Saturday, March 13, 2010

Healthcare insurance reform?

Interestingly and tellingly on the important issue of healthcare insurance reform our president chose to stay above the fray when he had lots of time, a super majority in the congress, a real reform bill with the public option in it and a mandate from the folk to reform healthcare insurance.


Now a year later, a narrow margin even with reconciliation, a riled folk in no mood to suffer fools especially the lackluster ones in congress, almost nothing worth passing in the bill and no public option and an evaporating mandate the president decides to go for it. I’m not buying it. This is the ploy, the tack experienced politicians who want to defeat a measure have used forever.

Done correctly it appears to the folk the president is fighting to have a law passed. While it is true---it’s true only after having already worked to kill any iteration of it worth passing.

For the past year the insurance industry has poured millions of dollars into the effort to defeat any chance of meaningful healthcare insurance reform that might lead to universal healthcare for millions of uninsured Americans. Six lobbyists for every member of congress continually work the will of the insurance industry as they have for a century or more.

San Antonio is perennially in the fat city list. Obesity leads to many disabling, crippling diseases. Those range from diabetes and hypertension to kidney failure and heart attacks. This should be a very relevant issue but none of our elected representatives is talking about it in a city that touts its “medical center.”

Citizens now face a dilemma---we must decide whether it is better to pass the present version of healthcare “reform” and have a watered-down almost meaningless iteration of what it should be or whether at this point it is more critical than ever to insist on the public option. This question was discussed recently on Bill Moyers Journal. Bill’s guests are informed and engaging.

Wendell Potter and Doctor Marcia Angell provide two views on the issue of healthcare insurance reform even as time runs out for any chance of meaningful reform.

Wendell Potter left his successful career as the head of Public Relations for CIGNA, one of the nation's largest insurers, and decided to speak out against the industry after attending “a "health care expedition," a makeshift health clinic set up at a fairgrounds, and he tells Bill Moyers, "It was absolutely stunning. When I walked through the fairground gates, I saw hundreds of people [yes Americans] lined up, in the rain. It was raining that day. Lined up, waiting to get care, in animal stalls. Animal stalls."

Doctor Marcia Angell is “currently serving as a senior lecturer in the department of social medicine at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Angell has devoted her life to researching, writing and speaking on topics incorporating medical ethics, health policy, the nature of medical evidence, the interface of medicine and the law, and end-of-life care.”

Whichever side of the issue you are on become informed. Give a damn about your fellow Americans---documented or not care to do good to “promote the general welfare”---like it says in the preamble to our Constitution. Besides, it makes for good public policy. Keep in mind that documentation doesn’t immunize anyone from anything.

Dump the current healthcare bill 1 of 2


Dump the current healthcare bill 2 of 2

Bill Moyers: Healthcare Insurance Reform: Doctor Marcia Angell

Corporate profits before patients?

Health insurance reform reality check

Wendell Potter on Profits Before Patients

Texans sorely lacking health care insurance

What does the "public" in "public option" really mean?

2009 Fattest Cities in America

More than 1 in 4 in Texas lack health insurance

Money-Driven Medicine

Sunday, March 7, 2010

The making of public policy: Bexar County: via Harris County this time

Sound the alarm!! It is matter of great concern!! Our country is being taken from us!!


What? The death penalty unconstitutional? The Dickens you say?

“A state district judge in Houston has granted a portion of a pretrial motion declaring the death penalty unconstitutional, a decision the Texas attorney general called “an act of unabashed judicial activism.”

“Judicial activism” is code the compassionate conservative religiosities use to mean anyone not hateful, not mean-spirited, not racist, not homophobic---you know in other words, “liberal.”

In the case at bar, defendant John Edward Green, Jr. is accused of “fatally shooting a Houston woman and wounding her sister on June 16, 2008.”

The facts in death penalty cases are seldom pretty or pleasant. If we become wrapped around that axel we do not get to the question at bar nor the issue raised by the defense.

The question is as Green’s attorneys argue whether or not the “law providing for the procedures surrounding instructions to a jury in the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure violate the Eighth and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment and guaranteeing the right of due process.” If illegal then it violates the constitution.

Judge Kevin Fine found the statute in question violates due process guaranteed by the Constitution.

Not to put too fine a point on it the judge stated in his ruling that “it is safe to assume innocent people have been executed.”

In Texas Red that is both an understatement and a given.

The state’s “official” Inquisition Team immediately went into sound bite mode.

“Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott offered to help the district attorney appeal Fine’s decision, which Abbott said ignored U.S. Supreme Court precedent.” Adding, “We regret that the court’s legally baseless order unnecessarily delays justice and closure for the victim’s family including her two children, who witnessed their mother’s brutal murder,”

“Gov. Rick Perry joined Abbott and District Attorney Patricia Lykos in slamming Fine’s ruling. “Like the vast majority of Texans, I support the death penalty as a fitting and constitutional punishment for the most heinous crimes,” Perry said. “This is a clear violation of public trust and I fully support the Harris County District Attorney’s decision to pursue all remedies.”

Of course Perry being a paragon of all that is good and right would be unlikely to say anything else. (See: Willingham)

We all know that without killing someone in reaction to a violent crime means there can be no justice or closure. If I’m not mistaken it is one of Christianity’s central themes. Lest the compassionate conservative religiosities send out a hit squad as religiosities of all stripes like to do I’m being facetious about collective murder being Christ-like. Of course going by what we see and hear the religiosities say we’d never know it.

The gist of the issue is that when people say the death penalty is legal and that all they want is justice they are not speaking accurately. What those people really want is not justice they want “revenge.”

The history of the death penalty in the world (and this republic as well) is as tempestuous as the history of nature and this planet---that is to say violent, unpredictable and extremely outrageous.

Don't forget that in 1972 (Furman vs Georgia) the supremes ruled the death penalty to be "cruel and unusual punishment." The high court found the "statutes" as written in that case were unconstitutional. So the compassionate, conservative religiosities around the country immediately began looking for ways to constitutionally kill as a state and nation. It didn't take long.

In 1977 not quite five years after Furman vs Georgia a case made it to the supremes that was found legally sufficient. Compassionate conservative religiosities around the nation breathed a sigh of relief, rejoiced---they could legally kill again! Just as god intended!!! In 1982 ten years after Furman the first lethal injection murder was committed by the nation---and yes you guessed it---in Texas.

The majority in Texas Red are a hateful lot. Our prisons are little more than an extension of our apartheid education system. No one in prison is rehabilitated.

When a person is released from prison they are almost always worse people than when they went in.

Our core systems fail the most vulnerable of our citizens.

When the Green case is appealed by the state, the supremes as presently constituted---that is rightwing, goper activists aka majority compassionate conservative religiosities who want nothing more than to allow compassionate conservatives to collectively kill someone---almost anyone---and culpability is of little consideration they will likely rule in favor of the death penalty regardless of the Constitutionality of the law in question.

Once again this calls to mind the writings of James Madison in the Federalist Papers in which he stated that majority rule is tyranny by majority.

In the history of this nation the majority population have believed slavery a good thing, a good public education for “whites only” (that goes for lunch counters, drinking fountains, restrooms and etc).

Ours is likely an unmendable misfortune.

More:  Houston judge declares death penalty unconstitutional
 
           History of the death penalty
 
           George Carlin:  Prisons
 
           Innocence Project
 
           Trial by Fire:  Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?
 
           America's Apartheid Public Education System
 
 
 
 
 

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Bexar County and (Texas Red) Primary Election Results

Should you entertain any doubts about the philosophical direction of the majority fine folk of the Lone Star state---Tuesday’s primary election results should disabuse you.

It is amazing that candidates with the high visibility of Hutchison and Perry take credit for conditions in Texas---on purpose.

Perry talks about how much business he has brought to the state. Yet our unemployment rates continue to climb. Oh and by the way, though the state needs the money to pay unemployment benefits Perry rejected federal money for that purpose.

Interestingly, though Perry claims credit for bringing business to Texas it seems those businesses are the only ones who have benefited receiving generous tax breaks even as the average working stiff in Texas earns only chump change. Texas is after all a “right to work state.”

The only jobs our leaders created last year were created (No matter what Perry tries to insist) by the stimulus package.

Texas lost over 300,000 jobs last year; about one-third that many, 89,000 were created by the stimulus. Perry? He won’t own up to that.

The working stiffs of the state endure an embarrassing lack of healthcare and an apartheid public education system.

Texas ranks 49 out of 50 states in the healthcare provided its citizens. Six of the ten counties in the nation that provide the least healthcare are located in (you guessed it) Texas. More of our students go on to prison than college.

“No child left behind” notwithstanding Texas is at the bottom of the list of states in providing even the pathetic apartheid public education it does.

No other governor in the nation can boast having executed 204 inmates during their term of office---some of whom might even have been guilty.

Hutchison for her part was there to support former senator Phil Gramm and his wife Wendy in their successful efforts in bringing about the de-regulation that brought us the economic catastrophe we now know as the great recession.

The people of the state of Texas have spoken.

Texas Red: a cratered landscape of prisons, deplorable apartheid public education, lack of healthcare and politicians and majority population intent on keeping it that way.

No wonder the founders believed that majority rule was tyranny by majority.

 
More:  Bexar County


Texas Results

Perry wins Republican nomination without a runoff

Voters Spank Far Right in State Board of Education Elections

Incumbent Montemayor wins Democratic Primary