Al Franken Pwns Health Industry Shill

(via Boing Boing)

Mikey Versus the Train

GOP Chairman Michael Steele continues to be a source of great entertainment.



This is what happens in the real world Mikey:



But, yeah, go ahead and make our day.

Freedom of Private Health Insurance: Rationing

This is how the private sector takes away your ability to make the best decision for your loved one's treatment and care.

In January 2005, doctors cleared Reggie for release. He was going home.

Grants Pass had a handful of nursing homes. They provided physical and speech therapy, but Linda was dissatisfied with the care. She confronted workers at one home, leading to Reggie's discharge. He returned to a hospital.

Linda was dealing with her own health problems. Her weight ballooned. She was admitted to the hospital repeatedly with breathing difficulties.

As Linda searched for a home for her husband, she got into a dispute with American International Group Inc., the insurance carrier for KBR. Linda wanted her husband close to home. She said AIG insisted that he go to a facility in Portland, where care was less expensive than in the hospital.

But we certainly don't want to encourage health care reform, do we? That might ration care and take away your choices.

A Real Breakthrough?

I love this idea.

Senate Democrats have begun discussions on a compromise approach to health care reform that would establish a robust, national public option for insurance coverage but give individual states the right to opt out of the program.

Let's have a battle of ideas here. Red states can opt out, blue states get the public option they want. Liberal v. conservative in the real world of living legislation where it can be tested on the merits instead of demagoguery and half-truths.

Tail Finds It Increasingly Difficult To Wag Dog

Rik Hertzberg takes his shots at the wing nut welfare state run by its corporate media masters.

What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism’s hands and feet, but its heart—also, Heaven help us, its brain—is a “conservative” media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint. Their sneers may be false and hateful—they all routinely liken the President and the “Democrat Party” to murderous totalitarians—but they are employed by large, nominally respectable corporations and supported by national advertisers, lending them a considerable measure of institutional prestige. The dominant wing of the Republican Party is increasingly an appendage of the organism—the tail, you might say, though it seems to wag more often from fear than from happiness. Many Republican officeholders, even some reputed moderates like Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, have obediently echoed the foul nonsense.

I don’t see any flaw in that logic. Do you?

Cancel Your Medicare!

Saw this at Balloon Juice:


I will be laughing about this one for a while.
(Via)

400 People Were Turned Away Today

"Crazy" After All These Years

Atrios:

if only "crazy" single payer advocates got this much attention

If only.

Death On The Corporate Express

The so-called "death panels" already exist:

Long before anyone started talking about government "death panels" or warning that Obama would have the government ration care, 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan, a leukemia patient from Glendale, Calif., died in December 2007, after her parents battled their insurance company, Cigna, over the surgery. Cigna initially refused to pay for it because the company's analysis showed Sarkisyan was already too sick from her leukemia; the liver transplant wouldn't have saved her life.

They just don't work for the gummint.

Health Care Reform Ad CNN Won't Run

(h/t Greg Sargent)

Health Reform For Idiots

Paul Krugman explains in layman's terms what health reform is all about:

The essence is really quite simple: regulation of insurers, so that they can’t cherry-pick only the healthy, and subsidies, so that all Americans can afford insurance.

Everything else is about making that core work. Individual mandates are a way to prevent gaming of the system by people who don’t sign up until they’re sick; employer mandates a way to hold down the on-budget costs by preventing a rush by employers to drop insurance; the public option a way to create effective competition and hold costs down further.

But what it means for the individual will be that insurers can’t reject you, and if your income is relatively low, the government will help pay your premiums

.

If you do not now understand what reforms are being suggested please don't vote--ever again. Disagree with the reform, if you wish, that is your perogative. Vote for representatives who will vote against the reform. That's fine. You have a right to your point of view. But if you still don't understand what health reform is about you have insufficient curiiosity, are lazy, or just stupid, and really should leave voting to people who take the time to inform themselves of the most important issues and then vote accordingly. But, please, you have the time to understand what changes are being proposed. When a bill is ready inform yourself to see if it does, in fact, meet your criteria--then ask your Congresscritters to vote accordingly.

Health Care Reform Obstruction, Ctd

This sounds about right to me:

Max Baucus, then, isn't negotiating universal coverage with the party of Everett Dirksen, in which many members supported Medicare. He's negotiating it with the party of Barry Goldwater, who was dead set against Medicare. It's a fool's errand that is creating a plan that's a marvel of ineffectuality and self-negation -- a latter-day Missouri Compromise that reconciles opposites at the cost of good policy.

Throwing America a Lifeline

STAN BROCK BRINGS HEALTH CARE TO AMERICANS WITH REMOTE AREA MEDICAL PROGRAM from R2 Studios on Vimeo.

Health Care Is NOT A Market

The supply is there when you don’t need it, and somehow vanishes when you do. As a consumer you do not know what health care products you will need, or when, although you do, within your given set of circumstances know the more common illnesses or injuries you might need to be cared for. Nor do you know how much they are worth, except that in the extreme case they are worth everything because they may save your life.

The idea that you are behaving like a free agent in this market is a monumental fallacy. You don’t have the professional understanding nor the foresight to know what you are buying nor why you are buying it. When you are sick you don’t need a choice of health plans, you need professionals to take care of you and get you the care you need. Chances are you will have heard of the illness you or your child has, and you may well be familiar with the required treatment for it. But what happens in the not rare case when that is not so?

Health Care Reform Obstruction

Just how much of an obstruction to healthcare reform is Senator Charles Grassley? And why is Max Baucus giving him that much sway? These are questions raised in my mind after reading this post from Matt Yglesias.

I think it’s right to say that one of the important dynamics in the health care fight is that even though Chuck Grassley is up for re-election in 2010 he doesn’t seem to have a serious Democratic challenger.

[snip]

Instead, the only thing Grassley has to worry about is a primary challenge from the right. Which means that the only thing Grassley has to do to secure his tenure in office is obstruct health care reform. Which wouldn’t necessarily be so bad, but Max Baucus appears determined to get Grassley’s support for reform. Which, in the presence of pressure from the right and the absence of pressure from the left, is almost certainly impossible.

Sanders 1, McCain 0