Obama On ABC

My friend who writes Faithfool (link included below) wrote to me the other day, saying he keeps his blog tidy; short and sweet. A great idea. I'll emulate.

In Weekend Opinionator, a feature of the NYTimes, they conclude a poor review for Obama's ABC Health Care Special. With 4.7 million viewers, Obama had less than half the number of viewers of CSI: New York, rerunning itself on who knows how many channels. Pardon my french, but whoopty-shit - just because America the Beautiful are junked out TV zombies, that doesn't make 4.7 million a small number of people. I'd be much more worried if more Bill O'Reilly videos were us-Tubed during the same period.

However, in the same breath I have to say not every Obama article need be favorable. Personally, I remember him saying, "make me do it" (referring to reform) and so I'd be perfectly happy if every media bit about Obama included a heady critique or three of his policy making. That being said, the NYTimes puts crap in it's html when they call 4.7 million a flop.

If I were Aristotle, I'd analyze that rhetorical point - the NYTimes announces a 4,700,000 viewer TV special a "ratings loser" (which kind of sounds like a good Onion headline). I'd say, well, maybe instead of trying to say 4.7 mill is a ratings loser, they're really just professing the viewpoint that watching the President isn't very popular. Even if I weren't Aristotle I'd be able to see that if everything that's less popular than CSI: New York (and the few other shows that beat Obama for rating that night) then literally more than ninety-nine percent of TV sucks. I figured that out myself long ago, but with different reasons. Using a misleadingly simple analogy, like determining popularity by measuring it against CSI: Miami is what the Greeks liked to call fallacy.

If I were the media, I'd be worried about providing a reform oriented President hours worth of direct persuasion to swaths of the country at a go. After all, hailed as the second coming by Oprah the Baptist, there is no telling what all this President might do. Bush really warmed up the plate for him by putting all our hopes and anxieties into a packed stadium with a six year losing streak. So Status Quo stadium is a little dumpy right now but if more of us cheer for the home team, maybe our Congressional players will make enough runs to get us the pennant. Meanwhile, please don't believe the people who think a President talking to America on the TV is a bad thing. What would Bush have said for an hour? Maybe one of the great purposes to civilization creating things like leaders is so that the leader can unite the people just enough to escape the denizens of fear and folly. Of all the things that can destroy the financial well-being of the country, steeply rising health care costs is probably the most likely, most needless, and the hardest to explain and understand. Even if you disagree with him and the liberal conspiracy which is quickly transforming the younger generation into secular pragmatists of great hedonism and worldly conscience, even if you're afraid that the government will end the good thing we don't have going with health care, even if you are supremely confident that the newest CSI is a new eschelon of entertainment perfection and is the one thing your entire day's joy comes down to, I urge you to listen; if Obama speaks we should centrally process what he's saying. You can bring your gun to church if you don't like what he says - that'll show him.


As a post-script, it's worth mentioning that television does more harm to America than every jihadist in the world put together. If obesity were a spirituality, TV would be it's holy icon. If an informed electorate were a rubix cube, TV would be the cretin that beat the cube with a big hammer for outsmarting him. If TV were a religion, it would be the Baptist evangalism brought to you by Coke, Holy War, Falwell, and Bakker, but it's only pay per view if you believe in god.

All We Have To Fear

I honestly believe that all we have to fear is fear itself. (there was a great T-shirt I saw the other day and almost bought, totally Alaskan or other outdoorsy places, with a picture of a tent, campfire, and night mountainous starry sky, and the caption below it read: "All we have to fear is fear itself, and bears.") Sometimes I feel like the more we invoke, remember, and pay homage to the mysterious and terrible events of 9/11, the more we give the perpetrators what they wanted from us. I idealogically agree with all such sentiments to remember and pay homage to the tragedy, but I pragmatically take exception to giving the event undue significance. I came by this opinion honestly and through the confluence of three or more things.

I) right after nine-eleven-oh-one, I had been a pharmacy cashier and then wine-salesman/gift-store cashier at a little place in vaguely conservative Corvallis, OR. By ten-eleven the place had literally hundreds of U.S. flags, all makes and models, for sale and on display. I hadn't thought anything of it, until a random customer, having recently returned from a trip to Europe and having been overwhelmed by the fervor in her home town, literally broke into tears in the store after having walked around and shopped amidst our patriotic looking store. The lady wasn't just freaked out by the sudden out-pouring of flag-waving, she felt clenched and frightened by the idea that if she didn't salute, she'd be completely frowned upon and ostracized. Since she had become vocal and angry while in the store, telling me all these things she was upset by since I was the Rice's Pharmacy representative closest at hand (and fortunately empathic enough to calm her down and preserve the company's reputation a bit), I received the brunt of her anger at our perceived symbolic demagoguery and opportunistic faux-patriotism. I myself hold the flag dear in terms of the Enlightenment ideals it represents, but also agree with the late great George Carlin, opponent of anti-flag-burning laws, who said: "I'll leave symbols to the symbol-minded." The lady I described points to the overwhelming pathos generated in the wake of my wedding day, and how odd the national reaction would have seemed had we all not been living it day by day. My reaction to her was colored by my own understanding of our national commerce and media: in a nutshell, I agree with the theory of Manufactured Consent developed by Noam Chomsky and that other guy. What this theory informs me of is that things like excessive flag waving or the demonization of flag burning (or if, say, some purportedly liberal senator did or didn't wear a U.S. flag lapel pin) is a social control designed to marginalize critics of the Federal government. The neo-con\military-industrial agenda was more than served by the hordes of symbol-minded patriots waving flags in the faces of the Progressives and True Conservatives who were both calling for a non-reactionary response (which ended up being cast as "offering counseling and sympathy to the terrorist enemies."

II) a few years before, my cousin had attended a WTO riot in Seattle that made world news headlines. His involvement and, much later, a Sociology class I took at UAA educated me as to what the WTO does or could represent. There is no excuse for violent action, but if those responsible for the nine-eleven attacks were muslim extremists who attacked us because we represent freedom and infadel threat, why would they attack the World Trade Center? I understand that in the world of economics, New York represents the heart and capital of the U.S.'s might. I get that there definitely is such a thing as muslim extremism, but again I think that unless you view the twin towers as a particular symbol for the United States (the patron saint of economic hegemony?), the World Trade Center itself is way less tragic to lose than the thousands of U.S. teens and twenties from poor cities and farms who were sent off to Iraq.

III) a little while ago I was posting a blog about things along these lines and tried looking up the actual statistics on an average American's chance of dying from a terrorist attack on U.S. soil from a muslim extremist. So this guy Michael Rothschild estimates: "Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered." -source, http://www.reason.com/news/show/36765.html.

These three things made me realize that whatever happened that day, nine-eleven has been repeatedly pushed and invoked to the benefit of American militarism. The only reason Americans accept the notion of a war on terror is because they're all mostly terrified of something less dangerous to them personally than cars, or, by some estimates, being struck by lightening. The only threat to the elite of America is that the U.S. political system will work, and peace will prevent the military/industrialists from continuing or furthering economic hegemony through U.S. and key U.S. ally military actions designed to open foreign markets to exploitation. Fortunately nationalism struck a resounding chord that day (even internationally in the form of sympathy by non-U.S. entities) and another Pearl Harbor let the Pentagon fill up on orders for newly mechanized, self-guided bombs, drones, and global reconnaisance while simultaneously marginalizing the rising tide of true patriotism, which questioned the wisdom of pissing off everyone on the planet by consuming 25% of it's resources.

Health Care Debate: The People vs. Dollars

I've been mentally engaged in following the current health care debate; Obama says health care is priority one, so I jump. You could argue that this means I'm a sheep, except that I've never been a sheep in my life - ask anyone who knows me just how "conformist" I am. In fact, I hear a lot of that rhetoric from the right, and it really ticks me off - if being a sheep means uniting under a leader who can put us back on an enlightened path, then I am a exceptionally sheepish sheep among sheep who happen to be the majority. Well gang, the fact is that I'm sick of business as usual in so many ways and though he's still a politician, B.H.O. is the only new train through town.

My Critique of: Following the Money in the Health Care Debate

By REED ABELSON

Published: June 13, 2009

Congress appears ready to confront one of the nation’s most contentious issues — health care reform — and arguments will fill the air in the coming months.

Luba Lukova

Related

Health Plan May Mean Payment Cuts (June 14, 2009)

I left this link above here in because I like how the title sounds kind of panicky in a way related to a fallacy coming up here soon. You can talk about saving American families in two different ways: 1) lowering the costs of living so less people are foreclosed, bankrupt, poverty-stricken, depressed, driven to crime/illness, etc. ; or 2) cutting payments to industry. The problem with casting "payment cuts" as the headline/link above does, is that mean pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies benefit the economy and Dow Jones Industrial Average, but they do so by selling the same drugs to Canada for half the price as what we charge Senior Citizens or AIDS patients for those same drugs here (unless they buy them in Canada, which works out better including the bus fare). They aren't punished for doing this, and much to the contrary, Wall Street would be very happy if such companies could charge even more.
So would a person generally on the Right or generally on the Left try to spin a National Health Plan by saying it "May Mean Payment Cuts" instead of "May Lower Cost of Health Care"? Further: is our national crisis called "We Need Lower Health Costs" or "We Need More Payments To Health Insurance Companies and Health Care Providers"? Just a fun rhetorical question to begin with...

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

TOP PRIORITY One thing is certain. Everyone will argue that the patient is their No. 1 concern.

Correction: everyone, if asked by a Newspaper or other media outlet, would say their patient is their No. 1 concern, without a doubt. But, shareholders of Health-related companies (with control of lobbying money money money), if asked by an Economics professor from their alma mater, would say that profit is their No. 1 concern. The very hallmark of the commerce we live in is, undisputedly and openly stated to be that profit should drive everyone and everything's economic decisions.

Much of the discussion so far has focused on President Obama’s proposal for a government-sponsored health plan that he says will reduce costs. Insurers and doctors argue it will limit patient choice. Drug companies warn that the quality of care could be compromised.

Many many more people than just Obama think such a plan will reduce costs. Many many doctors think it's a good idea, and how many people have any choice in health insurance right now? Do you have a choice when you get a plan from your employer (other than maybe plan A or plan B) or, and this is very critical, when you look into getting a job (like at an interview) do you find out what the health plan is before deciding whether to take the job? Also, how often do you decide not to take a job just because the health plan isn't sufficient for your needs or desires?

Anything drug companies warn me about, I'm going to take as a hostile act by a vile industry that is second only to oil in the Quantities of Dollars category. Oil does amazing things, and so do drugs, but oil companies like to wait twenty years before compensating oil spill victims, and drug companies like to spend more money on researching erectile dysfunction than anything else (wonder what feminism would have to say about this).

But Mr. Obama’s proposal is only one of many that await Congress as it wrestles with how to rein in exploding health care costs while taking care of the country’s nearly 50 million uninsured. The size and complexity of the issue are daunting. To help understand what’s going on, you need to follow the money.

Roughly $2.5 trillion is at stake, the amount the nation spends each year on health care, nearly a fifth of the American economy. How that money is divided up — or prevented from rising at its current pace — is at the center of the debate. Many doctors, insurance companies and drug companies say they fear that their revenues could shrink significantly and patient care could be threatened.

Before we talk about how that fifth of the American economy is divided up, I think we should mention the overarching goal: the nation shouldn't be spending a fifth of it's money on health care when we're buying lower quality at higher prices than any other industrialized nation on the planet. IF AMERICANS BEING UNINSURED AND DYING OF TREATABLE ILLNESSES OR POVERTY IS THE PROBLEM WE'RE TRYING TO SOLVE, THEN HOW DOES INCREASING INSURANCE AND DRUG COMPANY REVENUES OUT OF FEAR HELP THEM. It doesn't. It can't. If the profits these companies were making (which are already huge, successful, and amazing by any analysis) went towards outreach clinics or something I could see the logic in this. But, profits don't go there. That's why there's this thing called non-profit entities, also called charities.

Their arguments may prove to have merit. Doubt it. But “people are voting with their own economic interests,” said Les Funtleyder, a Wall Street analyst who is following the debate closely for Miller Tabak & Co. in New York.

When you hear nothing from one of the interest groups on an issue that is part of the larger debate, you can assume the silence means it has no financial stake in the outcome, he said. “You wouldn’t probably weigh in if you don’t have any skin in the game because if you weigh in, it makes you more of a target,” Mr. Funtleyder said.

Riiiight. Because Mr. Funtleyder knows insurance companies are really worried about their PR right now, so they're definitely policing themselves, spending extra to hire people to double check their persuasive efforts to make sure they are completely benign, utterly noble, and beyond reproach of those who would criticize their lobbying efforts as being somehow motivated by self-interest or profit-centered thinking. Riiiiiiiiiight. Those little drug and insurance organizations that have so much to fear from being a "target" of...my Mom...or, something...especially when they spend more money on television advertising than any other industry in America.

What all of the interest groups reliably support is any new program that would expand coverage to the uninsured. Such a program would translate into tens of millions of new, paying customers for hospitals, doctors, insurers and drug makers.

What all of the interest groups (from both sides of the aisle in Congress) reliably support is, and I'm paraphrasing here from the paragraph above: any new government paid program that wasn't like medicare - the monied interests lobbying Washington want to make sure nothing like Medicare happens, and that the U.S. spends dollars on the penny for their crappy services. Such a program would line millions of pockets for companies that profit from denying health care to policy holders or keeping really sick people off the books - namely for-profit Hospitals, Doctors, Insurers, and Drug Makers.

But what worries those groups is the accompanying talk in Washington about how to address the skyrocketing cost of health care, since any decline in spending would correspond to a reduction in revenues. Yes, helping the people would ideally mean not letting the industry take a fifth of our GDP every year. The discussion has become particularly heated over exactly how the government will find the savings necessary to help generate the $1 trillion or so that the government will need over the next decade to pay for universal coverage. A trillion per decade? Can the drug companies live on that? That's only 8.3 Billion a year - only an Air Force bomber or two. The nation’s doctors, for example, say they wholeheartedly support health care reform. But the American Medical Association has a long history of being opposed to legislation that threatens the status quo. It opposed the creation of Medicare more than 30 years ago. Indicative that the A.M.A. may fear socialism almost as much as Cheney does. Cuba has awesome health care, but their doctors can't even buy German automobiles - why bother?

What concerns doctors about a government-run insurance program that looks like Medicare is the possibility that it will pay like Medicare, said Robert Laszewski, a health policy consultant in Alexandria, Va. “Medicare pays doctors 80 percent of what an insurance company pays,” he said. “If you get a public plan, the doctors are going to get a 20 percent pay cut.”

WRONG WRONG WRONG. First of all, part of why Medicare pays 80 percent is that only old, poor, or otherwise destitute people get Medicare. If Medicare recipients pay only 80 percent for the drugs they buy we'd applaud that twenty percent savings as smart negotiating, but it's somehow different for other medical profiteers? Second of all, "If you get a public plan" the doctors across the nation will be able to give preventative medicine to every child and young adult, and only a small percentage of their customers (the currently uninsured) will suddenly be paying them .80 to the 1.00 (still a better rate than we get with privately administered health plans). Overall, doctors will get a pay increase since they'll have millions of new paying customers, and in this recession, even new customers who only pay 80% is a good thing in the long run. I hate the way the last sentence reads..."20 percent pay cut"...it's just like the link above in the way it spins saving the country from tailspin health care costs. Look at it this way: insuring everyone will tend to increase preventative care. But, by increasing preventative care, the rates of preventable diseases (like diabetes for instance) goes down in the population. So, all the companies that profit from the health care of people with these preventable diseases will no longer have as many customers. HEALTH CARE COMPANIES WILL ALWAYS SUFFER IF FEW ARE SICK, YET YOU DON'T SEE JOURNALISTS WRITING: "DRUG COMPANIES WARN THAT INCREASING NATION'S HEALTH WILL REDUCE PATIENT CHOICE." This is why I always say the media is far from left-biased, and is if anything military-industrial-right-biased.

But doctors are also likely to disagree among themselves over how different types of physicians should be compensated. Most people everywhere disagree about most things. Congress is thinking about raising the pay of primary-care doctors — general practitioners, family physicians and the like — as a way to encourage them to more actively oversee the care of patients and reduce expensive visits to specialists and hospitals. The record will show that Congress hardly ever votes for anything that reduces the amount of money it spends, much to our detriment. Congress has no business raising anyone's pay.

The specialists — the cardiologists, neurologists, surgeons and others — may have a different take on the discussion, Mr. Laszewski noted, especially if Congress cannot raise salaries of primary-care doctors without taking money from the highly paid specialists. “The question is, how are you going to help the primary-care doctors without cutting the cardiologist and the other specialists?” he asked.

Who cares? Let them fight over it in their BMW's. They can all eat cake as far as I'm concerned. Like I said, Congress shouldn't be legislating pay increases - I'm baffled as to why this is even in this article.

But even the family physicians, who stand to benefit the most, say they are opposed to a government-run plan if it reimburses them at the Medicare rate.

I love how this tiny bit of Health Care Reform minuteua is delved into by this supposedly broad treatment article - I've never heard anyone talking about how government run health care is going to affect family practicioners in particular, and even after this article, I'm not sure this argument is remotely central to the issue of skyrocketing health care costs - no one's complaining about family practicioners raking in too much profit, or that family practicioners are going to suddenly go out of business because of thirty new patients who only pay 80 percent. Just do the damn math!

Another group with a lot to win or lose is the nation’s private health insurers. Yeah, one of three stakeholders you've explicitly mentioned a couple times already, and also the only stakeholder that: benefits nobody's health, sacrifices nothing, does nothing except block access. With the number of people who are privately insured through their employer or their own policy not increasing, insurers are eager to find a new source of business. Health reform promises them at least some new customers who cannot afford insurance now but who might receive government help to pay for coverage. Yeah, cause conservative pundits need ammunition to rally against public health care...

But the trade association, America’s Health Insurance Plans, has clearly staked out its opposition to any kind of government-run health plan (wow, what NEWS!), which it says would have an unfair advantage (anything fair to us will seem unfair to them - guaranteed). The trade group fears its members would be driven out of business as the government uses its purchasing power to demand much lower prices from doctors and hospitals. Translation: Insurance giants fear their days are numbered because American's have figured out that we're the only country who throws money at health care to no avail. They're worried they can't survive if Health Care costs don't reach 75 % of GDP by 2075.

Karen Ignagni, the chief executive of the association, has criticized the government’s track record in running Medicare as a good reason not to expand government health insurance beyond the elderly and disabled. She says the program has done a poor job in taking care of people when they are very sick. “Medicare has not effectively coordinated care, addressed chronic illness, or encouraged high performance,” she recently told Congress.

I'm not going to bother posting and critiqueing the second page of the article. It reads much like this last paragraph, and is really just old, thoroughly debunked rhetoric left over from the Reagan administration. Needless to say, I feel very negatively about it because it is printed in mainstream press and goes rather unchallenged despite it's many fallacies and figures misleading to the cause of progress. So a hearty wheat toast to you and your health, may we all profit from the losses of wealth!