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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“Like a virus, no one is immune from ignorance – no matter what their profession or even educational background might be.“

4-13-2010m; Posted by Melanie Nathan

Rambam Medical Center in Haifa on Tuesday will launch the first invitro fertilization unit in Israel for HIV carriers with fertility difficulties who are rejected from treatment by other hospitals.

Although Israel boasts one of the highest availabilities of fertility treatment in the world, it never before had the facilities to carry out IVF treatment for HIV carriers.

Today, an HIV carrier who receives treatment has almost the same life expectancy as the rest of the population, and certain medical treatment enables carrier to conceive and give birth to healthy children.

Following the Supreme Court appeal by the task force and six women, in 2006 the Health Ministry set up a committee to look into fertility treatments among carriers of HIV and Hepatitis B and C.

The committee recommended setting up a separate infrastructure for fertility treatment for such patients, despite the fact that in many Western countries carriers receive the treatment in ordinary clinics.  The multiple postponements of the opening led to the Health Ministry being sharply rebuked by the Knesset Labor, Welfare and Health Committee.

The unit,  located in a remote, discreet area of the hospital, to afford for maximum privacy for the patients, will also serve carriers of other viruses, and it already has a waiting list with several women waiting for treatment.

The Rambam unit opens just two days after the launch of a sperm washing institute at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, allowing men who carry the HIV virus to conceive healthy children together with non-carrier spouses.

The opening of the new unit at Rambam, which includes a number of labs and sub-clinics, has been postponed at least four times.

Yonatan Karni, director of the Israel AIDS Task Force, said Monday “I’m thrilled to cut the ribbon for the unit, but what will truly convince me this is really happening will be to cut the umbilical chord for the first child born as a result of the process.   To get to this day we had to go through the Supreme Court and four years of public battles. To my surprise the greatest obstacle was the obstinacy of the healthcare system. I found that just like with the virus, no one is immune to ignorance – no matter what their profession or even educational background might be.”

Original Source:- 4-13-2010 Ha’aretz

New hospital unit allows HIV carriers to conceive through IVF

By Fadi Eyadat

Melanie Nathan – nathan@privatecourts.com

“By Tom Brandt / Opinions Editor Republicans are not sparing the rod when it comes to beating up on President Obama’s economic stimulus package, but it’s clear they are unable to raise their membership to withstand the newly found vigor of his congressional muscle.”

http://funmeme.com/post/2010/03/24/Republicans-Turned-off-by-Size-of-Obamae28099s-Package-e28093-Funny-Caption-Pic.aspx

Need we say more – nothing like a little visit to the past ….2009!

By Mel Nathan

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Melanie Nathan -March 25, 2010 ;   Human Rights Campaign reports that “Among the many federal rights and benefits denied to same-sex couples by the combination of marriage inequality and the federal Defense of Marriage Act is access to continued health care coverage under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA).  COBRA ensures that an employee and his or her spouse and dependent children can keep their employer-provided health insurance for a limited period after a qualifying event – usually the employee leaving or, particularly these days, losing his or her job.  The employee and his family usually pay for those benefits out of pocket, including additional administrative costs to the former employer, but that health insurance is still often cheaper than a plan in the individual market.  During the economic downturn, Congress has created subsidies to help families defray those costs.” Brian Moulton in Human Rights Campaign Post.

Unfortunately, same-sex couples and their families have neither the guarantee of continued coverage nor access to those subsidies.  Even if an employer offers domestic partner health benefits, as more and more companies do every day, they do not have to provide continued coverage of those benefits under COBRA.  And even if a fair-minded employer does so, a former employee’s domestic partner cannot be eligible for the COBRA subsidy.  So, yet again, despite being equally affected by economic hardships, same-sex couples are not equally protected by safety net programs like COBRA.

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA)  to the rescue – introducing a bill, the’ Equal Access to COBRA Act of 2010,’  that would help address this inequality and ensure that domestic partners currently covered by employer health plans have access to COBRA benefits.   This is one example of why any one incumbent who is up for reelection and who is LGBT legislation proactive MUST receive the support  the  entire LGBT community Across the Country.   This is another example of why DOMA must be repealed as soon as possible.

DO you think Carli Fiorina Would introduce this kind of Legislation or even support it in Congress.   I am going to call her  to ask the question and will get back here with the BIG update – Warning: Please Do Not Hold Your Breath

We at LGR applaud Senator Boxer for keeping her eye on the ball for us.  It would seem that HRC has been at the helm of this introduction.  While we are grateful for that,  this is yet another example of more time on more piecemeal legislation.   I would rather see an OMNIBUS Bill for all equality legislation or more simply put, THE HOT pursuit of  Rep. Jerold Nadler’s Respect for Marriage Act which will repeal DOMA.

By the way- the New health Care Bill does not help Domestic Partners who are discriminated under the Tax Code;  that means same-sex DP’s must pay tax on the health care benefit received through a partner’s work, as if it is income.    Again DOMA must Go!!!

STILL In solidarity:

by Melanie Nathan, EMAIL

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“A Great Unfinished Business, Until Today”; Now let us move on to CIR, Repeal of DOMA and DADT:

Melanie Nathan, 3-21-10 , 10.50 EST. Today an historic vote in the US House of Representatives will lead to Passage of  landmark Health Care reform.  When the votes hit 216, the House erupted and Speaker Pelosi walked elegantly into the history books, not only is she the first woman speaker, but THE speaker who got Health Care reform through vote and victory.

Today while  it seems as if the Immigration Reform March failed through little or no, albeit much deserved  TV coverage; there is a deep irony in such failure and that is what caused it to fail may hail its success – YES the day was usurped by visuals of the Congress hedging its bets on historic passage of Health Care Reform, and the fact that such was passed in the House and likely to pass in the Senate, yields a victory so enormous for President Obama, that he WILL now win Immigration Reform.  When The President’s message resounded through screens on the Mall, the people knew that they would be next. Today’s victory places capital and power sturdily in the hands of this US President.

The Republicans in the House called it ‘the arrogance of Washington’ and suggested  the Democrats  used trickery, speaking only about money and cost; the Democrats say this reform is imperative and spoke to the impact from an humanity standpoint.

My Congresswoman, Lynn Woolsey, California, spoke tonight, in the House,  with her  perfunctory  message, “ Being a woman IS a preexisting condition!” ( reiterated by Speaker Pelosi) That is going to change with this health care reform.  She reminded us that pregnancy could be a preexisting condition, that even injuries from domestic violence could be considered preexisting conditions.

What the Republicans seem to resent is the fact that the will of the people was to elect the democrats on the ticket that included health care reform. How could anyone in their right mind suggest voting no on the basis of “not good enough,” especially those that prompted the water down.

Those of you who voted NO will be held responsible when you are reminded in years henceforth of the positive impact of the changes, when lives are saved, and the preexisting amongst us survive and live longer to tell this tale.

Now enough – let us move on to more business – and let us realize that we MUST be partisan.  We must fight a partisan fight from day one on Immigration reform, on repeal of DOMA, DADT, and  enactment of ENDA. Bi-partisanship must now come from the Republican side. We should not chase them to get them on board. This is the only way they will hopefully come up with suggestions to forward legislation, rather than attacks to thwart it.

Recipe for success of future legislation:

Ingredients:

2 cup of –  Learn from mistakes

3 cups of  - forget the ideal of bipartisanship

1 cup of  - clarity through public outreach and education

3 cups of  - early explanation to American people

2 cups of – early talking points and Public Service Announcements

Instructions:

Obama, and Democrats mix all of the above from day one of the endeavor;

Push at the start and until the end; remain strong and resolute

Change the fairness doctrine in media broadcasting and revoke licenses of cable channels which term ‘news’ for talking point commentary, speculation and non sourced lies.

The Lesson: From the lesson of Health Care Reform, we have learnt that Bi-partisanship, in a climate of hate and greed is an oxymoron.
Republicans have the audacity to complain that this is not bipartisan legislation.   Lest we forget that there would be no legislation at ALL if it were to be bi-partisan.

Thanks to Partisanship no one is no longer un-insurable!
Thanks to Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her extraordinary leadership
and To President Obama

Acknowledging Great Leadership of late Senator Ted Kennedy
“A Great Unfinished Business, Until Today”
Victoria Kennedy plans to issue a Statement tonight

Written to supporters – I am sure I am not the only one who received this letter at 2.00 am Eastern today.

Melanie — 3-22-10

For the first time in our nation’s history, Congress has passed comprehensive health care reform. America waited a hundred years and fought for decades to reach this moment. Tonight, thanks to you, we are finally here.

Consider the staggering scope of what you have just accomplished:

Because of you, every American will finally be guaranteed high quality, affordable health care coverage.

Every American will be covered under the toughest patient protections in history. Arbitrary premium hikes, insurance cancellations, and discrimination against pre-existing conditions will now be gone forever.

And we’ll finally start reducing the cost of care — creating millions of jobs, preventing families and businesses from plunging into bankruptcy, and removing over a trillion dollars of debt from the backs of our children.

But the victory that matters most tonight goes beyond the laws and far past the numbers.

It is the peace of mind enjoyed by every American, no longer one injury or illness away from catastrophe.

It is the workers and entrepreneurs who are now freed to pursue their slice of the American dream without fear of losing coverage or facing a crippling bill.

And it is the immeasurable joy of families in every part of this great nation, living happier, healthier lives together because they can finally receive the vital care they need.

This is what change looks like.

My gratitude tonight is profound. I am thankful for those in past generations whose heroic efforts brought this great goal within reach for our times. I am thankful for the members of Congress whose months of effort and brave votes made it possible to take this final step. But most of all, I am thankful for you.

This day is not the end of this journey. Much hard work remains, and we have a solemn responsibility to do it right. But we can face that work together with the confidence of those who have moved mountains.

Our journey began three years ago, driven by a shared belief that fundamental change is indeed still possible. We have worked hard together every day since to deliver on that belief.

We have shared moments of tremendous hope, and we’ve faced setbacks and doubt. We have all been forced to ask if our politics had simply become too polarized and too short-sighted to meet the pressing challenges of our time. This struggle became a test of whether the American people could still rally together when the cause was right — and actually create the change we believe in.

Tonight, thanks to your mighty efforts, the answer is indisputable: Yes we can.

Thank you,

President Barack Obama

by Melanie Nathan
Private Courts™
nathan@privatecourts.com
http://visualcv.com/melnathan

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Melanie Nathan, 11.00 am, PST.  with stakes high for us and  STUPAK  changing vote to yes,  Vote count – amazingly close.   As Democratic Caucus ended, sporadically they locked arms, walked across independence avenue to the House to vote, amidst the screaming crazies.  Speaker Pelosi carrying a gavel, symbolically indicating it was going to happen.  She looked at protesters and unintimidated walked into the House.

I cannot imagine such a bold and profound action unless the VOTES , like the gavel are in hand!

I am shocked at the hold out Democrats who consider their re-election more important than the success of the entire administration – and yes that is looking at it from a political prospective.  Least of all  to mention “for the benefit” of American people.

History is being made.

Viral hate loses again- screaming the ‘N’ word or yelling ‘faggot‘ at Barney Frank will not stop what is right.  Although the Health Care Bill may not be all that we need, its a start and there will be more to come. This can now turn into a great Congress and Administration -

Now on to Comprehensive Immigration reform/ UAFA, the real of DOMA and DADT.  This can happen. Imagine the vote of 5 people left will in essence determine what is going to happen to the rest of legislation – much needed – that will impact the LGBT community so profoundly.

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Melanie Nathan

By Melanie Nathan   nathan@privatecourts.com

As the bill comes towards a vote, groups of Tea Party protesters are yelling out that this bill is “for the n—-,” according to an LGR reporter on the scene. This is an impression reinforced by comments from people saying that this is not about healthcare, but about stopping a black president. In fact, as the countdown to the bill’s final vote reaches zero, the real face of the Tea Party movement has begun to show itself. While many people started in on the Tea Party movement in order to vent frustration and are not, in fact, racists, the movement itself rapidly became a breeding ground for open bigots. White supremacist groups began active recruiting within many of the Tea Party affiliates, and even began taking them over. As of today, no one is pretending that this is about Healthcare any more, but about racism, homophobia, and even misogyny outright in an attempt to intimidate members of Congress into voting against a President that they hate because of his race.

Representative John Lewis is a veteran of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960′s. Both he and fellow Congressional Black Caucus member Andre Carson were verbally assaulted walking out of the Cannon House Office Building. Representative Frank was verbally assaulted later that day coming out of the same building. He told Talking Points Memo:

“I’m disappointed at a unwillingness to be just civil…the objection to the health care bill has become a proxy for other sentiments…Obviously there are perfectly reasonable people that are against this, but the people out there today on the whole–many of them were hateful and abusive…I do think the leaders of the movement, and this was true of some of the Republicans last year, that they think they are benefiting from this rancor. I mean there are a couple who–you know, Michele Bachmann’s rhetoric is inflamatory as well as wholly baseless. And I think there are people there, a few that encourage it…If this was my cause, and I saw this angry group yelling and shouting and being so abusive to people, I would ask them to please stop it…I think they do more harm than good.”

The Capital Police threatened to remove the protesters if they did not calm down, but they were quickly overwhelmed by the number of protesters that were there.

John Lewis was a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee during the 1960′s. In 1961, as a Freedom Rider, he was beaten badly by a mob of white Alabamans who were violently and vehemently opposed to desegregation.

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“We are deeply disappointed that, after months of lobbying for their inclusion, important measures specifically addressing the needs of LGBT people and people with HIV – ending the unfair taxation of employer-provided domestic partner health benefits, permitting states to offer early HIV treatment under Medicaid, collecting critical health data on LGBT people and addressing discrimination in health care – are not a part of this bill.”

Up until yesterday, Representative Tammy Baldwin was certain that these provisions would remain within the final bill.

The bill did put back in provisions funding abstinence only education despite the fact that such programs are a complete failure and only delay teens having sexual relations by about a year over other sex ed programs. Unfortunately, because so many of them are unaware of contraception, the rates of pregnancy among teens in abstinence only education programs is higher than those in more comprehensive programs.

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Back in September, a lawsuit against Jackson Memorial from a widow was dismissed. In that case, the widow was not allowed to see her wife before she passed away. Janice Langbehn and Lisa Pond had been together seventeen years when vacationing in Miami, Ms Pond suffered an aneurism and died. According to Jackson Memorial, the hospitals do not have a legal obligation to allow anyone to see their dying loved one.

The not-for-profit hospital network is asking the city for an advance of some $67 million to get them through April. They are suppose to receive some $90 million before 1 May. They will run out of operating cash by 5 April.

Jackson Memorial’s board is looking at possibly closing two branch hospitals. This would leave the hospital complex with just the main hospital, the children’s hospital, a rehabilitation hospital and a mental health facility. Jackson South, one of the two branches being looked at for closure, is part way through a new addition, and its closure would mean losing around $40 million in costs already incurred. Even just stopping the addition would save the hospital complex $60 million.

In large part, the problem with Jackson Memorial Health is that their emergency rooms are the only place many uninsured can go for health care of any kind in the area. Often times, those who go there cannot afford to see a doctor, and the hospitals cannot turn them away. With the economic downturn hitting Florida heavily, the health care system within the state is under heavy stress. Jackson Memorial Health is not the only health care facility under financial strain. Rutland Regional Medical Center in Rutland, Vermont is looking at cut backs and cost containment measures; however, their financial problems are dwarfed by those of Jackson Memorial.

Court Dismisses Lawsuit Against Jackson Memorial

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“One of them looked at me and as they would do after, I don’t know, 15 gin and tonics, and goodness only knows how many bottles of champagne, a staff member made an intonation to me that maybe I should be chasing after the bridesmaid and his points were clear and his words were far more colorful than that. And I grabbed the staff member sitting next to me and said, ‘Well, what I really ought to be doing is fracking you.’ And then [I] tossled the guy’s hair and left, went to my room, because I knew the party was getting to a point where it wasn’t right for me to be there. Now was that inappropriate of me? Absolutely. Am I guilty? Yes.”

To top it off, Massa is stating that the Obama Administration has orchestrated his ouster over the issue of Healthcare Reform. Massa’s resignation from Congress would drop the number of people who would be required in order to make the Healthcare Reform bill pass. “Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill, and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me and it will pass. You connect the dots,” Massa said.

A spokesperson for Representative Steny Hoyer, the House Majority Leader, rejected this assertion outright. To be clear about something, Representative Massa is hardly facing career ending ethics charges the way that Representative Charles Rangel is, and Rangel has remained in his seat. The charges leveled against Massa are alleged to have gone on for up to eight months prior to the actual complaint, and even Massa admits that his behavior, especially in this particular incident, was inappropriate; however, the House of Representatives is certainly rife with politicians who have done far worse and still remained in their seats.

Eric Massa: Democrats ousted me over health care

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Melanie Nathan, 3-4-10 Posts: – The need for immigration reform is at a critical level  in the USA; fueled by complicated, outdated, hardhearted laws; not to mention the heavy hand  of enforcement.   I speak English in an almost English accent with a South African twist;  I am white and immigrated to the US, legally; it was one of the worst experiences of my life. The treatment was bad-rude-ill fitting for a nation that purports to value people and family.

I have also been witness to the insidious way Hispanic people and other immigrants are treated by Immigration bureaucrats and it is not pretty. Now albeit cliche′d, this system is indeed broken.  Families are separated, children without mothers and fathers, people get sent back to places they have never lived in and cannot survive,  and of course the list goes on.

This is all known and I am not saying anything new; in fact I have over simplified a problem of tsunami proportion.  My purpose to place the following letter into minimalist context.

In March  3, 2010 a Republican politician wrote this  Letter to the editor in the Washington Post. After reading the letter which I have copied here – close your eyes and guess who wrote it.  Then we can chuckle together. Please tell me its me who is the moron.  I know there is a left brain and right brain, my question is : IS there a third brain that I know nothing about?

The Feb. 21 news story “Republican Party looks to rebuild support among Hispanics” portrayed the courtship of the Hispanic vote as an uphill battle.

But despite the rhetoric of groups that favor amnesty for illegal immigrants, the Hispanic vote cannot be successfully wooed by a “one-hit wonder” version of immigration reform. The Hispanic vote can be won by returning to the values that have drawn more than 38 million immigrants to our shores. Job security, affordable health care and national security are issues that affect every American, regardless of race or ethnicity.

President Bush received 40 percent of the Hispanic vote by focusing not on immigration but on the need to support small businesses, create jobs and preserve familial values. Republicans can secure the Hispanic vote by emphasizing those issues that unite us as a country, issues that extend far beyond immigration.

BY Lamar Smith, Washington, The writer, a Republican, represents Texas’s 21st District in the House of Representatives.
Washington D.C. Office
2409 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
ph: 202-225-4236 fax: 202-225-8628

Now it is my turn Lamar DeVille…..   You say “wooed by a “one-hit wonder” version of immigration reform.” Are you kidding me? Have you ever experienced what it feels like to be separated from a spouse, from your child?  Have you ever had to choose between children?  Those who have will give anything for a one-hit wonder” version of immigration reform.  Republicans  and all who think like this clearly devoid of any and all humanness.

These are your evil people – they will grind their mothers into chopped meatballs for a friggin vote. In this case the irony s that this bloke has successfully argued himself out of any Hispanic votes, lest he forget their loyalty, the fact that many  voted for Bush because he spoke Spanish and now they realize they were fooled – not only did Bush do nothing for the Hispanic community but  he ordered raids that forced people from their homes and out of the arms of their children, into detention centers and onto Buses back to wherever the first cross border stop was.

Lamar you songololo schmendrik – I give the Hispanic community credit for intelligence – never to be swayed by your crotchety old rhetoric and your BS attempt at persuasion.

Then he says - “The Hispanic vote can be won by returning to the values that have drawn more than 38 million immigrants to our shores.” Yes and like me Mr Moron they had to fight like hell to remain in this country.  What the heck are you talking about. You want the existing 12 million out of here and then you want to create jobs so you can draw others back?

Giving Amnesty will entrench family values – Giving amnesty will encourage entrepreneurship amongst the minority immigrant communities, where money will be spent and economy can grow.  I know there are studies to prove this- however it does not take a genius to figure it out.

“President Bush received 40 percent of the Hispanic vote by focusing not on immigration but on the need to support small businesses, create jobs and preserve familial values.”

Yes he did – seemed like a nice guy – he spoke Spanish and he smiled nicely. Little did they know that racist and war criminal Cheney would run the show instead.  Do you think they would be foolish to come to the polls for more of that?

Let me ask one more question – of Lamar – why is focusing on immigration and the need to support small business etc mutually exclusive; one does not preclude the other?

In light of the recent Power point presentation uncovering the dubious tactics of Republican strategists – I can truly see the underlying working papers that serve to create such ploys, but in your surreptitious charade you truly fail to see who the Hispanic people are.  They are family values, the do work hard, they have hearts that pump blood, they are mothers, dads and kids, teachers, they boost the economy,  they buy homes, they are our workforce, the pray in church, they get scholarships to good schools, they are judges and doctors.   They deserve better laws than we have – they deserve America’s appreciation for who they are and for what they do.  Yes they do…. we should do all we can to keep good people here.

If the laws were effective, we would not have undocumented people in this country. The law is counter productive to the need.  Supply and demand Lamar. The demand is indeed there for Hispanic immigrants and for all immigrants, so stop using your sleazy tactics – BS – ALL you are saying is – “DO NOT VOTE FOR IMMIGRATION REFORM” fellow Republicans… we can do other things instead?   Lets do what Bush did- keep them all illegal but nurture small business instead – then the actual Hispanic citizens will vote for us, especially while they watch you arrest and deport their neighbors, whom you could have kept here.

We will get the votes – after all its all about the votes – it is merely about the votes… lets do this and we will get their votes…  !

USA Today features dueling views on immigration solutions - June 29, 2009 – Posted by Katherine Vargas  – The current economic recession not as a roadblock to reform but as an opportunity to fix our current immigration system:

” …the recession has been teaching some useful lessons about how to ease the [immigration] crisis. Even before rising unemployment began to affect Americans, Mexicans were reacting to the changing jobs climate. Data just out from the Mexican government show 226,000 fewer people emigrated from Mexico in the year ended August 2008 than during the prior year. That’s a 25% drop.

…the recession is delivering another message: Enforcement alone won’t resolve the problem. If fewer illegal immigrants are coming, there’s no evidence yet that those already here are leaving. In 2008, there were still about 12 million illegal residents in the USA, only slightly down from 2007, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington think tank.

Presumably, they sense that tough times here mean tougher times where they came from, and Pew notes that many have families here, including children who are citizens. Which means the nation should provide a way for the most qualified to become legal, productive, taxpaying citizens.

—Recession freezes immigration debate but points to answers, June 29, 2009

This piece mirrors what we have often said: On immigration, it’s the economy, stupid. Undocumented immigration responds more to economic pull factors —like the ability to find a job to feed your family — than the politics of immigration enforcement tactics. If we want to move forward on immigration, we need less politicking and more problem-solving.

Unfortunately, not everyone got the memo. Although quietly acknowledging that mass deportation of 12 million undocumented immigrants is derisible —not to mention a logistical and resource nightmare— there are some who argue that “attrition through enforcement” could be a viable alternative to broad reform of our immigration system.

Enter Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). In his opinion piece, he makes numerous false claims on reform, including how legalization would bankrupt the Social Security system, despite economic reports that document the increasingly important role that immigrants can play in overcoming the demographic crisis and shoring up not only Social Security and Medicare, but the U.S. tax base and the U.S. workforce as well. He also writes:

Granting amnesty would increase illegal immigration…   To achieve immigration reform, the choices are not just amnesty or mass deportation. A strategy of “attrition through enforcement” would dramatically reduce the number of illegal immigrants over time. If the federal government enforced our immigration laws, especially those that target the employment of illegal workers, many illegal immigrants would simply return home because they can’t get jobs. Others would never come to the USA in the first place because they would not be hired

—Opposing view: Amnesty makes no sense, June 29, 2009

Wrong. The enforcement only approach toward solving our nation’s immigration problems is unrealistic and ineffective. Despite of the last administration’s beefed up enforcement tactics, there was only a small decrease in the undocumented population. Unless restriction-ists think that “attrition through economic recession” is the next big proposal, we need to come up with real practical solutions.

Immigration reform would help curtail illegal immigration. It would transform a disorderly immigration system that fosters illegality into a controlled and functioning legal immigration system that accurately responds to the economic and labor needs of our country. It would secure our borders by targeting enforcement resources to fighting crime, drugs and violence; it would restore fairness to our labor markets and it will uphold workers rights and values and traditions that unite all Americans.”

Melanie Nathan

By Melanie Nathan.
nathan@privatecourts.com
www.oblogdeeoblogda.com
www.privatecourts.com

Congressman Lamar Smith’s Biography (nice guy?)

A senior Member of the Texas Congressional Delegation, Congressman Lamar Smith has left his imprint on public policy through a variety of leadership positions and by advancing dozens of pieces of legislation.
Congressman Smith has been named one of the 100 most influential people in Washington by the National Journal and one of the nation’s top “influencers *and innovators” by Fast Company Magazine, which serves the technology industry.
In the last Congress, Congressman Smith was selected by his House colleagues as the Ranking Republican Member of the Judiciary Committee. As the top Republican, he helps shape committee policy on crime, immigration, intellectual property, and constitutional issues. Congressman Smith also serves on both the Homeland Security Committee, which considers legislation involving the war on terror, and the Science and Technology Committee, which has jurisdiction over renewable energy policies, environmental research, and America’s space program.  Representative Smith is a member of the House Republican Steering Committee, which appoints members and chairmen of committees.  He is a former Chairman of the Ethics Committee and a former member of the Budget Committee.
A fifth-generation Texan, Congressman Smith graduated from Yale University and Southern Methodist University School of Law. He and his wife, Beth, have an adult daughter and son.  The 21st Congressional District includes portions of Bexar and Travis Counties and all of Comal, Real, Kerr, Bandera, Kendall and Blanco Counties. More than 650,000 people live in the District.   Congressman Smith received the third highest number of votes in any contested congressional race in the last election. * not a real word.   Quoting from Lamar’s website.

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