tikkun olam

Remington: ‘Sorry for your loss — here’s your bill’

2012-01-28T20:20:00.000-06:00

Calgary Herald

With the family of deceased Canadian skier Sarah Burke facing a U.S. medical bill topping the value of an average Calgary home, I was reminded Friday of a quote by the late Justice Emmett Hall, a crusader for Canada’s public health-care system.

“We as a society are aware that the trauma of illness, the pain of surgery, the slow decline to death are burdens enough for the human being to bear without the added burden of medical or hospital bills penalizing the patient at the moment of vulnerability,” Hall wrote in a 1979 review of publicly funded health insurance.

To help Burke’s husband Rory Bushfield pay an expected $550,000 medical bill for nine days of intensive care in Utah, a website was set up by Burke’s agent asking for donations. The site had reached nearly $200,000 as of this writing Friday afternoon, prompting the Canadian Freestyle Ski Association to announce that the amount was enough that her family “will not have any financial burden related to her care.”

The association’s statement seemed odd, considering that the website was $350,000 short of its intended goal, but not if you understand the vagaries of a private health system dominated by big private insurers.

In the U.S. health system, “nobody pays the sticker price, except for those who are squeezed, which is normally the uninsured,” says Steve Morgan, a health policy analyst with the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Health Services and Policy Research.

“Big insurance doesn’t pay retail,” Morgan says of the U.S. health system. Typically, he says a hospital will present a bill big enough to choke a horse and the insurance company will negotiate it down. Individuals without insurance, or those who are under-insured, have little or no negotiating power and often end up paying bills that are financially devastating, Morgan said.

Burke was apparently not adequately insured in the U.S. Her ski association only covers sanctioned events. Because the event at which she was injured and subsequently died was an unsanctioned competition put on by her sponsor, Monster Energy Company, the ski association’s insurance did not cover her.

It was not clear if Burke’s family thought she was adequately covered, or if Monster had insurance for her. The company did not say if it would help cover her medical bills, which Morgan says is not surprising.

Monster, he said, could have negotiated behind the scenes to get the price down. The Canadian Freestyle Ski Association said the family had not yet received a final bill for her hospitalization, but that it is expected to be approximately $200,000, roughly the amount that had already been collected.

Morgan says Burke’s case should be a sobering reminder to Canadians of what could happen in a privately-insured market, rather than a public system where everyone is insured against a catastrophic event.

In 2000, the U.S. health policy journal Health Affairs wrote about the issue under the heading “Gouging the Medically Uninsured: A Tale of Two Bills.”

“Overcharging the uninsured is one of the many unintended and largely overlooked results of our decade-long obsession with curbing health-care costs,” it said. “Powerful interest groups — government, employers, insurers, hospitals, medical equipment vendors, and health care professionals — have fought vigorously to protect their interests. The uninsured, with no organized voice, emerge as losers.”

Since 2001, family health insurance premiums in the U.S. have increased 113 per cent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, with annual premiums for employer-sponsored family health coverage growing to $15,073 in 2011. Due to the economic downturn, the number of Americans going without insurance has grown by one million to 49.9 million people.

We complain of health-care costs and outcomes in Canada, but the U.S. ranks behind Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand and the U.K. in five areas of health system performance: quality, efficiency, access to care, equity and mortality, according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund.

“Our failure as a country to ensure basic health care for all of its citizens is in part to blame,” Glenn D. Braunstein, chairman of the Department of Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, wrote Friday in the Huffington Post.

It is, indeed, a sobering reminder to Canadians how lucky we are. As one commentator wrote of the Burke family’s experience with the U.S. system: “We are sorry for your loss. Here’s your bill.”

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein Embraces Dr. King’s Call to make Health Care a Right, Promote Economic Justice and End War

2012-01-18T20:12:00.000-06:00

From Jill Stein for President:

Dr. Jill Stein, running for president as a Green Party candidate, said if elected she would honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy by not only embracing his call for civil rights and racial equality but continuing his struggle for peace, economic justice and universal health care.

Dr. Stein, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, said she would make health care a right and enact a single payer, expanded and improved Medicare for All. In 1968, Dr. King said that “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

“All Americans are entitled to quality health care. We need to also control the excessive costs of health care, starting with eliminating the expensive and wasteful practice of health insurance, where profits are increased by denying access to health care. It is a scandal that President Obama, who has long admitted that single payer is the best solution, instead copied Milt Romney and mandated that all Americans buy health insurance,” stated Stein.

The last major speech Dr. King delivered, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”, was on poverty. Speaking at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., King talked about how the poor were invisible in America. When he was killed in Memphis four days later, while supporting the striking garbage workers, King was organizing a massive march in D.C. to launch a new campaign to end poverty.

Said King, ”There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.”

King called for “a campaign for jobs and income, because … the economic question was the most crucial that black people and poor people, generally, were confronting.”

Strikingly, a recent report has included that nearly 50% of Americans live in conditions of actual poverty, meaning that they are not self-sufficient and cannot afford food, transportation, and shelter, or are just one paycheck away from that falling into that condition. Income inequality in America is worse than it has been since 1927. The richest 1% own 40% of the nation’s wealth and get 24% of the income.

“We need economic policies that seek income equality. We need to guarantee access to the fundamentals of life, these being quality housing, food, transportation, education, and health care. We need a progressive tax system that requires the wealthy and Wall Street speculators to pay a higher share of the tax burden. We need to focus on providing a decent life for the 99%, not excessive wealth for the 1%,” said Stein.

Dr. King had concluded that a guaranteed annual income was needed as the prime step to ending poverty in our country. “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” Surprisingly, this was actually proposed a number of years later by President Nixon as a replacement for welfare, but Congress rejected it.

Stein said that she agreed with King on the need to end war and reinvest the military budget to fund domestic needs. Stein said she would also use the peace dividend to fund a Green New Deal to provide jobs while curbing climate change.

“I will bring our troops home not only from Afghanistan and Iraq and Africa and South America, but from the more than one hundred countries where we have bases. The best way to protect the security of Americans is to rebuild our economy and stop using our military and economic might to exploit other countries and enrich corporate war profiteers,” noted Stein.

King ended his speech at the Washington Cathederal four days before he was murdered with a day with a call for America to end the Vietnam War, and a call for a peace dividend. “Every time we kill [a Vietcong soldier] we spend about five hundred thousand dollars while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a good skirmish against poverty.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also stated, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Next civil rights frontier? It surely has to be health care

2012-01-18T14:23:00.000-06:00

The Charlotte Observer

"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane."

–Martin Luther King, 1966

In the exam room, the patient recounted her complicated illness. When she described symptoms related to her surgery, I suggested she see her surgeon.

She had spoken calmly until this point, but now tears came to her eyes. When she lost her job because of her illness, she lost her insurance and could no longer see any of her trusted physicians. Then followed months without needed care. Hers was just one of the sad money-related stories I hear daily.

Injustice we still tolerate

On Martin Luther King Day, it is easy to congratulate ourselves on our progress in moving beyond segregated schools, lunch counters and drinking fountains. The hard question is this: what injustices do we still accept that should, in fact, be intolerable?

Surely Dr. King would find the next civil rights frontier in health care, with nearly 50 million uninsured, almost 45,000 deaths annually due to lack of insurance, and more than half of all personal bankruptcies linked to illness and medical bills.

While the Affordable Care Act will bring improvements, such as decreasing the ranks of the uninsured, supporting community health centers, and investing in prevention, it leaves many gaps. At least 23 million people will still be uninsured in 2019. Tens of millions will be underinsured, one serious illness away from financial ruin. Most people who suffer medical bankruptcy had private insurance before getting sick. And medical bankruptcy is a cruel double whammy. Already beset with pain, anxiety and fear - due to serious illness - families find themselves financially devastated.

This doesn't happen in other industrialized countries, which have high-quality health systems that cover everyone.

The U.S. spent $7,960 per person for health care in 2010. Most developed countries spent less than half that amount and yet have better health outcomes and, in many cases, similar or better access to technical advances, such as hip replacements, bone marrow transplants, and MRIs.

How is this possible? As a nation, we waste about $350 billion in unnecessary paperwork and bureaucracy, thanks to our fragmented system of financing care through multiple insurers. And, although all countries are suffering from health care inflation, our rise in costs is far higher.

What to do? We should move to an Improved Medicare for All system, in which we share the cost of covering everyone, as we do for other valued services such as education, police, and the fire department.

How could we afford it? Our current public expenditures for health care that don't cover everyone are already greater than the total expenditures of countries that do.

First, we would save by cutting out the insurance company middlemen. Second, we would negotiate lower prices for medications and supplies. Finally, by abolishing private insurance premiums and substituting revenues from taxes based on ability to pay (a mixture of taxes on payroll, personal, and unearned income as well as stock and bond transactions), we would easily cover the uninsured.

Concerned that this is socialized medicine? Not at all. The U.S. has a high-performing socialized medicine system in the Veterans Administration, which owns hospitals and employs doctors and enjoys high patient satisfaction. Improved Medicare for All is not socialized medicine. The bills would be paid by one source, but medical practices and non-profit hospitals would continue to be independent.

Worried about the solvency of Medicare? Medicare actually operates economically, with administrative costs well under half those of private plans and with better cost control. In addition, Medicare has been considerably less inflationary. If billions of dollars were freed up in administrative costs nationally, that could go a long way toward comprehensive (not minimal) coverage for all, as well as fair (and not constantly threatened) payment for doctors and hospitals.

What are those expenses? Insurance companies incur them for designing plans, marketing, and deciding who is - or often isn't - eligible. Hospitals and providers also have excessive costs. While medical practices in Ontario spent $22, 205 per physician annually interacting with Canada's single payer agency, American practices spent $82,975 per physician dealing with health plans.

Use health care dollars to help

Consider the possible savings. This money could be used for actually providing health care.

My dream is to take care of patients and not have the specter of financial issues an unwelcome presence at every visit. I dream that there will be no tears in my office due to the unaffordability of needed care. And I dream that my time - and our health care dollars - will be spent helping people, not mired in bureaucracy.

Do you want to pay a real tribute to Martin Luther King? Be bold and visionary as he was. Fight "the most shocking and inhumane" injustice - and support Improved Medicare for All.

Jessica Schorr Saxe is a Charlotte physician and a board member of the Health Care for All NC.

#Occupy and U.S. Health Care

2012-01-18T13:24:00.000-06:00

CommonDreams

After wincing a bit from the free flu shot, my young patient turned to me and said, “What you’re doing here is awesome – it’s so hard get health care!”

“Here” happened to be New York City’s Zuccotti Park in mid-November, the epicenter of Occupy Wall Street, just days before the encampment was broken up by hundreds of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s armor-clad police in the dead of night. But it could have been anywhere in the United States.

Health care is in fact increasingly unaffordable for the 99 percent. More than 50 million Americans lack health insurance and thus reasonable access to treatment. A recent Harvard study showed about 45,000 excess deaths annually can be linked to lack of insurance.

Even people with insurance face formidable barriers to care like rising co-pays and deductibles. As a result, they are putting off care, getting sicker and ending up in our emergency rooms with serious complications – often facing crushing medical bills later.

This increased “cost sharing” by patients helps explain this week’s report by U.S. Health and Human Services showing the use of medical services has slowed. People can't afford it.

But lack of care invites serious illness or worse. That’s part of the reason why I and scores of other doctors, nurses, medical students and social workers came down to Zuccotti Park and volunteered our time to give out free flu shots.

But I confess that my desire to help went beyond the Samaritan impulse of preventing illness and aiding the sick, an impulse that, remarkably, still persists among our nation’s health professionals despite the toxic atmosphere of our for-profit health system.

I and many others were impelled to take action because the Occupy movement struck a chord with us. We’re angry that our health economy – like the overall economy – has more than sufficient resources to take care of all of us, but the resources are siphoned off by profit-driven corporations in the interest of “the 1 percent.”

Working on the front lines of health care, we see that economic and social inequalities in our present system make our patients sick. The lack of jobs and decent wages, affordable housing, healthy food and quality education takes a heavy toll on the mind and body, and each workday we see the casualties mounting.

We also recognize that the private health insurance industry and Big Pharma exemplify one of the Occupy movement’s central themes: that unchecked corporate greed tramples human needs. Need I recite the billions in profits these companies make each year, or the outlandish salaries of their CEOs, based on skyrocketing premiums and denials of care?

The private insurers, with all the bureaucracy and paperwork they inflict on us, add enormous costs to the delivery of health care, but add no value. Yet, unfortunately, they remain at the very center of our health system under the federal reform law.

There is a clear solution to our health care crisis. Put patients ahead of corporate greed and establish a nonprofit single-payer health care system – an expanded and improved Medicare for all – with no co-pays or deductibles.

A single-payer system would provide high-quality, comprehensive care for everyone – without exception – for no more money than our nation is paying now. We’d save about $400 billion annually due to lower administrative costs. Such a system would also give us tools to rein in costs, like the ability to negotiate lower pharmaceutical prices.

While helping out at Zuccotti Park, I was gratified to hear others chant a slogan I and millions of other Americans have long embraced: Health care is a human right. We will not stop fighting until that principle is enshrined in law and delivered in practice.

Now that will be truly awesome.

Mary O’Brien, M.D., practices internal medicine and serves on the faculty at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. She is a national board member of Physicians for a National Health Program (www.pnhp.org) and co-editor of “10 Excellent Reasons for National Health Care.”

Remembering King! + "We Have Not Overcome" Speech at #Occupy Ft Lauderdale

2012-01-16T16:44:00.001-06:00

Via DC Statehood Greens

(From Muhammed Malik of the Florida Green Party)

Watch this clip! Desmond Meade, President of FRRC and civil rights leader, speaking at #Occupy Ft Lauderdale yesterday! "WE HAVE NOT OVERCOME" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLS-E6caK9k

Remembering King...

http://www.letstalkaboutit.info/2012/01/remembering-king.html

Family! As you spend some time with your family remembering the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we hoped to help you reflect by replaying our segment from last week. Listen to the words of Dr. Paul Ortiz (University of Florida), Vjiay Prashad (Trinity College), Jill Hanson (Civil Rights Attorney), Robert Rooks (NAACP), Donald Anthonyson (Families For Freedom), and Marleine Bastien (FANM).

You can listen to our segment/tribute to MLK by downloading it here https://files.me.com/letstalkaboutit/i9zw0j.mp3

Quotes:

Dr. Paul Ortiz-"He would be embarassed, ashamed, and appalled at the state of human rights and civil rights that currently exist in this country."

"Dr. King...was saying[in his book Chaos or Community] 'let's open a dialogue about changing this economic system.'"

"It's almost as if people want to think about Martin Luther King day but don't want to read his own words."

"The March on Washington in 1963 was seen by the Kennedy Administration as a revolutionary action."

Vijay Prashad-"From when I came to the United States, I had never thought that Martin Luther King had been assassinated because his legacy, his meaning, everything he stood for seemed alive and well..."

"Just before he was assassinated he planned to create a city in Washington DC... where people who believed in the cause of ending poverty were going to create an occupation..."

"The most misunderstood piece of Martin Luther King's legacy is that he...was trying to create a society where race doesn't matter."

Jill Hanson-"I was about 12 or 13 when I first heard about him...I was a Catholic...he seemed to be really living the faith that I was taught."

"Today I think that he is equally relevant to the immigrant rights movement...you have a lot of very powerless people that have no other tools at their disposal, except for moral power."

"Today many people revere him and honor him...so we tend to forget that in his time he was very often despised...towards the end of his life he felt very depressed by the fact that he felt he hadn't made any progress...so we have to look at the long term of our actions and believe that someday "we will overcome."

Robert Rooks-"Before he was killed he was working on a sermon titled 'Why America may go to hell...'he had a more darker view of America."

"King had strong views...that I don't think we've totally unpacked as a nation and why I think we continue to do the things we do now."

Marleine Bastien (not played on show)-"King would be turning in his grave."

Donald Anthonyson-"We definitely don't need another Martin but we need more than one Martin...not only nationwide but globally..."

Enjoy your MLK day and don't forget to tune into our show every Wednesday at 7pm est.

Follow us on our blog: http://www.letstalkaboutit.info/

Like Us on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lets-Talk-About-It-Weekly-Radio-Program/149416298432424

Criminal Justice Reforms Can Save States Money — But Do States Know How Much?

2012-01-12T14:54:00.001-06:00

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Corrections spending is absorbing a growing share of states’ budgets (see map), leaving less for education, health care, and other priorities. Some states have adopted criminal justice reforms that reduce costs while protecting public safety — offering effective addiction treatment to more people convicted of drug-related crimes instead of incarcerating them, for example, or imposing sanctions other than prison time for people who miss meetings with their parole officer.

More states might implement these reforms if lawmakers had a rigorous assessment of the likely impact on the state budget, such as expected cost savings. Unfortunately, many states do a poor job of producing this vital assessment (called a “fiscal note”), as a new report from CBPP and the ACLU explains.

We examined more than 600 significant bills on adult sentencing and corrections policy that 49 states have enacted in the past three years and found that:

■States did not write fiscal notes for about 40 percent of them. Without an official certification that a bill would save money, lawmakers may have less incentive to vote for it.

■Most states failed to examine the bill’s fiscal impacts beyond a year or two. Some effective reforms, including certain drug and mental health treatment programs, require modest startup costs but reduce future prison spending significantly. Lawmakers need to be aware of these long-term benefits.

■About 15 percent of fiscal notes did not estimate a budgetary impact or indicated only that the impact was positive or negative. While some of these notes contained some useful information, they failed to accomplish the primary goal of a fiscal note: to provide the best possible estimate of the bill’s impact on the state budget.

■Few states’ fiscal notes explain their methodology. Without an understanding of the method used to determine a bill’s cost or savings, lawmakers and the public can’t evaluate the accuracy of fiscal notes, reducing their credibility and usefulness.

■Some states do little to ensure the credibility of their fiscal notes. In some states, executive branch agencies produce fiscal notes with no review by nonpartisan analysts. Lawmakers must believe that fiscal notes are credible before they can rely on them when deciding how to vote.

A few states, including Texas and Washington, produce fiscal notes that meet high standards. Our analysis describes the best practices in this area. To achieve them, many states may need to invest more resources in their fiscal note process, for example by hiring more professional research staff and upgrading the data available to them. But investing in good fiscal notes is far less costly than enacting or maintaining criminal justice policies that require more prison spending.

*Additional Reading (Link Posted by tikkun olam): Green Party Solutions: Transform the Criminal Justice System

Ten Key Values of the Green Party

2012-01-07T18:34:00.000-06:00

Green Party of the United States

1. GRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY

Every human being deserves a say in the decisions that affect their lives and not be subject to the will of another. Therefore, we will work to increase public participation at every level of government and to ensure that our public representatives are fully accountable to the people who elect them. We will also work to create new types of political organizations which expand the process of participatory democracy by directly including citizens in the decision-making process.

2. SOCIAL JUSTICE AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

All persons should have the rights and opportunity to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment. We must consciously confront in ourselves, our organizations, and society at large, barriers such as racism and class oppression, sexism and homophobia, ageism and disability, which act to deny fair treatment and equal justice under the law.

3. ECOLOGICAL WISDOM

Human societies must operate with the understanding that we are part of nature, not separate from nature. We must maintain an ecological balance and live within the ecological and resource limits of our communities and our planet. We support a sustainable society which utilizes resources in such a way that future generations will benefit and not suffer from the practices of our generation. To this end we must practice agriculture which replenishes the soil; move to an energy efficient economy; and live in ways that respect the integrity of natural systems.

4. NON-VIOLENCE

It is essential that we develop effective alternatives to society’s current patterns of violence. We will work to demilitarize, and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, without being naive about the intentions of other governments. We recognize the need for self-defense and the defense of others who are in helpless situations. We promote non-violent methods to oppose practices and policies with which we disagree, and will guide our actions toward lasting personal, community and global peace.

5. DECENTRALIZATION

Centralization of wealth and power contributes to social and economic injustice, environmental destruction, and militarization. Therefore, we support a restructuring of social, political and economic institutions away from a system which is controlled by and mostly benefits the powerful few, to a democratic, less bureaucratic system. Decision-making should, as much as possible, remain at the individual and local level, while assuring that civil rights are protected for all citizens.

6. COMMUNITY-BASED ECONOMICS AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE

We recognize it is essential to create a vibrant and sustainable economic system, one that can create jobs and provide a decent standard of living for all people while maintaining a healthy ecological balance. A successful economic system will offer meaningful work with dignity, while paying a “living wage” which reflects the real value of a person’s work.

Local communities must look to economic development that assures protection of the environment and workers’ rights; broad citizen participation in planning; and enhancement of our “quality of life.” We support independently owned and operated companies which are socially responsible, as well as co-operatives and public enterprises that distribute resources and control to more people through democratic participation.

7. FEMINISM AND GENDER EQUITY

We have inherited a social system based on male domination of politics and economics. We call for the replacement of the cultural ethics of domination and control with more cooperative ways of interacting that respect differences of opinion and gender. Human values such as equity between the sexes, interpersonal responsibility, and honesty must be developed with moral conscience. We should remember that the process that determines our decisions and actions is just as important as achieving the outcome we want.

8. RESPECT FOR DIVERSITY

We believe it is important to value cultural, ethnic, racial, sexual, religious and spiritual diversity, and to promote the development of respectful relationships across these lines.

We believe that the many diverse elements of society should be reflected in our organizations and decision-making bodies, and we support the leadership of people who have been traditionally closed out of leadership roles. We acknowledge and encourage respect for other life forms than our own and the preservation of biodiversity.

9. PERSONAL AND GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY

We encourage individuals to act to improve their personal well-being and, at the same time, to enhance ecological balance and social harmony. We seek to join with people and organizations around the world to foster peace, economic justice, and the health of the planet.

10. FUTURE FOCUS AND SUSTAINABILITY

Our actions and policies should be motivated by long-term goals. We seek to protect valuable natural resources, safely disposing of or “unmaking” all waste we create, while developing a sustainable economics that does not depend on continual expansion for survival. We must counterbalance the drive for short-term profits by assuring that economic development, new technologies, and fiscal policies are responsible to future generations who will inherit the results of our actions.

Ten Key Values from other state and local Greens.

There is no authoritative version of the Ten Key Values of the Greens. The Ten Key Values are guiding principles that are adapted and defined to fit each state and local chapter.

"The Green Party is no longer the alternative, the Green Party is the imperative"

~ Rosa Clemente

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein's message of change, on which real hope depends

2011-12-31T20:34:00.001-06:00

Letter to the Editor in response to "Invitation to a Dialogue: Time for a Third Party?", Dec. 27, 2011

2011-12-29T21:05:00.000-06:00

(NY Times)

From: Scott McLarty

To the Editor,

Instead of illusory centrism, America needs a permanent alternative party that rejects corporate campaign checks and instead represents We The People -- the 99 percent. The Green Party matches this description. Two candidates are competing for the 2012 Green presidential nomination, Jill Stein and Kent Mesplay.

There is no centrist gap between Democratic and Republican, just an overlap at the points where the parties have the most in common. We have two factions competing over how best to serve the one percent, with Democrats capitulating and adopting G.O.P. ideas (e.g., the 2010 health-care reform bill mandates, originally a Republican proposal), and Republicans sinking into extremism.

Democratic and Republican leaders measure the health of the U.S. economy according to Dow Jones, the G.D.P., corporate profit margins -- how the rich are getting richer. Greens judge our economy by the number of working Americans who enjoy financial security and good health care, the number of people lifted out of poverty, and the number of jobs created (potentially millions) in the effort to reduce fossil fuel consumption and stem global warming.

The survival of our democracy depends on the right of voters to vote for whichever candidates best represent their needs and ideals, without being told that the only viable choice is between Big Mac and Whopper.

Scott McLarty

Washington, DC

Note: I serve as media coordinator for the Green Party of the United States (www.gp.org).

Another element of the Obama Administration’s Lesser but Still real Evil

2011-12-26T19:12:00.000-06:00

Tikkun Magazine

When people often say that they are going to reelect Obama as “the lesser evil,” it is important to acknowledge that though lesser evil, the Obama Administration has been involved in considerable evil.

By Jeffrey Sachs

Huffington Post

The wonder of our world is that scientific knowledge is

now so powerful that we can save millions of children,

mothers, and fathers from killer diseases each year at

little cost. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and

Malaria has mobilized that knowledge over the past

decade to save more than 7 million lives and to protect

the health of hundreds of millions more. Yet now the

Global Fund is under mortal threat because of budget

cuts approved by President Obama and the Congress.

The Obama Administration had pledged $4 billion during

2011-13 to the Global Fund, or $1.33 billion per year.

Now it is reneging on this pledge. For a government

that spends $1.9 billion every single day on the

military ($700 billion each year), Washington’s

unwillingness to follow through on $1.33 billion for a

whole year to save millions of lives is a new depth of

cynicism and recklessness.

As a result of US budget cutbacks, and me-too cutbacks

by other countries, the Global Fund this week closed

its doors on providing new funds to impoverished

nations. It was supposed to accept proposals next month

from the poorest countries for an 11th round of

disease-control funds. Instead, it has scrapped any new

funding until 2014 at the earliest, and will only fund

the continuation of the coverage of existing programs.

US officials will prevaricate, noting that the US

spends this amount or that amount. History will treat

such excuses with the scorn they deserve.

Millions of people are now at risk of death in the

coming years as a result of Obama’s lassitude and

neglect. Hundreds of thousands of children who would

have been saved will now die of mosquito bites. They

will die because they live in poor tropical

environments where a mosquito bite kills, and where

their impoverishment makes it impossible for them to

afford a $5 bed net, $1 diagnostic test, $1 dose of

anti-malaria medicine, or access to a clinic. Countless

others will die because they cannot get AIDS or TB

treatments to stay alive.

If you think that money spent on the Global Fund is

money down the drain, think again. The Global Fund was

created a decade ago because the world needed to

respond to the uncontrolled epidemics of AIDS, malaria,

and TB. It has been a historic success, proving the

skeptics wrong. The Global Fund keeps alive 3.2 million

people on anti-retroviral treatment. It has financed

8.2 million courses of TB treatment and the

distribution of 190 million insecticide-treated nets.

You can read an overview here.

The Global Fund money has reached millions of people in

need. When its programs have been hit by corruption,

audits have paused the funding and reoriented the

programs. The result of this practical approach is

great success in many of the world’s poorest places.

Malaria has come down sharply, averting an estimated

400,000 deaths per year in Africa compared to the

baseline path as of the year 2000. Yet there are still

around 700,000 malaria deaths each year that can be

prevented if the Global Fund has the means. Read here

about the remarkable progress against malaria. Similar

progress is being made against AIDS. Now that progress

is at dire risk.

Reorienting less than 1 day’s military budget to help

save millions of lives (in conjunction with the efforts

of other countries) is not only a great humanitarian

step but also the most cost-effective step we can take

for our own security. Countries like Yemen or Somalia

are falling apart because they cannot meet their most

basic needs. We send in drone missiles – each one at

the cost of at least 20,000 bed nets — but we will

find no real security until we help address the

problems of disease, poverty, and hunger that

destabilize these regions.

It is painful to recall the campaign promises made by

Obama and Secretary Hillary Clinton. Both promised that

they would step up the fight to control AIDS, TB, and

malaria. Empty words. President Obama’s aides tell him

that foreign assistance is bad domestic politics and he

listens. On this issue even George W. Bush knew better.

The head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Congress,

Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, is not quiet. She is

an aggressive and outspoken foe of foreign assistance,

pretending to her constituents that cutting a $1

billion to the Global Fund is the way to balance the

budget. Great, we’re now 0.001 of the way there.

The United States Government, I noted earlier, is not

alone in the collapse of morality, decency, and common

sense. Each government that once contributed to the

Global Fund takes refuge in the budget cuts by the US

and the others. The apparent belief of the politicians

is that there is safety in numbers if they all starve

the Global Fund together.

We live in a country where the Federal Government

doesn’t think twice about the fate of impoverished and

dying people. Such a government won’t act to save your

life or mine. Politicians so brazen and irresponsible

need to be voted out of office. In the meantime, I will

join the efforts around the world to find new means and

new leaders to continue the struggle against the killer

diseases. I hope that you will do so too.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs is a professor and director of

the Earth Institute at Columbia University; Special

Advisor to the UN Secretery-General; author, ‘The Price

of Civilization’ Follow Sachs on Twitter:

www.twitter.com/JeffDSachs

Hardship in America: Homelessness Growing Among Families with Children

2011-12-24T22:02:00.000-06:00

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

The number of homeless families has been growing in recent years, but major programs that have proven effective at helping families find stable housing will serve fewer of them next year because of limited funding.

Since the recession began in late 2007, the number of homeless families with children living in temporary shelters has risen by 28 percent, to nearly 170,000 families in 2010, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Roughly four times as many families are living “doubled-up” or in other unstable home situations, school enrollment data from the Department of Education data suggest.

Numerous studies have documented the harmful long-term impact of housing instability on children. Compared to other kids, children whose families are homeless or living in unstable homes:

■Perform less well in school, are more likely to repeat a grade, and are less likely to complete high school — and the effects worsen with cumulative moves.

■Experience higher rates of mental health problems and developmental delays.

■Will more likely have physical health problems such as asthma or ear infections. (The Center for Housing Policy provides helpful summaries of the research here and here.)

Equally well-documented, housing assistance dramatically improves housing stability for low-income families that receive it. A recent study of families with children eligible for welfare assistance, for example, concluded that housing vouchers reduced the incidence of homelessness among these families by 75 percent. (Housing vouchers, which are federally funded, enable low-income households to rent modest housing in the private market at an affordable cost.)

Due to funding limitations, however, only about 1 in 4 eligible low-income families receives a housing voucher or other type of federal rental assistance.

Moreover, even fewer families will likely receive rental assistance in the future. Congress provided $1.5 billion for homelessness prevention in the 2009 Recovery Act, which likely averted an even sharper increase in family homelessness in 2010 (see graph), yet most local housing agencies will exhaust these funds well before the end of next year. Also, in HUD’s fiscal year 2012 budget, total funding for programs will fall by $3.7 billion (9 percent) below the 2011 level. Hardest hit are public housing and programs that promote the production of affordable housing. But even programs that fared relatively well in the budget, such as the Housing Choice Voucher program, will likely serve fewer families next year due to inadequate funding.

The Occupy Movement Must Also Become a Voters' Rebellion

2011-12-21T19:54:00.000-06:00

FDL, By Scott McLarty

To vote or not to vote -- that is the question for Occupy Wall Street protesters and for Americans sympathetic to the Occupy movement taking place in cities throughout the US.

For many of those who intend to vote, it means casting a ballot for Democratic candidates, including President Obama. For those who don't plan to vote at all, the outcome of elections is irrelevant, because nothing will change under the current political system. Are these the only two choices?

The US is in a crisis, a political holding pattern in which Democratic presidents and party leaders keep adopting more and more Republican agenda while Republican politicians sink deeper into irrationality and borderline fascism.

The crisis won't be solved by intoning "We must vote to reelect Obama and other Dems because Republicans will be worse" or by denial that voting can have any effect on the future.

Are we locked into a rightward-sliding two-party paradigm for the rest of history? What if millions of voters began to think outside of the two parties?

We'll never interrupt the bipartisan assault on protections for working people and the environment until we change the political landscape. Wall Street banksters have nothing to worry about as long as Ds and Rs keep getting voted into office. The status quo will be validated in 2012, as it is in every election cycle, in three ways:

(1) Non-voting and anti-voting: Nonvoters have no effect on the political landscape. Occupy activists and others who have ruled out voting as a way to effect change ensure that they'll have no collective influence on who gets elected or the policies of the candidates who get elected.

(2) Zombie voting: mindless votes for incumbents and party lines, regardless of a candidate's platform, background, and qualifications. For such voters, Election Day is an empty but necessary ritual undeserving of critical thought.

(3) The mistaken belief among liberals, progressives, antiwar voters, and others that the Democratic Party offers change, that things will get better if we just keep voting to elect Democrats, or that we have to keep voting for Dems because they're not as awful as the GOP.

By justifying votes for a party that long ago abandoned its "party of the people" principles, progressive, antiwar, environmentally-minded, and pro-labor voters have participated in their own political demise. We are long past the point at which lesser-of-two-evils voting has turned into self-defeat.

The position of progressives in the Democratic Party was clarified recently when President Obama scolded the Congressional Black Caucus for daring to complain about the White House's numerous capitulations to the GOP (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/25/obama-to-congressional-bl_n_979708.html). Rahm Emanuel, when he was White House Chief of Staff, called progressive critics "retards."

The Democratic Party expects progressives to continue voting for a party hostile to their ideals on the assumption that they have no one else to vote for and that a Republican victory would be far worse. When genuine progressives, like Rep. Dennis Kucinich, run for the Democratic nomination, their loss is assured and their campaigns ultimately serve to herd supporters into voting for a nominee that rejects nearly everything they stand for.

As Les Leopold argues ("Don't 'Occupy the Democratic Party' -- Four Lessons From the Populist Movement," AlterNet, Dec. 13, http://www.alternet.org/story/153354), there is no hope for a rehabilitation of the Democratic Party. If anything, the Democratic Party is likely to jump even further to the right in the wake of the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling, which struck down limits on corporate advertising for favored candidates, increasing the influence of business elites over both major parties.

Republicans are already trying to discredit the Occupy movement. We can predict that pro-GOP ads will slander the Occupy movement, and that, based on their usual tendency to retreat when challenged by the GOP, Obama and Dem leaders will dissociate themselves from the protesters and their demands. (See
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/11/29/gingrich-to-obama-repudiate-the-concept-of-the-99-percent/) If the 2012 presidential race is limited to D vs. R, the grievances and demands of the Occupiers will be banished to the margins by late spring 2012.

Beyond Protest

Electoral activism and street activism both have their limits and both are necessary. (Other strategies, like targeted boycotts, are effective too. Why rule out any nonviolent strategy?)

Street protest can be successful at capturing public attention, as demonstrations have proved throughout history. But it can be easy to mistake the vigor of protest movements, numbers of participants, and public sympathy with real success in changing the world.

The protests against the Iraq War during the last decade collapsed after Barack Obama's inauguration, because so many Democrats, believing they had just elected a progressive antiwar president, decided that protest was no longer necessary -- just when we needed it most.

What will happen in 2012 when pro-Dem unions and liberal groups and other Obama supporters are forced to decide whether to continue participating in Occupy protests against the Administration's policies or help get President Obama reelected? Organizations like MoveOn.org and Van Jones' American Dream are already trying to coopt the Occupy movement and spin it into "Reelect Obama." These groups will be reluctant to join the angry demonstrations that many of us hope to see outside the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina (as well as the Republican Convention, of course).

Participants in protest movements often espouse a variety of sometimes inconsistent ideals and tend to offer very general complaints and ideas for change. Demanding economic justice or an end to a war isn't a program for systematic change. The Vietnam War protests focused public opposition to the war and may have hastened the pullout of US troops. In the end, however, the protests didn't overturn the military-industrial complex or imperial culture of Washington, DC. Subsequent administrations, beginning with Jimmy Carter, maintained the pattern of US intervention in countries around the world.

In some cases, those in power simply ignore protest. The mass rallies throughout the US against President George W. Bush's order to invade Iraq in 2003 had no effect at all.

The Occupy movement must continue. We should look forward to its survival through the winter and renewed vitality when spring 2012 rolls around. But we must also find ways to make systematic changes and rebuild the political culture of the US so that wars of aggression, capitalist depredation, ecological irresponsibility (exhibited by the Obama Administration in early December during the UN meeting in Durban, South Africa, on climate change), assaults on the US Constitution, and other evils don't keep repeating every few years. In other words, we must replace people who are in power.

Vote For Yourself

The good news is that more and more Occupiers are showing interest in electoral action outside of the two Titanic parties. They've begun to embrace the vote as a strategy for challenging the corporate corruption and the erosion of democracy, in efforts like Occupy the Ballot (http://www.occupytheballot.org/).

Occupy Cincinnati demonstrators are already working to establish their own party
(http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_19279413 / http://www.occupationparty.org/ ). Carl Mayer, public defender and long-time supporter of Ralph Nader and the Green Party, recently spoke before Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park and expressed "his hopes of the OWS movement's becoming a viable third party in the future" (http://www.policymic.com/articles/2251/carl-mayer-speaks-at-zuccotti-park-says-ows-can-be-third-party).

On December 13, former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson launched a presidential campaign, via his newly founded Justice Party (http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/13/ex_salt_lake_mayor_rocky_anderson).

Alternative parties have been responsible for introducing urgent changes, whether the parties themselves have succeeded (the anti-slavery Republican Party in the mid 1800s) or failed. The list of reforms introduced by third parties and initially rejected by the political establishment includes abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, the eight-hour day and other workers' rights and protections, and civil rights for Blacks. If you're worried that the US is drifting into a new Robber Baron Era, remember that the Populist and Progressive parties helped end the last one in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Who will represent the important ideas on the electoral stage in the 21st century?

The Green Party (http://www.gp.org/) holds promise as an established national party, having laid a foundation for willing Occupy candidates to run for public office. In many states, Greens have accomplished the difficult task of achieving ballot status, overcoming prohibitive rules enacted by Democratic and Republican politicians to hinder alternative parties and candidates. Greens have spent more than two decades building party infrastructure and gaining campaign experience. The demands of Occupy protesters are clearly reflected in the Green Party's platform and refusal to accept corporate checks.

In New York, the Green Party achieved major-party status through Howie Hawkins' campaign for governor in 2010, fulfilling the state's stringent requirements and earning Greens their place on the 2012 ballot. New York Greens have been active in Occupy Wall Street since the protests began in September. In the 2011 general election, Cheri Honkala, a long-time housing activist and founder of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, ran for Sheriff of Philadelphia as a Green on an anti-eviction platform. Ms. Honkala spoke publicly at Occupy events about her pledge not to cooperate, if elected, with banks attempting to foreclose on Philadelphians' homes (http://www.cherihonkala.com/).

Speaking on the party's hope of emerging as a permanent independent political force in the 21st century, 2008 Green vice-presidential nominee Rosa Clemente said "The Green Party is no longer the alternative, the Green Party is the imperative." Some Greens have challenged Rocky Anderson to run for the Green nomination, noting that the Green Party already has ballot lines. (Greens will choose their nominee during the party's 2012 national convention in Baltimore, July 12 to 15.)

Whether Occupy activists decide to go Green or some other partisan route, they have the potential to lead a national voters' rebellion against the Titanic parties and trigger a sorely need seismic shift in US politics.

The day a few non-corporate-money Occupy candidates are elected to Congress is the day Democratic and Republican politicians are no longer each others' sole competition. The public debate on any given issue would open up to new ideas outside of the narrow D vs. R spectrum of policies and legislation approved by Wall Street, the oil companies, arms manufacturers, insurance companies, and other corporate interests.

There is no such thing as two-party democracy. Two-party elections are a single step removed from one-party states like the Soviet Union and China. At the heart of the voters' rebellion is the right to choose whichever candidates best represent one's own interests and ideals, without being told our choice is restricted to Big Mac vs. Whopper.

Refusing to vote and insisting on loyalty to Democrats will have the same effect -- a future limited to the parties of war and Wall Street. Thanks to the momentum of the Occupy movement, 2012 gives us an opportunity to save the US from the demise of our republic, collapse of the middle class, and descent into terrain that would be familiar to Benito Mussolini in the 1920s.

Given the increasing entrenchment of corporate-money politics in the age of Citizens United and accelerated redistribution of wealth and power to the one percent, this opportunity might be our last.

Scott McLarty is media coordinator for the Green Party of the United States and for the DC Statehood Green Party. He lives in Washington, DC.

Cenk renounces Obama over military detention of Americans without charge or trial

2011-12-18T22:07:00.000-06:00

Sen. Levin Charging That Obama Asked for Americans be Subject to Life-Long Military Detention.

2011-12-18T16:38:00.000-06:00

Daily Kos

In deference to people who do not have broadband connections and cannot easily view videos, here is a transcript because this is too important to not know exactly what Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) said on the Senate floor. Too important to not make abundantly clear what is taking place.

Levin pointed out that the Senate Armed Services Committee had taken pains to specifically exclude American citizens, as the Constitution would require, from the indefinite military detention provisions of the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act,) and that it was the Obama administration which specifically asked that Americans NOT be excluded. In other words, that they be subject to indefinite military detention the same as foreign nationals. The NDAA is now up for a vote.

Sen. Levin (addressing Senate president): "And I'm wondering whether the senator is familiar with the fact that the language, the language which precluded the application of section 1031 to American citizens was in the bill that we originally approved in the Armed Services Committee, and the administration asked us to remove the language which says that US citizens and lawful residents would not be subject to this section?

Is the senator familiar with the fact that it was the administration which asked us to remove the very language we had in the bill which passed the committee and that we removed it at the request of the administration... that would have said that this determination would not apply to US citizens and lawful residents? I'm just wondering is the senator familiar with the fact it was the administration which asked us to remove the very language [excluding US citizens], the absence of which, is now objected to by the senator from Illinois?"

What does this mean for us? This in no way excuses congressmens' and senators' treasonous votes passing the unconstitutional legislation. What is does do is expose the game of good-cop-bad-cop that Obama is playing, and shows him for the two-face that he is.

He can no longer say "the Congress made me do it, and they have enough votes to override my veto." So much for Change You Can Believe In.

And in twenty years when effective political dissidents are routinely thrown into military isolation forever without charge or trial, the standard joke among them will be "which party put you in here?"

Once in military custody you can be tortured and driven insane through permanent isolation, be given drugs, and deprived of all contact with family, friends, legal counsel, and the rest of the outside world for the rest of your life. You are entitled to no due process, recourse, or any other rights.

No one knows about this, and if it wasn't for a sharp-eyed American doing her duty and following the proceedings on CSPAN like a hawk, these damning words would be lost in the ether. This is the "eternal vigilance" the Founders were talking about.

Obama is busted as no different than any other Neo-con, a wolf in sheep's clothing, from the mouth of a ranking member of his own party. This final shattering of the "lesser of two evils" strategy played by the masters of both parties is good for Americans of all political stripes. I call on the Democratic Party to renounce Obama and to pass what emergency by-laws may be necessary to effect the nomination of a new party candidate before the Convention. I call on the loyal rank-and-file of the Democratic Party to demand of their leaders why they are not doing so. Some will be angered by these words, but I care not. If we are to walk into this era, at the very least let us walk into it with our eyes wide open.

Please post widely, re-post, and post again.

Why I Protest: Dr. Arthur Chen of Oakland, Calif.

2011-12-16T20:32:00.001-06:00

Time.com

A family physician, Dr. Arthur Chen, 60, was an unusual addition to the counter-culture of the Occupy Oakland movement. But the Connecticut-born Oakland resident who works in the city's Chinatown had a cause — health care reform — and the protests gave him a forum. He spoke to TIME's Jason Motlagh:

TIME: What was the event that precipitated your activism? And what made it personal?

Arthur Chen: I'm part of that 99%, proud to say, so it's very relevant. And then in addition to that... I've been seeing patients that are low-income impacted, many of them unemployed, and then struggling for survival. They're immigrants, and so I've seen the negative impacts in their lives from day to day. And I've seen uninsured patients who have to struggle with the recommendations that I make because of whether or not they can afford it. So it's been real to me on a personal level, and looking at the population as a whole, looking at the patients that I see, and just knowing intellectually that there's flaws in our current system. We're taking capitalism and its negative sides head on, which I think is essential to a democracy. And hopefully preserve the positive side of capitalism, because I'm not totally against capitalism; I just think at this point it's probably out of control.

How did you go about participating in the protests?

It was really hearing it in the news and hearing it through radio announcements, they're just totally on top of that. Democracy Now, if you're familiar with Amy Goodman. And so they were openly publicizing it and explaining it. So it was really helpful, and that prompted me to feel, okay, this is the moment and you really have to participate and you have to take time off and be there in solidarity with this and you know, help have representation. And then as a person of color, certainly here in Oakland, we have such a diverse population, but it's really important for people to see that the whole spectrum of our demographics are there, and feeling the need to really participate and be counted.

How did protests in other parts of the world affect, influence, or inspire you?

The Arab Spring, very inspiring. Just to have seen what had happened in Tahrir Square, and Tunisia and the start of things. And that it was really young people who played a significant role in that. All of that activity, the demonstrations in London around students outraged about increase in tuitions, and all of this activity and in Wisconsin, where people really spoke out against the governor, who really wanted to strip labor of its rights at that time, of collective bargaining. It's a combination of all of those things, and all of them, I think, again, representative about the growing resentment of the direction that our government is going, tax and policies that favor the rich, and don't really allow for an even spread of the resources to address our more needy populations.

What was the funniest thing you saw during the protests?

Well it really wasn't the funniest thing, but it made me think about a new generation. On the day of the general strike, when they started having speakers line up at the podium, right there at 14th and Broadway, one of the announcers said, we're going to start speaking and you're going to hear a lot of different views today. And you're going to hear some things that you may totally disagree with. And I chuckled a little bit, and then I thought, this generation is about inclusiveness and transparency. It was very moving, because I thought of previous demonstrations and big rallies where I know how controlled the speakers list is. And then in this particular case, they were just going the opposite direction and saying everyone's going to get a chance to speak. We aren't screening your point of view. That goes in line with the general assemblies, because I sat through a couple of those, and the way in which they're conducted, the inclusiveness, the way in which they ask us to sit down in groups with a few people around you. It's a different approach: it's horizontal. And so, it wasn't funny, but it made me smile.

What's an image of the protest you remember well?

The string people. They were expressing clearly the anguish and the pain of having to go through this economic downturn, but they were doing it with about four or five people caught up and tangled in string and rope.

What was the most memorable day of the protests in personal terms for you?

The most memorable day was when the camp was dismantled [which took place by around 5 a.m. on Nov. 14, 2011]. That day around 8:30 a.m. or so, I decided to swing by City Hall [outside of which the protesters were camped]. I wasn't seeing patients that morning; I was going to do some administrative work. So I swung by and I walked out. I had to get past a police barrier. And I just told an officer, look I have a meeting over in this other building in the rotunda, where I knew people, and he let me through. And so I walked by, and it was like walking by a graveyard. It was so disheartening to see just nobody there. And I had been there before and it was vibrant and alive and there were people who were energized and feeling really positive about making a statement. And so it was disheartening; the mood was really somber. There was nobody there. Then I heard helicopters flying overhead. And then I slipped into a coffee shop, just so I could stay out of the range of the officer that had let me by — and went in to just buy a roll, and they were totally empty. During that time I saw a battalion of police marching by, there was about 20 or 25 of them. And it just sent a chill down my spine, of where things had amounted to. A peaceful, nonviolent protest around the economic conditions and what are the causes of that, and here we had folks just cleared out and arrested, and now we had an oppressive looking police tactical squad coming in. That was probably my worst day.

Meet the new 1%: healthcare CEOs replace bankers as America's best paid

2011-12-16T13:05:00.000-06:00

The Guardian

No bankers in top 10 of America's best-paid executives, but those in charge of healthcare and drugs firms are in the money

Pity Wall Street's bankers. Once the highest-paid bosses in the land, they are now also-rans. The real money is in healthcare and drugs, according to the latest survey of executive pay.

There are no bankers in the top 10 of this year's GMI survey of CEO pay. In fact, they have been out since 2007, when Goldman Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein competed for the top slot with Richard Fuld, boss of soon-to-be-bust Lehman Brothers, and Angelo Morzillo, head of Countrywide, once the largest sub-prime home loan firm.

With the bankers still recovering from their tussle with hubris, old age and infirmity were 2010's boom businesses – at least in terms of pay. Leading the pack was John Hammergren, chief executive of McKesson Corporation. The firm's 52-year-old chairman, chief executive and president took home $145,266,971 in 2010.

McKeeson is probably the biggest company you've never heard of. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company is the largest pharmaceutical distributor in North America, distributing a third of the medicines used in the US. McKeeson's sales topped $112bn last year.

Hammergren's next closest rival was Joel Gemunder, outgoing boss of Omnicare, where he had been president since 1981. Omnicare is a pharmacy company that dispenses drugs in nursing homes – among other services – and had sales of $6.15bn last year. When Gemunder started at the firm it had sales of $150m. His 2010 total pay package was worth $98,283,242.

CVS Caremark, which operates 7,000 pharmacies across the US, awarded chief executive Thomas Ryan $68,079,823 in 2010. Caremark's share price was $71.70 on 1 May 1998, when Ryan joined the firm, and ended 2010 at $34.29.

Ronald Williams, boss of health insurance giant Aetna, made $57,787,786 in 2010. Another recipient of a golden goodbye, Williams made $50.4m on his stock options last year. Williams is one of the US's most prominent African American business leaders, and has campaigned against healthcare reforms that would have introduced a government-backed public insurance option to compete with private insurers. Since he became CEO, Aetna's stock price declined by 70%.

Health care system is weighing down America

2011-12-13T17:33:00.000-06:00

The Newport (R.I.) Daily News

An article in the Dec. 1 Daily News stated that Newport Hospital provided more than $16 million in uncompensated care in the past fiscal year. The report concluded this crucial community hospital continues to operate in large part due to the charity of wealthy donors.

What I was surprised not to see was mention of the fact that this problem is a nationwide crisis and is due not to Rhode Island’s struggling economy, but to the fact that the funding of American health care is fatally flawed.

Hospitals like Newport provide free care because so many in the community lack health insurance. More than 50 million people nationally and 10 percent of all Rhode Islanders are uninsured, and a larger number are “underinsured,” meaning that because of the high deductibles, co-pays and caps on their insurance policies, a single critical illness such as cancer will bankrupt them. Nationally, more than 50 percent of all bankruptcies in 2010 were due to medical bills, and of those bankrupted, more than 60 percent had insurance at the onset of their illness. America pays roughly $7,800 annually per person in health care costs. For a little more than half that amount, Canada and Europe insure every citizen and medical bankruptcies do not occur. Why? Because private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consumes about one-third of all U.S. health care dollars. Even worse, it is estimated that 48,000 Americans die each year due to a lack of health insurance.

In 2003, the New England Journal of Medicine, using the government’s own data, found that the U.S. could save $350 billion annually by changing from our current wasteful private-insurance system to a national single-payer system — enough savings to provide all necessary health care coverage for every American. One might ask, if the facts are so obvious, why does the government not enact these changes? The answer is: lobbyists.

In the summer of 2010, the health insurance industry spent $170 million per month to kill the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), and succeeded in stripping it of the public option and earlier Medicare eligibility. The weakened bill will not save money or fix the problem.

However, there is a bill in the House of Representatives, HR 676, the Medicare for All Act, which would create a single-payer system with the savings mentioned above. The bill has 72 sponsors in the House; unfortunately, they do not include Reps. David Cicilline or Jim Langevin. I would urge all Daily News readers to write to our congressmen to do the right thing for Rhode Islanders and our health care system and sign on as co-sponsors of this bill.

We cannot afford the current system.

It is literally killing us and bankrupting our country.

Students Occupy for Health Justice

2011-12-11T20:11:00.000-06:00

AMSA On Call blog

I met a patient last week who stopped taking her antidepressant medications because she had been denied long-term health insurance and thought it would improve her chances of eligibility. Unfortunately this obviously wasn’t in the best interest of her health.

I had another patient who presented to the emergency department with metastatic lung cancer. He had not been to the doctor in over 30 years because he couldn’t afford it. If he had sought treatment earlier he may have been cured.

Everywhere I look private health insurance companies are making our patients sicker.

I was proud to be at in Lafayette Park in Albany, N.Y., last Sunday for the Health Professional Students Day of Action for the 99%. We carried a banner that said “Health Professional Students Occupy for Health Justice and Single Payer.”

I support the occupy movement because I feel that powerful and profiting insurance companies get in the way of my practice of medicine. Treatment should be the same high quality for everyone; instead, we have to consider what someone can afford.

It too often becomes treatment for the “haves” and neglect for the “have nots.” But the thing is, these days you may not know which group you fall into. Insurance plans are so spotty, with major gaps in coverage, that you don’t even realize it until you need medical attention, and you find your plan does not cover it.

I see it every day in the clinic – treatment is designed around what the insurance will pay (or not) instead of what is best for the patient first and foremost. It’s no fault of the medical team; we want to give the patients the best care, but the insurance industry has our hands tied.

Today’s future doctors realize that health care is more than physical health, social determinants of health are equally as important. The schools our kids attend, the neighborhoods we grow up in, the cleanliness of the environment, joblessness, and poverty all deeply impact our health.

A classmate said today, “There is so much inequity and injustice, it cuts into everything, including caring for patients. If you really want to care for patients you’ve got to care about everything, not just their liver.”

I asked some of the other attendees why they support the Occupy movement. “Health care is a fundamental human right and by increasing access to health care we can reduce some of the inequality,” said one medical student. Another classmate agreed: “We’re here for health care because you can’t do anything if you’re not healthy.” Yet another: “As a future physician, it’s disconcerting that patients can’t get into my exam room, and I want to change that.”

Even early in their medical careers, these students see that there are major problems with the health of our nation.

As I talked with my classmates, I found that we were all there for slightly different reasons. “I feel like too much of our country’s infrastructure has been diverted away from the important stuff like health and well-being,” said another student. His peer believes “the system is broken and change needs to start somewhere.”

The United States is the only industrialized country that does not provide health care to all its citizens regardless of employment status or economic class. Our profit-driven health care industry raises costs and inequality.

But our political system has been corrupted by corporate money and power, and the 1% have rejected evidence-based health policy that save lives and money, namely expanded and improved Medicare for all. We support Occupy Wall Street because economic and social inequality makes our patients sick.

Occupy welcomes physician sharing vision for single-payer health system

2011-12-09T20:52:00.002-06:00

The Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)

Dr. Steve Auerbach has shared his vision for a single-payer health system with Occupy movements nationwide, and on Friday he brought it to Chapel Hill.

Auerbach, a pediatrician and a leader of the advocacy group Physicians for a National Health Program, pointed at a handwritten sign reading “Corporate greed makes us sick” while speaking to a crowd in Alumni Hall.

“It’s not a moral statement, it’s a matter of fact,” he said.

After his speech at the University, Auerbach and a crowd moved on to Peace and Justice Plaza outside the town’s courthouse to continue the discussion.

Auerbach’s speeches were part of a series of “teach-ins” being held across the country by “Health care for the 99 percent,” a branch of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He also spoke Saturday in Durham and Greensboro.

Auerbach discussed the role of insurance companies and lobbyists in health care. He criticized the fact that insurance companies might not cover people with certain conditions.

“If you take home one message, it’s this: You can’t make money insuring sick people,” he said. “That’s insane, it makes no sense.”

He said a single-payer health care system — where medical care for the entire population is funded by one entity, such as a government-run organization — would solve the inequality.

Some veterans of the Occupy movement viewed the speech and participated in the walk to Occupy Chapel Hill, including freshman Laura Carroll.

“I had been to some of the Occupy events before the raids happened, and I wanted to see how the movement shifted,” she said.

Other attendees said they were simply curious.

“I’ve sort of been watching from afar,” said freshman Mariah Earle. “My family always ridiculed the single–payer system, so I learned some actual factual things.”

Junior Addison Evans said speakers like Auerbach can spark conversation on campus.

“It is important to have informed debate,” said Evans, who received extra credit from her professor for attending.

Auerbach said he was glad to be part of the tradition of doctors advocating in civil rights movements.

“I consider myself extremely patriotic,” he said. “Despite 30 years of propaganda, the American people get it.”

List of essential services under U.S. health reforms is ‘skimpy’ and dangerous, say doctors

2011-12-07T16:13:00.000-06:00

BMJ

A national doctors’ organization says that most of the authors of a federally sponsored report on recommended health insurance coverage have financial ties to insurers and drug companies and that the insurance scheme will leave many U.S. citizens without access to health care.

The Institute of Medicine, which was contracted by the federal government to write the report, brought in security guards at the institute’s annual meeting to prevent doctors from distributing leaflets outlining the financial conflicts of interest of the report’s authors. The doctors, former institute fellows and members of Physicians for a National Health Program, were registered at the meeting and tried to give the leaflets to colleagues attending it.

Danny McCormick, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a former fellow of the institute, distributed leaflets at the meeting. He has signed a protest letter sent to the U.S. secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, along with more than 2,400 doctors, nurses, and health advocates, stating that the recommendations for “essential benefits” to be provided under the Affordable Care Act will provide “skimpy” care that would endanger the health of many citizens.

Although the report outlines 10 categories of benefits that insurers must cover, such as costs of hospitalization, preventive care, and ambulance transport, it does not prohibit insurers from shifting costs to patients through premiums, co-payments, deductibles, and cost sharing. In the event of a catastrophic illness or injury, patients could be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

Dr. McCormick said that a serious pitfall of the recommended essential benefits is that they would give patients the illusion that they have “real insurance.” He said, “Most patients, no matter how well informed, have no idea what their insurance policy covers. It’s only when some catastrophic event occurs that they find out that they are not fully covered.”

Nor would the insurance scheme necessarily cut over-testing and over-treatment, which Dr. McCormick says should be cut. Although the report panel recommends establishing an independent “national health benefits council” to review scientific evidence regarding new technologies, the plan does not task the council with assessing current testing and treatment strategies that might be unnecessary or dangerous.

Howard Brody, a member of the Institute of Medicine and Physicians for a National Health Program, told the BMJ that the Affordable Care Act “is truly a game changer” that will extend coverage to more people. Nevertheless, he added, “It’s not enough.”

Dr. Brody called the act a “sop to the insurance industry” and a “political decision, not a scientific decision,” since a single-payer system is considered unacceptable in the United States. He said that the institute was assigned a narrow task of defining only “what absolutely must be covered.” Unfortunately, he said, nothing in the recommendations would prevent insurers from providing “shoddy” coverage.

Dr. Brody said that the institute’s actions to prevent doctors from leafleting about the panelists’ conflicts of interest were “indefensible.” He said, “The institute is supposed to be an educational organization, the elite of American medicine, yet they treat their own members as if they were children incapable of assessing the information for themselves.”

The institute said that it complied with its policy on conflicts of interest by promptly disclosing committee members with a conflict of interest but whose expertise was needed to fulfill the committee’s charge.

Stein condemns White House blockade of Durban climate progress

2011-12-07T13:40:00.000-06:00

jillstein.org

Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate, criticized the White House today for effectively killing a legally binding global agreement at the UN Climate Change meeting in Durban. The meeting concludes on December 9th. Stein has called for a Green New Deal to create jobs while reducing climate change.

"I condemn the White House's inaction in the face of a global emergency," said Stein. "The U.S.' and other rich countries' inaction on climate change is not only inexcusable. U.S. and global emissions continue to rise and national legislation to reduce emissions is nowhere in sight. Even when the Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate in 2009-10, efforts to pass even weak legislation to reduce emissions were completely unsuccessful due to the powerful influence of Big Oil and Big Coal on both of the establishment political parties."

The White House's global position reflects the influence of the fossil fuel companies that continue to dominate the energy agenda of both the Democrats and the Republicans. President Obama has himself supported offshore drilling, including granting permits to exploit the pristine environment of the Arctic, expanding nuclear power, and promoting the unproven technique of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).

"Climate change is the biggest threat facing the U.S. and the planet. We don't need a nice sounding but meaningless statement coming out of Durban. The White House continues to block the creation of binding agreements for developed countries to reduce their greenhouse emissions and provide financial upport for developing countries to transition to carbon-free economies," stated Dr. Stein.

As part of her aggressive plan to combat climate change, Stein has proposed a Green New Deal, "that would create millions of green jobs through investment in weatherization, renewable energy, clean manufacturing, sustainable agriculture, public transportation and reforestation. The Green New Deal, according to Stein, would be paid for by redirecting trillions of dollars being squandered on wars for oil, Wall Street bailouts, and tax breaks for the wealthy. She says she will also end the White House's subsidies for "clean coal" schemes.

The emission reduction targets of the Kyoto Protocol, the only binding international agreement on greenhouse gases, expire in 2012. Despite the weakness of the Protocol, the U.S. has failed to ratify the agreement under both Democratic and Republican presidents. The United States and some other industrialized nations say they will adopt emissions limits only if rising powers like China, India, and Brazil (which were excluded from the original 1997 goals) also commit to matching reductions, which, according to Stein, "has been a formula for stalemate. The U.S. and a few other developed countries are responsible for releasing the vast majority of the global warming pollution that's in the atmosphere. It is appropriate that we take the lead in reducing the emissions."

"Global warming is already having a serious impact on the United States and the rest of the world. The year 2011 has been a year of extreme weather events marked by record rainfall and flooding, forest fires, and deadly tornadoes, and severe hurricane activity. These events have taken a huge toll on the lives and livelihoods of many thousands of U.S. residents. The global picture is one of growing climate instability and ever rising emissions. Yet the developed countries have made it clear that a new global agreement will not be in effect until 2020 at the earliest. U.S. leadership is desperately needed to galvanize a new world treaty to rescue the climate and our future economy that depends on it."

Since the disastrous UN climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009, the White House has worked to undermine the chances of a rules-based global agreement along the lines of the Kyoto Protocol. The Administration's support for ineffective voluntary commitments to reduce emissions in the form of a so-called "pledge and review" system has brought the UN process to the brink of collapse, as other major emitters have followed the U.S. and lowered their own already inadequate emissions reductions targets.

"This isn't leadership" said Stein. "It's an abdication of responsibility to the future that we can no longer tolerate."

New Report: Behind Closed Doors at the White House, Obama Administration Politicizes the Regulatory Process

2011-11-30T21:44:00.000-06:00

Center for Progressive Reform

Video via democracynow.org

When former Harvard Law Professor and eclectic intellectual Cass Sunstein was named administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), conservative, industry-oriented Wall Street Journal editorial writers enthused that his appointment was a “promising sign.” A slew of subsequent events has proved their optimism well placed, as we have noted repeatedly in CPRBlog.

But nothing beats hard, empirical evidence. In a report released today, CPR announces the results of an exhaustive six-month analysis of the barebones information OIRA has eked onto the web regarding 1,080 meetings held over a ten-year period (October 2001-June 2011) with 5,759 outside lobbyists, 65 percent of whom represented industry and 12 percent of whom represented public interest groups. The results were shocking even to us, long-time and admittedly jaded observers of OIRA’s one-way ratchet toward weakening public health and other protections.

•Obama’s OIRA changes more rules than Bush’s did. The Obama Administration has further entrenched a regulatory system in which White House officials trump agency expertise with decisions based on raw politics. While the Bush Administration changed 64 percent of regulations under this process, the Obama Administration has changed 76 percent.

•Industry dominates the OIRA meetings process. OIRA makes no effort to balance its meeting schedule by hearing from even a rough equivalence of organizations supporting protective regulations. In only 16 percent of reviews involving meetings did OIRA meet with organizations from across the spectrum of interested groups, while in 73 percent OIRA met only with industry representatives. These meetings come on top of an already exhaustive public process run by the agencies themselves, involving numerous meetings before a rule proposal is even crafted, multiple rounds of public comments that give a wide range of interest groups the opportunity to file thousands of pages of advice, public hearings across the country, thousands of hours of staff work invested in reviewing the comments and either accepting or rebutting the information they contain, and—last but not least—court review for many major rules.

•OIRA meetings correlate with changes to rules. Rules that were the subject of meetings were 29 percent more likely to be changed than those that were not. OIRA does not disclose its changes, but there is extensive evidence that OIRA functions as a one-way ratchet, exclusively weakening agency rules.

•OIRA is obsessed with the EPA. While rules from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) made up only 11 percent of all reviews by OIRA, 41 percent of all OIRA meetings targeted EPA rules. EPA rules were changed at a significantly higher rate—84 percent—than those of other agencies—65 percent—over the whole ten-year period.

•OIRA routinely misses deadlines, stalling public health and safety protections. By executive order, OIRA has 90 days to review a rule, plus a possible 30-day extension. Of the 501 completed reviews in which outside parties lobbied OIRA, 59 (12 percent) lasted longer than 120 days and 22 extended beyond 180 days (about six months).

•OIRA ignores public disclosure requirements. OIRA is required by executive order to make available “all documents exchanged between OIRA and the agency during the review by OIRA,” and agencies are required to “identify for the public those changes in the regulatory action that were made at the suggestion or recommendation of OIRA.” OIRA never follows those requirements, and the agencies—with the notable exception of the EPA in limited circumstances—don’t either.

•OIRA ignores the limitations on its reviewing authority. An executive order instructs OIRA to focus on “economically significant rules” (those imposing more than $100 million in annual costs), allowing OIRA to extend the scope of its review in very limited circumstances. In practice, “non-economically significant rules” are reviewed at a ratio of six to one with the rules that should be the primary focus of OIRA’s work.

Despite his selection of experienced and well-respected appointees to lead health and safety agencies—most notably, Lisa Jackson at the EPA, Margaret Hamburg at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and David Michaels at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)—President Obama has not made lasting commitments to substantially increase their budgets, has not supported them when they are politically attacked, and done next to nothing to press for updating the outmoded laws that hamper their efforts to police corporate misconduct. Worst of all, he has continued the Reagan and Bush tradition of enthroning OIRA as the final arbiter of whether public health and environmental protections see the light of day.

Centralized White House regulatory review shoves policymaking behind closed doors, wastes increasingly limited government resources, confuses agency priorities, demoralizes civil servants, and, worst of all, costs the nation dearly in lost lives, avoidable illness and injury, and destruction of irreplaceable natural resources.

Occupy the White House

2011-11-30T12:24:00.000-06:00

The Hill

If Green Party political veteran Jill Stein were to visit Occupy Boston several times, and if she were to describe the Occupy Wall Street movement’s grievances as “synergistic” with her own policy beliefs, and if she were to unveil her campaign for the 2012 presidential race at the height of the national movement’s growth, would that make her the country’s first Occupy Wall Street candidate?

Others might use simple logic to come to a “yes” conclusion, but Stein says no.

“I would not [say I’m an Occupy Wall Street candidate], because I think they have to decide who their candidate is,” Stein says in a phone interview from Boston, her hometown.

But in the same breath, she highlights the seamlessness between her candidacy and the Occupy Wall Street movement, describing the warm reception she received when she stopped by the Occupy Chicago base during a recent campaign trip through Illinois.

“I would say, when I went and showed up in Chicago, there were people who came up to me who said, ‘Oh, you’re Jill Stein — I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so grateful for what you’re doing,’ ” she says.

Occupy Wall Street candidate or not, Stein is embracing the movement — and also taking the nation’s college students under her wing — in launching a long-shot bid for the White House as another in a long line of third-party candidates who have experienced various levels of success in shaking up presidential campaigns of the recent past.

Synergy

Stein started considering a run for the presidency when the debt-ceiling showdown took shape in Washington last spring.

“This [was] really a crisis of the president’s creation, so that was pretty problematic to start with,” she says. “Then when he put Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security on the chopping block … it seemed to me absolutely unconscionable for the president’s policies not to be challenged.”

Stein announced her presidential bid in late October. Her main policy platform is what she calls the “Green New Deal,” which she claims will end unemployment through government investments in energy efficiency, among other tools. She promises to protect citizens from the special interests of Wall Street and corporate America and sees her campaign as “filling the void of a national voice for the 99 percent.”

Sound familiar?

That the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged as Stein was plotting her presidential run is merely a coincidence, she says, but a great one at that.

“It was so exciting to hear the same agenda reflected back at us, especially from a younger generation,” she says. “It felt almost miraculous that this was happening.”

But she’s careful not to appear opportunistic.

“We are not looking to hijack them or force them to be electoral or force them in any way to shift from what they’re doing,” Stein says. “I think the chemistry between the two entities is rich and synergistic, and we’ll see where it goes.”

It remains unclear how willing the Occupy Wall Street activists are to embrace Stein. An Occupy Boston spokesman said the group doesn’t endorse politicians and was unsure whether Stein had made any lasting impression on his comrades.

“I do believe I have heard that name around camp, but I am pretty sure she has kept a low profile,” spokesman Ryan Cahill wrote in an email.

Students

Stein sees a more reliable base on college campuses, and her first campaign stop reflected that priority.

The candidate traveled to Macomb, Ill., after being invited to Western Illinois University’s mock presidential election, a two-week event that includes conventions, campaigns and nominations. Stein won 27 percent of the vote, coming in third behind President Obama and GOP candidate Mitt Romney.

“I was, of course, the only candidate interested enough to show up at this thing,” she says, conceding that WIU is “hardly a hotbed of activism for Green politics.”

“We are very excited at the resonance we’ve had with students in particular, and that will be a major priority for us,” Stein says. “The student group, Campus Greens in Western Illinois, is growing and helping other colleges start up groups.”

It’s not hard to understand why any college student facing an extraordinarily tough job market and student-loan repayments would take a second look at Stein’s candidacy. She proposes forgiveness of student-loan debt and a tuition-free option at public colleges and universities.

“Students are currently an indentured class — they graduate with loans, which they cannot pay without loans,” she says. “It’s very hard for them to be contributors to the economy.”

She’s hoping to grow her student support from the Midwest outward. Other than a 10-day tour through California in late November, her campaign hasn’t yet planned other stops — “We are at the threshold of developing our plans,” she says — but ideally, she’d like to have students accompany her along the campaign trail.

Political awakening

Stein is a 61-year-old physician who was recruited by the Green Party in 2002 to run for Massachusetts governor after having made a name for herself in advocacy. She was working on community-level solutions to obesity, cancer, learning disabilities and other public health issues when the Green Party asked her to consider politics.

“I was not a political animal, but I was approached by the Green Party at a time when I was waking up,” she says.

After losing the 2002 race, she mounted losing campaigns in 2004, for the Massachusetts House of Representatives; in 2006, for Massachusetts Commonwealth secretary; and in 2010, again for the governorship. She won races for Lexington Town Meeting representative in 2005 and 2008.

“To my mind, low vote counts are not a reflection of a failed campaign,” she says.

What’s come out of her serial candidacy, Stein says, is an organization that will help her attack the monumental task that third-party candidates confront every presidential cycle: obtaining enough signatures to appear on the ballot.

Former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader says signature collection alone can consume a third-party campaign’s resources.

“By the time you finish, it’s Labor Day, and you’re exhausted, and you don’t have any money,” says Nader, adding that he sees promise in Stein. “She’s an M.D., which is a good advantage, since healthcare is a big issue … She has a good head on her shoulders.”

But if Nader faced an uphill battle in his two third-party presidential runs, Stein is looking at reaching for the impossible, one expert says.

While Nader had name recognition before entering electoral politics, “when you pick Jill Stein, you’re starting from zero,” says Southern Methodist University political science Professor Cal Jillson, noting that the only third-party presidential candidate to win was Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

What’s more, Jillson says, “the dominant parties write the rules for the participation of third-party candidates, and they write them in a way as to make it as difficult for them as possible to participate.”

No matter how long her odds of winning, Stein is brimming with enthusiasm after her first campaign stop. She plans to build her strength and conserve resources on upcoming trips by staying with local Green Party supporters, many of whom “tend to have really healthy foods … or organic gardens in their backyards.”

“The trip to Illinois was … the first road test,” Stein says, “and it felt great.”

The Struggle for Universal Health Care

2011-11-28T20:17:00.000-06:00

by Margaret Flowers

Once my eyes were open, I couldn't ignore what was going on. Awareness crept up, starting with a sense that something was wrong. That sense led me to examine the suffering around me -- suffering rooted in the injustice of our health system. I cannot close my eyes on the human toll of corporate domination in this nation.

This is why I devote my time to working for a health system in the United States that meets the human rights principles of universality, equity, and accountability: a single-payer national health insurance. Anything less will prolong suffering and unnecessary death. Every person in this country must have access to the same high-quality standard of health care.

But it goes beyond that. The International Declaration of Human Rights states that every person has the right to reach the highest level of health possible. And so, beyond access to care, we must also insist that every person have a home in an environment that is free of violence and poisons, an education, a job with a living wage, access to clean water, and healthy food that is affordable. Every person must be treated with dignity and respect. This is what we who advocate for health aspire to achieve.

Many will say this is asking for too much. Throughout history, people who sought real social change were told this. The Abolitionists, the Suffragists, and activists in the Civil Rights Movement were all told they were demanding too much, but they didn't accept that criticism and continued on.

This is what my colleagues and I will do. Those of us who work for social and economic justice will persist in our work, not because we believe that we will attain our final goal in our lifetime, but because we must. If we don't do it, then who will?

And so what are the secrets of this work?

First is to know the "why" and to keep that always at the forefront.

Second is to know where I fit in. I do not necessarily expect to succeed in my lifetime. However, I will die knowing that I contributed all that I could to advance humanity in the direction of a healthier society. This movement is greater than me. I am a small part of a continuum of evolution toward the survival of our species.

And third is to work from a place of love -- love for yourself and love for all those around you. Love is constructive. Love is forgiving when you or somebody else makes a mistake. And love is optimistic during even the darkest days.

This is what I have learned and what I want to share with you.

Dr. Margaret Flowers is a pediatrician who serves as the congressional fellow for Physicians for a National Health Program and is on the board of Healthcare-Now. She is one of the "Baucus 8."

Doctors Support Occupy Wall Street Because Wall Street Is Occupying Health Care

2011-11-26T19:20:00.000-06:00

PNHP

We support Occupy Wall Street because the private health insurance industry exemplifies the OWS movement’s central tenet: its unchecked corporate greed tramples human need.

We support OWS because economic and social inequalities make our patients sick.

We support OWS because we reject a system that forces us to treat patients differently based on the types of insurance they have and what kinds of treatments they can “afford.”

We support OWS because we believe in evidence, and evidence shows us that profit-driven health care raises costs and lowers quality. It’s unhealthy for the 99%; only CEOs and stockholders benefit.

We support OWS because our political leaders, held hostage by corporate money, reject evidence-based health policies such as a single payer reform that would save both lives and money.

We support OWS because the health care economy – like the overall economy –has more than sufficient resources to take care of 100%, but the resources are siphoned off by profit-driven corporations in the interest of the 1%.

We support OWS because we took the oath to do no harm, and our corrupt political and economic systems are doing all of us harm.

We support OWS because we are hopeful that we can change our society.

Join us!

Obama Silent In Wake Of Pepper Spray Torture, Jill Stein Speaks Out

2011-11-22T22:07:00.001-06:00

Irregular Times

Barack Obama refuses to say a word against it.

In the latest incident in what’s become a nationwide streak of policy brutality against protesters in the Occupy Movement, police at UC Davis pepper sprayed a line of protesters who were doing nothing but sitting peacefully in a line on a sidewalk. A police officer walked back and forth, spraying the protesters until their faces were orange with the chemical weapon. Officers forced open protesters’ mouths to put the spray down their throats, causing one student to cough up blood for at least an hour.

As people watching the protest started chanting “Shame on you,” the police officer then pointed his canister of pepper spray at the crowd, to warn them to stop chanting.

Not once during this protest were the police under any threat of physical violence.

Barack Obama refuses to even acknowledge the incident, and other pepper spray attacks against peaceful protesters.

Instead of opposing the police crackdowns against nonviolent protests, Obama has supported the police assaults , issuing a statement through his Press Secretary that it’s up to local governments to do what they want with the protests. Furthermore, the Obama Administration seems to have, through the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, assisted police in developing plans to quash occupation protests across the country.

Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for President in 2012, is countering Obama’s acceptance and assistance of police brutality against protesters with strong and clear opposition. Stein has called for the creation of an investigation by Congress of abusive law enforcement practices in the United States, and has pledged to undo the Homeland Security excesses that have led to the many pepper spray incidents against protesters in the Occupation Movement. “The President, as head of the executive branch, bears a responsibility to protect our citizens from infringement of their civil liberties. Should I become President, I would immediately issue an executive order to all federal agencies instructing them, in cases of peaceful assemblies of citizens, to oppose the use of militaristic assaults, intimidation, threats, or brutality. I would order the Department of Justice to stop conspiring against our people – and instead, work with the community to make sure that people’s rights are being respected. And I’d ask all agencies involved to ensure that the press is able to report on what happens, because the people have a right – and a need – to know,” Stein said in a press release.

At this point, I’d rather be pepper sprayed in the face than vote for Barack Obama. Jill Stein.looks like a good liberal alternative to me.

Six Green mayors sign on to letter from over 100 mayors opposing Keystone XL tar sands pipeline

2011-11-17T21:57:00.000-06:00

GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES
http://www.gp.org/

WASHINGTON, DC -- Six Green mayors have signed on to a joint letter to President Obama from more than 100 mayors expressing grave concerns about the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

The mayors, representing communities across the US, voiced relief at President Obama's decision to postpone the decision, as well as hope that the permit for the pipeline will be rejected when it comes up for review after the presidential election.

A summary of the letter, a link to the text, and a list of the mayors can be found online here: http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/sclefkowitz/over_100_mayors_voice_concern.html

The Green mayors who signed the letter are Larry Bragman (Fairfax, Calif.), Bruce Delgado (Marina, Calif.), David Doonan (Greenwich, NY), Gayle McLaughlin (Richmond, Calif.), Jim Sullivan (Victory, NY), and Jason West (New Paltz, NY). (Mayor Bragman signed after the web site was published.)

"The delay in the Keystone XL decision is a victory for all those who protested and spoke out about the dangers of the pipeline," said David Doonan. "The small number of jobs created by the pipeline do not justify the health risks of a pipeline carrying tar sands crude oil from Canada to the Gulf. We can create far more jobs through a national public works program that includes conversion to safe, clean energy technology. Besides the Keystone XL pipeline, the Green Party has called for a ban on hydrofracking, mountaintop removal mining, and offshore oil drilling, all of which increase fossil fuel addiction and represent serious public health risks."

Richmond, with a population of about 103,000, is the largest US city with a Green mayor. Mayor Gayle McLaughlin made news recently when she enthusiastically welcomed Occupy protests to Richmond (http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2011/11/09/one-bay-area-mayor-welcomes-occupy-protests-to-her-city).

Mayor Jason West made national news in 2003 when he solemnized same-sex weddings as mayor in defiance of state law, drawing 19 misdemeanor counts (later dismissed) and a restraining order. Same-sex marriage was legalized in New York in July, 2011.

See also:

Tar Sands Pipelines Safety Risks

National Resources Defense Council

http://www.nrdc.org/energy/tarsandssafetyrisks.asp

"Beyond Fossil Fuels"

By Cecile Lawrence, PhD, JD, New York Green Party candidate for US Senate in 2010

Green Papers, January 25, 2011

http://www.greenpapers.net/?p=58

JOBS WITH JUSTICE: TAKE ACTION!

2011-11-16T19:00:00.000-06:00

dcjwj.org

Since Occupy DC began two months ago, we’ve seen perpetual street heat, with actions almost daily and sometimes twice a day to confront corporate power and support the demands of the 99%. DC Jobs with Justice is continuing our campaigns to hold Walmart accountable, win a fair contract for Verizon workers, fight wage theft, and defend immigrant rights in DC, while also looking for opportunities to join together other struggles. Please join us the next two weeks for actions, teach-ins and discussion!

*Thurs, Nov. 17th: Labor –Community – Occupy Day of Action!

*Mon, Nov. 21st, 12:30pm: Save the US Postal Service action

*Mon, Nov. 21st, 5:30pm: Vigil in Solidarity with Alabama Families

*Mon, Nov. 21st, 6:30pm: Dialogue on Community Needs and Community Spaces

*Dec. 5th, 6:30pm: Paid Sick Days campaign briefing

*Nominate Scrooge of the Year!

*Labor –Community – Occupy Day of Action!

Thursday, Nov. 21st

Join union members, community members, and members of Occupy DC for a day of marches and teach-ins focused on good jobs! Join any part of the day. Schedule of activities:

10am – 10:30: Verizon workers and CWA members will gather at the Giant/Home Depot Parking lot at 901 Rhode Island NE for a brief rally and then march downtown to join Occupy DC. List of stops along march route and times available here: http://www.dclabor.org/ht/display/EventDetails/i/99621

Noon: Washington Teachers’ Union Teach- on public education reform and local education issues at McPherson Square (15th and K, NW)

2:30pm: March on the Key Bridge in Georgetown in protest of the deterioration of our public infrastructure and public services. March will leave from McPherson Square and join OUR DC to call on Congress to create jobs, stop cuts, and fix our crumbling infrastructure. Rally at Key Bridge will continue through rush hour. Join us there!

*Rally to Save the US Postal Service

Monday, Nov. 21st

12:30 p.m.

National Press Club, 529 14th St. NW (Metro Center)

Fight Back Against Union-Busting, Layoffs, and Service Cuts! The Postal Service is pushing to cut over 100,000 jobs and close down hundreds of post offices nationwide in order to save money, even though USPS has made a net profit of more than $600 million sorting and delivering the mail the past four years. At a time of record unemployment and inequality, USPS is attacking union contracts, pushing privatization, cutting good jobs, and scaling back services. Join Occupy DC and the National Association of Letter Carriers to rally outside of the National Press Club where Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe will be speaking. You've got mail. And you are 99 percent!

*Vigil in Solidarity with Alabama Families

Monday, Nov. 21st

5:30pm

Lafayette Park in front of the White House (16th and H, NW – gather by the status in the center of the park)

Stand Up Against Racial Profiling, Stand Up for Immigrant Rights! Alabama recently passed the harshest immigration law in the country. Modeled on Arizona’s “paper please” law, Alabama’s HB 56 mandates racial profiling and discrimination. This coming Monday, Nov. 21, the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice will launch its “One Family, One Alabama” campaign to repeal HB 56. Communities around the country will be standing in solidarity with their efforts to repeal this hateful law. Join us in Washington, DC for a vigil to show solidarity with families in Alabama and call on our leaders in Washington, DC to intervene to halt implementation of this law and others like it.

*Public Dialogue on Community Needs and Community Spaces

Monday, Nov. 21st

6:30 PM

Asbury United Methodist Church, 11th and K St NW

On Wall Street, on K Street, and around the country, thousands of people are Occupying public spaces, highlighting the failures of our government in ensuring that people’s basic needs are met, and creating a new vision of direct democracy and mutual aid. Here in DC, we have a long history of communities organizing to protect public services and public property, as well as creating community-run alternatives to meet our needs. What are the needs that you see in your community? How can we work together to make the transformations you want to see? Join us for a community meeting to discuss our visions for vibrant, valuable spaces that our city needs and the ways we can get there! For childcare rsvp to 202-420-1707. Co-sponsored by: Empower DC, One DC, DC Jobs with Justice and the Washington Peace Center.

Paid Sick Days for Tipped Workers Briefing

Monday, Dec. 5th

6:30 PM to 9:00 PM

SEIU 32BJ offices, 1025 Vermont Ave NW, 7th floor

Learn about the campaign to extend DC’s paid sick days law to cover tipped workers. Event will feature workers' testimonials, campaign training, and dinner! RSVP online at: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2486166190.

*Not too late to nominate your Scrooge of the Year!

The race for this year’s Scrooge Award is sure to be a close one. The award – given to the person or company that did the most “dastardly deeds” to working people in Washington, DC this year – could go to anyone, from Verizon to Solanges Vivens (CEO of healthcare contractor VMT) and the field is still wide open. Don’t let a bad boss go unrewarded! Nominate your scrooge here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/23HGMGF

Once the nominations are in you’ll have the chance to vote for your favorite Scrooge and then attend our Winter Cabaret on Dec. 10th where we’ll unveil the winner!

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War Is a Force That Pays the 1 Percent: Occupying American Foreign Policy

2011-11-15T20:19:00.000-06:00

Truthout.org

If the last decade was the era of occupations that everyone called liberations, then the 99 percent movement is seeking to make this the era of liberations everyone calls occupations.

"It's clear that the interests of the majority of people in this country do not align with the military-industrial complex who put corporate profiteering based on destruction ahead of the needs of people," said Alex Kane, a journalist and activist. "The nexus of power that Occupy is looking to challenge in this country does not stop at Wall Street. Military profiteering is an integral part of the system and it should be challenged."

The "liberation" of Afghanistan has yielded a corrupt government in Kabul, where Hamid Karzai, the former CIA-paid fundraiser for the Mujahideen, is positioning himself as chief lapdog for the Taliban and the ISI (the Pakistan intelligence agency), this alliance acting alongside American bombs to create, in the words of one member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, "no positive change." Well, no positive change for some. For others, like Karzai's wealthy friends, embezzling great chunks of the $70 billion worth of security assistance and development projects American taxpayers have spent in Afghanistan since the invasion has yielded quite a large chunk of positive change.

The "liberation" of Iraq was so successful that America is getting all her troops out of there by the end of 2011, unless you count the thousands of mercenaries who will remain there to enrich their corporate ownership on the 99 percent's dime. The Obama administration would also like you please to ignore its forthcoming troop buildup in the region simultaneous to the "withdrawal" from Iraq and the huge amount of money it will cost American taxpayers, who are told we're too broke to stimulate the economy.

America appears to have "liberated" Libya right into quasi-theocratic governance, its transitional government announcing that the decision regarding what to do with the body of its summarily raped and executed former dictator would be taken by the head of the Islamic Fatwa society. This is not actually a problem for America, whose mind is on other things. "It may not be quite the country that NATO thought it was fighting for (when Sharia is implemented in Libya)," said Libya expert David Hartwell, senior analyst at HIS Jane's. "But the huge amounts of oil and gas in Libya will make everyone learn how to reconcile themselves with the new Libya."

The state of these "liberations" all point to the great need for a different type of liberation, that of American democracy from the corporate interests that pull its levers to facilitate their accumulation of wealth. That is precisely the focus of the Wall Street occupiers, whose movement has attracted solidarity occupations and protests in cities around the world.

The 1 percent knows what good business war is, owing partly to America's seemingly insatiable will to spend its money on military affairs and the ease with which the national security state can be gamed to furnish private corporations with windfall profit-yielding public contracts. More than half of the discretionary budget is devoted to military matters, as though there were no use for that money domestically. Rakaa Iriscience of Dilated Peoples puts it well in the aptly titled "Big Business": "If more than half the budget goes to military spending, less than half goes to whatever it's defending."

And the 1 percent are making out like bandits. Robert Greenwald provides a handy comparison at Firedog Lake (http://my.firedoglake.com/robertgreenwald/2011/10/27/77853/)

Military Contractor CEO Pay in 2010
Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush: $22.84 million.
Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens: $21.89 million.
Boeing CEO James McNerney: $19.4 million.

Financial Sector CEO Pay in 2010
JP Morgan Chase CEO James Dimon: $20.81 million.
Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf: $18.97 million.
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan: $1.94 million.

Lobbying Expenditures for 2010
Lockheed Martin: $12.7 million.
Northrop Grumman: $15.7 million.
Boeing: $17.89 million.
JP Morgan Chase:$7.41 million.
Wells Fargo: $5.43 million.
Bank of America: $3.98 million.

War profiteers benefit from the same corrupt system that bolsters the wealth of stock traders: this country provides more democracy, freedom and protection to the very wealthy than to the average citizen.

Mercenaries with well-placed lobbyists get off scot-free for massacres, while staggering numbers of poor people of color (who have no lobbyists) are imprisoned and disenfranchised for nonviolent attempts to survive in a jobless economy. Every time we are told about the lack of money available for teachers and home heating assistance for the poor, we should recall that the Pentagon simply lost more than $6 billion in Iraq, and there is no serious attempt afoot to account for it.

Instead of facing justice, the mercenary industry continues to receive snuggles and handouts from our highest democratic leadership. Jeremy Scahill reports that the Obama administration has furnished Chicago mercenary firm Triple Canopy with millions of dollars to continue where Blackwater left off in Iraq.

Surely, this is not the democracy that Iraq war veterans Scott Olson and Kayvan Sabeghi were hoping to export to other countries. Now, both have been nearly killed in crackdowns on dissent by police officers sworn to uphold a document prohibiting governmental abridgement of the right of the people peaceably to assemble. Protesters spurred on by the Occupy movement have already surrounded the White House to protest special favors paid to the 1 percent by the government at the expense of atrocities; perhaps they'll head to the Pentagon next.

Or perhaps, as with the Move Your Money campaign and foreclosure resistance, they won't only protest, but also take direct self-reliant action to confront the system. "It is no secret that Israel receives $3.1 billion per year in military aid from the United States," says Anna Lekas-Miller, a New York University student who spends a lot of time at Liberty Plaza. "However, what many Americans are not aware of, is that their investments and retirement funds are directly invested in companies that fund and facilitate the occupation of Palestine rather than to education or healthcare in the United States. Let's empower ourselves on how to stop corporations in the United States from wreaking havoc on the world."

As some Occupy Movement participants turn to electoral activism, the Green Party sends them an invitation

2011-11-15T19:19:00.001-06:00

GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES
http://www.gp.org/

Greens condemn orders for police to clear Occupy encampments in Oakland, California and New York's Zuccotti Park

WASHINGTON, DC -- As some participants in the Occupy Movement across the US begin to turn towards involvement in elections, Green Party leaders are inviting them to run for office as Greens and to support Green candidates.

"The Green Party encourages those Occupiers who want to have an effect on the 2012 elections to help us build a permanent alternative party that represents the interests of We The People -- the 99 percent -- instead of banks, oil companies, arms manufacturers, insurance firms, and other powerful lobbies. The Green Party accepts no money from corporate PACs. Our platform reflects the values and demands of Occupy Wall Street," said Kent Mesplay, candidate for the Green Party's 2012 presidential nomination (http://www.mesplay.org).

• Breaking News: Greens condemned the police clearance of the Occupy Oakland encampment and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's order for police to evict the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park on November 15. New York Greens are offering assistance in the form of emergency housing, arrest support, and food and expressed hope that the court order obtained by the National Lawyers Guild would allow the encampment to continue. Greens noted that the clearances and other police actions in various cities will swell the November 17 Day of Action (http://occupywallst.org/action/november-17th). (See "Eviction of Wall Street Occupation Exposes Mayor's Corporate Collusion, Says NY Green Party," Green Party of New York State press release, Nov. 15, http://www.gp.org/press/pr-state.php?ID=459

Occupy Wall Street in New York City and other Occupy protests have declared that they do not endorse any political party and that the demonstrations are not a venue for electioneering. The Green Party has respected and cooperated with this request (http://www.gp.org/press/pr-national.php?ID=453).

But many Occupiers have begun to embrace electoral participation as a strategy for challenging the corporate corruption and the erosion of democracy in the US http://www.occupytheballot.org/ Occupy Cincinnati demonstrators are working to establish their own party http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_19279413/ http://www.occupationparty.org/) Carl Mayer, public defender and long-time Ralph Nader/Green Party supporter, recently spoke before Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park and expressed "his hopes of the OWS movement's becoming a viable third party in the future" (http://www.policymic.com/articles/2251/carl-mayer-speaks-at-zuccotti-park-says-ows-can-be-third-party).

"The Green Party, as an established national party, has laid a foundation for Occupy candidates to run for public office," said Budd Dickinson, secretary of the Green Party of the United States. "In many states, Greens have accomplished the difficult task of achieving ballot status, overcoming prohibitive rules enacted by Democratic and Republican politicians to hinder alternative parties and candidates. By allying themselves with the Green Party, by becoming the Green Party in some states and towns, Occupiers who wish to launch campaigns for office can take advantage of the infrastructure and experience we've been building for more than a decade."

In New York, the Green Party gained major-party status through Howie Hawkins' campaign for governor in 2010, fulfilling the state's difficult requirements and earning the Green Party of New York State its place on the 2012 ballot. New York Greens have been active participants in Occupy Wall Street since the protests began in September. (See "Hawkins Blasts Cuomo for Arrests at Occupy Albany," Nov. 14, http://www.web.gpnys.com/?p=11207

"If the policy goals and legislative agenda of the Green Party and Occupy Movement participants who wish to pursue electoral activism are the same, there's no reason we should compete with each other in 2012. Nor do we want to see the Occupy Movement exploited by the Democratic Party and front groups like MoveOn.org or the American Dream movement, which seek to corral people sympathetic to the Occupy Movement into voting Democratic and reelecting Barack Obama. There is no hope for the Occupy agenda as long as the US is stuck in the two-party status quo. Elections aren't the only way to effect social change, but change must including replacing the corporate-money politicians who now hold public office. We appeal to those who support Occupy Wall Street -- help the Green Party emerge as a major party," said Audrey Clement, co-chair of the Green Party of the United States.

"Without Green Party candidates to vote for, the demands of movements like Occupy get ignored, because their votes are routinely taken for granted by Democratic politicians who know that progressive voters have nowhere else to take their votes," said David Doonan, Green Mayor of Greenwich, New York.

The Occupy Movement's demands, such as an end to the legal status of corporations as 'persons', a halt to home foreclosures in the wake of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, rejection of an austerity budget that burdens working people and the poor, requiring corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share in taxes, a ban on hydrofracking, and withdrawal of all US military forces from Afghanistan and Iraq (including private contractors, which President Obama intends to keep in Iraq after 2011) reflect the Green Party's positions.

The Green Party also supports Medicare For All (single-payer national health care) and rejects the Democratic health care bill passed in 2010, which requires Americans to subsidize the for-profit insurance industry through 'mandates' to purchase private coverage or pay a penalty. The party also supports a massive public works program to include millions of new green jobs in conservation, conversion to safe clean energy, expansion of public transportation, and other efforts to curb the advance of global climate change.

The Green Party's goals are summarized in the 'Green New Deal' adopted by Green candidates across the US (http://www.greenpartywatch.org/2010/08/11/62-green-candidates-endorse-green-new-deal/). The Green Party will nominate a presidential candidate at its 2012 national convention, at a site to be announced.

Greens have warned that the Occupy Movement and its agenda may be eclipsed by late spring 2012 as the media focus on the debate between the Democratic and Republican candidates for the White House.

"No one can pretend that either of the establishment parties -- the Democrats and Republicans -- represents the Occupy Movement in any way," said Jill Stein, candidate for the Green Party's 2012 presidential nomination (http://www.jillstein.org/). "President Obama campaigned in 2008 as the candidate of change, but after taking office he simply continued the pro-war and pro-Wall Street policies of the Bush Administration, with troop surges and bank bailouts and attacks on social programs under the guise of deficit reduction. We need to create eight times more jobs than are promised by his inadequate 'jobs bill' and we need to stop his attempts to create job-destroying trade pacts with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. I'm glad he backed down from his climate-destroying threat to approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, but we know that without a long-term political pressure, schemes to exhaust the tar sands into the atmosphere will be back on the table. This is the time for a principled opposition party to emerge and give an effective voice to all those who are suffering under the current Republican/Democratic doctrines. Greens and OWS together are a formidable force to take our democracy back.

See also:

"Green Party calls for a nationwide moratorium on home foreclosures"
Green Party press release, November 3, 2011
http://www.gp.org/press/pr-national.php?ID=458

"Occupy Wall Street looks ahead to 2012"
By Justin Elliott, Salon.com, November 11, 2011
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/11/occupy_wall_street_looks_ahead_to_2012/singleton/

"One Bay Area mayor WELCOMES Occupy protests to her city"
("At least one Bay Area mayor is actually welcoming the Occupy Wall Street movement to her city: [Green] Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin.")
By Joe Garofoli, Politics Blog, San Francisco Chronicle, November 9, 2011
http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2011/11/09/one-bay-area-mayor-welcomes-occupy-protests-to-her-city/

Why are we here?

2011-11-13T16:16:00.001-06:00

By Claudia Fegan, M.D.

[Note: The following remarks were delivered to the participants in this year’s PNHP Leadership Training Institute in Washington, D.C.]

Why are we here?

We are here because every patient deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.

I had a patient who worked as a laborer, not a high-paying job, but a job that allowed him to buy a home and support his family. I met him 10 years ago. I was challenged to control his blood pressure. It was very difficult. I tried numerous combinations of medications.

Over the course of 2-3 years he had frequent visits, allowing me to adjust his meds. We talked a lot. I got to know this man very well. He always came alone. He talked about his children, his wife, his disappointments, his accomplishments and life.

Eventually we got that blood pressure under control and we saw each other less frequently. Five years later he had a massive myocardial infarction, a heart attack. His wife brought him to County Hospital and we admitted him. He was a good candidate for bypass surgery, so he had the procedure, did well and went home weakened, but hopeful.

I remember he told how fortunate he felt because his brother, with poorly controlled diabetes, doesn’t live near County and is unable to get regular care.

Six months after his bypass surgery my patient had a massive gastrointestinal bleed and again his wife brought him to County where he eventually had to have a hemicolectomy. After that his wife brought him to all his appointments with all of his medications. It was clear he was having trouble with his memory and he needed help to manage his complicated regimen.

There were good times and bad, sometimes everything was working and sometimes not.

He developed claustrophobia and could not stand being sent to the Emergency Department at County where there was usually a 12-24 hour wait on a gurney before he got admitted to the floor. Sometimes he yelled and complained and his wife cried, sometimes the three of us had a good laugh about something silly. Life carried on.

Last month in the middle of the night he became short of breath and stopped breathing before the paramedics arrived. Although he was revived it was clear by the time he arrived at the hospital we had lost the man we all knew.

I had that conversation with his wife – that he would not want to be preserved on a ventilator this way indefinitely. She told me she believed that, but wanted to know how I knew.

I told her we had had that conversation early on in our relationship and, although he never returned the advance directives form, despite being given it numerous times, he was clear on his wishes. I don’t think he could read the form and he didn’t want to discuss it with his wife.

Once his brothers and sisters arrived from out of town, life support was discontinued and he died.

His wife called me a week later to thank me for all I had done. I told her it was my job.

Two weeks later his sister called to ask if I would be her doctor.

Why are we here? Because there is no patient in need who doesn’t deserve what my patient got: he was treated with dignity and respect.

Why are we here? This month Wal-Mart, the largest private employer in the United States, decided all future part-time workers who work less than 24 hours a week would no longer be eligible for insurance benefits; new workers who work 24-33 hours a week would no longer able to cover their spouses on their policies; employees with HMO coverage would now have a $5,000 deductible; and all employees would have to pay a larger share of their premium costs, causing more employees to opt out of accepting the company’s health insurance benefit.

We are here because access to health care should be a right and not a privilege based on your ability to pay for it.

Why are we here? We are here because this month the esteemed Institute of Medicine decided the “essential health benefits” under the new health law should be defined as a package that will fall under a pre-defined cost target instead of building a package of essential benefits based on appropriate data and then figuring out what that would cost.

We are here because someone has to say this is wrong.

Why are we here? We are here because a Consumer Reports analysis of National Committee for Quality Assurance rankings noted the five largest national insurers, Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente and United Healthcare, plus the mostly state-based Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, account for about 75 percent of the 390 ranked private plans, but only 36 percent of the top 50 in terms of quality.

United Healthcare is the nation’s largest health insurance company, but none of its private plans rank among the top 100, and most occupy the bottom half.

We are here because we know there is a better way to guarantee the public access to quality health care. A single-payer health care system would actually allow us to get a better handle on the quality of care delivered.

Why are we here? We are here because undocumented immigrants represent 1 in 7 of the uninsured. These undocumented immigrants will not be eligible for public insurance or any type of the private coverage obtained through the exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act.

If we had a real single-payer national health program, the financing of the system and the delivery of care would be separated from each other. Everyone would contribute funds to the system based on their ability to pay.

In such a system, everyone, including undocumented immigrants, would receive care. We are here because in a just society we would guarantee access to care to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay or their immigration status.

Archbishop Oscar Romero from El Salvador said, “Do not give in charity what is due in justice.” Archbishop Romero was assassinated one day after a sermon where he called on Salvadoran soldiers, as Christians to obey God’s higher order and to stop carrying out the government’s repression and violations of basic human rights.

I mention Archbishop Romero not because I am a religious person, but because he spoke to a responsibility of people in positions of authority.

As physicians we have a responsibility to those in need, particularly to our nation.

Why are we here? We are here because people are suffering, people are dying and we know the answer. We are here to arm ourselves with the information we need to heal our nation, to save our patients.

Why are we here? We are here because Dr. Quentin Young turned 88 years old this year. He has worked tirelessly in this effort his entire professional career. We owe it to Quentin to carry on this fight and to win it in his lifetime.

Although Quentin’s parents Abe and Sarah each lived to be 98, we should not assume we have 10 more years to win this fight. We know what needs to be done and we know how to frame the discussion.

It is so simple, we need a plan that takes everybody in and leaves nobody out. Come one say it with me, we will feel better for it:

Everybody in, Nobody out!
Everybody in, Nobody out!
Everybody in, Nobody out!

Now let’s go out and change this country for the better.

Claudia Fegan, M.D., F.A.C.P, C.H.C.Q.M., is interim chief medical officer at the Cook County Health and Hospitals System and past president of Physicians for a National Health Program. She is co-author of the book "Universal Health Care: What the United States Can Learn from Canada" and a contributor to another book, "10 Excellent Reasons for National Health Care.”

Green Veterans Speak Out

2011-11-11T12:38:00.000-06:00

By Gail Dixon (via DC Statehood Green Party)

Veterans Day, for many Americans, means parades, speeches, flags, and the usual political theatrical displays of patriotism. Those who have never experienced war itself can never truly understand the effect on the lives of those who have endured the horrors of warfare.

Since the advent of industrialized warfare in World War I, working people have too often served as cannon fodder in wars for the profits of the ruling class. The dawning understanding of this dynamic has birthed anti-war protests and resistance movements like Occupy Wall Street, which continues to draw veterans and others outraged at the current wars and their cost in lives and a damaged national economy.

"The late singer and composer Phil Ochs wrote 'It's always the old to lead us to the wars, it's always the young to die,'" said Mike Spector, chair of the Green Party of New Jersey. "The young men and women returning from the conflicts are finding themselves in trouble, mentally and physically. As wars become enshrined in the nation's foreign policy, the more they will be forgotten, tear-drenched home-comings and memorial flag-waving ceremonies to the contrary. The Green Party has always been the party of peace in this country, the true alternative to the parties of ceaseless war. Our goal is to ensure that Veterans Day will eventually be replaced by World Peace Day."

We in the Green Party have always believed what Gil Scott Heron said: "Peace is not just the absence of war, but the active pursuit of justice." With this thought in mind, we offer the perspectives of Green veterans on war.

• TE Smith, Washington, DC, member of the DC Statehood Green Party: I am a Black Vietnam vet. Lke hundreds of other young Black males in Washington, DC in the 1960s, I really had no real idea what was going on. There was very little to no conversation or explanation in the Black community about the war, the draft, or much else of real importance.

We all heard about the Civil Rights Movement and the marches "down south," but they were not really explained to us teenagers. While I was in Nam I became more knowledgeable of the Black Power movement and the Civil Rights Movement. After returning to the states I became a student of Black consciousness, which includes all of Black thinking. This led me to more reading and more awareness of different peoples' struggles in the world, like those of the native peoples on this continent, the Palestinians, and others. The one thing I read about that caused me to see the African American struggle on an international scale was Malcom X's speech and analysis at the-non aligned conference in 1956 in Bandung, Indonesia. The next reading that helped shape my present position was Noam Chomsky's book "Manufacturing Consent," which he co-wrote with Edward Herrman.

As a Black veteran of the second largest imperial war in this century, I always noticed that none of the physical, social, and psychological analysis and history about Viet Nam spoke to the Black experience, nor was there local recognition upon return. I, like most others, took this for granted -- it was typical of the anti- Black sentiment pervasive in this society. Now, some 35 years later, I am not concerned about those aspects as a veteran.

My concern now is that there be no more combat veterans. I don't think there has been any evidence that this country is in any physical danger from any other country commensurate with the level of armament and military manpower we have amassed. Young people should not be indoctrinated into the war mentality. Veterans Day should be dedicated to understanding why we were killing and being killed for the world resources that capitalism demands -- by any means, fair or foul. My fondest dream is that in the future humans will be "veterans" of an effort to build a just world where all humans can develop and flourish to their maximum.

• Richard P. Fuller, Coordinator of the Green Party of Monmouth County, NJ, with seven years of Naval service, Final Rank: Lt. (j.g.), Communications Officer on USS THOR (ARC-4): I am a Korean War era veteran for peace. At the University of Rhode Island, all males were required to serve two years in Army ROTC classes and drills. Simultaneously, I joined the Naval Reserve as a freshman, went to boot camp, and later to Reserve Officer Candidate school and graduated college as an Ensign. My active duty service on the cable-laying ship, the USS THOR (ARC-4), lasted for three years so I had a total of seven years of paid naval service. I received an honorable discharge in 1959.

Before the Iraq War began I had already become a veteran for peace. My decision was determined mainly by the Green Party's Key Value of Nonviolence and by the lives and teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi. In high school I had read about the courageous nonviolent path that Gandhi took in a book entitled "Fighter without a Sword." After Rutgers University showed the film "Sir! No Sir," I met with some Iraq Veterans Against War and purchased their fundraiser comic-style book "Addicted to War" by Joel Andress, which I highly recommend.

Several years ago I joined a weekly anti-war demonstration at the gates of the recently closed military base at Fort Monmouth in Eatontown, NJ. My favorite protest sign reads STOP WAR & OCCUPATION. Over the years my fellow protesters and I have supported the troops with signs that carry messages like HEALTH CARE NOT WARFARE, MONEY FOR EDUCATION NOT OCCUPATION, SUPPORT THE TROOPS---BRING THEM HOME NOW! and many more. Dressed in my Green Party gear and a button-bedecked cap, I have marched for peace in at least six venues in New Jersey, as well as in New York City and Washington, DC.

I believe that all vets should be eligible for the GI-type educational benefits that I and others received in the past. Veterans and their families should be provided with hospitals, rehabilitation services, psychological counseling, detoxification programs, and with lots more government support. I'm proud to be a Green vet for peace.

Gail Dixon is a former elected member of the Board of Education of the District of Columbia and leader in the DC Statehood Party (now the DC Statehood Green Party). She currently resides in Trenton, NJ, and is a member of the Green Party of New Jersey.

Why Amend the Constitution to Eliminate Corporate Personhood?

2011-11-09T23:49:00.000-06:00

My Left Nutmeg

Amending the U.S. Constitution to eliminate corporate personhood will open up the creative space in the American democracy, according to David Cobb, the Green Party 's presidential candidate in 2004.

Cobb, who is now the spokesman for MovetoAmend.org addressed 35 people at the University of Connecticut's Dodd Center on Tuesday, October 25. It was the first stop on his Connecticut grassroots organizing tour.

The problem is not with the idea of a corporation," Cobb said, "The problem is what we are doing with it. It is stupid that we are embedding a corporation with human rights."

"Democracy means conversations in public places," Cobb said. "Democracy means that I have the opportunity to participate in power."

Cobb has been on the road barnstorming about the for six weeks, and every time he speaks to a crowd, he asks if they think that the American people run their government. No one ever raises their hands.

"I think it is a good thing that no one ever raises their hands," Cobb said. "People are disabusing themselves of the notion that we rule the government."

The most important thing we can do is be honest and tell the truth, Cobb said.

He took the audience on a historical tour of the corporate framework that we know today. Corporations were first created during the Roman Republic as a means to build roads, aqueducts, hospitals and universities.

The genius of a corporation is to take private goods and put them to public use, voluntarily," Cobb said. Taxes, on the other hand, appropriate private goods for public use involuntarily.

"We are not anti-corporate," Cobb said. Agglomerations of capital are necessary to accomplish certain tasks. "It is valid to say corporations work for good things," Cobb said.

In fact, Cobb supposed that 99 percent of corporations are fine. But, the one percent of corporations that have become the modern transnational corporation are now predatory instruments of oppression.

Cobb did not cite this, but a study released by Swiss researchers last week explained that 147 corporations seem to control more than 50 percent of the global economy.

The modern corporation began during the European Age of Discovery, which, as a truth teller, Cobb said was an age of empire and colonialism and rape and theft of resources.

Corporations like the British East India Company existed to exploit people, lands and resources. "It was designed to legalize the destruction of Indian institutions and replace them with British institutions," Cobb said.

The divine right of kings - which most of us cannot discuss without laughing now - created these companies to benefit the king and the members of parliament, who were all shareholders.

Of the 13 original American colonies, 10 were joint stock corporations. One, Georgia, was a penal colony, and the original slaves there were white, Cobb noted.

The original charter of the Massachusetts Bay Trading Company stated its purpose was to plant and rule and govern on the king's behalf and on behalf of the shareholders, ie, parliament.

The king appointed governors to run the colonies. The colonists did not like this. The American revolution, then, is a story about a people's uprising against unaccountable corporate CEO's, Cobb said.

"We cannot merely call for socially responsible corporations," Cobb said.

It makes no sense to ask corporations "Would you please not cause so much cancer? Would you please not cause so much asthma? Would you please not destroy the Gulf of Mexico? Is a little less death all we want?" Cobb asked.

In a word, no. The Move to Amend the constitution is about people regaining the sovereign power over corporations. The beauty of the American constitution is that it vests all authority to govern in the people, who delegate that to the government.

People are sovereign, government is subordinate. People have rights, government has duties.

"In discharging those duties, government is not allowed to violate the sovereign rights of people," Cobb said. "Government cannot infringe on human rights."

In 1789, the US Constitution became the supreme law of the land, yet it applied to only five percent of the people who lived here - the landholding, white males. Women, blacks, Native Americans, indentured servants - none of them had legal personhood under the Constitution.

Historian Howard Zinn considered American history to be a struggle of people to be defined as persons with rights under the U.S. Constitution.

At the formation of the American Republic, corporations had to be created by acts of the legislature, Cobb said. They had to be for the public good, were time delimited, and were dissolved when they served their functions.

Today, corporations can be formed for any legal purpose, go on forever, and be created with the stroke of a pen. And they have the rights of legal personhood. This needs to change, Cobb said.

The real world ramifications of amending the Constitution to eliminate corporate personhood are vast, Cobb said. For example, if a corporation had to open its books to the public like at the start of the American republic, the Enron disaster never would have happened.

The move to amend the constitution will hopefully result in a conversation that involves securing the affirmative rights to food, health care, housing, education, clean air, clean water, and meaningful employment.

Cobb closed by asking "What is our social contract? We have not renegotiated the social contract in America in a long time. The current social contract in the Constitution protects property rights."

Getting metaphysical, he said that if enough people believe something, it can be true. Just as the divine right of kings was eliminated, so can corporate personhood be eliminated, and a new world be created in its wake.

Census Bureau measures more Americans living in poverty

2011-11-08T17:14:00.003-06:00

The Washington Post

The Census Bureau on Monday released a new, comprehensive poverty measure that painted a more dismal picture of the nation’s economic landscape than the official measure from September.

The report found that 49.1 million Americans — 16 percent of the population — lived in poverty in 2010, which is higher than the 46.2 million Americans found to live in poverty by the official measure released in September.

The new report marked the culmination of a years-long effort by the Census Bureau to come up with a poverty measure that takes into account the huge amounts of money in social services benefits provided to the needy, as well as their expenses for things such as medical care and payroll taxes.

The increased level of poverty revealed by the supplemental measure is at odds with what some poverty experts expected. The increased level of poverty was fueled by the sharply higher levels of poverty among senior citizens found by the alternative measure.

“The elderly just overwhelm it,” said Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The poverty rate for those 65 and older was 15.9 percent based on the supplemental measure, much higher than the 9 percent rate for the elderly when using the official poverty yardstick.

The biggest factor increasing the poverty rate for seniors under the alternative measure was out-of-pocket medical expenses, which are not captured by the official poverty rate but are by the alternative measure. At the same time, neither the accumulated wealth of senior citizens nor their Medicare benefits are included in the official or supplemental measure, which some experts said skews the number of elderly who are counted as impoverished.

Among whites, 14.3 percent were found to be in poverty under the supplemental measure, more than a percentage point higher than the 13.1 percent poverty rate found by the official measure.

Hispanics had a poverty rate of 28.2 percent under the alternative measure, higher than the official poverty rate of 26.7 percent.

The proportion of black Americans living in poverty declined slightly under the alternative measure, from 27.5 percent under the traditional measure to 25.4 percent. Among children younger than 18, the poverty rate under the alternative measure was 18.2 percent, much lower than the official rate of 22.5 percent.

Although there are shortcomings, poverty experts say the supplemental measure offers a more comprehensive view of the nation’s poverty picture than the official measure.

Unlike the traditional method, it offers different poverty thresholds for renters, homeowners paying a mortgage and owners who have no mortgage. Overall, the new measure puts the poverty threshold at an annual income of $24,343 for a family of two adults and two children — higher than the $22,113 poverty threshold under the official measure.

The alternative measure also factors in the effects of payroll taxes and the cost of living in different parts of the country. In addition, it accounts for any government programs including the earned income tax credit, housing subsidies, food stamps and free school lunches.

“You could not look at our official poverty statistics and see any impact of government programs,” Haskins said.

"During Obama’s tenure, Wall Street has roared back, even as the broader economy has struggled."

2011-11-07T13:56:00.000-06:00

Washington Post

President Obama has called people who work on Wall Street “fat-cat bankers,” and his reelection campaign has sought to harness public frustration with Wall Street. Financial executives retort that the president’s pursuit of financial regulations is punitive and that new rules may be “holding us back.”

But both sides face an inconvenient fact: During Obama’s tenure, Wall Street has roared back, even as the broader economy has struggled.

The largest banks are larger than they were when Obama took office and are nearing the level of profits they were making before the depths of the financial crisis in 2008, according to government data.

Wall Street firms — independent companies and the securities-trading arms of banks — are doing even better. They earned more in the first 21 / 2 years of the Obama administration than they did during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration, industry data show.

(See data in an Excel file here.)

Behind this turnaround, in significant measure, are government policies that helped the financial sector avert collapse and then gave financial firms huge benefits on the path to recovery. For example, the federal government invested hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in banks — low-cost money that the firms used for high-yielding investments on which they made big profits.

Stabilizing the financial system was considered necessary to prevent an even deeper economic recession. But some critics say the Bush administration, which first moved to bail out Wall Street, and the Obama administration, which ultimately stabilized it, took a far less aggressive approach to helping the American people.

“There’s a very popular conception out there that the bailout was done with a tremendous amount of firepower and focus on saving the largest Wall Street institutions but with very little regard for Main Street,” said Neil Barofsky, the former federal watchdog for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, the $700 billion fund used to bail out banks. “That’s actually a very accurate description of what happened.”

Neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration, for instance, compelled banks to increase lending to consumers, known as “prime borrowers.” Such a step might have spurred spending and growth, although generating demand for loans may have proved difficult in the downturn.

A recent study by two professors at the University of Michigan found that banks did not significantly increase lending after being bailed out. Rather, they used taxpayer money, in part, to invest in risky securities that profited from short-term price movements. The study found that bailed-out banks increased their investment returns by nearly 10 percent as a result.

“If the goal was to support lending, it would have been sensible to require a portion of the money to support credit origination,” said Ran Duchin, one of the finance professors who completed the study. “Lending to prime consumers was not the most profitable use of their capital.”

Some of Wall Street’s success has moderated in recent months, with bank stock prices down and layoffs on the rise. This mostly has reflected the renewed slowdown in the U.S. economy this year and the European debt crisis buffeting global markets.

Representatives of the financial industry say regulations in last year’s Dodd-Frank legislation, which Obama pushed for and signed, also have crimped bank profits. But many analysts think the law will make the financial system more stable. The legislation, for instance, requires banks to maintain a greater capital cushion to withstand losses during bad economic times. The measure also created a regulator whose sole purpose is to police lending to ordinary Americans.

But many of the legislation’s most significant measures have yet to be put into place, and their ultimate effect on the bottom line remains unclear.

Financial firms have raised major concerns about one of the largest structural changes made by the law, the “Volcker Rule.” This measure would bar banks from engaging in trading and other speculative activity on their own behalf rather than to profit customers. But the rule’s impact could prove limited because of loopholes and exceptions allowed by lawmakers and regulators working to implement it.

Federal assistance

One of the main reasons Wall Street rebounded so quickly from its lows is government support.

Even before Obama took office, the government pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into banks. The Federal Reserve, which is independent of the administration, lowered interest rates, allowing firms to borrow money cheaply and trade with it, booking huge profits. The Fed also introduced lending programs that bolstered stock and bond markets and allowed banks to earn a steady return on reserves they kept with the central bank.

“The too-big-to-fail banks got bigger profits and avoided failure because of trillions of dollars of loans directly from the Federal Reserve,” said Linus Wilson, assistant professor of finance at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “Today, their profits are boosted by lower borrowing costs because their managers and creditors expect a Fed lifeline when markets get jittery.”

Banks also have benefited from the large increase during the recession in unemployment insurance. Increasingly, banks offer debit cards to the unemployed to collect their government benefits. These debit cards carry a range of fees that bolster banks’ bottom lines.

What’s more, states — with their budgets shattered by the financial crisis and recession — have increasingly been moving to enroll new employees into Wall Street-run retirement accounts rather than government pension programs. That’s potentially more lucrative for Wall Street, which can charge fees for managing the savings of individual retirees.

Since Dec. 31, 2008, the largest banks — those with more than $100 billion in assets — have increased their total combined assets by about 10 percent.

As banks get larger, they can become more profitable. This is because investors tend to be more willing to lend them money at interest rates lower than those other banks are charged. There is a common perception that big banks are less risky because the government will still step in to save them if they get into financial trouble. On the flip side, under new financial regulations, the largest banks will have to hold more financial reserves than smaller banks — although precisely how much is still being discussed.

Banks’ profits up

Profits have also rebounded. The largest banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, earned $34 billion in profit in the first half of the year, nearly matching what they earned in the same period in 2007 and more than in the same period of any other year.

Securities firms — the trading arms of big banks and hundreds of other independent firms — have fared even better. They’ve generated at least $83 billion in profit during the past 21 / 2 years, compared with $77 billion during the entire Bush administration, according to data from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

Compensation at these firms also has bounced back. Financial firms paid about $20.8 billion in bonuses for work done in 2010, according to research by the New York state comptroller. In New York City, the average Wall Street salary last year grew 16.1 percent, to $361,330, which is more than five times the average salary of a private-sector worker in the city.

By contrast, millions of Americans continue to face economic difficulties. That is fueling broad public anger at Wall Street and has given rise to the “Occupy” protest movements nationwide.

Obama’s advisers say they plan to harness this frustration in the presidential campaign by drawing a contrast with Republican candidates who favor rolling back the Dodd-Frank legislation.

“People are going to make their own judgments based on the positions that candidates take and their track record,” said David Plouffe, a senior Obama adviser. “. . .You have to look at these as comparative exercises.

“Americans want leaders who will be fair and insist on accountability on Wall Street. But Republicans, including all of their presidential candidates, have essentially said, ‘Let’s give Wall Street a blank check.’ ”

The president, however, has not shunned Wall Street. He has courted financial executives for campaign donations, including inviting them to a campaign gathering at the White House. He has attracted more money for his campaign and for the Democratic National Committee from financial firm employees than all of the GOP candidates combined — a total of $15.6 million.

Green Party calls for a nationwide moratorium on home foreclosures

2011-11-05T22:40:00.000-05:00

GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES
http://www.gp.org

Greens urge Obama, Congress to halt further bank foreclosures: Wall Street firms should suffer 'austerity' for the economic crisis they caused, not the American people.

WASHINGTON, DC -- The Green Party of the United States called for an immediate nationwide moratorium on foreclosures and urged President Obama and Congress to take steps to halt further actions by banks to foreclose on the homes of Americans in the continuing economic recession.

"An order barring lenders from evicting people from their homes would be a powerful first step towards restoring financial stability and easing the fears of middle- and low-income working Americans," said John Eder, Green candidate for Mayor of Portland, Maine (http://www.johneder.org) and former State Representative in Maine. "The economy might be thriving again for the one percent, but for most Americans, the Subprime Mortgage Crisis and 2008 recession are not over. Millions of families face the loss of their homes, millions are without a job or only semi-employed, millions have no health coverage or inadequate coverage."

Green Party candidate Cheri Honkala, running for Sheriff of Philadelphia in the 2011 election, has pledged not to cooperate with banks attempting to evict residents from their homes (http://www.cherihonkala.com). Ms. Honkala is a long-time housing activist and founder of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union.

Victims of the subprime scam and Americans facing the loss of their homes deserve assistance instead of eviction (Green Party Platform on housing: http://www.gp.org/committees/platform/2010/social-justice.php#1002699). The suspension on foreclosures should continue at least until a determination can be made about which would-be homeowners were offered subprime mortgages by banks with insufficient regard for the ability of the borrower to make good on payments or get refinancing.

Greens across the US are participating in Occupy movements against the greed, recklessness, criminality, and unchecked political power of banks, Wall Street firms, and other corporate elites.

Green Party leaders said that major banks and other financial institutions made billions of dollars by defrauding people who were unlikely to make good on payments into taking out adjustable-rate mortgages, pooling the high-risk mortgages into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), giving the toxic securities high ratings, and taking taxpayer-funded bailouts when the house of cards collapsed. The banks then began to foreclose on homes, often filing fraudulent paperwork for eviction of families.

Democratic and Republican politicians, including Presidents Clinton and Bush, supported the deregulation that made these actions possible and presided over the failure of regulatory agencies to use existing laws against the abuses. President Clinton played signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (repealing the Glass-Steagall Act) and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which deregulated derivatives, CDOs, credit default swaps, and other complex securities, both of which helped trigger the crisis.

"If the federal government can bail out Wall Street firms that caused the crisis, it can act now to protect Americans faced with the loss of their homes," said Terry Baum, Green candidate for Mayor of San Francisco (http://www.terryjoanbaum.com).

"When Democratic and Republican politicians talk about austerity, funding cuts for social services, plans to slash Social Security and Medicare, and similar steps to fix the economy, what they mean is that working people must suffer for the irresponsibility and crimes of Wall Street. As the SEC's slap on the wrist penalty for Citigroup's sale of toxic mortgage-backed securities proves, this austerity is one-sided. CEOs and other top staff whose behavior caused the meltdown continue to rake in millions in salaries and bonuses." (See "Judge questions SEC settlement with Citigroup," The Washington Post, Oct. 27).

Greens said that President Obama, despite his expressions of sympathy for people facing lost homes and jobs, remains on the side of Wall Street. Recent news stories confirm that he is seeking and receiving fat campaign checks from corporate contributors (http://october2011.org/blogs/kevin-zeese/era-occupy-wall-street-obama-relies-wall-street-fund-his-re-election). Mr. Obama received more financial industry contributions than any politician in US history in 2008. During this campign, he endorsed President Bush's bailout for Wall Street. After taking office, he stacked his administration with Wall Street insiders like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, economics advisor Larry Summers, and Chief of Staff Billy Daley.

"President Obama has offered window dressing instead of relief for Americans hurt by the crisis. He won't risk offending the banks by stopping the foreclosures -- especially in an election season in which his campaign is desperate for stacks of campaign checks from the 'one percent' contributors. He won't consider making systematic changes in how the financial industry operates, such as restoring Glass-Steagall safeguards and breaking up the 'too big to fail' banks. President Obama's token steps toward change have been matched with real steps backward -- the President's recent minimalist jobs proposal coincided with his job-killing free-trade agreement with Korea, Colombia, and Panama. In contrast to the President's lip service about change, Greens are calling for concrete solutions, starting with a moratorium on foreclosures right now," said Mark Dunlea, former Chair of Green Party of New York State and Executive Director of a statewide anti-poverty organization in New York.

"Most Republican and Democratic politicians judge the US economy according to Dow Jones, profit margins of top corporations, the GDP, i.e., how much the rich are getting richer. Greens judge the economy by how many Americans have living-wage jobs with benefits, are safe in their homes, enjoy financial security and good health care, are moving out of poverty, and how well the environment is protected, now and for future generations. Those are the priorities of the secure green economy we are committed to creating," said Mr. Dunlea.

Obama administration approves virtual destruction of Medicaid

2011-11-02T21:31:00.002-05:00

PNHP Blog

This entry is from Dr. McCanne's Quote of the Day, a daily health policy update on the single-payer health care reform movement. The QotD is archived on PNHP's website.

California gets OK for large cuts to Medi-Cal
By Anna Gorman
Los Angeles Times

The Obama administration will allow California to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from Medi-Cal, a move doctors and experts say will make it harder for the poor to get medical treatment.

California plans to reduce rates by 10% to many providers, including physicians, dentists, clinics, pharmacies and most nursing homes, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Thursday.

Cindy Mann, deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told reporters the action gives California the flexibility it had requested to address its budget shortfall. “We know that the reductions that are being approved today will have significant impact on affected providers, and we regret the very difficult budget circumstances that have led to their implementation,” she said.

California, which already spends less per beneficiary than any other state, has led the way in aggressively slashing its programs. Now the government’s decision to allow California to move forward with its plans sets a precedent for other states seeking to reduce their Medicaid bills.

The California Medical Assn. expressed frustration over the new cuts, saying that physicians could receive as little as $11 a visit. Doctors will have no choice but to stop seeing Medi-Cal patients, said CEO Dustin Corcoran. “You can’t pay the bills at these rates,” he said. “They are unconscionably low.”

Federal healthcare reform, which includes a massive expansion of Medicaid, also could be seriously hampered by this new round of cuts, Corcoran said.

“They built federal healthcare reform on the foundation of Medi-Cal, and they just destroyed that foundation,” he said. “We have a hard time seeing how healthcare reform has a chance of being successful in the state of California after these cuts are implemented.”

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-medicaid-20111028,0,4273464.story

One of the most important components of the Affordable Care Act is the expansion of Medicaid coverage for uninsured, low-income individuals. Does the Obama administration seriously believe that this will be an effective step toward bringing affordable health care to everyone?

Look at what they just approved for California. The state already spends less per Medicaid (Medi-Cal) beneficiary than any other state, yet the Obama administration has approved another 10 percent reduction. Just wait until the budget cutters in other states get wind of this!

Theoretically, drastic payment reductions are met by further ratcheting down overhead expenses. At $11 per office visit, only a fraction of expenses can be covered, no matter how stringent the budgeting. In essence, the government is asking providers to help finance Medicaid through their own personal charity. Trying to cover 7.6 million Medi-Cal patients in the state by depending on provider charity is asking more than the system can bear.

Two quotes above need to be repeated.

Cindy Mann, deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: “We know that the reductions that are being approved today will have significant impact on affected providers.”

Dustin Corcoran, CEO of the California Medical Association: “They built federal healthcare reform on the foundation of Medi-Cal, and they just destroyed that foundation.”

And the other major component of the Affordable Care Act? A mandate for individuals to purchase inadequate coverage by paying unaffordable premiums.

The Obama administration officials and their co-conspirators in Congress could not have been serious about bringing us real reform. If they were, we would have an improved Medicare covering everyone.

We need to go to Freedom Plaza and join the Occupy Movement.

Video of Jill Stein for President of the United States Announcement Speech with transcript

2011-10-26T21:07:00.000-05:00

Via GreenPartyWatch.org

On Monday October 24, Massachusetts medical doctor Jill Stein held a press conference in Boston announcing her candidacy for the Green Party’s 2012 presidential nomination. Here is a video of her announcement speech, followed by a transcript, courtesy of JillStein.org:

Video

We stand here today at a time of great crisis for our nation – and a time of incredible potential for change. We face unprecedented, converging problems in our economy, our environment, human rights and the quest for peace. The American people are ready to meet these challenges, but many of us have, for good reason, lost confidence in the political establishment and its leaders in Washington.

These leaders have given us massive bailouts for Wall Street, layoffs on Main Street, declining wages for workers, wars for oil abroad, and attacks on Medicare and Social Security. They’re privatizing education, rolling back civil liberties and racial justice, plundering the environment, and driving us towards the calamity of climate change.

In response, the American people are standing up like we haven’t seen in decades. And they are providing the leadership that’s not coming from the political elite. People are realizing that We the People have to take charge, because the political parties that are serving the top 1% are not going to solve the problems the rest of us are facing. And we need people in Washington who refuse to be bought by lobbyist money and for whom change is not just a slogan.

My name is Jill Stein. And all this is why I’m here today to announce my candidacy for President of the United States.

I’m running because America deserves a new deal – a Green New Deal that provides a secure future for We the People and the planet we depend on. Here are five key pieces to the Green New Deal that we must achieve and can achieve, with your support:

First we can end unemployment in America now. It’s not only a crisis that hurts families and communities. It’s also a drag on our economy. Like FDR’s New Deal that helped us out of the Great Depression – the Green New Deal will directly create jobs. It will put 25 million people back to work, end the Bush/Obama recession and jump start the Green economy of the 21st century. The jobs it creates will build the infrastructure for a stable, renewable energy economy. This will provide real national security by making wars for oil obsolete. It will ensure that our energy dollars create jobs right here in America. It will build public transportation, clean manufacturing and sustainable agriculture. Ending unemployment through the Green New Deal is a triple win for people, the economy and the environment.

Second, it’s time for the United States, the richest country in the world, to catch up with the rest of the developed nations and provide health care for everyone as a human right. We can do this through a Medicare for all system that will not only provide quality health care – it will save trillions by streamlining the massive health insurance bureaucracy and ending runaway medical inflation.

Third, we can forgive the crushing student debt burden and liberate an entire generation of young people who are being turned into indentured servants. And we can provide tuition-free education from pre-kindergarten through college - an investment in our future that will pay off enormously.

Fourth, we can establish an immediate moratorium on home foreclosures. We can stop predatory banks from throwing families out of their homes, and we can require these banks to adjust outstanding balances to reflect current market value. The banks – not just homeowners – need to share the impact of the banks’ own fraud and abuse that started the foreclosure crisis in the first place.

Fifth, we can bring the troops – including the private security contractors – safely home now from Iraq and Afghanistan. That allows us to redirect the trillions of dollars being spent on needless wars and the bloated military back into urgent human needs here at home.

By entering into the Presidential dialogue, we will force real issues into the debate, and build the movement for all the critical solutions that the Wall Street politicians are trying to keep off the table. We’ll give people a choice and a voice in this election and enable them to go to the polls and vote to take their government back – and get it working for We the People again.

I’d like to say a few words as a mother and a doctor, because it’s from that perspective that I first became involved in the political process about 20 years ago. And it’s that perspective that keeps me in it.

As a doctor, I saw that our broken health care system was desperately failing the people who need it. As a mother, I was especially concerned about the new disease epidemics descending on our children – the rising tide of obesity and diabetes, asthma, cancer, learning disabilities and autism. As a practicing physician, I became impatient with dispensing pills in the clinic and then sending people back out to the things that were making them sick – the air pollution, toxic chemicals, community violence, degraded nutrition, car-centered transportation and poverty. I thought if only our elected officials knew how many human tragedies could be averted by fixing these things, how much money we could save by preventing costly diseases – I thought surely they would do something.

So I spent years working to persuade elected officials to act. Slowly I realized that in order to persuade elected officials, you need to shower them not with information, not with heartfelt human concerns and cost saving solutions, but rather with bundles of big campaign checks. That was my wake up call that if we want to prevent needless harm to our children, if we want to get the health care we need, or the education or the jobs – we need to first fix the broken political system.

Twenty years later, as a mother and a doctor, I see that our kids are still struggling – not only with high rates of diseases they shouldn’t have. But in every aspect of life – struggling for decent schools, to stay safe on the streets, to afford a college education, to get a job and to get out of debt. And they’re losing the battle on every front.

People ask me why I keep fighting political battles in a rigged system. The answer is simple. I keep fighting because when it comes to our children, mothers don’t give up.

Young people today haven’t given up – and they’re the ones really carrying the burden of this rigged system. If they’re not giving up, we shouldn’t either.

In fact, young people are not only not giving up, they’re standing up like never before – – as we see so clearly in Zuccotti Square and Freedom Square and Grant Park and Dewey Square and hundreds of other Occupy encampments around the country. And just like in the civil rights movement, when the young people stand up, the nation changes forever. If more of us take a lesson from them, we’re going to be an unstoppable force. That’s why I’m here today asking you to be a part of our campaign. Because we need to bring the integrity and vision of everyday people into creating a future that works for all of us. Let’s open up the doors on Capital Hill get the big money out, and let the people back in to guide our way forward – the schoolteachers and nurses, truck drivers and electricians, students and secretaries, the postal workers and factory workers, scientists, farmers, musicians and pharmacists. The people who repair and teach and cook and heal, and do honest work.

When the people do the governing – not the lobbyists and Wall Street executives – then we’ll have a government we can trust. Please go to jillstein.org to find out more about our people-powered campaign. And while you’re there, join us to become part of it. It’s time for a Green New Deal for America. A job for every worker. Health care, education and housing for every American. A livable planet for our children. On November 6 next year, let’s take our democracy back and build the secure green future we all deserve. Thank you!

A health crisis follows mortgage foreclosure crisis

2011-10-24T14:12:00.000-05:00

latimes.com

The mortgage foreclosure tragedy is not only hurting Americans' wallets, it's affecting people's health, particularly older Americans who lose their homes, according to a study released Thursday.

Researchers led by the University of Maryland performed the first study to determine the health effect from the foreclosure crisis that began with subprime lending practices in 2003. As recently as 2009, the authors note, just over 2% of all U.S. homes were in foreclosure.

The study examined data from the 2006 and 2008 Health and Retirement Study, a poll of people ages 50 and older. In 2008, people were asked about their mortgage status and whether they had fallen behind on payments, were in foreclosure or had lost their homes. The analysis showed that people who had mortgage problems were much more likely to have mental health problems as well as other health-related disadvantages, such as not being able to afford prescription medications and adequate healthy food.

Nearly one-third of the people who were mortgage-delinquent reported fair or poor health compared to 19% who were not delinquent.

"The rise in mortgage defaults may have important public health implications that could ultimately prove costly to affected individuals, employers, the healthcare system, and society," the authors wrote.

The study was published in the American Journal of Public Health.

President Obama raises more money from Wall Street than 2012 Republican presidential candidates

2011-10-19T19:28:00.000-05:00

Washington Post

Despite frosty relations with the titans of Wall Street, President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data.

Obama’s key advantage is his ability to collect bigger checks from fewer donors, because he raises money for both his own campaign committee and for the Democratic National Committee, which will aid in his reelection effort. As a result, Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all the other GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data.

Consider the case of Bain Capital, the Boston-based private equity firm that was co-founded by Romney and where he made his fortune. Not surprisingly, Romney has strong support at the firm, raking in $34,000 from 18 Bain employees, according to the analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

But Obama has outdone Romney on his own turf, collecting $76,600 from Bain Capital employees through September — and he only needed three donors to do it.

This fundraising edge might seem counterintuitive in light of Obama’s thorny relations with business groups and Wall Street executives, who strongly opposed his financial reform law and have bristled at proposals to close corporate tax loopholes and raise income taxes on millionaires. In fact, he has raised just $3.9 million from the finance sector for his campaign committee itself, aside from the DNC, compared with Romney’s $7.5 million.

Still, Obama retains a persistent reservoir of support among a number of Democratic financiers who have backed him since he was an underdog presidential candidate. He also can draw upon the unique abilities of an incumbent president to raise money from avid supporters.

Obama’s ties to Wall Street donors could complicate Democratic plans to paint Republicans as puppets of the financial industry, particularly in light of the left-leaning “Occupy Wall Street” protests that have gone global over the past week. In response to the protests, the Obama campaign and other Democrats have stepped up their attacks on Romney and other Republicans for their opposition to Wall Street regulations.

One top banking executive who raises money for Obama, who requested anonymity to discuss fundraising efforts, said reports of disaffection with the president “are exaggerated and overblown.” He said a strong contingent of financiers in New York, Chicago and California remain supportive of Obama and his economic policies, even as some have turned on him.

But, this donor also acknowledged, “it probably helps from a political perspective if he’s not seen as a Wall Street guy.”

None of this means that Obama doesn’t face troubles with Wall Street donors, who have emerged in recent years as among the most important sources of campaign cash for major national politicians.

Obama’s campaign committee, without the DNC, has raised notably less money from major banking firms such as Goldman Sachs, whose employees gave him more than $1 million in the 2008 cycle. So far this year, about two dozen Goldman employees together have given Obama’s committee about $45,000, one-sixth of the amount Romney’s campaign has taken in.

But six Goldman employees also gave a total of $92,000 to the DNC side of Obama’s fundraising effort.

Unlike the Republican candidates, Obama can raise money for both his own campaign account, which can take donations up to $5,000 for the 2012 cycle, and for the DNC, which can accept $30,800 per individual each calendar year. The same donors will be able to give another $30,800 to the DNC next year as well.

The end result is more money from fewer donors: Obama has raised a total of $15.6 million from employees in the finance sector, according to the Post analysis. Nearly $12 million of that went to the DNC, the analysis shows.

Romney has raised less than half that much, or about $7.5 million, from the industry, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry brought in close to $2 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. No other Republican candidate has raised more than $400,000 from the finance sector, which also includes insurance and real-estate interests.

Romney is particularly reliant on money from the finance sector, which accounts for about a quarter of his total contributions, the data shows. By contrast, about 5 percent of the $90 million raised by Obama’s campaign committee this year came from the finance sector.

Obama retains a core group of supporters on Wall Street who are central to his fundraising efforts. About a third of Obama’s top 40 fundraisers, who have helped bundle together $500,000 or more in contributions, hail from the finance sector, including big names such as former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine of MF Global, hedge fund manager Orin Kramer and UBS chairman Robert Wolf.

Obama’s chief of staff, William M. Daley, was also vice chairman at J.P. Morgan Chase before coming to the White House this year.

Democrats have ratcheted up their attacks on Republicans for ties to Wall Street in recent weeks as Obama embarked on a nationwide push for his jobs bill, which includes a proposed tax hike for income above $1 million. In one memo on Tuesday, for example, DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse said Romney’s campaign “seems quite proud of the fact that they are leading the money race for campaign cash from Wall Street” and said Romney “will allow them to write their own rules again.”

Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said in a statement that the contributions from financial sector show that many corporate leaders agree with Obama on the need for “an economy that’s built to last, not on loopholes and outsourcing.”

“There are business leaders across industries who agree with the president that steps needed to be taken to ensure that the American people are never again held hostage by risky Wall Street deals that threaten our entire economy,” LaBolt said. “Mitt Romney and all the Republican candidates believe the opposite.”

The DNC and Romney campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

Wall Street Comes to D.C. to Profit from Health Care; 99% Say 'Wall Street Greed Kills Those in Need'

2011-10-19T14:04:00.000-05:00

Dr. Margaret Flowers

The October2011.org Movement confronted Wall Street investors who came to Washington to figure out how they can make more money from health care. The Wall Street Comes to Washington Healthcare Conference underscores why people across the United States are occupying their cities to protest Wall Street greed.

The meeting was sponsored by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation which has spent decades trying to undermine our social insurances: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Panelists included representatives from JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

According to Paul Ginsburg, current President of the deceivingly-named Center for Studying Health System Change, who moderated the panel, the purpose of the conference was to discuss market development and Wall Street health policy, to look at trends for an equity analysis of publicly traded health companies.

The panel started with a discussion of why people are currently using less health services. They blamed employers for clamping down on employee costs. They said this ‘trend’ may reflect the ‘new normal’ of people choosing the care that they think is the most important. There was no mention that people are self-rationing, delaying or avoiding necessary care, due to the high cost.

Then they addressed the large increase in health insurance premiums, stating that the Kaiser Family Foundation study which revealed a 9% increase in premiums was false. They stated their goal of having more people with private insurance and more people using health services. Of course, this is not because they want to make sure that people who need care can get it. For Wall Street, health corporations are businesses and they are out to maximize profit, usually by collecting premiums and then denying payment for care.

When the discussion turned to how far they could push their profit gimmicks before the public started to shame them, I stood up and walked to the microphone. I told the Wall Street bankers that they had no place in health care, that because of them people are dying of preventable causes or going bankrupt or homeless trying to pay for needed care. They are criminals masquerading as health policy experts.

For too long investors have put profit ahead of human needs. This is particularly clear in health care where more than 100,000 Americans die each year from preventable causes. The United States spends more per person than any other country, but gets very poor results. Countries that spend less provide health care to all and have better health outcomes. Countries that have universal health systems do not have people losing their homes because of health crisis while in the U.S. two-thirds of foreclosures are due to a health care crisis.

Marriott security officers took me out of the hotel and I sat in front of the entrance where I was joined by 2 more protesters, including Adara who shared the story of her father’s suicide which happened because of a health problem and the inability to afford care. Dozens of October2011.org people were outside the hotel protesting. They were chanting “Wall Street Greed Kills Those in Need,” “No More Wall Street Health Care” and “We Are the 99%.”

The protest lasted for several hours blocking the entrance to Marriott. Police did not make arrests. In fact, DC police have agreed to a 4 year wage freeze in order to maintain health benefits. That’s why we are the 99% and we are standing together to make the country and the world a better place for all of us.

The October2011.org continues to occupy Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC seeking to shift power to the people and end corporate rule.

URGENT: Sign letter of protest over IOM’s skimpy health plan prescription

2011-10-17T14:11:00.000-05:00

FOR ACTION TODAY

A recent Quote of the Day message expressed alarm at the fact that the Institute of Medicine is recommending a grossly inadequate, skimpy, spartan standard for the package of benefits to be offered by health plans in the state insurance exchanges being established under the Affordable Care Act:

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2011/october/ioms-disturbing-report-on-essential-health-benefits

Following is a letter asking the Obama administration to reject this recommendation. Though only selected names will be used in publicizing this letter, we encourage everyone who concurs with the views expressed to sign it, using this link:

http://www.pnhp.org/iom-letter/index.php

President Obama: Reject the Institute of Medicine’s skimpy health plan prescription

We protest the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) recommendation that cost rather than medical need be the basis for defining the “essential benefits” that insurance policies must cover when the federal health reform law takes effect in 2014. If adopted by the Department of Health and Human Services, this recommendation will sacrifice many lives and cause much suffering. We call on Secretary Sebelius and President Obama to reject them.

The IOM proposal would base the required coverage on the benefits typical of plans currently offered by small businesses – enshrining these skimpy plans as the new standard. These bare-bones policies come with a long list of uncovered services and saddle enrollees with unaffordable co-payments and deductibles.

Already, millions of underinsured Americans forgo essential care: adults with heart attacks delay seeking emergency care; children forgo needed primary and specialty care; patients fail to fill prescriptions for lifesaving medications; and serious illness often leads to financial catastrophe.

The inadequate coverage the IOM recommends would shift costs from corporate and government payers onto families already burdened by illness. Yet this strategy will not lower costs. Delaying care frequently creates even higher costs. Steadily rising co-payments and deductibles over the past two decades have failed to stem skyrocketing medical inflation. And nations that assure comprehensive coverage – with out-of-pocket costs a fraction of those in the United States – have experienced both slower cost growth and greater health gains than our country.

Our patients urgently need what people in these other nations already enjoy: universal and comprehensive coverage in a nonprofit system that prioritizes human need over corporate profit.

The IOM committee was riddled with conflicts of interest, many members having amassed personal wealth and career success through their involvement with health insurers and other for-profit health care firms. Its recommendations were lauded by insurance industry leaders who have sought to undermine real health reform at every turn. As the Lancet noted on its Dec. 5, 2009, cover: “Corporate influence renders the U.S. government incapable of making policy on the basis of evidence and the public interest.”

Sadly, the committee’s damaging recommendations suggest that this corporate bug has also infected the IOM.

Beware the Democrats! An Insidious Threat to the Occupy Movement

2011-10-15T19:51:00.002-05:00

by ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH,
CounterPunch

The threat I am referring to is not that of being pepper-sprayed, arrested, beaten or imprisoned. It is a different type of threat: a stealthy challenger that while pretending to advance the goals of the Occupy Movement tends to undermine it from within—more or less like the proverbial elephant in the room. I am referring to the threat of preemption, or cooptation, posed by the Democratic Party and union officials. In light of their unsavory record of undermining the revolutionary energy of social movements, projections of sympathy for the anti-Wall Street protesters by the White House, the Democratic Party officials and union leaders can be viewed only with suspicion.

Expressing sympathy for the protester, President Obama recently stated: “I think people are frustrated, and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.” At the same time he also defended the decision to bail out banks and other Wall Street speculators, arguing that the decision was necessitated by the need to salvage our financial system. It is obvious that, as usual, the president is talking from both side of his mouth.

On the same day (October 6th) that the president projected sympathy for the protesters, Vice President Biden also expressed similar sentiments. Comparing the Wall Street protests with the Tea Party, he stated: “The Tea Party started, why? TARP. They thought it was unfair – we were bailing out the big guy.” The vice president’s reference to the Tea Party is by no means fortuitous; there are clear indications the Democrats are trying to utilize the Occupy movement the way the Republicans do the Tea Party. “The mushrooming protests could be the start of a populist movement on the left that counterbalances the surge of the Tea Party on the right, and closes what some Democrats fear is an ‘enthusiasm gap,’” reported the New York Times on Friday, October 7th.

Projections of sympathy for the Occupy movement have not been limited to the White House. Many officials of the Democratic Party have either personally appeared at the Zuccotti Park to express support or sent statements of support for the protesters. Likewise, a number of union leaders joined a large protest rally held in New York City’s Foley Square on October 5th to show sympathy for the protesters.

Then there are the liberal political pundits and media outlets such as the New York Times that are also trying the build bridges between the Democratic Party and the Occupy movement in an effort to channel the protesters’ energy to the party’s electoral machine. For example, the New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman recently wrote: “And there are real political opportunities here. Not, of course, for today’s Republicans. . . . But Democrats are being given what amounts to a second chance. The Obama administration squandered a lot of potential good will early on by adopting banker-friendly policies. . . . Now, however, Mr. Obama’s party has a chance for a do-over.”

On the face of it there is nothing wrong with the Democratic Party officials or union leaders expressing support for the protesters. In light of their actual economic policies, however, that support can be characterized only as hypocritical. The Democrats are as much responsible for the economic problems that have triggered the protests as their Republican counterparts. The Obama administration has played an especially destructive role in pursuing a devastating neoliberal austerity agenda in term of bailing out the Wall Street gamblers, extending the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy, expanding the US wars of choice—and then cutting vital social spending to pay for the financial resources thus usurped.

Equally blameworthy are union bureaucrats who have enabled the White House and the Congress in the implementation of such brutal austerity programs. Hollow posturing aside, the AFL-CIO has opposed neither the neoliberal austerity policies at home nor the imperialist wars of aggression abroad. Well-paid union officials have not even seriously challenged factory closures; nor have they earnestly resisted brutal cuts in workers’ wages and benefits.

In projecting sympathy for the Occupy Movement, the Democrats are essentially trying to have their cake and eat it too! Their efforts to express support for the protests can be interpreted only as opportunistic and utilitarian: to identify themselves with the rapidly spreading popular protests against the status quo, to mask the Obama administration’s neoliberal devotion to Wall Street, and to harness the energy of the protesters in order to garner their vote in the 2012 elections.

If successful, this would not be the first time the Democratic Party would have derailed and dissipated social struggles for change; it has a long record of such policies of betrayal, going back all the way to the Populist Movement of the late 19th century. Barack Obama’s promise of change in the 2008 elections in pursuit of garnering the grassroots’ vote was only the latest of the Democrats’ strategy of playing the good cop in order to contain radical energy. Two years earlier they had managed to undermine a vigorous antiwar movement by voicing the protesters’ demands to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if they won the majority seats in the Congress. Having thus gained the control of both houses of the Congress in the mid-term election of 2006, they shamelessly backed away from their promise to antiwar voters.

One can only hope that the Occupy Movement is armed with the knowledge of the Democratic Party’s record of cooptation and betrayal of radical movements; and will therefore chart a political movement of the working people and other grassroots independent of both parties of big business.

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2007), teaches economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.

White House eliminates insurance program for long-term care

2011-10-14T21:36:00.000-05:00

Washington Post

The Obama administration ended a major benefit in the 2010 health-care law on Friday, announcing that a program to offer Americans insurance for long-term care was simply unworkable.

Although the program had been dogged from the start by doubts about its feasibility, its elimination marks the first time the administration has backed away from a key piece of what remains of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement.

Republican critics of the law immediately said the decision proved that the legislation is unsound and unsustainable.

Because the program had been projected to reduce the federal deficit by $86 billion over the next 10 years, terminating it complicates the nation’s budget picture. It is now estimated that the health-care law will cut the deficit by $124 billion from 2012 to 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Known as the Community Living Assistance Services (CLASS) Act, the program was intended to be purely voluntary and open to all working Americans. It would have provided a basic lifetime benefit of a least $50 a day in the event of disability, to be used for coverage of even nonmedical needs such as making a home wheelchair accessible, or paying a caregiver.

The program was to be entirely self-financed by the premiums participants paid. Obama officials said this presented them with a problem: If they designed a benefits package generous enough to meet the law’s requirements, they would have had to set premiums so high that few healthy people would enroll. And without a large share of healthy people in the pool, the CLASS plan would have become even more expensive, forcing the government to raise premiums even higher to the point of the program’s collapse.

For the past 19 months, experts in the administration have searched for ways to get around this conundrum.

On a Friday call with reporters, Kathy Greenlee, assistant secretary for aging at the Department of Health and Human Services, announced their sobering conclusion: “At this point, we do not have a viable path forward to implement the CLASS Act.”

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) said the finding was long overdue. Gingrey, who sponsored a bill to repeal the legislation, observed that more than a a year ago the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid determined that the program was at significant risk of failure.

“I feel justified and vindicated,” Gingrey said. Like other Republicans, he predicted that this would be the first thread in the health-care law to unravel. “The bottom line is as people start to understand this bill, you are going to see more and more of a domino effect,” he said.

Sherry Glied, assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at HHS, countered that the CLASS program was an isolated case whose practicality was questionable from the beginning. “There is a very clear difference between that kind of uncertainty and the rest of the law,” she said.

How Obama Is Jeopardizing Medicaid

2011-10-11T22:14:00.000-05:00

The New Republic

by Pema Levy

Pema Levy is an assistant editor at The American Prospect.

In one of its many attempts to get its budget deficit under control, in 2008 California decided to cut its reimbursement rates to medical providers for poor and disabled persons enrolled in the state's Medicaid program. The result was that providers began to cut back on services, and pharmacists stopped filling prescriptions because the reimbursements came to less than the cost of the drugs. California, for all intents and purposes, was no longer upholding the federal mandate to provide Medicaid patients with "meaningful access" to care. Numerous lawsuits were filed against the state to reverse the cuts, and they are now consolidated into Douglas v. Independent Living Center of Southern California, the first case the Supreme Court will hear today, on the first day of its new term.

As it stands, Douglas is no longer about Medicaid rates or "meaningful access," but whether Medicaid beneficiaries and providers have the right to sue the state to enforce federal Medicaid statutes - and, in a surprising move, the Obama administration has sided with California, with the Deputy Solicitor General arguing before the Court today that only the Department of Health and Human Services should be able to enforce compliance with Medicaid. "They want the prerogative of when and where to intervene in state conduct matters," says Sara Rosenbaum, a law professor and health care expert at George Washington University, venturing a guess as to the administration's motives. California's backers also worry about court-imposed payment schemes replacing state discretion, as well as a surge in litigation.

But the Obama administration's position is a big mistake. Not only would rolling back such private rights endanger patients and providers, it could also impede the administration's own agenda. Because the ability of the federal government to enforce its health care laws through HHS is limited, it often relies on private lawsuits to keep states in check. In fact, the success of the administration's signature policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act, could depend on exactly the kind of action it's trying to rule out.

OF THE 32 MILLION Americans the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act will eventually insure, almost half - 15 million - will gain insurance under a massive Medicaid expansion by January 2014. The impact of the ACA, in other words, depends on states complying with Medicaid requirements -the very laws Douglas could effectively end the ability of private citizens to enforce through legal action. Another scenario where you might see the ACA falter is if a state took over responsibility for running a health-care exchange, and then failed to comply with federal requirements in some way. A ruling against providers and beneficiaries in Douglas therefore "limits the options for enforcing the Affordable Care Act," says Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law. "At this point the assumption is that the states will implement it and that the federal government will enforce it. The possibility to enforce implementation [either through private actions or HHS] is a fall-back position. But in the future, particularly if Obama loses the 2012 election, it narrows options for making sure implementation goes through."

Even under a Democratic administration, however, leaving enforcement up to HHS is a disaster waiting to happen. That's because, historically, HHS has a middling record of enforcing Medicaid's rules. For instance, the California rate cuts that launched the lawsuit in question are still in effect, points out Rochelle Bobroff, Directing Attorney of the Federal Rights Project at the National Senior Citizens Law Center. "The federal government never goes to court over non-conforming state plans," says Bobroff. "They just don't do it." More importantly, HHS is largely limited to one, very poor enforcement mechanism: the ability to cut off all Medicaid funding to a noncompliant state. If the threat of a cutoff doesn't scare a state into compliance, following through would only end up hurting the Medicaid recipients HHS is trying to help.

Under a president Bachmann or Perry and their HHS Secretary, says Jost, "you'd have a situation where [the ACA] was basically unenforceable with regard to the Medicaid expansion."

Moreover, the ACA is just one piece of the possible collateral damage from ruling in favor of California. Under a broad ruling, a whole swath of federal requirements could be endangered. "Every state out there is waiting to see what happens in Douglas to cut access," says Rosenbaum. "The litany of what kind of bad state conduct could be unleashed is long because the only weapon against it is the risk of injunction. The theory that there's no right of action will carry over out of the Medicaid Act."

One area where states would likely begin to move in response to a victory for California is in cutting federal money - like Medicaid and Title X funding-that's currently directed to abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood. The ability of beneficiaries and providers to stop state laws seeking to defund clinics would likely be impeded, allowing backers of the proverbial "war" on abortion and contraception to score a major victory. And with an especially broad ruling, says Steven Shapiro, legal director for the ACLU, "there would be consequences for a wide-ranging variety for civil liberties and civil rights litigation [including] state and local immigration cases."

This all depends, of course, on if the state of California wins in Douglas, and then how broad the Court's ruling actually is. The poor tools at HHS's disposal are partly a result of the fact that the government has historically relied heavily on private actions to enforce federal laws. For this reason it seems unlikely that the Court will take away private citizens' cause of action altogether, as a broad ruling would overturn a large number of cases and go against decades of established jurisprudence. But on the other hand, a narrow ruling seems likely. "It's hard to be optimistic with 32 states and the federal government [on the other side]; this is going to be a difficult case to win," says Bobroff. "Given this Supreme Court and its hostility to plaintiffs," Jost notes, "it's depressing."

It's important to note that the Obama administration is taking a more moderate position and is asking the Court for a narrow ruling on the Medicaid Act alone. But its decision to back the state of California over private beneficiaries and providers is still baffling for heath care advocates and experts. Even a narrow ruling could impede the implementation of health care reform. "I have no idea what they were thinking, but it's a major disappointment," says Shapiro. "They went against their historic and the legally correct position." Indeed, when the Supreme Court was deciding whether to hear Douglas, the administration's position was that private actions were important to carrying out federal law. When the Court took up the case, however, the administration performed a remarkable about-face. "There's a huge amount riding on this case," says Rosenbaum, "and the
ironies here are phenomenal."

NATIONAL ADAPT MAILING LIST- Adapt Community Choice Act List http://www.adapt.org

Green Party to Democratic apologists: The message of the Wall Street protests is not 'Vote Democrat'

2011-10-09T20:38:00.001-05:00

GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES
http://www.gp.org

For Immediate Release:
Sunday, October 9, 2011

Contacts:
Scott McLarty, Media Coordinator, 202-518-5624, cell 202-904-7614, mclarty@greens.org
Starlene Rankin, Media Coordinator, 916-995-3805, starlene@gp.org

Video and Livestreaming:
Green Party Occupy America
http://www.gp.org/campaigns/occupy-america/index.php
Cheri Honkala, Green candidate for Sheriff of Philadelphia, visits Occupy Wall Street Â http://vimeo.com/29997382
Cheri Honkala speaks at Occupy DC Â http://www.vimeo.com/30200014
Interview with New York Green Mark Dunlea at Occupy Wall Street Â http://www.gp.org/video/display.php?ID=59
Interview with Michael O'Neil, Secretary of the Green Party of New York State, Occupy Wall Street Â http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orcQYUyfUyY

WASHINGTON, DC -- Green Party leaders sharply criticized Democratic Party supporters online and in the media who have tried to turn the ongoing Occupy Wall Street, Occupy America, and October 2011 demonstrations across America into an appeal to vote Democrat and reelect President Obama in 2012.

Many of the protesters have expressed their disgust with two-party politics (http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/wall-street-protesters-disgusted-parties-14687840)and the influence of corporate money. Â Organizers have rejected attempts to shoehorn the movement into any party and assert that the protesters come from diverse political persuasions.

Greens, who are participating in the protests and among the organizers, have pointed to the Green Party's alternative vision for America, as expressed in the Green New Deal (http://www.greenpartywatch.org/2010/08/11/62-green-candidates-endorse-green-new-deal)
and on the party's web site (http://www.gp.org).

The Green Party offers a platform for peace, economic security for working people, millions of new green jobs in conservation and clean energy development, an end to fossil fuel addiction, real steps for curbing global climate change and restoring the health of the planet, universal health care (Medicare For All), and reforms that would limit the power of corporations and restore the promise of participatory democracy and fair elections. Â Green candidates do not accept corporate money.

Mark Dunlea, co-founder of the Green Party of New York State: "The Democratic Party does not speak for the Occupy Wall Street, Occupy America, and October 2011 protesters. Â No political party speaks for the protesters, not even the Green Party. Â The protesters speak for themselves. Â The Green Party has endorsed and joined the demos because we share the same frustration and anger as the other protesters. Â Greens are there because we bring alternative ideas like the Green New Deal. Â And we're there because we encourage the 99 percent -- We The People -- to organize, end pro-corporate two-party rule, and replace the politicians in public office who enabled Wall Street's theft of America's future. Â This can only happen through an independent alliance with the same diversity we're seeing at the protests: labor activists, Greens, progressives, anarchists, libertarians, nonvoters, disappointed Democrats and Republicans, and all others who want realÂ change."

Sanda Everette, co-coordinator of the Coordinating Committee of the Green Party of California: "If pro-Democrat web sites and the media believe that the message of the protests is 'Vote Democrat' and 'Reelect Obama' in 2012, they've missed the point. Â The current demonstrations became necessary after Election Day 2008, when too many liberal, progressive, and antiwar Democrats declared 'Mission Accomplished' with Barack Obama's election victory. Â The Democratic Party has proved itself as dedicated to Wall Street as the GOP. Â We look forward to more protests and direct action as the election season unfolds, especially during the 2012 Democratic and Republican conventions."

Farheen Hakeem, Green candidate for the Minnesota State Senate in District 61 (http://www.farheenhakeem.org) and co-chair of the Green Party of the United States: "Say no to the parties of war and corporate money! Â That's our message to all Americans who are worried about the dangerous direction that the two Titanic Parties have steered our country. Â If the field of presidential candidates is limited to incumbent Obama and the Republican nominee after the primaries, then everything the Wall Street protesters are talking about will be erased from the election season debate and from the media. Â Hopes for a progressive challenge in the Democratic primaries are unrealistic. Â The challenger will inevitably be defeated by the Obama campaign juggernaut, which is already loaded with corporate campaign checks, and the challenger's supporters will find themselves muzzled, with the expectation that they'll vote Democrat."

Terry Baum, Green candidate for Mayor of San Francisco (http://terryjoanbaum.com): "Barack Obama received more Wall Street money than any other candidate in US history. Â Instead of change, the Obama Administration gave us Phase 2 of the Bush-Cheney agenda: more Wall Street bailouts, more endless war, more offshore oil drilling and the dangerous Keystone XL pipeline, more mountaintop detonation mining. Â Instead of financial security for Americans, we got plans to slash Social Security and Medicare. Â We got minimal assistance for people facing home foreclosures and more crushing debt for college students. Â We got silence about the racist death penalty and record-high mass incarceration of young black, brown, and poor people in a greedy private prison system. Â We got a health care bill with mandates that are a direct public subsidy for the insurance industry (originally a Republican proposal), but no universal health care or controls forÂ skyrocketing medical costs. Â We got impunity for Bush officials who authorized torture and other war crimes -- and more extraordinary rendition, more warrantless surveillance of US citizens, more erosion of due process, more persecution of whistleblowers, and even a secret presidential hit list of Americans targeted for assassination."

Cheri Honkala, Green candidate for Sheriff of Philadelphia (http://www.cherihonkala.com) running on an anti-foreclosure platform, speaking at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC on October 6: "What I'm doing is not symbolic. Â It's concrete and Bill and Aida and Glenn who's here with me today, like millions of people across this country are gonna lose their homes... unless you take this seriously and not just march about it, pray about it, and sing about it but help me fill every damn poll in Philadelphia where there's a birthplace of revolution and change... Â We can do this again in this country and take our country back!"

See also:

"Green Party of the US endorses, joins 'October 2011' protest against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and 2012 austerity budget"
Green Party media advisory, September 27, 2011
http://www.gp.org/press/pr-national.php?ID=450
October 2011 http://october2011.org
Occupy Wall Street http://www.occupywallst.org
Occupy Together: events across the US and in other countries in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street http://www.occupytogether.org
Declaration of the Occupation of New York City
NYC General Assembly: The Official Website of the GA at #OccupyWallStreet
http://nycga.cc/2011/09/30/declaration-of-the-occupation-of-new-york-city
It's Our Economy http://itsoureconomy.us

MORE INFORMATION

Green Party of the United States http://www.gp.org 202-319-7191

Green candidate database and campaign information: http://www.gp.org/elections.shtml

News Center http://www.gp.org/newscenter.shtml

Speakers Bureau http://www.gp.org/speakers

Ballot Access Page http://www.gp.org/ballotstatus

Livestream Channel http://www.livestream.com/greenpartyus

Video Page http://www.gp.org/video/index.php

Press conferences, forums, and other events at the Green Party's 2011 Annual National Meeting in Alfred, NY, broadcast and archived on the Green Party's Livestream Channel http://www.livestream.com/greenpartyus

2011 Annual National Meeting http://nygreenfest.org

Green Pages: The official publication of record of the Green Party of the United States (Summer 2011 issue now online) http://gp.org/greenpages-blog

After the Wall Street Protests: To change America’s political direction, we need a voters’ revolt and a permanent noncorporate alternative to the Titanic Parties

2011-10-08T00:07:00.001-05:00

FDL

The protests against Wall Street’s criminal theft of America’s future, to be followed on October 6 by the ‘October 2011′ occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, are cause for optimism. Maybe ‘Arab Spring’ is finally coming to the US. (‘American Autumn’?) The protests, now spreading to other cities, are continuing despite the troops of police ready to club, pepperspray, and corral peaceful protesters into nets for mass arrest.

The biggest impediment to the democracy movement is not Fox News and pundits who believe that the Occupy Wall Street demos are a demand for ‘big government’, as if their entire understanding comes from a GOP talking points memo. It’s not the dismissive tone of journalists from the New York Times and other mainstream papers. It’s not the cable news stations who misreport the goals of the demonstrations or ignore them altogether.

The greatest danger is that many Americans sympathetic to the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ grievances, and maybe a small number of the protesters themselves, will soon fall into a familiar habit. In a few months we can expect to hear some of them declare “We must vote to reelect President Obama in 2012, to prevent a Republican victory.”

The Republicans have already won, regardless of who takes the oath of office in January 2013. Endless wars, Wall Street pillage, and the trashing of the US Constitution are no longer the exclusive intellectual property of the GOP.

Barack Obama’s progressive supporters acknowledge that he didn’t quite fulfill their expectations as an agent of change and a bulwark against war and the predatory power of corporations. But the GOP is so much worse, they say, that we have to keep voting Democrat. This is nonsense.

The liberals, progressives, leftists, editors and columnists for The Nation and Daily Kos and other publications who insist we vote Dem in every election cycle are preaching self-defeat.

Apologists for the Democrats will say, “But there are some real differences between the two parties!” That’s true. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would not have been repealed by a Republican administration.

Overall, however, the differences between D and R have grown more and more insubstantial during the past few decades. In many cases, Democratic presidents used their power to fulfill the GOP agenda, often accomplishing what Republican couldn’t by themselves, for example, President Clinton’s passage of NAFTA with help from a Democratic Congress and President Obama’s willingness to carve up Social Security and Medicare.

On nearly every big issue from the wars to Wall Street’s looting of the economy to offshore drilling and oil pipelines, President Obama has shown a smooth continuity from the Bush-Cheney Administration. When he clashed with Republicans in the health care reform debate, the argument was really over which side could best accommodate for-profit insurance companies and other special interests, with Democrats offering mandates that require everyone to purchase private coverage, an idea they pilfered from Republican Congressmembers who introduced it in the 1990s. (See “Whose side are they on? An unexhaustive recent history of bipartisan convergence” below.)

The major newspapers, network and cable news shows, and other media inflate the small differences because they like to make the news as simple-minded as possible, and that means limiting the public debate to D versus R on any big issue. Other points of view, such as the one expressed by the Wall Street protesters, aren’t fit for serious coverage, or sometimes any coverage at all.

Progressives who believe that President Obama “is really one of us” are as deluded as conservatives who believe Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and other phony populists and corporate royalists when they call President Obama a socialist, by which they mean he’s a few degrees less rabid in his devotion to corporate rule than they are.

Instead of Democrat versus Republican, we should look at US politics as D and R versus the rest of us. Elections have become a contest between Democrats ready to fulfill GOP agenda and the GOP itself. Whether we elect a Democrat or a Republican to the White House, whether Democrats or Republicans win control of Congress, the center of political gravity remains on the side of the GOP. As George Lakoff has observed in several books and numerous essays, Democrats play according to Republican rules. Even when they’re telling outright lies, Republicans deal in gut-level messages that Democrats find themselves parroting: Support our troops! End big government!

Both of the Titanic parties accept enormous sums of money from corporate PACs to do the bidding of corporate special interest lobbies, but the GOP is far more shameless about its service to corporate elites and its ideology of privatization, deregulation, and concentration of economic power.

Democrats, on the other hand, want to be perceived as the party of the people, but won’t wean themselves off corporate campaign checks. They retreat from their stated principles and traditional constituencies and ignore progressive voices within their own party on the assumption that voters on the left have “nowhere else to turn.”

The retreat of the Democrats, their confused allegiances, and embrace of so much of the GOP agenda have meant a license for Republicans to move to ever greater extremes. Now we have a ‘liberal’ party that has moved to the right of Eisenhower and Nixon and a rightwing party that has descended into irrationality. Every decade, the political paradigm drifts further and further to the right.

If we want to interrupt this drift, we have to think outside of the two-party power bloc. The Occupy Wall Street protesters and their supporters have no voice in the two-party mainstream of electoral politics. It’s assumed that –if they vote at all — they will line up behind President Obama and a Democratic machine that regards them with contempt.

Time for a Voters’ Revolt

Dropping out of the elections and refusing to vote are not an option. Until we take steps now to break down the rule of the Titanic Parties and replace them in public office, we face decades of more endless wars, more erosion of basic human rights and protections for working people, and dwindling chances of a solution to global climate change.

Activism should not be limited to electoral politics. But the movement for a change in America’s political direction must include a voters’ revolt and the emergence of a strong and permanent alternative party that rejects corporate money and influence.

Without such an insurgence in 2012, the following topics will be missing from the election season debate after April or May: the plundering of the US economy by the financial industry; multi-trillion-dollar bailouts for Wall Street; the assault on public sector unions; universal health care (Medicare For All); ending the endless wars; the death penalty (Troy Davis will be forgotten); the dangers of the Tar Sands pipeline, offshore drilling, nuclear power, mountaintop removal mining, warrantless spying on US citizens, torture, and other gross abuses of power. Neither incumbent Obama nor the GOP nominee will mention these things.

Despite the best intentions of progressives like Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, and others, the Democratic Party will not be rehabilitated. A progressive challenge to President Obama in the primaries, as recently encouraged by Ralph Nader and others, will keep some of the complaints and ideals of the Wall Street protesters alive for a few months. By late spring, the challenger will be defeated by the Obama campaign juggernaut and the challenger’s supporters will find themselves muzzled, with the expectation that they’ll vote Dem anyway. That’s what happens in every presidential election.

The usual objection to voting third-party is that the candidate might ‘spoil’ by subtracting votes from a Democrat and enabling a Republican victory, with the role played by Green presidential nominee Ralph Nader in 2000 as the classical example. There are numerous problems with this accusation — it ignores manipulation and voter obstruction by GOP officials in Florida, a patently biased Supreme Court ruling that canceled vote recounts and delivered the White House to George W. Bush, and Al Gore’s own feeble campaign, which lost double-digit points in polls during the final months of the race (while Mr. Nader’s percentage never rose above a few percentage points) and failed to take even Tennessee, Mr. Gore’s home state. In Florida, the number of registered Dems who voted for Mr. Bush was four times the number who voted for Mr. Nader. Why don’t Democratic apologists ever apply the spoiler label to Republicans?

The assertion that Mr. Nader siphoned votes away from Mr. Gore assumes that Democratic candidates have some kind of prior claim to our votes. The subtext of the spoiler accusation, when leveled by pundits and politicians who’ve made no effort to promote reforms like Instant Runoff Voting that would eliminate the alleged spoiler effect, is that two-party rule must never face interference from alternative parties and independent candidates. It’s a notion of democracy only one step removed from single-party states like China and the Soviet Union.

The only fair and democratic elections are multi-party elections, in which every voter has the right to see more than a choice between Big Mac and Whopper on the ballot, the right to know which candidate best represents his or her own interests and ideals, and the right to vote for that candidate.

Imagine that multi-party democracy existed in the US. The election of a half-dozen noncorporate alternative-party candidates to Congress would alter the political landscape, with Ds and Rs no longer each others’ sole competition.

If such a candidate participated in the presidential debates, he or she would raise ideas that no Democratic or Republican nominee would ever touch, like Medicare For All and rapid withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Commission on Presidential Debates is owned and run by the Democratic and Republican parties, who took control over it in order to bar other parties’ candidates. D and R politicians in many states have conspired to rig the ballot access rules of many states to block third-party and independent candidates from running for office. The two Titanic parties have been corrupted by their own exclusive power as much as by corporate money and clout.

These obstacles are all surmountable, but only through a concerted mass effort led by a broad alliance of those critical of the two-party status quo, the bureaucratic and political power of major corporations, and the expanding power of government. The Occupy Wall Street protests, which have drawn progressives, Greens, anarchists, libertarians, nonvoters, frustrated Democrats and Republicans, and many others, are a model for such an alliance.

Alternatives like the Green Party are waiting for their moment — the moment of mass epiphany when Americans recognize them as an imperative comparable to the anti-slavery Republican Party in the mid 19th century. The Occupy Wall Street protesters are the abolitionists of the 21st century, demanding an end to the predatory power of Wall Street and other corporate elites over our political system, our jobs, our homes, our savings, our health, nearly aspect of our lives.

Until we recognize that Democrats are as dangerous to America’s future as Republicans, until we spark a national voters’ revolt, we’ll continue to commit political suicide every Election Day.

The Occupy Wall Street participants want to push the country in a different direction, away from corporate oligarchy, military aggression, and environmental depredation. Protests and direct action must continue as the election season unfolds, especially during next year’s national Democratic and Republican conventions. We must find, build, and promote noncorporate ways to live our lives and expand participatory democracy (see Ben Manski’s essay “The Protest Wave: Why the Political Class Can’t Understand Our Demands”).

And if we want these things to have a lasting effect, the “99 percent” movement that inspired the current demonstrations must move to the next level, which must include independent electoral action in 2012 and beyond.

Sidebar: Whose side are they on? An unexhaustive recent history of bipartisan convergence

• Is President Obama a “warrior for the middle class”?

In 2008, Mr. Obama became the highest recipient of Wall Street campaign contributions in history. After he was elected, he followed in the footsteps of Republican presidents by stacking his staff with Wall Street insiders and operators — Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, economics advisor Larry Summers, Chief of Staff Bill Daley — whose deregulatory policies made the 2008 economic meltdown inevitable.

With bipartisan support in Congress, the Obama Administration bailed out the Wall Street firms that were responsible for the meltdown, while offering minimal aid to Americans facing unemployment and home foreclosures because of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis that these firms created. The White House and Congress have taken no steps to restore the Glass-Steagall Act or enact other reforms to curtail Wall Street power and prevent the next crisis.

The federal government plans to begin selling off the massive portfolio of foreclosed homes now owned by HUD, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac to private investment conglomerates (“vulture funds”), possibly the “largest transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector” in history.

Such actions were predictable by September 2008, before Mr. Obama’s election victory, when he undercut his pledge of “change we can believe in” with an endorsement of the first Wall Street bailout, in harmony with the Bush White House and his GOP competition, John McCain.

After promising to do so during his campaign, President Obama has refused to renegotiate NAFTA and other international trade pacts. These agreements, which tend to favor corporate power and profit over the rights and well-being of working people and the health of the environment, were authorized by President Clinton, who had initially opposed NAFTA while running for the White House in 1992.

Democrats have refused to repeal Taft-Hartley restrictions on union organizing. When Republican Gov. Walker want on the warpath against the organizing rights and benefits for public sector workers in Wisconsin in early 2011, Democratic Gov. Cuomo launched a similar assault against public sector workers in New York.

• Are Democrats the party of health care reform and Social Security?

The Democratic Party discarded its platform promise, since 1948, of a national health program while Bill Clinton was president. In 2009, Democratic leaders declared that universal health care (single-payer, also called Medicare For All) would be “off the table” — Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus’s words when he organized the health care reform round tables.

President Obama’s health care bill imposes mandates that function as a direct public subsidy to the health insurance cartel, an idea that Republicans proposed during the 1990s. Whether Democrats passed Obamacare in 2010 or the Republicans prevailed in blocking it, the insurance industry, Big Pharma, and other corporate lobbies would be the real winners.

Contrary to the current belief that the President recently compromised on Social Security and Medicare, he made his intention to slash them clear in 2010 when he appointed his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (“Catfood Commission”) and stacked it with politicians, economists, and company heads hostile to both programs. Rather than alleviating the skyrocketing costs of health care, the highest cause of personal bankruptcies, Obama policies further threaten middle- and low-income Americans and burden retirees.

• Are Democrats the party of social justice?

President Obama has remained silent about record US incarceration rates — the world’s highest, surpassing repressive countries like China and Iran — and the fact that most of those behind bars are young, poor, and mostly black or brown. Since President Clinton, Democratic leaders have supported the growth of the private prison industry, which profits by filling up cells with more inmates.

Both Democrats and Republicans support the War on Drugs, which has ruined lives and caused endless devastation in poor neighborhoods, and the death penalty, despite racial disparities and a growing list of exonerations and errors. President Obama refused to comment on the fate of Troy Davis, who was executed by the state of Georgia despite significant doubts about his guilt (seven out of nine witnesses changed their testimony, some of them claiming police coercion).

• The environment and global warming?

President Obama has authorized more offshore oil drilling (despite the lessons of the disastrous BP spill in the Gulf); endorsed new nuclear power plants that will make money for energy companies while taxpayers assume the high cost and high liability (despite the example of Fukushima); allowed mountaintop removal mining to continue to obliterate and poison the West Virginia landscape; remained silent about the extremely dangerous technique called hydrofracking for natural gas in New York and Pennsylvania; endorsed the myth of clean coal; and is on the verge of approving the dangerous Keystone XL pipeline from the Canadian tar sands.

On September 2, 2011, President Obama killed proposed national air-quality standards for smog, overriding a plan by the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce air pollution. His administration, and Democrats in general, have supported greenhouse gas emissions trading schemes (“cap and trade”) that will allow polluting companies to trade and collect licenses to continue polluting. US obstruction remains the greatest impediment to the Kyoto Protocols.

• Peace?

Democrats pretended to be the antiwar party in recent elections, but in 2006 they boosted funding for the wars after gaining control of Congress. President Obama escalated the war on Afghanistan and expanded it into Pakistan, and launched a new invasion (Libya) without the consent of Congress. While ordering the withdrawal of some troops from Iraq, he is implementing Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to replace US armed forces, which are directly accountable to Congress, with private “mercenary” security firms, which aren’t.

In October 2002, the Democratic leadership voted for President Bush’s request for an extra-constitutional transfer of war power from Congress to the White House, effectively endorsing his plan to invade Iraq on fraudulent claims about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, nuclear weapons acquisition, and collusion with al-Qaeda. Under the Obama Administration, Democrats have adopted the neocon doctrine of unilateral aggression and the use of military force against countries at peace with the US. There has been virtually no difference between the Bush and Obama policies on the Middle East. The Obama Administration, which continues to arm Israel, had no objection to the Israel’s invasion of Gaza and massacre of civilians and strenuously objected to Palestine’s bid for UN recognition.

• The US Constitution and international law?

The Obama Justice Department has refused to investigate Bush-Cheney officials for torture and other gross abuses of power, constitutional violations, and war crimes. The administration has continued many of the same policies: warrantless surveillance of US citizens, denial of habeas corpus, extraordinary rendition, maintenance of “black sites,” harassment and legal action against whistleblowers. President Obama has surpassed the last administration in his intention to assassinate US citizens suspected of terrorism without any semblance of due process, as in the recent case of Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born cleric killed in Yemen, whose name was on a secret “hit list” of people the President has targeted for summary execution.

Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader Encourages “Occupy Wall Street” Protesters To Challenge Wall Street Abuses

2011-10-07T20:07:00.002-05:00

NEWS RELEASE

For Immediate Release
via dcstatehoodgreen.org

Contact: Ralph Nader (202) 387-8034 or
Matthew Zawisky 716-479-2351

Ralph Nader to speak at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC
On Pennsylvania Avenue NW between 13th and 14th Streets NW
Saturday, October 11, 2011 at 12:45 pm

Statement by consumer advocate, Ralph Nader

The frustration seen in the protests on Wall Street over the past few weeks demonstrates a widespread and growing citizen discontent with the two political parties in Washington, D.C. and with a political system that is dominated by corporate interests.

It is time for citizens to push their elected officials to break the corporate stranglehold on our economy. Congress should start by enacting a financial speculation tax that would help curb the wheeling and dealing on Wall Street and that could raise hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue to help with the our country's economic recovery.

Congress has done more to bail out Wall Street than Main Street. Wall Street crooks have avoided penalties and prosecution and continued to receive bonuses and excessive compensation while pensions and savings have been looted.

Wages have remained stagnant while the largest corporations and executives have seen record profits and bonuses year after year. Congress has done little in the face of a staggering – and growing – income inequality in this country, where the top 1 percent of the population has financial wealth equal to the combined financial wealth of the bottom 95 percent of the people.

And Congress has done nothing either to disclose or stem the flow of millions of corporate dollars into the electoral process. Corporate Political Action Committees are corrupting the electoral process and blocking the voices and concerns of millions of people.

These are not the signs of a healthy democracy. Those taking part in the “Occupy Wall Street” protests and in similar protests cropping up across the country are working hard to make their voices heard. It is way overdue for the President and Congress to listen.

Pain, Protests and the People

2011-10-06T12:18:00.003-05:00

gerryspence.wordpress.com

The protests on Wall Street have been overdue but will end too soon. Slaves cannot long maintain a war against the master. A money-made
U. S. Supreme Court has insured that the Moneyed Master can buy elections, and only the Master has such money. The democratic idea of government by the governed is a myth. One notes that the Republican party is so sensitive to its master’s power that it dare not suggest raising taxes on the Master –- not even an impoverished penny, much less plug the illegal loopholes through which the Master sucks the last of the life blood from the nation. All such slaves know that all power is vested in the Moneyed Master.

The current protests are curious news. But the media, both the printed and electronic, belong to the Moneyed Master. The people have no voice and their protesting voices on Wall Street and elsewhere are lost in the din of the growling, empty stomachs of children and the sounds of terror from a people who are crippled, not because their arms or legs have been severed, but because they can find no jobs. The Moneyed Master has closed its doors against the people and sits on its money like an old hen on rotten eggs.

The people will not prevail. No, not now. The gluttony of the Master must first run uncontained like maddened rats in a cheese factory until the sky grows dark and the light of hope fades, and there remains only the sound of the Master’s gnashing teeth greedily devouring all but the faintest dreams of the people.

With its endless propaganda the Moneyed Master has caused its slaves to believe they are free. But when that cruel hoax is ripped bare of its deceitful cloth and stands naked before the people, and when enough of the people sleep under the bridges and their children’s bellies swell from hunger then one day it will be too late for the Master. Suddenly, without warning, the people will rise up in explosive unison like a long sleeping volcano. Raging and turmoil will ring across the canyons of the streets and blood will flood the streets, and the people will at last prevail.

These are the times when the people cry out their pain to the deaf ears of the Moneyed Master. But such are only the beginning steps of the infant. The people will grow strong from their pain. Pain is the nourishment of growth. And in the end the people will prevail as they have though the eons against the tyrants of power. But not now.

Higher Fees Paid To US Physicians Drive Higher Spending For Physician Services Compared To Other Countries

2011-09-29T22:42:00.000-05:00

Health Affairs

Abstract

Higher health care prices in the United States are a key reason that the nation’s health spending is so much higher than that of other countries. Our study compared physicians’ fees paid by public and private payers for primary care office visits and hip replacements in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We also compared physicians’ incomes net of practice expenses, differences in financing the cost of medical education, and the relative contribution of payments per physician and of physician supply in the countries’ national spending on physician services. Public and private payers paid somewhat higher fees to US primary care physicians for office visits (27 percent more for public, 70 percent more for private) and much higher fees to orthopedic physicians for hip replacements (70 percent more for public, 120 percent more for private) than public and private payers paid these physicians’ counterparts in other countries. US primary care and orthopedic physicians also earned higher incomes ($186,582 and $442,450, respectively) than their foreign counterparts. We conclude that the higher fees, rather than factors such as higher practice costs, volume of services, or tuition expenses, were the main drivers of higher US spending, particularly in orthopedics.

Eliminate the Profit Motive in Health Care

2011-09-29T22:33:00.000-05:00

Arnold S. Relman, M.D. Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School Former Editor-in-Chief, New England Journal of Medicine

There are two interrelated critical issues in health reform right now: how to extend and improve insurance coverage, and how to control the unsustainable rise in health care expenditures. Virtually all of the current legislative attention is focused on the first issue but, notwithstanding claims to the contrary, none of the proposals now on the table offers any credible solution for the control of rising costs. Without control of health cost inflation, the present system will not be viable much longer.

Expansion of coverage is of course a highly desirable goal, but it inevitably increases expenditures even beyond today's exorbitant levels. President Obama has repeatedly said he would veto any health proposal that is not "budget neutral" over the next decade. The legislation now under consideration claims to meet that requirement through savings promised by the insurance, drug and hospital industries and through reductions in Medicare expenditures (excessive payments to private insurers for Medicare Advantage plans would be a major target), possibly supplemented by taxes on employment-based health plans for high income employees. However, critics question whether these measures would fully pay for the almost one trillion dollars of new costs for covering most of the uninsured over the next decade.

But the estimate of the costs of expanded coverage does not include the cost of the constant inflationary rise in all medical expenditures, lately about 6 - 8 percent per year. This would increase total health spending by roughly another two trillion dollars over the next decade. Administration policy-makers speak hopefully of savings to be generated in the long term by switching to electronic records, using more preventive measures, and applying the information gained from studies of comparative effectiveness. But skeptics might call this "faith-based" savings, because there is no solid evidence to support such hopes. The sobering fact remains that something more must be done soon to slow medical inflation or the entire health system will inevitably slide into bankruptcy. And yet none of the legislation currently being considered addresses that problem. Adding more benefits to the system, and covering more people with public and private insurance, are certainly important, but even if those improvements were paid for, they would not slow down the numerous inflationary forces that make our medical care system unsustainable.

What are those inflationary forces? I believe the most important among them are the incentives in the payment and organization of medical care that cause physicians, hospitals and other medical care facilities to focus at least as much on income and profit as on meeting the needs of patients. I have discussed this subject in a recent book (A Second Opinion. Rescuing America's Health Care. Public Affairs, New York, 2007). The U.S., more than any other advanced country, has come to rely mainly on private markets to deliver medical care, and on fee-for-service to pay its physicians. The incentives in such a system reward and stimulate the delivery of more services. That is why medical expenditures in the U.S. are so much higher than in any other country, and are rising more rapidly. Our business-oriented system inevitably drives up expenditures because in medical care the balancing tensions between the suppliers and consumers of services that constrain costs in ordinary business markets do not exist. Physicians, who supply the services, control most of the decisions to use medical resources, and patients, who are the consumers of those resources, do not pay most of the costs.

The economic incentives in the medical market are attracting the great majority of physicians into specialty practice, and these incentives, combined with the continued introduction of new and more expensive technology, are a major factor in causing inflation of medical expenditures. Physicians and ambulatory care and diagnostic facilities, are largely paid on a piecework basis for each item of service provided. Hospitals also bill insurers according to the days of care and the services they provide, although payments for treatment of an illness may be aggregated. However, all providers compete for income and market share, often advertising and marketing for that purpose. They almost never compete on prices because public and private insurers, not patients, pay most of the costs. Competition in the current medical market therefore tends to drive up total costs because it results in greater use of services, while rarely lowering prices.

Control of medical expenditures is unlikely without a major reform of the payment and organization of medical care. Expanding and improving the medical insurance part of the health system will not solve the expenditures problem unless the perverse incentives in the delivery of care are also corrected. In fact, expansion of insurance benefits without this other reform would probably make matters even worse. A so-called "public option" will not solve this problem either, although its competition might force private insurers to reduce their premiums or increased benefits. But even if some sort of low-cost not-for-profit insurance plan were offered as an optional choice for the uninsured and those dissatisfied with their present coverage, the inflationary effects of fee-for-service payments and an entrepreneurial medical care system would still be operating. After all, Medicare is a low-overhead plan that costs its beneficiaries less than private plans, but the rate of inflation in its expenditures is nearly as rapid as the inflation in private medical insurance expenditures. The benefits of Medicare are just as threatened as those of the private insurance system because costs are rising rapidly in both the public and private sectors of health care.

Judging from the current debate in Washington, there is little evidence that lawmakers are aware of these facts or, if they are, that they have the stomach for resisting the powerful vested interests that stand in the way of major reform. That is why the Goldman Sachs prediction of a compromised legislative outcome is likely to be correct. At the end of this Congress we will probably end up in a position not unlike that facing the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Over three years ago it enacted legislation that greatly expanded insurance coverage, but from the outset it faced serious financial problems in funding the increased costs. A special state commission has recommended to the Massachusetts legislature that it consider ways to eliminate fee-for-service payment of physicians in favor of some type of system that would be based on organizations of physicians and hospitals that could accept global prepayments for comprehensive care. It remains to be seen whether and how these recommendations can be implemented, but it is telling that Massachusetts seems now to realize what our national lawmakers have not yet grasped: Sustainable universal, or near-universal, coverage requires more than fixing the insurance system. It needs major reform in the payment and organization of medical care as well.

In my book, and in a recent article in the New York Review of Books (July 2), I have proposed a system of medical reforms that would deal with the cost problems in both the insurance and medical care sectors of our health care system and would ensure good care for everyone. I recommend replacement of the current mix of public and private insurance plans with universal coverage for comprehensive care that would be funded by a progressive national health insurance tax. Medical care would be provided through community-based not-for-profit multi-specialty group practices, which would be staffed by salaried physicians. When medical insurance is no longer a for-profit business, when physicians no longer are paid on a fee-for-service basis, and when the entire health care delivery system is not-for-profit, economic incentives to over- or underserve the needs of patients can be eliminated by appropriate regulation and we can expect improved quality of care at lower costs. The total national expenditure on medical care can be controlled by the level of national funding, while decisions about the proper use of medical resources can be safely left where they belong, in the hands of physicians and their patients.

Carrying out such a transformation of the health care system would of course be a formidable task, probably achievable only in gradual steps. It would require a sea change in the current political climate. A large part of the public, supported by most business leaders who are outside the medical-industrial complex, and by an awakened medical profession, would have to be convinced that a major reform of this kind offers the only chance for an equitable but affordable medical care system of good quality. In a just-published commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine ("Doctors as the Key to Health Care Reform", NEJM, September 24, 2009) I explain how crucial change in the organization and payment of medical services is to achieving a sustainable health care system. The medical profession will have to be a willing and active partner in carrying out these reforms.

Lawmakers need votes and public support even more than the money from vested interests, so they probably would act if a majority of voters were to make its wishes clear and if the medical profession were part of this awakening. But before public opinion can be galvanized to demand a sweeping change of this kind we may, unfortunately, have to experience a disastrous financial collapse of the health care system, with widespread loss of benefits. An expansion of coverage without changing the medical care delivery system and controlling medical inflation, might very well hasten such a collapse.

Health Insurers Push Premiums Sharply Higher

2011-09-28T17:35:00.000-05:00

NYTimes

Major health insurance companies have been charging sharply higher premiums this year, outstripping any growth in workers’ wages and creating more uncertainty for the Obama administration and employers who are struggling to drive down an unrelenting rise in medical costs.

A study released on Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a research group, showed that the average annual premium for family coverage through an employer reached $15,073 in 2011 — 9 percent higher than in the previous year. And even higher premiums could be on the way, particularly in New York, where some companies are asking for double-digit increases for about 1.3 million New Yorkers in individual or small-group plans, setting up a battle with state regulators.

The higher premiums are particularly unwelcome at a time when the economy is sputtering and unemployment is hovering at about 9 percent. Many businesses cite the cost of coverage as a factor in their decision not to hire, and health insurance has become increasingly unaffordable for more Americans. The cost of family coverage has about doubled since 2001, compared with a 34 percent gain in wages.

Aetna and United Health/Oxford said their requested rate increases in New York largely reflected actual hospital, physician and pharmacy costs. “Our rate requests are simply keeping pace,” said Maria Gordon Shydlo, a spokeswoman.

How much the new federal health care legislation pushed by President Obama is affecting rates remains a point of debate, with some consumer advocates and others suggesting that insurers have raised prices in anticipation of new rules that would, in 2012, require them to justify any increase of more than 10 percent. Kaiser pointed out that the increase this year could be an anomaly, after several years of 3 percent to 5 percent increases during the recession.

Kaiser estimates that one to two percentage points of the increase this year is related to provisions of the law already in effect, like coverage for children up to 26 years old and for prevention services like mammograms.

New York, along with states including California, Connecticut and North Carolina, has been exercising its regulatory muscle to try to tamp down some of the increases. The Obama administration this month funneled a total of $109 million to many states, in part to help fight against “unreasonable” increases.

The increases now under consideration in New York would affect 1.3 million of the 3 million residents in individual and small-group plans; the amounts vary considerably depending on the type of policy. The increases requested by Aetna, for example, range from 8.9 percent to 53.6 percent, while those from United Health Group/Oxford range from 13 percent to 34 percent, according to the State Insurance Department.

The state’s power to deny increases does not extend to rates for large employers; the Kaiser survey included large and small company policies, which cover about 60 percent of working-age Americans with insurance. Employers, on average, pay the bulk of premiums and absorb some of the increase each year while passing the rest onto workers.

The increase in premiums was striking because in a poor economy, many people put off going to doctors, to avoid co-payments and higher deductibles. Despite a decrease in the use of medical services, companies have defended higher premiums — and their high profits — reasoning that their costs would rebound once the economy recovered.

Insurers also say that the use and price of medical services have continued to rise in individual and small-group plans, in part because those policies tend to have a higher proportion of people with serious illnesses. If the health care law survives legal challenges and goes into full effect in 2014, increased competition will make it tougher for companies to charge those customers more, the administration says.

Aetna and United Health/Oxford said their requested rate increases in New York largely reflected actual hospital, physician and pharmacy costs. “Our rate requests are simply keeping pace,” said Maria Gordon Shydlo, a spokeswoman for United Health Group/Oxford, which secured rate increases of 18 to 24 percent last year.

Consumer advocates contend that the latest requests exceed any documented rise in costs, with some companies enjoying three years of record profits and paying millions of dollars in dividends and executive compensation.

“We’re at a watershed moment,” said Elisabeth Benjamin, who represents Health Care for All New York, a group of 100 organizations advocating affordable care. “The Cuomo administration has to decide, will the Department of Insurance stand up for the little guy, John Q. Public, or let the insurance companies get away with this nonsense?”

Since last year, the Insurance Department has posted more than 4,000 policyholder objections online. In one typical letter, a small businessman, citing six years of annual increases of more than 15 percent, raged, “There are no words to express how utterly greedy and unconscionable another double-digit increase in health care costs are to the world of small companies and those employed by them.”

Such messages are not lost on Benjamin M. Lawsky, the state’s superintendent of financial services, who oversees the department. “We get it,” he said. “These increases are often hitting people who just can’t afford it.”

“At the same time,” he added, “we have to make sure these companies stay healthy. What keeps us up at night is the need to strike a responsible balance.”

Decisions are expected in October. In the first round of reviews late last year, on premiums that took effect Jan. 1, the department approved a 10 percent increase, on the average, reduced from requests averaging 14 percent. Mr. Lawsky said the result showed the system was working.

But to Leslie Moran, senior vice president of the New York Health Plan Association, an industry group, the result confirms that under the new law, the process bows to political pressure, not actuarial reality.

“There was an effort to somewhat artificially suppress premiums to prove that the prior approval system was working,” she said, noting that New York requires at least 82 percent of premium revenue be spent on paying medical claims. (Nationwide, under the new health care law, the minimum is 80 percent.)

One company, MVP Health Care — asked about its highest rate increase requests: 40 percent, 55 percent and 56.8 percent in three plans in Rochester — said the requests had been made in error and were withdrawn last week. Gary Hughes, a company spokesman, said the plans had 805 policyholders and MVP intended to drop them at the end of the year. It was not clear what those customers would do.

Such changes can leave regulators with little recourse. Allan Evans, a musicologist who was undergoing chemotherapy for lymphoma last year, was notified that his Emblem Health premium would increase 270 percent, to $2,293 a month for his family’s $5,000-deductible policy, provided through his wife’s business, a small Italian language school in Greenwich Village. Emblem had eliminated his family’s category and offered a more expensive plan. That kind of increase is not reviewable by the state.

“We were in shock,” Mr. Evans, 55, said. What saved him, he said, was a change in his part-time contract at the New School that made him eligible for coverage.

Ilene Margolin, a spokeswoman for Emblem, said she could not comment on an individual case, but added: “We lost tens of millions on some of those products. For some people, we reviewed if they were in the right risk pool. I’m not saying this is pretty, but there were actuarially sound reasons.”

Although demand for care nationwide appears to be growing relatively slowly, insurers and benefit consultants also say prices for medical care continue to climb as drug makers and hospitals charge more. “If they’re a popular brand or anchor hospital, they’re going to negotiate a significant increase if they can,” said Edward A. Kaplan, a benefits expert with the Segal Company, which recently surveyed insurers about costs.

Some analysts and companies are already questioning the high increase found through Kaiser’s survey, saying costs are slowing down and increases in premiums would probably be more moderate in 2012.

Some small business say they expect their premiums not to rise as sharply, only because younger, healthier employees are keeping claims low. “Up until last year, we saw very hefty increases — double digits,” said Heather Gombos, an executive for R. M. Jones & Co. and affiliated businesses in New Britain, Conn., which insures about 50 of 80 employees.

Family coverage is now running $12,000 a year, Ms. Gombos said, and she is waiting to see what increases are proposed for the coming year. “What it comes down to is good luck,” she said.

Green Party of the US endorses, joins 'October 2011' protest against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and 2012 austerity budget

2011-09-28T13:23:00.000-05:00

GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES

Contacts:
Scott McLarty, Media Coordinator, 202-518-5624, cell 202-904-7614, mclarty@greens.org
Starlene Rankin, Media Coordinator, 916-995-3805, starlene@gp.org

Greens call for an end to the Bush-Obama post-9/11 decade of wars without end, bloated military budgets, skyrocketing hate crimes against Muslims in the US, torture and other abuses of power

Green Party Speakers Bureau: Green leaders available to speak on peace, foreign policy, and domestic issues http://www.gp.org/speakers/subjects.php

WASHINGTON, DC -- The Green Party of the United States has endorsed the "October 2011" protests and other events marking the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan and the beginning of the 2012 federal austerity budget.

On October 6, 2011, thousands will gather on Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC to â€œoccupy the plaza and hold a People's Assembly where we come up with just and sustainable solutions to the crises we face and demand that these solutions be presented and that the people's needs be addressed. We will plan and engage in creative acts of civil resistance and demand that our inherent rights and freedoms be protected, and that our children have a chance to live in peace, to breathe clean air, and to grow edible natural food,â€ according to the Octobr 2011 web site.

Participants hope that the event will spark a US equivalent to the pro-democracy 'Arab Spring' of early 2011. Green leaders said that, after the changes in the Middle East, the demise of Osama bin Laden, and the severe damage to the nation's economy and rule of law that resulted from the wars, it's time to restore peace and sanity in America.

"In making this endorsement, we're challenging the dangerous political direction of the US. We also challenge others who support 'October 2011' to recognize the Green Party's leadership on the issues these events will address, such as endless wars, the demand for Medicare For All universal health care and millions of new jobs, and the need to end the control of top corporations over our political system," said Sanda Everette, member of the Coordinating Committee of the Green Party of California and former co-chair of the Green Party of the United States. Ms. Everette will participate in the October 6 event.

"If participants in the next month's events mute their criticism of President Obama and affirm their intention to vote Democrat, despite the numerous retreats and betrayals of the Democratic Party during the past decade, they will undermine the whole point of October 2011. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, bloated military spending, economic meltdown and Wall Street bailouts, failure to help people facing home foreclosures and unemployment, attacks on Social Security and Medicare, and abuses of power and violations of the US Constitution -- on all of these, the Democrats and Republicans have converged. Without a strong protest against both ruling parties, there is no chance of change," Ms. Everette added.

Green Party leaders hope that 'October 2011' would shine a light on the following:

The cost of the wars has reached $3.7 trillion during the past decade and has contributed to the domestic economic crisis. A report from the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan notes that "spending on contracts and grants to support US operations [is] expected to exceed $206 billion by the end of the 2011 budget year" and revealed [w]idespread waste and fraud discovered in wartime spending.The 'War on Terrorism' after 9/11, with its own high costs, is now the longest war in US history.

The Green Party has opposed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since President Bush ordered the invasions, and has called for a sharp reduction of military funding, with funds redirected towards job creation and other human needs (See "Green Party, responding to President Obama's Sept. 8 address, calls 'Green New Deal' the key to job creation," Green Party press release, September 9, 2011.

Hate crimes targeting people who are or perceived to be Muslim, South Asian, and Arab in the US have risen 1700% since 9/11.Thousands more have suffered months of detention without charges on suspicion of involvement with or sympathy for terrorism, apparently because of their ethnicity or religion and despite lack of evidence.

Since 9/11, Americans have seen widespread abuses of power and violations of the US Constitution and international law to which the US is signatory, such as indefinite detention and denial of habeas corpus, torture and extraordinary rendition, maintenance of 'black sites' outside of legal scrutiny, warrantless surveillance of US citizens, and harassment of whistleblowers.

The Obama Administration has maintained most of these policies and shielded Bush Administration officials who violated the law, while more vigorously targeting whistleblowers and even authorizing extra-judicial killing of suspects who are US citizens. As Scott Horton noted in a recent Harper's article,in the wake of 9/11 many US military functions have been privatized and removed from government and public oversight, the CIA has changed from an intelligence agency into a military force, the National Security Agency has migrated from foreign intelligence to domestic surveillance, and the Justice Department has become more and more a tool for political purposes.

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We Can No Longer Wait On Change: Come Protest October 6th

2011-09-25T18:03:00.004-05:00

Tikkun Daily

On October 6th, 2011, ten years after the United States invaded Afghanistan, and as the 2012 federal budget goes into effect with its brutal austerity measures, I will join thousands of people who will converge on Freedom Plaza, just a few blocks away from the White House in Washington, DC. We will mount a deliberate, prolonged, nonviolent protest. We will congregate there because we have no other choice. On sundown on our second day there, I will begin my Yom Kippur fast, only this time it will mean so much more to me than it has before.

I am an Israeli American. I moved from Israel to the United States almost ten years ago – in October 2001 – and was very eager to get naturalized and participate in American democracy by voting here. I felt that this is going to be where votes count the most, because U.S. policy affects each and every corner of the world. Most importantly, I felt that United States has the political clout to bring about a peace in Israel and Palestine. I believed in American democracy even after watching with bated breath the 2000 election recount, and I thought that if only the “good” party holds on to power, then U.S. policy will be good. That was ten years ago. By the time I became a U.S. citizen five years later I took upon myself the civic and moral responsibility for a second sovereign government that flaunts international law, one which is embroiled in two horrific wars, with no end in sight. By then I had also lived in this country long enough to get better acquainted with the bleeding internal wounds that slash through this nation. As I became increasingly informed, I became increasingly vocal, and increasingly angry. Initially, in 2006 I was eager to vote, but was thoroughly frustrated at getting naturalized just a few weeks too late for the registration deadlines; by 2008 I voted begrudgingly, without much faith in the promised “Change.” And by 2010, I voted with contempt, knowing that my vote for a Democratic member of congress is a wasted vote. Next time, I will not vote for Democrats with the hope that they will represent me any more. I know better.

I, along with the rest of the American people, have both passively and actively lent my consent to a government that has proven time and again that it will not look out for our values or our interests. In fact, regardless of which of the two parties is in power, we have seen one president after another, and one congress after another, enact policies that directly undermine our individual and collective well-being. As a result, the very same popular consent that powers the democracy that we ostensibly enjoy has been continuously eroding. More and more Americans realize that they are not only ill-served by their elected officials, but also that they do not truly have a choice in the matter. We are presented with two parties on the ballot, neither of which is beholden to its voters. They share a common allegiance to the money – the inordinate amount of money that is necessary for winning a modern electoral campaign. The comprehensive control of moneyed interests over our political power structure guarantees that decisions at all levels of government are made at the service of those individuals, groups and corporations who control the nation’s wealth – a steadily diminishing sliver of the general public – rather than the people who actually cast the votes on election day; rather than the people whose life, liberty and pursuit of happiness the government is supposed to serve.

Those interests are as diverse as they are all-encompassing: from the military-industrial complex that president Eisenhower warned us about over 50 years ago, to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries that effectively ensure that the U.S. maintain the most expensive, inefficient and inhumane health care system in the developed world. From the large energy multi-nationals that pollute our waters while enjoying lavish tax breaks, to the Wall Street bankers whose reckless gambling brought about a world-wide financial crisis. They are all very well regarded in the American corridors of power, because they fund American electoral campaigns.

We the people are left to suffer the fallout:

• War: A prolonged state of war, war with all its attendant atrocities and horrors, war with no regard for congressional (or popular) approval, war with dubious benefits to our national security, war by varied contrived names that drains our national treasury and swells our national debt. War is the hallmark of American foreign policy, whether it is our own troops carrying it out or, or our allies.

• Economy: Unemployment, poverty, homelessness, hunger. Decades of deregulation, “free trade” and other “pro-business” fiscal policies have rendered large swaths of our workforce idle. Entire industries have moved abroad, and in those that still offer some measure of domestic employment, workers often face a race to the bottom of the pay scale. The middle class – the bedrock of our economy – is gradually evaporating, as more and more of its former members find themselves among the ranks of the poor, even if they still have a job. Multitudes lose their homes to unscrupulous bankers, who then go on to receive taxpayer-funded bonuses. At every turn, the working poor and middle class are asked to “tighten their belts” as the rich get richer.

• Health care: Immense disparities in access to care, skyrocketing healthcare costs, mediocre public health outcomes. American health care providers offer the best care and medical services that money can buy, but more and more Americans can no longer afford the costs. Our society as a whole suffers from clinical outcomes comparable to those in developing countries, and among our peers, we are one of the only nations that does not regard health care as a fundamental individual right. We are still the wealthiest nation in the world, and we allow 45,000 of our fellow Americans to die every year because they could not get the medical care that could save their lives.

• Education: Immense disparities in access to education, ignorance, illiteracy. Government budgets consistently underfund our primary education teachers, ensuring that our children are undereducated. After that weak start, at early adulthood they have a choice of either saddling themselves with insurmountable college debt, or forgoing higher education and taking their chances in the inhospitable economy.

• Environment: Pollution, droughts, floods, famine, disease, mass extinctions. We are compelled to continue to rely on fossil fuels, barrelling down the road to catastrophic climate change, despite wide-reaching scientific consensus about our role in our own imminent demise. The relentless pursuit of more and more oil and coal obliterates our oceans and mountaintops. Despite the recent disaster in Japan, the government still support expansion of nuclear power plants. Like in so many other large-scale enterprises, risk is socialized, while profits are privatized.

It goes on. This list of oppressions is long and familiar, and both reason and compassion call us to respond to them. A free and sovereign people should be able to petition their government for redress of grievances. It is both our right, and our civic duty, and we are told that we can do just that in each election cycle. But after many changes of personnel in elected offices that have failed to deliver the necessary remedies, many of us have resigned to accept these hemorrhaging wounds in our communities. Some of us accept them explicitly by avoiding the ballot box when election time comes around. Some of us accept them implicitly – we continue voting for the candidate or party we consider “the lesser evil,” clinging onto the hope that this one will be different. But change does not come. Incumbents and challengers, legislators and executives, Democrats and Republicans – they all stock their campaign “war chests” with funds that flow in from the wealthy and pay for ads targeted at the poor. As electoral pundits will invariably tell us, in the swing districts, it’s all about getting out the vote. It’s pulling the merely downtrodden out from the ranks of the decimated, and getting them to participate in their own bludgeoning.

We are told that if we do not participate, everything will get much worse. Institutionally, the Democratic Party knows that progressive Americans are terrified of having another Republican president, or Senate. They only really compete for people who might vote Republican, so they ignore the left. Progressive slogans that are thrown around during the campaign season are quickly diluted into “centrist” legislation, which in most cases is pulled directly out of Republican bills. This is how we got a Republican health care reform package under a Democratic president with Democratic control of both houses of Congress. This is how we got the extension of the egregious Bush tax cuts, measures that were the bane of most Democratic voters. This is how our entire government got hijacked into a deceptive debate about the deficit and national debt. The previous Democratic president dismantled welfare, and the current one is proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The Democrats blame Republican intransigence for their legislative failures, but many congressional matches are lost without a single political punch being thrown. As long as the prevailing Democratic political strategy is to hew as far toward the “center” as possible and the party continues to preemptively abandon their progressive constituents, they can never honestly claim defeat at the hands of their opposition. They are responsible for their own undoing.

And still – we are called to go out and vote. Not only that – we are expected to go out and vote unquestioningly. We are expected to vote and then go home and acquiesce, until the next cycle.

But this year is special. This year we have seen people all around the world rise up and take a strong nonviolent stand against governments that have failed them. In the Middle East they did so after decades of oppression. In Europe we are seeing masses congregate in the streets and city squares to protest economic austerity measures foisted down upon them. In Wisconsin the state capitol was taken over by the people, shining a bright light on the Republican campaign against workers’ rights. We have seen examples of homegrown, democratically organized movements sprouting up spontaneously. These are responses to government systems that grew so divorced from their citizens that they left the people no other choice. They were compelled to take a step beyond the mechanics of their current systems, be it despotic or electoral. These popular struggles are still unfolding, but regardless of their eventual achievements, they can serve to inspire the American body politic. They can wake us from our slumber and show us another way. Whether we like it or not, we have reached that very same point of no return. It is up to us to acknowledge the predicament that we are in, and to recognize that our elected “leaders” will not save us. It is not on their agenda because it does not serve their funders’ interests. We have no time for petitioning through “the proper channels,” or to wait for the next election cycle and voice our protest at the ballot box. We need to make our voice heard.

It is up to us to reclaim our rights as individuals and as a people. It is up to us to serve as an example to others and to educate. To that end, we too, will congregate peacefully and establish our popular assembly in Freedom Plaza. We will demonstrate that there is political power in the hands of the people. At the core of our demands will be the dismantling of the stranglehold that money has on the power structure. We will demand a focus on people and their lives, instead of on corporations and their profits. The specific demands that follow will inevitably include an end to war, socially-motivated fiscal policies, universal health care and education, responsible and effective environmental regulation and a genuine investment in renewable energy sources, to name a few. The details will be discussed and developed in assembly meetings on the ground.

Americans who can no longer tolerate their oppression will come to Freedom Plaza on October 6th, 2011. We will stay there; we will recreate our democracy.

As the sun sets this eve of Yom Kippur, I will fast and take stock. With eyes wide open, I will reflect on what I’ve done and what I have failed to do. I will cease to participate in the American electoral farce and I will instead take part in the most important movement of our generation. This is my tikkun olam. Will you join me?

Health Care Versus Wealth Care: Investors with a Conscience Should Divest from Health Insurance Companies

2011-09-20T12:00:00.002-05:00

Tikkun.org

I was the doctor on duty one night in August when the ambulance rushed a man into our Midwestern hospital ER. As I walked into the room, the scene was right out of TV. A nurse was trying to start an IV. Someone was running an EKG. A student had just put oxygen in the patient’s nose. The room seemed crowded. The paramedics were sweating and slightly out of breath.

But my attention was on a pale, thin, fifty-five-year-old man sitting bolt upright on a gurney, clutching his chest and straining to breathe. Cold sweat dripped off his nose. I asked a couple of quick questions as I leaned him forward to listen to his lungs. Someone handed me his EKG showing an acute heart attack.

I slipped out of the room for a second to get the cardiologist on the phone. He would be right in, along with the rest of his team. But it was a Thursday night, late, and they were coming in from home. It would be at least twenty minutes until high-tech medicine could work its wonders, until the cardiologist could thread a thin plastic catheter into the patient’s heart and put in a stent to open his blockage.

I was back to the room in a flash, and he looked no better. We gave him intravenous nitroglycerin, morphine, and powerful blood thinners. He began to look less frightened and some color crept back into his face. We still had a few minutes before they would be ready for him in the cardiac catheterization lab.

Just then I became aware of a woman quietly sobbing in a chair in the corner of the room, probably his wife. I walked over toward her and, as I neared, I reached out to touch her shoulder. She suddenly turned a fierce face up at me, saying: “When he told you he’d been having pain for two hours, he was lying! He’s been having chest pains for the last two weeks!”

She didn’t let up: “We were in the ER six months ago with his chest hurting, and they told him to see his cardiologist, but we don’t have any insurance. They won’t see him again without cash up front! What are we supposed to do?”

Her voice rising, she added: “And you know what else? They’re suing us in small claims court right now over the bill from our last ER visit!”

Here was this poor woman, in my ER, not only deathly afraid that she might lose her husband tonight, but also afraid that whether he lived or died they might face an impossibly huge medical bill and lose their house, their car, everything.

The patient was a self-employed house painter, and he’d had a previous heart problem. Self-employed and a pre-existing condition — in America today with those two strikes, you are out. There is no way to afford health insurance. Is the Affordable Care Act going to fix this?

The Affordable Care Act and the Health Care Lobby
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) faces an uncertain future. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in August ruled the individual mandate unconstitutional. Judge Hull, who cast the deciding vote, was a Clinton appointee. The verdict states:

This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives.

The ACA was essentially written in the Senate Finance Committee chaired by Max Baucus. The actual author was his chief health care aide, Liz Fowler. Her job before working for Baucus? Vice president of WellPoint/Anthem/Blue Cross, the country’s largest health insurer.

President Obama signs the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act at the White House on March 23, 2010.

The health insurance industry played both sides against the middle during the congressional debate. While publicly claiming to be in favor of reform, they secretly funneled millions to front groups and organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, which fought the bill tooth and nail. What the insurers wanted most out of the deal was the individual mandate — a federally enforced requirement that all Americans buy their defective products, with taxpayer-financed subsidies for those who couldn’t afford the premiums. What they wanted least were regulatory burdens that might limit their profitability.

Not being able to buy insurance if you are sick is one of the catch-22 aspects of our crazy system. In the eyes of insurance bureaucrats, it seems that life itself is a pre-existing condition. The ACA’s ban on the use of pre-existing conditions to deny insurance coverage is scheduled to go into effect in 2014. Preventing that will be the next target of their lobbying fury.

It’s Good to Be an Insurance Company
In this down economy, there are few bright spots for investors. Thank God for health insurance.

The Big Five health insurers — WellPoint, UnitedHealth, Aetna, Humana, and CIGNA — together cover almost 100 million of us. Their profits from April to June 2011 totaled over $3.3 billion, 13 percent over their second quarter profits in 2010. Last year was their best year ever. For the twelve months ending in July 2011, these giants saw their average stock price rise almost 50 percent. These are huge corporations: WellPoint and UnitedHealth are in the top fifty of the Fortune 500.

What to do with all that profit? WellPoint, the behemoth created a decade ago from formerly nonprofit Blue Cross plans in fourteen states, spent $67 million on lobbying over the past three years. They paid their CEO, Angela Braly, $13 million in 2010, but that was paltry compared to the reimbursement package of UnitedHealth CEO Stephen Hemsley, who cleared $37 million, including the stock options he exercised.

Health insurance companies are raking in ever-rising profits, even as patients with insurance are driven into debt.

Those stock options take on extra significance when company stock repurchases are considered. WellPoint, to take only one example, spent $21.6 billion of patients’ premium dollars to buy back its own stock from 2003 through 2010.

Spending billions on stock buybacks benefits a tiny elite of CEOs, board members, and top officers, who are compensated largely with stock options. They buy the stock back to push the price upward. Their options increase in value as the share price rises. This is an enormous transfer of wealth from individuals and employers to top management. It benefits the largest Wall Street stockholders as well, but not you, not me, not patients.

This industry exists to collect premiums and process claims, and while they have no problems collecting our premiums, it’s a different story when they have to pay. The June 2011 AMA Health Insurer Report Card revealed commercial health insurers have an average claims-processing error rate of 19.3 percent, an increase of 2 percent compared to last year. The increase in overall inaccuracy represents an extra 3.6 million in erroneous claims payments compared to last year and added an estimated $1.5 billion in unnecessary administrative costs to the health system. Medicare, by comparison, had an error rate of less than 4 percent.

They are obviously not using their piles of cash to improve service. What about lowering premiums? In our dreams.

Health insurance premiums have more than doubled over the last ten years, rising at four times the overall rate of inflation. (Over the same period Medicare premiums have barely risen at all, with no increase in out-of-pocket expenses.) While premiums have risen, coverage has shrunk. Copays and deductibles increase every year. People with individual coverage can have annual deductibles of $10,000 and more. No wonder illness leads to bankruptcy, even if you have insurance.

Bankruptcy, Moral and Financial
Every business day in America, 3,700 families file for bankruptcy caused by illness and medical bills, and that number is rising. This shameful situation happens in no other wealthy democracy. It would be a scandal anywhere else. Most medically bankrupt families were middle-class before they suffered financial setbacks. Roughly 60 percent of them had attended college; twenty percent of families included a military veteran or active-duty soldier.

Unexpected stays in a hospital bed drive thousands of middle-class and working-class families to declare bankruptcy every day.

Most astoundingly, 60 percent of the individuals whose illness led to bankruptcy had private health insurance when they got sick. Don’t we buy health insurance to avoid financial ruin? High deductibles lead directly to bankruptcy and foreclosure. To make matters worse, they cause people to postpone needed care. All of which lead to higher insurance company profits.

The insurers don’t like to tell their customers this, but when they talk to their Wall Street masters, they sing a different tune. Angela Braly of WellPoint, speaking during a conference call for financial analysts in 2008, was asked if she would consider lowering premiums if that would increase enrollment in Anthem policies. Her reply, “We will not sacrifice profitability for membership,” was just what they wanted to hear.

That sentiment hasn’t changed. Recently Aetna’s chief financial officer, Joseph Zubretsky, made similar comments on a conference call. Concerned that investors might think Aetna was willing to grow by adding people to its rolls who could have substantial medical needs, Zubretsky soothed their fears, “We would like to have both profit and growth, but if you have to choose between one or the other, you take margin and profit and you sacrifice the growth.”

Recall that these are the same companies that developed algorithms to target women diagnosed with breast cancer so they could scour their health records for an excuse to cancel their policies. This inhuman practice, known as rescission, has supposedly been banned by the ACA.

Buying Doctors
If insurance companies are not lowering premiums to attract more customers or investing in infrastructure to reduce errors, what else besides their own stock (and some politicians) are they buying? Doctors! UnitedHealth is quietly buying medical groups who treat patients covered by its plans in several areas of the country. WellPoint announced in June that it would acquire CareMore, which operates twenty-six clinics in the Los Angeles area. CIGNA claims that it saves 9 percent on patients treated by doctors in a Phoenix medical group it controls. Is this a good thing?

In July, Kaiser Health News, in an article titled “Managed Care Enters The Exam Room As Insurers Buy Doctor Groups” said:

Some observers watching the developments say the health law, which in part was sold as a way to rein in insurers, has had the opposite result, opening the door for the companies to take control of even more parts of the health system.

“There’s a gigantic Murphy’s law emerging here,” said Ian Morrison, a California-based health care consultant who does some work for United, as well as most of its competitors. “The very people who were the demons in all of this, that the public can’t stand — managed-care firms — are the big winners.”

And the losers? Patients, and those of us paying premiums.

Health, Health Care, and Health Insurance
No other wealthy democracy spends as much on health care as we do. It’s not even close. Most of our peer countries spend about half as much per capita as we do.

If you hear politicians proclaim “America has the best health care in the world,” you can stop listening to them at that point. They are not reality-based. We may be paying the most on the planet for health care, but there is no objective evidence to support the claim that our health care is the best. Again, it’s not even close. The World Health Organization ranks U.S. health care thirty-seventh, just below Costa Rica.

No other wealthy democracy relies on for-profit insurance companies. Here we stand alone.

On August 10, 2011, the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch editorialized, “If America truly is serious about dealing with its deficit problems, there’s a fairly simple solution. But you’re probably not going to like it: Enact a single-payer health care plan.” The editorial goes on to explain that the “way for government to address its health costs is not to shift them, but to reduce them. This is what a single-payer health care system would do, largely by taking the for-profit players (insurance companies for the most part) out of the loop.”

The editorial asserts, “the ACA didn’t go far enough,” and concludes: “Eventually, the United States will have a single-payer plan. But we’ll waste a lot of money and time getting there.” Its authors could have added “and waste a lot of lives” too.

What is a “single-payer plan” like the Post-Dispatch endorses? Robert Reich, author, professor, and secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, explained it this way in February 2011:

If the individual mandate to buy private health insurance gets struck down by the Supreme Court or killed off by Congress, I’d recommend President Obama immediately propose what he should have proposed in the beginning — universal health care based on Medicare for all.

Medicare is a single-payer plan. Everyone over age sixty-five is covered by this simple, single plan, which is publicly financed and privately delivered. How would a single-payer plan save money? The Post-Dispatch explains, “Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.”

The respected journal Health Affairs published more evidence of the economic advantage of a single payer system on August 19, 2011. The article “US Physician Practices Versus Canadians: Spending Nearly Four Times As Much Money Interacting With Payers” found that U.S. physicians’ office staff “spent 20.6 hours per physician per week interacting with health plans — nearly ten times that of their Ontario counterparts. If U.S. physicians had administrative costs similar to those of Ontario physicians, the total savings would be approximately $27.6 billion per year.”

The evidence is overwhelming: the for-profit insurance industry adds a huge amount of inefficiency, bureaucracy and cost to our system while adding no value, only hassle. These companies are parasitic middlemen we would be better off without. Their interest is in wealth care, not health care.

On top of that, the insurance industry is the single greatest barrier to achieving an efficient and affordable system to cover all Americans. If you have any doubt, read Wendell Potter’s Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans. During the debate over the ACA, health insurance lobbyists sank the president’s public option, even though 70 percent of the public favored it. Their war chests overflow with money and their influence grows every day.

Hoping Congress will fix this leads only to despair. We need new ways to weaken the death grip this powerful industry has on us.

Divestment
There is a battle going on for the soul of America. Before he died, Ted Kennedy wrote to President Obama about health care reform, calling it “the great unfinished business of our society.” Kennedy avowed, “What we face is above all a moral issue; that at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.”

Back in the ER on that hot August night, I sent my man to the cath lab and they successfully stented his blockage. He went home the next day with a bill for $25,000. I tried to call him a few months later, but the phone number was “no longer in service.”

Congress and the politicians are “no longer in service.” We’ve got to look elsewhere.

Could we simply boycott health insurance? No, over 50 million are without insurance now, and they are living sicker and dying younger because they have barriers to care.

Stockholders with a conscience have tried for years to engage corporate leadership and have attempted shareholder resolutions to reform the industry from the inside. Despite their best efforts, they have had no significant positive effect so far.

It is time to move beyond resolutions and on to divestment.

The Divestment Campaign for Health Care is one group that is organizing a push in that direction.

From 1985 to 1990, over two hundred U.S. companies cut all ties with South Africa, resulting in a loss of $1 billion in direct American investment. This economic pressure hastened the fall of apartheid. It happened as a result of people power, democracy in action. Pension funds divested from companies doing business with South Africa. Faith communities declared they would not support injustice. Students called on their universities to cleanse their endowments. An idea was born — “socially responsible investing.”

There is nothing socially responsible about investing in the health insurance industry.

"Go to your church, your union ... your friends and neighbors, and tell them it’s time to get the health insurers out!" the author writes. Here, a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Cortland, New York, rallies for single-payer health care.

Up to now, they have received little scrutiny from investors. One exception is Domini Social Investments, whose Global Investment Standards give “support [for] government’s responsibility to provide basic public goods that are as varied as health care, prisons, primary school education, and national security.” Domini is “concerned about the extent to which health insurance privatizes a public good.” As a result, Domini has disqualified most health insurers from their portfolios.

In contrast, the $4 billion TIAA-CREF Social Choice Equity Fund holds $24 million in WellPoint stock, as well as Aetna and Humana from the health insurance Big Five. WellPoint stock may only represent 0.6 percent of the total fund, but in this large, diversified mutual fund, which includes over 800 individual stocks, WellPoint is in the top 5 percent of the fund’s largest holdings. TIAA-CREF has refused to exclude health insurance companies.

The Presbyterian Church USA, often in the vanguard of the faith community, is there again. Their General Assembly meets in the summer of 2012 and they will vote on an “Overture” to “implement divestment procedures as well as encourage individual Presbyterians and congregations to divest of holdings in the [publicly traded health insurance] companies.” Other faith groups cannot be far behind.

We have nothing to lose. Health insurance companies have everything to lose as their stock prices drop and their influence wanes. Go to your church, your union, your pension plan, your 401k advisor, your university endowment, your city council, your friends and neighbors, and tell them it’s time to get the health insurers out!

Who can defend these corporations? There is no business case, no health care case, no moral case to support their ongoing existence. They make their profits by avoiding taking care of sick people — by refusing to issue policies, canceling policies, or denying payment. I went to medical school in order to care for the sick.

The health insurance industry must go.

Rob Stone is a gardener, grandfather, and teacher. He has practiced emergency medicine in Bloomington, Indiana, since the early 1980s, and for the past year has been transitioning his medical career to hospice and palliative medicine. He is founder and director of Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan and serves on the board of directors of Physicians for a National Health Program.

Number of Uninsured Up Another Million

2011-09-17T19:32:00.002-05:00

MedPage Today

A record 49.9 million Americans were without health insurance during 2010, up almost 2% from the 49.0 million uninsured in 2009, the Census Bureau reported.

The percentage of the population without insurance rose 0.2 percentage points, from 16.1% to 16.3%, though this was not significant at the P<0.1 level, the agency said.

Results from the agency's 2010 Current Population Survey also found increases in the number of Americans living below the poverty level (46.2 million versus 43.6 million in 2009) as well as declines in inflation-adjusted median household income. The proportion of the population with private health insurance overall also declined, as did the proportion with insurance provided by employers.

In a statement, the Census Bureau indicated that these trends were outgrowths of the recent recession, even though the economy was officially in recovery during 2010.

The agency noted that the first years after previous recessions were also typically marked by increases in poverty rates and declining income and health coverage.

Regionally, the biggest increase in being uninsured occurred in the Northeast, jumping 0.6 percentage points from the previous year, to 12.4%. But the 2010 rate was still lower than for any other region.

Southern states, on the other hand, had the highest overall uninsured rate, at 19.1%, but this was actually a slight drop from 2009 when the rate stood at 19.2%.

Ironically, individuals with jobs were more likely to be uninsured than the population as a whole. The survey found that, among people 18 to 64 years old who worked at some point during 2010, 28.0 million (19.5%) lacked health insurance.

Also, people with disabilities were hit hard in 2010. Whereas 16.0% lacked health coverage in 2009, last year the figure rose to 17.3%.

Other results from the survey concerning health insurance included:

•Percent covered by private health insurance: 64.0% in 2010, down from 64.5% in 2009
•Percent covered by employer-based plans: 55.3% in 2010, down from 56.1% in 2009
•Percent covered by Medicaid only: 11.2% in both years

In the Current Population Survey, lack of health insurance is supposed to mean that respondents had no coverage at any time during the year. The Census Bureau said the survey includes a series of questions meant to confirm the complete lack of insurance, but it acknowledged that misunderstandings by respondents are common.

Nader Rips Conyers for WilmerHale Bailout Bill

2011-09-16T12:58:00.002-05:00

Corporate Crime Reporter

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader last week ripped Congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan) for his role in getting passed special interest legislation that would retroactively save corporate law firm WilmerHale more than $200 million.

“You got an amendment passed into law,”Nader wrote to Conyers in a letter dated September 9, 2011. “It wasn’t a raise in the stagnant minimum wage or some tougher measures on corporate crime or needed revisions to the Patriot Act or curbing official illegality by the Executive Branch.”

“No, it was to save a drug company and its law firm a great deal of money and allow higher prices for patients which included neutering the potential malpractice liability of the law firm – $214 million worth – retroactively of course,” Nader wrote. “This bailout is in an overall anti-small business, anti-small inventor, patent bill.”

President Obama is expected to sign the bill into law this week.

The Senate passed the bill last week, and the House passed it in June.

The bill is a patent system overhaul bill, with a special provision that would most likely let WilmerHale off the hook on a $214 million malpractice judgment.

The story spans more than a decade.

WilmerHale was handling a patent filing for a drug company – the Parsippany, New Jersey based Medicines Company.

The law firm missed the filing deadline by a day, causing the patent to be denied by the Patent and Trademark Office.

The company sued the law firm for malpractice.

WilmerHale settled the malpractice case by agreeing to pay $18 million, plus another $214 million in damages if a generic competitor for one of its drugs in question came on line before June 2015.

The bill – soon to become law – would retroactively grant the company the patent it was seeking by changing Patent Office rules on late filings.

The bill was sponsored by Conyers in the House and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) in the Senate.

The bill was actively opposed by Senators Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) and Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma).

Nader is siding with Sessions and Coburn and the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

In a last ditch but failed attempt to stop the legislation from passing the Senate, Coburn and Session wrote a letter to their Senate colleagues.

“The key question is whether we will vote to bail out a law firm that made a mistake and now wants consumers and taxpayers to pay the freight for that error,” they wrote.

The answer from the Senate last week – yes.

The Senate voted to reject an amendment introduced by Sessions to delete the WilmerHale bailout provision from the bill.

The Wall Street Journal also weighed in against the bailout:

“There are few things as unbecoming as a law firm and drug company seeking special favors from Congress that would weaken patent law for their own self interest,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized last week. “Asking Congress to break the rules as a special favor corrupts the law.”

“Amazing who was on the right side here,” Nader wrote to Conyers. “Lamar Smith, Jeff Sessions, Tom Coburn. They argued against interfering with the litigation.”

“This is the same half of WilmerHale – that is, the merged Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering – that stood with the auto giants in 1966 in weakening the auto safety legislation. WCP lobbied successfully to delete the criminal penalty – properly defended by Tip O’Neill – provision from the bill for willful and knowing violation of safety standards.”

“So this is where we are with leading progressives in the Congress,” Nader wrote. “No authentic push for Obama’s 2008 promise to raise the federal minimum wage to $9.50. No push for a comprehensive corporate criminal law code in the midst of a corporate crime wave. And the most minimum attention to the runaway outlaw presidency that, with Congressional complicity, has turned Congress for a decade into an inkblot during these endless, costly unilateral wars and remote interventions.”

“Promises, nice words, meetings, but nothing like the activated, driven toughness of those who call themselves Tea Partiers, where you work.”

Muslim Council of America Opens Free Health Clinic in Braddock, PA

2011-09-14T14:44:00.002-05:00

The Braddock Free Clinic is available to residents of the wider Braddock region including all of the area previously served by UPMC Braddock Hospital. The clinic will operate on Saturdays and Sundays from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM in the Braddock Municipal Building. Volunteer doctors organized by the Muslim Council of America will operate the clinic. It is hosted by Braddock Borough Council and supported by SOCH. The open house will give everybody a chance to see the beginnings of a new medical care model in the Braddock area and meet the people who will be providing the services. New patients can also sign up at the open house.

Riffat Chugtai, Executive Director of the Braddock Free Clinic, said, “We want to reach a wide geographic area. Patients are not limited to Braddock. We target the service to adults without health insurance who have incomes below 350% of the poverty level. This is not a publicly funded program. It is a commitment by the Muslim community to the healthcare needs of the region. Doctors and administrative staff are volunteers committed to community healthcare.”

Jesse Brown, Braddock Borough Council President, said, “We want the clinic to be successful and serve the widest area possible. We won’t turn anybody away because of where they live. This is the seed of a new healthcare network in the Mon Valley and surrounding areas. I think it can be a model for other communities as well.”

Tony Buba, nationally known filmmaker, who is the spokesperson for SOCH said, “This is a small step toward restoring healthcare in Braddock and working toward access to healthcare by everybody. What we truly need is a single payer health system. We thank Dr. Akhtar and the Muslim Council of America for taking notice of our two years of struggle against the closure of UPMC Braddock and helping bring healthcare back to those who are uninsured and need care the most.”

For more information, contact:

Dr. Mohammad Akhtar, 724-538-3858, CEO, Muslim Council of America
Riffat Chugtai, 412-612-6381, Clinic Executive Director
SOCH: Tony Buba, 412-351-4808

Soaring Poverty Casts Spotlight on ‘Lost Decade’

2011-09-14T12:50:00.002-05:00

NY Times

WASHINGTON — Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.

And in new signs of distress among the middle class, median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1997.

Economists pointed to a telling statistic: It was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period, said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard.

“This is truly a lost decade,” Mr. Katz said. “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

The bureau’s findings were worse than many economists expected, and brought into sharp relief the toll the past decade — including the painful declines of the financial crisis and recession —had taken on Americans at the middle and lower parts of the income ladder. It is also fresh evidence that the disappointing economic recovery has done nothing for the country’s poorest citizens.

The report said the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line last year, 15.1 percent, was the highest level since 1993. (The poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,314.)

The report comes as President Obama gears up to try to pass a jobs bill, and analysts said the bleak numbers could help him make his case for urgency. But they could also be used against him by Republican opponents seeking to highlight economic shortcomings on his watch.

“This is one more piece of bad news on the economy,” said Ron Haskins, a director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution. “This will be another cross to bear by the administration.”

The past decade was also marked by a growing gap between the very top and very bottom of the income ladder. Median household income for the bottom tenth of the income spectrum fell by 12 percent from a peak in 1999, while the top 90th percentile dropped by just 1.5 percent. Overall, median household income adjusted for inflation declined by 2.3 percent in 2010 from the previous year, to $49,445. That was 7 percent less than the peak of $53,252 in 1999. Part of the income decline over time is because of the smaller size of the American family.

This year is not likely to be any better, economists said. Stimulus money has largely ended, and state and local governments have made deep cuts to staff and to budgets for social programs, both likely to move economically fragile families closer to poverty.

Minorities were hit hardest. Blacks experienced the highest poverty rate, at 27 percent, up from 25 percent in 2009, and Hispanics rose to 26 percent from 25 percent. For whites, 9.9 percent lived in poverty, up from 9.4 percent in 2009. Asians were unchanged at 12.1 percent.

An analysis by the Brookings Institution estimated that at the current rate, the recession will have added nearly 10 million people to the ranks of the poor by the middle of the decade.

Joblessness was the main culprit pushing more Americans into poverty, economists said.

Last year, about 48 million people ages 18 to 64 did not work even one week out of the year, up from 45 million in 2009, said Trudi Renwick, a Census official.

“Once you’ve been out of work for a long time, it’s a very difficult road to get back,” Mr. Katz said.

Median income fell across all working-age categories, but was sharpest drop was among the young working Americans, ages 15 to 24, who experienced a decline of 9 percent.

According to the Census figures, the median annual income for a male full-time, year-round worker in 2010 — $47,715 — was virtually unchanged, in 2010 dollars, from its level in 1973, when it was $49,065, said Sheldon Danziger, professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.

Those who do not have college degrees were particularly hard hit, he said. “The median, full-time male worker has made no progress on average,” Mr. Danziger said.

The recession has continued pushing 25-to-34-year-olds to move in with family and friends to save money. Of that group, nearly half were living below the poverty line, when their parents’ incomes were excluded. The poverty level for a single person under the age of 65 was $11,344.

“We’re risking a new underclass,” said Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research and Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“Young, less-educated adults, mainly men, can’t support their children and form stable families because they are jobless,” he added.

But even the period of economic growth that came before the recession did little for the middle and bottom wage earners.

Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that the period from 2001 to 2007 was the first recovery on record where the level of poverty was deeper, and median income of working-age people was lower, at the end than at the beginning.

“Even before the recession hit, a lot of people were falling behind,” he said. “This may be adding to people’s sense of urgency about the economy.”

The suburban poverty rate, at 11.8 percent, appears to be the highest since 1967, Mr. Sherman added. Last year more Americans fell into deep poverty, defined as less than half the official poverty line, or about $11,000, with the ranks of that group increasing to 20.5 million, or about 6.7 percent of the population.

Poverty has also swallowed more children, with about 16.4 million in its ranks last year, the highest numbers since 1962, according to William Frey, senior demographer at Brookings. That means 22 percent of children are in poverty, the highest percentage since 1993.

The census figures do not count noncash assistance, like food stamps and the earned-income tax credit, and economists say that as a result they tend to overstate poverty numbers for certain groups, like children. But rises in the cost of housing, medical care and energy are not taken into account, either.

The report also said the number of uninsured Americans increased by 900,000 to 49.9 million.

Those covered by employer-based insurance continued to decline in 2010, to about 55 percent, while those with government-provided coverage continued to increase, up slightly to 31 percent. Employer-based coverage was down from 65 percent in 2000, the report said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 13, 2011

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect figure for the number of people the Census Bureau found to be in poverty in the Unites States. The number is 46.2 million people, not 56.2 million.

U.S. poverty rate reaches 15.1 percent

2011-09-13T12:33:00.002-05:00

The Washington Post

The nation’s poverty rate spiked to 15.1 percent in 2010, the highest level since 1993, the Census Bureau reported on Tuesday, providing vivid new evidence about the country’s inability to escape the lingering effects of the recession.

About 46.2 million Americans lived in poverty last year, marking an increase of 2.6 million over 2009 and the fourth consecutive annual increase in poverty.

The total number of people living below the poverty line — which in 2010 was set at an income of $22,314 for a family of four — is now at the highest level in the 52 years the statistic has been collected.

The continued rise in poverty was just the latest manifestation of a troubled economy that has left 14 million Americans out of work and caused unemployment to hover above 9 percent for 25 of the past 27 months.

As poverty has spiked, median household income declined by 2.3 percent to $49,445 between 2009 and 2010. The typical household now earns less than it did in 1997, when inflation is factored in, a troubling sign of economic stagnation.

The decline in income has been most pronounced among those who earn the least. Overall, median household income has declined by 7.1 percent since peaking in 1999. The bottom 10 percent of earners have seen their income decline by 12.1 percent, while the top 10 percent have experienced a decline of 1.5 percent in that time period, the Census Bureau reported.

The Census Bureau also reported that 16.3 percent of Americans are without health coverage, a share that officials called statistically unchanged from 2009.

“Income down, poverty up, health insurance coverage down or flat,” said Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “The news on economic well-being in the U.S. is not good.”

The news was particularly bad for blacks, Hispanics, children and women. The poverty rate for Hispanics climbed to 26.6 percent from 25.3 percent, and for blacks it increased to 27.4 percent from 25.8 percent. For whites, the poverty rate in 2010 was 9.9 percent, a half percentage point increase from the previous year. Meanwhile, 12.1 percent of Asian Americans fell below the poverty line in 2010, which was statistically unchanged from 2009.

Among children, the poverty rate climbed to 22 percent. The black child poverty rate climbed to 39 percent, while the Hispanic child poverty rate reached 35 percent. The white child poverty rate was 12.4 percent.

Overall, Hispanics children account for 37 percent of the children in poverty, a share that has gone ups substantially since 2009, according to William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer

“The Hispanic population has been hit hard by the recession,” Frey said. “They have been in jobs — construction and services — that have borne the brunt of what is going on in the economy.”

Meanwhile, record numbers of women were living in poverty, according to an analysis of the Census data by the National Women’s Law Center. The poverty rate among women climbed to 14.5 percent in 2010 from 13.9 percent in 2009, the highest level in 17 years.

More than 17 million women lived in poverty in 2010, including over 7.5 million in extreme poverty, with an income below half of the federal poverty line.

“Behind today’s grim statistics are real people who are finding it harder than ever to keep a roof over their heads, feed their families, get the health care they need and give their children a chance at a better life,” said Joan Entmacher, NWLC vice president for Family Economic Security.

The report found that the recession was forcing hard-pressed Americans — particularly the young — to double up in households with relatives and friends. Among Americans aged 25 to 34, the number of people doubled up in households has increased 25 percent since the recession hit in 2007.

Downward Mobility from the Middle Class: Waking up from the American Dream

2011-09-13T12:11:00.002-05:00

The Pew Charitable Trusts, Economic Mobility Project, September 2011

The idea that children will grow up to be better off than their parents is a central component of the American Dream, and sustains American optimism. However, “Downward Mobility from the Middle Class: Waking up from the American Dream” finds that a middle-class upbringing does not guarantee the same status over the course of a lifetime. A third of Americans raised in the middle class — defined here as those between the 30th and 70th percentiles of the income distribution — fall out of the middle as adults.

Failing Forward: Crisis among nation's children

2011-09-10T20:32:00.002-05:00

NY Times

Sometimes I push back on my heels, look at this country and wonder aloud: “What on earth are we doing?”

We have a growing crisis among the nation’s children, yet our policies ignore that reality at best and exacerbate it at worst.

According to a report issued this week by the Guttmacher Institute, the unintended pregnancy rate has jumped 50 percent since 1994, yet a July report from the institute points out that politicians are setting records passing laws to restrict abortion. It said: “The 80 abortion restrictions enacted this year are more than double the previous record of 34 abortion restrictions enacted in 2005 — and more than triple the 23 enacted in 2010.” Add to this the assault by conservatives on Planned Parenthood, and what are we saying?

This is what we’re saying: actions have consequences. If you didn’t want a child, you shouldn’t have had sex. You must be punished by becoming a parent even if you know that you are not willing or able to be one.

This is insane.

Even if you follow a primitive religious concept of punishment for sex, as many on the right seem to do, you must at some point acknowledge that it is the child, not the parent, who will be punished most by our current policies that increasingly advocate for “unborn children” but fall silent for those outside the womb.

This is not how a rational society operates.

Aside from the raft of negative outcomes associated with unintended pregnancies, there are a host of other indicators that suggest a perilous world for the nation’s children.

A report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation last week found that “the official child poverty rate, which is a conservative measure of economic hardship, increased 18 percent between 2000 and 2009.”

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the number of children facing food insecurity in 2009 soared to nearly one in four. And ABC News pointed out this week that a breathtaking 49 percent of all children born in this country are born to families who receive food supplements from the federal Women, Infants and Children assistance program.

As the World Bank points out, “undernutrition” in young children has been linked to delayed growth and motor development, lower I.Q.’s, behavioral problems and decreased attention, deficient learning and lower educational achievement.

Yet we wonder why our children’s educational outcomes are so low when compared with other wealthy nations. We even have the nerve to begrudge teachers for not being able to squeeze success out of children primed for failure.

It should come as no surprise that a C.D.C. report this month found a continued rise in the percentage of children being diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or that the country has continued its course of mass incarceration. The prison population in the United States has nearly quadrupled over the last 25 years. In fact, we have the highest incarceration rate of any Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development country. This isn’t only a moral outrage; it’s also budgetary lunacy. As a report released last month by the Children’s Defense Fund pointed out, “the U.S. spends almost two-and-a-half times as much per prisoner as per public school pupil.”

We simply can’t keep turning to pills and prisons to solve issues of poverty and poor parenting. This is unhealthy, unsustainable and unwise.

We have to do a better, more focused job of teaching sex education and providing contraceptive options (kudos here to the administration for moving this month to require insurance companies to provide birth control services to women at no extra cost). We have to remove the stigma and judgment around sex. Sex isn’t bad or unnatural. It’s one of the most natural things that we do. It just needs to be safe and responsible.

We also have to preserve women’s birth options should they become pregnant, including the option not to give birth. And, finally, for all the children who are born, we must make a valiant effort to give each and every one of them a fighting chance, which includes food and medicine when their parents can’t provide it. We must do this not as a boon or crutch to the parent, but as a selfish investment in the future of this great society.

They need our help now more than ever because the current economic stress may take some time to overcome.

As an updated Budget and Economic Outlook report issued by the Congressional Budget Office this week points out, the unemployment rate is expected to stay above 8 percent until the middle of the decade.

Now is when we need government to step up and be smart.

This is exactly the wrong time to do what the Republicans would have us do. In their 2012 budget, they propose cutting nutrition programs as part of austerity measures so that we don’t leave our children saddled with debt. Meanwhile, they completely ignore the fact that those cuts could leave even more children saddled with physical or developmental problems.

They want to hold the line on tax breaks for the wealthy, not paying attention to the fact that our growing income inequality, which could be reversed, continues to foster developmental inequality, which is almost impossible to reverse.

We have to start this conversation from a different point. We must ask: “What kind of society do we want to build, and what kinds of workers, soldiers and citizens should populate that society?” If we want that society to be prosperous and safe and filled with healthy, well-educated and well-adjusted people, then the policy directions become clear.

They are almost the exact opposite of what we are doing.

Study: Costs Keep Med Students From Much-Needed Mental Health Care

2011-09-10T19:41:00.003-05:00

CommonHealth blog

Medical students are a challenged lot — sleep-deprived, stressed and driven. With the constant cramming of facts into their overloaded heads, and the constant need to steel themselves against the daily rounds of disease and injury, many medical students are left mentally and emotionally drained. Like their patients, they need a doctor. But many don’t reach out for help.

In a research letter just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Drs. Rachel Nardin and J. Wesley Boyd — both from the Harvard-affiliated Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) — help illuminate the vulnerability of U.S. medical students to untreated and debilitating depression and substance abuse. These at-risk students tend not to seek the mental health services they need, the researchers found, due to the overwhelming cost of appropriate mental health services.

Schools and parents may be mandated to provide health insurance, but the study found that many of the plans offered did not provide affordable or adequate coverage for mental health and substance abuse treatment.

Data culled for this first-time survey of health insurance offered to U.S. medical students was collected from June through December 2010. The findings from 115 of the total 129 public and private medical schools in the U.S. revealed wide variability in annual dollar and visit limitations across the non-uniform plans.

For example, mental health dollar limits ran from $1000 – $200,000 for outpatient services; $800 – $200,000 for outpatient substance abuse treatment; and $1000 – $200,000 for inpatient mental health and substance abuse treatment.

Nardin said the survey also revealed that “Private medical schools are more likely than public schools to offer worse-than-average cost-sharing for outpatient substance abuse treatment. The worst region in the country, she said, was the Northeast.

Boyd, a faculty psychiatrist and an outspoken advocate for physician health, served for six years as associate director of the Physician Health Services, Inc., a nonprofit subsidiary of the Massachusetts Medical Society that provides confidential consultation and support to at-risk medical students and doctors across the state.

“Over the past two decades,” he said, “I have seen medical schools try to humanize the student’s experience and observed hospitals ratcheting up easier practices along with their awareness of physician health.” But the reality remains that medicine is very intense and stressful for those who are vulnerable to depression, anxiety, and substance abuse.

Troubled students often resist seeking treatment at the onset of their symptoms, fearing high out-of-pocket costs and an accumulation of more school debt. “But with any psychiatric disorder or substance abuse,” said Boyd, “early intervention definitely correlates to better outcomes.”

“There is a lack of sympathy for this fear of debt,” he said. “Most people just assume doctors will make a lot of money. But mounting debt from long stints at expensive schools weighs very heavily upon the students and most will do anything they can to avoid increasing it.”

According to statistics from the graduating medical school class of 2008, Nardin said, the median debt for public school students was $145,00 and for private school students it was $180,000.

To provide context for the cost of outpatient substance abuse treatment, I spoke with Talbott Recovery Campus, in Atlanta, Georgia, well known by Boyd and others for its Impaired Professionals Program. Debbie Kingston of the intake department told me: “The 90-day residential treatment program costs $39,000 for out-of network plans. If in-network, most insurance plans only cover $2000-$8000 of the total cost.”

Kingston added that detox, even though required, was not included in this tab. Depending on the addiction, detox can take from two to ten days. These costs also do not include the need for on-going monitoring and mental health support once a patient completes their residential stay.

In an article posted recently on Commonhealth, Rachel Zimmerman reported on a study, also authored by Boyd, that points to a more general obstacle to mental health care. The study’s hypothesis, which was borne out, posited that availability of psychiatric services has greatly diminished “due to a combination of paltry reimbursement rates and budget cutbacks.” The study’s authors wrote: “Reimbursements for psychiatric services are far lower than for other types of care, so institutions frequently restrict access as stringently as possible.”

Of the 64 medical facilities listed by Blue Cross and Blue Shield in the greater Boston area and contacted for the study, only four could offer an appointment within two weeks. Others refused to offer an appointment due to requirements that all patients be enrolled with a primary care doctor affiliated with that particular psychiatric facility. Study researcher Andy Lindenmeyer, a fourth- year resident in the Harvard Longwood psychiatric program, said, “I think the point here is that having health insurance does not equal access to care.”

Stephanie Woolhandler, a professor of public health at City University of New York and a visiting professor of medicine at CHA, summed up the state of mental health care in a recent email: "The reality is that access to mental health care is very poor in this country, even for people with private insurance. Because mental illness is stigmatized, the mentally ill are often unable or unwilling to fight their insurance company to get their care reimbursed. The result is a very uneven distribution of care, with abundant mental health resources available to those who can pay out of pocket, while those that must rely on their insurance find that mental health care is restricted or even unavailable.”

“We need our medical schools to push themselves to provide students with more affordable care,” said Boyd. “What’s best for the health of our students will result in better physicians and the future well-being of their patients.”

A note of disclosure: Both Drs. Boyd and Nardin, authors of the survey letter published in JAMA, are active members of the group Physicians for a National Health Program, an organization of physicians who advocate for single-payer national health insurance.

Healthcare, babies and the national debt: The real cost

2011-08-31T18:07:00.002-05:00

Frost Illustrated

The term “infant mortality rate” is a measure of the number of babies that die under one year of age per 1,000 live births. It is a useful indicator of how effective a healthcare system is—the lower the number, the fewer babies die.

Although there are a lot of people who feel the U.S. has the best healthcare system in the world, according to the Center for Disease Control, the United States actually ranks 29th in the world for infant mortality. And it gets worse. Infant mortality for African Americans is consistently more than twice that for white Americans—infant mortality among African Americans in 2007 was 13.3 deaths per 1,000 live births compared to a rate for non-Hispanic whites of 5.6.

There are a lot of reasons why this disparity exists—it happens to be a very complex issue. One big factor is simply the lack of access to appropriate healthcare. Healthy babies need healthy mothers, and the process starts well before a woman gets pregnant. But, that process can’t happen if you don’t have insurance and can’t afford to see a doctor.

Every other developed country in the world has decided that people should be able to get the care they need when they need it, and without having to worry about going bankrupt. In America, the healthcare system has ended up protecting the interests of for-profit companies over the needs of individuals and, as a result, people are left without access to care. And, the problem is spreading—even people with insurance are finding that their copays and deductibles are becoming so expensive that they put off needed care because they can’t afford it.

And, now we have the debt crisis, and a lot of politicians who want to simply cut back on spending without thinking about the consequences. Unfortunately, this means that there will be less money available to solve problems like our higher infant mortality rate. And, that means that not only will babies continue to die, but people who need all types of medical care will only show up sicker and in worse shape, which means it will cost us even more to take care of them.

Those politicians don’t seem to get the fact that when you cut back on healthcare, not only do you hurt people, but you also make it more expensive for everybody else.

Instead of blindly cutting back on spending, we should start by making sure that everyone gets the care they need. Then we could sit down as a society and begin to control the free-for-all that exists amongst the for-profit companies that are fighting to get healthcare dollars while people suffer.

Every other developed country has figured this out, and their babies live. But, we seem to be incapable of trying to learn from them—powerful vested interests want us to think that any way besides our way must be wrong.

An entire world of solutions is out there, but in America, lobbyists and politicians can literally stop the debate with irrelevant accusations of “socialized medicine” or “government takeover of healthcare.” So we all end up paying more for healthcare and more people are afraid to go to the doctor because they can’t afford it.

If we could say that we actually had the best results in the world, perhaps this would be tolerable. Unfortunately, the real result is that the youngest, sickest and poorest of us will be hurt, and we will all pay the rising cost of treating the ones that survive. It means that babies—and especially African American babies— will be dying because no one wants to look at the obvious solutions that are all around us.

Dr. Walker is a local physician and member of Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan.

Invitation to a Dialogue: A National Health Plan

2011-08-28T19:02:00.002-05:00

New York Times

To the Editor:

In “Will Health Care Reform Survive the Courts?” (State of Play, Sunday Review, Aug. 21), Philip M. Boffey states that “reforms would work far less well without an individual mandate” that requires citizens to buy health insurance or pay a penalty.

I disagree. Health care reform could provide better care at less cost by replacing individual mandates with a single-payer national health care plan financed by taxes. Congress’s power to mandate purchase of private products sold at a profit is disputable, but Congress’s power to tax is not.

Other industrialized countries have national health plans providing care to more citizens at less cost with better outcomes than our system. And they don’t use mandates that allow insurers to charge different prices for different people.

These health care systems have three common properties: public subsidies ensure that everyone has access to care regardless of health, wealth or employment; primary care is encouraged; and publicly accountable, transparent, not-for-profit agencies transfer funds from patient to provider.

There is no need to experiment with mandates. Convert our current health care system into a national health plan.

SAMUEL METZ
Portland, Oregon

The writer, an anesthesiologist, is a founding member of Mad as Hell Doctors, which advocates a single-payer system.

Can We Have Health Reform Without an Individual Mandate? Yes, It's Called 'Medicare for All'

2011-08-21T20:42:00.002-05:00

The Nation blogs

The essential vote on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals panel that ruled that the individual-coverage mandate in President Obama’s healthcare reform is unconstitutional did not come from a reactionary Republican appointed by Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.

Rather, it came from respected jurist whose two appointments to the federal bench—first as a judge for the Northern District of Georgia in 1994 and then to the 11th Circuit in 1997—were made by then-President Bill Clinton. No, Judge Frank Mays Hull is not a raging lefty, but nor is she a right-wing judicial activist. A former law clerk for Judge Elbert Parr Tuttle, who as the chief justice of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit from 1960 to 1967 led the court in issuing a series of epic decisions on behalf of civil rights, Judge Hull has a reputation as a moderate defender of the rule of law who has earned reasonable marks for her pragmatic and decidely mainstream interpretations of the Constitution.

So why did Hull join with another member of the appeals court panel (Chief Judge Joel Dubina, an appointee of George H.W. Bush) to form the 2-1 majority that rejected the individual mandate while affirming the rest of the law? Perhaps it was because one can favor sweeping healthcare reforms—including an expansion of Medicare—while still believing that it is wrong to require Americans to buy insurance from for-profit insurance companies.

Hull telegraphed her thinking with repeated questions during June oral arguments in Atlanta regarding the case. Noting that “the panel spent a significant amount of time discussing whether the mandate is ‘severable’ from the rest of the law,” Politico pointed out that: “Hull in particular asked the federal government three times where the line should be.”

Ultimately, Hull and Dubina came to the conclusion that the individual mandate could, and should, be removed from an otherwise constitutional plan.

Why? Because, as the judges wrote in their majority decision: “This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives.”

Those of us who favor fundamental healthcare reform have always been uncomfortable with the individual mandate. So was candidate Barack Obama, who distinguished himself from Hillary Clinton (a mandate backer) by saying in a February 2008, interview: “Both of us want to provide health care to all Americans. There’s a slight difference, and her plan is a good one. But, she mandates that everybody buy health care. She’d have the government force every individual to buy insurance and I don’t have such a mandate because I don’t think the problem is that people don’t want health insurance, it’s that they can’t afford it. So, I focus more on lowering costs. This is a modest difference. But, it’s one that she’s tried to elevate, arguing that because I don’t force people to buy health care that I’m not insuring everybody. Well, if things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house, and that would solve the problem of homelessness. It doesn’t.”

Candidate Obama was right.

The individual mandate was always a bad idea. Instead of recognizing that healthcare is a right, the members of Congress and the Obama administration who cobbled together the healthcare reform plan created a mandate that maintains the abuses and the expenses of for-profit insurance companies—and actually rewards those insurance companies with a guarantee of federal money.

Those who think that the for-profit (or even not-for-profit) insurance industry has to control any healthcare reform initiative have every right to be upset with the 11th Circuit’s ruling—which almost certainly will send the case of the Obama healthcare plan to the US Supreme Court.

But those of us who have no desire to perpetuate the insurance industry can and should recognize that the proper—and entirely constitutional—reform is an expansion of Medicare to cover all Americans.

There is no question that Medicare is a sound and popular program. (Just ask House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, who took an epic political beating when he proposed a scheme to replace the successful single-payer system with a voucher scheme designed to enrich insurance firms.)

While Medicare is exceptionally popular, polling shows that the individual mandate is not—according to recent surveys, roughly 60 percent of Americans oppose it.

It also passes constitutional muster.

As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich notes: [No] federal judge has struck down Social Security or Medicare as being an unconstitutional requirement that Americans buy something. Social Security and Medicare aren’t broccoli or asparagus. They’re as American as hot dogs and apple pie.”

“So if the individual mandate to buy private health insurance gets struck down by the Supreme Court or killed off by Congress, “ says Reich, “I’d recommend President Obama immediately propose what he should have proposed in the beginning — universal health care based on Medicare for all, financed by payroll taxes.”

The insurance companies would, of course, scream.

But let them complain.

Americans don’t need mandates. They need healthcare.

And they have every right to ask, as activists with Physicians for a National Health Program have, that Medicare be expanded to cover all Americans —affordably, efficiently, capably and constitutionally.

US Physician Practices Versus Canadians: Spending Nearly Four Times As Much Money Interacting With Payers

2011-08-21T20:12:00.002-05:00

HealthAffairs.org

Physician practices, especially the small practices with just one or two physicians that are common in the United States, incur substantial costs in time and labor interacting with multiple insurance plans about claims, coverage, and billing for patient care and prescription drugs. We surveyed physicians and administrators in the province of Ontario, Canada, about time spent interacting with payers and compared the results with a national companion survey in the United States. We estimated physician practices in Ontario spent $22,205 per physician per year interacting with Canada’s single-payer agency—just 27 percent of the $82,975 per physician per year spent in the United States. US nursing staff, including medical assistants, spent 20.6 hours per physician per week interacting with health plans—nearly ten times that of their Ontario counterparts. If US physicians had administrative costs similar to those of Ontario physicians, the total savings would be approximately $27.6 billion per year. The results support the opinion shared by many US health care leaders interviewed for this study that interactions between physician practices and health plans could be performed much more efficiently.

Address why, not how, of health costs

2011-08-14T21:50:00.003-05:00

Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette

Politicians and special interest groups are always trying to control the debate over health care. But there is one undeniable fact: we are paying more for health care than we ever have before.

People offer lots of explanations for this: malpractice, fraud, private insurance, obesity. All these problems contribute to the rising cost of health care. However, the primary reason is that there has been so much money sloshing around our health care system, and so many fragmented, for-profit entities getting that money, that prices keep climbing at a higher rate than almost anything else in the economy.

Unfortunately, politicians are reluctant to look closely at whether we are getting our money’s worth because special interests have tremendous control over the system. For instance, we hear about how expensive Medicare is, but did you know that although Medicare is spending our tax dollars, pharmaceutical lobbyists have made sure that it is forbidden to bargain over drug prices? Or if two treatments are equally effective, but one is expensive and the other is cheap, Medicare is required to pay for both without question?

To make matters worse, private insurance companies usually emulate Medicare, but they have to pay even more because otherwise health care providers won’t deal with them. There could be huge cost savings if we looked carefully at issues like these. But whenever someone tries to raise such questions, businesses that might lose money start complaining about “government takeover of health care” and the debate is shut down.

Since politicians don’t want to look at cost-effectiveness, the only way employers, insurance companies and the government can save money is to have us, the consumers, bear more of the cost. This is why co-pays and deductibles have increased so much over the past few years, and why employees have had fewer raises as employers spend more on insurance. It is also why some people want to change Medicare to a voucher program; doing so would further unload the cost onto patients. But none of this addresses why the costs are going up in the first place – it just gets us to pay more.

And there is another reason why this is happening. There are a lot of powerful people who think that the state of American health care will be better if we have more “skin in the game.” The feeling is that, as we pay more for medical treatments, we will become better shoppers for health care and that will bring costs down. Actually, there is a lot of data that suggest that putting more of our skin in the game doesn’t solve the problem. Instead, people end up putting off needed care and become sicker, or people who are really sick burn through their deductible so quickly that it doesn’t have any effect on costs at all. Plus, if huge corporations and the government can’t control the rising cost of health care, it is hard to imagine that individuals can. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make any difference that putting more of our skin in the game won’t solve the problem – the people with that viewpoint dominate the situation.

It is frustrating that our leaders are fighting over issues that are irrelevant when it comes to addressing the real problems. Things such as waivers or changing the eligibility age for Medicare do nothing to solve rising costs or improve the quality of care – they simply unload the costs onto us. We need to demand that politicians look at what we are paying for, rather than just how to pay for it. As we spend more every year on insurance, co-pays and deductibles, remember that it is our money and our health that are at stake. Unless we take the time to get involved, we may soon lose all of our skin to their game.

Dr. Jonathan D. Walker is a member of Hoosiers for a Commonsense Health Plan (hchp.info).

Editorial: If U.S. is serious about debt, there's a single-payer solution.

2011-08-14T21:15:00.002-05:00

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

If America truly is serious about dealing with its deficit problems, there's a fairly simple solution. But you're probably not going to like it: Enact a single-payer health care plan.

See, we told you weren't going to like it.

But the fact is that everyone who has studied the deficit problem has agreed that it's actually a health care problem — more specifically, the cost of providing Medicare benefits to an aging and longer-living population. The bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform reported last December: "The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects if we continue on our current course, deficits will remain high throughout the rest of this decade and beyond, and debt will spiral ever higher, reaching 90 percent of GDP in 2020.

"Over the long run, as the baby boomers retire and health care costs continue to grow, the situation will become far worse. By 2025 revenue will be able to finance only interest payments, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Every other federal government activity — from national defense and homeland security to transportation and energy — will have to be paid for with borrowed money."

That being the case — and nobody argues that it isn't — there are two broad ways for the government to address its spiraling health care costs. One, shift more of those costs to recipients, by trimming benefits and/or extending eligibility ages and indexing eligibility to personal income. This is politically unpalatable, particularly to most Democrats, President Barack Obama being a conspicuous exception.

The second way for government to address its health costs is not to shift them, but to reduce them. This is what a single-payer health care system would do, largely by taking the for-profit players (insurance companies for the most part) out of the loop.

The advocacy group Physicians for a National Health Program estimates that "private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third (31 percent) of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans."

Once everyone is covered, the government would have the clout to bring discipline into the wild west of health care spending. It could insist that providers be paid for quality of service, not quantity. Health facilities and equipment could be managed by regional boards. Medical services could be "bundled" — rather than paying hospitals and doctors and laboratories separately, there would be fixed prices for treatments. And so on.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed in 2009 contains many pilot programs designed to test cost-reduction strategies. Most of them won't kick in for another six to eight years, by which time health care costs will be approaching 20 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. The combined state and federal share of that will be 49 percent, up from 45 percent today.

Indeed, a study published this month in the journal Health Affairs estimates that while the Affordable Care Act will pay for itself by 2020, it won't actually "bend the cost curve," as the Obama administration had hoped. But the study, done by the Actuary Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, says the ACA will significantly slow the rise of health care costs to state and local governments.

But consider those two findings: In effect, they say that if reducing overall health care costs is the goal, then the ACA didn't go far enough. Thirty million more people will be insured and government costs will grow more slowly. But overall health care costs will continue to explode.

Sooner or later, a nation serious about controlling spending must take broad control of the health care system.

It surely won't be sooner. Compared to the political fight that would erupt over a single-payer plan, the congressional battle over the Affordable Care Act would seem as tame as resolution praising mom, the flag and apple pie.

The ACA was a compromise. Mr. Obama brought everyone to the table — doctors, insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals — and came away with a "best we can get" kind of bill. Many of those at the table turned around and lobbied against it or sought special favors once the bill came before Congress.

It passed by narrow margins, and Congress is decidedly more conservative now. Indeed, the new House majority has voted to repeal the ACA and challenges to its constitutionality continue to work their way toward the Supreme Court.

But now, like a baby discovering its toes, Congress has discovered the deficit. And the plain fact is that unless you want to commit political suicide and cut Medicare to the bone — as Rep. Paul Ryan's, R-Wis., budget plan would do — the best way to seriously address long-term deficits is to get control of health care costs through a single-payer plan.

In 2008, when health care costs amounted to "only" 16 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, Great Britain was spending 8.7 percent of its GDP on health care, and Canada was spending 10.4 percent. Both nations have single-payer plans. Quality of care scores in both nations are at least comparable, and in most cases, better.

Eventually, the United States will have a single-payer plan. But we'll waste a lot of money and time getting there.

Getting Up Close And Personal With Emergency Care, Canadian Style

2011-08-08T13:56:00.003-05:00

Kaiser Health News

It had been a gorgeous day of cycling the rolling hills of Quebec's Eastern Townships. I wasn't traveling very fast when I hit a patch of gravel on the trail, but I went flying, landing hard on my left side.,

I sat up, holding my left arm. I couldn't lift it, and it hurt much more than could be explained by the cuts and scrapes that were dripping blood all over my shorts. Meanwhile, the base of the thumb on my right hand, with which I'd apparently tried to break my fall, was misshapen and swollen. I'd also injured my left flank, as I discovered when I tried to walk.

As my two friends propped me up and tried to identify our location for the 911 dispatcher, I awaited my first real-life encounter with the mostly government-funded Canadian health-care system.

As a health care writer, I talk with people all the time about their experiences navigating the system, whether in the United States or elsewhere. Writing about health care is different from writing about the arts, say, or sports, in one crucial way: When you write about health care, you're often left feeling profoundly grateful that you didn't have to experience firsthand the event that you're describing. But now my luck had turned, and I was about to get up close and personal with emergency care, Canadian style.

The ambulance arrived within 15 minutes, and I had a bumpy but uneventful ride to the hospital, a regional trauma center at one of the local universities. On arrival, we showed them my passport and American insurance card. Because I was a trauma patient, I was wheeled right in, just as would happen in a U.S. hospital. A nurse removed my clothes, cutting off my shirt since I couldn't move my arm. Another nurse drew blood.

At the request of a very young-looking resident, I moved various body parts on command and answered questions about what hurt. The resident, who was my main contact throughout the visit, also looked over my injuries, including checking my ears and eyes. She was friendly and kind, and kept up a running commentary in mostly fluent English explaining what she and others were doing. (One of my friends, a French-speaking Montreal resident, stayed with me and interpreted when the medical staff's questions or my answers were complicated.)

One of the most striking things about the exam was how little high-technology equipment they employed. Until I had X-rays made of my hand, hip, shoulder and knee, a blood-pressure cuff was the most advanced equipment I encountered.

Emergency department technology use varies, of course, in Canada and elsewhere. Still, clinicians at a trauma center in the United States treating someone with injuries similar to mine would probably wheel a portable ultrasound machine to the bedside in the trauma bay to scan for internal injuries, says Sandra Schneider, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians. They would also probably do CT scans, perhaps of my neck, pelvis and back, to make sure there were no bone breaks that didn't show up on the X-rays. Some of the tests might not be absolutely necessary, but "a lot of what [U.S. emergency physicians] do is because we are very frightened of getting sued, because we get sued so often," says Schneider.

In an analysis of data from 2003 to 2008, researchers at Yale and in Canada found that Americans were nearly twice as likely to get a CT scan during an emergency department visit as were Canadians living in Ontario.

In Canada, residents who go to the emergency department pay nothing for the visit, not even for X-rays or other imaging tests or for lab work, says Michael Schull, an emergency physician who co-authored the study on CT use. They also pay nothing for specialist visits and hospital admissions, he said.

"Hospitals aren't making any money off these tests," Schull says. "There's no incentive to do them, because they're not going to get paid for them."

After the X-rays were taken and I was wheeled back into the trauma bay (No. 13, but I figured I'd already had my bad luck for the day), the resident came to my bedside with a big smile on her face and said, "You really are in pain! You have three fractures!" Validation is nice, but I wished the news were different.

I had two fractures at the top of the humerus, the long arm bone that attaches to the shoulder, and another break in a bone at the base of my thumb. The shoulder breaks could be expected to heal cleanly, she said, but the thumb was slightly out of alignment and might require surgery. There were no broken bones in my pelvis or hip; the pain and difficulty walking I was experiencing there was probably caused by torn or otherwise damaged muscles, tendons and ligaments.

The trauma team referred me to an orthopedist to examine my shoulder and a plastic surgeon with expertise in hands to look at my thumb. Unfortunately, an orthopedist wouldn't be able to see me until two days later. (The chief orthopedic resident, however, stopped by that night and reassured me that it would be okay to wait.) I did get examined by a plastic surgeon that evening, but my friends had to drive me to a sister hospital several miles away to see him. Specialists, it seemed, were pretty thin on the ground.

According to a 2010 Commonwealth Fund survey of health care in 11 countries, 33 percent of Canadians waited six days or more to see a specialist when they were sick, compared with 19 percent of Americans.

My pelvis apparently did not warrant special attention. Since the injury seemed to be muscular rather than skeletal, the hospital staff would do nothing further to diagnose what was wrong, the resident said. Her recommendation for me — rest and exercise — would probably be the same no matter what I'd done to any tissue.

I couldn't argue with her reasoning, and if she was right, it was the sensible course. But what a difference in approach from what I would be likely to experience in the United States, Schneider says, where clinicians would probably have worked hard to nail down a definite diagnosis. I left with prescriptions for morphine, naproxen (an anti-inflammatory) and Tylenol.

Puzzled by my U.S. private insurance card, the billing person estimated that my care that night would cost 700 Canadian dollars (about $740) and charged my credit card. If it turned out I had been overcharged, she said, they would send me a refund. Yes, you read that right: overcharged.

Although comparing costs and bills is tricky, by any measure my evening in the Canadian emergency department was a good deal.

Medicare for all would save billions on paperwork

2011-08-08T12:58:00.002-05:00

The Capital Times

Medicare’s path started 46 years ago on July 30, 1965. Medicare has been a lifesaver for millions of senior and disabled Americans. Medicare has improved the health of our seniors, reduced their risk of poverty, and improved the financial security of their families.

Unfortunately, there are discussions in Congress that would steer Medicare off path. Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” proposes to shift Medicare to a private voucher system. Other proposals would increase the age of eligibility from 65 to 67, and increase deductibles and co-pays.

These approaches would increase the number of uninsured Americans and shift costs to Medicare recipients. The Congressional Budget Office estimates Ryan’s plan would shift two-thirds of the cost of care to consumers by 2030, with out-of-pocket costs amounting to over $20,000 per year for each Medicare recipient.

The current economic crisis was not caused by Medicare and will not be solved by cutting benefits or shifting costs to beneficiaries.

We should look to build on and expand Medicare, not weaken or dismantle it. By replacing our patchwork of private and public insurance programs with a single publicly financed system that handles all bills, we would save about $400 billion annually that’s currently spent on unnecessary paperwork and overhead — enough to provide comprehensive coverage to all the uninsured and to improve coverage for the rest of us.

Now is the time to take the path forward to an improved Medicare-for-all health care program.

Melissa Stiles, M.D.
Madison, WI

WARNING: WASHINGTON IS NOT ON OUR SIDE

2011-08-01T13:42:00.002-05:00

FDL

Following is an article released today by Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party co-chairs John Andrews and Jill Stein, in advance of Green Fest, the annual meeting of the Green Party of the United States, which begins Friday in New York State. Stein also serves on the New Progressive Alliance Steering Committee.

The shameful debt ceiling flap that has embroiled Washington in recent weeks has left the American people wondering if they can trust any of their current political leaders to do the right thing. The immediate cause of this manufactured crisis lies with the Republicans holding the American economy hostage to a threatened default if their anti-government demands were not met. President Obama is fully justified in rejecting those proposals which would do enormous harm to essential functions of government.

But President Obama has repeatedly failed to stake out a principled counter position that would force a truly “ balanced” compromise. Instead he has shown his basic agreement with the key Republican positions from the outset. The heated rhetoric and insults that are flying about in Washington today are merely camouflage for the fact that the two dominant parties are occupying a very narrow part of the political spectrum. The bitter arguments are all about who can best accomplish the common goals of protecting the wealthy and well-connected while scaling back programs that ordinary people depend on.

In 2008, Americans elected Barack Obama in the belief that he would reverse the policies of George W. Bush. But he has betrayed the hopes of constituency after constituency. Now Obama’s “balanced” plan elevates deficit reduction to the highest priority, so important that it justifies massive cuts in badly needed domestic programs. He has falsely declared Social Security and Medicare to be too expensive to maintain and proposed a destructive “trimming” – including cuts of up to 9% in Social Security income and a two-year delay in Medicare coverage. Obama’s plan allows the bloated Pentagon budget to trundle along with only minor cuts achieved through “efficiency.” Despite his attempt to label his plan as “balanced,” Obama cuts $3 for every $1 in proposed revenue enhancement. He’s declared tax increases off the table before 2013, and even then advocates only small steps to correct the worst abuses.

Through all this, the President has skillfully deflected attention from the fact that all $4 trillion targeted for debt reduction could be recouped through long overdue measures to restore fairness to a drastically unfair tax system – namely reining in offshore tax dodging, modestly taxing Wall Street speculation, raising income taxes on households earning over $1 million annually, and progressively taxing estates worth over $5 million.

It’s no accident that in his nationwide speech President Obama cited former President Ronald Reagan in support of his position, and emphasized that the Republicans have nothing to object to in his plan because it is pursuing their longstanding goals. The apparent Democratic strategy is to brag about their opposition to the more extreme proposals of the Republicans. And the Republicans are happy to ask for more than they really think they can get, and watch the Democrats move ever further to the right.

Lost in the shuffle are the real concerns of everyday Americans, whose real wages are declining, whose jobs are disappearing, who can’t afford the rising costs of health care and education for their children, who are still losing their homes in record numbers, and who cannot afford lobbyists to plead their case.

The convergence of the two major parties in America has robbed voters of a way to fix a government that is failing them. When you have just two choices on the ballot, neither of which are on your side, your vote loses most of its value. The “hope for change” that drove Obama’s election in 2008 is clearly dead. But the thirst for real change still runs deep in the electorate. This makes us more grateful than ever to be part of an independent third party that consistently stands up for the public interest, and doesn’t need a spin machine to manufacture excuses for selling out. Life becomes much simpler when you just decide to do the right thing.