Thursday, April 23, 2009

True Health Care Reform

Most Americans would agree that access to health care is a civil right. Our inalienable right of life isn't possible without it, and the pursuit of happiness is a lot tougher when you're sick. Most if not all would also agree that the system we have is broke. Well, if we want everyone covered with better care while spending less, what kind of system do we create to fix it? The answer is Single Payer. Because our debt as a nation is so high, this is a reform we need to implement now. We are spending too much and getting too little. Joe Conason illuminates in Salon:
Although the public share of health expenditure in the United States is much lower than any other OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) country except Mexico, the public expenditure on healthcare is much higher per capita than in most OECD countries. So we pay a lot more in taxes devoted to medical care -- not including insurance premiums, co-payments, fees, and other health costs -– than taxpayers in those 27 countries that have universal coverage. Our public expenditure provides coverage only for the elderly and some of the poor (through Medicaid and the SCHIP program for children) while other countries provide universal coverage while spending less.

How much less? Nations with comparable standards of living like France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, and Japan spend roughly between half and two-thirds per capita what we spend annually. They cover everyone and their results are measurably better. And the supposed downsides of universal coverage, such as lack of access to sophisticated medical technologies, are belied in many of these countries. For instance Japan has lower per capita health expenditures than the United States (and universal coverage,) but its citizens have greater access to MRI machines, CT scanners and kidney dialysis equipment than Americans do.
It's clear that health care is one of the areas that the public sector is better than the private. It's cheaper, more effective and based on an American study comparing the health between different races, ethnicities, and education levels, it's also more equitable. What I found most surprising is that we already have a successful model of how all this would work. "The VA hospitals represent the most successful large-scale reform in the delivery of health care that this country has seen in decades," explains Timothy Noah in Slate. So, why is this more effective and more efficient system never brought up?
It... stems from a conviction that has seeped deep into the political culture that anything run by the federal government must be inferior to market-based alternatives. The Obama administration and Congress are utterly terrified that in crafting health care reform they will run afoul of this infantile prejudice. They will therefore move heaven and earth to avoid acknowledging the VA's pioneering use of computerized medical records, its avoidance of the justly lamented fee-for-service model (VA physicians are salaried), and the efficiencies it realizes by treating patients over the long term. The implications of this success are too terrifyingly pinko. The VA is, after all, a system in which the role of insurer, physician, and hospital are all assumed by the U.S. government.

Monday, March 30, 2009

Wow

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Divided We Fall

I haven't read all of this article in Salon (it seems pretty boring), but there are a couple golden nuggets that validated my interest.

I've done the skimming:
If Juanita and Chris are casualties of the intensified war of attrition businesses are quietly waging on workers, Rodney represents a deeper unraveling of jobs and job security, thanks to a globalized economy in which the hard-pressed workers in this country are pitted against cheaper labor pools in Latin America, South Asia, China and even the American South. In such a job environment, what is one to do?

Someone I interviewed prior to my job center visit described her reaction when she heard that her company had recently closed a plant in the Midwest: "The first thing I thought, and I felt bad for thinking it," she recalled, somewhat sheepishly, "was that means more work for us -- at least for the time being."
Quantcast

Her comment speaks volumes, as does her request not to be identified. Who needs union busters, patroling shop stewards, or legions of high-paid lawyers fighting wage and hours claims when a worker is so anxious about job security that she responds positively to the laying off of those she imagines as potential competitors? When employees police their own behavior for fear of the ax -- monitoring their time checking e-mail or using the bathroom -- bad times distinctly have an upside for management....

A look at corporate opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), whose passage in Congress is a central demand of organized labor, offers a glimpse of how persistently companies seek to disadvantage their workers. EFCA would allow workers to form a union when a majority of them sign union cards in a given workplace. "Card check," as it is frequently called, enables them to organize unions without the need for an election. In a November column surveying the business elite's response to the act, Wall Street Journal Op-Ed columnist Thomas Frank wrote: "Card check is about power. Management has it, workers don't, and business doesn't want that to change."
The author concludes that there are two business wars being fought - the second covertly eliminates employees that would otherwise have been retained in better financial times. He asks at what point the press will finally acknowledge this less reported war. Isn't asking how one side is supposed to fight without an army the more important question?

Friday, March 27, 2009

Operation Comix Relief

A Framingham man who runs a program that sends comic books to military personnel overseas says he may have to cut back because his mailing rates have doubled.

Chris Tarbassian of Operation Comix Relief tells The MetroWest Daily News the price jumped from $2.58 per shipment to more than $5 after he was told he could no longer ship comics at the less expensive media mail rate.

The nonprofit sends comics to about 500 men and women each year.
I've sent some comics here and plan to send more. Hopefully something will be done to make this easier for Tarbassian to get more comics to more troops. Are you listening Senators Kerry and Kennedy?

More info:
Original Boston Globe article

More extensive MetroWest Daily News story

Operation Comix Relief

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Interesting Article For Those Into Birds

Check this out from National Geographic:
Peruvian warbling antbird couples harmonize to warn rival couples away from their territories. But put a single female nearby and the duet turns into a musical shouting match....

The songs of warbling-antbird pairs usually begin as evenly spaced series of couplets. Females can either meld their tunes to their partner's—or jam the other's signal by jumping in at the wrong time....

Threatened by rival pairs, the couple put up a united front, singing rhythmic and coordinated duets. But cooperation broke down when solitary rivals came around.

"Specifically, females responded to unpaired sexual rivals by jamming the signals of their own mates," (Joseph) Tobias and (Nathalie) Seddon wrote.

"Perhaps the most striking result is that males don't like females 'jamming' their song," Tobias said. Males "try to avoid [the females'] jamming, suggesting that they perceive it as costly in some way."

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Gov. Jindal's Rebuttal

If Gov. Patterson of New York had spun a similar tale regarding his actions on September 11th, wouldn't it be big news? While Bobby Jindal has been panned for his callow performance the other night on national T.V. (Happy Mardi Gras), I don't think much has been made of the fact that he made up the story of his role in cutting through the bureaucratic red-tape during Hurricane Katrina.

Here's what he said:
During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I'd never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: 'Well, I'm the Sheriff and if you don't like it you can come and arrest me!' I asked him: 'Sheriff, what's got you so mad?' He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go - when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn't go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, 'Sheriff, that's ridiculous.' And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: 'Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!' Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.
Here's what happened:
When the storm made landfall on August 29, Jindal was on a foreign trip. His family was evacuated to his parents' house in Baton Rouge, and when he returned, he went straight there to join them. In a September 1st CNN interview given from Baton Rouge, Jindal talked about taking an aerial tour of the disaster area, but didn't mention anything about having been on the ground personally. We've reviewed Nexis and other sources, and can find no news reports putting Jindal on the ground in the affected area during the few days after Katrina struck when people might still have needed boats to rescue them from rooftops.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Remember When You Were Asking the Definition of Hypocrisy?


Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call -- including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG -- were urged to persuade their clients to send "large contributions" to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill....
Hyperbole ensues...
"This is the demise of a civilization," said (Home Depot co-founder Bernie) Marcus. "This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I'm watching this happen and I don't believe it."

Donations of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to Republican senatorial campaigns were needed, they argued, to prevent America from turning "into France."

"If a retailer has not gotten involved in this, if he has not spent money on this election, if he has not sent money to [former Sen.] Norm Coleman and all these other guys, they should be shot. They should be thrown out their goddamn jobs," Marcus declared.
The sky is falling! We are in a recession and these people want to unionize?! They need to stop thinking about what's in their own greedy self-interest and start putting the country's economy first. Wait - not so fast - Bank of America's own research document states that 'though it could increase labor costs for retailers it would be a "de facto wage and benefit increase" that would increase the amount poorer consumers could spend. Plus, I think that $25 billion was meant to keep the economy floating not line pockets.

Read in full at The Huffington Post.

P.S. Blog sarcasm sure makes you look like a smug prick.

The Hermit's Fiddle (I)

I haven't posted much of anything for a long time partly because of other priorities and partly because I'm not sure what I want to do with this strand of web. At first, I just wanted to use this space to post articles in lieu of sending out time consuming mass e-mails. Just posting links seemed stupid, so I started writing more analysis, but this presented me with the classic question not asked by the many narcissistic bloggers out there - who cares? The last few months I've posted only what I felt I had to. For now, that's enough until I figure out what else to do.

P.S. Just kidding Alexis.