More of the Same, Only More Expensive:
In ten years, "Allowing people to buy insurance across state lines" will effectively mean, "Everybody buys insurance from South Dakota, because they have the weakest regulations on health insurers. It's exactly what happened to the credit card industry, so anyone who thinks this "free market solution" will do anything but make our health care system worse is simply not paying attention.
Second:
You link to a poll showing the current Democratic proposals to be unpopular. But you miss three crucial facts:
1) Many individual elements of the health care bill (employer mandates, ban on pre-existing conditions, the insurance exchange) poll *extremely* well. The public option also polls very well.
2) Polling has also shown that, if you give people straightforward, unbiased information (read: NOT Democratic talking points, just a non-partisan description of what the bill does) then the poll numbers improve dramatically.
3) Much of the opposition to the current bill comes *from the left.* Like me, they want to kick insurers to the curb by either giving America a strong public option or (even better) moving to a pure single-payer system.
Update: Apparently, this is the sort of hate speech that gets you a comment ban from Sarah Palin's people. My comments seem to have been deleted, and I'm no longer able to add comments.
Oh well, more time to practice my dolphin calls.
6 comments:
Darth--I think you and your brother should find pen-pals in Eastern Europe. Maybe the upwind Eastern Ukraine.
Basically, single payer can be catastrophic. You can't imagine how bad, how controlling the US medical industrial complex can be. Because we have one, single payer is never going to work the way it does in other countries. They are already practicing a form of Euthanasia.
What happens when the medical-fascist "one ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bind them all and in the darkness bind them" finds that 3 people, all white males, come down with diabetes in the same week. Only the one millionaire gets the treatment. Though the horse is out of the barn--we are likely no longer contagious, there may well be a 4th and 5th--one of these manages the local Wallmart. These are the kind of contingencies people in infectious disease play with as models: worst case scenarios.
They know these clusters exist. Diabetics know they exist. But to enforce the gag rule only one case can be admitted and only one treated.
My doctor--that is my old doctor and this one is not a Doctor, managed my diabetes carefully. I took my blood sugar and according to how high it is, I take one or two pills, also according to what's
for dinner. I take one pill for a light meal and two for the scotch oatmeal with organic chicken liver in it which I need at least 3 times a week and which helps more if I eat it at every meal--I'm a Scot as you know, and don't mind a nice stew of stout oatmeal for my anemia. I have to take two pills when I have it. I have been trying to maintain the full blood transfusion I had for low blood volume by feeding my blood as much good stuff as I can, and it seems to have helped, along with a lot of limes and wild mint for chlorophyll.
Jay, one of Grandma's nephews and his wife came to Juniper to be close
to the hospital. I think he's a son
of Grandma's older sister but he might have been her brother in law.
This is the wing of the family that discovered oil on their ranch and set up a United Order for the family. They bought semis (trucks) and motel's with decorative rock that we mined one summer when all were at Grandma and Grandpa's.
I tried to raise money for a family medical fund--20 dollars a month, and that was twenty years ago or so.
Mom said it was her money and she could spend it on anything she wanted, but Laura and David assured me that they would take care of me when the time came.
Jay's family sent 120 dollars, but she wouldn't put it in the bank. I think that was the share paid for from their united fund--most people think only polygamists do that, but it was a civic part of Mormonism in the old days.
So that was 4800 per family or person, however they sent it in. If Meredeth's family chipped in at 100
dollars a month, that would have totaled 24000 dollars in the catastrophic medical fund. Leaving 28,800.00 by now. It would have worked as a family medical charity.
You may not know that Kent and La Dawn's mother, Grandma's sister's childrens' mother died of Diabetes
when they were in high school. THey went on living in their mother's house and Grandma and Grandpa were their foster parents until they came of age. They are more part of our family than the younger generation remembers. Meredith's family remember.
They knew that these days, there is insurance--this was new when they were young, but it didn't pay for the poor who couldn't pay premiums.
And it didn't pay out enough that it would be a life-saver. The LDS hospitals were failing medically.
Nurses said that the rate of newborn mortality was 50 per thousand at the Provo Hospital. East Oakland was 28 per thousand, one of the largest infant death rates in the country.
I think the Salt Lake hospital was better. My friend delivered her baby
on a gurney in the hallway. Too many babies in Provo born to student couples who could barely make tuition. So maternal malnutrition was very high.
So Mom tore up that check. Danny's thirty dollars she just cashed without telling him. She's probably still doing it.
Love your elders and give them gratitude for the good they did in their lives, but this doesn't fall under that category. Our mothers are corrupt. And it doesn't add up to love, certainly not love for me.
What very, very bad things had Chris been told about me all his life? He alluded to this in his letter of resignation as my Nephew.
That qualifies as black propaganda. And, though I would never write it,
I do know very well what it is.
There are also cold war strategies taken from Gregory Bateson who is worth reading--all of his books. He intended his work to be used against the enemy and it was turned into MK Ultra. Because of upwind Hanford, it was used by the internment industry there to break down family bonds.
When I was there children were not considered under the guardianship of their parents across the board. If still in force or even on the books, this means that someone close to us is not in a good or safe place. I'm afraid I agree with my self severed nephew.
But what happens when a State goes dysfunctional. Single payer goes fascist.
It is a form of slavery and actually dates from the Pennsylvania slave laws. Pennsylvania was the last State in the North to ban all slavery and many of the followers of Eugene Debbs went there from Pennsylvania.
The AFSC, who gave me the green car job, is housed in what is their equivalent of the Church office building and their grants do not take religion into account.
We are talking about a kind of common law that has persisted. Old slaves without family to take them in were confiscated by the state of Pennsylvania and sold to masters on their word that they would do a better job of owning them.
So in my time in the big O, behind the Emerald curtain, I saw all of what I have described played out. Also when I was in the hospital during the Bird Flu Epidemic, I was in a big double room suited for family all day visits. Two of these families had relatives in trouble in the O state.
One had a family member die in Northern Oregon. Family traveling to the funeral on the train dissapeared and when the family member in my room left, they were still missing. They probably had private sleepers, but taken off the train they were able to bring federal money into the O's economy.
I consider myself still M., but don't believe that your honored elders will be rewarded for their conduct in any future world that may exist.
I am glad that the force that impels us to honorable and compassionate conduct can forgive what we do not have the strength to forgive.
I don't believe that families working together to support the family is wrong, even if the work load of the oldest daughter is heavy. If there is true need, love and justice, even gratitude from parents and grown siblings, it is simply a wrong forced on the family by poverty.
This is not what happened. I was a slave. Your mother, especially treated me as her slave for she had an alliance with my parents and believed everything that happened to me was right and good.
I did day and night care for the twins, David and your mother in junior high school. And when she was at the same age I was still doing it. I did the shopping and
cooking, afternoon care until the twins were in kindergarten. And it made me so ill because I was already
ill and diagnosed by a Pediatric Rhumatologist who consulted with Kaiser, anyway the PE teacher realized that I was ill and let me sleep in a pile of hay where the boys' pole vaulted--it was where they landed.
L +C are still angry at me because they felt that my preparation for college and my going to College was wrong. Even against the Church because they taught things there that were against the Church, even at BYU. I think this had to do with a few of Dad’s friends who were into rare books and later taught a slightly different history than the one they knew well at the Y. When I knew Gene England and he was working on the MMM Massacre I was talking to grandpa and we exchanged notes not shared with the class.
They were and are fanatics. The brand of Mormonism they practice is sometimes fanatical, sometimes not. Mom is my hedge against death at the hands of ignoramuses. I don't get supplies because of temporary chaos in California, I might really die. It's considered a gift as long as nothing is sent directly to me.
A group came through who all had an infection and they wanted them for a longitudinal study, which confused the pharmacist. When they found out that I wasn't getting my sleep meds they said that none of them would pay for their meds until mine went through.
Nearly all of the patients were moved off my level or went home in protest and I didn't. I thought it sad and even offensive. That allowed me to stay long enough to finish my treatment.
I can become deleterious if I don't sleep for a few weeks and after a few months of unremitting insomnia the part of my brain that controls my heart will lose the capacity to do so. It is a horrible way to die. My Irish Grandmother knew what I had--she was born in 1885 and knew a lot about nursing people with what I had.
She was the oldest of 10 and when the younger ones were older he said that she ought to leave her boys with the family and make a life for both them and herself. There were other issues but Laura denies them.
Arguing with her or pitting us against one another will be counter productive and I will lose--the game is already rigged that way.
Anon-a-mouse
The reference to "he" below was Paddy Mc Cool. Patron saint, clan leader of all abandoned or orphaned children as he had been. My grandmother's father.
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