I can’t wait to see this new movie, which is opening this week in several cities. Beginning in 1987, this very real plague began to spread in earnest. And the medical establishment and the government were painfully slow to respond.
More info here.
Tag Archives: healthcare
Obviously constitutional
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Charles Fried, Solicitor General in the Reagan Administration has this to say about the constitutionality of the health insurance reform legislation:
Fried, now a Beneficial Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, told the committee in his opening statement that the commerce clause of the Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate, which is precisely what the law signed by President Barack Obama does.
“To my mind, that is the end of the story,” Fried said. “The mandate is a rule. More accurately, it is part of the system of rules by which commerce is to be governed.”
Good enough for me.
Related articles
- Reagan Solicitor General Says Health Care Is Constitutional (VIDEO) (alternet.org)
- Charles Fried tells the GOP what it doesn’t want to hear (washingtonmonthly.com)
Healthcare reform v. the deficit
The Republicans have vowed to repeal healthcare reform. They have also vowed to reduce the deficit. Their problem? Repealing healthcare reform will increase the deficit by $300 Billion.
The nonpartisan budget scorekeepers in Congress said on Thursday that the Republican plan to repeal President Obama’s health care law would add $230 billion to federal budget deficits over the next decade, intensifying the first legislative fight of the new session and highlighting the challenge Republicans face in pursuing their agenda.
The new House speaker, John A. Boehner, flatly rejected the report, saying it was based largely on chicanery by Democrats.
Related articles
- UPDATE 6-U.S. Republican bid to scrap healthcare hits snag (reuters.com)
- You: Cost of healthcare repeal put at $230 billion (latimes.com)
Finally! Affordable Lasik surgery
Not only is it affordable (at $99.95), you can do it yourself at home.
Note: This is not an endorsement and if you are tempted to take this seriously you might want to read this.
NYT on the Singularity (updated)
The New York Times has published a story outlining the current state of the Singularity and thinking about the Singularity. Worth a read.
Oh, here, from the article, is a short-hand description of the Singularity in case you are unfamiliar with the term in this context.
[The Singularity is] a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.
At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past.
Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process. For those who haven’t noticed, the Valley’s most-celebrated company — Google — works daily on building a giant brain that harnesses the thinking power of humans in order to surpass the thinking power of humans.
Update: If you read the article, you might also enjoy this reaction by Anne Laurie over on Balloon Juice.
Political video of the day
Evil assumes the shape of a sandwich
Have you seen the ads for the new KFC chicken “sandwich”? Note that I deploy the word “sandwich” in quotes. Why? Turns out that this “sandwich” uses fried chicken for the bread. How sick can a culture get? This product is two pieces of fried chicken pocketing cheese and bacon. No lie. It is called the “double-down sandwish.” KFC’s site markets this abomination using the phrase “unthink” which is an understatement.
When I see a cultural abomination like this, I turn to the finest critic of the decline of American civilization: Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle for guidance. He latest column does not disappoint.
… when I sit back, sip my scotch and scan the newswires for sundry effluvia indicative of our culture’s joyful hellbound deathspin, the realization soon dawns that I can think of few gigs more nightmare-inducingly, soul-deadeningly horrible than being an executive for garbage food megacorp.
That is to say, a VP for McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Burger King or their ilk, someone who sits around all day trying to discover new ways to manipulate, coerce, poison, and otherwise flagrantly kill millions of humans worldwide by convincing them to eat mass-produced, industrial feedlot, chemical-blasted garbage you should not feed to your dog unless you totally hate him and want him to get heart disease and die.
***
Did you notice? How in one pseudo-food item, you are consuming not one, not two, but the mutated, chemically injected flesh/byproducts of fully three different distended, liquefied, industrially tortured creatures? Feel the love, pitiable animal kingdom.
Read the whole essay. Save your life. Save your loved ones. Save some helpless industrial farmed animals.
How far is this:
from this?:
What victory looks like
Let’s see the Republicans run on repeal against this sort of advertising.
Yes we can vs. no you can’t
The ultimate debate between Obama and Boehner.
Political quote of the day
The Republicans fought long and hard for people’s right to wait three hours in an emergency room for someone to take their blood pressure, and they went down to defeat, and now they should stop and rethink their Waterloo strategy. The picture of the grinning GOP congressmen holding “Kill the Bill” posters was not an attractive one. Those guys all get excellent hrothgar from the government, at bargain prices. If you choke on your shoe during a speech in the House of Representatives, you’ll be whisked away to Walter Reed, and specialists will extract your hoof from your mouth and your head from your colon and clean you up and all for a tiny annual premium. It does not behoove men who are enjoying a huge pork sandwich to deny a few pork rinds to others and to grin in the process.
* * *
Now Sen. McCain says there will be no further cooperation with the administration. OK then. Thanks for clearing that up. Now that bipartisanship has been buried for good, Democrats can get about the business of running the government, which is their duty as the majority party, and let the Republicans sulk in their rooms and work on their Facebook updates. They’ve made it clear that if Mr. Obama suddenly decided to come out in favor of Mother’s Day, they would fight against it as a ruthless exercise of federal power and a violation of due process. Fine. Talk to the hand.
GOP amendment to healthcare reform
Well, the GOP is certainly ready to deal with the big issues. For example, one of the proposed amendment to be pushed by the Republicans in the Senate is to ban viagra for sex offenders.
Political quote of the day
This is a big fucking deal.
– Vice President Joe Biden, referring to the passage of healthcare insurance reform. And he is right.
How healthcare reform affects you
Bye-bye Rush
Rush Limbaugh said he would leave the country healthcare reform passed.
Click here to send him a bon voyage card.
Finally
Healthcare reform has passed.
Reactions:
This is, of course, a political victory for President Obama, and a triumph for Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker. But it is also a victory for America’s soul. In the end, a vicious, unprincipled fear offensive failed to block reform. This time, fear struck out.
Imagine the narrative shift if this bill is passed. Obama will not have imposed this monstrosity on the country from on high; he will have ground it through the bloggers, and the pundits will declare a resurrection. The narrative will be about his persistence and his grit, rather than his near-divinity and his authority. And suddenly it will appear — lo! — as if this lone figure has not just rescued the US economy from the abyss, but also passed the biggest piece of social legislation in decades.
There is only one story better than Icarus falling to earth; and it’s Icarus getting back up and putting on some shades.
For now, the significance of the vote is moving the United States FROM a system in which people can assume they will have health coverage IF they are old enough (Medicare), poor enough (Medicaid), fortunate enough (working for an employer that offers coverage, or able themselves to bear expenses), or in some other way specially positioned (veterans; elected officials)… TOWARD a system in which people can assume they will have health-care coverage. Period.
Republicans enjoy making fun of Nancy Pelosi, but the House Speaker kicked their butts on health reform. Perhaps it is time to revisit the always misguided notion that the San Francisco Democrat is some sort of light weight. She is not only the first woman Speaker, but she is well on her way to being remembered as one of the toughest. Even when President Barack Obama wavered, after Senate Democrats recently lost their super majority with the GOP victory in Massachusetts, Pelosi pushed him to stay on target for comprehensive health reform.
Somehow, holding only the White House plus big majorities in the House and Senate after an epic 2008 victory in which Communism (”overwhelming majority of American voters”) defeated America, the Fascists have “passed their health care reform legislation” using “Chicago mob rules” known as “popularly elected legislators passing laws.” NOBAMA, EVER. And now Nancy Pelosi and her Klingon devil leader, Barack Hitler Obama, will speak to a grateful nation!
John Boehner:
What I hope is that the Democrats take a beating at the ballot boxand rethink their contempt for those mouth-breathing illiterates in the electorate. I hope Obama gets his wish to be a one-term president who passed health care. Not because I think I will like his opponent–I very much doubt that I will support much of anything Obama’s opponent says. But because politicians shouldn’t feel that the best route to electoral success is to lie to the voters, and then ignore them.
I’ve never been prouder to be a Republican. The party’s Congressional leaders have fought this battle to the end on behalf of the American people–with intelligence, toughness, persistence and good humor. The contrast between the parties has never been starker than in today’s debate. If any intelligent Democrats were watching–there must be some left–they had to be embarrassed for their party.
More prosaically, it’s also unaffordable. That’s why one of the first things that middle-rank powers abandon once they go down this road is a global military capability. If you take the view that the U.S. is an imperialist aggressor, congratulations: You can cease worrying. But, if you think that America has been the ultimate guarantor of the post-war global order, it’s less cheery. Five years from now, just as in Canada and Europe two generations ago, we’ll be getting used to announcements of defense cuts to prop up the unsustainable costs of big government at home. And, as the superpower retrenches, America’s enemies will be quick to scent opportunity.
Longer wait times, fewer doctors, more bureaucracy, massive IRS expansion, explosive debt, the end of the Pax Americana, and global Armageddon. Must try to look on the bright side . . .
Now that it’s done, Barack Obama will go down in history as one of America’s finest presidents. It’s always possible of course that, like LBJ, he’ll get involved in some unrelated fiasco that mars his reputation. But fundamentally, he’s reshaped the policy landscape in a way that no progressive politician has done in decades.