After spending half a year working at the Center for Media Justice and basically deepening my distaste for the media to the point where saying FOX out loud is enough to make me projectile vomit down the nearest news anchor's open mouth, I have been reduced to scanning the headlines via Yahoo and watching CNN on the treadmill at the gym. I figure I can learn all of what I need to know in terms of distorted media biased issues reporting from one of those sources, in small spurts, without risking nausea or a brain tumor.
Today, though, I was reading an article on Yahoo that talked about the upcoming speech that Obama is planning to a joint session of Congress. First of all, joint sessions of Congress are extremely rare occurrences. The only time they happen regularly is during the State of the Union. Otherwise, they are generally reserved for things like announcing a formal declaration of war, the end of a war, the death of a someone of near God-like stature, or the annual Congress Christmas Party and Intern Rubdown.
In the aforementioned article, it happened to say, punnily, that one of the opposition points of the conservative lobby and GOPers is that they are worried about the health of private health insurance companies.
Excuse me? The HEALTH of private health insurance companies? Did United Healthcare come down with tuberculosis, AIDS, or malaria and I missed it? No? Until then shut the fuck up talking to me about some goddamn entity that exists on paper as having any health needs whatsoever. I have health needs...I need to be healthy; I need to be able to get sick and not have to worry about dying from a heart attack when I get the doctor bill; and I need to not have to decide whether or not I should spend money on electricity or Zoloft.
Health of health insurance companies. Nigga please.
This is the one time in all my life that I have heard Democrats advocating for a full on market system that will force private companies to play by the rules of capitalism by competing with a new and larger player that will force bloated, vampiric, profit mongering private health insurers to stop price gouging, price setting, and profiting from the illness, death, and misery of people and start looking at ways to keep people healthy, reduce costs and provide the most effective treatment for the lowest price. That is how the fuck you stay in business in any other damn industry...hey health care...suck my dick...I don't give a shit about the CEO of United Heath care raking in a salary of $124.8 million (and yes kiddies that is what former United Health Group CEO Bill McGuire made in 2005).
This is also the first time I have ever heard Republicans talk about protecting the market from competition. Excuse me...is Rush Limbaugh back on those pills? Is Trent Lott back to advocating for the return of the Dixiecrats? Is someone up in the Senate Office building smoking crack rock? I find it highly amusing the inviolate free market economy beliefs of Republicans are about as deeply held and inviolable as 13 year old boy at Neverland Ranch.
There is no health care reform without a public option. Period. Without a public option the health care reform becomes a minor tweak of the health care system where teeny changes will be made, that will save money in the short term, will not address the fundamental underlying problems with the system, will result in bloated health care premiums over the long term, and will inevitably lead to a return to the status quo or worse...the collapse of the U.S. economy under the burden of health care costs. States are already seeing this happen, for example, in Minnesota, the majority of every new tax dollar raised goes to offset state health care costs. When all of our money is going to pay for bloated programs that do not work and to premiums and systems that create poor care and massive numbers of underinsured or uninsured, why the hell wouldn't we do anything and everything possible to address the real issue: CREATING A HEALTH CARE PROGRAM AND SYSTEM ACCESSIBLE TO EVERYONE, AFFORDABLE TO EVERYONE, and SOLVENT!
Anticipating Obama's speech to Congress, I can feel the spirit of my Big Mama sitting with me. I am about to pull on my house coat, lube up my slippers, chew on some tobacco, and cut a switch. I am going to sit in the gallery in Congress, spitting in to my chaw bucket, and slappin' my switch menacingly on the bench...staring down at Obama and daring his narrow black ass to back off a public option. And the minute some cock-eyed, short dicked, Cadillac insurance carrying Republican member of Congress (or Blue Dog Democrat for that matter) opens his or her mouth to as much as yawn during or after the speech, I am going to lay into their asses like their Mama's should have and scream at the top of my lungs, "Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You...You Don't Like A Public Option? Then YOU PUT THE 40,000,000 uninsured on YOUR health care plan."
Don't worry GOPers and Blue Dogs...the ass whoopin' you got comin' is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.
No it ain't. Bend over and take it bitches. Cuz you have earned this whoopin', and I hope Obama tears your fat asses up.
Any way I can help in this cause?...let me know.
ReplyDeleteI think the best thing to do, right now, is to make those phone calls and write letters to your federal legislators.
ReplyDeleteDamned hippies!
ReplyDeleteCan I Get A WOOT! WOOT! You tell them S.O.Bs. I'm wit' ya. Motha Puckers!
ReplyDeleteGracie: Pass me the patchouli, girl.
ReplyDeleteJames: We funna have us a riot up in this piece.
I can't watch CNN for more than five minutes without having a cataleptic fit. Don't even try me on Faux Spews.
ReplyDeleteThe entire health "industry", institutionally, is one giant rip off... Obama cut a deal with the drug companies to shave $8 billion dollars a year off their pricing, in return for not opposing healthcare reform, and spending a few million on ads supporting it.
In return, the other $342 billion a *year* they make in profit is safe from further "threats". What a deal! For them!
Why are we sitting here desperately hoping the god damn yellow bellied Democrats will squeak some kind of lame ass, watered-down "public option" into what my local representative is now deliberately calling "health insurance reform" (because it doesn't touch anything else about the system), when what we all want is Canadian style SINGLE PAYER healthcare. Polls show that 40% of the public supports single-payer (even though it has been declared "off the table" and utterly demonized and denigrated and infeasible), and that this half-assed "public option" only moves the numbers up by 5%? (think those are Zogby numbers, not sure at this point)
I mean, god damn, wouldn't you think that it was worth going for the gold ring, rather than the brass one, given how small a difference that is?!?
Seriously, look at it this way: even with the public option (whatever it looks like), how many of us are really going to feel any better about the prognosis we'd face, fiscal and physical, if we get sick?
Let's remember: Federal employees have a choice of the "Cadillac" health care plan that Congress has available to it - and 60% of them still choose to entrust their lives to Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
Check out what Physicians for a National Health Program has to say about covering everyone the same way the Federal Employee Health Benefits Plan does.
http://www.pnhp.org/change/Why-FEHBP-Reform-Wont-Work.pdf
I also have to say that my Dad was a California state employee, with a generous health care plan, and he still wound up being dumped into an understaffed nursing home facility, almost straight out of Intensive Care, twice, and, flat out, I believe that Blue Shield's cost-containment efforts killed him (six weeks after he went into the ICU the first time last fall).
Dude, Brandon, I hope you can see that we are being played, big-time - fuck this public option bullshit, man, yo mamma oughta be up in the gallery with a whoopin' stick, giving Obama the evil eye and demanding he support *REAL* health CARE reform: single-payer.
This is classic diversionary politics - get all us radicals and progressives and liberals all worked into a lather over some bullshit half-assed compromise, and keep us off the street and from demanding what we really want, and NEED.
Fuck this, I'm fed up, this public option won't do shit for me as a self-employed individual. Where the FUCK am I (or most other self-employed Americans) going to come up with over $1k a month?!? Plus deductibles and co-pays?!?
Sen. Ron Wyden's health plan
Plan: Blue Cross and Blue Shield standard family plan
Cost: $1,120.47 a month
Wyden's share: $356.59 a month (up $42.12 from 2008)
Annual deductible: $300 per member or $600 per family
Routine physical: $20 for doctor, screening tests fully covered*
Well-baby care for the twins: fully covered*
*with preferred providers
http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2009/08/when_oregon_sen_ron_wyden.html
Dude, seriously, *THIS* is what we're arguing for? The right to be forced to cough up $13,500 a month for health "insurance" to a private company whose sole goal is to turn as large a profit as it can by denying us access to healthcare(or, alternatively, to a federal bureaucrat) and still risk going broke as a result?!?
Fuck that. FUCK THAT. The Democrats can take their "public option" and shove it where the sun don't shine, IMHO.
Hey Thomas Love:
ReplyDeleteI am 100% behind you. I am 100% for a single payer health care system. This, though, is one of those moments that I have made a decision to continue pushing for single payer but to face the reality of what is about to break off up in Congress. And in Congress, single payer is off the table.
Frankly, I would rather have no health care reform bill pass and watch the entire thing implode. And though I believe incremental change never changes anything, I am wishing and prayer and dreaming that once the public sees that not even a public option is the answer...that only single payer universal is the answer...that the resulting outcry will force the hands of politicians sucking on the tit of the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies.
I am with you Thomas. Absolutely. The problem is that if Obama crashes and burns on this health care reform...he is fucked.
Well, yes and no - Clinton's experience is instructive. It took him a couple of years to recover from his own half-assed healthcare reform debacle, but he eventually managed it. ... and methinks that Obama's personality is such that he'll be able to keep his dick in his pants and not wind up under impeachment for perjury and thus have the wind taken out of his sails.
ReplyDelete... but we, as a society, will be fucked until he's managed to recover from the debacle. We need Obama to be effective and to have political capital, to have any hope of keeping the Republicans and Blue Dogs in check, and for even minor change in a positive direction.
Again, though, that's the pragmatist in me speaking... the idealist says that we're fucked either way, the planet doesn't have time for this bullshit... the idealist says that if Obama and the Democrats demonstrate their utter inability to disentangle themselves from their vested interest in preserving the status quo and not rocking the boat (and thus preserving their corporate funding stream), then the political space for something much more progressive, grassroots, and citizen oriented will be created.
Here's a California headline: HMO claims-rejection rates trigger state investigation
The data? They *REJECT* one out of ever FIVE claims. 20%! Again - *THIS* is what we're fighting for?
"Six of the state's largest insurers rejected 45.7 million claims for medical care, or 22% of all claims, from 2002 to June 30, 2009, according to the California Nurses Assn.'s analysis of data submitted to regulators by the companies."
"The rejection rates ranged from a high of 39.6% for PacifiCare to 6.5% for Aetna for the first half of 2009. Cigna denied 33%, and Health Net 30%.
Anthem Blue Cross, the state's largest for-profit health plan, and Kaiser, the state's largest nonprofit plan, each rejected 28% of claims."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-insure4-2009sep04,0,4654309,full.story
FUCK THESE BASTARDS. FUCK THEM. 40% of all claims filed rejected? How many car insurance companies would stay in business if they pulled that shit? $13,500 a year for a 1 in 4 chance that my claim won't be accepted?!?
We *loves* the CNA. They endorsed Nader in 2000. They get it. They give a shit. They actually dug this stuff up when no one knew about it.
We *hates* *hates* *hates* the insurance companies with a passion second only to our loathing for the cigarette companies that destroyed my lungs, enslaved my parents, trashed the house I grew up in, and nearly killed them by burning down their house.
I love you THomas. I love you I love you I love you. YEs I do.
ReplyDeleteBrandon,
ReplyDeleteI don't think they will suck your dick since It's a pre-existing condition.
OMG Yuval. You have just won the One Liner of the Week Award.
ReplyDelete