We’re #1! We’re #1! Favorite chant of the right wing, right? In their minds, the United States of America isn’t just Ronald Reagan’s shining city on the hill, it is top of heap in every imaginable way in this world. That would be wonderful, if it were true. The idea that the United States is the best at everything is a myth perpetrated upon the faithful to keep them from questioning why we aren’t the best.

The United States ranks #1 in health care costs, but 37^th in health care delivery. We rank 22^nd in science education, 27^th in math and 33^rd in reading. We rank 17^th for taxation as a percentage of GDP (which kind of puts the lie to us being #1 in taxation). Our personal income tax rate is ranked 22^nd in the world, but our corporate tax rate is ranked 2^nd. That does not reflect what our corporations actually pay, just what our rate is.

The latest blow to myth of being #1 is the Save the Children State of the World’s Mothers Report. The United States is ranked 25^th best place in the world to raise a family. The rankings are based on parental leave policies, preschool enrollment rates, breast feeding support, teen pregnancy rates, female education rates, maternal death rates, infant mortality rates, support systems for parents including safety nets like welfare and food subsidies, the whole panoply of ways that a nation or culture supports women and families.

Twenty-fifth, huh?

Who beat us on this critical listing of the manner in which nations care for their mothers and children? Norway, Iceland, Sweden, New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Australia, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Slovenia, France, Portugal, Spain, Estonia, Switzerland, Canada, Greece, Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, and Belarus. The top thirty were finished off by the Czech Republic, Austria, Poland, Croatia, and Japan.

The list is broken into three sections: most developed nations, less developed nations and least developed nations. The countries in the “most developed nations” list comprise the top 43 ranked nations on all criteria and are almost entirely European and first-level British Empire nations, plus Japan. The middle designation is made up of 80 nations ranging in development from Israel to Zimbabwe. The bottom 42 are primarily African, marginal Asian nations like Cambodia, and war zones like Yemen and Afghanistan.

We can probably take solace from the fact that the United States rose from #31 in 2011 to #25 in 2012. Still, 25^th? That’s one more way in which the United States has slipped over the past thirty years, since, oh, the shift in the Republican Party from the Northeast to the Deep South, since the rise of the conservative movement, since the beginning of the death slide of unions and the middle class…..

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• The Best Country for Raising Kids? Report Says It’s Not the United States(undisputedlegal.wordpress.com)

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• Mother rankings: Norway 1, U.S. 25(cnn.com)

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• Niger: Worst Place To Be A Mom, Study Says(inquisitr.com)

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• Welcome to Motherhood: You’re on Your Own(crooksandliars.com)

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Attorney Eric Holder and Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announcing arrests

Attorney General Eric Holder and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have announced the arrest of 108 persons in every aspect of health care who have defrauded the Medicare system of upwards of $455 million. The arrests took place in Miami, Tampa, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston and Baton Rouge. Local news reports have added suburbs of these cities as the sites of arrests as well. This is the third, and largest, wide-spread arrest of people who have committed Medicare fraud.

In Miami, 45 defendants are accused of $159 million in false billing for home health care, mental health services, durable medical equipment, physical therapy and HIV infusions. Two defendants in Houston are charged with $62 million in false billings for home health care. In the home health care cases, the agencies which provide home health care aides paid people to claim they were receiving home health care. This one is particularly heinous. The state of Vermont has proven that paying for home health care aides, including paying relatives to provide that aid, is cheaper than keeping Medicare patients in nursing homes, and better for most patients who prefer to stay in their homes among their relatives. The spread of the use of home health care services could be a wonderful way to reduce Medicare costs, but these frauds put the whole idea at risk.

President Obama has stated repeatedly that major savings could be made in Medicare if we had a better system in place to find and eliminate fraud. The Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services are working to prove that claim.

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• FBI makes arrests in metro Detroit in nationwide crackdown on Medicare fraud (clickondetroit.com)
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• 100 charged in Medicare fraud busts in 7 cities – San Francisco Chronicle (drugstoresource.wordpress.com)

Yeakel wrote in his ruling that “The court is particularly influenced by the potential for immediate loss of access to necessary medical services by several thousand Texas women. The record before the court at this juncture reflects uncertainty as to the continued viability of the Texas Women’s Health Program.”

The Huffington Post noted that:

After HHS cut off Texas’ Medicaid money, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) promised to make up for the $30 million funding gap and pay for the Women’s Health Program with the state’s own money. But conservative Texas officials have suggested that they would rather end the entire program than allow Planned Parenthood to participate in it.

Planned Parenthood pleaded with Perry on Monday to keep the program in place despite the court’s ruling, because it offers cancer screenings, birth control, testing and treatment for STDs and other health exams to low-income women across the state.

Patricio Gonzales, CEO of Planned Parenthood Association of Hidalgo County “We call on Governor Perry and the state to put Texan women first and set aside any vendetta they may have against Planned Parenthood. No woman should ever have to fear being cut off from her doctor’s care because of shortsighted political games.”

Of course, the Republicans are not waging a war on women in the same way that the sun isn’t going to rise in the East.

She is not a veteran, but her situation parallels that facing our female veterans. There are not enough facilities for homeless women and their children. We all assume that there are shelters, but there really haven’t been enough of them, and they have always had a shortage of segregated spaces for women and children. Too many of them are frankly dangerous for women.

Though overall homelessness among veterans has declined by 12% to around 67,500 last year, the number of homeless female veterans has climbed from 1,380 in 2006 to 3,328 in 2010.

Homelessness is a problem that is always with us, it just gets forgotten for spells. It made headlines during the Reagan administration because of the policies that enlarged the problem. One of the consequences of block granting social program money to the states was a need by the states to find ways to cut their budgets. Too often, one of the ways was to close residential facilities for the mentally ill, try to use out-patient treatment centers. We ended up with a lot of mentally ill people sleeping on the streets. Economic downturns always lead to more homelessness, and this last one was particularly hard because it resulted in so many people losing their homes.

The Veterans Administration inspector general has issued a report on housing that received VA grants. It found bedrooms and bathrooms without locks, inadequate lighting and women housed in facilities approved only for men. Nine of the 26 facilities did not have proper safety precautions. One female veteran and her 18 month old son were put into a facility with a registered sex offender.

The problems for female veterans go beyond the lack of facilities for women. Many of these women suffered sexual assault in the service. They were not properly cared for in the service and that has carried over into a distrust of the Veterans Administration. Female veterans have a 12.4% unemployment rate, slightly higher than that for male veterans. Many are single mothers.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is working on solutions to this problem. Their budget calls for $300 million in grants and technical assistance for community groups to help veterans remain in their homes or find other housing. The Department is working on ways to prevent homelessness among veterans, with a goal of ending veteran homelessness by 2015 set by the President. There are grant programs for local community groups to work with veterans to acquire health care and aid with financial planning and job skills.

Pete Dougherty, executive director of the VA’s homeless veterans initiative office, explained, “Part of what bring people to homelessness is isolation…The more you can keep that internal support around, the better.” The support must begin, however, upon discharge, not when a veteran is on the brink of having her or his life collapse. Moving the process in closer is something the military has been trying to do recently with counseling and interventions before discharge. They are playing catch-up with the problem. These wars have been sending home more disabled veterans than ever before and more victims of PTSD. National Guard personnel who were guaranteed their jobs upon returning have been deployed so many times that there are no jobs for them to return to, the companies they worked for no longer exist, or they have suffered in some way that makes them incapable of returning to those jobs, or they have not been able to keep their skills current with their former jobs. Even our veterans benefits system is not as good as it was for my parents.

We have been engaged for the past eleven years in two guerilla wars, the worst kind of warfare. With an all-volunteer army and the National Guard, we have not had enough replacements for the men and women we have sent to these wars. Too many of these veterans were older than the men we used to send to war – men who joined the National Guard to avoid Vietnam ended up in Baghdad, leaving not just children but grandchildren behind, or as one of their wives put on a bumper sticker “One weekend a month, my ass!” These two wars have left us with a multitude of veterans’ problems just as parts of our government want to cut back on the services we need for our veterans. If not building one warship could provide housing and job training, mental and physical health services, the means to rejoin civilian life for our veterans, that is what we should choose to do, that would be the morally correct choice.

Related articles

• More women vets are homeless, but housing scarce (kansascity.com)
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• Homeless Female Veterans Placed in Frighteningly Unsafe Shelters [Military Women] (jezebel.com)
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President Obama signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, 2 years ago.

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll, released on Wednesday, gives a better picture of what Americans think of our health care system and the Affordable Care Act. The poll broke down the issue into three reponses – Do you like the ACA? Do you dislike the ACA? Do you think it’s not enough?

Only 35% of Americans completely dislike the ACA and want it repealed. The remaining 65% of Americans are divided into 44% who favor the law and 21% who want more. The “want more” usually means a public option, Medicare for all.

The majority of Americans want our health care system fixed, and no wonder. The latest findings from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have raised our score for health care services, from 37^th in the world to 27^th in life expectancy and 31^st in health care coverage. Our health care costs $8,402 per person per year, 17.9% of our GDP, the highest cost in the world.

So, the next time you hear Speaker John Boehner intone that “the American people have spoken,” remember that we have – 65% of us do not support his positions. He and his party only speak of 35% of us on this issue. Now, if we can translate that into election results….

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U. S. resident without health insurance

The latest poll (every day there’s a “latest poll”) says that 51% of Americans want the Supreme Court to throw out the whole Affordable Care Act. Republicans are going to have a ball with that poll number. It’s right up there with the one they have been quoting for two years – 76% of all Americans oppose Obamacare.

But the poll that came up with that 76% number has been misquoted ever since it was published. The real results showed that 38% disapproved of the law because there was no public option, 38% hated it outright and 24% approved of it. That is not the same thing as 76% oppose it. There are a few people credited with the quote, but whoever said it was absolutely right “There are three kinds of untruths – lies, damned lies and statistics.”

Why doesn’t anyone ask the right questions? It is impossible to know how people feel about the Affordable Care Act unless the questions start being more complete and more definitive.

What are the right questions? Well, let’s start with what people know or believe about the law:

Does the law prevent people being denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions? Does it cover young adults under their parents’ insurance when they cannot get insurance on their own? Does it create “insurance exchanges” that would allow individuals to join a group, the way employees of a company belong to a group, and the number of people in the group will lower the premium costs for everyone? Does it increase the choices of types of insurance a person can buy? Does it create “death panels” that will deny care if the patient is considered too far gone for care? Does it deny insurance companies the right to terminate insurance when a patient uses the insurance too much for the company’s profit? Does the law create a new Federal bureaucracy with tens of thousands of new employees? Does the law hit people with penalties for not being insured? How much is the penalty? Do you have insurance through your employer?

How much do you contribute to your insurance premiums if you have employer-provided health insurance? How much is your deductible? How much are your co-pays? Do you have life-time limits? Do you have prescription coverage? Do you have dental? Do you have vision coverage? If you buy your insurance privately, how much do you pay for it? How much do you use it? In a private policy, what are your deductible and co-pays? Do you have state insurance? What are your premiums, deductible and co-pay?

Do you believe that the more people belong to an insurance pool, the lower the premium costs for everyone?

Do you know where the United States ranks against the rest of the world for health care costs? Do you know where the United States ranks for health care delivery – based on life expectancy, access to care, infant and maternal death rates, and other baseline deliveries – against the rest of the world? (The correct answers are #1 at nearly twice the #2 nation and #37).

Do you think Medicare has been a successful program? Do you think in some states Medicaid patients have better coverage than private insurance patients? Do you believe that Medicare and Medicaid patients have access to any doctor they want? Do you think some doctors refuse to accept these patients? Do you think emergency rooms are being overused as primary care facilities because people on Medicaid cannot get private doctors? Do you know how many hospitals have shut their emergency rooms?

What do you know about nationalized health care in other countries? Do you think they deny care? Do you think the waiting lists for care are too long? Do you think they undermine personal freedom and choice? Do you think they outlaw private physicians and hospitals?

Do you know which president first proposed nationalized health insurance? (Answer: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.) Do you know which presidents have supported nationalized health insurance? (Every one since up to Dubya.) Do you know how large corporations view nationalized health? (They support it as more important to their bottom line than killing unions.)

Do you know the difference between single-payer health insurance and a national health care system?

Do you believe that only communist countries have nationalized health care and the presence of nationalized health care means a country is not a democracy?

Do you know how the Federal employee health insurance system works? Do you think the government – you as the taxpayer – pay for all health care for Federal employees? Do you know that the Federal system is an employer-provided system just like major corporations like General Electric? Do you know that the Federal employees’ system is just a pool for private insurance companies? Do you know that the President and his family are the only people who receive free health care from the taxpayer?

Do you oppose any government health insurance system? Do you support limited government health insurance systems for specific Americans, like Medicare? Do you support a total single-payer government health system?

The baseline premium for Medicare is $99.90 a month. The yearly deductible is under $150 and the co-pays are 20%. Is that better than your private insurance?

Polls tend to ask a half-dozen questions at best. They go for the broadest questions, ignoring the fact that nothing in life is broad, that everything has nuances and details that need to be understood. The entire health care battle has been conducted in these broad strokes. The only people out there who seem to be looking at the details are the leaders at AARP, and their focus is the attempts by Republicans to kill Medicare. We really, the administration really, needs to understand how little people understand about the Affordable Care Act and what they need to better explain. They need to see how much misinformation and propaganda is flooding the debate. We can no longer afford to have our major national policies determined by how little people understand the issues. This isn’t 1859, we cannot allow our future to be determined by something as simplistic as “The South wants to keep their slaves,” and “The North wants to take away our rights.”

If you want to see how dumbed-down our country has become, think about the census form you filled out. One page, right? Nine out of ten households only got the one-page form. It used to be four pages and all of us got it. We keep shrinking our information pool and operating out of less and less comprehension of who we are and what we think. The health care debate impacts our future economy, our life expectancies, our chances of epidemics, our productivity, every aspect of our lives and our future. It deserves more than a six-question poll.

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• Breaking it Down: The Health Care Law and Cost Control (whitehouse.gov)
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Kansas State House, Topeka

Kansas is debating yet another anti-abortion measure, but this one is a doozy. It could end certification for doctors in obstetrics and gynecology in state-affiliated medical schools.

The bill states, “no health care services provided by any state agency, or any employee of a state agency while acting within the scope of such employee’s employment shall include abortion…” Excuse me?

Doctors are taught how to perform abortions because, whether the right wing believes it or not, sometimes abortions are necessary to save a woman’s life. This bill would make it impossible for these procedures to be taught in any medical school in Kansas that operates within the jurisdiction of the state of Kansas, as in any attached to a state university. Without that training, doctors who graduated from Kansas medical schools could not be certified to practice obstetrics and gynecology.

As it is, medical students in state schools in Kansas have to go to non-state schools to complete their ob-gyn residencies.

An amendment has been proposed for the bill which would exempt doctors and medical students from the bill, but the amendment has not been taken up in the Kansas legislature or the committees reviewing the bill. In fact, anti-abortion groups want the legislature to ignore the amendment. Kathy Ostrowski of Kansans for Life, stated from her vast medical training that, “There is no professional reason that ob/gyn resident physicians have to learn how to destroy unborn children in order to achieve competency in pregnancy management, stillbirth evacuation or treating abortion complications.” Right. They have no reason whatsoever to save a woman’s life if the saving of it would destroy an unborn child. Kansans for Life only believe in the lives of the unborn, not the lives of adult women.

There are times when one must question the manner in which laws are written and adopted. This is one of them. No doctor was part of writing this law. No doctor’s input has been considered here, not even the entire administration of the University of Kansas School of Medicine. There are too many times when laws are written without professional input, without sufficient understanding of the full consequences of laws. We spend too much time passing laws and then fighting about them in our courts in front of judges who are just as under-educated about the implications of a law as the people who wrote it in the first place. It’s a waste of time, money and effort.

We need a law about how to write laws, you know, one that starts with any law has to be subjected to a panel of bi-partisan specialists in the field, and then by a panel of paranoid Hollywood script writers who can tell exactly how the whole thing will go pear-shaped, like the ones who said “We knew it was possible to use a plane as a bomb, why didn’t the NSA?”

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It is with great disappointment and bafflement that I stand here yet again in the year 2012 to draw a line in the sand against another outrageous attempt to roll back women’s access to basic health care services. After insisting that we debate the long-settled concept of providing access to birth control when 99 percent of American women use this medication at some point in their life, many of whom use it not even for contraception, Republicans have chosen to take another extreme step to roll back all women’s health care rights.

So instead of talking about how to grow our economy, we are wasting time on the latest overreach and intrusion into women’s lives. When will my colleagues understand this very non-debatable fact, that the decision of whether a woman takes one medicine or another or what type of health care she should have access to should not be the decision of her boss? A commonsense, simple principle that bosses and employers should not make these very personal decisions. What could be more intrusive than that? Let me be clear. This debate, as you said, Senior Senator from New York, Mr. President, as you said in your remarks, this has nothing to do with religious freedom. You don’t have to take it from me. Take it from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the most conservative justices of our Supreme Court. In the majority decision in 1990, Employment Division v. Smith, Justice Scalia wrote, “we have never held an individual’s religious belief excused him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting that the state is free to regulate.” That is what we’re seeing here. Employers cannot pick or choose which laws they’re going to follow. Employers can’t pick or choose if they want to follow this labor law or that labor law. They have to follow the law.

This extreme amendment Republicans are bringing up for a vote today makes it clear as day, this is a political and ideological overreach, not a religious issue. The fact that they want to exempt all businesses from providing any preventive care for a woman is outrageous and a clear, callous disregard of the health and well-being of America’s women. The Blunt Amendment would allow any insurer or employer to refuse coverage for any health care service otherwise required under the Affordable Care Act, jeopardizing vital and necessary health care for millions of Americans, services like prenatal care that help our babies survive, fertility treatments, testing for HIV, mental health services, screening for cervical cancer, screening for type 2 diabetes, vaccinations, coverage for any or all of these services and countless of others could be denied to any person under this radically broad amendment.

This amendment isn’t just dangerous for women. It’s also dangerous to our children, and children’s health groups are opposing this amendment because vaccines could be denied on the basis of personal beliefs. And denying childhood preventive care could negatively influence their health as adults, adding billions of dollars in additional health care costs throughout the lives of these children as they grow.

We will not stand for these attempts to undermine the ability of a woman to make her own decisions about what is best for her and what is best to protect her children. If our Republican colleagues want to continue to take on this issue head on, we will stand here as often as necessary to draw a line in the sand and to make it known that in the Senate we oppose these attacks on women’s rights and women’s health. And even if House Republicans aren’t going to allow women’s voices to be heard in their hearings, women’s voices will surely be heard all across our country.

It’s time to agree that women deserve access to preventive health care services regardless of where they work and who their boss is. And it is time to agree to get back to work on legislation that can create jobs and get our economy moving. That is what the American people want us to be debating. That is what our mission should be here in Congress. And that is where our sole focus should be, not on undermining protections and well-being for America’s women.

President Obama's signature on the Affordable Care Act

The Republicans in Washington are engaged in a two-pronged attack on the Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare. They couldn’t stop it from being passed, so they are nibbling away at it.

First, the Blunt Amendment. It allows employers to opt out of any of the preventative services that Obamacare requires as a baseline for health insurance simply by citing some vague “religious or moral objection.” The first thing to go would probably be contraception. Any company can claim it has a “moral objection” to providing this essential preventative medication that prevents unwanted pregnancies, and the abortions that many unwanted pregnancies result in. Nice moral choice – deny birth control and then deny abortions.

But the Blunt Amendment also results in the stripping of the mandatory provisions of Obamacare that were intended to cut costs by providing people access to the preventative and diagnostic services that keep a small problem from becoming an acute medical problem. Just removing the part of the regulations that call for no co-pays or deductibles for these preventative services would keep many people from using them. Co-pays and deductibles can be a barrier to people using their health insurance. Take my health insurance (please, take it)…it would cost me two weeks’ take-home pay to meet the deductible for the full blood workup my doctor wants every year. It cost me ten weeks’ take-home pay for a morning in the emergency room and a series of tests that resulted from a bad generic medication. Co-pays and deductibles can turn having health insurance as bad as not having it at all.

Blunt’s amendment could also allow states to decide they are not going to provide basic care to persons who are newly qualified for Medicaid. A state like Arizona, which has already shut down many life-saving aspects of Medicaid, could simply refuse to provide any care whatsoever. It would allow discrimination against persons that the employer or insurance provider believes violate their morality, specifically, any bi-racial couple or legally married same-sex couple could be denied insurance because their relationship is not morally acceptable to someone.

Lastly, an almost incomprehensible clause in the Blunt Amendment would make it possible for a health plan or individual to sue a state if it even suggested implementing minimum standards for health insurance.

All of this is on top of Republicans trying to repeal the cost-saving board for Medicare that the law created.

The Independent Payment Advisory Board is supposed to by 15 members, appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, health care experts, who are supposed to hold down Medicare spending without cutting payments to beneficiaries. Congress can override the IPAB by finding alternative ways to save money, other than restricting reimbursement to health care providers. The health care industry hates this idea.

The thing no one will discuss is the way fee-for-service plans work, whether they are insurance plans or government plans. The more a health care professional does, the more they get paid. Additionally, there is so much fear of malpractice claims that health care providers overdo themselves to make sure they don’t make a mistake. So, there is a culture of over-ordering tests and over-doing anything they need to do. There is also a culture of ordering a new medication even though the only reason for doing so is to keep a patient from taking two pills that do the same thing. They are called combo-drugs and they would be under patent, and therefore available only in the new brand-name, making them more expensive than the two old drugs, available in generic, combined. There are also doctors who are so in love with their new equipment, they just have to use it all the time, even when a cheaper method would get the same results. The IPAB is designed to look at some of this, sort of in the manner in which the Canadian health board looks at medical facilities in a town and says, no, you don’t need to duplicate services.

There is so much that is wrong with our health care delivery in this country, and so little in the way of real solutions being offered. We desperately need doctors who will take Medicare and Medicaid patients. We desperately need health insurance for everyone, so that the cost of the uninsured isn’t passed on to those with insurance. We rank 37^th in health care delivery in the world and first in cost. That’s the wrong equation. The Republicans are determined to fight any reform in the system, do anything they can to pay off the health industry and pharmaceutical lobbyists who pour so much money into their campaigns. I would love to see how much money the health care industry and pharmaceutical industries could cut prices if they weren’t pouring millions into their lobbyists and pay-offs.

Recently, I wrote about a stem cell treatment for arthritis that is available only to dogs. Follow the money on that and figure out why humans can’t get the same treatment. If we had a cure for arthritis, the companies that make pain killers would collapse. No more millions of bottles of Excedrin and Aleve being sold. It’s that simple. If this president was a tenth the socialist the Republicans say he is, we would have proper health care in this country.

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• Texas Medicaid Director: 91 Percent Of Texans Will Have Insurance If State Implements Obamacare (thinkprogress.org)
• Why Republicans Are Fighting To Repeal Obama’s Medicare Cost-Cutting Board (alternet.org)
• The insanity of health insurance (cafehayek.com)
• VIDEO: Senate Dems Claim Blunt Amendment Would Put CEO Between Woman And Her Doctor (thinkprogress.org)
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President Obama signing the Affordable Care Act

The Gallup polling company, along with Healthways, has been documenting health insurance coverage in America since 2008. This year’s results are not good. In spite of a slow but steady increase in jobs, fewer Americans are getting their health insurance from an employer. Only 44.6% of Americans had employer-provided health insurance in 2011 down from 45.8% in 2010. The number of uninsured Americans has risen to 17.1%, the highest since 2008.

In 2010 and 2011, the percentage of Americans receiving government health insurance – Medicare, Medicaid or military/veteran’s benefits – was unchanged at 25.2%, slightly above the 2008-09 rates.

It is no surprise that higher income Americans get more of their health coverage from employers (70.4%) compared to lower-income Americans (23.7%). Young adults at 31.1% and Hispanics at 28.3% are the lowest numbers receiving employer-based health insurance.

The numbers reflect three trends. First that there are too many long-term unemployed in America, in spite of the increases in jobs. Second, that there are too many underemployed Americans. The service industries – retail, hospitality and non-hospital health care – are notorious for only hiring part-time to avoid providing health insurance. And finally, the percentage of the cost of the premiums that employers are willing to pay for has shrunken. Even the Federal government, which once had benefits so generous they outweighed the salaries that were only 60% of private sector, is paying less than 50% of the premiums for employees and retirees, with ever-increasing co-pays and deductibles. Ever since the Affordable Care Act was introduced in Congress, the premiums for Federal employees and retirees has been raised every year.

Vermont has two programs in addition to the usual Medicaid program, that address the lack of health insurance for adults. The V-HAP program is for the unemployed and Catamount is health insurance for the underemployed, with premiums based on income. These two “socialized” programs have made Vermont the healthiest state in the union, and made those with employer-based health insurance damned jealous. They are not perfect, but they are certainly better than not having any way to get insurance. They are what a public option could have been if the Democrats hadn’t been blackmailed into giving up what over a third of all Americans wanted. Republicans like to cite a study done after the Affordable Care Act was passed that showed 76% of Americans didn’t like it. What they leave out is that half that number, 38% wanted a public option. Only 38% of Americans didn’t want the law at all. The remaining 24% liked it the way it was.

The second most expensive country in the world for health care is Finland (at least the last time I looked) and they pay half what we do. But our health care delivery is rated at only 37^th internationally. The most expensive health care in the world, but thirty-six countries deliver better care at less than half the cost. The Gallup-Healthways poll only reinforces the need to re-examine the Affordable Care Act. Without employers to provide the insurance, the plan will rely on people having to buy their own insurance and needed subsidies to do so. At that rate, we would be better off with that public option. It would cost us a whole lot less.

Related articles

• New Site Allows Search for Health Care Plans that Include Same-Sex Partners (mombian.com)
• Level of Americans Without Health Insurance Continues to Rise (fdlaction.firedoglake.com)
• Individual Health Insurance Plans: Too Many Options, Too Little Guidance (health.usnews.com)
• Preventive Care Services Covered at 100% Under Health Care Reform? (prweb.com)

Amy Hunter, the President of Equality Michigan Pride PAC stated “Michigan voters elected Rick Snyder because he had a plan to fix our state’s economy. He was going to help keep the best and the brightest here and position Michigan as an economic leader. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the Governor has made compromises we find disappointing. After nearly a year-long policy debate, Snyder has put hardworking couples and their children into harm’s way by eliminating important health care coverage. Michigan’s gay residents are fed up, and this is one way that we’re pushing back.”

They have set up two sites. The first is www.talkbacktorick.com where an open letter can be signed opposing the stripping of rights from LGBT Michiganers as well as to help buy airtime for the radio ad which can be heard at www.talkbacktorick.com/ads-in-your-town .

The Michigan State House, Lansing

It is not surprising that Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed House Bill 4770 despite staunch criticism from a variety of different quarters. The bill eliminates healthcare coverage for domestic partners of public employees and is considered a gross violation of the powers of local governments. Ever since the Republicans took power in Michigan, they have been doing what they can to strip lesbians and gays of their rights.

Here is a statement from Emily Dievendorf, Director of Policy, Equality Michigan:

“Governor Snyder’s support for this bill is appalling. Today, the Governor told unmarried public employees that they can no longer care for their partners or children. He has put hardworking gay and lesbian couples and their children into harm’s way by eliminating important health care coverage. He has spent the last two years talking about creating a welcoming state with a attractive business climate, and this bill flies in the face of those goals.”

“All families in our state, including gay and lesbian families, should have fair access to health care coverage. Governor Snyder caved to the radical social agenda coming from the legislature. He has rejected our shared commitment to economic growth. In order to compete in today’s global business environment, we must build a culture that prioritizes fundamental fairness. This law will only serve to hurt Michigan.”

Many public entities provide coverage for domestic partners of employees, including:
• University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Wayne State University and 11 of the 12 other public universities
• State of Michigan (33,000 eligible employees under contracts that went into effect in 2011)
• At least eight cities, counties and school districts, including Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo

Ed Gillespie (photo by Gage Skidmore)

Last week’s exchange between Jon Stewart and former RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie was fun. Gillespie was trying to push the Republican position that the Affordable Care Act must be scraped and offered up “insurance exchanges” as a replacement, as long as they involve lifting any requirement that employers provide health insurance for their employees. Well, the exchanges are already in the health insurance reform act, so the interview was a fascinating dance.

The term “insurance exchange” has been tossed around for years, without much in the way of a decent explanation of what they are or how they work.

You need to go back to 1994 and the Hillary Clinton plan to reform health insurance to really appreciate the ironies in this. After the Clinton reform plan went down, Bill Moyers did a whole hour on the subject. He said that the bottom line on it was this – people had demanded the same kind of health insurance plan as was available to the employees of the Federal government, and that is precisely what Hillary had offered them. 1994 was a matter of propaganda over facts, with the insurance industry winning. Even before Hillary unveiled her plan, they were calling it “socialized medicine.” They still are. It is totally lost on most of the Republican base that “socialized” means the government runs it. Vermont has socialized medicine, but the Affordable Care Act isn’t socialized medicine. There is no public option.

Since then, Republicans have come to advocate insurance exchanges, which are just what Hillary proposed and what is available to Feds. Of course, they never explain it that way, so they can take credit for being brilliant.

Federal health insurance is something I am intimately acquainted with, so I’ll be happy to explain to you why I’m waiting breathlessly for my husband to turn 65 and go on Medicare so I can go on Vermont’s Catamount insurance program. That’s how much I love Federal employee health insurance. I can’t wait to be free of it and save around $300 a month.

Federal employees choose from a menu of health insurance plans, all of them run by private sector companies. The government pays less than half the premium, the employee pays the rest. The plans come in all shapes and sizes – fee-for-service, PPOs, HMOs, insurance for self-only, insurance for a whole family, broad ranges of deductibles and co-pays. There are only a couple of plans that are available everywhere in the country and they are both fee-for-service. Most of the offerings are within a state, and don’t cross state lines. That is an issue that was addressed in the ACA – allowing people to cross state lines for insurance.

In the same interview where he was pushing freeing employers from providing health insurance, Gillespie was saying that people could use professional associations to gain access to affordable health insurance through these insurance exchanges. Right there, you negate the whole idea of everyone being able to access affordable insurance. Lawyers or doctors or hardware store owners could get insurance that has a reduced premium because of their association’s membership numbers, while their employees pay more.

The Federal system works on one simple principle – there are a lot of Federal employees, around two million of them. There are also over a half-million postal workers. The two nation-wide insurance plans look at these numbers and say, “how many of those 2.5 million can we get?” The state-only plans look at the number of Feds in their state and ask the same question on a smaller scale. They know that they have a guarantee of nearly half the premium being paid by the Federal government. They know that all Federal and Postal employees will have to buy a policy, and there is a slightly reduced level of administrative costs with the Federal employees. The government administers the money. They collect the premiums from the employees with payroll deductions. The government handles the whole process of enrollment and premium collection. The whole setup is very attractive to them.

But take out any of those factors, and the policies become less attractive. The Republicans want no individual mandate, so there is no guarantee of enrollment. With private individual policies, there is a whole level of administration needed – billing and collection – with no guarantee of getting the money. The “risk pool” might be 311 million Americans, but the risks are higher than with the 2.5 million Federal and Postal employees. The “risk pool” by the way is the number of people enrolled in a particular company. The more people, the lower the risk that someone will collect payment. To tilt the “risk pool” in their favor, health insurance companies (prior to the passage of the ACA) rejected pre-existing conditions and older enrollees. Without the ACA, those guarantees disappear, and the insurance companies can go back to improving their “risk pool” by rejecting people who might actually need health care.

Health insurance exchanges only work where there is a guaranteed source of enrollees and a guaranteed funding system. Otherwise, they are nothing but a fancy name for what is already out there – dozens of insurance plans vying for your dollar. Remove the state-line barrier, as everyone wants, and you increase the confusion exponentially.

The American people are caught between the very human need for health care and a system that favors not providing that care. The less health care that is provided, the greater the profit margin. It’s not rocket science. It’s fairly simple math. The insurance exchanges will not improve health care delivery or reduce costs. They will simply give people the option of buying as little insurance as they possibly can, with the expected results. Very cheap policies have very high deductibles, which lead to people avoiding health care and unpaid medical bills in the event of an unexpected crisis.

No matter what is proposed as a band-aid for our health care system, it will not be enough. No matter how attractive they try to make their “solutions” sound, none of them will really fix a system that is far beyond sick. The only real solution is the one we will not embrace at this time – a timetable to replace private health insurance and for-profit health care with nationalized medicine.

Related articles

• The health insurance exchange illustrated (wrnihealthcareblog.wordpress.com)
• Survey: New York Small Businesses More Likely To Offer Health Insurance If Exchange Is Available (thinkprogress.org)
• Peter Orszag Probably Right About the Depressing Future of Health Care (fdlaction.firedoglake.com)
• Final Rules Set for Insurers on Spending Ratios (prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Congress Exempted From Obamacare? (forbes.com)
• Employees Will Pay More For Health Care If Employers Drop Coverage (thinkprogress.org)

Medicare has its flaws. The co-pays and deductibles have created a very strong industry in Medicare-supplemental insurance. Because it starts at age 65, there are far too many people who put off routine medical care until it kicks in, a factor that certainly impacts the costs of Medicare. The biggest problem with Medicare, and Medicaid for that matter, is the way doctors refuse to be involved with the program.

The programs pay less than private insurance pays, and they involve a lot of complicated paperwork. For Medicare and Medicaid patients, finding a doctor is often frustrating and aggravating. Frequently, Medicaid patients in particular find themselves being treated by somewhat less-than top-level physicians. A senior citizen, moving to a new community or coping with a doctor retiring, have to spend days on the phone trying to find a new doctor. The situation is so severe in some areas that the Federal government has a program to subsidize doctors who will accept Medicare and Medicaid patients.

Not fixing the automatic reimbursement cut will result in more doctors refusing to treat Medicare patients. We don’t need this. Until we finally join the rest of the world in having nationalized health care, we need more doctors willing to accept these patients. Our health care system places a great financial burden on physicians – first with paying off their enormous student loans, then with the costs of opening an office or buying into an existing practice, and then the operating expenses of an office which include ridiculously high premiums for malpractice insurance and employee health insurance. Asking doctors to accept a 27.4% cut in their pay for certain patients is unacceptable.

Related articles

• Medicare in America: ‘It has to get better’ (money.cnn.com)
• New UnitedHealthcare ‘Medicare Explicado’ DVD Educates Hispanics About Medicare and Medicaid Benefit Options (multivu.prnewswire.com)
• States Still Struggling to Pay for Medicaid (reason.com)
• Why the American Medical Association Had 72 Million Reasons to Shrink Doctors’ Pay (forbes.com)
• Consumer Driven Healthcare Proponents Finally Proven Wrong (forbes.com)

According to WalMart spokeswoman Tara Raddohl, the retail giant will announce in January the “partners” who will help them “dramatically….lower the cost of healthcare…by becoming the largest provider of primary healthcare services in the nation.”

Gee, I wonder if they’ll accept Medicaid, since so many of their employees’ children are enrolled in state health insurance programs.

There are a range of clinics available in many communities, from free clinics to walk-in clinics to multi-doctor practices to clinics that accept patients who can afford to pay on a sliding scale. Most of them are over-used and under-funded.

Ian Morrison, a California health care consultant, told NPR that in-store clinics may be the wave of the future. There are clinics in malls. A cynic like me would say that WalMart is ramping up competition against the malls. It already did major damage to small pharmacies when they offered $4 a month generics.

But Ann O’Malley, a researcher at the Center for Studying Health System Change in Washington told NPR that WalMart may be over-reaching. “Maybe WalMart can deliver a lot of this stuff more cheaply because it is an expert at doing this with other types of widgets, but health care is not a widget and managing individual human being is not nearly as simple as selling commiercial products to consumers.” She was unsure if WalMart could “truly attack cost problems” in health care.

WalMart holds down costs through a system of distribution centers. They buy huge amounts of a product and have them delivered to the center and they distribute them to the stores form there. There are no choices of merchandise by an individual store to match their community. They are also one of China’s biggest customers. Their optical departments buy large quantities of frames, which holds down the cost of glasses, offsetting the cost of lenses.

Years ago, we belonged to an HMO that ended up abandoning its highly cost-effective model. They owned our local hospital, which processed all the lab work for patients from their multi-doctor clinic. One could choose to see only one doctor repeatedly or take the spin of the wheel when making an appointment. One of the doctors told me that the clinic was very attractive for new doctors and ones nearing retirement age. The younger ones got to practice medicine without the exorbitant costs of setting up offices and buying malpractice insurance. The older ones liked the office hours and the fact that the younger ones got stuck with being on-call. When the HMO had a problem with the pharmacy chain they had contracted with, they opened their own pharmacy. While it lasted, it was the lowest cost, most effective and efficient health care we ever had. The thing that killed it was the narrow profit margin. The HMO’s shareholders wanted a higher return on their investments.

For this idea to work effectively, it will be necessary for WalMart to also offer the insurance. The more the layers of profit are reduced, the greater the over-all profitability of a venture like this. And WalMart employees can spell irony.

Related articles

• Wal-Mart looks into expanding services at health clinics (usatoday.com)
• WalMart Shifts Employee Healthcare Costs To States (lezgetreal.com)
• Dr. Always Low Prices? Wal-Mart wants to be your physician (shortformblog.tumblr.com)
• Wal-Mart Slices Health Benefits (lawprofessors.typepad.com)

After all, the ballot initiative states that it preserves the freedom of people to choose their own health care. The words are so Tea Party specific that it is designed to get people to vote for it. But what is this ballot initiative set to do?

Well, it is set to do something unconstitutional, that is what. You see, this particular ballot initiative is designed to do something that it should not…repeal the individual mandate in the Healthcare Reform Bill.

The Ohio Daily Blog notes that:

Because of this language — which is going to sound good to everyone — this issue will pass overwhelmingly. Count on it. It doesn’t really matter. Its intention is to repeal the federal Affordable Health Care Act in Ohio — and it just can’t legally be done. No state initiative can overturn a federal law.

We’ve also heard this will be a public relations coup for the anti-”Obamacare” folks, showing enormous public opposition to a bill that helps millions of people get health-care coverage they previously wouldn’t have had access to. But that’s simply untrue because most people voting “yes” on this will have no idea that’s what they’re voting to do — because IT DOESN’T SAY.

The summary is nothing but vague, nice-sounding words that say nothing. What does “freedom to choose your own health care” mean when insurance companies are charging you half your income for limited coverage?

So, what kind of morally bankrupt people would pull this? Why, the Tea Party and the Republican Party, of course. After all, democracy is for other people, not for Americans.

The Rebel Alliance logo

Well, I did say earlier today that Occupy Wall Street might consider moving away from just Wall Street and banks……

On Thursday night, when a group of WalMart executives showed up at a political fundraiser, they found Washington D. C.’s Union square filled with a flash mob banging drums and playing the famous John Williams’ theme from Star Wars. They were carrying signs identifying themselves as the Rebel Alliance.

The group was a combined action by Occupy D. C. and the labor rights group Respect D. C. The Respect D. C. website explained that they were motivated by the issue of living wages. “WalMart is only required to pay the District’s minimum wage, currently $8.25 per hour. The company says it will pay competitive wages, but does not specify what competitive means. Many workers in suburban stores, even after several years with WalMart, make less than the $12.50, the current living wage as defined by D. C. law. Low-wage jobs do not help workers, especially those with families, move out of poverty to become contributors to the District’s tax base and economy. WalMart can be a force to improve wages and benefits for workers in the District. According to the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley, if WalMart were to increase workers’ pay to $12 an hour, and pass 100 percent of the wage increase on to consumers, the average impact on a WalMart shopper would be $0.46 per shopping trip, or $12.49 per year.”

The demonstration came the night before WalMart’s announcement that they are cutting employees’ health care benefits, so the organizers did not know how much greater the adverse impact of WalMart on its employees was about to become.

The issues are good. The difference between minimum wages and living wages is the difference between poverty and a reasonable life. The living wage varies from location to location, but is pretty consistently higher than minimum. Minimum wage was a decent idea when it was an entry level or what one paid to a part-time employee who was also a student, but as it has become the base wage of two whole industries, it is contributing to our lower median incomes and higher poverty rates.

Nonetheless – Star Wars? Really, guys?

Look, I appreciate the fact that Occupy Wall Street is very unorganized, very organic. But the protesters need to realize that if they ladle their protests with pop culture, especially pop culture that is so strongly associated with what the right-wing considers geek-freak conventions, they will not be taken seriously. The movement is already suffering image problems over the bongo drums and costumes. Those are the people being filmed by the right wing, so that the whole movement can be branded as just a bunch of hippie freakazoids. Please, can we leave the costumes and cultural references to the Tea Party?

Related articles

• WalMart Shifts Employee Healthcare Costs To States (lezgetreal.com)
• Wal-Mart ups health-care premium, trims benefits (marketwatch.com)
• Occupy Wall Street roundup, Day 34 (dailykos.com)
• Occupy Wall Street: Some fakers and confusion (wilderside.wordpress.com)

The Michigan State House, Lansing

Cuts to Michigan’s welfare program will be spared a major round of cuts thanks to a federal judge. The judge stated on Teusday that the state had done a poor job of notifying thousands of people that they would no longer receive cash benefits. Judge Paul Borman ordered that new notices be sent.

The Republicans who control the legislature and Republican Governor Rick Snyder approved a new and stricter four-year cap which was suppose to start on 1 October. It is the latest attempt to oppress and destroy the poor while benefitting the rich. The lawsuit was filed by advocates for the poor and alleges that more than 10,000 families and 20,000 plus children will be affected.

Source

The Michigan State House, Lansing

The Michigan House of Representatives has passed House Bills 4770 ad 4771 by a vote of 64-44. The bills eliminate healthcare benefits for unmarried partners of public employees and prohibit any government entity in the state from providing these benefits. It also prohibits unions from including them in collective bargaining agreements. The push for these two came from State Representative Dave Agema and Attorney General Bill Schuette.

Policy Director for Equality Michigan Emily Dievendorf stated

“We are ashamed of our Republican lawmakers today. They continue to attack hardworking gay and transgender citizens rather than rebuilding our state. Anti-gay legislators are pushing a regressive policy agenda that ignores best practices in business and makes our state hostile to gay and lesbian couples. Voters should be outraged.”

“Tens of thousands of public and private employees in our state have access to health care benefits for domestic partners. Policies that provide such benefits are used throughout the country to treat employees fairly and retain talented workers. Leaders from Fortune 500 companies, public school districts, and municipal governments across the country know that their workforces are stronger when employees are able to take care of their families.”

Some 900,000 Michigan employees of private companies are eligible to offer healthcare beneifts to domestic partners, and more than twenty major Michigan corporations provide such benefits including Ford, GM, Chrysler, Dow Chemical and Whirlpool. Many public entities also provide these benefits including ten of the public universities and five city and county governments.

So, do not be surprised if there is a drain of workers from Michigan over this, and a lack of qualified people to replace them. The GOP holy war to destroy the economy continues forward.

Of course, if this is challenged in the courts, it could face the same kind of problems that a similar move has in Arizona where the courts have ruled against stripping lesbian and gay domestic partners of their benefits.

The Michigan State House, Lansing

The Republican legislature in Michigan is taking up House Bills 4770 and 4771 this week to end the offering of health insurance to unmarried partners. The fact that these bills have been pushed by two openly anti-gay officials is blurring the underlying issue – this bill would hit straight couples as well as same-sex couples.

The bills would end the health care benefits for other eligible adults living with a state employee. Currently, those benefits are under an extension granted by the Michigan Civil Service Commission in January. The bills would not only terminate that extension, but prohibit the granting of those benefits in any other government in the state – from cities and towns, from public universities, from anything that might be considered a “government” entity – and prohibit unions from including them in collective bargaining.

The bills are being pushed by Republican Representative Dave Agema of Grandville and Attorney General Bill Schuette, who are pushing for anything that might make life difficult for gays and lesbians, which has naturally taken this debate into the issue of gay rights, but “eligible adult” can, in certain circumstances, also mean a straight partner, a child or a parent. All sorts of combinations of adults are denied the rights that are granted by a marriage license, and forced to enter into multiple legal contracts, paying out money for lawyers, for something that should be accessible with a simple partnership contract.

Sometimes, we are so focused on the rights of one group, we lose sight of others who are also being harmed. Emily Dievendorf, Director of Policy for Equality Michigan, issued the following statement: “These bill are yet another desperate attack on our community. Radical lawmakers are attempting to interfere with local employment policy and weaken working families’ ability to care for their loved ones. They are trying to codify their anti-gay biases into law. It’s simply intolerable and voters should be furious. Tens of thousands of public and private employees in our state have access to health care benefits for unmarried partners. Policies that provide such benefits are used throughout the country to treat employees fairly and retain talented workers. Leaders from Fortune 500 companies, public school districts, and municipal governments across the country know that their workforces are stronger when employees are able to take care of their families. Passage of these bills would help run our state into the ground. We call on the House to vote these bills down immediately and send a message that lawmakers value fundamental fairness, strong working families and a healthy workforce.”

Most major companies provide partners’ benefits. Some allow a broad definition of what constitutes a “family” to include any dependent, adult or child. Just attacking these bills as a “gay issue” misses the broader point and dismisses the possibility of broader support. What benefit does a state gain by cutting off access to health insurance for any population? Will those people then be eligible for Medicaid? Just processing the applications for assistance will place strains on the Michigan bureaucracy. Will they join the mass of uninsured Americans who are straining our medical system with unpaid bills? Few people think of the cost of the uninsured, but their situation hurts all of us. We pay for them in state and federal programs to provide health care for the poor. We pay for them in our health insurance premiums and medical bills which seek to re-coup the losses created by the uninsured. We pay for them in their lost work hours and lost school time because the denial of access to basic health care results in them only getting help when their health is in crisis and more time-consuming and expensive to treat.

We as a society are trying to find solutions to the problem of being 37^th in the world in health care delivery while being the most expensive country in the world in health care costs. Cutting anyone off from health insurance just makes the problem worse. Michigan House 4770 and 4771 impact far more than the gay and lesbian partners of civil servants. They impact the economy of the whole state.

Related articles

• MI House Approves Stripping Domestic Partner Benefits From Workers (lezgetreal.com)

It appears that Texas Governor Rick Perry was “taken aback” by members of the audience at last night’s CNN/Tea Party Express debate who cried out that if a sick man did not have insurance, he should be left to die. Talk about Christian morality here. Apparently, Perry stated somewhere in there that “We’re the party of life.”

The incident came as US Texas Representative Ron Paul was asked by Wolf Blitzer about whether or not this hypothetical man should be left to die, several members of the crowd yelled “yeah!” Representative Paul tried to harken back to the 1920′s and talked about how communities and churches would help pay for the medical costs of healthcare for such a person despite the fact that those few communities which do hold fundraisers for such cases almost never manage to raise enough money to do so, and most churches can barely manage to help those that they do.

The Huffington Post notes:

The Texas congressman suggested that no one was ever turned away from the hospital when he worked as a doctor or when he’s conducted volunteer work at churches. He said, “We have given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves, assume responsibility for ourselves … that’s the reason the cost is so high.”

Perry, though, stated to NBC News and the Miami Herald that “We ought to be coming up with ways to save lives.” Of course, Perry tends to believe that we should get rid of those things that would help to pay for saving those lines.

Texas has the highest rate of uninsured in the nation, which only adds to the healthcare costs of that state. The LA Times noted that “But in the 11 years the Republican presidential hopeful has been in office, working Texans increasingly have been priced out of private healthcare while the state’s safety net has withered, leaving millions of state residents without medical care.”

Nearly a third of all of Texas’ children do not receive an annual physical, and infant mortality rates have gone up significantly while declining across the nation. Of course, there are all of those wonderful churches and communities that are stepping forward to help those without insurance.

Right?

A recently released study of North American medical schools says that they are not giving thier students enough training on issues particular to the LGBT community.

While experts have called for medical schools to cover LGBT issues, the study says the actual content and amount of such training hasn’t been known. It also noted medical schools set aside an average of only seven hours for topics related to the health care needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) patients.

The survey of deans of 150 American and Canadian medical schools as well found wide variation in the amount, content and quality of instruction on LGBT health.

The researchers discovered that the average reported combined hours assigned to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender content was five hours. The corresponding median value was seven hours. During clinical years, 44 medical schools (33.3%) reported 0 hours of LGBT content, 9 schools (6.8%) reported 0 hours during preclinical years, and five medical schools (3.8%) reported 0 combined hours. Compared to U.S. allopathic schools whose reported median clinical hours were 2 hours, U.S. osteopathic schools had considerably less median with 0 clinical hours.

97% of those who responded to the questionnaire, reported that their school educates medical students to ask patients if they have sex with men, women, or both when obtaining a sexual history. 72% of the institutions reported teaching students the difference between behavior and identity (e.g., men might have sex with men and identify as straight), while 21.2% were not sure if this difference was taught.

62.9% of the institutions reported teaching half of 16 topics related to LGBT in their required or elective curricular, while 8% reported teaching all 16 of the topics.

Study author Dr Mitchell R Lunn of Harvard University added  in a statement: “Every time a patient comes to a new doctor, that individual effectively has to ‘come out’ again.

“There is a lot of fear about how that is going to go. The fear of discrimination has pushed some people away from the doctor and some never return.”

The findings appeared Sept. 7 in a medical education theme issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Related articles

• Medical schools spend small amount of time teaching content related to health of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender patients, survey finds (thesexreport.org)
• Medical schools teaching little about gay health (miamiherald.typepad.com)
• Education For Medical Students Relating To The Health Of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual And Trans-Gender Patients Is Only Five Hours On Average (medicalnewstoday.com)
• Medical schools teaching little about gay health (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Medical schools failing to cover LGBT health issues: Study (canada.com)
• LGBT health issues not being taught at medical schools, Stanford study finds (eurekalert.org)
• Docs in Training Learn Little About Gay Health (abcnews.go.com)

17 August 2011
by Bridgette P. LaVictoire

Governor Sam Brownback appears to care more about making sure that people get married rather than making sure that they can get healthcare. Perhaps he is hoping that people will be able to watch their spouses die from something curable because they cannot afford health insurance. He has rejected a $31.5 million federal grant to help implement the new healthcare law, but is applying for $6.6 million to promote marriage.

Brownback claimed that the state was rejecting the healthcare grant because he was concerned “that the federal government would not be able to meet its financial commitments.” He also felt that the states should be using fewer federal dollars, not more.

Of course, noone pointed out that this means he should not be asking for any grants at all.

The Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services are seeking $2.2 million a year for the next three years to help pay for counseling to encourage unwed parents to marry despite all of these beliefs in the insolvency of the federal government. State officials have said that this was an effort to help reduce child poverty because it encourages stable families.

So would allowing same-sex marriage and getting people healthcare.

Anthony Hensley, a Topeka Democrat, believes that Brownback’s world view is influencing what federal dollars they go after. Hensley stated “When it benefits their philosophical ideology, everything is fine. Where it doesn’t fit in or goes against them — either from a policy or political standpoint — then the federal money isn’t OK.”

Brownback’s staff told the Star that they do not have a blanket policy regarding federal grants. They said in a statement “Each potential grant and the federal requirements that come along with them are evaluated on a case-by-case basis with an increased watchful eye toward long-term mandates with short-term funding streams.”

According to CJOnline:

When asked if the state had rejected other grants, Brownback’s staff said it is more accurate to say the state has declined to apply for some grants.

For example, the state isn’t pursuing any part of the $900 million that the federal government will disburse in the next five years to help communities reduce chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. A spokeswoman for the state health department said the grant wasn’t in line with state priorities and concerns were raised about strings attached to the money. She also said the state could use existing funds to implement some of the same programs.

Brownback believes that children raised by married couples are more likely to succeed in school, less likely to have behavior problems or live in poverty. To a certain degree, he is correct. This is actually one of the major reasons why the LGBT Community have been pushing for marriage equality.

According to Angela De Rocha, spokeswoman for the Kansaas Department of Social Rehabilitation Services “The governor’s priority issue is reducing child poverty in Kansas. This is part of that approach.”

Of course, when people do no have health insurance or healthcare coverage, they are more likely to fall into debt, and more likely to divorce.

CJOnline also noted:

If the state receives the grant, the federal government would pay to send unwed parents to six counseling sessions offered by either secular or faith-based counseling services chosen by the state. The parents would volunteer for the program and could choose the kind of counseling service they wanted.

If the parents completed the program and marry, the federal grant would pay the $85.50 cost of their marriage license.

The state estimates that more than 7,600 mothers or couples would begin counseling at $25 to $50 per session. Sixty percent of those are expected to finish the program and qualify for a free license.

Even if the couple doesn’t marry, the grant application said, the parents will learn how to maintain relationships and work together for the good of their child.

Countries With Universal Health Care

The Federal Appeals Court in Atlanta has declared the Affordable Health Care Act unconstitutional. This one is going to end up in the Supreme Court because the lower courts are dividing on their rulings. The critical issue is the individual mandate, which would require nearly all Americans to have health insurance from some source, the same way Hawaii and Massachusetts have required it.

I’m waiting for someone to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the mandate that car owners must have auto insurance, and homeowners must have homeowner’s insurance, and in a flood plain must also have flood insurance if they have a mortgage. If it is unconstitutional for the Federal government to require health insurance, then why can states mandate auto insurance and mortgage lenders mandate up to four different insurance policies?

If we can’t have a Federal mandate for health insurance, can we have a law barring people who have jobs qualifying for Federal health insurance programs because their employers won’t provide insurance? I am really tired of having my federal taxes used to provide health insurance for the children of Walmart employees and my state taxes providing health insurance for small business employees.

The Republican mantra about the health care law is “it will kill jobs.” Yep. Business owners are threatening to fire people if they have to find a health insurance policy that they can provide access to. It’s not even as though the law demands that the business pay the entire premium for health insurance. Hell, the Feds don’t, so why should businesses? Instead, they prefer to keep their employees below the state threshold for providing benefits and let Medicaid provide insurance for their employees’ children.

In the 67 years since Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that health care should be part of our Second Bill of Rights, every effort has been expended to protect the private insurance industry, until our health care costs twice as much as the next most expensive country in the world and our health care delivery keeps dropping lower and lower every year. We are currently 37^th in the world. THIRTY-SEVENTH!! Thirty-six countries have lower infant mortality rates, lower maternity mortality rates, better access to health care services, long life expectancies, lower rates of communicable diseases, lower rates of deaths from controllable and treatable conditions, better ratios of medical service providers to population, etc. etc. on every possible measure of human health and well-being.

The American people are not benefitting from our alleged “best health care system in the world.” (Millionaire Rush Limbaugh’s words.) The insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies are benefitting from our health care system. They have the money to buy our politicians and protect their industries. All the American people have is illness, untreated controllable diseases and early death. All the American people have are politicians who are now telling us that we as a nation cannot afford public subsidy of our health care for those who are denied access to health insurance by their employers. All the American people have is a political movement that says we should all accept the loss of health insurance as a benefit of employment since so many private sector companies have figured out how to avoid the expense. All the American people have is the prospect of a two-tier health care system, with the rich getting the best care money can buy and the rest of us, both the dwindling middle class and lower classes, lining up for hours at free clinics and rationing our medications.

All we have is a nation sliding toward parity with Somalia and Darfur for health care delivery because one portion of our population has been conditioned to believe that health care is not a human right and anyone who says it is is a stinking commie. Nationalized health has not infringed in any way on democracy in Canada, Australia, England, Germany, France or any other republic with the intelligence to know that private insurance simply increases costs and denies care. One-third of us wanted a public option. One-third of us supported the law the way it is. We are being denied our human right to health care by one-third of this county. What every happened to majority rules as long as it does not oppress a minority?

Related articles

• Appeals Court Rejects Health Insurance Mandate (npr.org)
• The Latest Health Care Court Case (whitehouse.gov)

MSNBC and Ed Schulz are calling for donations to assist in the operation of a free clinic in New Orleans on August 29. For more information please go to www.freeclinics.us or text health 50555 to donate $10.  And if I got those wrong, please see the links below – I’m our site’s resident tech dummy and really bad at creating links.

In the past two years, these free clinics for the uninsured saved hundreds of lives and served thousands who hadn’t seen a doctor in years. These are not freeloaders and bloodsucking lay-abouts. These clinics are for uninsured working people who earn too little to afford medical care. Only children and pregnant women get Medicaid in low-income families except in those few states like Vermont, Massachusetts and Hawaii that passed laws that give access to health care to all. Please, donate, volunteer, do whatever you can to support this clinic as you supported the ones in the past.

The retail model, pioneered by Walmart, is to keep employees under the state threshold for hours per week that requires providing benefits. That means almost everyone you see on the floor of a department store, big box home improvement store, supermarket, fast food restaurant, even your local small businesses, is uninsured and only gets medical care in emergencies. Unless they have a spouse or partner with health insurance, their children are on Medicaid, which you are paying for so that the retailer can maintain a “healthy” profit margin. Further distancing these people from medical care is the critical shortage of doctors willing to accept Medicaid and Medicare patients and the lack of public hospitals. The free clinics serve the people that the rich and the right wing would see die of treatable, controllable conditions rather than reform the system.

I know how tight all our budgets are. Think of the $10 as a vote against those who so blind to reality that they think a person who takes home less than $1,000 a month can afford $100 to walk into a doctor’s office just to get permission for the $400 to $500 worth of tests to determine what’s wrong. Think of the $10 as saving a human life.

And if you can’t afford the $10, please volunteer. It’s one day of your time for years of a person’s life. It’s a fair trade.

Related articles

• Majority of Free Clinics Have Had to Turn Away Needy Patients (dailyfinance.com)
• Volunteer for the 2011 NEW ORLEANS C.A.R.E. Clinic (medicineandtechnology.com)
• You can help give healthcare to someone who can’t – here’s how (thoughtstomull.com)

A Molotov Cocktail

The Dallas police and fire department have confirmed that a Molotov cocktail, diesel fuel in a glass bottle with a rag fuse, was thrown at one of the Dallas area clinics run by Planned Parenthood. Holly Morgan, the director of media relations and communications for Planned Parenthood, said that the attack took place around 11 p.m. local time Tuesday. She said, “It didn’t penetrate the health center office and none of the staff or patients were there, which is great. It scorched the outside of the door and I believe there was a little scorching to the retail locations on either side of it.”

This time, there was no one in the building. This time, no one was hurt. This time.

It is time for words to have consequences, before there is another assassination like that of Dr. Tiller. Those who have stirred up all this anger against Planned Parenthood with their speeches and misinformation need to be held accountable. That includes Senator Jon Kyl. We have laws in this country about libel, slander and incitement to violence. They need to be used to their fullest extent. All we need is one person or organization to finally use the laws the way they should be and not back down from fighting this out.

Related articles

• Dallas-area Planned Parenthood Target of Violent Attack (hayladies.wordpress.com)
• Anti-Abortion Fanatic Sued By Government (lezgetreal.com)
• Live on tape: Congressmen Weigh In on the Need to Investigate and De-Fund Planned Parenthood (deaconforlife.blogspot.com)

The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department has filed suit against Maryland resident Richard Retta for repeated violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act and harassment of patients at Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington.

According to the complaint, Retta is being cited for eight specific instances of interfering with patients and escorts entering the clinic and harassing them and their escorts going into and leaving the clinic. He is accused of violating the distance requirements for protesters, having physical contact with a patient on one occasion, following patients and escorts as they leave, and physically obstructing access. In general, the complaint says that Retta “attempted to, and did, by physical obstruction, intentionally intimidate or interfere with persons because they were or had been providing or obtaining reproductive health services, or in order to intimidatge such persons from providing or obtaining reproductive health services at the Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington.”

The government is seeking a $10,000 fine for violation of the Freedom of Access Act and $5,000 each for three of his victims, plus a restraining order to keep him, alone or with others, from continuing his campaign of protest.

Abortion is legal in this country, at least for the time being, and any action which attempts to prevent people accessing a women’s clinic should be treated in the same way as any action which attempts to prevent people exercising any other legal action. The same people who made a huge scandal out of two idiots standing around outside an alleged polling place, with their arms crossed over their chests, looking like the “gansta” hamsters in a car commercial – supposedly “intimidating voters” – are the same ones who say nothing about people like Retta blocking legal access to a health care facility. Legal is legal and Retta deserves more than a fine and a slap on the wrist. He deserves jail time for trying to prevent people exercising their legal rights.

Related articles

• Planned Parenthood Faces New Scrutiny Over Abortions, Abuse (usnews.com)
• States more than double previous record for anti-abortion legislation in 2011 (dailykos.com)
• Kansas and South Dakota Abortion Law Goes To Courts (lezgetreal.com)
• Kansas Gov. Appoints Anti-Abortion Lawyer to Medical Board (lezgetreal.com)

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

A long time ago, a group of Vermont legislators dedicated a lot of time and effort to revising the state’s criminal code. It was a monumental job, cleaning out stupid old laws, streamlining and combining overlapping ones, addressing new problems with modern language. Shortly after the statutes were adopted, however, it was discovered the hard way that they had inadvertently made armed robbery a misdemeanor.

The Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare) ran to over 2,000 pages. Around half of that dealt with voiding old legislation that had to be ditched before the new legislation could be enacted. Purely from the perspective of creating and writing legislation, it was a remarkable achievement. Nancy Pelosi’s joke about reading it after they passed it was just that, a joke. No one ever reads all the stuff about voiding old laws. They concentrate on what the new parts say.

Somewhere in those 2,000 plus pages there was a small errror involving a small group of people. It seems that after 2014, if a couple retire at 62, they could have a combined income of $64,000 a year and qualify for Medicaid because their Social Security benefits would no longer be counted against their eligibility.

Where can I sign up? Oh, 2014. That’s too late for me. My husband retired from the Federal Court System. As a retiree, he was allowed to retain our health insurance. We pay $470 a month, almost one-third of his pension, for a health insurance policy with a $700 deductible and a 20-25% co-pay depending on use. That deductible is equal to my monthly take-home from my part-time job. We barely make it from one end of the month to the other (long story involving extended family). That deductible is the reason we don’t have anything done that we can avoid.

In 17 months, he will go on Medicare and I will switch to Vermont’s health insurance for the working poor, Catamount. We will both be paying premiums, but about $300 a month less than we are now. The coverage is actually better. Catamount has dental.

$64,000 a year sounds like a lot, until you figure taxes (Social Security is taxed based on other income), and such things as mortgage payments and car payments and supporting your kid who can’t get a job. The premiums on a private insurance, when subsidized by a former employer, can seriously reduce a couple’s income – as in an almost $6,000 a year reduction. Without the employer subsidy, it can run as high as $10,000 a year. If it weren’t so difficult to get a G.P. who accepts Medicaid, I would say the 3 million people who would qualify for this glitch would be dancing in the street. One of the reasons Medicare costs so much is the manner in which people do not get adequate health care until they have Medicare.

Obviously, there will be every effort expended to correct this “error” before 2014. That’s a pity, really. It would be a perfect opportunity to test out the public option on a small, controlled scale.

We are back to what Vermont does well, now that we’ve mentioned what it occasionally does badly. For those working adults who do not have employer-provided health insurance, the state has a subsidized program. Premiums are based on income. Not having employer-provided health insurance means practically everyone who works for a retail chain and most small businesses who keep their employees below the hour-per-week threshold at which the state mandates benefits.

The fight in Washington is over the cost of Medicare and Medicaid. That’s the wrong end of the argument. We should be fighting over why our health care costs twice as much as the next highest country. We should be fighting over the impact that profit has on health care costs. We should be fighting over the cost of malpractice insurance premiums. Medicare and Medicaid cost as much as they do because our health care system’s costs are out of control and totally unjustifiable. It is the cost of insurance and multiple layers of profit that make a $700 test in Finland cost $1400 in America. Until we can discuss the real cause of our health care crisis, we are just going around in circles.

Related articles

• Health care quirk grants middle-class Medicaid (cbsnews.com)
• Liberty and Health Care (aleksandreia.wordpress.com)
• Oops! Obamacare provides Medicaid for the middle class (capitolhillblue.com)

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker

Under Wisconsin’s BadgerCare, the state’s Medicaid family planning program, young men with little income could get tested for sexually-transmitted, sometimes fatal diseases. Testing for HIV and hepatitis C costs around $300, something an uninsured college student with a part time job simply cannot afford.

Now, Scott Walker has decided that these young men can fend for themselves. Almost 7,000 low-income Wisconsin men use BadgerCare, but Walker’s latest budget bill would cut off service to them. It would also cut off Wisconsin’s participation in federal funding for family planning under Medicaid, impacting young women as well. The bill, currently in the Joint Finance Committee in the Republican-dominated state legislature, would also include provisions that increase age restrictions, require parental consent for anyone under 18, reduce the eligibility down to 200% of the federal poverty level and cut more than $1 million from Planned Parenthood, all conservatives favorite victim when it comes to family planning services.

Pro-choice advocates believe that Walker and the Republicans are doing this to get rid of all family planning funding in the state. The executive director of Planned Parenthood, Tanya Atkinson, said, “Taking men out of the program not only serves to remove critical health care for men, but it puts us out of compliance with our agreement with the federal government and puts the entire BadgerCare program at risk. It’s a politically palatable way of systematically dismantling Wisconsin’s family planning program.”

Pro-Life Wisconsin legislative director Matt Sande defends the legislation with this reasoning: “The assumption is that, if you get women on birth control, that would reduce BadgerCare-funded births and save money. But how much are men contributing to those purported cost savings? Less than 7,000 men use the program, compared to 50,000 total patients. You’re looking at a small percentage of the overall population, so it just seemed to a Republican legislator to be a gratuitous add-on that is not saving the state anything.” But Sande’s further statements show what this is really about. “Medicaid is a state program providing free state-funded birth control and condoms to 15-, 16- and 17-year olds, and that’s a violation of parental rights. We oppose the BadgerCare program for that reason, and also because of the fact that government-funded birth control increases pregnancies and promotes promiscuity – it has the opposite of its intended effect.” Yep – sex education promotes sex. To date there has not been one single proof of this ridiculous proposition offered by anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-sex fanatics. The proof, however, is that the statistics for teen pregnancies fell dramatically during the Clinton administration when sex education and birth control were made more available. It is also in the fact that the year with the highest rate of teen pregnancies was 1958, before the pill and before wide-spread sex education.

BadgerCare serves about 57,600 low income Wisconsinites, according to Planned Parenthood, and there were a state health department-estimated 11,000 unplanned pregnancies in 2008. Without access to family planning services, it is argued that there would be an increase in unwanted pregnancies, STDs, undetected cervical, breast and testicular cancers.

Whatever savings Walker thinks this bill will give Wisconsin, the fact is that it will cost the state all its federal funding for family planning, and hit the state with the costs of dealing with the consequences of the loss of preventive and early detection services – potentially millions in health care dollars and hundreds of Wisconsin lives. Walker, however, would rather kill people than give up on the billions of dollars of tax cuts he wants for corporations and the top 2% of Wisconsinites. And pro-lifers would rather see young women getting illegal abortions in kitchens, risking permanent damage and death, than hand out condoms to prevent the pregnancies in the first place.

July 12th can’t come soon enough for Wisconsin.

Related articles

• Hysteria Over Federal Response To Indiana Defunding Planned Parenthood (lezgetreal.com)
• Wisconsin, Tennessee Try To Pull Planned Parenthood Funding (huffingtonpost.com)
• In My State (almostclever.wordpress.com)
• Administration says Indiana law violates Medicaid rules (cnn.com)
• Editorial: Planned Parenthood ban unwise, illegal (knoxnews.com)
• HHS rejects Indiana’s new law to defund Planned Parenthood (dailykos.com)
• Opposition Rises To De-Funding Planned Parenthood (lezgetreal.com)

Image via Wikipedia

6/2/11  by Jennifer Morgan
Founded in 1984 in Toronto, Canada by Frank Toskan and Frank Angelo, M•A•C  cosmetics believes in giving back to the community and environment. M•A•C cosmetics, now owned by Este Lauder Companies, prohibits animal testing on their products and ingredients, encourages recycling of their product containers by offering customers a free lipgloss, eyeshadow or lipstick when they return six empty packaging containers, and has raised millions of dollars in support for those living with AIDS with their M•A•C  AIDS Fund.
 
South Africa faces one of the fastest growing rates of HIV/ AIDS infection in the world. Because of this high HIV prevalence, survivors of sexual violence are at a high risk of becoming infected with HIV/AIDS. Evidence has also shown that women living with HIV/AIDS are at higher risk of experiencing violence. With one in three women between the ages of 25 -29 living with HIV this puts many young women in an additional high risk category.
 
Thursday June 2nd, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced a public-private partnership with the M•A•C AIDS Fund to expand critical medical and emergency support services for survivors of rape and sexual assault in South Africa. This partnership is designed to empower South African women, provide greater access to medical care including HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment programs, psychosocial services and legal assistance. With so many of today’s companies putting profits first and people last, it’s refreshing to see a company like M•A•C step up and be a part of the solution.

U. S. Dept. of Health & Human Services

Nine months before my mother died, she underwent vascular surgery to repair a graft in her groin that had been part of a previous surgery involving a stent and an aortic aneurysm. She spent 48 hours in the hospital. There were no stitches over the surgical site, just a “wet to dry” dressing. Her discharge orders literally said “daughters are teachable.” We took her home in the back seat of a Ford Escort. The next morning, a nurse from the Visiting Nurse service arrived to teach us how to remove her dressing, lay gauze in the open gaping wound, pour in sterile water and lay in more gauze before taping the whole thing down with a special covering that wouldn’t tear her fragile skin. In a major screw-up, her follow-up appointment was not scheduled in a timely manner and she was off her Plavix long enough because of the surgery to cause a mini-stroke 32 days later.

Her doctor’s explanation for sending her home was that this was the procedure decided upon by the cost containment division of her hospital. I’ll spare them. Let’s just say it is one of the most prestigious hospitals in New England. I seriously adore this hospital. The doctors are incredible, the services are exceptional, the whole place usually operates with a precision I have rarely seen in medical facilities. Still….48 hours after major surgery on a woman in her eighties? Yeah, we were teachable. We should be. Mom was a highly-respected nurse and trained us very well. We’re both intelligent and responsible women. But how many families could have coped with such a situation?

Which leads us to the objections being raised to the draft regulations coming out of the Department of Health and Human Services for the new Health Care law’s “accountable care organizations” – those networks of doctors and hospitals which would collaborate on keeping Medicare patients healthier and save money for taxpayers. The law envisions setting up these networks to improve health care delivery. The aspect that is currently being put together in my home town involves computerizing all doctors’ offices and pharmacies, all nursing care facilities of every kind so that records are shared instantly. It’s driving my doctor’s staff nuts, but as an employee in an assisted living facility, I’d love for our staff to be computer literate enough to put our files and prescription orders into this system.

The American Medical Group Association, which represents almost 400 large medical groups and provide care for 1 of every 3 Americans, has raised objections to the proposed regulations. Among their members are the Cleveland Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare in Utah and Geisinger Health Systems in Pennsylvania. The claim the rules are so unacceptable, it would be impossible for them to work.

The AMGA, whose motto is “The Best Medicine In America, The Best Medicine For America”, has published a compensation and finanical survey for the past 22 years. It presents detailed date on what everyone is charging for their services. Such surveys can be used to set fees that are identical to each other and restrict competition.

AMGA President Donald Fisher said “It’s not just a simple tweak, it’s a significant change that needs to be made,” to the regulations. According to the group, there would be no flexibility for patients who need more expensive treatments or closer follow-up. So? How is that any different from the rules imposed by insurance companies?

The administration is gathering input from many sources to help them put the regulations together. Nothing is going to be easy with the implementation of this law. Everyone who has a stake in maintaining the status quo in medical care will fight to keep their system going. Let’s all make sure we are moving full speed ahead to standing still.

The resistence to making changes to cut costs is predictable. Every industry resists changes. It is easier to go with the momentum than to stop and assess what can be better done.

Our medical system is a mess. The hospitals that serve the poor are in deep debt and facing attempts to close them by state legislatures. We have a desperate shortage of general practitioners. We have an overabundance of specialists. Nurses have been driven from patient care to administration, while we increase the amount of responsibility that can be assigned to less-trained personnel. Doctors refuse to accept Medicare and Medicaid patients. An estimated 30 million of us have no health insurance and that number is going to rise as fewer and fewer of us can find full time jobs with benefits. We are falling further and further behind health care delivery in other countries while our costs go higher and higher. We have the most technologically advanced health care system in the world, and are rapidly reaching the point where only a small percentage of us will be able to afford the most basic health care.

The Affordable Health Care Act wasn’t perfect. It lacked the public option so many of us wanted. Most of us either approve of the law or think it didn’t go far enough. The Republicans have used those “not far enough” poll results to claim that the majority of Americans are opposed to the law. The majority of us want better health care at lower costs and accessibility for everyone. The last thing we need is the government being pushed by the profit-driven aspects of the system to limit the reforms.

Related articles

• Rand Paul: If You Believe Health Care Is A Right, You Believe In Slavery (alan.com)
• Kids’ Health Issues to Watch: The Growing Reach of Retail Health Care (education.com)
• Obama plan for health care quality dealt a setback (thenewstribune.com)
• Health Care For All Nears Reality In One State (huffingtonpost.com)
• Nurse practitioners fill state health care gap (bendbulletin.com)
• Study: Care costs continue brisk growth in 2011 (seattlepi.com)
• Doctors, nurses aren’t the only ones who are finding work in health care – The Boston Globe (macc5022.wordpress.com)
• Different fates for 2 Illinois charity hospitals (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

From MyHealtheVet, you can track your prescriptions, get VA wellness reminders, check your appointments and when available send Secure Messages to your health care team.

One of its features is two medical libraries for you to research your topic of interest. MedlinePlus® offers over 700 topics on conditions, diseases and wellness from the National Library of Medicine, plus many other helpful and informative resources. While HealthWise® contains comprehensive, current, evidence-based, and unbiased information to help consumers make decisions about their health.

There are personal assessment tools for alcohol, depression and substance abuse screening, plus a tool for testing for PTSD. There is also information on service related conditions and common conditions.

You will create a profile and emergency contact list. You can add your insurance information, allergies and any medical conditions that may be important in case of an emergency. After you do all that you can print out an emergency information card that you can carry in your wallet or on your person in case you are unconscious and need medical treatment.

You can download any data about you contained in MyHealtheVet. You can download it in a format that is easy to read, either in PDF or TXT formats.

In-Person Authentication (IPA) is a process used to verify a MyHealtheVet (MHV) user’s identity. Registered MHV users who are VA patients that have completed the IPA process will be able to view the names of their VA prescriptions.

Before In Person Authentication can occur, several requirements must be met. You need to fill out a form available on-line in MyHealtheVet. You must take this form to your VA facility and there you will supply your VA identification card to a staff member. In-Person Authentication will extend your features in MyHealtheVet to include being able to view key portions of your electronic medical records.

There are a lot more features I could discuss here and I’ve only highlighted a few. Every veteran should use MyHealtheVet to keep up with their medical history. Sign up today and take charge of your health.

Sitting here listening to the analysis of the President’s speech on deficit reduction, I finally realized something. No one ever talks about WHY Medicare costs so much. The answer is remarkably simple: The rest of our health care delivery system sucks big time.

I’m 62. This is not an analysis from some think tank kid who only shaves once a week. This is the view from the trenches. I can’t wait for my husband to turn 65 and go on Medicare. He will finally be able to afford to get the preventative testing our doctor wants him to have that we can’t afford because of the co-pays and deductibles on our $450 a month Federal employees’ health insurance. Without his insurance, I will be able to go on Vermont’s low income health insurance system, Catamount, get the same benefits we get now and only pay $80 a month for it. That $370 a month savings – just one month’s worth – will pay the amount our insurance will not pay for one instance of blood work to check my overall responses to the medications I take to control my heart.

The vast majority of Americans are in the same sinking boat my husband and I are in. We are barely making our ends wave at each other. Any extra expense throws us to the wolves. Two years ago, I was one of the people who were victimized by a generic medication manufacturer who shorted the pills.. Out of pocket cost me 10 weeks of take home pay. In order to keep a roof over our heads, I had to push those bills out over the course of eighteen months. Think I got anything out of the manufacturer? Dream on. There weren’t enough of us who had this problem to get the attention of one of those law firms that advertise for class action suits on medications. Suing on my own would have cost me more than what I had spent.

Want to know how to hit a brick wall with a health insurance company? You just need to be one of those people who for some reason cannot take a generic medication. They really hate paying for name brands.

We are the lucky ones. We have insurance through my husband’s former employer – the Federal government. It costs us $5,400 a year, a $600 a year deductible and co-pays that can range between 20% and 40% depending on what the insurance company decides is the “customary and reasonable” fee for services. It is infinitely better than the insurance we used to have, which had four different deductibles of $600 each – doctor’s visits, hospitalizations, testings and prescriptions – and determined “customary and reasonable” by averaging charges across a geographic area that included at least two major cities where health costs were lower than in the survey region’s small cities and towns.

If – big IF – someone is lucky enough to have health insurance, there is a tendency to avoid elective procedures, including testing, because of the deductibles and co-pays which can devastate a tight budget. Without insurance, or with only major medical or inadequate insurance, all testing and most treatment gets put off until that magical day when Medicare kicks in. We saw months of this when Keith Olbermann was reporting on the free clinics he helped raise money for across the country. The primary benefit from these clinics was in the number of people who were finally diagnosed as having totally controllable, treatable conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes. Because they had no insurance, they had never been diagnosed. Because they had no insurance, they hadn’t seen a doctor for years, except in emergencies. Because they had no insurance, they put off getting treatment until they were in a crisis. Even with insurance, because of deductibles and co-pays, far too many people make the same choice. They don’t get tested, they don’t see doctors, they don’t seek treatment until they need crisis intervention.

We have relatives in Canada. Lise complains that the worst thing about the Canadian health care system is the number of people who go to the doctor when they have a cold they could have treated at home with over-the-counter medications. There is a delivery problem in countries with nationalized health – people go to the doctor, they get diagnostic tests, they get preventative care. Sometimes, the system backs up. Take your pick. Which would you rather have – waiting a couple of weeks to see the doctor for a routine exam or not being able to afford the blood work and other tests the doctor would order for a routine exam? Though recent surveys indicate that the American life expectancy is longer than it was a few years ago, it is not gaining as quickly as the rest of the industrialized world. We don’t live as long or enjoy as good health in our senior years as the people in first-world countries with nationalized health. Those as the facts.

Our Medicare system is overwhelmed because we reach the age of 65 in desperate need of the medical care we have denied ourselves through our forties and fifties because we can’t afford to seek care.

No one ever wants to talk about the impact of a profit motive on health costs. We have the highest health care costs in the world and don’t crack the top ten for health care delivery. Finland, which ranks as the healthiest country, spends $2104 per person on health care, 7% of their GDP. We spend $5711 per person and 16% of our GDP and have the shortest life expectancy and highest infant mortality rate of the leading developed nations in the world. The difference is not our allegedly “best health care in the world” it is our profit motive. And at the base of that profit motive are insurance companies. Doctors pay crippling premiums for malpractice insurance, driving up the fees they have to charge. And medical practices, testing facilities and hospitals add to the bills of the insured to cover the unpaid bills of the uninsured.

Why do prescriptions cost less in Canada? Because the system doesn’t allow the same profit margin that is accepted in America. Same drugs, same manufacturers, less profit margin, lower costs to patients. It’s first grade arithmetic, not rocket science. Add in the costs of the insurance that is subsidizing your prescription purchases, and the costs go up further. That takes it up to fifth grade math.

The simplest way to control the cost of Medicare, to control our health care costs overall and make us a healthier nation is to make it possible for Americans to get the health care they need when they are 45 and they won’t spend as much on health care when they are 65. It’s a total no-brainer.

So, when the hell are Democrats going to talk plain English and explain this to Americans? Maybe when they finally learn to get on Fox News and yell louder than the scripted Republicans who are dominating the non-debate.

Related articles

• Medicare isn’t the problem — it’s the solution (salon.com)
• Fixing Medicare: Obama Vs. Ryan (npr.org)
• How Would You Fix the Health-Care System? (fool.com)
• Robert Reich: Mr. President: Why Medicare Isn’t the Problem, It’s the Solution (huffingtonpost.com)

Rep. Paul Ryan

I just spent a whole afternoon researching the Federal budget and about a gazillion aspects of it in order to tear down the “plan for prosperity” that Republican Paul Ryan, Chairman of the House Budget Committee just presented to America. I racked up four pages of facts and data and basic economic jargon, and lost track of the amount of Excedrin I took. My ears aren’t ringing yet, so it couldn’t have been too much.

Here’s the short version. Ryan is wasting everyone’s time. Not even his own party is stupid enough to vote to privatize Medicare. The Republicans in general are wasting our time, by concentrating on social repression instead of creating jobs, by lobbing lies instead of facts, by playing the fear card and the hate card on a daily basis. They are so programmed to scare the crap out of us, they are still fighting the Cold War even though global communism is deader than last year’s Christmas tree.

The Tea Party got its name from the acronym for Taxed Enough Already. Well, the Republicans aren’t proposing anything that actually addresses the amount of taxes ordinary Americans are paying. Scandalously, the Democrats aren’t spreading President Obama’s message that the best thing we could do about taxes is scrap the system, eliminate the thousands of tax credits and tax breaks and loopholes and create a fair tax system with a lower rate for everything. Right now, personal income taxes amount to 6% of our GDP while corporate taxes amount to only 1%. When our country’s economy was booming, they were equal at 6%. We need to restore that.

We need to explain, clearly and concisely, that we are the only developed nation on earth that does not have nationalized health. We spend $5,711 per person on health care, but don’t even crack the top ten for health care delivery. Finland, the healthiest nation on earth, spends only $2,104 per person. We didn’t lose our manufacturing base only because of high wages. We lost it because health insurance added too much to the cost of business. We were told that by Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca back in the 1970′s when our manufacturing started going overseas. For four decades, we’ve ignored the warning until we have no manufacturing base anymore and almost no middle class.

Ryan’s plan doesn’t touch the defense budget. The facts: the United States spends 46.5% of all the money spent on defense in the whole world. The next highest defense spender is China, at a whole scary 6.6% of the world’s defense spending. Russia spends 3.5% of it. We could cut 86% of our defense budget and still be on par with China. We need to ask just who the hell we are defending ourselves against? Why do we need to spend $707 billion a year to defend ourselves against anyone? Personally, I’m sick of spending 20% of our national budget just to prove how big the collective American dick is.

Ryan’s plan for prosperity is just a new version of trickle down economics, with a really nasty twist of destroying all systems which provide a safety net for the poor. Trickle down economics doesn’t work. It has never worked. The only thing that has ever trickled down from the mansions on the hill is sewage.

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“They’re proposing raising taxes on small business,” Pelosi said of the two bills. “Under current law, women can buy insurance that covers a full range of reproductive health care. Under the Republican plan, women in private plans can’t use their private money to purchase a full range of reproductive health care, effectively taking away the right of women to spend their own money on the health care they choose.” “Small businesses that received tax credits for their employees will lose their tax credit if they choose a full range of plans that cover women’s health,” Pelosi added.

Representative Tammy Baldwin also went on the offensive recently to push back against the Republican attempts to destroy women’s rights:

Education, business loans, health care for life, burial benefits, widows and children’s benefits, all of these were part of our nation’s promise to our veterans and servicemen sixty years ago. And frankly, paying out those benefits when more than half of the young men in the country had put on the uniform was a very expensive proposition.

The Pentagon’s budget for next fiscal year is due out next week and Ash Carter, the Pentagon head of acquisition had hinted that there may be cuts to health care and other military personnel costs. He made these statements to a group of New York investors and defense industry leaders on Wednesday. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that “health care costs are eating the Defense Department alive.” Well, duh. What’s the latest figure for the wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq – over 30,000? How many of them are long-term disabilities? Men who died in Vietnam would have survived with today’s medical care, and that translates into much higher costs for long-term care. Bringing up our Veteran’s Hospital system to modern standards has cost a mint and a half, especially since so many of those facilities were so abysmal a decade ago. And along the way, since we have relied so heavily on the National Guard to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of our reduced standing army, we have had to expand our military health system to care for National Guardsmen in ways it never has before. Of course, it costs more.

Tricare, the military health system that covers military families as well as our serving men and women is coming under attack. That is flatly unacceptable.

Also being considered is a pay freeze for the military. Excuse me? We learned during the occupation of Iraq that an unskilled truck driver working for a war profiteer, sorry, contractor, averaged a salary more than twice that of our National Guardsmen, and they paid no income tax on that $60,000 a year. And the truck drivers were the lowest paid contract workers in the war zones. We paid out billions to Halliburton, RGB and the others to pay billions in untaxed income to their workers while our military families fought foreclosures and credit card overcharges and drastically reduced incomes for National Guard families.

Naturally, even with cuts in Pentagon spending that the Republicans don’t want, there will be plenty of money for planes, tanks, weapons and the paraphernalia of modern warfare.

So here the ultimate in cost cutting ideas for the Pentagon – GET THE HELL OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN! Gee, that was simple.

But being realistic, how about this idea – collect all the fines and penalties for overcharges, misuse of funds, unfulfilled contracts, damages for injuries, etc. from those overpaid contractors. Cut all the contacts, not just the ones with companies that have violated them, and finally do them properly – with the bidding process that the Bush/Cheney administration bypassed to enrich their friends. Find those missing billions that no one can account for or take them out of Halliburton’s and the other’s bottom lines.

We as a nation have a duty and obligation to care for the men and women who have and are serving us in the military in all its forms. We have a duty and obligation to care for the families who may lose their mother or father in war. We have no honor as a nation if we fail to do so.

But now, it’s not just the doctors who are getting out of the baby delivery business, it is hospitals as well.

In New York City, 5 hospitals have closed their maternity wards since 2003. In Pennsylvania, 39 hospitals have closed their maternity wards since 1997. In Alabama, 26 have closed since 1980. In rural Kentucky, there are only 7 obstetricians for every 100,000 residents, compared to 11 per 100,000 in the cities. The closing of the maternity unit at Mary Breckinridge Hospital in Hyden, Kentucky, in the Appalachian Mountains, left pregnant women traveling over an hour for prenatal care and deliveries. That means a lot of babies being delivered on the side of the road.

The number of births in America is not down sufficiently to explain the closures. The causes are the exorbitant premiums insurance companies charge for malpractice insurance in the field and the increase in the number of pregnant women who are on Medicaid because of the recession. In 2009, 22% of all women of childbearing age were uninsured and almost 15% were on Medicaid, according to the Gurrmacher Institute, a New York reproductive health researcher.

Medicaid and Medicare patients have been complaining for decades about the lack of doctors willing to treat them. Without regular physicians, these patients are forced to turn to hospital emergency rooms and clinics, burdening them with the decreasing reimbursement rates of these two programs. Now, hospitals are responding to this monetary crisis by closing maternity wards, increasing the risk of both maternal and infant deaths. Medicaid pays on average, only 88% of costs, which doesn’t sound bad for those of us who pay 20% co-pays for our medical insurance. But that 12% co-pay is being levied on people who barely manage to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head. They are not necessarily welfare recipients either. Medicaid is available to the working poor, the cashier at your local store who is only allowed by her employer to work fewer hours than the threshold number for benefits and at or just above minimum wage. Squeezing out payments to doctors and hospitals when you only take home $150 a week means giving up things like lunch and trips to the thrift store to replace your kid’s winter boots.

Medicaid is funded by a combination of Federal and State money. Many states have balanced budget amendments which make it impossible for them to run deficits. Others are so far in debt their credit ratings are in the proverbial toilet. The on-going assault on the health insurance law passed last year makes it unlikely we will see increases in Medicaid funding at the Federal level. It is turning into a literal life-and-death crisis.

Arizona is cutting Medicaid services in order to cut their budget deficit. They have already canceled transplant surgery for 96 patients who will die without transplants. One person is already dead because of these cuts, taken from a program Gov. Jan Brewer calls “Cadillac insurance” I didn’t know that Cadillac makes hearses. These closures and denial of service for the poor are the real “death panels.”

The United States of America has the highest health care costs in the world, nearly twice that of other nations, while our health care delivery and quality keeps sinking further and further behind other industrialized nations. We are rapidly dropping into third-world status on such measurements as access to health care, life expectancy and infant mortality, all because the insurance industry and its allies can scare the hell out of people with just two words: socialized medicine.

The governor and legislature of the State of Vermont are currently working out the details for implementing some form of single-payer health insurance – socialized medicine. We already have a Medicaid program that is far broader and pays higher reimbursements than any other state. We provide insurance for the unemployed and low cost insurance for the working poor with better benefits than I have with my $500 a month health insurance whose premiums have gone up twice in the last 13 months. The only stumbling block to this expansion of health insurance is the portion of the new health care law that limits the options states have until 2016. Vermont’s success may determine the fate of a national health service for all Americans.

The final language is being worked out.

Source

Well, according to the Wikipedia entry on Socialism, the definition is:

“Socialism is an economic and political theory advocating public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources. In a socialist economic system, production is carried out by a free association of workers to directly maximise use-values (instead of indirectly producing use-value through maximising exchange-values), through coordinated planning of investment decisions, distribution of surplus, and the means of production. Socialism is a set of social and economic arrangements based on a post-monetary system of calculation, such as labour time, energy units or calculation-in-kind; at least for the factors of production.”

You will notice that there are no references to tyranny or despotism there in. Or if you prefer, here is the Mirriam-Webster definition:

1. any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods

Of course, these people behind the Facebook page have a belief that Socialism is bad, evil, horrible, and terrible and that it is a form of dictatorship associated with Nazi Germany without ever actually listening to anyone by the faux historian Glenn Beck. Instead, they would rather remain blissfully ignorant of what Socialism is in order to blindly believe that unfettered Capitalism is the way to go.

If they would let comments through, we could all educate them, but alas, they have chosen not to.

Source

Extremism has been on the rise of late with advocates of violence referring to the possibility of “Second Amendment” remedies if the Tea Party does not win Congress this year, and at least one Tea Party member threatening to put a bullet in the head of the leader of Delaware’s GOP. The FBI was alerted about Moose’s plans by Planned Parenthood and the FBI began an investigation into that Facebook page which advocated the use of extreme violence against abortion providers. Last week, he began collaborating with a confidential informant in crafting a plan to bomb an abortion clinic in North Carolina. Moose was, apparently, also in communication with others who advocate violence against abortion clinics.

Among the targets of Moose’s anger were abortion doctors, President Barack Obama’s health care plan, and the plans to build the so-called Ground Zero Mosque in New York City. He also expressed his support for anyone killing abortion providers. According to the affidavit, he stated on his page “Whatever you may thing about me, you’re probably right. . .Extremist, Radical, Fundamentalist…? Yep! Terrorist…? Well, I prefer the term ‘freedom Fighter.’

According to the affidavit he also wrote “The Death Care Bill passed last night. Keep your phone and rifle close and wait. . .There are few problems in life that can’t be solved with the proper application of high explosives . . If a mosque is built on ground zero, it will be removed. Oklahoma City style. Tim’s not the only man out there that knows how to do it.” The last, of course, refers to the actions of Timothy McVeigh who murdered several hundred people when he detonated explosives in front of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. Despite claims of links to external sources from others, McVeigh has been proven to be the originator of the plot.

Moose was an unemployed father of three who now faces a very long stay in prison without much chance of finding gainful employment as he faces twenty years in prison for distributing bomb making instructions.

Moose posted detailed isntructions for making TATP this August. That explosive was used by the terrorists in the 2005 London subway bombings. After obtaining a search warrant, the FBI read through Moose’s private correspondences with his fellow abortion opponents including one that stated “I have learned a lot from the muslim terrorists and have no problem using their tactics.”

The sting operation began on 3 September when the FBI informant phoned Moose and told him a story about his best friend’s wife’s plan to have an abortion. Moose offered to help, and on 4 September, Moose and the informant met in the Concord Mills TGIFridays. There, Moose described several bombs that the source could make to destroy the clinic, and Moose gave the source instructions on how to do surveillance on the clinic including drinking a few beers and staggering around drunk. After being confronted, the source was suppose to ask for the bathroom.

On 5 September, the source contacted Moose and Moose walked him through making the explosives.

To date, no one involved with Moose has been willing to offer a comment.

Source

President Obama made the decision to appoint four people, and Sorian was one of them. Sorian is also openly gay. Within the press release issued by the White House, President Obama stated “At a time when our nation faces so many pressing challenges, I urge members of the Senate to stop playing politics with our highly qualified nominees, and fulfill their responsibilities of advice and consent. Until they do, I reserve the right to act within my authority to do what is best for the American people.”

The White House background on Sorian states:

Richard Sorian is currently a Senior Adviser to the Secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services. Previously, he was Vice President for Public Policy and External Relations for the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), where he directed the organization’s media relations, policy development and advocacy, and relations with employers, consumers, and other key stakeholders.

Before working for NCQA, Sorian was Director of Public Affairs for the Center for Studying Health System Change and a Project Director at the Georgetown University Institute for Health Care Research and Policy. From 1993 to 1998, Sorian was a Senior Advisor for Health Policy Communications in the Office of Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna E. Shalala. In that capacity, Sorian focused on health care reform, HIV/AIDS policy, and health care quality improvement. From 1997 to 1998, he served as Deputy Director of the President’s Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry, where he directed work on the Patient’s Bill of Rights.

From 1980 to 1993, Sorian was an award-winning journalist covering U.S. health care policy development. He was editor of Medicine & Health and the Journal of American Health Policy. He is also the author of three books: The Bitter Pill: Tough Choice in America’s Health Policy (1989); A New Deal for American Health Care (1993); and The Health Care 500 (1988). He is a graduate of George Washington University and, in 1989, was awarded a Fellowship for Advanced Studies in Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health.

The recess appointments are, undoubtably, going to upset several people in the Republican Party. Unfortunately, they have been holding up appointments for people not normally considered the least bit controversial.

Source

Olbermann: You brought up civil unions, and that brings me to another quote from some of the WABC material. Let me read this again. You said, “There’s no point starting off trying to do something that’s good if it’s going to meet with an enormous resistaance from a lot of folks.” Does that not describe your effort to get civil unions and the 50-state strategy or the Obama presidential campaign or health care reform? We can go on forever and say doesn’t that describe the American Revolution?

Dean: Yeah, I don’t think you intentionally truncated that quote. What I meant to say was if you get further…. Look, these folks have a right to build this and where they’re about to build it. I think to focus solely on that and exclude further dialogue is a mistake. Look, will the United States survive whether we build this or not where it’s supposed to be built? I think so. But this might be the time where we’ve got to start setting this stuff aside and listening to each other instead of talking past each other. Look at the Middle East peace process. There are people at the far ends of the spectrum who want to undo the progress. I think this may be a teachable moment. I really do.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Yesterday, Representative Anthony Weiner of New York got before the House and gave the republicans a good tongue lashing. He called them cowardly. He attacked them saying “stand up and say, ‘Oh, if only we had a different process we’d vote yes.’ You vote yes if you believe yes! You vote in favor of something if you believe it’s the right thing! If you believe it’s the wrong thing, you vote no!”

He also exclaimed “It is a shame! A shame.”

Anthony Weiner, a long time friend and former roommate of the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, though they have had their differences, recently married Huma Abedin, a long time aid of Hilary Clinton’s. Ms Abedin was born in Michigan, but grew up in Saudi Arabia. She is Muslim, and Weiner is Jewish.

The Republicans have long tried to use the 9/11 tragedy for political reasons, including pushing for the war in Iraq. It is shameful that they have abandoned those who put their lives and their health at risk in those first few days trying to save those who might have survived the collapse of those two buildings. It is as shameful as Pope John Paul II refusing to take the helmet of Father Michael Judge who died performing last rights for the fallen on that day. The Republicans should be ashamed, and if Peter King and the rest of these people believed in the sacrificed of the women and men who died that day, or the sacrifices of those who went to Afghanistan in order to try and bring some modicum of justice to the families of the fallen, they would have voted yes without regard to who wrote or introduced this bill.

The Republicans have chosen to obstruct what ever they can in order to gain political power. It is time that they remembered that this is not about power, but service. Peter King should lose his seat this year. He won’t, but he should. As should every single Republican out there who has not had the moral courage to actually debate or discuss laws, but instead, have thrown temper tantrums because a Black man won the presidency rather than their crotchety old Arizonan who chose to nominate as his Vice-President a woman who elicited from me the line “can’t you see this is the last act of a desperate man?”

Representative Weiner, thank you for doing the right thing, and thank you for your impassioned speech last night.

This morning on FOX News, Weiner and fellow New York Representative Peter King got into a shouting match with regards to this issue. Here is Weiner’s rant from last night.

Image via Wikipedia

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So far, the Republicans have done a poor job of showing how they are not the party of ‘no’. After all, they are the part of ‘no regulation’, ‘no taxation’, ‘no unemployment benefits’, ‘no jobs’, etc.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor stated “House Republicans have engaged with the American people to develop innovative solutions that meet the serious challenges facing our country.” Yes, indeed, they have on the “GOP Solutions” website by getting rid of everything that they do not agree with.

However, New York Representative King was a little too honest with regards to the lack of an agenda on the part of the Republicans.

From the Bill Bennett radio show:

BENNETT: Is it enough for Republicans to say we are opposed to what [Obama's] doing — stimulus, health care, we don’t like what he’s doing with the government, and look at the job situation — or do we need to have meat on the bones? And say, this is what we are for? Do we have to have positive proposals? [...]

KING: So, It’s a combination of being against what Obama is for, and also giving certain specifics of what we are for. Having said that, I don’t think we have to lay out a complete agenda, from top to bottom, because then we would have the national mainstream media jumping on every point trying to make that a campaign issue.

And later in the interview:

KING: That’s where we have to make a much more intelligent argument and defend the Bush tax cuts. Because after all the years of the Bush tax cuts, after two wars, after September 11th, as of 2007, the deficit was down to $165 billion, which is almost chump change by today’s standard. No, the tax cuts is what saved our economy. People forget, they have this talk about how there was a $6.5 trillion surplus projected when President Bush come in. The fact is, he inherited a severe economic downturn — the third quarter of 2000, the first quarter of 2001, the economy was tanking. Then we had September 11th, then we did have two wars — both of which I’ve supported — and with all of that, the economy continued to add jobs, and by 2006, 2007 the deficit was being dramatically reduced.

Of course, we already know the Republican agenda. Oppose everything that President Barack Obama stands for, and jettison everything from healthcare reform to Wall Street reform. Get rid of everything that protects the American people from the businesses that would, if given the chance, poison and kill them.

The new rules are the final result of a process that began on 15 April 2010 when President Barack Obama issued a moratorium on the hospitals regarding the rules and informed them that they had to respect the rights of patients with regards to non-related or non-spouse visitors. Hospitals will be required to have written policies regarding the designation of visitors based upon clinical needs. There are some diseases where not even relatives are allowed to visit directly.

The key provision in the rules states that the designated visitors must have all the same access as a family member. The rules update the Conditions of Participation, which is the minimum standards for these participating hospitals. The new rules cover all hospital and critical access patients, it does mean that hospitals much allow access to an inpatient “regardless of whether the visitor is a family member, a spouse, or a domestic partner (including a same-sex domestic partner), as well as the right to withdraw such consent at any time.”

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius stated via the press release “Every patient deserves the basic right to designate whom they wish to see while in the hospital. Today’s proposed rules would ensure that all patients have equal access to the visitors of their choosing-whether or not those visitors are, or are perceived to be, members of a patient’s family.”

Marilyn Tavenner, CMS acting administrator stated “This proposed rule is an important step forward in the rights of all Americans to expect equal rights and privileges from the health care system, regardless of their personal and familial situations. In the environment of inclusion that this rule promotes, patients and providers can expect improved patient experiences of care.”

Sister Margaret McBride was a nun and administrator at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center. After helping to provide the abortion, she was automatically excommunicated from Catholicism. She sat on the ethics board that included doctors who agreed that the woman, who was eleven weeks pregnant, should have an abortion. They agreed that without it the woman would die.

Susan Pfister, the hospital’s vice president, stated via an email to a local newspaper “In this tragic case, the treatment necessary to save the mother’s life required the termination of an 11-week pregnancy.” Of course, the Catholic Church does not see it this way. The hospital adheres to the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services as part of Catholic Healthcare West, but Ms Pfister maintains that it does not answer all of the questions raised regarding abortion.

Phoenix Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted sees it very differently. Apparently, he believes that an abortion can only be caused by a secondary effect of treatment for something else like cancer. “I am gravely concerned by the fact that an abortion was performed several months ago in a Catholic hospital in this diocese. I am further concerned by the hospital’s statement that the termination of a human life was necessary to treat the mother’s underlying medical condition. An unborn child is not a disease. While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother’s life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child. The end does not justify the means.” Olmsted informed the Arizona Republic. Of course, what happens if the only way to save a single life is to sacrifice the life of another since both lives cannot be saved?

Sister McBride was rebuked and demoted by the Church, though Olmsted was not directly involved in that. The woman was sick with pulmonary hypertension, a condition which hampers the lungs and heart. It is also dangerous and even fatal to have while pregnant. The hospital consulted with the patient, the woman’s family, the ethics board, and the woman’s physicians. According to the hospital: “If there had been a way to save the pregnancy and still prevent the death of the mother, we would have done it. We are convinced there was not.”

Sister McBride has decline to comment. The patient has not been named due to privacy concerns. The pregnancy was terminated last year.

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Claudia Wright is the great-great-granddaughter of Brigham Young, and a former Mormon. She is lesbian, and lives openly with her partner. She is a retired school teacher and a solid Democrat. This compares well in the eyes of the Democrats to Matheson, who has been called little more than a ‘tarted up Republican’, according to one commentator. Wright is also, apparently, a very intelligent woman.

When Matheson began to lose support among the delegates, he put out a frantic call to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer to try and get some support back. Hoyer tried everything to get Matheson returned to Congress unopposed. Matheson admits that he understands that people are upset about certain votes that he cast, including against Healthcare Reform. Hoyer stated “I expect members of Congress to come and represent their districts. Jim Matheson is uniquely qualified and uniquely in touch with that district.”

John Weis, a voter from Salt Lake City, challenged Hoyer on this matter. “Claudia Wright can win this district. Claudia Wright would’ve voted for cap-and-trade [carbon emission controls]. Claudia Wright would have voted for health care. You are saying we don’t need someone with a backbone.” Of course, Hoyer dismissed the criticism by pointing to the 1994 election which many politicians are expecting to repeat in this election despite the fact that recent indications are that many Tea Party activists which have the Republicans tacking to the far Right and Democrats quaking about losing is not as powerful as it appears since, so far, Bob Bennet is the only Republican incumbent to lose his seat.

Some inside the Utah Democratic Party believe that the location of the convention inside Salt Lake City hurt Matheson since not all of his delegates from the rural areas came to vote. It will be an intense battle for either of them to win the nomination and the election.

Despite depictions of doom and gloom, a lot of how the general election in November turns out depends upon the candidates. A lot of incumbents are not going to make it far enough to be voted on in November, and that may result in a far different outcome than is expected by both parties.

Matheson forced into runoff election
Can Brigham Young’s Great Great Gay Progressive Granddaughter Oust A Blue Dog & Win A House Seat In Utah?

4-20-210 -Melanie Nathan

The response to the horrific story of Clay Greene and Harold Scull has been very gratifying and inspiring. Clearly, their story struck a chord in all of us. To some degree we can’t help imagining ourselves in exactly this situation. Forty-eight hours ago, few people knew their names, and now a Facebook page in their honor has more than 7,000 fans. Quite simply, this case demonstrates how our relationships as LGBT people are so fragile, especially when we reach our later years. Just one small incident, in this case a fall down some steps, sends the world crashing down.

This was posted by Kate Kendell on Bilerco Project.

Harold and Clay were in a committed relationship for twenty-five years, and they lived together for twenty years. Both Harold and Clay had worked in Hollywood and were passionate collectors of film memorabilia. Harold had worked for MGM studios in the 1950s and was a favorite of Louis B. Mayer in the studio’s heyday. At the same time, Clay worked in television with many popular stars of that period. In addition to his film industry career, Harold was an accomplished artist and avid collector, especially of Mexican and Central American Santos religious art and artifacts. Art, heirlooms, and memorabilia graced the walls of their leased home, in which they planned to live together until their deaths.

Several folks have commented about the legal status of Clay and Harold’s relationship. These tragic events began in April 2008, one month before the California Supreme Court‘s historic marriage ruling. By the time the California Supreme Court ruled and marriages began for that brief six months, Harold was already hospitalized and Clay imprisoned in a nursing home.

We can’t change what happened to Harold and Clay, but we can do what we try to do every day: to create a world where what happened to Harold and Clay never happens again.

Clay and his partner of 20 years, Harold, lived in California. Clay and Harold made diligent efforts to protect their legal rights, and had their legal paperwork in place—wills, powers of attorney, and medical directives, all naming each other. Harold was 88 years old and in frail medical condition, but still living at home with Clay, 77, who was in good health.

One evening, Harold fell down the front steps of their home and was taken to the hospital. Based on their medical directives alone, Clay should have been consulted in Harold’s care from the first moment. Tragically, county and health care workers instead refused to allow Clay to see Harold in the hospital. The county then ultimately went one step further by isolating the couple from each other, placing the men in separate nursing homes.

Ignoring Clay’s significant role in Harold’s life, the county continued to treat Harold like he had no family and went to court seeking the power to make financial decisions on his behalf. Outrageously, the county represented to the judge that Clay was merely Harold’s “roommate.” The court denied their efforts, but did grant the county limited access to one of Harold’s bank accounts to pay for his care.

What happened next is even more chilling: without authority, without determining the value of Clay and Harold’s possessions accumulated over the course of their 20 years together or making any effort to determine which items belonged to whom, the county took everything Harold and Clay owned and auctioned off all of their belongings. Adding further insult to grave injury, the county removed Clay from his home and confined him to a nursing home against his will. The county workers then terminated Clay and Harold’s lease and surrendered the home they had shared for many years to the landlord.

Three months after he was hospitalized, Harold died in the nursing home. Because of the county’s actions, Clay missed the final months he should have had with his partner of 20 years. Compounding this tragedy, Clay has literally nothing left of the home he had shared with Harold or the life he was living up until the day that Harold fell, because he has been unable to recover any of his property. The only memento Clay has is a photo album that Harold painstakingly put together for Clay during the last three months of his life.

With the help of a dedicated and persistent court-appointed attorney, Anne Dennis of Santa Rosa, Clay was finally released from the nursing home. Ms. Dennis, along with Stephen O’Neill and Margaret Flynn of Tarkington, O’Neill, Barrack & Chong, now represent Clay in a lawsuit against the county, the auction company, and the nursing home, with technical assistance from NCLR. A trial date has been set for July 16, 2010 in the Superior Court for the County of Sonoma.

I live in the neighboring County  and share a Congresswoman with the Couple, Re. Lynn Woolsey.

Melanie Nathan: In my capacity as an appointed Commissioner on the Marin Human Rights Commission,  (2009-2013) -I will be looking at the case from a variety of  perspectives – I am not going to assume that it is a moot matter for future couples simply because of the new directive issued by President Obama.  Often changing the culture is more difficult that changing the law.
Read more about NCLR’s Elder Law Project.

Reference NCLR.

http://spectrumlgbtcenter.blogspot.com/

Picture Features – Shanon Minter NCLR.

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