What a Responsible Public Health Care Plan Could Mean to You
1. You can keep your current insurance—if you are lucky enough to have care you love.
2. You’ll have access to a comprehensive medical care plan that won’t reject you or inflate your rates based on who you are.
3. You’ll have a primary care physician you can select and see on an ongoing basis. This physician will provide all care including preventative care, mental health screening and dietary advice.
4. Your rates will be predictable and will only rise at or below the rate of inflation.
5. Medications will become more affordable and less tied to marketing costs.
6. Your insurance will be available to you regardless where you are working.
7. If you become extremely ill, your care will continue at costs that are manageable and fair.
8. Health care will be respected as a right—not a privilege.
9. Your children will get all the care they need at minimal cost to you.
10. Billions of dollars that private insurance companies spend trying to not insure Americans and treating preventable conditions brought on by smoking and obesity will be saved.
The Republican’s Deficit Deception: Fiscal Irresponsibility at Its Worst
The Republicans should have a Ministry of Truth to erase the history that don’t like. Instead they just blatantly lie and misrepresent the past to make their case.
As Dick Cheney has said, deficits don’t matter—except when the money is being used to create a more just, responsible society.
The fact is that the GOP purposely drove up the debt in order to prevent the government from delivering more services that help more people. They don’t believe in a government that works for anyone but businesses, banks and defense contractors, and a large debt fuels the argument that we can’t afford real change.
President Bill Clinton left this country with a SURPLUS in 2001. Of course, there was still a huge debt, but we were paying it down.
The only reason we have the debt that we do is because of the irresponsibility of George W. Bush and the Republican Congress.
Bush and Cheney cut taxes for the rich and then they cut taxes for the rich, when they were done with that they cut taxes for the rich. Just weeks after 9/11 the administration was arguing that the attack required cutting the Capital Gains taxes.
These cuts didn’t build infrastructure, fund sustainable development, keep people in their jobs or provide health care for the needy. They just lined the pockets of the top 5% of this county as this country waged war in two foreign countries. It’s unprecedented in American history and a blatant example of the irresponsibility of the Right.
Obama is trying to bring responsibility back to capitalism and create fundamental reforms that will prevent another unnecessary crisis.
Republicans can say that 2 + 2 = 5, but that doesn’t change the fact that they aren’t concerned about debt. They’re just scared to death of creating a government that actually works for people.
A Public Health Care Plan Could Save Your Life
50 million people in this country have no health care insurance.
Some can’t afford it. Some aren’t willing to pay the outrageous fees they are being charged because of a pre-existing condition or previous ailments. A few just don’t want it.
And because they don’t have insurance, they have no access to preventative care, early diagnosis or general wellness. We have no idea how much that costs us eventually in Medicare and public assistance.
But we do know about the billions the private insurance companies make and millions they spend trying to prevent covering the wrong procedures or people.
A public health care plan would change this by giving every American access to affordable health care.
Private insurance companies complain this will make it impossible for them to compete—as if their profits were more important than saving American lives.
In fact, it will help private insurers by covering the people they spend millions to not cover. And it will help small businesses, entrepreneurs, freelancers and the entire economy by creating jobs by relieving employers the onerous burden of providing decent health benefits.
Creating a public health care plan could save your life. Or the lives of your friends, families, fellow Americans. And we will retain our system of private insurers who will be forced to offer premium care and service.
Here’s the serious part. Our best and only chance public health care plan could die in the next few weeks.
The opponents of universal care are powerful, as powerful as the banks, those banks that’ve retained an iron grip on Congress even after causing this Great Recession.
The attacks against a public plan will be shady, targeted and smart. Really stilted TV ads are already darkening our airwaves
We need a creative aftershock to the earthquake that helped get Obama elected.
We need everyone to tell the story of health care.
You need to explain what a public plan mean to you. Tell people about your experiences being denied coverage. These stories can be personal and painful, but they are poignant and necessary.
We also need filmmakers, poets, writers and all creative sorts to tell the story of why a public plan maters to us as a people.
And we need everyone to know why NOW maters so much. Universal health care has been the goal of Democratic administrations throughout the 20th century. But the current recession reveals how important it is become a more responsible, empathetic society.
This President has the will of the people behind him.
But unless we can tell the story of why a public health care plan matters so much, the private insurance industry and their friends in the GOP will defeat a bill that could save your life.
Obama’s Answer to the Muslim World
If there was anyone out there who still doubts the importance of electing Barack Obama President of the United States, his Speech to the Muslim World is your answer.
Of course, this one gesture can’t heal his predecessor’s seven-year plan to piss off the Muslim world.
Of course, we still have to deal with the aftermath of seven-years that flaunted International Law and common decency, mostly at the expense of the Muslim world.
Of course, there are Hawks and Conservatives that will spew vitriol against any sign of empathy for any foreigner they do not deem worthy. Hawks and Conservatives who will look to Tehran and see fundamentalists as enraged and committed as they to spreading ideas through violence.
Of course, these critics will call Obama naïve—as if a political movement that despises scientific theories like evolution, that invades non-aggressive countries without conducting a meeting of the National Security Council to weigh the move, that nominates Sarah Palin to the Vice-Presidency can expect us to take their judgment on naivety seriously.
But the image of a man who would have been declared 3/5 of a man at the founding of this country standing as the President of the United States was America’s new answer to the world. And that same man poignantly advocating non-violence is proof itself to the Muslim world that anything is possible when women and minorities are given the transformational power to vote.
He didn’t condemn the feudal states that oppress their people. He didn’t ask for forgiveness for the US’s role in perpetuating the refugee crisis in Palestine. But he did present a simple way forward through fundamental respect and engagement.
If there was anyone out there who doubted if peace was better than war, George W. Bush did his best to give you his answer.
If there is anyone on earth who still hopes to live in peace, thank you for your patience. We’re de-Cheneyifying ourselves as fast as we can.
I didn’t believe in miracles — then I saw this parked a few blocks from my house.
The Better-Off Dead
1.
A policeman was blocking the front door when I arrived. Serious sunglasses, snug short-sleeved shirt, stiff slacks, arms locked across his chest. The splotchiness of his freckled skin could only be seen when you were immediately in front of him. Probably because his forearms glistened with smooth layer of sweat–a necessary reaction to the burn of the desert sun, still brutal at minutes after five PM. Read more »
Nothing to Sell But Fear Itself
Newt Gingrich has always had a problem with context.
He didn’t get that impeaching a President for lying about an affair while he was having an affair wasn’t a brilliant move.
And he doesn’t quite get that the terrorist threat, while grave and serious, isn’t the same existential threat that marked the Cold War.
And he especially doesn’t get that selling the fear of boogiemen to people who are worried about keeping their job, their health care, their 401k isn’t going to work—even a world where an act of nuclear terrorism is likely if not inevitable.
But on Sunday, the thrice-married, recent Catholic convert, former Speaker of the House said these words: Let me just say, I think people should be afraid. He then listed a series of Al Qaeda attacks (all of which resulted in less loss of American lives than the Iraq War) from the 90s, ignoring that the Bush Administration ignored intelligence that predicted the 911 attacks.
Fear doesn’t keep anyone safe. Either does blind aggression. What keeps people safe is realistic threat assessment, constant engagement and willingness to learn from mistakes.
What keeps us safe is context, and Newt’s fear mongering is just a non sequitur.
Child Abuse?
I’m not certain I would diagnose myself with chemical depression. But if I am currently suffering, a definite symptom would be my recent interaction with a nine-year old girl.
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Jonah Goldberg — Fortunate SOB
Do you remember Jonah Goldberg? His mom was the woman who convinced Linda Tripp to tape her private conversations with the twenty-one year old Monica Lewinsky.
Goldberg has made his way into a high-paying profession where ethical standards don’t help you find work: Conservative punditry.
This article about Obama fear-mongering is the most unconsciously satiric thing I’ve ever read.
Look out Americans, your President is trying to trick you into creating jobs, improving education and fighting global warming with FEAR. Don’t let him trick you into capriciously preventing “moral hazard” and “creative destruction.” The consequences could be horrible: I might have to pay more taxes on the money I earn pooping out Conservative nonsense.
If Obama were conjuring terror alerts to distract us from NOT finding weapons of mass destruction in a country we invaded because of its weapons of mass destruction, then calling Obama’s well wrought rhetoric “fear mongering” might make sense.
Goldberg’s family legacy is a stain on the shapeless dress that is the politics of distraction. He’s the Kato Kaelin of the Lewinsky Scandal, and the LA Times should be ashamed they’re passing this drivel as discourse.
Arguing with the Losers
In teaching there’s a saying: Arguing with a student is like wrestling with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.
In this analogy applied to politics, Rush Limbaugh is obviously the pig.
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