Tag Archives: healthcare

Past time for Obama to fight

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Andrew Sullivan argues that President Obama must directly take on the paranoid claims of the right and, in doing so, he must fight with every tool at a President’s disposal. And, all of us who supported the President must again to so, even if we are not getting everything we want. Read the entire essay, but here is an excerpt:

The seismic events of the last few days ends, in some respects, the phony war of the first year of Obama’s presidency. As is the case in truly fracturing democracies, the opposition simply does not and cannot accept the fact that it is out of power. The incoherence of the opposition to Obama – that he is both Jimmy Carter and Adolf Hitler, as Stephen Colbert pointed out last night – reveals the irrationality of the hate. It began immediately on the FNC/RNC right. And the ferocity of the campaign against Obama, the sheer dickishness of the GOP and its acolytes, the total oppositionism to everything he has done and indeed anything he might do… suggests that any hope for some kind of cooperation from this rump is impossible.

***

This is about more than health reform and we have to see it in that context. This is about a cynical nihilist attempt to break this presidency before it has had a chance to do what we elected it to do by a landslide vote. It is an attempt to destroy a majority’s morale, to break a president’s foreign policy autonomy, to prevent engagement in the Middle East peace process, to stop action on climate change, to restore torture, to increase tensions with the Muslim world, to launch a war on Iran. We cannot delude ourselves that if Obama fails, this is not the alternative. It is.

And we have to re-engage as powerfully as we did in the campaign to fight back against these now emboldened forces of reaction. I think this is true not just for the sake of the country but also for the sake of the GOP. The nihilist obstructionism and rhetoric they have embraced makes constitutional democracy close to impossible. Their total lack of any workable alternatives to dire problems is a form of degeneracy we have to avoid empowering.

So fight, Mr President.

Goldman Sachs gets flu vaccine. Oh really?

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More from Maureen Dowd in today’s New York Times:

In an interview with The Sunday Times of London, the cocky chief of Goldman Sachs said he understands that a lot of people are “mad and bent out of shape” at blood-sucking banks.

“I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer,” Lloyd Blankfein, the C.E.O., told the reporter John Arlidge.

But the little people who are boiling simply don’t understand. And Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who unforgettably labeled Goldman “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” doesn’t understand.

Banks, Blankfein explained, are really serving the greater good.

“We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital,” he said. “Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle. We have a social purpose.”

When Arlidge asked whether it’s possible to make too much money, whether Goldman will ignore the people howling at the moon with rage and go on raking it in, getting richer than God, Blankfein grinned impishly and said he was “doing God’s work.”

A fear epidemic stalks America

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I keep hearing more and more seemingly rationale people announce that neither they nor their children are going to be vaccinated. They will not be vaccinated against swine flu, nor will they take any other vaccinations.

If this were simple craziness, it would be fine. But the fact of the matter is that those who refuse vaccinations hurt not only themselves, but all of us.

Amy Wallace, writing in this month’s issue of Wired, outlines the damage done by vaccine deniers. It is a fascinating article and well worth a full read. Excerpt:

Consider: In certain parts of the US, vaccination rates have dropped so low that occurrences of some children’s diseases are approaching pre-vaccine levels for the first time ever. And the number of people who choose not to vaccinate their children (so-called philosophical exemptions are available in about 20 states, including Pennsylvania, Texas, and much of the West) continues to rise. In states where such opting out is allowed, 2.6 percent of parents did so last year, up from 1 percent in 1991, according to the CDC. In some communities, like California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco, non-vaccination rates are approaching 6 percent (counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth).

That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.

One data point for healthcare insurance reform

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Employee healthcare insurance premiums for small business in 2010 are increasing approximately 15% to $5,500 per employee.

Some people who oppose reform complain that it would be too expensive, as if healthcare insurance cost isn’t skyrocketing with the existing patchwork system. Healthcare insurance premiums are growing extremely rapidly and is too expensive for many small businesses. These are the businesses where most job growth occurs. The current course is unsustainable. Some form of reform is needed.

Political quote of the day: Chuck Hagel

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As some Republican senators have said publicly — that if we kill Obama on this, and we destroy this, and we defeat his, that will drive a stake through his political heart on this administration. I just find that about as irresponsible of a thing as I can think of.

–Former Republican Senator from Nebraska, Chuck Hagel, speaking at the University of Michigan.  Full speech below.

Don’t bogart that joint, dude (updated)

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The Obama administration has announced that Federal prosecutors will no longer go after medical marijuana users or distributors. Finally, some action to reflect the will of the voters.

People who use marijuana for medical purposes and those who distribute it should not face federal prosecution, provided they act according to state law, the Justice Department said on Monday in a directive with far-reaching political and legal implications.

Meanwhile, the City of Los Angeles is looking to begin a big crackdown on distributors.

Update: And yesterday, a judge ruled that the City of Los Angeles could not impose a moratorium on new marijuana shops. And here is the full-text of the DOJ Memorandum.

Political quote of the day

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It’s smoke and mirrors. It’s bogus. And it’s all too familiar. Every time we get close to passing reform, the insurance companies produce these phony studies as a prescription and say, “Take one of these, and call us in a decade.” Well, not this time.

– President Obama, in his Saturday radio address, taking the insurance companies head-on. He also announced that he is supporting the repeal of the exemption from anti-trust laws that insurance companies now enjoy.

Healthcare quote of the day

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A physician takes an oath to put his patient’s interests ahead of his own. A corporation is legally bound to put its shareholders’ interests first. And this is part of the inherent conflict between health care as a business, part of our economy, and health care as a public good and part of our society. Health care has become a growth industry. That means higher health care bills. That means more and more middle class people cannot afford health care in this country.

- Maggie Mahar, author of the book Money-Driven Medicine, appearing in the documentary film of the same name (shown on the PBS television program Bill Moyers Journal, 2009-08-28). (via Quote of the Day mailing list)