Several Good Articles and Blog Posts on Health Care Reform

Here are some links and exerpts from several good blog posts and articles I have read on the inter-tubes about health care reform (or not).

Here is a link to a video and partial transcript of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) being interviewed by CNN's Wolf Blitzer at the Crooks and Liars web site. Problably only Bernie out of all the 100 senators has the cajones to say what needs to be said. Sanders is defending single payer, here are some good money shots:

Sanders: United Health Insurance. A couple of years ago the head of that company was a guy named William McGuire. He received $1.6 billion in stock options. Now, do you think that's a cost effective way of putting money into health care? We don't have enough primary health care doctors -- one guy has $1.6 billion.

SANDERS: All that we're changing -- we're not telling people they should go to a different doctor. We're not telling people they don't have a free choice --

BLITZER: But you're telling them they should go to a different health insurance company.

SANDERS: Do you think people are saying, Oh, my God. I want a freedom of choice of hundreds of health insurance companies? That's not what they're saying. They're saying, I want to go to the doctor that I want to go to. I want to go to the hospital --

First, Sanders draws attention to something that is rarely addressed in mainstream discourse, and that is the fact that for-profit insurance companies are parasitic on the system. You and your employer pay your insurance premium, part of which is paid out not for health services, but to stock dividends and corporate executive salaries. Also, notice how Blitzer simply adopts the anti-reform framing of confusing choice of insurance companys and choice of doctors. Sanders rightly clears up this obfuscation in arguing that a single-payer system would still allow people a choice of doctors.

Next article is from the web site Dissident Voice and Kevin Zeese. Here is the introduction:

"Thursday, as Senator Tom Harkin (D-IO) left the health care hearing room he leaned over to me and said:

I used to sell insurance. The basic rule is the larger the pool the less expensive the health care. Today we have 1,300 separate pools – separate health care plans – and that is why health care is so expensive; 700 pools would be more efficient and less expensive and one pool would be the least expensive. That’s why single payer is the answer.

Nothing like common sense."

Finally, I picked up this link from Louis Proyect on the Marxmail list to a Pappadablogger, who spills the beans on how so many prominent Democrats are in the monied pockets of the health for profit industry, either through campaign contributions, personal ties, or as actual share holders. Here is a small excerpt:

"A key House committee member, Rep. Jane Harman from California, is not only married to one of the richest men in the country, she personally has – are you still sitting down? – Congresswoman Harman personally owns $3.2 million of healthcare industry corporate investments.

In fact, the 11 key members of the House and Senate have a total of $27 million in healthcare corporate investments. And they will write the bill? Are you feeling sick yet?"

Yep!

More Children Being Murdered, Anti-Abortion Zealots Continue Not to Notice

A couple of week ago I posted on the fact that many children die of hunger and malnutrition, and anti-abortion zealots hardly seem to notice.

It was recently brought to my attention that there is another active killer of children. Left I on the News fills us in:

"One by one, the killer claims victims. The latest, a 12-month-old infant named Muhammad Rami Ibrahim Nofal. Just last week, another 1-year-old named Odai Samir Abu Azzoum and 10-year-old Ribhi Jindiyeh. The majority of victims of this serial killer have been children. Remarkably, though, virtually none of these murders have even been reported in the Western media. Much less has there been
an outcry to do something about the killer, even though the identity and location of the killer is well-known.

Of course this killer is Israel, but, sad to say, there plenty of accomplices. Active accomplices like the U.S., E.U., and Egypt, who actively help to promote and enforce the blockade which claimed these victims - the 337 Palestinians who have died because they were refused or delayed entry into Israel where they could have obtained medicine or medical care unavailable in Gaza - and many more - the unknown number who have died in Gaza, the victim of "natural" causes which were anything but natural.

Why do I call this murder? I don't know what the law states, but if someone is poisoned and you hold the antidote in your hand and refuse to give it to them, surely you're as much of a murderer as the person who administered the poison. It's not a perfect analogy, since the "poisoner" in at least some of these examples is actually genetics, although in others, it's even worse, since it may well be that the one with the antidote is also the "poisoner," that is, that Palestinians in Gaza are developing deadly medical conditions which never would have occurred in the first place had they been living under less squalid conditions. Continues.... "

Al Jazeera English has a specific story on how the Israeli blockade of Gaza caused the death of a two year old by denying him medical care in a timely manner. It should be noted that Israeli doctors wanted to treat him.

Like I had wondered before, why are there no demands by these so-called "pro-life" people to demand radical action to end this horrible oppression? Is it because only some babies are worthy of concern? Or that only in gestation babies are worth saving because it gives these zealots a moralistic finger to wag at "loose" women? Hmmmm?

What Was My Point About America's Memory Hole?

Oh, yeah, and this article by Chomsky published at Alternet (originally at TomDispatch) fits well with my previous post and commentary on America's easy forgetfullness about atrocities committed in our name.

American Amnesia: We Forget Our Atrocities Almost As Soon as We Commit Them
by Noam Chomsky

"The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation, and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so.

For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that Guantanamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would be beyond the reach of the law -- a place, incidentally, that Washington is using in violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasons were, of course, alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. The same expectations held for the Bush administration's "black sites," or secret prisons, and for extraordinary rendition, and they were fulfilled."

More importantly, torture has been routinely practiced from the early days of the conquest of the national territory, and continued to be used as the imperial ventures of the "infant empire" -- as George Washington called the new republic -- extended to the Philippines, Haiti, and elsewhere. Keep in mind as well that torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression, terror, subversion, and economic strangulation that have darkened U.S. history, much as in the case of other great powers.

Accordingly, what's surprising is to see the reactions to the release of those Justice Department memos, even by some of the most eloquent and forthright critics of Bush malfeasance: Paul Krugman, for example, writing that we used to be "a nation of moral ideals" and never before Bush "have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for." To say the least, that common view reflects a rather slanted version of American history."

(continues at link)

The Mainstream Media is Not Even Coming Close to Reporting The Worst of It

On the May 19th edition of Democracy Now! Jeremy Scahill reports on prisoner abuse at Gitmo:

"And while much of the focus has been on the tactical use of torture at Guantanamo, almost no attention had been paid to a parallel force that was torturing prisoners in a variety of ways, including waterboarding them, and that is this riot squad of sorts that you referred to called the Immediate Reaction Force. The prisoners and their lawyers at Guantanamo call it the “Extreme Repression Force.”
And basically what this is is a thug squad that is used to mercilessly punish prisoners who show the slightest bit of resistance or who do things that technically they’re not supposed to do, infractions like having two Styrofoam cups in their cell instead of one.
Guards will call in this goon squad. They come in with their Darth Vader outfits, and they literally gang-beat prisoners. There are five men, generally, that are sent in. Each of them is assigned to one body part of the prisoner: the head, the left arm, the right arm, the left leg, the right leg. They go in, and they hogtie the prisoner, sometimes leaving them hogtied for hours on end. They douse them with chemical agents. They have put their heads in toilets and flushed the toilets repeatedly. They have urinated on the heads of prisoners. They’ve squeezed their testicles in the course of restraining them. They’ve taken the feces from one prisoner and smeared it in the face of another prisoner."

Left-Wing Wacko commentary:
If you only paid attention to reports in the corporate mainstream media, then you would likely think that the whole torture controversy is only about the water-boarding of a few high-level Al-Qaeda detainees that ended years ago. But of course it goes much deeper than that. There have been numerous incidents of torture, some resulting in death, in POW camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, and probably other places. Lets not forget about the extraordinary renditions to secret prisons run by repressive regimes and a whole host of other torture and extra-legal repression techniques that periodically come to light and then disappear down the memory hole. Kudos to Jeremy Scahill for dragging this scary shit into the light!

Deja Vu, U.S. Weapons Fall into the Hands of Insurgents Fighting U.S. Forces

From the May 20th edition of the New York Times:
Arms Sent by U.S. May Be Falling Into Taliban Hands

KABUL — Insurgents in Afghanistan, fighting from some of the poorest and most remote regions on earth, have managed for years to maintain an intensive guerrilla war against materially superior American and Afghan forces.

But military officials, arms analysts and dealers say it points to a worrisome possibility: With only spotty American and Afghan controls on the vast inventory of weapons and ammunition sent into Afghanistan during an eight-year conflict, poor discipline and outright corruption among Afghan forces may have helped insurgents stay supplied.

Left-Wing Wacko Commentary:

If any of this sounds familiar, there have been previous stories about this sort of thing occurring in the Iraq war as well. I am skeptical that the blame can be placed solely on Afghan or Iraqi "corruption". But it is noteworthy that U.S. imperialist forces are aligned with probably significant numbers of people who really don't believe in the cause that they are allegedly being supported in.

You know how right-wing ideologues always have complaints about why various U.S. war efforts go poorly? You know, things like "Our troops have to fight the enemy with one arm tied behind their backs" and which it is usually implied that it is liberal Democrats, or "political correctness" that has done the arm tyeing? Then there is the blaming of the allegedly "liberal" mainstream media or the American anti-war movement that in some way or the other has undermined the war effort. This rhetoric has been commonplace both during the Vietnam era and today during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Remember this story when you hear this bullshit in the future. A good rebuttal will be to remind the right-wing ideologue that the U.S. military was arming its own enemies! Ahh, the follies of empire!