For some reason I never realized that the insurance industry had an anti-trust exemption. I think it is time that a bunch of state attorneys general started looking at anti-trust laws and challenge the constitutionality of giving an anti-trust exemption to a payment system that actually has the beneficiary of the payment betting against themselves—when we make a premium payment, we are betting that we will get our money back, but the only way to do so is to get sick. It is a huge casino with the cards stacked against everyone but the shareholder. Why does that shareholder in a casino deserve more consideration than the health of an entire nation? …. Claudette Konola

http://www.truthout.org/091709A?n

Give some credit to Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, who unveiled his
$774 billion health care reform bill on Wednesday, for being true to his word
about wanting to craft a centrist, compromise piece of legislation. That’s
exactly what he did, and after revealing his bill, that’s exactly where Baucus
put us: in the middle of the road, right where all the squashed roadkill can be
found lying on top of a long, yellow stripe.

Something peculiar is happening.  I think the kabuki dancers strutting across our public stage have all lost their scripts. I feel like I’m watching a Court Trial on TV, only the Judge is Groucho Marx.  It’s as if he’s basing his rulings from the Bench on the worst possible puns he can think of.

Like a Trial, a Kabuki performance is carefully scripted. The audience knows how the story starts, how it will proceed, and how it will end. They know that no romance or betrayal or murder they see on stage really matters. The drama is reduced to a Ritual that affirms the ultimate authority of Gods and Governments, where even good and evil are only players on the stage.

But today, the players are improvising their performance, which is a big kabuki no-no. Custard pies have replaced swords. Singing dogs have replaced swordsmen.  Members of the audience are shouting at the bit players. The whole performance is going nowhere fast.

Consider that we are going to be treated to five hours of Obama interviews this weekend. THAT certainly wasn’t planned; nor do Barack and Rahm look forward to this politically  dangerous ordeal.  It is a desperate final attempt to regain control of the script.

But why?

I’m thinkin’ that the that Rahm, Max, Barack and our eight largest health insurance companies quietly made a deal last March. The fix was ‘in.’ It was a tight, buttoned-down fix.

… but they knew they’d have to sell it before they passed it.

So they did what kabuki politicians always do:  They called it a “centrist” package that already included everything that all sides could want; and nothing that could create a problem for anyone.  They took a page from Mark Penn’s Hillary Clinton Campaign Bible
and declared themselves foregone winners even before the campaign started.

Rahm forgot two things, though:  The Voting Public, and the Republican party, neither of which ever mattered in Chicago. Republicans weren’t included; so they decided to obstruct the deal. Watching their obstructionist strangeness, we had second thoughts. Thinking twice; we slowly came to believe that Republicans were rabid-crazy, and that  Rahm’s reform bill wasn’t reform at all.

Summer has passed. The votes are in.  We don’t like Republicans, but we don’t like Rahm’s compromise Bill, either. We have slowly turned toward a Single-Payer goal, but  will settle for a Public Option for now.

Rahm tried to regain control all Summer. Nobody bought mild reform. Nobody bought  triggers. Nobody bought co-ops. Nobody was intimidated by birthers, deathers or  teabaggers or was impressed by the politicians who sided with them.

Public approval for a Public Option stands at an impossible-to-ignore 70%.

The wheels have left Rahm’s bandwagon.  This was not anticipated.

They don’t even know how to improvise.

The center did not hold.

” …
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

— William Butler Yeats, 1919

m

PS:  Barkeep, send this bottle of champaign over to Howard Dean’s table with my compliments.

“Mary Travers, whose ringing, earnest vocals with the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary made songs like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ ‘If I Had a Hammer’ and ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ enduring anthems of the 1960s protest movement, died on Wednesday at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut. She was 72 and lived in Redding, Conn.”

Dear President Obama,

I understand you’re thinking of dumping your “public option” because of all the demagoguery by Sarah Palin and Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich and their crowd on right-wing radio and Fox. Fine. Good idea, in fact.

Instead, let’s make it simple. Please let us buy into Medicare.

It would be so easy. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with this so-called “public option” that’s a whole new program from the ground up. Medicare already exists. It works. Some people will like it, others won’t – just like the Post Office versus FedEx analogy you’re so comfortable with.

Just pass a simple bill – it could probably be just a few lines, like when Medicare was expanded to include disabled people – that says that any American citizen can buy into the program at a rate to be set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which reflects the actual cost for us to buy into it.

So it’s revenue neutral!

To make it available to people of low income, raise the rates slightly for all currently non-eligible people (like me – under 65) to cover the cost of below-200%-of-poverty people. Revenue neutral again.

Most of us will do damn near anything to get out from under the thumbs of the multi-millionaire CEOs who are running our current insurance programs. Sign me up!

This lets you blow up all the rumors about death panels and grandma and everything else: everybody knows what Medicare is. Those who scorn it can go with Blue Cross. Those who like it can buy into it. Simplicity itself.

Of course, we’d like a few fixes, like letting Medicare negotiate drug prices and filling some of the holes Republicans and AARP and the big insurance lobbyists have drilled into Medicare so people have to buy “supplemental” insurance, but that can wait for the second round. Let’s get this done first.

Simple stuff. Medicare for anybody who wants it. Private health insurance for those who don’t. Easy message. Even Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley can understand it. Sarah Palin can buy into it, or ignore it. No death panels, no granny plugs, nothing. Just a few sentences.

Replace the “you must be disabled or 65″ with “here’s what it’ll cost if you want to buy in, and here’s the sliding scale of subsidies we’ll give you if you’re poor, paid for by everybody else who’s buying in.” (You could roll back the Reagan tax cuts and make it all free, but that’s another rant.)

We elected you because we expected you to have the courage of your convictions. Here’s how. Not the “single payer Medicare for all” that many of us would prefer, but a simple, “Medicare for anybody who wants to buy in.”

Respectfully,

Thom Hartmann

]]> http://magginkat.wordpress.com/2006/11/01/only-two-party-government-offers-oversight/feed/ 0 magginkat http://magginkat.wordpress.com/2006/10/31/hello-world/ http://magginkat.wordpress.com/2006/10/31/hello-world/#comments Tue, 31 Oct 2006 03:32:09 +0000 magginkat ]]> The Final Say

by Eric Margolis | Oct 29 2006 – 10:40am |  permalink

Eric Margolis’s blog

TOKYO — U.S. midterm congressional elections are pretty humdrum affairs that usually produce low voter turnouts. But this Nov. 7 vote is shaping up as the most exciting and important midterm election in modern American history.

The upcoming vote has generated extraordinary interest around the globe. Polls in Asia, Europe, and Latin America show the widely-expressed hope that American voters will deliver a stinging rebuke to the Bush administration and end its war in Iraq.

This week, a senior State Department official finally spoke the truth about administration policies in Iraq, calling them “arrogant and stupid.” He later retracted his statement, but the damage was done.

Exhibits A & B: The increasingly out-of-touch Vice President Dick Cheney just assured listeners on a recent radio show that the catastrophic war he and the neoconservatives engineered in Iraq was going “remarkably well.” And President George Bush commanded the powerless puppet government the U.S. installed in Baghdad to “get tough” with powerful Shia militias.

Panicked by the looming spectre of defeat in Iraq, Bush suddenly declared his cherished mantras — “we won’t cut and run” and “stay the course” — inoperative. The new party line for Republican apparatchiks is “flexible response.”

Meanwhile, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq suggested more troops from North America were needed to control anarchic Baghdad. John McCain, the current Republican frontrunner for the 2008 presidential election, has been calling for doubling of U.S. troops in Iraq, which would mean reinstating the draft.

‘Fudge and flee’?

But Bush’s new motto looks more likely to become “fudge and flee” as he scrambles for a face-saving way out. Things are so bad that the administration is pleading with “axis of evil” members Syria and Iran to help it out of the Iraq mess.

Wiser or more politically savvy Republicans are swiftly backing away from the increasingly unpopular president.

Today, however, Republicans, once the Grand Old Party of two of America’s greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower, have sunk to their lowest point in memory. Only 16% of Americans approve of the job the Republican-run Congress is doing.

The U.S. Constitution established Congress as America’s premier arm of government. Bush, Cheney, and their neocon allies used 9/11 to turn Congress into a rubber stamp, much like the old Supreme Soviet whose ranks were filled with corrupt non-entities.

Look at the embarrassing Republican leaders in Congress, the world’s greatest legislature:

The shambling Senate leader, Dennis Hastert, was a wrestling coach. The once feared House leader, Tom Delay, was a cockroach exterminator before going to Congress. He recently resigned under a barrage of accusations of wrongdoing. They were barely worthy of political office in Dogpatch, never mind Washington.

Both Republicans and Democrats are steeped in Washington’s endemic corruption and influence-peddling due to their constant need to raise campaign funds by kow-towing to special interests. Members of both parties voted like clapping seals for the Iraq war.

But Republicans took the lead in promoting and sustaining that totally unnecessary conflict, now estimated to likely cost upwards of $1 trillion before it is lost. They eagerly co-operated in the Bush/Cheney efforts to emasculate Congress, muzzle the media, create an all-powerful president, and undermine civil liberties and the U.S. constitution.

Senior Bush administration officials responsible for the Iraq disaster — Cheney, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and Colin Powell — made fools of themselves before the world by chorusing a litany of grotesque lies that would have made old Kremlin boss Leonid Brezhnev blush crimson. If Democrats retake the Senate or House, their first act should be to open investigations of how America was misled into war.

In fact, it’s hard to think of another administration in modern history that has done more grave damage to U.S. interests and reputation abroad, or so grievously undermined the system of constitutional government at home. None of America’s foreign enemies have ever inflicted so much damage.

Politicians are all too rarely punished for their egregious misdeeds and dishonesty. But this Nov. 7, Americans will have a golden opportunity to deliver judgment on the politicians and officials who misled them and the nation.

Each and every Republican and every spineless Democrat who voted for the illegitimate war and for the monstrous deficit spending should be kicked out of office.

Basic rights

So, too, should every legislator that supported Bush’s shocking violations of the constitution such as wiretapping and spying on citizens, and overriding or dismissing laws made by Congress. All legislators who voted this month to ignore or violate the sacrosanct laws of the Geneva Convention and the basic right of habeas corpus, and who disgracefully voted to legalize torture, should be ousted.

American voters will hopefully ignore all the fearmongering they have been subjected to and remember the basic and most important tenet of democratic politics: “Throw the rascals out!”