Category Archives: Politics: US: Healthcare

If It’s a Commie Plot, Why Aren’t ‘Patriots’ More Into Fighting It?

Doug Holland’s comment on the previous post sparks an interesting question I have not seen raised elsewhere.

Holland writes, in the context of vaccine resistors,

The whole endless show is an invitation to the Russkies or Chinese. If they ever have an urge to attack, like we’ve been told for decades they’re itching to, they should use a biological agent against Americans. Even if there’s an easy way to prevent the infection, millions and millions of us are so stupid we’ll refuse it.

Which makes me wonder: I would imagine that many of the same people who object to COVID vaccinations also think COVID was released from a Chinese lab. Thus, the “China virus”.

But if you really thought that COVID was a Chinese plot, why wouldn’t you, as a patriotic, red-blooded, American, want to be first in line to defang that plot? Even if it meant wearing masks everywhere and taking a supposedly ‘untested’ vaccine [corrected] with various mysterious risks that you heard might have felled someone’s cousin’s friend?

Indeed, neither vaccination nor mask-wearing has been sold much as a patriotic activity. Why is that?

Posted in COVID-19, Politics: US: Healthcare | 4 Comments

Death Panels Spotted

© 2011 TUBS, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Remember all that fuss about how Obamacare was going the cause the government to set up “death panels” to ration care? Remember what happened? (Hint: no government death panels although insurance plans continued pre-existing systems to decide what stuff they would not cover, which works out to something quite similar but without accountability; I guess that’s capitalism, and wealthy folks get other choices, so it’s ok.)

But now, thanks to a combination of low vaccination rates and low incidence of mask-wearing, both aided and abetted the state government, Idaho is having such a big COVID spike that hospitals are flooded. So Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare is starting to ration hospital care. Looks like ‘death panels’ to me:

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare on Monday activated its “crisis standards of care” in 10 northern hospitals hard-hit by staff shortages, hospital bed shortages, and a “massive increase in patients with COVID-19 who require hospitalization,” the department announced Tuesday.

The crisis standards mean that the quality of care in those hospitals will be reduced for all patients. Resources will be rationed, and patients with the best chances of survival may be prioritized.

In practice, that could mean that: emergency medical services may prioritize which 9-1-1 calls they respond to; some people who would normally be admitted to the hospital will instead be turned away; some admitted patients may be sent home earlier than typical or may find their hospital bed in a repurposed area of the hospital, like a conference room; and, in the worst cases, hospital staff might not be able to provide an intensive care unit bed or a ventilator to a patient that has a relatively low chance of survival.

“Crisis standards of care is a last resort. It means we have exhausted our resources to the point that our healthcare systems are unable to provide the treatment and care we expect,” Dave Jeppesen, director of Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare, said in a statement. “This is a decision I was fervently hoping to avoid. The best tools we have to turn this around is for more people to get vaccinated and to wear masks indoors and in outdoor crowded public places. Please choose to get vaccinated as soon as possible—it is your very best protection against being hospitalized from COVID-19.”

Posted in COVID-19, Politics: US: Healthcare | 1 Comment

Robert Paul Wolff Explains Tea Party Rage at ‘Obamacare’

WHY DOES THE RIGHT HATE OBAMACARE? isn’t a use of Occam’s Razor by a famous philosopher, but rather a famous philosopher’s use of the other string in his bow, his many years as a professor housed in a department of Afro-American Studies.

I have to say that, even if Occam’s Razor isn’t invoked, as explanations go it has the virtues of clarity and simplicity:

The emotions aroused on the right by the ACA are quite mysterious. It is not at all surprising that large numbers of people in the United States have intense feelings about abortion or same-sex marriage. I may find those feelings reprehensible, but I am not surprised by them. Nor does it surprise me that many people feel strongly about taxation, or about America’s military involvements. These are quite naturally subjects of controversy, and though we may grow angry at those who disagree with us, we ought not to be surprised by the disagreements. But medical insurance?

Medical insurance is a bit like highways, supermarkets, or television — a familiar part of life that we more or less take for granted. Most of the time, those of us who have medical insurance [which is to say, eighty percent of Americans, or more] use it without giving it a great deal of deep thought. …

And yet, there is now a sizeable fraction of the American public, and a considerable number of Representatives and Senators, who say that they consider Obamacare an assault on everything they hold dear, a fatal blow to the American Way, a Socialist plot to destroy life as we know it, an evil so great that it is worth bringing the government to a halt and threatening the world financial system to defund it or even slow marginally the pace at which its provisions go into effect.

What on earth is going on? The answer, I think, is actually rather simple, although unpacking it will take me more time than I usually devote to a blog post.

To put the answer in just four words, the real, underlying reason for the hysteria engendered by the ACA is: Because Obama is Black.

There follows a sustained discussion of white-black relations in the colonies and then the US, noting that, “During all of this time, it remained the case that poor Whites, exploited and oppressed by White capitalists, could tell themselves that they were free, White and twenty-one, that they were, at the very least, not black.” Then, this:

The Civil Rights Movement, launched by African-Americans half a century ago, threatened, and eventually began to break down even these legal, customary, residential, and employment barriers. It was at this time that the old familiar political rhetoric about “working men and women” also began to change. The new rhetoric spoke of “middle-class Americans,” which, although no one acknowledged it, was a thinly veiled code for “not Black.” As economic pressures mounted on those in the lower half of the income pyramid, Whites wrapped themselves in the oft-reiterated reassurance that at least they did not live in the Inner City []which is to say, Black neighborhoods], that they were “Middle Class.” All of the political discourse came to be about the needs, the concerns, the prospects of the Middle Class, which to millions of Americans, whether they could even articulate it, meant “not Black.”

All of this crumbled, frighteningly, calamitously, disastrously, when a Black man was elected president. “Free, white, and twenty-one” ceased to be the boast of the working-class White man. Statistics do not matter, trends do not matter, probabilities do not matter, income distribution differentials do not matter. If a Black man with a Black wife and two Black children is President of the United States, then a fundamental metaphysical break has occurred in the spiritual foundation on which White America has built its self-congratulatory self-image for three centuries and more.

Hysterical Whites tried every form of denial. Obama’s election was theft. Obama is not an American. Obama is a Muslim. Obama is a socialist. Obama’s election was a one-time proof that we are not racist, to be followed immediately by restoration of the status quo ante bellum. When Obama was reelected, vast numbers of Americans went into terminal denial. They seized upon the ACA simply because it was, as everyone knew, Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment. To repeal it, to defund it, to make it as though it had never existed, would be in some measure to deny that he had ever been President. The actual details of the ACA matter not at all. Neither do the actual felt medical needs of those driven insane by the very fact of Obama’s tenure in the White House. None of that has anything at all to do with the real cause of the hysteria. Why are millions of Americans driven beyond hysteria by the ACA?

Because Obama is Black.

On balance I still think that the Republican elites, at least, hate and fear the Affordable Care Act because they think it will work — thus locking in the Democratic vote as Social Security did two generations earlier — and also because the GOP’s opposition will relegate its elites to the dustbin of history. I don’t pretend to understand why, even so, they would be willing to have the US default on its debts, a plan that will cost them and their supporters a great deal of money, not to mention hurting almost everyone else at home and abroad and vastly reducing US global power and influence. (Closing the government for a while, I vaguely get, I imagine they think it’s mostly evil anyway.)

Update: Corroboration for Prof. Wolff’s view in Digby’s They’d rather die than help the “others”. Works for PG County, MD too; but in Miami it’s poor Latins as much or more than anyone else. Remind me why our local GOP opposes a benefit for the majority of their constituents?

Posted in Politics: US: Healthcare | 18 Comments

‘Call a Canadian’?

I can't decide if this is smart politics or an invitation to thousands of horrible intrusions on the private lives of innocent people.

Call a Canadian : Effect Measure

Back in the days when Quebec was a referendum in the Province on whether to secede from the rest of Canada, there was a campaign from outside to call a Quebecois to tell them that Quebec was a valued part of the country. People dialed their own phone number but with a Quebec area code. Mr. Link suggests that Americans start a similar campaign to Call a Canadian:

Want to know what universal single-payer health care is really like? Do people die on gurneys waiting for operations? Would you pay through the nose in taxes? Is it really worry free? Instead of listening to “experts” from the health insurance industry, lobbyists, the government, or even Michael Moore, why not call an average Canadian and find out for yourself?

Substitute your area code for a Canadian one listed below and call your own phone number. Introduce yourself and ask the person at the end of the line what they think about their health care system. Ask about their own experience. The service, the price, the choice, whatever.

Then make up your mind if single-payer universal health care is a good idea for the USA.

Canadian Area Codes:

  • 709 Atlantic Time plus a half hour
  • 506 and 902 Atlantic Time
  • 819, 418, 581, 450, 613, 514, 438, 343, 416, 647, 905, 289, 705, 519, 226, 807 Eastern Time
  • 204, 306 Central Time
  • 867, 780, 587, 403, 587 Mountain Time
  • 250, 778, 604 Pacific Time

Somehow, I just can't shake the idea that most foreigners would just as soon not find a strange American on the line quizzing them about health care (or anything else for that matter).

Posted in Politics: US: Healthcare | 18 Comments

Maybe Health Care Just Isn’t Funny

Sen. Ron Wyden's office is sending out email touting this video, Senator Ron Wyden | Stand Tall for Health Care Reform.

They offer reviews such as “Ron Wyden Makes Health Care Reform Funny… [a] truly funny and risky political ad” and “The most entertaining political advertisement I've seen in a long time”.

So, judge for yourself.

I didn't like it at all. But I do like the slogan: “Are you ready for universal health care that can never be taken away?”

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Krugman Blogs Health Care

Paul Krugman blogs on healthcare:

I'm amazed at the way “government health care” is still a scare-term, when 90 million Americans already get insurance from Medicare, Medicaid, or other government programs including [federal employees] and the V.A. system — and most of them find their care just fine. Actually, government insurance is already bigger in dollar terms than private insurance (private spending is 55 percent of health spending, but a substantial fraction of that is out of pocket.) And somehow nobody notices.

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