As I write this, rioters are storming the streets of Tehran, doing battle with the armed storm troopers of their religious dictatorship. Brave people, those protesters. I admire them. Not so long ago, here on American soil, we made folks like that into heros, calling them Minute Men and such. Brave people, mostly young, idealistic, and willing to risk life and limb to fight for freedom.
But as the battle unfolds, I can’t help but feel that it is hopeless, that cruelty and power, and vote manipulation and religious fanaticism, will win out, for now. I guess I’ve been in a hopeful mood, with Obama getting elected and working on health care, saying he’ll wind things up in Iraq, really doing something about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, etc. Now I am asking myself why I ever thought there would be anything like a fair election in Iran. The religious zealots are in ultimate control, they know it, and they aren’t going to give it up.
Ahmadinejad is their point man, attack dog, lightning rod. The Iranian people can, most of the time, largely be distracted from their broad dissatisfactions—the evidence of which is playing out on street corners in Tehran at this moment—by constantly being refocused on the bugaboo Satans their leaders have created, most notably Israel and the United States. By denying the Holocaust and calling for the destruction of Israel Ahmadinejad wins points among the militant and fanatical elements across the Middle East, inflaming them to take Iranian money, build bombs, blow themselves up, and generally make whatever trouble they can while, by the way, killing all the Jews they can, among others. So then, like many other dictatorial leaders across the Middle East (Israel is the only thing approaching a genuine democracy, although there are those who would even argue that), the speeches and the fixed, fake elections help to squelch any outcry about poverty, economic stagnation, poor schooling, poor health care, heavy-handed repression, and last but not least, the subjugation of women.
So in the end the Ayatollah needs Ahmadinejad. I’m not easily given to hate, but I do hate the bigmouth troublemaker for what he says, what he is, and what he represents. Because he is the poster boy for all that is wrong in the Middle East among those who oppose Israel. On the world stage now, he epitomizes the arrogance, the hate, the unwillingness to listen to reason, the eagerness to ignore history, the clinging to some distorted version of religion that encourages the senseless murder of innocents and the pointless hatred of nations.
One small step up from Nazism only because of the absence of a powerful, efficient and effective machine of mass death, this whole philosophy represented and promoted by Ahmadinejad and others like him is the reason the Middle East stays stuck, represents the worst of human nature, and poses a threat, ultimately, to us all. Iran is moving quickly toward having useable (I think the experts say “deliverable”) nuclear weapons. When they have those, even the machine of mass death—or at least some of its most deadly tools--will be in place.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
CHENEY AS ATTACK DOG
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has assumed the role of the new Republican attack dog. I’m glad he’s around to remind us of what the Republican Party really stands for. First and foremost, it stands for torture. Let’s face it, some spinners can split hairs, but waterboarding and other stuff they did was torture and we all know it. Further, Cheney’s Republican Party promotes such extreme executive power that a President can put people in captivity indefinitely, often with little more justification than the notion, often based on false, flimsy or unreliable evidence that they might be dangerous. You might recall that this kind of despotic power that was popular among medieval kings who could throw anyone who rubbed them the wrong way into a dungeon—forever. History teaches us that this is why we had the Magna Carta, why representative government emerged in enlightened societies, and why countries like the Good Old U.S.A. treasure our democracies and their rights and freedoms. Further, Cheney’s Republican Party stands for a kind of America that is reviled around the world for an arrogant, idiotic, isolating and ineffective foreign policy. So thanks Dick, you can cite 9/11 as much as you want, cry wolf all you can, smear the “new America” President Obama is creating all you want. Some Americans may have a short memory, it’s true, but most of us remember voting for Barack Obama, and we remember why we did. You see, Dick, that “new America” we’ll have during the Obama era, that’s the old America we loved and cherished before you and that yo-yo from Texas came along.
WE NEED HEALTH CARE, NOT HEALTH INSURANCE
I’ve noticed that there is often confusion between “health care” and “health care insurance” in the current common lexicon. In today’s world the two phrases have become, sadly, almost synonymous. Well let me clarify, “health care” is treatment that saves lives and helps people get better when they are ill or injured. “Health care insurance” is a scam that has been perpetrated against the American people. Now my last statement is a pretty controversial one, but I urge you to keep reading allow me the opportunity to justify it in a few paragraphs.
The foundation of health care insurance, the basic economic model upon which it is based, is flawed. It isn’t flawed in terms of making money, it does that, perhaps too well. However, it IS quite deficient in terms of paying for care to make people better. First, insurance companies only make money by figuring out how to avoid providing people with the care they need, after all, care costs money. Second, insurance companies have an army of agents, customer service people, healthcare gatekeepers, and executives all of whom have to be paid. A whole bureaucracy including fat cats with multimillion-dollar salaries, and even stockholders who expect dividends—all of this paid for with the money we think is going toward paying for our healthcare. But all of those millions, folks, they aren’t going to doctors and hospitals.
The really tragic part of health care insurance is the wreckage it leaves in its wake. We see it now in America, and you probably know people who have been its victims. Patients who, even with insurance, can’t afford to get all of the care they need, or can’t afford the medications that are required for their treatment. There are health care consumers who have insurance but have had to sell or mortgage their homes, or dramatically reduce and contract their lifestyles so that they can pay their portion of their health care costs. One might ask, what’s the point of having health care insurance if even with coverage a serious illness or injury means you will face financial ruin? And the even more obvious question—What’s the point of having health care insurance if you can’t afford the health care you need?
So, you see, it’s just a scam--another example of the basic bait-and-switch bunko stuff that has existed for centuries, but in a modern new package. All of the things we all think we are getting when we pay those premiums, well those aren’t really what we get when we’re sick or injured. In reality we are get far less—much less than our money’s worth.
Now the country is moving to repair the system. On the whole that’s a positive thing. But there is concern about who is at the table. The insurance companies have their agenda, and one can expect them to have that “the business of business is business” mentality, which would be based on their ability to maintain profitability. Why?
During the last several decades the basic economic model of health care has changed. Do you remember when your local hospital was a nonprofit organization? I know a lot about nonprofit organizations and they exist for the benefit of the communities they serve. During those same decades the American people were sold a bill of goods about nonsense like “public-private partnerships” along with a lot of right-wing pap about how business does everything better than government. Well, I’ve worked in government and in the private sector and I’ve seen some darn good organizations and some ridiculous ones on both sides.
Let me say out loud something that you will realize is right as soon as I say it. Working for profit is no guarantee of quality products or services. Poor quality stuff represented to consumers as something better than what it is can be found in every shopping mall. And poor quality service has become commonplace in modern America. So if this is what we experience every time we shop or try to get something fixed, why would be believe that BUSINESS is the solution to all of our societal problems? Our job as citizens is to recognize when they are feeding us lies, and politicians, especially those on the political right have been doing lots of this about how business can save us. What business can do is make money. Then those same businesses that make more money are beholden to the politicians, and can give them even more money not to listen to us or care about what is good for us. Is that something we want to support?
Besides, government does lots of things well. People performing as part of a government workforce maintain our birth records, pick up our trash, deliver our mail, and do little things when they have to like defeating the Nazis and the Japanese because they want to take over the world. There is a lot of American pride about what we can do when we set our minds to it, and you know, we can do some things pretty darn well. We can do those things either publicly—as a government effort—or privately.
It makes little sense to involve the private sector in things where profit isn’t the primary motive. Because if we involve the private sector in things where profit isn’t the primary motive, then profit will become the primary motive, and that is exactly what has happened in health care. The goal of helping people to get well, or recover from an illness or injury has been displaced by the profit motive, by multi-million dollar salaries for fat cat executives, and by making money for stockholders. We don’t need profit to be part of our health care system. We shouldn’t be paying health care CEO’s a hundred million dollars a year, and we don’t need stockholders wanting dividends or demanding that management behave in a ways that impress Wall St. to make stock values increase.
As I said, an important change that has happened in the health care system in America in the last several decades is that it has switched from being not-for-profit (or nonprofit) to being for profit. So now that the time has come to reconstitute health care in America, we have to ask, what do we want? Do we want health care sold and managed as a commodity, on a for-profit basis to make money? Or do we want health care managed as a utility the way Los Angeles County manages water and power, or other user-owned systems operate solely for the benefit of their users?
We have seen many changes in the health care system in America, and most of them haven’t been good. We used to beam with pride about having the most admired system in the entire world. Just a few years of for-profit management has changed that, so when are we going to catch-on to the fact that we need to rethink the foundation, the fundamental model of how we organize and manage health care? The system should exist for the medical well-being of everyone, and the financial well-being of no one. Eliminate the fat cat executives, the stockholders, the army of people paid to deny us care, process our “claims” and then kick us out of the program because our health care needs are too costly. All of those people are paid, and they are eating up the money that we need to be spending on surgery, medicines, and expensive machines that can see inside our bodies. Those people are unnecessary. They provide no health care, and they are draining essential economic resources from a system that desperately needs money to make us well.
Last but not least, we need a system that takes care of everyone, that doesn’t blame or victimize people because they get hurt or sick, or have genes that result in illness, or they get cancer. We need a system that doesn’t bring people to economic ruin because they need health care. We need a government overseen, managed, contracted or operated system that will take care of people who need taking care of, and do it with regard to efficiency, but without regard to profit, and with great compassion and concern. We need a system that works to make people better, and that exists only for the purpose of making people better. We don’t need a system that makes a few greedy people rich by denying care to the rest of us and undoing what once made the American health care system the most respected and admired in the world.
The foundation of health care insurance, the basic economic model upon which it is based, is flawed. It isn’t flawed in terms of making money, it does that, perhaps too well. However, it IS quite deficient in terms of paying for care to make people better. First, insurance companies only make money by figuring out how to avoid providing people with the care they need, after all, care costs money. Second, insurance companies have an army of agents, customer service people, healthcare gatekeepers, and executives all of whom have to be paid. A whole bureaucracy including fat cats with multimillion-dollar salaries, and even stockholders who expect dividends—all of this paid for with the money we think is going toward paying for our healthcare. But all of those millions, folks, they aren’t going to doctors and hospitals.
The really tragic part of health care insurance is the wreckage it leaves in its wake. We see it now in America, and you probably know people who have been its victims. Patients who, even with insurance, can’t afford to get all of the care they need, or can’t afford the medications that are required for their treatment. There are health care consumers who have insurance but have had to sell or mortgage their homes, or dramatically reduce and contract their lifestyles so that they can pay their portion of their health care costs. One might ask, what’s the point of having health care insurance if even with coverage a serious illness or injury means you will face financial ruin? And the even more obvious question—What’s the point of having health care insurance if you can’t afford the health care you need?
So, you see, it’s just a scam--another example of the basic bait-and-switch bunko stuff that has existed for centuries, but in a modern new package. All of the things we all think we are getting when we pay those premiums, well those aren’t really what we get when we’re sick or injured. In reality we are get far less—much less than our money’s worth.
Now the country is moving to repair the system. On the whole that’s a positive thing. But there is concern about who is at the table. The insurance companies have their agenda, and one can expect them to have that “the business of business is business” mentality, which would be based on their ability to maintain profitability. Why?
During the last several decades the basic economic model of health care has changed. Do you remember when your local hospital was a nonprofit organization? I know a lot about nonprofit organizations and they exist for the benefit of the communities they serve. During those same decades the American people were sold a bill of goods about nonsense like “public-private partnerships” along with a lot of right-wing pap about how business does everything better than government. Well, I’ve worked in government and in the private sector and I’ve seen some darn good organizations and some ridiculous ones on both sides.
Let me say out loud something that you will realize is right as soon as I say it. Working for profit is no guarantee of quality products or services. Poor quality stuff represented to consumers as something better than what it is can be found in every shopping mall. And poor quality service has become commonplace in modern America. So if this is what we experience every time we shop or try to get something fixed, why would be believe that BUSINESS is the solution to all of our societal problems? Our job as citizens is to recognize when they are feeding us lies, and politicians, especially those on the political right have been doing lots of this about how business can save us. What business can do is make money. Then those same businesses that make more money are beholden to the politicians, and can give them even more money not to listen to us or care about what is good for us. Is that something we want to support?
Besides, government does lots of things well. People performing as part of a government workforce maintain our birth records, pick up our trash, deliver our mail, and do little things when they have to like defeating the Nazis and the Japanese because they want to take over the world. There is a lot of American pride about what we can do when we set our minds to it, and you know, we can do some things pretty darn well. We can do those things either publicly—as a government effort—or privately.
It makes little sense to involve the private sector in things where profit isn’t the primary motive. Because if we involve the private sector in things where profit isn’t the primary motive, then profit will become the primary motive, and that is exactly what has happened in health care. The goal of helping people to get well, or recover from an illness or injury has been displaced by the profit motive, by multi-million dollar salaries for fat cat executives, and by making money for stockholders. We don’t need profit to be part of our health care system. We shouldn’t be paying health care CEO’s a hundred million dollars a year, and we don’t need stockholders wanting dividends or demanding that management behave in a ways that impress Wall St. to make stock values increase.
As I said, an important change that has happened in the health care system in America in the last several decades is that it has switched from being not-for-profit (or nonprofit) to being for profit. So now that the time has come to reconstitute health care in America, we have to ask, what do we want? Do we want health care sold and managed as a commodity, on a for-profit basis to make money? Or do we want health care managed as a utility the way Los Angeles County manages water and power, or other user-owned systems operate solely for the benefit of their users?
We have seen many changes in the health care system in America, and most of them haven’t been good. We used to beam with pride about having the most admired system in the entire world. Just a few years of for-profit management has changed that, so when are we going to catch-on to the fact that we need to rethink the foundation, the fundamental model of how we organize and manage health care? The system should exist for the medical well-being of everyone, and the financial well-being of no one. Eliminate the fat cat executives, the stockholders, the army of people paid to deny us care, process our “claims” and then kick us out of the program because our health care needs are too costly. All of those people are paid, and they are eating up the money that we need to be spending on surgery, medicines, and expensive machines that can see inside our bodies. Those people are unnecessary. They provide no health care, and they are draining essential economic resources from a system that desperately needs money to make us well.
Last but not least, we need a system that takes care of everyone, that doesn’t blame or victimize people because they get hurt or sick, or have genes that result in illness, or they get cancer. We need a system that doesn’t bring people to economic ruin because they need health care. We need a government overseen, managed, contracted or operated system that will take care of people who need taking care of, and do it with regard to efficiency, but without regard to profit, and with great compassion and concern. We need a system that works to make people better, and that exists only for the purpose of making people better. We don’t need a system that makes a few greedy people rich by denying care to the rest of us and undoing what once made the American health care system the most respected and admired in the world.
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