The Sickly State of Health Insurance
The Sickly State of Health InsuranceBy Nomi Prins, AlterNetPosted on September 12, 2006, Printed on September 12, 2006http://www.alternet.org/story/41416/The following is an excerpt from Jacked: How "Conservatives" are Picking your Pocket (Whether you voted for them or not) by Nomi Prins, PoliPointPress, 2006.What do a successful ABC television producer, an ex-Los Angeles Laker turned actor, and a former meth addict turned PR god all have in common? First, they all spend way too much time in LA traffic. Second, they all think America's current health-care system sucks.
Poncho Hodges is a 34-year-old former LA Laker. He's the tallest person I've ever stood next to. I walk with him (Poncho used to live in New York, so is down with the whole walking thing) to a nearby Starbucks, on Magnolia and Lankershim Boulevard. My all-black outfit (yes, it is a New York thing) looked a little grim next to his red and white Yankee cap and red and white sneakers. His face was framed by bling studs and a thick gold chain necklace.
Poncho attended the University of Colorado on a basket-ball scholarship. He did a stint as power forward for the Lakers. He's perfectly healthy now, but having witnessed tons of sports injuries in his career, he knows the importance of coverage. "Health insurance?" he says with a voice as deep as James Earl Jones. "Been winging it."
Like other members in the Screen Actors Guild and vari-ous professional groups or unions, he gets insurance through group policies that are imbedded with obstacles. "I got the SAG one, but you need to gross like $15,000 a year to keep it. You have to gross about $25,000 to get dental."
For seven years, he played basketball all over Europe, and learned from his time there: "America needs to take lessons from other countries where if you're a citizen, you get health care, no matter who you are." Ideas like this separate Poncho from the thinking of our gov-ernment, even though he considers himself a Republican. "I like the things they stand for -- like on religion -- and I'm down with keeping American traditions. On the economic thing, it's different -- they don't care about the poor, they're too privileged." He is further proof that the need for decent health care cuts across political beliefs, and he is one more example of how out of touch conservatives are even with their own constituents.
After Poncho takes off in his size 15 Nikes, I have another latte. For this one, I'm joined by Jed Wallace, a super-lively PR person. Jed has an expensive individual health insurance plan, which also covers his two young daughters. He got it on-line. "It's Blue Cross/Blue Shield -- over $800 a month, a $10 deductible on office visits, $30 on prescription drugs, $500 on ER work, and an annual deductible of $750." Part of the reason the plan is so expensive is Jed's former ultra-Hollywood lifestyle. He craved the dream: "I wasn't exactly sure how, but my ego said I wanted to be rich and famous -- then you get pummeled by reality."
Reality for Jed started with smoking pot, then doing hallucinogens. It soon became a full-blown meth addiction. During the mid-'90s, he co-hosted a web radio spot and "Popcorn," a movie review show on MTV. He made, as he put it, "shitloads of money, burned through it, and started doing coke." MTV was short-lived, so he got into the bar business in Santa Monica. "It was 'on' from there -- partying, drugs, everything."
By April 2000, he was cruising high. The manager of one of the beer companies he bought along the way happened to be his drug dealer. "I was working 20- to 22-hour days -- I had to get into meth, the delusion that with a little, you could do anything."
He rationalized that he provided his two-year-old and wife with a home, money, and cars. He paid employees in drugs. Finally, his wife left him. Eventually she returned and created an inter-vention that led him to Life's Journey Center in Palm Springs. It was, as he put it, "a humbling experience. There, we also discovered I was bipolar -- that's why my insurance is so high."
Now, he speaks to kids in recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous. "Lots of people in treatment wind up dead, back on drugs, or in jail. I'm lucky. People helped me. 'Cause it's not covered by insurance." He's been clean for two years, having been to hell and back, and has met tons of lost people along the way. Many of them, he believes, were souls that could have been helped by wider reaching health care. "This government is totally detached from the real American psyche and spirit," he says, driving me back to my car. "You parked all the way over here?! Why?"
The next day, I hit ABC Studios, where it was definitely turning Christmas. A young intern was passing out ginger-bread cookies while I waited for Harry Phillips, a producer of
Primetime. After a few minutes he arrived, a friendly man with a neatly trimmed gray beard and mustache, and offered me herbal tea from their kitchen.
Behind his desk are several bags of Christmas presents, mostly for his youngest daughter, Abigail. "She's 12 going on 20," he says. On his walls are several Emmy awards, a map of the United States, and a Norman Rockwell print of a young black girl in Mississippi.
He's been at ABC for 16 years. His health plan is through Disney/ABC, and is CIGNA/PPO, for which he pays $250 a month with a $350 annual deductible. Born in Canada on Memorial Day in 1952, he has been in the United States for 15 years but maintains dual citizenship. The biggest reason why? Yep: "Health care--socialized medicine." As far as he's concerned, Canada just flat out gives its citizens better care than we do. And it's hard to argue with him. Canada has the equivalent of an interlocking system of Medicare and Medicaid. Everyone's in the same risk pool and there are fewer administrative costs.
His ABC health-care plan is a good one, and Harry knows it. He also realizes how lucky he is compared to many of us: "I'd be willing to give up some of that privilege in return for others to have more access to health care in the U.S." Meanwhile, Harry is holding onto his Canadian national health care (CARE) card and his home in Canada because "retiring there makes a lot more financial sense." Sadly, most of us don't have this option. And after all, should we really have to feel "lucky" to have decent health care?
Rising Health Care Costs and Your WalletThe private health-care system is filled with waste. In 2003, health-care bureaucracy cost the Americans who use it $400 billion. And health insurance companies don't even actually provide
health care. It's not like GM, which provides cars (or tries to anyway).
Let's make no mistake about this: insurance companies are middlemen. Their sole job is to connect the dots that stand between you and your medical treatment. More often than not, it seems like their job is actually to create red tape between you and your wallet. Why do we put up with them? Because these companies are so entrenched in our daily lives that we can't imagine an alternative. But there are other options, whether or not the Bush conservatives want to acknowledge them. A recent study found that national health insurance, financed by the federal government instead of private insurance companies would save Americans about $286 billion annually in paperwork alone. This would be enough to give all uninsured Americans full prescription drug coverage.
President Bush goes out of his way to ignore these obvious statistics. He goes out of his way to bolster our current system, which is only getting worse. Medical expenses rose faster than inflation in the 1990s as insurance companies created plans to limit our treatment options through something they like to call "managed care." To me this translates as: we manage our (enormous) profits,
you wing your (shoddy) coverage.
On top of that, the costs of plans have increased. Between 2000 and 2005, average monthly premiums for individual cov-erage shot from $342 to $603, and annual deductibles (the amount you put out before your insurance kicks in) almost doubled, to $323 from $175.
To make sure drugs companies weren't left behind as health insurance companies grabbed their enormous profits, the Bush Republicans introduced the prescription drug bill -- or "Medicare Part D"-- for Medicare beneficiaries, the 42 million Americans who are disabled or 65 or older.11 In far from conservative wisdom, the bill doesn't include the ability to bargain with drug companies for lower cost drugs. Since its inception, drug companies have substantially raised prices on nearly all drugs covered by the program. Plus, the cost of this drug-company orgy to our federal budget is projected to be a staggering $8.7 trillion between now and 2080.
The Medicare prescription drug bill was part of the 2003 Medicare law and took effect in January 2006. Your first $250 of drugs is free. Then comes the cloud, looming behind that slim silver lining: you pay a quarter of costs from $251 to $2,250, and
all of the next $2,850. That "doughnut hole" lasts until you hit $5,100 in drug costs per year. After that, Medicare picks up most of the tab. All in all, the gap in coverage has only increased with the new plan, and with it, out-of-pocket expenses for the average participant. By January 2006, less than half of the elderly able to sign up for the prescription drug plan did. Why? The sign-up process was nearly impossible to figure out.
"The Bush administration knew that going in," Diane Archer, founder of the Medicare Rights Center, told me. "They banked on it. They didn't even keep the right to negotiate prices with the drug companies. Others who did sign up didn't get their plastic ID cards that confirmed they had, so they couldn't get the drugs they needed." And the problems aren't limited to the people who need those drugs. Before the bill, Medicare's overhead was only 4 percent of its total cost to the federal budget. After the prescription plan was adopted, overhead tripled. Nevertheless, Bush has decided the program is a raging success.
Unfortunately, Bush is not alone. Drug and health insurance companies felt the love that average citizens didn't feel, as they were second only to oil companies in 2005 stock market performance. Once again, those companies book the profits, and we Americans foot the ever-growing bill.
Nomi Prins is a senior fellow at the public policy center Demos and is the author of Jacked: How "Conservatives" are Picking your Pocket (Whether you voted for them or not) PoliPointPress, 2006. © 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/41416/
How Bushs Metaphoric
How Bush's Metaphorical War Became RealBy George Lakoff and Evan Frisch, AlterNetPosted on September 11, 2006, Printed on September 12, 2006http://www.alternet.org/story/41471/Language matters, because it can determine how we think and act.
For a few hours after the towers fell on 9/11, administration spokesmen referred to the event as a "crime." Indeed, Colin Powell argued within the administration that it be treated as a crime. This would have involved international crime-fighting techniques: checking banks accounts, wire-tapping, recruiting spies and informants, engaging in diplomacy, cooperating with intelligence agencies in other governments, and if necessary, engaging in limited "police actions" with military force. Indeed, such methods have been the most successful so far in dealing with terrorism.
But the crime frame did not prevail in the Bush administration. Instead, a war metaphor was chosen: the "War on Terror." Literal -- not metaphorical -- wars are conducted against armies of other nations. They end when the armies are defeated militarily and a peace treaty is signed. Terror is an emotional state. It is in us. It is not an army. And you can't defeat it militarily and you can't sign a peace treaty with it.
The war metaphor was chosen for political reasons. First and foremost, it was chosen for the domestic political reasons. The war metaphor defined war as the only way to defend the nation. From within the war metaphor, being against war as a response was to be unpatriotic, to be against defending the nation. The war metaphor put progressives on the defensive. Once the war metaphor took hold, any refusal to grant the president full authority to conduct the war would open progressives in Congress to the charge of being unpatriotic, unwilling to defend America, defeatist. And once the military went into battle, the war metaphor created a new reality that reinforced the metaphor.
Once adopted, the war metaphor allowed the president to assume war powers, which made him politically immune from serious criticism and gave him extraordinary domestic power to carry the agenda of the radical right: Power to shift money and resources away from social needs and to the military and related industries. Power to override environmental safeguards on the grounds of military need. Power to set up a domestic surveillance system to spy on our citizens and to intimidate political enemies. Power over political discussion, since war trumps all other topics. In short, power to reshape America to the vision of the radical right -- with no end date.
In addition, the war metaphor was used as justification for the invasion of Iraq, which Bush had planned for since his first week in office. Frank Luntz, the right-wing language expert, recommended referring to the Iraq war as part of the "War on Terror" -- even when it was known that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and indeed saw Osama bin Laden as an enemy. Fox News used "War on Terror" as a headline when showing film clips from Iraq. Remember "Weapons of Mass Destruction?" They were invented by the Bush administration to strike terror into the hearts of Americans and to justify the invasion. Remember that the Iraq War was advocated before 9/11 and promoted as early as 1997 by the members of the Project for the New American Century, who later came to dominate in the Bush administration. Why?
The right-wing strategy was to use the American military to achieve economic and strategic goals in the Middle East: to gain control of the second largest oil reserve in the world; to place military bases right in the heart of the Middle East for the sake of economic and political intimidation; to open up Middle East markets and economic opportunities for American corporations; and to place American culture and a controllable government in the heart of the Middle East. The justification was 9/11 -- to identify the Iraq invasion as part of the "War on Terror" and claim that it is necessary in order to protect America and spread democracy.
What has been the result?
Domestically, the "War on Terror" has been a major success for the radical right. Bush has been returned to office and the radical right controls all branches of our government. They are realizing their goals. Social programs are being gutted. Deregulation and privatization are thriving. Even highways are being privatized. Taxpayers' money is being transferred to the ultra-rich making them richer. Two right-wing justices have been appointed to the Supreme Court and right-wing judges are taking over courts all over America. The environment continues to be plundered. Domestic surveillance is in place. Corporate profits have doubled while wage levels have declined. Oil profits are astronomical. And the radical rights social agenda is taking hold. The "culture war" is being won on many fronts. And it is still widely accepted that we are fighting a "War on Terror." The metaphor is still in place. We are still taking off our shoes at the airports, and now we cannot take bottled water on the planes. Terror is being propped up.
But while the radical right has done well on the domestic front, America and Americans have fared less well both at home and abroad.
What was the moral of 9/11?
To Osama bin Laden, the moral was simple: American power can be used against America itself. This moral has defined the post 9/11 world: the more America uses military force in the Middle East, the more damage is done to America and Americans.
The more Americans kill and terrorize Muslims, the more we recruit Muslims to become terrorists and fight against us.
The war in Iraq was over in 2003 when the US forces defeated Saddam's army. Then the American occupation began -- an occupation by insufficient troops ill-suited to be occupiers, especially in a country on the brink of a civil war, where neither side wants us there.
The number of lives lost on 9/11 is currently listed as 2973. As of this writing 2662 Americans have been sent to their deaths in Iraq, a Muslim country that did not attack us. At the current rate, within months more Americans will have been sent to their deaths by Bush than were murdered at the hands of bin Laden.
9/11 was a crime -- a crime against humanity -- and terrorism is best dealt with as crime on an international level.
It is time to toss the war metaphor into the garbage can.
The war metaphor is still intimidating progressives. To come out against "staying the course" is to be called unpatriotic, weak, and defeatist. To say, "no, we're just as strong, but we're smarter" is to keep and reinforce the war metaphor, which the conservatives have a patent on.
It is time for progressives to jettison the war metaphor itself. It is time to tell some truths that progressives have been holding back on. What has worked in stopping terrorism is just what has worked in stopping international crime -- like the recent police work in England. What has failed is the war approach, which just recruits more terrorists. In Iraq, the war was over when we defeated Saddam's army. Then the occupation began. Our troops are dying because they are not trained be occupiers in hostile territory on the cusp of a civil war.
Bush is an occupation president, not a war president, and his war powers should be immediately rescinded. Rep. Lynn Woolsey's resolution to do just that (H.R. 5875) should be taken seriously and made the subject of national debate.
I am suggesting a conscious discussion of the war metaphor as a metaphor. The very discussion would require the nation to think of it as a metaphor, and allow the nation to take seriously the truth of our presence in Iraq as an occupation that must be ended. You don't win or lose an occupation; you just exit as gracefully as possible.
Openly discussing the war metaphor as a metaphor would allow the case to be made that terrorism is most effectively treated as a crime -- like wiping out a crime syndicate -- not as an occasion for sending over a hundred thousand troops and doing massive bombing that only recruits more terrorists.
Finally, openly discussing the war metaphor as a metaphor would raise the question of the domestic effect of giving the president war powers, and the fact that the Bush administration has shamelessly exploited 9/11 to achieve the political goals of the radical right -- with all the disasters that has brought to our country. It would allow us to name right-wing ideology, to spell it out, look at its effects, and to see what awful things it has done, is doing, and threatens to keep on doing. The blame for what has gone wrong in Iraq, in New Orleans, in our economy, and throughout the country at large should be placed squarely where it belongs -- on right-wing ideology that calls itself "conservative" but mocks real American values.
Metaphors cannot be seen or touched, but they create massive effects, and political intimidation is one such effect. It is time for political courage and political realism. It is time to end the political intimidation of the war metaphor and the terror it has loosed on America.
George Lakoff is the author of 'Whose Freedom? The Batle Over America's Most Important Idea' (Farrar Straus Giroux). He is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and a Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute. Evan Frisch is a technology strategist at the Rockridge Institute. © 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/41471/
In Search of Accurate Vote Totals
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September 5, 2006
Editorial,
The New York TimesIn Search of Accurate Vote Totals It’s hard to believe that nearly six years after the disasters of Florida in 2000, states still haven’t mastered the art of counting votes accurately. Yet there are growing signs that the country is moving into another presidential election cycle in disarray.
The most troubling evidence comes from Ohio, a key swing state, whose electoral votes decided the 2004 presidential election. A recent government report details enormous flaws in the election system in Ohio’s biggest county, problems that may not be fixable before the 2008 election.
Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, hired a consulting firm to review its election system. The county recently adopted Diebold electronic voting machines that produce a voter-verified paper record of every vote cast. The investigators compared the vote totals recorded on the machines after this year’s primary with the paper records produced by the machines. The numbers should have been the same, but often there were large and unexplained discrepancies. The report also found that nearly 10 percent of the paper records were destroyed, blank, illegible, or otherwise compromised.
This is seriously bad news even if, as Diebold insists, the report overstates the problem. Under Ohio law, the voter-verified paper record, not the voting machine total, is the official ballot for purposes of a recount. The error rates the report identified are an invitation to a meltdown in a close election.
The report also found an array of other problems. The county does not have a standardized method for conducting a manual recount. That is an invitation, as Florida 2000 showed, to chaos and litigation. And there is a serious need for better training of poll workers, and for more uniform voter ID policies. Disturbingly, the report found that 31 percent of blacks were asked for ID, while just 18 percent of others were.
Some of these problems may be explored further in a federal lawsuit challenging Ohio’s administration of its 2004 election. Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who has been criticized for many decisions he made on election matters that year, recently agreed to help preserve the 2004 paper ballots for review in the lawsuit.
Ohio is not the only state that may be headed for trouble in 2008. New York’s Legislature was shamefully slow in passing the law needed to start adopting new voting machines statewide. Now localities are just starting to evaluate voting machine companies as they scramble to put machines in place in time for the 2007 election. (Because of a federal lawsuit, New York has to make the switch a year early.) Much can go wrong when new voting machines are used. There has to be extensive testing, and education of poll workers and voters. New York’s timetable needlessly risks an Election Day disaster.
Cuyahoga County deserves credit for commissioning an investigation that raised uncomfortable but important questions. Its report should be a wake-up call to states and counties nationwide. Every jurisdiction in the country that runs elections should question itself just as rigorously, and start fixing any problems without delay.
