In 1980 my brother died in one of those notorious one-car accidents that plague the nuclear whistleblower set. He’d arrived that afternoon with his wife and three children with U-Haul in tow to start a new life. He and my hubby drove into town to get formula and disposable diapers for his youngest, never made it home. By morning he was dead, hubby was in ICU.

It fell to me to deal with the car insurer and health insurer from his last job as health physics site coordinator at a nuke in Georgia, a job he’d quit two weeks before in order to move his family to New Mexico where we’d found refuge, had a job waiting for him building equipment consoles for radio and television stations. Because his insurance was through a rent-a-tech outfit out of Pittsburgh that often shuffled personnel around to different plants for outages and such, it covered him for a full 30 days between assignments and 30 days following termination. It came with a life insurance rider with a double indemnity clause if he died in an accident – $100,000 for his family.

It was the first time I’d lost someone very close, the first time I’d had to deal with reluctant insurers (we’d previously enjoyed purely socialist health care via the US Navy). I made a deal with the car insurer during a meeting in Santa Fe that if they’d go ahead and pay $1500 for his funeral expenses, they could fight it out with his health insurer for the hospital bills. This allowed his wife to pay for the cremation and an urn, which was only fair.

Hubby had no insurance, but the county of Taos had instituted a sales tax to cover the cost of indigent DFHs and mountain folk that ended up using the public hospital, so we didn’t have to worry about that – we never received a single bill. Which was also fair, considering they’d done absolutely nothing for him other than put him in a bed and hook him to a monitor. I was the one who pulled the glass out of his head, cleaned out his holes and butterflied his cuts, the punctured lung reinflated itself, and what can you do for smashed ribs? They didn’t even wash the blood off.

The life insurer for my brother balked, but by then we’d left New Mexico. We stayed only long enough for hubby to regain strength and get sis-in-law settled into a cabin, supplied with wood for the coming winter, and hooked up with food stamps and various support groups to help her transition to widowhood. In the end for my sister-in-law it took three lawyers in two states to get the life insurer to pay (how dead do you have to be?!), and they ate up $60,000 of the $100,000 that was supposed to go to his family.

So I got into the habit whenever life insurance salesmen called of asking if the policies they sold came with a legal rider to cover the cost of lawyers it would take to make them pay when we die. That was as effective at shutting them down as showing up to the door in a saffron robe when the JWs came calling!

My next experience with life insurance was as executor for my mother’s estate when she died in 2002. She’d worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida before retiring, had a $125,000 life policy through their offerings that she’d been paying on faithfully even when she couldn’t afford medicine. When the paperwork was done I was informed that BCBS’s provider had sold the policy when she retired, and the new insurer would only honor $60,000 of it.

Her policy was clear in black and white, she’d never been informed that her coverage had changed, and her payments had never been adjusted. I informed my sisters that it was a complete scam, that we could hire a lawyer and handily win a lawsuit. But it would take at least 5 years and the lawyer would eat more than what the scammers were offering. So of course we had to settle for the $60K, even knowing it was a complete rip-off. That policy represented something my mother had counted on to leave us, so I was glad she wasn’t around to deal with this. I reported them to the state Insurance Commissioner, who of course did nothing at all.

Health insurance is no better these days, nor has it been better for a long, long time. In 1992 our 21-year old son was injured in a car accident. We had a small business policy, $2500 deductible but a million overall. They pre-approved everything, including an air ambulance transfer from Louisiana (where the accident occurred) to Florida where we lived. Then, after his remaining injuries were identified and surgery was deemed necessary, the insurance company decided to rescind the policy and the doctors abandoned our son. Simply told us everything was fine and sent him home. He died two months later when the unrepaired rip in his internal carotid gave way and he bled to death. His doctors of record – five of them – refused to accept him into the hospital.

It took two lawyers two years to make the insurer pay the bills for what they’d approved, two more lawyers and seven years to get to trial in a malpractice suit against the doctors who abandoned him to his death for something that was entirely treatable. When it was all over the lawyers made out like bandits and we were out more than $50,000 for that small modicum of ‘justice’. The practices that were blatantly unethical and in several aspects illegal in 1992 have since become standard operating procedure. Which is where we are today.

Now whenever someone tries to sell me health insurance coverage I ask the same question – does this policy come with a legal rider to pay for the lawyers it’ll take to get you to pay a claim? None of them do, of course.

There’s a lot wrong with our medical system in this country, including some extremely serious problems with the delivery system itself I wrote about previously. Rampant malpractice, medical errors, in-hospital prescription errors, iatrogenic disease, pure negligence, etc. And a lot of that is a result of a class-based rationing system that nobody likes to admit exists, but does. Medicare patients get a different quality of care than the well-insured, the marginally insured get less care as well, the Medicaid recipients get genuinely lousy care, and the uninsured get pretty much nothing. ERs don’t even stitch cuts or set bones these days, they might butterfly your gash (or give you butterflies to do it with), dispense a pain pill, maybe offer a tetanus shot, and tell you to call a specialist who might fit you in in a month or so. The uninsured are routinely charged twice as much or more than anyone else. Nowdays even the insured are driven into bankruptcy by an accident or illness.

The only rational answer to this ever-worsening situation is universal, single-payer health care. Where everyone has the same necessary coverage and everyone receives what they need as best as can be provided. This is not what we’ll get, of course. What we’ll get are individual mandates for private scams and exactly zero oversight of the delivery system that all by itself is the third leading cause of death in the U.S., killing about 200,000 people a year who wouldn’t have died if they’d simply stayed away from doctors and hospitals.

I read today that by the time “Health Care Reform” (whatever that turns out to be) takes full effect in 2019, things will be much, much worse. If insurers are free to continue raising their policy rates at 4 and 5 times the rate of inflation – as has become the annual norm over the past decade and more – a fair insurance policy from a private insurer for a family of 4 will cost as much as $30,000 per year. If subsidies are available so that premiums, deductibles and co-pays together don’t account for more than 13% of Adjusted Gross Income, the government will be paying for all or some of this outrageous cost for every family whose AGI is less than $300,000 a year. How is that in any conceivable economic scheme “reform?” Where is the government supposed to get that much money? IRS fines of $3800 on the few who choose not to buy private $30,000 policies? That wouldn’t pass muster in any 6th grade math class!

Insurers are in it for the profits, not to make medical care available to people who need it. They are corporate entities, profit and profit alone is their job. Politicians are owned by the corporate lobbyists who are spending millions every day to make sure their scam remains lucrative. We’ll see no real reform. This is all just another huge heist and corporate bail-out, amounting to a $10,000-$30,000 tax increase plus a profits-bailout from the government for those who can’t afford the price. Which is the vast majority of us whose income has remained flat for a decade or decreased in the last couple of years.

I am surely not the only person who sees that this is never going to work. So I have grown very impatient with the strange Kabuki that pretends it might.

I might live another seven years and finally get some of that Medicare I’ve been paying into faithfully since I was 16 years old. Then again, given my strong dislike and distrust of the Amerikan medical system, I might not. That’s my karma, I’m okay with it and will take my chances. What I will NOT do is pay a huge chunk of my now nonexistent income so some insurance hack can get million-dollar bonuses for sentencing people to death. Nor will I have the government pay that same insurance hack his million-dollar bonuses FOR me. That might mean the IRS will charge me an extra $3800 on my taxes every year, but since I’m too marginal to pay that much in taxes, so what?

A friend of ours, Gordon Smith, has a good chance of getting elected this November. I’m thinking of trying to interest him in what Taos did way back in the late 1970s, of adding a penny sales tax on goods, a few cents on gasoline, a few bucks on tourists at local resorts and hotels, earmarked to the county hospital to pay for care to the uninsured. Lord knows we’ve got more than our share of DFHs and mountain folk here too (I’m one of ‘em). It worked in Taos, the referendum passed handily even in those dark economic days. I think it would pass here. And it’s a much better and fairer way of covering the actual cost of health care than anything D.C.’s been able to come up with.

[background on the NM adventure at the Institute for Southern Studies]

House minority whip Eric Cantor explains how he supports Rush Limbaugh as the Republican Party’s leading economist, with some really great “ideas.” Like cutting taxes for corporations and wealthy Americans, while slashing government spending on Medicare and Medicaid. Now, why didn’t Republicans think of this when they had complete control of the government over the last eight years? Oops… they did.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports in One in 10 Americans receiving food stamps that indeed, a record 32.2 million Americans are now receiving food assistance to the tune of just over $112 a month. This reflects the latest unemployment figures, 8.1% in February, the highest in a quarter century. Luckily, under President Obama’s stimulus plan, food stamp recipients will be getting a temporary 13% increase which still won’t actually feed a person for a whole month given rapid inflation of food prices, but will stretch the budget a little farther.

DKos diarist Dartagnan offers the Republican response to the situation of so many Americans finding themselves in need of assistance from the government to cover something so basic as food. It won’t surprise you any more than Limbaugh’s not-new “ideas” about how to keep the rich from having to pay their fair share toward the public good.

Seems Craig Blair, a state legislator in one of America’s poorest states – West Virginia – has introduced a bill that will require recipients of food stamps or any other form of government assistance to submit to random drug testing. He includes unemployment benefits in his plan, reflecting once again the tired old Republican worldview that insists that people down on their luck and in need of assistance are just lazy, drug-addicted bums that don’t deserve a handout (even if they’ve been paying for unemployment insurance for many years). That this testing would add an entire layer of bureaucracy and hoop-jumping doesn’t seem to bother him, nor does the additional millions of dollars it will cost the state to test those long lines of people at the unemployment office. Jerkwad.

But West Virginia wingnuts aren’t the only ones on the New Eugenics bandwagon. Lawmakers in 10 states are now considering the very same type of legislation. They tried this in both Michigan and Arizona, but those laws were either struck down in court or found to be so expensive they were unworkable. In Tennessee, state representative Susan Lynn introduced similar drug testing legislation, justifying it with the usual Repuglican sense of social justice…

“Taxpayers are concerned that they might be funding the monster of drug addiction, and they don’t want that,” Lynn said. “This is really no different than what people are used to.”

Wow. I didn’t know you could buy pot with food stamps! Did you? Can Rush Limbaugh use them to buy Oxycontin?

Amazing…

Janis Joplin once sang someone else’s song very poignantly – “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose…” – and that’s semi-true in my experience. We all make choices about what’s important in our lives, and usually become enslaved to that which we choose. At the low end of the scale there’s never enough, just paying the bills is a constant struggle. At the high end of the scale there is also never enough. The thirst for more and more and more rules lives and ruins them too.

As Wall Street melts down we’re suddenly informed we must Spend, Spend, Spend!!! They can never make up their minds. Either we’re not saving enough or we’re not spending enough, it’s always our fault. I call bullshit. Slave wages have not even kept up with the cost of living, they can’t have it both ways.

I read about a 50-something day care worker yesterday who a coworker noticed sitting in the corner crying. When asked what’s wrong, she finally said she couldn’t feel her face. The coworker was alarmed, saw one side of her face drooping as they were talking, speech slurring. She drove her friend to the hospital, but the woman just cried harder and wouldn’t get out of the car. Said yes, she must be having a stroke, but if she walked in the door she’d lose everything – house, car, meager income (job)… she was terrified. Her friend finally talked her into going, she is still in the hospital and her coworkers are trying very hard to raise the tens of thousands she’ll need to pay for the care. There is no insurance at that end of the scale.

Some people on that discussion board from Europe and Australia were horrified. Simply trying to imagine what it must be like to face utter ruin just because you need to see a doctor – when you might be dying. Where dying is the “reasonable” choice, just so your children aren’t left bankrupt. Every other civilized country in the world provides basic health care for their citizens. Only in America…

This is wrong. We all work, much harder than the greed-head capitalists who skim the wealth we create for themselves. There are only so many hours in a day, and humans need sleep. If two full-time minimum wage jobs or three part-time minimum wage jobs – 16 hours a day, the kids are home alone – can’t provide a decent income, it’s NOT because these people are “lazy” or “shiftless” or anything. That’s wrong too. Now that Wall Street has cashed-out, millions who are very much willing to work won’t have jobs – there won’t be any. Great Depression v2.0. This is what unfettered ‘free market capitalism’ has wrought. It’s not pretty, and I sincerely doubt Jesus would approve.

So the haters are busy whipping up more hate. Buzzwords like “socialism,” taxing the rich, scary black people, gays and terrorists around every corner… “God’s Voter Guide.” That’s f***ing obscene! Dogs and cats living together, total chaos!!! Booga Booga, blah, blah, blah, Osama bin Laden, blah, blah, blah, Barack HUSSEIN Obama, blah, blah, blah. Disgusting.

We need change, not hate. Hate’s not going to help anyone, it’s just going to cause more pain. Maybe if the so-called Christians spewing hate 24-7 and worshipping golden bulls on Wall Street were exposed as the liars, posers and hypocrites they truly are, we could finally all work together to improve our nation and everyone’s lives. As if this were the United States of America, sans secessionists and domestic terrorists in the White House.

There’s a difference between “socialism” that has the government working for the people, and “socialism” that has government working for the corporate greed-heads. One is how the rest of the free world functions these days. The other is fascism. Things can’t go on like this, so when the dust clears which choice will we make? Valueless money is just mammon. Belongs to Caesar, not to God (who is pennyless). Our nation is drowning in it. If We the People ever come to our senses, we’d realize there are way more of “us” than “them.” So I hope. Right now that’s pretty much all there is, and a great many others are hoping too…

Happy Halloween – Booga Booga!!!

Stephanie Woolhandler, M.D. of Harvard Medical School testified before the President’s Council on Bioethics this past week about her experiences with [non]health care in Amerika. The council was created in 2001 to ‘advise’ the president on bioethical issues arising from advances in biomedical science and technology. 

Single-payer, “Medicare for All” type reform is drastically needed as the US falls farther and farther away from the so-called ‘Modern World’ in terms of the general health, life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality rates, and the sheer number of hard-working citizens who will die without any medical care at all because they simply have no access and cannot afford it.

“I’ve seen people die because of co-payments and deductibles.”

There are an estimated 47 million Americans with no insurance. And as more and more of them are losing their jobs and their homes as the economy descends into depression, that number will rise dramatically. An estimated 18,000 Americans Die every year because they have no health insurance or money to pay thousands of dollars’ worth of deductibles and co-pays for the junk insurance they do have. Fully one half of personal bankruptcies in this country are the result of getting sick or injured. 76% of those filers HAD insurance when they got sick or injured, but the deductibles and co-pays bankrupted them anyway.

America doesn’t need health insurance. It doesn’t need more junk health insurance. It doesn’t need to force businesses to be non-competitive in the world markets because they have to provide health care (via insurance) to those lucky enough to have jobs that offer it…

What America needs is health care.

Tomorrow – July 30 – is the 40th anniversary of Medicare. As an action item, LtEs and letters of complaint/support can be sent to the NY Times in response to Blumenthal’s opinion piece, to AHIP the insurance industry lobby, and/or to The President’s Council on Bioethics.

American citizens are dying right now for lack of health care, at the rate of at least 50 per day. Is killing men, women and children in Iraq MORE important than treating people right here at home?

“We will never forget, we will never hide, and we will never stop asking ourselves every morning what we must do to prevent what happened to ever repeat itself.”

So said Israeli President Shimon Peres at the main ceremony marking Holocaust Memorial Day at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned his audience that anti-semitism is on the rise across the world today, and that insidious forms of Holocaust denial were asserting themselves even in nations that have every reason to remember with circumspection what occurred in Europe 63 years ago.

Iran’s quixotic dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims the Holocaust is a “myth,” and hosted a revisionist Holocaust conference in 2006. Given that Israel and Iran are currently at a heightened state of tensions – complete with bravado from Hillary Clinton about “nuclear umbrellas” and US defense of Israel (which has plenty of its own nuclear weapons) – it’s worthwhile for those who weren’t born when this horror occurred to take a long, hard look at reality.

Yet in Britain, Muslims have joined in commemoration events, which is a step forward, at least for those Muslims who have chosen to participate in the modern world by immigrating to countries like Britain.

A documentary film entitled Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was released just two weeks ago purporting to examine the censorship and discrimination in American academia against biologists and other scientists who criticize the Neodarwinian model of biological evolution. The never-ending Evolution vs. Creationism debates aside, a disturbing focus of the film are images linking Darwinism to Eugenics, and Eugenics to the Holocaust. This has resulted in the explosion of a very strange form of Holocaust denial coming from the ranks of science and academia that is a bit shocking.

Despite the ebbs and flows of partisan politics and election campaigns and candidates who will say or do anything to get themselves elected to power, today is a very good day to stop for a moment and asses our overall sociopolitical situation. We are at war on two fronts (again), and the costs are now coming due in increasing poverty and rising prices for every necessity of life. Will we again stoop to blaming the poor? Will we once again single out the religious for persecution and ‘elimination’? Will we allow the so-called “intellectual elite” to deny the lessons of real history in order to justify a renewed eugenics aimed (as always) at those they see as ‘lesser’ humans?

That seems a serious question to me. The quadrennial international convention of the United Methodist Church meeting on this day in Fort Worth, Texas, issued a historic and detailed resolution deploring the legacy of eugenics in the 20th century, apologizing for Methodist support of eugenic policies in America in the first half of the 20th century, and warning about a resurgence of eugenics in the 21st century. They are the first Christian denomination to issue such a resolution and apology, in recognition of the Holocaust such policies were used to justify.

Perhaps someday we’ll see a similar resolution from some organization of influence in biological/evolutionary science apologizing for the corruption of Darwin’s theory that was used to justify forced sterilization and miscegenation laws in this country and in Europe, and which did in fact get further corrupted by Hitler in his quest for “racial purity.” That too would be a step forward after more than 6 decades. Denial is more than just a river in Egypt.

Links:

Marking annual Holocaust Memorial Day
Holocaust Memorial Day
Israel marks Holocaust Memorial Day
Eugenics Apologies

Yes, that does happen, and has been happening often enough over the past decade that the judicial system is now very much involved. The 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana further ruled that insurers cannot cancel policies unless they can demonstrate that the policyholder willfully misrepresented his health on the application, and that the insurer had investigated that application before issuing the policy.

The decision was unanimous, and comes at a time when the practices of health insurers in California are under increasing scrutiny by the state Legislature, the Department of Insurance, and the Department of Managed Health Care. In the past few months state agencies and issued fines, citations and even filed suit against California’s major health insurers for the way they have treated policyholders.

The court’s action came in a case involving an Orange County small business owner whose coverage was cancelled by Blue Shield of California after a disabling car accident. That case now goes back to the lower court for trial, while Blue Shield must pay the appellate court costs. The decision also opens the door to trials in hundreds of similar lawsuits now working their way through the legal system.

This of course doesn’t prevent insurers from using arbitrary cancellation policies in other states, and their fondness for the practice is legendary. In fact, this is one of the biggest contributors to our current national “Health Care Crisis” – and one that simply cannot be fixed by forcing citizens to purchase insurance (as the health care plans of almost all current Republican and Democratic presidential candidates favor). What good is health insurance that gets cancelled as soon as you need it to pay health care bills? And what is the practice of collecting monthly premiums – often more of a family’s income than housing and utilities – for policies subject to arbitrary cancellation, if not theft?

Single Payer health care is the only reasonable option at this point, and America doesn’t have a lot of time to get its act together on that. As Baby Boomers head into retirement – and Medicare, and increased reliance on doctors and drugs – the situation is only going to get worse. The health insurance industry is basically a trading market dealing in futures of human suffering, and that is certainly nothing to be proud of. If we can afford billions of dollars a month to kill people (wars of aggression and occupation), we can afford to provide basic health care to all citizens.

Including the nearly 50 million who now have none, and the estimated 100 million who are underinsured. As many as 95% of the population is a single serious accident or illness away from medical bankruptcy, even if they’ve been paying more than $1200 a month for coverage for years.

Links:

Court curbs insurers’ ability to rescind medical policies

Eschaton: Some Happy Xmas News

Nobel laureate, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory James Watson got himself into a bit of a pickle after opining in an interview with the UK’s Sunday Times (published Oct. 13) that he isn’t hopeful about our attempts to help Africa because Africans just aren’t as smart as other humans.

Within a week Watson had been soundly denounced by his scientific colleagues, the debate over cultural bias in intelligence testing was reignited, and the subject of modern day “New Eugenics” became prominent in dozens of internet forums and political websites.

By the end of the week Watson found himself out of a job as Cold Spring Harbor desperately tried to divert unwanted attention from its sordid history as the scientific base of American eugenics in the early decades of the last century. He also had his book tour cancelled and was sent home to “think things through.”

Now, it’s not unusual for James Watson to ruffle some PC feathers. He’s been at it ever since he stole Rosalind Franklin’s life’s work while simultaneously denouncing her for her ‘natural’ female inferiority. He has always been a notorious bigot, is probably lucky got to be 79 years old before his usually amused peers finally put him out to pasture.

Then this week the BBC weighed in with some rather humorous reporting on things genetic. Check the capture of their online website below, and see if you can figure out what’s wrong with this picture…

Now, the average person might look at that headline juxtaposed to that particular picture, and think that some input-flunky at BBC just decided to get cute. But last week that same BBC reported that according to “evolutionary theorist” Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics, humans are on a course to split into “a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass” representing two distinct sub-species within the next 100,000 years or so.

Curry described the two subspecies as an upper class of tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent and creative beings as opposed to the underclass of dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures. Hmmm…

One might wonder what’s going on in the biological fields of evolutionary theory and genetic research to suddenly break through the recently erected barriers of political correctness. When added to the robust emergence of this “New Eugenics” movement, people might begin to wonder if science ever really got over its fondness for eugenic ’solutions’ to human social issues. Perhaps they were just forced to lay low after the notorious debacle of Hitler’s Holocaust and various attempted genocides since then. Maybe racist eugenics just went underground for awhile, but never really swore off the political corruptions of science they once embraced so enthusiastically in the name of Charles Darwin.

At any rate, it’s something to think about. Since it’s so suddenly out there loud and clear asserting the same sort of garbage eugenicists asserted back when they testified in favor of laws to force sterilization on the poor, the imprisoned, the handicapped, and the orphan. In THIS country, not in Nazi Germany (which used American eugenics laws to promote its own version).

Links:

Liberal Eugenics

Science Magazine: Is a New Eugenics Afoot?

ZMagazine: The New Eugenics