Americans go to the doctor far less than their foreign counterparts. The most likely reason? It’s expensive. While the quality of healthcare in the U.S. might be high, it does little good if citizens can’t afford to go. (I’m also going to guess that most workplaces are not keen about handing out sick days so employees can visit a doctor.) It will be interesting to see if the average number of visits per year increases with the ACA in effect.

The post Infographic: Americans don’t go to the doctor very often appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Although many of my friends have praised the Affordable Care Act and Obama for working to get it passed, I have a different view.  When, to appease the health insurance industry, Obama bargained away the “public option,” I knew the ACA was not going to get us to single payer. My friends tell me to be happy that more people will get health insurance coverage, and to “not let the perfect be the enemy of the possible.” I tell them it’s important to not let the possible cloud our vision. The Affordable Care Act is not a healthcare bill, like Medicare, it is a taxpayer funded, for-profit health insurance subsidy that makes health insurance more “affordable.”  The good part is that it expands Medicaid coverage. The bad part is that it expands coverage at the discretion of the states. Another good part is that it has some new cost controls in place. The bad part, not nearly enough.

What the ACA is not: universal coverage, a step to single payer, or a solution for the working poor who don’t qualify for Medicaid and don’t make enough to buy insurance on the exchanges. What the ACA is: a fake “market” solution to a health care crisis— “fake” because it is built on a government giveaway to private business. It expands private health insurance coverage through government subsidies and includes a government mandate that everyone buy insurance. This “public-private partnership” serves to further entrench and enrich the private health insurance industry at taxpayer expense, and probably closes the door on single payer for a decade, if not decades.

A single payer system, like Medicare, would not only guarantee universal health care for all, but it would drastically reduce the cost for health care and prescription drugs, stopping corporate price gouging in its tracks. A George Mason University study confirms that U.S. healthcare spending is more than twice the average for developed countries. And what does our expensive, profit-driven system buy us? The National Research Council and Institute of Medicine reports that the U.S. is near the bottom in a study of 17 affluent countries in nine key areas of health: infant mortality and low birth weight; injuries and homicides; teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections; prevalence of HIV and AIDS; drug related deaths; obesity and diabetes; heart disease; chronic lung diseases; and disability.

The ACA, written by Liz Fowler, a former VP for WellPoint, made sure insurance industry profits were prioritized. In service of that goal, the ACA uses public taxpayer funds to market the private insurance industry’s products to “consumers.” That would be the government run and funded ACA websites. In exchange for removing some of the most egregious and vicious industry practices, such as denying coverage for preexisting conditions and dropping coverage when people get sick, the industry gets to expand its customer base—for free, and with the added bonus of a government mandate to buy their products. On top of us footing the bill for marketing private, for profit health insurance to ourselves, we also provide a subsidy to those of us who are lower-income consumers (in reality a subsidy to the for-profit health insurance industry) to make the unaffordable, profit driven insurance “affordable.”

The Obama administration’s push to sign up young people for dubious high deductible ”bronze” plans is not so they can have access to health care. It’s to make sure the insurance companies are made whole, that the revenues promised them are met. The government and industry need healthy young people to sign up to offset those who are older and sicker so that industry profits are protected. Because this is a government subsidized for-profit program, the ACA will only be a “success,” if the profits are there for the industry.  If the profits fail to materialize, the ACA falls apart. The media, ever a servant to power, accepts without question the priority of the insurance industry’s profits.

Yves Smith, at Naked Capitalism, quotes Ezra Klein and Sarah Kiff at the Washington Post:

First Ezra Klein:

The next challenge for the law, as the White House knows, will be the outreach challenge of signing up enough young-and-healthy people to balance out its risk pools.

And Sarah Kliff amplifies:

“One of the things I’ve been curious about is any demographic information about who is and isn’t signing up, so we can get a sense of how to best adjust and tailor our public efforts,” Chris Abele [a country official from Milwaukee] asked.

No dice. “Chris, at this point we hope to add that to our statistics very soon but we don’t have the breakdown by age and zip code and area,” Sebelius responded. As to how to focus outreach efforts, Sebelius directed Abele to “focus on the general population in terms of likely uninsured but also young and healthy individuals.”

So here we have yet another insane, sociopathic statement from the political class, and everybody who hears it nods and smiles away as if everything is perfectly normal. And it is! It is!

Did you hear what the Secretary of Health and Human Services really, actually said? She said her first priority was not health. Rather, her first priority is the actuarial soundness of the ObamaCare pool. For example, if every sick person in the United States who doesn’t have insurance signed up, and nobody else did, that would be a disaster. (Not to the sick people, of course.) And why? Because the insurance companies would lose money.

The ACA offers some improvements in health insurance coverage in exchange for an expanded consumer base. In addition to removing the most cruel aspects of health insurance mentioned previously, the industry is providing preventive care, there are caps on administrative costs, and kids can stay on parents plans until age 26. But—and here’s the progressive view—we are nowhere near where we really need to be.  If we are to have a humane healthcare delivery system, one that is truly available to everyone, our sociopathic, parasitic, for-profit insurance system has to go.

Eric Naumburg, MD, writes at Physicians for a National Health Program,

We need a humane healthcare system, not a profit-driven one. In a rich country like America, healthcare should be a public good, not a privilege. If we expanded traditional Medicare to everyone, there would be no need to figure out if you can afford a bronze, silver, gold or platinum plan; instead there’d be one standard of care for everyone.

Thanks to the ACA strengthening the for-profit healthcare system through taxpayer-paid, corporate welfare, “Medicare for all” is going to be a harder fight and take longer to achieve. The health insurance industry, further entrenched, is already doing well. An October 26, 2013 Forbes headline reads: “Despite Glitches, Obamacare Profit Windfall to Insurers Well Underway.”

The post Affordable Care Act: a taxpayer subsidy for the health insurance industry appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), considered by many to be one of the smartest members of Congress, is running for New Jersey’s open senate seat in a primary against Wall Street and hedge fund backed Democrat Corey Booker, mayor of Newark. Another progressive, New Jersey congressman Frank Pallone, has joined the race to fill the late Frank Lautenberg’s seat. Booker has a substantial lead in the polls over both Pallone and Holt, but insiders give Holt a better chance to defeat Booker. Here’s one of Holt’s refreshing campaign videos—refreshing because he presents truly progressive ideas. You can view his other videos on NSA spying, Wall Street, climate change, Social Security, and student loans on his campaign website.

Holt is a scientist, a teacher, an expert on monitoring nuclear weapons – and (I love this) a five-time Jeopardy! winner who beat IBM’s computer “Watson.” He holds a Ph.D in physics, has been an assistant director of Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory and a faculty member at Swarthmore. Before he ran for Congress, he did a stint at the State Department monitoring the nuclear programs of countries like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. As a congressman, he has led the fight on climate change, working to add tough new restrictions on greenhouse gases to cap-and-trade proposals. He voted against the war in Iraq, against unwarranted spying on Americans, and he fought to repeal the misguided PATRIOT Act. Holt, is a strong advocate for single payer health care.

When Obama came into office in 2009, single payer was the obvious and rational solution to our predatory, inefficient, and costly health insurance system, but single payer, or “Medicare for all” was unacceptable to Obama’s Wall Street backers. So, with the help of other corporate Democrats and health insurance executives, Obama kludged together the Affordable Care Act, which, among other things, was designed to knee-cap single payer. Obama and Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus brought in insurance lobbyist Liz Fowler to write the mind bogglingly complex bill in secret. Their guiding principal was to do no harm to any corporate profit stream. FDR saved capitalism, but Obama saved the health insurance industry—at least for now.

The official line, that Obama had to write the bill to please Republicans, is a myth. Republicans and most Democrats work for the same donors. Obama, rather cynically, used the so-called “public option” to co-opt the progressive base that had worked tirelessly to elect him. Because his brief was to pass a bill that was acceptable to heath care CEOs and Wall Street, the public option never was a viable “option.” To that end, he delivered a highly flawed, industry friendly, insurance-based health care delivery system spawned from warmed-over Republican ideas.

Is Obamacare better than what we had? Of course it is—our health care system was so bad there was nowhere to go but up. Some of the worst industry practices, such as denying coverage to sick people, have been ended in exchange for the mandate that everyone buy insurance. The exchanges, at least in some states, will drive down the cost of premiums for the uninsured. There are new options for preventive care. But, because it is profit-driven, Obamacare remains an absurdly expensive, complicated, and inefficient way to deliver healthcare. And, as we will soon discover, it is full of loopholes beneficial for the health care industry.

We, the American people, need single payer, and, if elected to the Senate, Rush Holt, a true progressive, will advocate for it.

The post Rush Holt, New Jersey progressive running for Senate, backs single payer appeared first on Occasional Planet.

A very knowledgeable person, who wishes to remain anonymous, has written the most comprehensive and exhaustive analysis to date of “Obamacare” —The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). You can find it on Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy website. Be forewarned, this very long and detailed explanation of the ACA might make your brain hurt. But if you want to understand the nuts and bolts of Obamacare—the reality vs. the vague promises—then pour yourself a stiff drink and click here. We’ve heard about the positive reforms of the ACA—and there are positive reforms. See Occasional Planet “related posts” for a survey of the positive aspects of the bill. Indeed, the ACA takes the edge off the most egregious health insurance industry practices in exchange for the guaranteed expansion of its market and bottom line. But will the ACA reforms make up for its deeper systemic flaws? The ACA will go into full operation in 2014, so it’s time to look under the hood of the bill, understand what’s coming, and see how it will play out in the lives of lower to middle income Americans. To get right to the point, the ACA is another “government/ business partnership” designed to make money off of the American people by feeding taxpayer money to corporations. Roberts’ characterizes it this way in his introduction to the article:

The ACA was not selflessly designed with the intent of providing affordable and equitable medical services to those in need, but rather to acquire taxpayer money for the private insurance companies under the seemingly helpful guise of health care and the ideological excuse of personal responsibility. It takes money from ordinary people and gives it to a medical insurance industry that profits handsomely from this legally-enforced corporate welfare—all while keeping Americans locked in the same broken system that puts profit before patients.

The worst outcome of this bill, according to Roberts’ anonymous author, is that it will significantly increase household debt for individuals and families who can’t afford the “affordable” high-deductible, insurance.  It will become yet another source of financial stress in a very difficult economy, undermining the whole idea of improving the heath of the many. The forced purchase of health insurance will bring increased revenue to the industry and more kickbacks to Congress, creating a bloated, entrenched system similar to the banking industry. Eventually it, too, will be “too big to fail.” At least that’s one possibility, one the industry is hoping for. The following is an outline of the article:

1)   Health insurance Exchange basics. This includes a discussion of how your Modified Adjusted Gross Income (MAGI) will affect all determinations made by an Exchange including eligibility for Medicaid. This is something you need to pay attention to now, in 2013, as your MAGI this year will determine what you pay for health insurance in 2014.

2)   Determining Eligibility for a Tax Credit. The tax credit is paid in advance for the year you are currently in based on an estimate using your last year’s tax return. The advance payment of the tax credit carries with it some potential heavy-duty consequences. (See point 4.)

3)   Tax Credits and Your Share of the Premium. The author provides Federal Poverty Level formulas and explanation of how the tax credit subsidies will work.

4)   Payback of Tax Credits to the IRS. The advance payment of the tax credit is essentially a loan from the government paid on your behalf to the insurer. When you file you tax return for the year you received your “advance tax credit,” if your income changes from your estimate, you have to settle with the IRS. Your industry friendly Congress has increased the cap on this money you might owe to $2,500, thereby putting a huge financial burden on the backs of the people ACA claims to help. If you happen to get ahead, and make more than 400 percent of the poverty line, you will have to pay back the entire subsidy.

5)   Medicaid Expansion and Estate Recovery. In a nutshell, if an Exchange determines you are eligible for Medicaid, you have no choice but to be enrolled in it. (So much for the assurances that you will have a “choice.”) When you die, the State, on behalf of the Federal Government, will go after your estate for repayment of Medicaid services. In other words, loads of taxpayer money for banks, corporations, and the Jamie Dimons of the world, but none for you! The State will go after any of your remaining assets, including your family home.

6)   Insurance Plans at the Exchanges. The author covers the four plan levels that will be offered. For each, you will pay for all your medical care until you reach the annual deductible, then you will pay a percentage of the coinsurance until you reach the out-of-pocket spending cap. The high deductibles in all but the two most expensive plans could put you into debt for routine care and may stop you from seeking necessary treatment for illness or injuries. The promise of access to affordable health care is, in reality, access to inadequate, high-deductible coverage. Most importantly, Obamacare has no cost controls. There is nothing stopping insurance companies from increasing their rates.

7)   Penalty for Being Uninsured. If you choose not to buy the ACA health insurance you can’t afford, most likely, the IRS will deduct the penalty from your refund. If you don’t qualify for a refund, you will be hit with an outstanding tax obligation.

8)   Exemptions from the Penalty. The author covers the various exemptions, including the laughable one where the purchasing of health insurance would cause you to experience “serious deprivation of food, shelter, clothing or other necessities.”  Laughable, because it may be the story for millions.

9)   Other Tidbits. The author explains the Accountable Care Organization (ACO) that will manage your care and how they are set up to encourage doctors to abuse the system at the patient’s expense.

10) Enroll America, Herndon Alliance & The Exchanges—Master’s of Spin. Enroll America is a non-profit financially backed by Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, UnitedHealth, etc. to encourage people to purchase health insurance in the open market or the Exchanges. Its board of directors is made up of industry cartel—CEO’s, presidents, vice presidents, and directors of organizations like the American Hospital Association, Express Scripts, Kaiser Permanente, and so on. Never short on chutzpah, they are asking for donations on their “not-for-profit” website to help them sell insurance to you. Their goal is to fleece you for another $100 million by 2014.  Herndon Alliance is a health care spinmeister creating messaging to change public opinion about insurance products. The Obama talking points used to promote the ACA came from Herndon. Herndon and other PR firms are working with the Exchanges to promote enrollment. The author ends with this:

The ACA is most definitely a “uniquely American solution” which has little to do with reforming this country’s barbaric health care system. It merely controls peoples’ finances and choices while leaving insurance companies in charge and does virtually nothing to end their abuses. It will leave many millions of Americans uninsured and millions more underinsured at a staggering cost to taxpayers.

A generous (and seriously wrongheaded) view of Obamacare is that it was a progressive bill designed to be a steppingstone to single payer. But, in reality, it was designed to strengthen, expand, and more deeply entrench corporate control of healthcare delivery. What will happen when the ACA comes online in 2014? I think millions will decide (out of necessity) to take the IRS fine rather than go into further debt buying inadequate, high deductible insurance. The insurance companies, limited to a smaller profit margin, and not getting the numbers they want, will decide they can’t make enough money to keep their yachts afloat, and fold. Hospitals, tired of treating people in emergency rooms for free, will push for Medicare expansion, as will the general population. Slowly, in fits and starts, we will move to Medicare for all. That will be a huge improvement. But, in order for us to have humane healthcare for all, the profit taking throughout the system has to stop—the $200 a pill prescription, the $15 box of hospital tissues, the many unnecessary, but lucrative procedures that line the pockets of surgeons. The “free market” for-profit health care industry with its bloated costs is the underlying cancer of healthcare delivery in the United States. Physicians for a National Health Program sums it up:

The financing infrastructure of the Affordable Care Act is fatally flawed since it cannot ever reach our goals. In contrast, if we replaced the financing system with a single payer national health program, such as an improved Medicare that automatically covered everyone, we could eliminate the profound administrative excesses of our current fragmented financing system, and use global budgets for hospitals, negotiated rates for health care professionals, and bulk purchasing of pharmaceuticals and supplies to slow the intolerable increases in health care costs. Those economic tools are effective in a truly universal system, but really don’t work in a dysfunctional, fragmented system such as that of the Affordable Care act.

The post Obamacare: a primer for 2014 appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Dear Governor Nixon: During the debate over the Affordable Care Act (ACA), we learned many things as a country. Chief among them, in my mind, is that a citizenship without medical coverage is a growing problem, both for the health of our people and for our finances. People should never go bankrupt because they or their children get sick or seriously injured, but every day they do. Every day thousands of Missourians go without necessary health care. Some of them lose their livelihoods and, unable to provide for their families, they turn to the state for help.

Health care is widely regarded as a human right in developed nations, Mr. Governor, and every facet of our society reflects that. Our health care professionals take oaths to practice medicine ethically and put the patient first, to aspire to prevention before cure. All of those ideals are acknowledged in the ACA via free preventative care, rescission bans, and coverage for pre-existing conditions, among other things.

We also have laws that require hospitals to provide medical treatment to everyone who needs it, regardless of citizenship or ability to pay. Every single taxpayer chips in to programs like the VA, Medicare, and Medicaid so that the people who need health care the most–but in most cases are least able to afford it–are able to get the care they need. Responsible employers share the cost of employee health care because they know a healthy worker is a productive one. Good health is necessary to a life in the pursuit of happiness, liberty, and the American dream.

The Affordable Care Act is simply an addendum to this societal norm, this very basic right. A right we all recognize and accept, whether we gain from it politically or not, whether we will admit to it publicly or not.

This is why I’m asking you to take the first step in extending Medicaid to cover hard-working Missourians earning up to 133% of the federal poverty line by including it in your budget. Please sign this state on to the Medicaid expansion so that more Missourians in need of something as basic as medical care can live in good health, keep their jobs and their homes, and provide for their families with dignity. Health care is a human right and Missourians are people too.

The post Dear Governor Nixon: Extend Medicaid coverage in Missouri appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Want to get rid of Obamacare? Take heed of the story Nicholas Kristof tells in a recent New York Times posting.

His long-time friend Scott goes without health insurance because he did not think he could afford it. At age 52 he was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer. Had he been insured, it’s likely the cancer would have been detected sooner.  Scott gambled, and lost.

The Affordable Healthcare Act is far from perfect. Kristoff terms it “inelegant.” But already, it is reducing the number of Americans without health insurance, those young people now covered under their parents’ plans. Come 2014, even more people will be insured. The personal mandate the Republicans so revile will make it possible for people like Scott to be covered.

Think this election is only about the two men who are running? As Kristoff points out, “The real impact of the election will be felt in the lives of men and women around the country…” People like Scott who are “battling a gnawing uncertainty that he should never have had to face, that no American should so needlessly endure.”

Kristof reflects further,

Let’s just stipulate up front that Scott blew it. Other people are sometimes too poor to buy health insurance or unschooled about the risks. Scott had no excuse… He’s the first to admit that he screwed up catastrophically and may die as a result.

Yet remember also that while Scott was foolish, mostly he was unlucky. He is a bachelor, so he didn’t have a spouse whose insurance he could fall back on in his midlife crisis. In any case, we all take risks, and usually we get away with them…

The Mitt Romney philosophy, as I understand it, is that this is a tragic but necessary byproduct of requiring Americans to take personal responsibility for their lives. They need to understand that mistakes have consequences. That’s why Romney would repeal Obamacare and leave people like Scott to pay the price for their irresponsibility.

To me, that seems ineffably harsh. We all make mistakes, and a humane government tries to compensate for our misjudgments. That’s why highways have guardrails, why drivers must wear seat belts, why police officers pull over speeders, why we have fire codes. In other modern countries, Scott would have been insured, and his cancer would have been much more likely to be detected in time for effective treatment.

Is that a nanny state? No, it’s a civilized one.

The post Kristof: Why Obamacare matters appeared first on Occasional Planet.

How important is it that young people go to the polls and vote?  If you’re an Obama supporter as I am it’s crucial.  Look at the numbers. An estimated 23 million Americans under the age of thirty voted in the 2008 election.  That was 3.4 million more than voted in the 2004 election.  Of those youth voters in 2008, seventy percent had attended college.  Fully two-thirds of those in the 18- to 29-year-old demographic cast ballots for Obama.

Recently, I’ve heard some pretty outrageous claims dropping out of the mouths of otherwise intelligent people. But one of the most shocking has been young people in their twenties telling me that they’re planning to sit out this election because “there’s no difference between these guys.”   Obama/Biden and Romney/Ryan?  Are they kidding?

Excuse the dismissive language.  But is it actually possible that some people can’t see the difference?  Our political system is in total meltdown failure when many educated, young people such as those I’ve spoken to can’t tell the difference between the policy prescriptions of the two presidential candidates, their parties, and their parties’ platforms.  Is it laziness? Ignorance? Inattentiveness?  Lack of critical-thinking skills?  Or is it the result of brains so clogged by gaming or weed that there’s no corner in there for real-world concerns?

In order to set the record straight,  here’s a letter to those twenty-somethings who are strutting around with blinders on.

Dear Confused,

You may not have bothered to inform yourself about the issues that are dominating the upcoming elections.  Perhaps you don’t know what’s going on out there because you’ve turned down the volume on the TV.  Did you lose your Internet connection or fail to pay the bill?  Or is it that you pulled the covers up over your head and indulged in an extended nap for the four years since the last presidential election?

If you’re awake and aware now, pay attention.  Here are some things that are really going to affect you.  Believe me. It’s really going to make a difference to you if we have a Democratic or Republican administration and a balanced Congress or one dominated by the Tea Party.

Frankly, if you sit out this election and just won’t bother to vote, do us all a favor and hold back on the bitching, because there will be no one to blame but yourself.

Think about reproductive issues.

Nobody’s monitoring you but, hey, we know a little bit about your sex life. So listen up, because Republican attitudes and policy commitments are really going to hit you where it hurts.  Guys, your girlfriend’s right to choose is no big deal, right?  You thought she could get access to any sort of birth control you and she believe to be appropriate.

Sorry, but Republicans don’t agree.  Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney are targeting you and your partners.  They’ve set their sights on overturning Roe v. Wade if they can just appoint one or two more right-leaning Supreme Court justices in the next four years. And they’ve got a pretty good chance because the actuarial tables are in their favor if they win.  In fact, four out of the nine justices are in their mid to late seventies.

Maybe you’re lucky and you’re not living in one of the states where the Republican-dominated legislature is pushing to defund and shut down access to Planned Parenthood, but in many states across the country, affordable gynecological care provided by Planned Parenthood might soon be history.

Ladies, how about the cost of your birth control pills? Are you ready to have to make the decision about whether you can afford birth control at all? The Republicans are committed to repeal of the Affordable Care Act that requires new insurance plans to cover the entire cost of your birth control. Frankly, they’re thinking that maybe if birth control is too expensive you’ll think twice about that hooking-up thing. And in case you missed it, the Republicans are making it harder, if not impossible, in some states for any woman of any age, married or unmarried, to choose whether it’s the right time in her life to have a child or to have more children.

Now think about jobs.  

Maybe you decided after high school that college wasn’t for you, or that it was too expensive, or that you didn’t want to be working just to pay back student loans for the next few decades. Maybe you thought that working a secure, living-wage job with good benefits in American industry was the right move for you.

Obama/Biden and the Democrats think you should have a chance to do just that and that good government can help. Romney/Ryan and the Republicans probably want you to have that chance as well but don’t believe that government has any role in making that happen for you.  They’d rather let the market determine if you’ll find and keep that job or not.  If the market says it’s cheaper and suits a corporation’s bottom line to outsource what might have been your good job to China or India, well that’s just the way the free market works.

Did you hear, though, that Obama/Biden took bold and politically unpopular steps to bail out the auto industry? Unlike Romney and Ryan, they believed that government had a role in saving one of America’s most important industries. That commitment saved 1.414 million American jobs in the auto industry, in suppliers to the industry, in parts manufacturers, in mining, construction, and metal and metal-products industries not just in Michigan and Ohio but all across the country. In fact, you might be one of the lucky 1.414 million.

Finally, think about your health.

I know you’re feeling pretty invulnerable to health concerns at your age.  But maybe you’re one of the 57.2 million Americans under the age of sixty-five with a pre-existing condition.  Obama and the Democrats may have just saved your life when they passed the Affordable Care Act, which forbids insurance companies from denying you coverage because of your pre-existing condition.

Maybe you’ve recently developed a health problem so severe that you’ll need multiple operations.  You’d be one of the 105 million Americans who will no longer face lifetime caps on health care benefits and who will now be able to have those operations. And Romney/Ryan? They’re committed to repealing the Affordable Care Act that will allow you to have those life-saving procedures and not be dropped from your insurance coverage.

And there’s even more you might want to consider.

Is there really no difference between the Republican and Democratic approaches to climate change?  To who will be getting tax increases—the wealthy or the middle class? To the wisdom of resuming nuclear-weapon production?  To diplomacy or military intervention? To regulating a financial industry that almost collapsed the world’s economy? To the safety of your food, air, and water?

Think about it.

The post Dear 20-something: Think about the issues, then vote! appeared first on Occasional Planet.

What they have clearly become is a partisan arm of corporate America. This is a real serious problem for our democracy. It’s essentially a court that rules in one direction. Even if they do uphold the health care law, this court is no longer perceived as the independent arbiter of the law that the people expect them to be.

—former U.S. Senator, Russ Feingold

In a surprise move, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the more liberal members of the Court in upholding the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). But, it would be a mistake to assume this decision signals a return to balance and judicial restraint. Roberts appears to have restored impartiality to the institution, but it is more optics than substance designed to shore up a reputation increasingly under criticism by the American people. Since its infamous Citizen’s United decision, the court has not fared well in public opinion. According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll:

Just 44 percent of Americans approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing and three-quarters say the justices’ decisions are sometimes influenced by their personal or political views.

In the short term, the upholding of ACA is genuinely good news for millions who will suffer less under the wasteful, punishing, for-profit health insurance system we have in the United States. No more pre-existing conditions, no more life-time caps on treatment, kids get to stay on parents insurance until 26, subsidized insurance exchanges for those who can’t afford premiums, no more dumping you if you get sick, and so on—no doubt these are good, even life-saving, changes to this notoriously bad system—one that has devoted whole departments to denying care.

But, at its core, the ACA is a corporate friendly bill. So, even though it allows better health care access for millions of Americans—and the decision to uphold it is a political victory for the Obama administration—the Robert’s Court keeps its reputation as a partisan arm of corporate America intact. No matter which way this decision went, the health care industry would be fine. The right wanted ACA to fail for political reasons. They wanted to use it to harm Obama’s chances for a second term. Although Roberts, voted to uphold the law, his treatment of the Commerce Clause is of concern to a number of progressive court watchers. Senator Chuck Schumer also expressed concern that the courts limiting the Commerce Clause in the ACA decision could be a way to, in the future, limit the ability of the federal government to help average families.

Adam Serwer, writing for Mother Jones feels the Commerce Clause is not as much of a problem as the court’s reasoning on the expansion of Medicaid. According to Serwer, “The Affordable Care Act substantially expanded Medicaid coverage so that it would cover 16 million more Americans, but it forced states to either take the new funding or give up all the Medicaid funding they were already getting. The high court said that was not kosher.”

The court upheld most of the law, and the mandate that citizens have to buy health insurance or face a tax penalty. Because we have a for-profit health delivery system, in which profits trump human need, we will continue to spend twice per person what other Western countries spend for what has proven to be inferior care. Which is why, as a nation, we can’t let this decision take our eyes off the only sane solution: single payer health care or “Medicare for all.”

Citizen’s United decision was intended to undermine democracy

In the wake of his seeming non-partisan, impartial ACA decision, it’s important to remember Roberts presided over one of the worst decisions ever made in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court—Citizens United. In a recent article penned for the Stanford Law Review, “The Money Crisis: How Citizens United Undermines Our Elections and the Supreme Court,” Feingold writes:

. . . Chief Justice Roberts apparently wanted a much broader, sweeping outcome, and it is now clear that he manipulated the Court’s process to achieve that result. Once only a question about an “on-demand” movie, the majority in Citizens United ruled that corporations and unions could now use their general treasuries to influence elections directly.

Despite giving strenuous assurances during his confirmation hearing to respect settled law, Roberts now stands responsible for the most egregious upending of judicial precedent in a generation. As now-retired Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent to the majority in Citizens United: “Five Justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.”

In other words, let’s not forget, the Robert’s court is a right-wing, partisan court on steroids. The ACA decision, as Arthur Lieber writes, was conservative rather than extreme. But I don’t think it signals a lessening of the ongoing danger this court presents to the nation and the rule of law.

In his article, Feingold suggests that beginning in 2004, with Howard Dean’s campaign, and culminating in the election of Barack Obama in 2008, corporations and their billionaire owners were increasingly alarmed at the growing power and democratizing influence of the Internet. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama raised an astounding $500,000,000 online and engaged the electorate through a new, sophisticated use of the Web. The right wing members of the Court, equally alarmed at this expansion of democracy, were eager to counter the growing power and influence of ordinary people with a heavy handed tipping of the scales toward big money. Rather than apply the law narrowly and impartially, the Roberts court, in its Citizens United decision, revealed itself to be actively aligned with the fears and anti-democratic agendas of the 1%. Stepping way outside of its intended role, the court, under Justice Roberts leadership, used a case before it to severely damage the democratic process.

Citizens United resulted in the creation of corrupt entities called “super pacs” designed to drown out the voices of the majority of Americans with massive infusions of anonymous money into the political process. Thanks to John Roberts and the other conservative members of the Court, instead of small-dollar online donations making up the biggest sources of money in the 2012 election, the lion’s share will come from unnamed corporations and a small group of, mostly conservative, anonymous billionaires.

Which is why for progressives, no matter how disappointed you are in President Barack Obama (and I am), it is absolutely crucial that we reelect him for a second term. With a possibility that there will be three vacancies on the Court in the next four years, if Barack Obama appoints them, Citizen’s United can be overturned.

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Ask people if they support what specific provisions of healthcare reform actually do for them, [eliminating pre-existing conditions, etc.], and they’ll say they like it. But ask them if they favor “Obamacare,” and an individual mandate to buy insurance, and they’ll say it’s a bad thing. There’s an obvious disconnect there, and much of it is being pushed by right-wing attacks on health care reform.

Unfortunately, the attempt to make “Obamacare” a dirty word is working. According to a USA Today/Gallup Poll released on Feb. 27, 2012:

…In the nation’s dozen top battleground states, a clear majority of registered voters call the bill’s passage “a bad thing” and support its repeal if a Republican wins the White House in November. Two years after he signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act— and as the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments about its constitutionality next month — the president has failed to convince most Americans that it was the right thing to do.

So, there’s a lot of work to do to dispel the myths and disinformation about health reform, and to refocus the dialogue. Here are some helpful suggestions from Media Matters about how to have a conversation about health care:

It’s not a government takeover

After people are informed that, under healthcare reform, they’ll still get their health coverage through their employers [not government], and wouldn’t be affected by the individual responsibility provision of the law, 60 percent of Americans support the program.

There’s a lot to like

Support for individual responsibility also goes up when people understand that:

Without it, insurers could refuse to cover sick people.

Without it, people might wait until they are seriously ill to get coverage, driving up insurance costs for everyone.

People would be excused from having to buy insurance if the cost would consume too large a share of their income.

For health insurance to work, it’s necessary to include people who are healthy to help pay for those who are sick.

It’s already working

Nearly 90 million Americans took advantage of the new health law’s prevention benefits last year [2011].

Nearly 3 million seniors with Medicare saved $1.5 billion on their medicines, and 24 million took advantage of the new Medicare preventive care benefit in 2011.

4 million small businesses can now claim tax credits for providing health coverage to their employees.

Nearly 17 million children with pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied coverage.

2.8 million more young adults [ages 19-26] are now covered through their parents’ health insurance as they finish school or look for a job.

And, by the way…

On health care, Americans trust President Obama more than Republicans in Congress by a 9-point margin. And as for the “anti-mandate” venom being spewed on the right, let’s remember that “individual responsibility” has been a Republican mantra for many years and that, in fact, the idea that all Americans should have to buy health insurance was, originally, an idea promulgated by Republicans [as a way of enriching health insurance companies, of course]. Only when it became attached to President Obama did that idea become radioactive.  Really, people: we all want to be in charge of our own care. Healthcare reform doesn’t change that.

Okay, so the Affordable Care Act ain’t the ideal, Medicare-for-All solution that progressives yearn for [this one, too], and it’s a huge boon for insurance companies. But what we had before was clearly a disaster for individuals and families, and virtually everyone agreed that it stunk. Despite its flaws, there’s a lot to like in the Affordable Care Act, and people who look at its provisions from a personal standpoint—rather than through the nothing-Obama-does-can-be-okay filter pushed by Republicans—see the merits for themselves and their families. Repealing or gutting healthcare reform would be a step backwards, and we need to do everything we can to prevent that from happening—including attempting to have rationale conversations about the new law with people who haven’t taken the time to see it for what it can be—or already is—for them.

The post Talking about health care reform: People get it when they see what it does for <i>them</i> appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The war on women’s bodies is back in full swing. The Catholic hierarchy is trying to equate contraception with abortion. And, who knew the breast cancer charity, Komen for the Cure, is run by right wing anti-abortion activists who want to destroy Planned Parenthood? The GOP is whipping up a fight over abortion, contraception and the Affordable Health Care Act because they have nothing else to run on. It’s so deja vu, like we never left the 70s.

Only this is 2012 and the world is different today. We have the Web, social media, and the fact that a majority of women in this country have used birth control and/or expect to have access to it. For example, 98% of Catholic women have at some time in their lives used birth control even though the church hierarchy forbids it.

Forced trans-vaginal ultrasounds and all male panels on contraception

The trans-vaginal ultrasound soon to be required for a legal abortion in Virginia, and the all male panel that just testified before the House on contraception, are causing outrage among women and the men who support them. This flyer seems like a blast from the past, but it is a statement by women waking up in the present. It will be fascinating to watch as a new generation of women takes on these issues in the context of social media and 24/7 cable news. For example, this photo was published on Facebook.

Meanwhile senator Roy Blunt (R-MO) has introduced an amendment to a transportation bill to allow companies, institutions or health care providers to deny contraception based on “moral conscience.” Actually, the amendment allows them to deny any health care based on their “moral conscience” i.e. mammograms, well women exams, or diabetic treatment. They can even deny care because they “morally object” to the price of that care, and, their objection doesn’t have to be based on religious belief. It appears Blunt wants CEOs to have the final say on women’s health. But right wing men and women have made a mistake because this is a fight they are going to lose. And it is a fight that will help get Obama reelected.

Obama is gaining support among women

In the last few months, Gallup polls have shown Obama gaining support among women. By way of disclosure, I am one of those progressives who have been highly critical of Obama’s corporate and bank friendly polices, his less than stellar record on civil rights, his pro oil and nuclear energy policies, and his escalation of the use of drones. Not what I signed up for. But, I can’t deny he has moved the country forward in some significant ways—not as much as I would like, or as much as he could have—but significant none-the-less. That said, it is extremely important that he and other Democrats win in November to stop the damage that will happen to this country if the GOP keeps the House and gains control of the Senate and the White House.

So, not only will I vote for Obama, I will enthusiastically work on his campaign. If he doesn’t win, and if Democrats lose ground in the House and Senate, (and at the state level) the reactionary Republican war on women’s bodies will continue, as will the war on social safety nets, and on children and the elderly. In our weakened economy, this right wing assault will be devastating for women, children, the elderly, and most working families. In other words, if you think things are bad now, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Republican overreach may help Obama win second term

Because of Republican overreach on social, labor and economic issues, at both the state and federal level, Democrats stand a good chance to retake the House and gain more seats in the Senate. Also, Republcians lack of enthusiasm for their current crop of presidential candidates is not helping their chances. So, even in these difficult times there is hope. It may be that our collective national consciousness is evolving toward a more humane and compassionate public policy. Having experienced the reality of right wing policies, we may be returning to a more democratic ethic that places value on public good, and leaving behind  the Republican ethic of extreme individualism cynically promoted by corporate interests. The Occupy Movement has helped the 1% vs the 99% meme to enter the mainstream lexicon, and the extremism of the corporate backed Tea Party is losing it’s appeal

It could also be that we have evolved more than the GOP realizes when it comes to social issues—such as women’s reproductive rights. Polls are showing that the electorate is more progressive on these issues than loud right wing media and conservative religious institutions would have us believe. Consider the swift and vocal rebuke of the Komen Foundation’s attempt to defund Planned Parenthood, and the fact that the backlash Republcians wanted against contraception being provided by the Affordable Care Act is simply not happening. A recent CBS News/New York Times poll suggests that only Republican men oppose covering the full cost of contraception under the Affordable Health Care Act.

Sexist billionaire’s joke falls flat on MSNBC

We may be witnessing, in the draconian legislation of the radical right, a desperate grasping onto power by those who stand to lose the most, conservative white males who will eventually be in the minority of a our increasingly racially diverse nation.  This group of men—who make up much of the 1%, and the hierarchy of conservative religions—still hold on to the medieval idea that they have a right to control women—their bodies, their sexuality and their reproductive capacities. They, and the misguided conservative women who insist on their own disempowerment, are becoming fossils of a reactionary past. Witness the chortling white haired billionaire who appeared on MSNBC a few days ago and suggested women use an aspirin for birth control by putting it between their knees. Not only were women not laughing at his joke, but even Republicans cringed at his insensitivity.

When awakened, women can be a powerful force in electoral politics, and it could be that reactionary Republicans have met their match. The tired old Republican wedge issues of contraception and abortion may no longer work for them.

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