Think Humanely

Rep. Dennis Kucinich announced that he would vote ‘Yea’ for the excrement-filled piece of legislation laughingly referred to as health care reform. Kucinich, who has advocated for universal health care, has the following press release on his website:

Congressman Kucinich, along with Congressman John Conyers (D-MI), introduced HR 676, Medicare for All, a bill to provide high-quality health care to every American. This bill would provide all Americans the health care they need, from any doctor they choose, at a universal, high standard of quality. Americans would not be burdened with co-payments, premiums or deductibles. Rather, they would be guaranteed access to medically necessary health care, including inpatient and outpatient care, dental care, vision care, pharmaceuticals, and other treatments that a patient’s doctor would deem necessary.

Medicare for All would cost the same amount of money that is now spent on health care costs. Funds would be provided by savings from a vast reduction of paperwork, existing government spending on healthcare, savings from rational bulk procurement of medications, a tax on the top 5 percent of income earners, a small tax on stock and bond transfers, and a phased-in payroll tax that is less than what employers currently pay on average for less complete employee health coverage.

Compare the above bill, which is excellent and actually accomplishes what those who support the current Senate bill claim to support, with the utterly corrupt and impotent legislation that is likely to now be passed both in the House and the Senate. The current version of bill most likely to pass has no single-payer system. It has no public option. It has nothing to control costs. It has nothing to keep greedy insurance companies from charging customers mafia-like rates for coverage. Worst of all, especially given that insurance companies have no check on their price-gouging, is that the government is forcing every single American to buy from one of these private insurance companies or else face the bureaucratic wrath of the IRS. Here is what I wrote about the mandate vis-à-vis no public option:

The service provided by private insurance companies is so astronomically priced and provides so very little that of all the medical-related bankruptcies in this country, 60% are actually already insured. The average cost of health insurance doesn’t reflect the hundreds of thousands that one is still likely to incur if ever seriously injured or ill. This isn’t protection. It’s more akin to a mafia shakedown. Pay us money or we’ll beat the shit out of you. Paying this mandate won’t be the sign of a responsible American, but a desperate one who has been mugged in the alley, an American that is likely to fall further and further into economic disarray while receiving a product that has consistently been ranked as one of the worst in the Western world. The World Health Organization currently has us rated #37 in the world , far behind all of those “evil socialist” countries in Europe and elsewhere.

The very idea of forcing Americans to give more of their money – money that they do not have – to private insurance companies is repulsive. These companies already make billions of dollars. According to FactCheck.org, the following companies posted these earnings:

UnitedHealth Group: $859 million in the second quarter of 2009
Humana Inc.: $282 million quarterly profit
Health Net: $40 million profit in the spring alone
Wellpoint: $693 million in this quarter
CIGNA: $435 million for the quarter

All of this while the average family income has fallen. David Leonhardt writes , “the typical American household made less money last year than the typical household made a full decade ago. . . In the four decades that the Census Bureau has been tracking household income, there has never before been a full decade in which median income failed to rise. (The previous record was seven years, ending in 1985.) Other Census data suggest that it also never happened between the late 1940s and the late 1960s. So it doesn’t seem to have happened since at least the 1930s.” As if further stuffing the coffers of gluttonous, indifferent insurers with the diminishing savings of Americans were not offensive enough, consider not just the inferiority of the service, but the character of the companies providing it. Their profits are in direct proportion to the suffering of Americans. Former senior executive at CIGNA Wendell Potter testified against his former company before the very Senate that craft this bill. As Ezra Klein reports

“The industry, Potter says, is driven by ‘two key figures: earnings per share and the medical-loss ratio, or medical-benefit ratio, as the industry now terms it. That is the ratio between what the company actually pays out in claims and what it has left over to cover sales, marketing, underwriting and other administrative expenses and, of course, profits.”

Think about that term for a moment: The industry literally has a term for how much money it “loses” paying for health care.

Knowing this, these companies find ways to refuse the authorization of treatments. Americans will be paying for something that they may never receive, not because of some product shortage or lack of need but simply because the insurance companies know they can increase their profit off of saying no to the sick and dying. And whereas a car insurance company’s refusal to pay a claim may only result in having to live with a dent in the side of your car, a health insurer’s declination can and does result in death.

This is who the Senate, knowing all of this full well, wants to force you to enrich. This is who they want to force you to rely on in order to live and be healthy. Is it any wonder then that the stock for these companies have increased upon completion of a bill that is supposedly reforming and regulating the industry? Shahien Nasiripour notes

“Investors are seeing the Senate’s version of health care reform as a massive public subsidy for insurance companies — and as a result, are sending the sector’s stock prices shooting up, up, up. Stripped of a government-run insurance plan, the bill would give tens of millions of Americans no option but to start paying hefty premiums to private companies.

“The rise in stock prices has been particularly striking in the period since Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said on October 27 that he would filibuster a Senate health care reform bill if it included a public option – a threat that caused Senate leaders to cave without much of a fight.

“Here’s a quick breakdown of major health insurance company stock performance from Oct. 27 to Friday’s market close:

• Coventry Health Care, Inc. is up 31.6 percent;
• CIGNA Corp. is up 29.1 percent;
• Aetna Inc. is up 27.1 percent;
• WellPoint, Inc. is up 26.6 percent;
• UnitedHealth Group Inc. is up 20.5 percent;
• And Humana Inc. is up 13.6 percent.”

Kucinich, in a press release in November of 2009, had the following comments about the then-version of the “reform” bill:

We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are. But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system.

Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000%. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care. Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick.

But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies — a bailout under a blue cross.

And the bill which Kucinich rightfully lashes above is one that actually had a public option. This is what makes his turn to support the current legislation so very disappointing. It would be one thing if we knew that the Senate would largely fix all the gross deficiencies in the bill via reconciliation, which would include adding in a public option. But we don’t know this. And we have no reason to even find such a scenario probable. Instead, we’ll likely see only minor tweaks – if any – made, and thus Americans will once again be forced to take it on all fours.

So why did Kucinich do this? He has obviously spent most of the current session thinking that this and similar bills are pretty horrible. He has obviously thought that there are significantly better alternatives, alternatives that will actually benefit the American people whereas this one largely will not. I obviously cannot know what goes on in this man’s mind; I do know, however, that he has been the subject of some rather vociferous attacks by members of the left.

Markos Moulitsas said that Kucinich had blood on his hands and would face a primary challenge if he continued to oppose this government subsidiary of private insurance companies at the expense of poor Americans. This hack then proceeds, petulantly, to claim that Kucinich has never accomplished anything in his career, that he’s a ‘Utopian,’ and that he doesn’t represent his constituents. The last is an especially odd claim given that Kucinich has been re-elected, term after term, since 1996. Moulitsas: you, sir, are a fucking asshole.

Alex Koppleman recently wrote the absurdly titled piece, “The Liberal Case Against Dennis Kucinich,” in which he parrots many of Moulitsas’ so-called points without providing any ioda of skepticism or critical opposition to the ranting of what appears to be a man who has let the popularity of his circle-jerk of a website go to his head. Two individuals, whatever intelligence they might exert on other public policy issues, here display the mental acumen of people who have been deprived of oxygen for one minute too long.

Again, I don’t know what role, if any, such public admonition played in Kucinich’s reversal. But I almost have to hope that it did; the alternative is that he somehow convinced himself that this bill is actually worth becoming law. If this is true, then there is one less voice fighting for the ‘Utopia’ that Americans deserve.

In a related note, Sen. Harry Reid’s wife and daughter were in a serious car accident recently. His wife broke her nose, neck and back. She was rushed to a hospital and operated on, during the course of which she had a titanium plate inserted into her neck. She is expected to make a full recovery. How fortunate for her that her husband not only makes $174,000 for less than a year’s worth of work, but also receives federally-provided insurance.

I previously wrote about the equally gynophobic and misogynistc Stupak-Pitts Amendment here and here. Today came news of an analysis of the amendment by the George Washington School of Public Health and Health Services. A brief overview, quoted word for word from the George Washington news release, can be found below. For the entire analysis, click here.

An analysis conducted by the GW School of Public Health and Health Services’ Department of Health Policy, concludes that the Amendment would produce industry-wide effects, leading to the elimination of health plan coverage for nearly all medically indicated abortions. Although the Amendment appears to address only plans that receive federal exchange subsidies, even health plans sold to private, large employers that purchase outside the exchange ultimately are likely to be affected, the analysis concludes. These findings are based on an assessment of the extent to which the health benefits services industry adjusts its products over time to conform to the regulatory environment in which it operates.

“Under national health reform, millions of women, including women who are covered by small employers (as employees or spouses or dependents of employees) as well as those who are currently uninsured, will receive their coverage through health insurance exchanges. By barring the sale of subsidized products that cover medically indicated abortions as part of a broader package of benefits, the Amendment can be expected to cause the industry to re-design its offerings in order to avoid violating the legal restrictions on abortion applicable to exchange products that receive subsidies,” said Professor Sara Rosenbaum, JD, lead author and Chair of the Department of Health Policy. “The Amendment also can be expected to chill efforts to develop supplemental coverage for medically indicated abortions, because it appears to prohibit the joint administration of both a basic and supplemental product,” Rosenbaum noted.

The analysis also concludes that, based on past experiences with claim administration decisions involving treatment exclusions, insurers can be expected to interpret the exclusion broadly, excluding coverage of not only most medically indicated abortion procedures but also treatments for serious illnesses, injuries, and medical conditions that include an abortion undertaken for health reasons.

Yesterday I wrote about the callous Stupak-Pitts Amendment to the health care reform bill that was passed by the Democratically controlled House of Representatives. Here is a video from the Center for Reproductive Rights that helps underscore some of the incoherent tragedy of the legislation:

Let us not forget some of the other procedures, conditions, and medications that will and will not be covered by the bill. Birth control pills? Not included. So not only will it be made dramatically more difficult for women to find funding for an abortion, the easiest, most efficient, and safest method for preventing a situation that could possibly lead to an abortion – birth control – will not be covered either. The people over at DoubleX note that “Women who use it have lower rates of infant and child mortality, more time to nurse their children, and a smaller likelihood of high-risk pregnancies and anemia.” It’s as if all these men in Congress have some Machiavellian plan to increase the number of unwanted, diseased newborns.

This would certainly explain why one of the medications that this horrible bill does cover is Viagra. Fuck you, ladies! – figuratively and literally. You may not be able to protect yourself from unwanted pregnancies or do anything about one, but any and all males can still ensure that they’re hard enough to inseminate you. All the unsatisfied wives of Stupak, Pitts, and their equally filthy ilk are sure to rejoice at this news, as are the remaining 160 million women in this country.

Obama and the Democratic Party have once again shown themselves to be incompetent legislators that are perfectly okay with being held hostage by the private insurance industry and religious assholes. Everyone knew that the health care “reform” bill that was going to the floor of the House was a watered down, unethical, and undeniably corrupt piece of legislation. It was as if the Democrat-crafted bill had been birthed out of the diseased canal of an insurance lobbyist. What wasn’t nearly as expected, however, was that the bill would be made significantly worse due to one amendment, an amendment named in part after a Democrat.

Adele Stan notes that the Stupak-Pitts Amendment would accomplish the following:

* Prohibit individuals who receive the affordability tax credits from purchasing a private insurance plan that covers abortion, despite the fact that a majority of health insurance plans currently cover abortion.
* Result in a de facto ban on private insurance companies providing abortion coverage in the health insurance exchange, since the vast majority of participants would receive affordability tax credits.
* Prohibit the public option from providing abortion care, despite the fact that it would be funded through private premium dollars.

[. . .]

The Hill reports that:

Liberals on the committee threatened to vote against the final healthcare bill if it included Stupak’s language, warning that it would be a return to the days of back-alley abortions.

“I forsee a return to the dark ages,” Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., told The Hill. “I’m 73, I’ve seen these dark things, they use these coat hangers and die.”

“I used to think that life was black or white, but the older I get the most gray it becomes,” liberal Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., told the panelists of the House Rules committee as they debated whether to allow the amendment. “I find this amendment very, very uncomfortable.”

I know that this is Change I Can Believe In™! After all, there’s no way such a discriminatory, misogynistic, theocratic amendment would ever have been passed when those GOP assholes were in control of the Executive and Legislative branches. Wait…what?

Adele Stan http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/143811/anti-woman_amendment_to_health_care_passes_house/

I first learned of Alan Grayson from Glenn Greenwald, who had reported on Grayson’s desire to de-fund defense contractors guilty of fraud and corruption, and Matt Taibbi, who had mentioned him in a post about the Congressman and the Federal Reserve. Taibbi wrote the following:

I have personal experience with… well, let’s call it the unique personality of Alan Grayson. In his capacity as an attorney he once basically threatened to have me dismembered and have my body parts dumped in a tin canister and fired into the center of a burning supernova. And that’s actually underselling the real language he used. We were having a disagreement about the use of information given to me by a certain source in a story about military contracting, and in the middle of what had been a normal contentious argument between two sane adults, dude suddenly assumed this crazy monster-voice and just went medieval on me. He was roaring into the telephone about how he was going to crush me, how I was going to wish I had never messed with him, how I didn’t know who the hell I was dealing with, and so on. One phrase I remember in particular was, “I am going to strip the bark off of you!” It came totally out of the blue and it was like being on the telephone with a metamorphosing werewolf — the whole performance genuinely freaked me out. I may even have peed a little, I can’t remember.

When I heard Alan Grayson was running for Congress, I remember thinking to myself, That Alan Grayson? The lunatic? It can’t be, I thought. I kept imagining trails of half-eaten sheep leading to his campaign appearances. But it turned out to be true. And when I checked, his platform turned out to be quite sane and even kind of interesting. Then he got elected and I suddenly started seeing his name attached to all of these calls for transparency, various crusades for FinReg reforms, etc.

And now every time I see Alan Grayson, he’s tearing some freaked-out bureaucrat a new asshole in the middle of some empty conference room in the Capitol somewhere. I see the looks on the faces of these poor souls and I know exactly what they’re going through. Which is just hilarious, frankly. Especially since these people all tend to deserve it.

I don’t know about you, but I get slightly turned on after reading something like that about an elected official. But the above isn’t the real reason for this post. Grayson has recently incurred the wrath of the belligerent GOP, who decided that a good use of their time, when they’re not busy saying ‘No!’ to anything and everything that might possibly benefit people who don’t share their skin pigmentation or religious fanaticism, would be to seek his official censure.

What did Grayson, the representative for the 8th district of Florida, do to deserve such a rebuke? Watch the video below:

Here’s a partial transcript of what he had to say:

The Republican’s healthcare plan for America is: Don’t get sick. That’s right. Don’t get sick. If you have insurance, don’t get sick. If you don’t have insurance, don’t get sick. If you’re sick, don’t get sick. Just don’t get sick. That’s what Republicans have in mind for you, America. That’s the Republicans’ health care plan. But I think the Republicans understand that that plan isn’t always going to work. It’s not a foolproof plan. So the Republicans have a backup plan in case you do get sick […] If you get sick America, the Republicans’ health care plan is this: Die quickly.

Aroused yet? If not, keep reading.

Alex Koppelman wrote that Grayson, amid the growing Republican backlash over his remarks, “head[ed] back to the House floor on Wednesday to discuss his remarks — but the apology the congressman made is probably not what his Republican colleagues had in mind.” Watch this:

I’d like to see every one of the goddamn Republicans, and every one of the cowardly, bought and paid for, acquiescent Democrats take the floor of Congress and apologize to the 122 families who lost their loved ones today. Then I want to see them get up and do it again the day after that, and after that, and after that. I want them to apologize to the 900,000 people who will be forced to declare bankruptcy this year due to medical costs. I want them to stand up and apologize to the 78% of these people who are bankrupt despite having insurance. I want these despicable, petty, hypocritical assholes, all of whom have government-run insurance, to apologize to Kenneth Hoagland, who was arrested because he couldn’t pay his medical bills, and the friends and family of Army. Spc. Gregory James Missman, a 36-year-old who re-enlisted to serve in the clusterfuck that is Afghanistan after losing his job so that he could receive health insurance for his family. He was killed July 8th.

But such apologies will never come, not from these abhorrent people. I always shuddered whenever I heard President Bush utter the word ‘evil’ when describing the leaders of other nations or other religions. Hyperbole usually does more harm than good. And yet there are moments, moments that are sometimes all too frequent in modern America, when the word ‘evil’ is apt. Opposition to universal health care is immoral, unethical, and, without question, evil.

If I had money, I’d donate some to Grayson. He might be bat-shit crazy, but he’s my kind of bat-shit crazy, and we’d all be better off if there were a few more of him in Congress.

UPDATE: (continue reading…)