It’s not a new insight, for me or most progressives. It’s easy to take shots at the Republican Party because its positions and especially its methods disgust me. However, the U.S. needs a progressive party. The Democrats used to fill that role, more or less. Now, not so much. Goodbye, Ted Kennedy. We miss you already.
Bill Moyers talks about it on Bill Maher’s show in the context of healthcare reform.
A principle of successful deception through mass media is that quantity trumps quality. An unending stream of lies, even when refuted, still fools some and energizes those who want to believe. Sometimes, however, the liars can’t even pass the laugh test. Investor’s Business Daily put out an editorial hit on Democrats’ health care initiative by comparing it to the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS):
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
IBD’s bringing up the British NHS is the first warning sign of bad faith. The NHS is the employer of doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals in the UK. Such a system is not a model for any of the health care bills before Congress.
More to the point of the specific quote, Stephen Hawking’s treatment at the hands of NHS is not a hypothetical. He has already been treated by the NHS. In an email reply to a blogger, Hawking wrote:
I wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high quality treatment without which I would not have survived.
Doh! IBD really screwed the pooch on that one! To make matters worse, IBD removed the sentence about Hawking and added:
Editor’s Note: This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK.
No, IBD, that wasn’t the howler. If you really didn’t know that Hawking lives in the UK, that’s plain ignorance. But the egg on your collective editorial face is from the fact that you pretended to understand how the NHS works, and you got it blatantly, hilariously wrong! By going down the path you pointed out, any reasonable person would come to the opposite conclusion about what Hawking’s case means.
So what are the real facts about access to health care in the US, the UK, and other countries? From a November 2008 study by the Commonwealth Fund:
Comparing the numbers for the US and the UK – lower is better – the UK looks much better. In fact, the US comes in dead last among all countries on all three measures. So if you live in the US and are worried about being denied access to medical treatment, you don’t have to read some right-wing Bizarro-World fantasy piece. Look around you. We have met the enemy, and they is us!
Right-wing organizers and media personalities have been mobilizing their audiences to attend and disrupt town hall meetings of Democratic legislators. Paul Krugman writes:
Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.
And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.
In general, I think that ordinary people need to get more involved in politics and hold their elected officials to account. However, what is happening on the right is very different from the examples of activism I admire. For one thing, violence and the threat of violence have no legitimate place in citizen activism. There are times when fighting is necessary, but moving us in that direction is reckless and irresponsible.
Another difference between responsible activism and the mob is education. I don’t mean schools and degrees, but instead an understanding of at least the basics of whatever is at issue. We have examples of disinformation, like the “kill Granny” scare. We also see plain ignorance, like seniors shouting for government to stay out of Medicare. It’s sad to see people used as pawns to fight against their own interests.
From The Washington Post:
A campaign on conservative talk radio, fueled by President Obama’s calls to control exorbitant medical bills, has sparked fear among senior citizens that the health-care bill moving through Congress will lead to end-of-life “rationing” and even “euthanasia.”
The controversy stems from a proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical interventions they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills. Under the plan, Medicare would reimburse doctors for one session every five years to confer with a patient about his or her wishes and how to ensure those preferences are followed. The counseling sessions would be voluntary.
But on right-leaning radio programs, religious e-mail lists and Internet blogs, the proposal has been described as “guiding you in how to die,” “an ORDER from the Government to end your life,” promoting “death care” and, in the words of antiabortion leader Randall Terry, an attempt to “kill Granny.”
For me, it goes without saying that this “kill Granny” scare campaign is the worst kind of demagogy. However, the Democrats should have seen this coming. Many bills have several hundred pages, but you can’t treat health care reform in the same way. For the forces of Reaction, this is a do-or-die battle. The more complicated the bill is, the more targets they have to snipe.
In the reality-based community, there is a debate about two models of health care – the national health insurance model (i.e., single payer) vs. the Bismarck model (i.e., heavily regulated competition). One concern is that with national health insurance (NHI), if the system is underfunded or has some other kinks, Congress will have to become involved again. Given how broken American politics is, that is an unwelcome prospect. In a Bismarck system, the insurers would at least make sure that income and outgo are balanced, while competition exerts downward pressure on premiums.
Another point, however, weighs in favor of NHI: it is much simpler. The concept is easy to understand – Medicare for everyone. Or, if it is politically necessary to be incremental, Medicare for anyone who doesn’t choose a private insurer. If the Republicans utter the word “socialism,” then the line of counterattack is clear: Republicans want to destroy Medicare (i.e., socialized medicine).
From The Guardian:
The industry is often accused of wriggling out of claims. Firms comb medical records for any technicality that will allow them to refuse to pay. In one recently publicised example, a retired nurse from Texas discovered she had breast cancer. Yet her policy was cancelled because her insurers found she had previously had treatment for acne, which the dermatologist had mistakenly noted as pre-cancerous. They decreed she had misinformed them about her medical history and her double mastectomy was cancelled just three days before the operation.
Last month three healthcare executives were grilled about such “rescinding” tactics by a congressional subcommittee. When asked if they would abandon them except in cases of deliberately proven fraud, each executive replied simply: “No.”
Ugh! Paul Krugman gives a brief summary of “Why markets can’t cure healthcare,” based on Kenneth Arrow’s analysis. Let’s please put aside the insanity of market fundamentalism. Markets do many things well, but we need to make corrections when the results are intolerable.
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