they were speaking to me or to the phone.

It’s a losing battle, I realise, my fight against cells and other techno-stuff. The 5% of us who don’t always want to be instantly connected to everyone else are like Dutch boys with our fingers in the dikes. We may stop one small leak but waves of water are washing over the top, drowning us in a sea of gizmos and gadgets.

Yet Again, The Army Fails Its Troops

Like politicians, institutional bureaucracies know the best way to bury bad news is to release it late on a Friday afternoon.

This is exactly what the Pentagon did in the waning twilight last Friday when investigators publicly unleashed a searing, 325-page report on the string of shootings last May in a combat stress and mental health clinic in Baghdad’s Camp Liberty that left four soldiers and one sailor dead. After repeatedly reaching out for help, Army Sgt. John Russell stole a gun from an MP, walked into the clinic where he had been treated briefly an hour earlier and opened fire.

The PR ploy worked. The report was ignored over the weekend by virtually every media outlet except Stars and Stripes. No doubt the Pentagon was relieved because the report tears a strip off the Army for not giving commanders in Iraq – and, by extension, Afghanistan – the necessary tools, training and guidance to handle at-risk soldiers.

So, once again, the Army fails to support its own troops and, worse, it’s failing and flailing over the same basic issue in 2006 that dragged the Army kicking and screaming into 21st century after it was criticized for punishing soldiers who sought mental health help during or after war zone duty tours. Supposedly, the Army changed its policy and began actively encouraging all personnel to get treatment without fear of retribution.

OK, so soldiers and officers can go for help without risking their career. The problem is the top brass didn’t bother to tell field commanders – from sergeants to senior officers – how to spot a troubled trooper or what to do with them when they suspected a problem.

A staff member on the House Armed Services Committee, who is not authorised to speak with reporters on-the-record, told me on Monday, “We have no idea how to budge the Army into doing something positive that actually works” when it comes to dealing with either enlisted personnel or officers who are suspected of having mental health issues.

“(Senior officers) come before the committee and say all the right things,” this staffer continued, “but it looks like they forget all about it the moment they walk out of the hearing room.”

Institutional Problem

The report damns what is, as my dad’s father would say in a thick dialect as he kvetched about lukewarm soup at Plotnik’s deli in Milwaukee, “Oy, a farshlepteh krenk” – a chronic complaint.

In doing its investigation, the Army interviewed Russell’s fellow grunts, commanders and doctors to trace the events leading to the shooting. The report chronicles widespread failures – one after another, in Russell’s case – to implement the Multi-National Force-Iraq mental health policy. No one from non-commissioned officers to field commanders are provided direction to carry out preventive mental health measures, according to the report.

In a statement that is both disturbing and sad, Russell’s sergeant said, “What I don’t understand is from the time a soldier has been identified that they may have behavioral health problems, what do you really do with them?”

Yikes.

The Army report insists that majors through lieutenant colonels “require precise instruction in effective suicide and behavioral problem remediation measures to effectively support our behavioral health professionals,” the report states.

At the unit level, “there is no real conception of when to command refer a soldier for assistance.”

Leaders with Russell’s unit “admitted they lack the fundamental skills to deal with behavioral health issues,” and had no formal policies or procedures to guide them, according to the report.

It gets worse. The investigation says there is no clearly defined procedure to track and monitor the issues once they are identified. Russell’s commanders were not aware he had threatened suicide or that his immediate supervisors had removed the bolt from his gun.

Who’s In Charge?

In Paddy Chayefsky’s great 1971 film The Hospital, George C. Scott – a worn down and worn out physician – explains the inexplicable death of a patient by saying, “We just neglected him to death.”

In a sense, the Army neglected Sgt. Russell to death – and the deaths of five other people.

The report details how the Army tells units dealing with a potentially suicidal soldier to use the “buddy system” and “unit watch” without providing “even notional reference to describe” as to what the terms actually mean in real life. They have been common in the Army for years, but there is no Army-wide standard or instruction for how to carry them out. Russell was supposedly on “unit watch” in the days leading up to the shootings yet his unit had no guidelines on how to actually do this.

“We’re looking into whether there will be hearings on this,” the Congressional aide told me. “The problem is, it seems like no one is in charge when it comes to mental illness in the Army.”
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I wrote this piece originally for the LA Progressive, where it appeared earlier today.

Everyone But Fox And The Taliban Applaud Obama’s Peace Prize

No sooner was it announced that Barack Obama won the 2009 Peace Prize, than I heard from Ann Aurelius. An old friend from high school back in Minneapolis, Ann is as Norwegian as Lutefisk and pancake suppers in a Lutheran church basement during a cold Minnesota winter. When Garrison Keillor talks about the people of Lake Woebegon, he’s talking about Ann.

“Cheeky Norwegians! Good for them!” Ann enthused in an early morning e-mail shortly after getting word. “The world needs shaking up! I think they realize that his fight for justice (including) universal health care is as much about world peace as ending wars and conflicts. Even beer in the Rose Garden to smooth out racial issues. Sometimes, it's not about the big things but an entire attitude.”

The head of the Nobel Committee didn’t say it any better.



Except for the lowlanders at Fox and the Taliban’s official spokesman, most of the world is applauding the move in Oslo. Beyond the usual tributes from Obama’s fellow heads-of-state, a think piece in The Independent explains why he may have won.

The Independent observes “… the Nobel prize has a long history of being awarded more for the committee's aspirations than for others' accomplishments … The prize is awarded to encourage those who receive it to see the effort through, sometimes at critical moments … The Nobel committee has the audacity to hope that he'll produce a record worthy of its prize.”

Agence France Presse is considerably less inhibited, saying the president “sensationally won the Nobel Peace Prize …” And across the Channel, Peter Beaumont of The Guardian writes what is on the minds of many today, noting that perhaps the prize was “awarded to Barack Obama for what he is not: For not being George W. Bush.”

And over at the Grande Dame of broadcasting, Paul Reynolds of BBCNews.com writes, “The citation indicates that it is President Obama's world view that attracted the Nobel committee – that diplomacy should be founded ‘on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.’”

The Livid Right

I wonder if Fox News, The National Review and RedState.com are happy that they have something in common with the Taliban: Each blasted Obama receiving the Nobel Prize as soon as the award was announced.

In fact, because of the time difference between Afghanistan, Norway and New York, the Taliban may have scooped Fox this morning.

Under the headline “Becoming Jimmy Carter Faster Than Jimmy Carter,” RedState’s Erick Erickson whined “I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota … but that is the only thing I can think of for this news …” Apparently not knowing anything about the peace prize, including how or why it is awarded, Erickson is saying the only reason a black president could win the accolade is because he is black. And the right wonders why progressives brand so many of them racist when they write or talk about the president.

Not surprisingly, Fox has the wildest ideas.

Crazy Foxes

Tommy De Seno at FoxNews.com is no more informed of the process than Erickson. He carefully catalogues Obama’s first 12 days in office – that’s when the nomination period ended – and other than “skipping church” three times and “release federal funding to pay for abortions in foreign countries,” Obama did nothing. De Seno brushes off ending torture as “re-affirmed Army Field Manual techniques for interrogations” and “expressed desire to close Gitmo” as mere trifled.

Hey, Tommy: The nominations may have closed Feb. 1 but that doesn’t mean the Nobel Committee tosses all of the names in a hat and draws out one in October. There’s actually a lengty consideration and deliberation process involved and, I’ve read, often heated arguments between committee members over different nominees.

Not so this time: The Nobel Committee announcement said the choice of Obama was unanimous.

That didn’t stop Foxtails commenting on De Seno’s posting from acting like idiots. Here are a handful of the hundreds of comments written, without fixing spelling, punctuation or grammar:

Martmann, North Carolina: i have a funny inkling that acorn is behind this travesty by the nobel prize committie acorn acorn acorn thats what they do for there former lawyer and teacher at there institution.

ataube439 Massachusetts: I didn't think Barack Obama hated the Jews enough to win the prize. Go Figure.

Kathykwny New York: Obama's arrogance will know no bounds now that he has this bogus honor. (He) would rather see us marginalized and subservient to dictators around the world. Congratulations, Mr. President! You have finally done it!

Wooptyone Wisconsin: “Way to go Ole and Lena...

Truthproject Colorado: Kudos to Fox Network for Not pandering to this administration. The Nobel committee has proven once again that they can not discern egos from ethics. I am glad that Mr. Obama is not my savior.

thom1 Pennsylvania: Is he the first person from Kenya to win this? just wondering?

I’m not sure how Fox friend “martmann” manages to wrangle his mind in enough different directions until it links ACORN and the Nobel Peace Prize but he’s convinced of it enough to write a comment for the entire world to see. Meanwhile, “Wooptyone” is busy making derogatory comments about Norwegians and “atyube439” is revelling in his anti-Semitism.

I don’t know whether this is sad or scary.

I do know that when a sitting American president is named a Nobel laureate – including Obama, only Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson have been so honoured while still in office – it is a cause for rejoicing not just in the US but in the world. It also puts tremendous pressure on Pres. Obama to live up to the high standards and expectations the world has set for him.

Finding a near-term way out of Afghanistan would be a good place to start.

Was Jesus A Socialist?

According to Variety’s weekend tally of boffo box office receipts, Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story took in nearly $4.9-million in its first weekend of national release. While far more people went nut up instead of shut up and saw Zombieland than screened what Time magazine’s Mary Corbliss called Moore’s “magnum opus,” enough tickets were sold to land his frequently biting, often hilarious and totally frightening indictment of free markets run amok at number six on Variety’s list of the weekend’s most popular films – rare for a documentary but common for Moore and beating Fame, The Informant and Love Happens while tying with Whip It in the process.

I went to see Capitalism at a four o’clock show Sunday afternoon, the second time I’d seen the picture. Living in Toronto, I was startled to see the theatre more than half-filled; although I recognised a few familiar faces from Democrats Abroad, the audience was Canadian and I didn’t realise my adopted country would be so interested in Moore’s ripping apart America’s soft but well-paid and stock option-laden underbelly. Apparently so: Last night, CBC NewsWorld aired Sicko uncut, Moore’s searing denunciation of the US health care system, in prime time.

Intriguing Question

I saw Capitalism again because I suspected I missed a lot when I screened it before the Toronto Film Festival. Then, it had me roiling with anger-bordering-rage like many people who watched it on opening night. In a mass e-mail Saturday morning, Moore wrote to friends:

“One manager … said, ‘It's a good thing we carry (candy) at the concession stand instead of pitchforks and torches! These crowds were ready to march over to the local Citibank and do something!’ Another manager said a crowd in the lobby formed around the little Chase ATM machine next to his popcorn stand and started to ‘yell at it.’"

Sunday afternoon I discovered I was right; I missed a lot and watched it more dispassionately.

What didn’t register at the first screening was the profound theological message Moore, a devout Catholic, wires into the film. He doesn’t do it in a way that even remotely resembles what the evangelical right does on a daily basis, treating God and Jesus like the personal Mr. Fix-It of believing evangelicals and, by extension, the world if it only accepted The Word The Way True Believers Know It.

Indeed, Moore makes it plain that he has no use for Christians – including Catholics – who use “Jesus” as a banner to argue against everything from eliminating poverty, taxes, science, abortion, immigration, health care reform and illegal wars. But he poses an intriguingly serious question that reviewers – including me – almost entirely overlook:

Was Jesus a Socialist?

For people of other faiths, it might be more appropriate to ask whether Moses had a progressive agenda? Could it be that Mohammad was a lefty? For non-believers or those who question the whole idea of religion, the question might be put more aptly as, “Can anyone with an ounce of humanity in them think it’s alright to pass laws and enact regulations that allows stealing from the poor to give to the rich?”

Heavy Hitters

Moore trots out some heavy hitting priests – including two Bishops – to answer in the affirmative: Yes, Jesus was a socialist. Although I’m not religious and wasn’t raised in a religious home, let alone a Christian one, I took enough comparative religion classes to remember that stuff about giving to the poor, the fishes and loaves, rich men squeezing through needle eyes and all the rest.

Judaism is on the same page, even if pre-dates Christianity by a few millennia and there aren’t any Holy Ghosts rumbling around in its dark hallways.

The Old Testament legislates laws which are a sort of tax for the benefit of the poor. The institution of the sabbatical year was so "that the poor of the people may eat" as well as to cancel debts about which the warning was given, "If there be among you a needy man, one of your brethren, within thy gates, in thy land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not harden thy heart nor shut thy hand from thy needy brother …”

Even the Quran insists that Moslems have a special duty to take care of the needy, the less fortunate and the downtrodden.

Come to think of it, it’s really only right wingers in the US – which often means Christian fundy’s – who’ve perverted religion to argue for small, ineffective government, tax breaks only for the wealthiest, health care only for the healthiest, food only for the fullest, good schools only for the smartest, and clean air or water only for those who pollute.

I’m not here to start an argument over how to interpret religions but rather to point out that Moore’s real issue isn’t that capitalism needs destroying but that it has lost way. It has wandered too far from its basic, religious roots in helping ensure not just economic and social equality but a levelling of the great breach that’s opened between the rich and everyone else.

Since many on the right keep insisting that “America is a Christian nation,” maybe it is time for them – for the nation – to start acting more like Christians. If Jesus existed – even as a historical figure and forgetting about the fairy tale of him springing from the womb of a virgin as god’s son – I’m convinced, like Michael Moore, that Jesus was a socialist.

Only Video Of Anne Frank Found, Posted On-Line

In a way, this is very unnerving.

The Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam just started a YouTube channel and one of its first uploads is a 1941 home movie of a wedding party leaving a building. As the camera pans around, Anne is seen looking out an upper floor window.

Not The Belly Of The Beast

This week, I re-enter the Canadian national health system for tests to see if my cancer returned since the last round of treatment ended six months ago.

For those of you in the States who might be starting to believe the Republican noise machine, be assured that I’ve not been on a waiting list or pleading my case before a death panel and, regardless of the outcome, I won’t be handed a staggering bill on my way out the door. The only inconvenience – besides waiting anxiously to learn the results – is that I couldn’t get an appointment when I wanted. I’d asked for Monday morning but am stuck with midday on Thursday.

Hardly a journey into the belly of the beast – apologies to Jack Abbott and Norman Mailer – as right wing lunatics keep insisting is the only possible outcome of a government-sponsored public option.

Yes, it’s personally unnerving and thoroughly unpleasant but at least I don’t have to worry about an insurance company pulling the rug out from under me because I’m denting its bottom line, forcing me into bankruptcy. Nor do I have to fret that whoever represents my riding in Parliament is a complete idiot like the grotesquely insensitive Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA). At a town hall meeting recently, he told a constituent suffering from years of clinical depression but can’t afford health insurance to pay for a psychiatrist to “go to an emergency room.”

Actually, the man did go to an emergency room – after he tried committing suicide.



As Georgia Liberal so aptly noted on Thursday, “Treating major depression is not a one-shot deal. That is like saying cancer patients should get treatment one night in the ER and it is all better.”

If only.

Oh, and in case Broun The Knuckledragger didn’t notice, people receive a bill for going to the ER. It ain’t free in the US which is why hospitals hire collection agencies, and sue patients who can’t pay, forcing sick people who are hapless victims of an awful system into bankruptcy.

Thanks Max Baucus and the ObstructaDems and the GOP and Fox and the medico-insurance complex. You’ve really done a number on America. The question for us is: Why are we sitting at home reading this instead of storming Washington demanding the change we voted for?

Glenn Beck Can’t Take Glenn Beck’s Heat

The website is clearly labelled satire and parody; in fact, it says so in very strong language on the home page for anyone who can’t figure it out for themselves. But Glenn Beck, never known for possessing a sense of wit – although some may call him a half-wit – is livid that Isaac Eiland-Hall launched glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.

Essentially, Eiland-Hall turns Beck on himself, using his own tactics in a way that is vaguely reminiscent of a time, one hundred lifetimes ago, when Edward R. Murrow demolished another rabid demagogue, Sen. Joe McCarthy by using McCarthy’s own words.

As if channelling Beck’s writers, Eiland-Hall’s site proclaims it, “exists to try and help examine the vicious rumour that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. We don't claim to know the truth – only that the rumour floating around saying that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990 should be discussed. So we're going to do our part to try and help get to the bottom of this.

“Why won't Glenn Beck deny these allegations?” the website asks. “We're not accusing Glenn Beck of raping and murdering a young girl in 1990 – in fact, we think he didn't! But we can't help but wonder, since he has failed to deny these horrible allegations. Why won't he deny that he raped and killed a young girl in 1990?”

Beck uses this identical approach to everything from claiming Pres. Obama is a white-hating racist to accusing him of indoctrinating young children by urging them to stay in school to insisting health reform is really a hidden plot involving death panels for granny.

Warning: Satire Ahead

Unlike, say The Onion, which everyone knows is satire as it tears apart every mainstream American convention, apparently many people going to Eiland-Hall’s site are missing a few pencils in their box and don’t get the joke. To assure the world – and protect himself legally – the site’s creator has a prominent disclaimer along the bottom of the home page.

Notice: This site is parody/satire. We assume Glenn Beck did not rape and murder a young girl in 1990, although we haven't yet seen proof that he didn't. But we think Glenn Beck definitely uses tactics like this to spread lies and misinformation.

Read the last sentence again. That's the point. Read it a third time and ignore the name of the site itself, because anyone who believes that we're trying to actually get people to believe Glenn Beck raped and/or murdered is *whoosh* missing the entire point. So don't be dumb like a lot of people are. I greatly expanded this text because so many people *read* it, and *still* didn't understand.

Not even an obviously fake video of a supposedly distraught woman convinces some that the whole thing is a grand send-up of someone – Beck – who increasingly parodies himself on Fox every day.



Et Tu, Glenn

Gee, here’s a surprise: Beck doesn’t like the site. Uninformed bullies seldom enjoy seeing themselves parodied.

But knowing full well that a federal lawsuit to block the site would fail miserably because courts have held for more than 50 years political satire and humor are protected by the 1st Amendment, Beck’s lawyers are trying an end-run. They’ve filed an administrative complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization. WIPO handles disputes over domain names. The complaint claims that the site was improperly using a trademark and the domain name was registered and being used in bad faith.

Yesterday, Eiland-Hall's lawyer, Marc Randazza, filed a response. In it, he says the site should be his because it's a valid critique of Beck's politics.

"The Web site is a legitimate criticism site, consists of political satire, and thus the Respondent has legitimate rights in the domain name," the brief says. "Mr. Beck's attempt to censor this criticism is improper and should be rejected."

To help the tribunal, Eiland-Hall’s lawyers helpfully offer a history of esoteric inside jokes that became Internet phenomena from "Mr. Spock Ate My Balls" to Richard Gere's unflattering "Gerbil story." But the case also makes a political point, noting an interview Beck conducted with Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), a Muslim, in which Beck said on air, "I like Muslims, I've been to mosques … And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview because what I feel like saying is, sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”

Mr. Beck, what I feel like writing is, sir, prove to me that you are not completely unhinged. And, anyway, why won’t you deny rumors that you raped and murdered a young girl in 1991 so this whole thing can be put to rest?

Medical Journal "Health Affairs" Bends And Coughs Over For Aetna

For several years, professional medical journals have been drawing heavy artillery fire for not disclosing any conflicts of interest its authors have with the subject they’re covering, hyping faulty studies and publishing too many glowing articles about new pharmaceuticals that have questionable value.

This is why the latest issue of Health Affairs leaves me deeply troubled because the peer-reviewed health policy journal turned over the cover of a recent issue to Aetna, the nation’s third largest insurance company. That’s right, Aetna. The same behemoth with a vicious Rotweiller in the health care reform dog fight opposing any reform that doesn’t profit Aetna.

Health Affairs made a deal with Aetna to sponsor the current issue of the journal. The problem is that the theme of the edition is “Bending the Cost Curve.” This is wonk speak for “controlling or containing medical costs in ways that send shivers up the spine of Aetna.”

Unfortunately, “Bending The Cost Curve” is clever jargon that often filters into the MSM and down to the general public, where no one knows what the hell it means. William Safire, whose love of the English language and its use, and who died this weekend, must be spinning in his still-fresh grave.

In exchange for its cash, Aetna got to design a cover that was pasted on the publication, hiding the journal’s real cover. The faux cover is the one a reader sees unless they look under the hood, and this one is a doosey. It features a “Dear Colleague” letter from Aetna CEO Ronald A. Williams. In the letter, Williams enthuses about his company’s concern for patients and improving the quality of care.

We believe that the right solution will be based on what is already working in the private sector, and should include an individual coverage requirement and guaranteed issue with no pre-existing conditions. Addressing health care costs is equally important, and we must simplify the system so that doctors and caregivers can spend more time with patients.

It sounds wonderful except for four things.

First, any physician or health care worker who thinks Aetna is their “colleague” is seriously delusional.

Second, Aetna’s “right solution” isn’t working in the private sector for anyone except Aetna, and its insurance brothers-in-Satan. This is why nearly 50-million Americans aren’t insured at all with another 12-million underinsured, and why a new Harvard study documents that 45,000 people die every year because folks like Williams either cancel their coverage, deny treatment or refuse to issue a policy to them.

Third, if simplifying the system is so important, why hasn’t Aetna done it already so “doctors and caregivers can spend more time with patients”? It’s insurers that can’t figure out a way to standardize forms or how to process a claim in less than 180 days so a doctor gets paid promptly for a patient’s visit.

Fourth – and this is what really sent me over the top because Williams' letter never mentions it – Aetna and the industry will go along with “guaranteed issue with no pre-existing conditions” only if Congress mandates that everyone has to buy a policy from the insurers rather than through a public option because such a requirement means billions in additional revenue and profits for Aetna and its friends.

Aetna had no comment on the sponsorship and it’s hard to figure out whether Aetna’s funding affects editorial decisions.

In one section called “saving money,” there’s a think piece called “Opportunities To Improve The Quality Of Care For Advanced Illness.” It describes a care management program Aetna is piloting that “gives people culturally sensitive supporting information, to make informed choices and obtain palliative services in a timely manner.”

Whoa! Where are the tea baggers and cries of “Death Panels!”?

I guess someone on the right decided that it’s okay for insurance companies to help people make informed choices about end-of-life care, but not for the government to pay the cost of a doctor’s visit so a Medicare patient can have the identical discussion.

Chalk it up as example No. 3188 of Republican hypocrisy.

This whole thing makes me want to wretch. Aetna trumpeting concern for cost-control and the plight of the uninsured on the cover of a professional journal is the kind of chicanery that became so familiar this summer. The insurance industry keeps portraying itself as a good guy in this fight, all the while working behind the scenes to stop what is good for Americans.

Being on the cover of Health Affairs is a PR flack’s wet dream about burnishing the image of a badly tarnished reality.

– Hat tip to Trudy Lieberman

Health Reform Inaction More Likely To Kill You Than A Drunk Driver

Here’s a special note to the Republican Party, its Congressional leadership, fellow-travellers like Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh, big Pharma and the insurance industry as the Senate Finance Committee prepares to debate the public option on Tuesday:

Every 12 minutes, your delays kill a fellow American who doesn’t have access to health care due to a lack of coverage.

While totally irrational tea baggers claim Pres. Obama is somehow both a Commie and a Nazi, as a result of a new study those of us in the reality-based world can hold up a sign of, say, H. Edward Hanway, chairman and chief executive of CIGNA Corp., or any other industry CEO, with the phrase “Helped Kill 5 People This Hour” scribbled underneath the photo. While we might be as tasteless as the poppycock protesters on the rampaging right, at least we’d be accurate.

Who says so? No less an authority than Harvard University's medical school.

According to new Harvard University research released Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health, in roughly the time it takes to read this article, one American dies of not having health insurance or access to care. Take two down if you are a slow reader.

One of the co-authors, Dr. David Himmelstein who is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, observes, "The Institute of Medicine, using older studies, estimated that one American dies every 30 minutes from a lack of health insurance. Even this grim figure now is an underestimate. Now, one dies every 12 minutes."

Deader Than In Iraq

In 2009, the nation claiming to provide the best medical care in the word simply killed nearly 45,000 people, dead because they couldn’t afford insurance or medical care. The previous study was done in 2004. So, in less than a half-decade, the death rate caused by not having health insurance more than doubled.

In case the intellectually challenged GOP still doesn’t get it, Dr. Himmelstein put it in real simple terms, telling Reuters, "We're losing more Americans every day because of inaction ... than (by) drunk driving and homicide combined.”

Or, in language even the GOP can’t help but comprehend, the lack of health insurance kills nearly nine times more people in the US every year than the total who died in Iraq and Afghanistan combined since 2001.

Overall, researchers find that American adults age 64 or younger who lack health insurance have a 40% higher risk of death than those with coverage. Those are close to the high mortality rates for smokers and drug addicts.

Another co-author of Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler – who also teaches medicine at Harvard and is a physician in Cambridge MA – compared the situation in America with the rest of the world.

"Historically,” Dr. Woolhandler says, “every other developed nation has achieved universal health care through some form of non-profit national health insurance. Our failure to do so means that all Americans pay higher health care costs and 45,000 pay with their lives."

The Baucus Caucus

Don’t think that Blue Dogs and ConservaDems – who should rightly be renamed ObstructaDems – are faultless here.

In exchange for the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to them as campaign contributions by the health insurance industry and the rest of the medico-industrial complex, they are complicit in the killing of sick people in their own country – including residents of their own state or district.

And Max Baucus manages to keep a straight face while proposing a subsidy to insurance companies by requiring everyone to buy a policy from one of them.

An executive at Humana, a large health insurance company, who is not authorized to speak to the media told me confidently, “We can write a bare-bones policy on anyone, even people with cancer or bad hearts. We just set the premiums high enough, put the deductible in the $10,000 per year range, have a 30% co-pay on everything else, and take 90 days to pay proviers. It’ll be a license to print money.”

In other words, the Baucus Caucus’ brilliant idea of providing coverage to all means that somebody who is diagnosed with cancer and runs up $100,000 in medical bills one year for exams, tests, chemo, radiation and possibly surgery, will be out of pocket somewhere around forty grand. And the insurance companies become legalized thieves that would make Wall St. financiers whose tricky default swaps and goofy mortgages that damn near bankrupted the world in 2008 seem like philanthropists by comparison.

Poll after poll shows overwhelming voter support for a true public option. The question is whether the Baucus Caucus, Blue Dogs, ObstructaDems and a few courageous Republicans such as Olympia Snowe are paying attention.

UPDATE 6: Palin’s As Goofy In Hong Kong As She Is At Home

While Muammar Quaddafi was boring UN delegates with a meandering 90-minute speech in New York yesterday, it seems that half a world away Sarah Palin was doing the same thing in Hong Kong.

Palin was paid a reported $300,000 – I assume that’s American dollars, not Hong Kong – to speak for 90 minutes to a meeting of investors convened by a local brokerage firm. Although closed to the press, today’s New York Times carries a fairly flattering report based on its reporter speaking with a Canadian who listened to her speech.

Not nearly as flattering is the account of her talk that I found in an e-mail this morning from an old friend who I met in the 1990s when I was travelling to Hong Kong three or four times a year.

According to JoAnne, large numbers of Americans walked out during her speech, Europeans were whispering and laughing amongst themselves, and Chinese investors – who, culturally, are too polite to walk out on anyone giving a talk no matter how boring, frivolous or yammering the speaker might be – turned their attention to BlackBerry’s or one of the many other electro-gizmo’s that Hong Kong business people are so fond of that most restaurants require cell phones to be checked before seating a patron.

The Times account overlooked some of these details that put Palin’s reception in perspective.

Here is the e-mail, with irrelevant matters like stuff about her job and family edited out, and a few typos corrected.

To: Charley James
From: JoAnne X. XXXXXXXXX
Date: 24 Sept 2009
Subj: Sarah’s A Yawn in Hong Kong

Hey CJ from a different day in HK
…

There she was at last, a life size replica of Tina Fey up on stage wearing something almost tasteful but definitely small townish bought from what must have been the softer side of Sears. (Thanks for the line – I’ve been using it for years!) No one in the room who wasn’t from North America knew quite what to expect; a few Yanks apparently did because a trickle of them got up and left as she was being introduced.

Suspecting what would be coming, I was tempted to join them but decided to hear what Her Craziness had to say.

I’d give you some specifics but there weren’t many. Basically, she gave a stump speech that might have worked at a Chamber of Commerce lunch in Juneau but left a room full of highly educated, very sophisticated and worldly business people scratching their heads. If she intended to use the speech as a way to build credentials as a foreign policy expert, Sarah could have stayed home and avoided the jetlag. The South China Morning Post called her speech “a triumph of low expectations.”

She talked about health care reform and actually brought up death panels, much to the deep befuddlement of Asians in the audience. And the anger of Americans, another dozen of whom got up and stalked out. After the speech, several local execs asked me if the US actually has death panels for the sick and elderly, an abhorrent idea to people who revere not just the aged but their ancestors. It took me several minutes

A lot of her colloquial references were lost on the crowd. She kept talking about “Main St.” which means nothing in Asia or even Europe, for that matter. Somebody should have told her to change the reference to something local, like “Aberdeen” or “Kowloon side” because people kept looking at each other wondering what the fuck she meant about Main St.

As for foreign policy, she pretty much kept that under wraps. At least she didn’t tell the crowd she can see Russia from her porch in case Putin rears his head in American air space. She touched on the virtues of war in Iraq and Afghanistan just long enough to get glowers from an unsympathic audience, mumbled something about North Korea and China that was a total non-compute … that’s when I looked around on purpose and, sure enough, spotted two or three people from China’s State Security Bureau in the audience taking furious notes – they’re always at speeches and always easy to spot in their ill-fitting, poorly made suits sporting bad haircuts …

…

Anyhooo … after she finished she took some pre-arranged questions giving pap answers to pap questions, signed a few autographs and posed for photos – well, this is Asia after all, everybody takes photos of everything – and then was out the door.

…

Not sure what anyone was expecting other than seeing an American celebrity famous for gaffes, white trash relatives and shooting Bullwinkle from helicopters. If you didn’t expect much, you got what you came for.

That’s the news that’s fit to print. I have no idea why she flew over here for the speech except for the money. If I were a sponsor, I’d have asked for a partial refund. Well, at least she finished her speech and didn’t quit half-way through because she wanted to do something else.

Best,
J

So there it is: Sarah Does Hong Kong. Sounds as if she was her usual informed, thoughtful self, spending as much time discussing serious issues overseas as she did when she was campaigning.

We're Number 37!!!

This has been making the rounds of the intertubes for a day or two but it's so good, it is worth reposting here.

New Study: Public Option Popular In Blue Dog Districts, Across Nation

Poll analyst wunderkinder Nate Silver teams up with Markos Moulitsos of Daily Kos today to discover the public option enjoys the support of a majority of voters in all but one Blue Dog district.

Moreover, despite the pronouncements of Blue Dog Democrats in the House and Senate – as well as by Republicans – a health insurance public option is wanted by a majority of voters across all but a small handful of the 435 Congressional districts.

Moulitos writes this morning that “Nate Silver determined that poverty levels and support for Barack Obama were the factors driving support for the public option. A few mathematical equations later, he projected support for the public option (widespread nationally) and declared as a result that, contrary to assertions, the public option is popular in most Blue Dog districts.

“The Blue Dogs have been fighting the good fight on behalf of the insurance companies, doing everything they can to stymie reform. When called to task for their anti-reform efforts, they hide behind their constituents, claiming they are simply representing the views of their constituents. We were curious – is there any truth to these claims? As we've seen, in some places (like Nebraska), it's true, but in others, like in Jim Cooper's Tennessee district, it's not,” Moulitos concludes.

As if any more proof were needed, these new numbers show that opponents of the public option are simply running a well-organized scam for the insurance industry.

Even in districts where Blue Dogs claim to be simply representing the will of their constituents, the numbers prove them to be liars. And while there are margins of error in any poll, the fact is that in almost every district support for a public option outweighs opposition by more than the margin – or the “Keith Number” as Keith Olbermann called the undecided’s plus the margin of error during the last election.

Isn’t it w-a-y past time for the president, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to call out Democrat opponents for what they are: Lying shills who are in the pocket of insurance companies, and who have no regard for the problems of their constituents.

What A Surprise! “Values Voters” Pick Racist Huckabee

The so-called “Values Voters” held their annual hate-in and what a surprise: Mike Huckabee won the straw poll of presidential contenders, taking 148 of the 500 votes cast, a whopping 28%.

Huckabee, the silver-tongued, jovial Baptist preacher now best known for losing weight, charmed the crowd gathered in Washington over Rosh Hashanah weekend –Shanatova, en shallah to all – by dog whistling coded racist messages that wowed folks in the ballroom.

This is nothing new for Huckabee, who’s trying desperately to be the GOP’s Great White Hope in 2012 now that Sarah Palin has become a caricature of herself. As Max Blumenthal pointed out in The Nation during last year’s Republican presidential primary season. Borrowing a page from George Bush’s 2000 primary playbook that short-circuited John McCain’s surging campaign, Blumental reported how far Huckabee was willing to go:

As South Carolina's Republican primary election draws nearer, Mike Huckabee has ratcheted up his appeals to the racial nationalism of white evangelicals.

"You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag," the former Arkansas governor told a Myrtle Beach crowd on January 17, referring to the Confederate flag. "If somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell them what to do with the pole. That's what we'd do."

Appealing to white racists is old hat for Huckabee.

Long before he was a nationally-known politician, Huckabee carefully nurtured a relationship with America's largest white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens. The extent of Huckabee's relationship with the racist group is unclear but he accepted an invitation to speak at the group's annual conference in 1993 and delivered a videotaped address that was "extremely well received by the audience,” according to reports at the time.

No wonder he took the straw poll that, in the final analysis, is representative of absolutely nothing.

Whose Values?

Exactly whose values do the voters gathered in DC think they represent?

Certainly not mine. I consider myself a “values voter,” which is why I gleefully cast my ballot for Barack Obama last November. His values reflect the best of what America is supposed to be all about.

Oh, wait. The “Value Voters” summit didn’t even pretend to be about my values because I’m not a right wing fundamentalist who thinks the earth is 8,000 years old and America was really founded as a Christian theocracy. That’s probably why I didn’t see any black or brown faces in crowd shots, nor folks named Schwartz or Lopez as registered delegates. Nor were any of the opening prayers offered by Imans.

A few actual American values were overlooked on the weekend.

Apparently, they weren’t very concerned about genuine Judeo-Christian values, either. Nowhere on the agenda was there mention of discussing Sen. David Vitter wearing diapers with a hooker or his name on the DC Madame’s list. Nothing was said about Sen. John Ensign’s dalliances or "gifts" to his mistress and her family. How about Sen. Mike Enzi, who admitted having an affair with a female staff member? What about Gov. Mark Sanford’s hikes on the Appalachian Trail with his Latin Lover, sometimes at taxpayer expense?

How come nobody spent time discussing the righteousness of 20,000 people in the US dying each year because they lacked access to health care? Why didn’t anyone raise the very Christian value issue of helping 1-million Americans forced into bankruptcy by medical expenses? Where was talk about the values of the money changers in Wall St. temples grabbing seven-to-nine figure bonuses as they destroyed the lives and economic security of tens of millions of their fellow citizens? Who brought up the values that should be used to fight to poverty, hunger, homelessness and helping those who are without hope?

There was plenty of time to bash the government and an African-American President but no time to deal with the real issues confronting the nation.

Those are some values that sad collection of so-called “value voters” put on display.

Cut The Crap: Compared To America, Canada’s Health Care Is A Utopian Dream.

It’s time for a truth-and-reality check on conservative crazies in Congress, on Fox and loose in the country who keep using the Canadian national health system as their example of why they object to making major reforms to America’s medico-insurance complex.

I’ve experienced health care on both sides of the 49th parallel and can tell you that, compared to what happens when you get sick in the US, Canada is utopia.

While films such as Michael Moore’s Sicko and Capitalism: A Love Story and shorts produced by Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films do much spotlight the problem in bold face terms, the need to change the health care delivery and payment system in the US is essentially the collected nightmare stories of millions of individuals and families.

My sister was one of them.

Denied!

When my sister and only sibling was diagnosed with cancer in 1999, she and her husband had major battles with their insurance company which fought tooth-and-nail to cancel coverage and deny care at sight of the first claim form.

Why?

Because in her original application – roughly 10 or 11 years earlier – the insurer discovered that she forgot to note that, at age eight, she had two sessions with a child psychologist after our family dog died. She had real trouble coping: Tarzan taught her to walk when she was an infant, letting her hang onto his back as he walked her slowly around the house. As a pre-schooler, she’d dress him in outfits for tea parties – the kind little girls have, not Glenn Beck’s monstrosities. When Tarzan died, it was her first experience with losing a loved one and she couldn’t stop crying, even a week later at school.

To the insurance company, which went rummaging through Janice’s past after collecting more than $60,000 in premiums over the years she was a policyholder, that oversight meant she was a scamming liar trying to defraud them. It relented only after being confronted by a series of insistent phone calls from her oncologist and increasingly strong letters from the family lawyer. Nevertheless, the fight took weeks, causing Janice and Steve enormous grief and worry – on top of worrying about Jan’s cancer.

But it didn’t end there.

After being told she was terminal, Janice wanted to die at home in familiar surroundings with her three cats on the bed and her husband of 17-years sitting in the room. Nope, the insurance company ruled. They’d pay for her to stay in a hospital wired to machines and tubes at roughly $2,000 a day or more but the $150 or so it’d cost to have a nurse come each morning to check Jan’s vitals and a health care worker every afternoon to stay while Steve ran errands, bought food and have a few minutes away from his gruesome death watch was verboten.

A Supreme Irony

How ironic.

At first, the company wasn’t willing to pay anything yet when given a chance to reduce its expenses to less than 10% of what they were running, they balked. A bizarre-o world example of what’s wrong with health insurance in the US.

So, there ensued another series of letters between their lawyer and the insurer and, this time, also her employer, threatening legal action and public exposure. Reluctantly, the insurance company backed down. To its credit, the senior vice president of human resources at the large corporation where Janice worked before getting sick phoned to say that he was appalled at learning of the treatment she was receiving and assured Steve that if the insurance company didn’t pay for home care, the employer would.

In a way, Janice and Steve were “lucky.”

Besides having a caring employer, they had the resources and toughness to summon a lawyer to go toe-to-toe with the insurer. And, in the end, her care was covered. But, like Barack Obama’s mother, Jan and Steve spend much of the 11 weeks leading to the end of her life fighting with an enormous insurance company bureaucracy and its “medical advisors” who never clapped eyes on Janice before trying to deny what she’d been paying years to have. Happy to take money from her pay check every month for her share of the premium, the insurance company fought desperately when it was time to meet its end of the deal.

The best system in the world? Only people who never had the misfortune of dealing with it would say so. They must be the people in surveys who say they like their current insurance.

Meanwhile, Up North

Walk across the road where Minnesota meets Ontario and enter an entirely different world of health care.

I’ve lived in Toronto since 1991, during which time my out-of-pocket costs for health care have been zero. Nothing. Nada. Zip. This includes more than a year seeing a psychiatrist for depression and grief after my sister died; she passed away six months after mother and three years following our dad’s death, and I was overwhelmed. It also includes two separate hospitalizations for heart problems, one very minor and one more serious. And I’ve been fighting colon cancer with chemo, radiation and surgery for four-plus years.

None of my care has cost me anything. I never waited to see a specialist, or to have tests or treatment. When surgery was prescribed, I saw another doctor for a second option and was still on an operating table within two weeks.

Before the right goes all batty and begins yelling I pay for coverage through income tax, I’ll admit that I do. But – and this is a big but, much larger than the butts on the back ends of many of the 9/12-er’s waddling around Washington last weekend – I did the math and my total cost of taxes plus insurance is less than in America.

Yes, my federal and provincial taxes are higher than if I lived in the US. But what I pay includes the cost of government health insurance. So, when I looked at US and Minnesota tax tables – Minnesota being my last state of residence in America before moving here – and added in the average of what friends back home tell me they pay annually in health insurance premiums, I pay about 9% less in Canada than if I lived in the States.

Nine percent less.

Never Cancelled

My coverage never can be cancelled or denied. I pay no deductible. There’s no such thing as a pre-existing condition. I had coverage the first day I arrived in Toronto after filling out a short, half-page form. I never heard the words “Not in our network” when seeing a physician or specialist.

When I was ill, no one went scrounging through my past to find a reason to deny coverage. When I am discharged from hospital, the only thing I receive is a warm handshake and a sincere, “We’re glad you’re doing so well.”

I did have some oput-of-pocket costs. I paid for cable television in my room, a morning newspaper, a vegetarian pizza from a place near the hospital and a few Chinese food deliveries after being taken off the restricted diet list. If I’d had high speed internet in my room, I would have paid for it myself; national health doesn’t cover surfing the net.

Shortcomings

Utopia? No. Only when compared to the US health system nightmare. And there are problems with the Canadian system.

For example, Ontario is short of doctors. It’s not because of a brain drain but because of the physicians themselves. The College of Physicians and Surgeons, the licensing board in all of the provinces, for many years made it nearly impossible for immigrating doctors to practice here, a kind of closed shop protectionism.

The rationale – often justified – was that foreign trained physicians and surgeons don’t meet Ontario standards. Fair enough. But then the College required people to start med school all over again, as if they’d never treated a patient.

Most of these physicians readily admit they need additional training when arriving in Canada. But why force them to start a 10 year process of med school, internship and residency all over again? I suspect that human anatomy is the same at a university in, oh, Kenya, Mumbai or Jamaica as it is at the University of Toronto.

Fortunately, the government stepped in to apply pressure on the Colleges. Now, additional training is handled much more swiftly and the doctor shortage is starting to ease.

Constant Claptrap

Trial lawyers joke that when the facts are against you, argue the law; when the law is against you, argue the facts; and when the law and the facts are against you, then pound the table.

The anti-change artists in the health care debate are left pounding the table because everything is against them. But there’s no talking with most of them because they react like small children: They cover their ears, scream loudly to drown out what’s being said and stamp their feet. It’s their only genuine argument.

The arguments against making major changes to the medico-insurance complex are about as accurate as Glenn Beck’s crowd count. I’m not sure it will do any good but we have to keep trying. For one thing, since I’m uninsurable in the US until I’m eligible for Medicare, I can’t come home until there’s a rational new plan in place.

GOP Warns Collins, Snowe: Oppose Health Care Or Face Primary Challenges

Now we have proof positive that the crazies grabbed control of the asylum as bullies shake down and thump – not entirely figuratively – Republicans in the halls of the US Senate.

Maine’s two usually reasonable and moderate Republican Senators – Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe – spent the summer trying to find ways to support health care reform, including some form of a public option. Suddenly, they did an abrupt about-face: No public option, no non-profit co-ops, no triggers, no anything in the bill they’d previously supported.

So what happened?

“Last week, they were bombarded with calls, elevator and hallway chats, and e-mails from the RNC, the Senate leadership, other Senators, people on the party’s Senate campaign committee, serious donors,” a GOP Senate staffer explains to me Tuesday afternoon by phone.

“Basically, the message was the same” he insists. “Support health care in any form and face serious, well-funded primary challenges when they’re up for re-election.”

(As an aside, the Senate Republican Campaign Committee used to be run by John Ensign, resident of the infamous C Street Home For The Perpetually Bewildered, and best known for sleeping with an aide, hiring her 19-year old son as a “strategic consultant” to the SRCC, firing another aide who happened to be married to the woman Ensign was hiking the Appalachian Trail with, and then having his mommy and daddy provide $96,000 in “gifts” to the aides and two of their three children to smooth everything over. So we know how the SRCC operation works.)

Republicans Are Fringe

Since Snowe’s term expires in 2012 and Collins isn’t up for re-election until 2014, that seems like a long spell for the goofball right of the Republican party in Maine to stay mad. After all, Snowe received 74% of the vote when she was re-elected in 2006, a year when Republicans all over the country were being booted from office without so much as a good riddance.

“Because you’re not part of the party, you don’t know how it operates these days,” the man reminds me.

“The fringe is the party,” he says, the emphasis his. “Between now and 2012 or 2014, the goofballs can show up at every town meeting, state fair and garage door opening ceremony either one of them attends. Their life would become a living hell.”

The staffer would not let his name be used because he’s not authorized to speak with reporters, nor would the five other people who work on the Republican side of the Senate who essentially confirmed his comments. But I’ve known each of them for years, trust information they provide because each has always been accurate, and none have an axe to grind.

Calls to Senators Snowe and Collins were not returned by the time I posted this article. But I was directed to a statement on Snowe’s website that claims if, “after we have implemented landmark insurance market reforms, private insurers fail to deliver the affordable coverage Americans require” she would support, maybe, down-the-road, possibly something that resembles a public option.

That would be when? Maybe in 2066, on the millennial anniversary of Magna Carta? How many more than the 62-million already uninsured and underinsured Americans will never see a doctor, die, file for bankruptcy or go to bed every night hoping their kids don’t get sick tomorrow before Snowe and her colleague Susan Collins see the world as it really is?

Ashamed

In her website statement, Snowe also trots out the totally discredited notion that reform will lead “to a government takeover of health care.”

No wonder another GOP-side Senate staffer confesses to me, a touch of sadness in her voice, “Right now, I’m ashamed to be a Republican.”

Despite the fact that this same staff member gave her full-throated support to the McCain-Palin ticket and that didn’t seem to shame her, nor did George Bush’s eight years, I am willing to accept that some sort of divine intervention leading to her Come To Jesus awakening in the spirit in which she offers it. Better late than never.

Oh wait. Maybe she’s seeing the light because her brother-in-law and sister are struggling to cope with medical bills: Their 10-year old was diagnosed with leukemia earlier this year and there’s a constant fight with the insurance company supposedly providing coverage to pay for the child’s treatment.

I know what that’s like. I’ve been through it with my sister.

Snowe Job

I’m not sure what Snowe and Collins are up to but, clearly, it has nothing to do with what is best for one-fifth of the American population directly and the rest of us indirectly.

Sadly, the Snowe Job being pulled is totally uncharacteristic of both Senators. In the past, they’ve acted like Responsible Republicans most of the time – even when I disagreed with them. Now, they’ve become no better than the louts who got their mad on in Washington Saturday afternoon. The fear Snowe and Collins have of that small but vocal slice of the Republican Party is driving them to put their own interests ahead of those of the nation.

There is an irony to this.

Dick Cheney spent eight years scaring Americans into doing what the GOP wanted. Now, the GOP is scaring Republicans into doing what a tiny minority of lunatics want them to do and the hell with the rest of us.

It'd be much funnier if it wasn't so sad.

Teabaggers In The Mist - Updated 9.15.09

Glenn Beck once insisted that he started his “9/12 Movement” to recapture the sense of unity in the nation the day after the terrorist attacks in 2001. That idea lasted about four minutes Saturday morning as evidenced by the signs held aloft at the event he and a group of well-funded astroturf organisations in Washington created.

Thanks to Oliver Willis’ website, we have a disturbing record of just how bizarre and out-of-touch the ragtag and often racist crowd of batty birthers, deathers, tenthers, climate change deniers, Federal Reserve haters, anti-abortionists, pro gunners and the just plain kooky turned out to be.

Like Sen. Jim DeMint (R-Crazyland). He actually autographed a sign that reads “We Are A Christian Nation.”

Over at RedState, people are claiming that two million protesters showed up. The police estimated the crowd at about 75,000.

I realised that the most disturbing thing about Willis’ photo essay is that the people whose signs he captured on film - OK, I'm showing my age; he probably captured them on disc - are allowed to own checking accounts, sign contracts, own passports and have children.

UPDATE - I've decided that my two favourite characters from Saturday's Mad On Washington are the old lady carrying a sign reading "Keep Government Out Of Medicare!" and a fellow in his late 60s who is in a YouTube video declaring to a questioner that he'll stop cashing his Social Security cheques when the government stops interfering in his life.

The Only Way Out Of Afghanistan Is To Leave. Here’s How.

There’s a reason why Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires.

From the time of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan to the British, Soviets and now the US and NATO, Afghanistan’s poppy fields, barren plains and rugged mountains are filled with the ghosts and treasuries of would-be conquerors. Sooner or later, America, Canada and NATO will meet the same dismal fate as everyone who went before them.

George Bush invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to rid it of al Qaeda and its Taliban protectors, taking away a “safe haven” for plotters of the 9/11 attacks. Since this was accomplished in a matter of weeks with relatively few American deaths, Bush’s neo-con puppet masters then made two disastrous mistakes.

First, they sent troops off to fight a stupid, illegal and totally unnecessary war in Iraq, a country which posed as much threat to the US as Bermuda, with no plan for bringing stability to a country stripped of its institutions.

Second, Washington installed a pretend government in Kabul to create a democracy by forcing a strong, central government on the nation – something that is an anathema to the very soul, nature and character of dozens of centuries of Afghan history.

To keep voters from becoming as questioning as they are now, once the Taliban was gone Bush marketed the Afghan War by claiming it is about democracy, women’s rights, education and nation building. President Obama still says the US is in Afghanistan to fight al Qaeda. But al Qaeda barely exists; its handful of members long ago decamped to Pakistan’s unruly and ungoverned tribal regions.

In fact, this war has become all about oil pipeline routes and Western domination of the energy-rich Caspian Basin. And, of course, there is pressure on Obama from the right that the US cannot afford to “lose” a second war under his command. So he seems to feel that his only option is charging full-tilt over a cliff. Unless he ends this daft misadventure, his granddaughters may see American soldiers still fighting in the badlands of Afghanistan.

Put bluntly, Afghanistan is a bloody mess and America, Canada and NATO add to the problem every day. It’s way past time for us to go home.

Buy Poppies

Before any stability can be returned to the country, the Taliban and other insurgents in the south have to be cut off from their cash flow: Opium smuggling.

Since drug dealers, traffickers and customers are protected by corrupt officials in Kabul and provincial capitals, the only realistic answer is for America and NATO to become poppy farmer’s highest paying customer. It’s a tactic that was wildly successful in Turkey and it can work in Afghanistan, as well.

Some small part of the crop can be resold to pharmaceutical companies which use opium as an ingredient in many legal drugs; the rest can be burned. It’s far cheaper than the current cost of the war. Moreover, within a year, the West will bankrupt the Taliban by deriving it of the estimated $300-million the illegal drugs trade produces and which it uses to buy weapons, food, pay bribes – and buy next year’s poppy crop.

On an on-going basis, America and, hopefully, the EU can subsidise Afghan farmers to grow other crops, using our vast knowledge of agriculture to teach people who still live in the third century how to feed themselves and, eventually, their nation. Again, it’s a far less-expensive venture than fighting a hopeless, unending war even though this may become a semi-permanent part of America’s foreign policy.

As crucial, buying up the poppy crop for a few years will make it incredibly difficult for the Taliban to re-supply, re-equip and re-emerge as a potent force in the region. If destitute farmers and unemployed teens can’t find piece work burying IEDs or launching RGPs for the Taliban, much of its amateur infantry who get paid $5 a day to kill foreign troops will disappear.

The Pashtun

Once the opium supply is controlled and eradicated, the US should put on hold the fruitless task of building up the central government and even most provincial governments, turning its attention instead to bolstering Afghanistan’s traditional source of political power: Tribal leaders.

Like most of its foreign policy, the Bush Administration was wrong-headed about handling Afghanistan once the Taliban were routed. Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes, who make up 55% of the population, were excluded from power as Washington deceived itself into believing that a strong, central government could be created where one never existed.

The neo-con’s never grasped that Afghanistan is a three-legged ethnic stool and, by removing the Pashtun leg, stability became impossible. It's the same misunderstanding that led to carnage in Iraq after Washington banned Sunni's from participating in rebuilding their country.

There will be neither peace nor stability until the Pashtun majority is enfranchised. This means dealing directly with Taliban, which is largely Pashtun. The West cannot run Afghanistan by using the minority Tajik’s, Uzbek’s and Shia Hazara.

The solution to this no-longer-necessary war is not more phoney elections but a comprehensive peace agreement between ethnic factions that largely restores the status quo before the 1979 Soviet invasion. This means a weak central government in Kabul – for which Hamud Karzai is ideal – and a high degree of autonomy for self-governing regions.

Instead of pretending that Kabul governs any of the country beyond its suburbs, the government should reinstate the loya jirga, or regular, tribal sit-downs. Decisions are made by consensus, often after lengthy haggling. This is the tradition of Afghans and many Islamic societies. Afghanistan worked pretty well for several thousand years under this traditional, informal and easy-going system.

Historical Reality

There’ll have to be a quid pro quo with the tribes beyond buying the opium crop, teaching farmers how to grow other vegetables and short-circuiting the Karzai government.

First, integrate the Pashtun back into civil society. At the moment, the Taliban are the ethnic group’s only voice.

Second, stop all drone attacks on insurgent targets where civilians always end up bearing the brunt of the bombings.

Third, make it clear to tribal leaders that the US doesn’t care about their disputes with other tribes, and won’t interfere as long as it doesn’t spill over into killing American and NATO forces.

Fourth, recognise that cash goes a long way to buy loyalty in Afghanistan. It always has and always will. Just as the US did in Iraq with Sunni militias, put the tribal leaders on Washington’s payroll – with the understanding that killing of Americans will stop immediately. It worked in Anbar and other Sunni provinces and it will work in Afghanistan.

Fifth, pay bonuses to tribal leaders – and members – if they provide actionable intelligence about Taliban activities in their area. But before anyone is hauled off to the infamous prison at Baghram Air Base, make sure that someone isn't trying to settle an old score as happened regularly in 2001 and 2002,

Sixth, use US and NATO ground forces to secure areas where needed but rely on the tribes to police themselves.

Seventh, at a loya jirga – rather than in Karzai’s presidential palace – ask Afghan elders to draw up a list of benchmarks that establish when and under what circumstances Western forces will leave. It may take months to achieve a final agreement but, in the meantime, it’s likely that violence will decline slowly and, at the end, a close-to-peace and stability situation will endure.

We won’t solve Afghanistan’s social or political problems by continuing to wage a cruel and apparently endless war. Our soldiers will never be able to change Afghanistan’s social behavior or end tribal customs that go back thousands of years. They are too busy defending their own bases from angry Afghans and it’s time to leave them alone.