Saturday, August 22
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It’s all about health care reform Diggz, Michelle, and Ryan talk to Ryan’s friend Dan, and Diggz friend Dave for a two-hour, non-stop, wacky, zany, exciting in-depth discussion about health care. Hold on to your sides folks, this is a rib splitter.
UStream Video feed:
Audio Only:
The French don’t consider their system socialized. In fact, they detest socialized medicine. For the French, that’s the British, that’s the Canadians. It’s not the French system. But unlike in Britain and Canada, there are no waiting lists to get elective surgery or see a specialist.
In France, the sicker you are, the more coverage you get. For people with one of 30 long-term and expensive illnesses — such as diabetes, mental illness and cancer — the government picks up 100 percent of their health care costs, including surgeries, therapies and drugs.
It’s expensive to provide this kind of health care and social support. France’s health care system is one of the most expensive in the world, but it is still not as expensive as the U.S. system, which is the world’s most costly. The United States spends about twice as much as France on health care. In 2005, U.S. spending came to $6,400 per person. In France, it was $3,300.
Yeah….but it’s still France.
I’ve been spending a lot of time criticizing the critics of health care insurance reform lately and even dismissed a long time friend over his callous attitude towards a very sensitive topic.
Last night I found myself actually saying things like “I’m not really this liberal.” And I’m not…fiscally I’ve typically sided much more with conservatives than democrats (it’s the religious right I tend to disagree with most). I donate to the CATO institute. I’ve read everything Ayn Rand’s ever written, and even met my (now ex) wife at an Ayn Rand conference.
I welcome debate, when it’s debate…informed, reasoned…even passionate. But when debate gets drowned out by noise, lies, fear mongering and screams, I have no tolerance. I hear Palin scream “death panels” and I feel obligated to point as big of a digital finger as I can at her and scream back, “MORON!”.
But there are reasonable arguments against the proposed health care reform. Personally I’d like to see a system that greatly reduces the financial incentives for insurance and drug companies to prey on sick people. I’d like a system that can’t exclude anyone and doesn’t drop you in the event a serious illness. Basically I want a system like our roads, our fire departments, or our public parks: safe, efficient, affordable and always there. Unfortunately it doesn’t sound like that’s what we’re getting.
According to Bob Herbert, “With the public pretty well confused about what is going on, we’re headed — at best — toward changes that will result in a lot more people getting covered, but that will not control exploding health care costs and will leave industry leaders feeling like they’vehit the jackpot.”
Read his whole not-so-happy column here: Op-Ed Columnist – This Is Reform? – NYTimes.com.
RT from my friend Dave @Grobleski …
For the second day in a row, thousands of people lined up for free dental, medical and vision services in South Los Angeles courtesy of a nonprofit group that provides mobile health care for the rural poor.
Remote Area Medical set up for eight days of care at the Forum in L.A. The enormous response to the free care was a stark contrast to recent videos of Glenn Beck-watching Tea Baggers screaming at town hall meetings in opposition to proposed health insurance reform.
Thousands Line Up for Promise of Free Health Care – NYTimes.com.
I had a little scare today. Last night I was feeling a little run down after work. I had trouble sleeping but when I finally did fall asleep I woke up and couldn’t breathe. This wasn’t the first time, after my bout with bronchitis earlier this year the doc at the walk-in clinic told me I might have asthma and he referred me to a specialist.
Problem is, I don’t have health insurance.
So what do you do when you wake up and can’t breathe? I headed to the emergency room, with a quick side trip to the ATM to get out some cash. I pulled out $600, my daily max.
There are 4000 asthma-related deaths every year in the United States, many of them uninsured (or under-insured) children. Asthma is the most common chronic disease among children. Asthma is treatable, but the most common treatment (inhaled corticosteroids) costs over $100 per month, which is way beyond what many families can afford.
4000 preventable deaths a year…more than all the people who died on September 11th. EVERY YEAR.
Except they aren’t being killed by foreign terrorists, it’s something much more sinister. Our own failed health care system is just letting them die.
This is why I support health insurance reform. Not because I think it’s going fix everything that’s wrong, but we have to do something. Because I know that there’s not always an extra $600 in my account. What if the bill was $4000? or $40,000? Is that when I just become another death statistic?
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, right?
PEOPLE….IT’S THE FIRST ONE!!!!!!
http://www.whitehouse.gov/health-insurance-consumer-protections/
It’s getting increasingly difficult for me to have any respect for anyone who doesn’t support universal health care for all. We are the richest country in the history of the world, and yet we do not take care of our own sick citizens.
The United States is the only developed nation that does not have a comprehensive national health care plan for all its citizens.
Who are these people that hate health care? Why do they hate America so much? Why do they want to continue in a system that gives financial incentives to KEEP PEOPLE SICK?
Sarah Palin said (in a Facebook posting) that Obama’s proposed health plan “is evil” and would create a “death panel” that would deny care to the neediest Americans. She’s like a character out of a Oliver Stone movie.
Rush Limbagh recently said the proposed health care logo was similar to a Nazi symbol. Nice one, you bloated pill popping prick.
The web site “Tea Party Patriots” circulated instructions to anti-health fanatics to attend Obama Town hall meetings and “Yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early. Get him off his prepared script and agenda,” the memo continued. “Stand up and shout and sit right back down.”
The sad part is that Fox is reporting all of this like it is news. If you watch Fox regularly as a source for your news, you need to get your head checked out.
But then again, I don’t think any health insurance plan covers ignorance.
Now I’ll go back to tea-bagging your mom.
NYT: Health debate turns hostile at meetings – The New York Times- msnbc.com.
I was having dinner at my friend Dave’s house and caught this segment that Rachel Maddow did exposing men and money who represent themselves as “average Americans”.
“Maddow: This is what these groups do. They’re experts at fake grass roots campaigns that promote corporate interests. Americans for Prosperity is the group that ginned up anti-stimulus rallies earlier this year. They also organized what they called the “Hot Air Tour” to campaign against the whole idea of global warming. They were the ones who sent Joe the Plumber around the country to rail against the Employee Free Choice Act, which is pro-labor legislation.
This oil industry and Republican operative billionaires club is according to the Republican party spokesman today, just average middle class Americans. Just regular American folks sitting around the kitchen table thinking about whether they can get away with saying that the government, continuing its long standing policy of encouraging living wills, is really a secret plot to kill old people.
One other thing about Americans for Prosperity, their most visible spokesman, is a man named Tim Phillips. He is the President of the organization and we’ve asked him to come on the show to talk with us about the group. Tim Phillips got his start in fake grass roots with a firm called Century Strategies, run by Ralph Reed. Century Strategies is famous for having duped Christian groups into lobbying for energy deregulation. You know, like the Bible said.
They were doing that at the behest of Century Strategies’ client, Enron. Tim Phillips and Ralph Reed were later made even more famous in the Jack Abramoff scandal, for duping Christian groups into lobbying against gambling. But only in areas where these guys happened to have competing gambling interests as clients.
These guys are the pros. This is an industry. Americans are showing up at these events to shout down the discussion, to chase their Congressmen, and they are enraged. And they’re enraged at least in part because they’re being riled up by over the top, fabricated conspiracy theories about health care. And they’re being directed and orchestrated by the corporate interests that do this for a living and do it very well.
RecessRally.com is not some organic outgrowth of American anger. This is how corporate America creates the illusion of a grass roots movement to support their own interests. This is what they do. They are professionals. This is an industry.
To talk about these town hall events as some organic outpouring of average American folks who have concerns about health care is to be willfully blind to what is really going on, which is professional P.R. operatives generating exploitative, manufactured, strategically deployed outrage in order to line their own pocket.
These P.R. spin misters get paid a lot of money for doing it. The corporations they work for get to kill legislation that would hurt their profits. And the real people who they launch into these town hall settings after they’re told that health care reform is a secret commie plot to kill old people and to mandate sex changes, those real people get more, and more, and more and more angry, and more, and more, and more alienated, and ultimately they get left, like the rest of us, with a health care system that is broken and doesn’t work in the interest of the American people, but does work in the interest of the corporations that profit from the way the system is now.
This is professional, corporate funded Republican staffed P.R., and it should be reported as such.”
Very informative and enlightening blog that takes the majority of the right-wing “conservative” criticisms (that are funded by the insurance lobby) and compares them to the actual wording of the current health care proposals before congress. Not an easy read but well worth it…
Please Cut the Crap!: Deconstructing the Right Wing Lies on the Health Insurance Bill — Pages 1-500.
