Reform Health Care Reform

Despite the hyperbolic cries of "socialism" from misinformed Limbaugh-listening, Fox 'news'-watching ditto heads, this bill is far too friendly to the corporate insurance industry.

To really bring health care costs down to where it should be in a truly market-driven economy, we need a robust public option or a Medicare buy-in option. Currently, there is very little competition between health insurance companies, as they have divvied up areas and pretty much charge what they want.

This bill, despite the exchanges to be created, will not reign in these greedy companies sufficiently, as their motivation is money, not the health of the American people.

Health care reform has been a long time coming, and the battle this time around has been fierce. The insurance companies and their corporate lobbyists threw everything they had at Congress and at the public to try to sway Congress in order to kill reform and keep things just the way they are.

Thanks to representatives like ours, Congresswoman Doris Matsui of Sacramento, California, we are on the way to true reform.

But please don't stop now. Let's get a public option (or the option to buy into Medicare) done, and that will not only bring down costs, it will insure we keep the "Corporations-First" party in the minority, where they belong.

Corporate Zombies Are Eating Our Democracy

The issue of corporate “personhood” has come to the fore again, due to the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, handed down on January 21st.

But even some corporations didn’t like the ruling. Dozens of current and former corporate executives from corporations including Delta, Playboy Enterprises, Ben & Jerry’s, Seagram’s, Hasbro, Delta Airlines, Men’s Wearhouse and Crate & Barrel sent a letter to Congress asking it to immediately pass the Fair Elections Now Act, which would publicly finance all congressional campaigns out of a special fund created by a fee levied on TV broadcasters. They say they are tired of getting fundraising calls from lawmakers and now it will get worse.

Of course, these smaller corporations are not the ones who will be doing most of the new spending anyway. It’ll be the mega-corporations, the ones that have been buying legislation through campaign contributions and their swarms of lobbyists on Capitol Hill for some time now. It’s just that now there will be no limits on their so-called “speech.”

The concept of “corporate personhood” grew out of a Supreme Court case decided in 1886, San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. However, it was just a note by the court reporter that somehow miraculously bestowed this status on corporations. J.C. Bancroft Davis, wrote for the court: “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”

Justice Hugo Black (who served on the Court from 1937-1971) wrote, “In 1886, this Court in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, decided for the first time that the word ‘person’ in the amendment did in some instances include corporations...The history of the amendment proves that the people were told that its purpose was to protect weak and helpless human beings and were not told that it was intended to remove corporations in any fashion from the control of state governments...The language of the amendment itself does not support the theory that it was passed for the benefit of corporations.”

During the Court’s deliberations in this most recent decision, freshly appointed Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong, and that the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights as flesh-and-blood people. Judges “gave birth to corporations as persons,” she said. “There could be an argument made that that was the court’s error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics.”

Clearly, it is a flawed precedent. And instead of compounding the error by wiping out a hundred years of other precedent that at least put some limits on corporate spending in political campaigns, the Court should have corrected the original mistake, as Sotomayor suggested.

Congress is debating a new bill that aims to counter the Court’s decision, but by most accounts – and like everything Congress does these days pertaining to corporate power – it is much too weak.

Surely, the future of democracy itself in the USA is at stake. Until we can take the big money out of politics, our elected officials will continue to serve the entities that provide them with the money to run big, expensive campaigns, instead of the people. Corporate spending should not be protected as free speech, for it is just the opposite – the practice smothers the real free speech of actual citizens, rendering our views seemingly irrelevant.

Happy friggin’ new year

I’d like to say “Happy New Year,” but it’s not looking very good for so many people. “Hope and change” seems to have dissolved into despair and more of the same.

I’ve developed a pretty thick skin, politically speaking, over the years. Idealistic in my youth, as the youth tends to be, I thought our generation (I’m 55) could turn things around. When politician after politician dashed my hopes, I decided it was the system, and things would never change until fundamental changes were made there.

I still believe that. Most of all, we must somehow, as a nation, get the big money out of politics. It is corrupting everything, especially Congress, as the recent health care fiasco so obviously shows. (When over 70% of the nation says it wants a robust public option, for example, you’d think it’d be a slam dunk. But no, the insurance companies that pile on the cash for Lieberman and his ilk get their way, yet again!)

I allowed myself to believe Barack Obama was really going to be different. After all, he wasn’t part of the privileged class, like so many of our presidents have been. He worked hard to make something of himself, then eschewed high-paying lawyer jobs to work for the downtrodden on the streets of Chicago. Surely, I thought, this man could not be so easily corrupted.

But there’s something about holding high office, apparently. Now, he does the bidding of his generals and wages war, as is the American custom. He sits on the sidelines and twiddles his thumbs as the very issue that got him elected gets debated in Congress, seemingly oblivious to the fact that botching it would piss off the majority of people who voted for him. He didn’t even defend the things he campaigned for, like the public option.

He and the super-majority of Democrats we elected compromise before the debate even starts, then compromise some more. Any real bargainer knows you start with something way beyond what you expect to get (in this example, Single Payer), giving you a bargaining tool, in order to end up with something acceptable (like a robust public option). You don’t start with what you really want. Not when you’re negotiating with such a powerful force as Big Money, which is, in the final analysis, the actual opponent.

So, surprise, surprise, we end up with something Big Money (and Big Insurance) is very happy with, but which helps the public very little, if at all. And now we’re set to do it all over again, with bank “reform.” Yeah, right! I can save everyone a lot of time: just ask the banks what they want. They’ll get it anyway.

As I see it, every group fighting for change on any issue ought to all come together and fight for campaign reform. Because until we get the big money out of politics, we’ll keep witnessing the same charade, over and over again.

So, happy friggin’ new year.

Corporate chokehold

Once again, the corporate interests that have a chokehold on our elected representative bodies have succeeded in derailing any real change for the better.

The health care bill is now a bloated corpse – a rotted, stinking shell of what was once originally envisioned. All this thing will succeed in doing is reward the soulless insurance corporations for their intransigence by making them even richer.

The Democrats promised that if we would just give them a 60 seat majority in the Senate, a majority in the House and a Democratic president, they would be able to finally deliver. Instead, the spineless bunch has caved, again, even on abortion rights.

What could have been their greatest moment, when they finally stood up for the people against the big-moneyed interests, has instead disintegrated into the predictable mind-numbing process we helplessly witnessed this summer and fall: Just another giveaway to the mega-corps running the country.

The big mistake, of course, was compromising right off the bat, then compromising some more, then some more, ad nauseam... all in a futile attempt to come up with some kind of “bipartisan” bill, so that the Dems could say they are “mainstream.”

Rather than take Single Payer off the table at the start, they should have used it as their bargaining position. Then, perhaps, we might have been able to at least get a real, robust public option.

Personally, I think Single Payer is the way to go. The rest of the democratic industrialized world runs its variations of it quite successfully, and we even run one already ourselves – in the form of Medicare for seniors. It’s true that when this process started, it didn’t seem could pass such a bill, being that our legislature is what it is. Still, as any negotiator knows, you don’t start out giving away the store.

But there is still a Single Payer bill alive, HR 676; and a California bill, SB 810. Now that the public option plan has become a Frankensteinian monstrosity, it’s what we ought to fight for. Thousands of doctors and nurses nationwide back it. Let’s dump the bloated giveaway bill, and go for the gold.


P.S. It’s that time again! This holiday season, give a unique, thoughtful gift, one that keeps giving all year long – the Humor Times!

Drop the toxic health care bill, implement the simple solution

The health care bill has been thoroughly polluted with a stifling complexity, a result of all the haggling and trying to please all sides. The best solution is the simplest one, the one that has worked well for decades in every other industrialized democracy in the world (in various forms): single payer. In fact, it has even worked just fine here, in the form of Medicare for seniors. What we need is Medicare for All.

I firmly believe it is immoral to deny health care to anyone, and that's what our system does on a consistent basis. It denies care to those who can't afford insurance, the cost of which has risen astronomically in recent years, as have insurance company profits; and said insurance companies regularly deny health care to even those who have been paying into their greed-lined coffers. They deny for 'pre-existing conditions,' or because they don't like a procedure the doctor orders, or for whatever reason their legions of deniers can come up with.

Putting a profit motive in between doctors and patients is quite simply morally indefensible.

Congress, drop this toxic bill and give us what the majority wants, and what we all need: single payer.