Our Issues
As Sarah Arnquist has written, aside from his awful internment in a Vietnamese prison camp, it is hard to find a day in McCain's life when he was not sheltered by the government-run health care he now claims to loathe. Born the son of a Navy admiral, he was cared for by Navy physicians during his childhood. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in the United States Naval Academy, and the military's care continued until he retired from the service in 1981. In 1982, he won a seat in Congress, ushering him into the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, and in 2001, he qualified for Medicare. When he says, "we have the highest quality of health care in the world in America," he is speaking as a man who has enjoyed a lifetime of government-run care.
But now John McCain is seeking the presidency as a Republican, and a healthy distaste for government-run health care is de rigueur. "I am convinced," said John McCain at Miami Children's Hospital, "that the wrong way to go is to turn over your lives to the government and hope it will all be fine. It won't." Spoken like a 71-year-old whose government health coverage has kept him healthy enough to run for the presidency.
"Consumer-driven" health plans are favored by many Utah legislators & other conservatives as a market-based solution to rising healthcare costs. These plans typically combine high deductibles with a tax-advantaged health account that can be used to pay deductible and medical/dental expenses that are not covered.
The latest survey by the non-partisan Employee Benefit Research Institute found that
Here are two of Dr. Joseph Jarvis's six suggestions for bringing about true health-care reform in Utah (Salt Lake Tribune):
Perverse incentives: From the Wall Street Journal on April 5: "Research at Dartmouth Medical School suggests that if everyone in America went to the Mayo Clinic, our annual health-care bill would be 25 percent lower (more than $500 billion) and the average quality of care would improve. ... Of course, not everyone can get treatment at Mayo. ... But why [is] this example of efficient, high-quality care not being replicated all across the country? The answer is that high-quality, low-cost care is not financially rewarding. Indeed, the opposite is true. Hospitals and doctors can make more money providing inefficient, mediocre care."
Market-based health policy: If we are to eliminate the perverse incentives that lead to inefficient, mediocre care, we have to give up the cherished notion that health care is a commodity efficiently distributed by market forces. We do not principally fund health care through the private sector — 60 percent of revenues paying for health services come from taxpayers, making our citizens more taxed for health care than any people in the world. Beyond that, health care is not subject to market forces, such as a lowered price increasing demand. No one ever had an appendectomy because the price was right. The occurrence of illness and injury primarily determine demand for health services.
On Monday might, The Brad Blog reminded us that most of the votes in the Pennsylvania primary would be unverifiable:
On Tuesday night, you will be told who the winner of the Pennsylvania primary is. You will accept it. You will have no choice. No matter who the winner really is. Or isn't.
This Tuesday's crucial contest will be primarily run on 100% faith-based, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen or push-button) e-voting machines across the state. There will be no way to determine after the election whether the computers have accurately recorded, or not, the intent of those voters who voted on them. As VerifiedVoting.org summarizes the crucial contest, it "will be essentially unrecountable, unverifiable, and unauditable."
Most of the votes, more than 85%, will be cast on such DRE systems which do not provide so-called "Voter Verified Paper Audit Trails" (VVPATs), as their use has been found unconstitutional in the state, since its been determined, accurately, that ballot secrecy cannot be guaranteed when using such paper trail systems. Not that it matters.
With or without a so-called "paper trail" printer, all touch-screen/push-button/DRE voting machines are equally unverifiable and antithetical to American democracy. Period.
Sara Robinson at Orcinus is starting a series about the FLDS that includes reporting from Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven and the new book The Secret Lives of Saints by Daphne Bramham. Here's Sara's series so far; check back at Orcinus periodically for more.
- Are FLDS women brainwashed?
- The Secret Lives of Saints
- What We're Not Talking About, Part I: Other Issues With the FLDS
One of the things we need to understand is just how the FLDS managed to stay so far under the radar for so long — and what twisted consequences were allowed to follow from that lack of oversight. Bramham shows that they did a stunningly effective job of building their own self-sufficient infrastructure of community institutions — hospitals, police forces, courts, financial trusts, schools, and employers — that allowed the church to function without interacting with the outside world any more than necessary. Most of the group's institutions were designed to mimic and supplant outside authority well enough to keep the group (and especially its treatment of women and children) hidden from the prying eyes of outsiders. And, for 60 years, those who were responsible for providing higher-level oversight for all these institutions have almost always been somehow induced to look the other way. [...]
Like African-Americans in the slavery era, women who tried to run were captured by these police and returned to their husbands for punishment — or taken to the hospital for the dreaded mental health evaluation. The police force's main job is to be the muscle that enforces the Prophet's control of the entire community. When the Prophet decides that a man no longer deserves his home, these are the cops who enforce the eviction. Appealing to the FLDS judges has been useless: due process as we understand it doesn't even enter into the conversation.
There is progress on this front. The state of Utah began to move against the Hildale police force in 2005, revoking the certification of its polygamous chief. Sam Roundy admitted that he'd investigated over 25 sexual abuse cases in the past decade — including one that involved the rape of an eight-year-old — and never reported it to child protection authorities. (He pleaded ignorance of all mandated reporter laws.) However, Roundy was replaced with another polygamous officer who immediately sent Warren Jeffs a letter pledging his loyalty, and I found no word that he's left office since. Later that year, the Utah Supreme Court also disbarred the local polygamous judge, which paved the way for reform of the local courts.
But the Saints are now in many places besides Utah; and officials in these other states shouldn't be surprised if they try to hijack cops and courts and replicate this system wherever they go. In Utah, decades of failure to attend to this effectively deprived tens of thousands of people of their civil rights. It can't be allowed to happen again.
Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, has a column in the Wall Street Journal, of all places:
Consider, for example, the one fateful charge that the punditry and the other candidates have fastened upon Mr. Obama — "elitism." No one means by this term that Mr. Obama is a wealthy person (he wasn't until last year), or even that he is an ally of the wealthy (although he might be that). What they mean is that he has committed a crime of attitude, and revealed his disdain for the common folk.
It is a stereotype you have heard many times before: Besotted with latte-fueled arrogance, the liberal looks down on average people, confident that he is a superior being. He scoffs at religion because he finds it to be a form of false consciousness. He believes in regulation because he thinks he knows better than the market. [...]
It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have designed and supported the policies that have brought the class divide back to America — the people who have actually, really transformed our society from an egalitarian into an elitist one — perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil, like a cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers. Likewise do their retainers in the wider world — the conservative politicians and the pundits who lovingly curate all this phony authenticity — become jes' folks, the most populist fellows of them all.
Does the American Dream include a McMansion for every family? Some will settle for a cottage. In Gulfport, Mississippi, the state has designed and produced "Mississippi Cottages," which are skinny, sturdy and small houses in happy pastel colors. They cost an average of $32,000 to build, and actually are both healthy and popular with those who live in them - unlike the horrible FEMA trailers. With foreclosures accelerating, one would think there could be a market for affordable housing. OTOH
The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency has installed more than 2000 of them throughout southern Mississippi and plans to put in 3,500.But local governments in Mississippi have resisted the cottages. They fear people who get the cottages will simply live in them and not rebuild their houses, said Mack Womack...of MEMA.
Offering the gloomiest assessment of personal economic progress in close to half a century, a new survey has found that most Americans think they have not made economic progress over the past five years, as their incomes have stagnated and they have increasingly borrowed money to finance their lifestyles.
As many Americans struggle with declining housing values, increasing food and energy prices and growing unemployment after a long period of flat wages, well over half of respondents said they are either losing ground economically or are stuck in the same place, according to the report released today by the Pew Research Center. Only four in 10 said they have moved forward in the past five years — a record low, Pew says, and far off the record 57 percent who in 1997 said they had moved forward in the previous five years.
Paul Krugman says that "the power of competition" does not drive down healthcare costs:
For one thing, even if you buy the premise that competition would reduce health care costs, the idea that it could cut costs enough to make insurance affordable for Americans with a history of cancer or other major diseases is sheer fantasy.
Beyond that, there's no reason to believe in these alleged cost reductions. Insurance companies do try to hold down "medical losses" — the industry's term for what happens when an insurer actually ends up having to honor its promises by paying a client's medical bills. But they don't do this by promoting cost-effective medical care.
Instead, they hold down costs by only covering healthy people, screening out those who need coverage the most [...]. They also deny as many claims as possible, forcing doctors and hospitals to spend large sums fighting to get paid.
And the international evidence on health care costs is overwhelming: the United States has the most privatized system, with the most market competition — and it also has by far the highest health care costs in the world.
- How government lowers healthcare costs (Jacob Hacker in the Washington Post)
- How to debunk a mischaracterization of what your candidate said (Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post, demonstrating that he can think rationally when defending Republicans)
- Small currency outlets in Amsterdam refuse to take U.S. dollars (Reuters)
- After a brief dip last week, Obama takes an 8-point lead over Clinton nationally (Gallup)
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