The Velvet StraitJacket

Freshman Republican Lynn Jenkins said: “Republicans are struggling right now to find the great white hope. I suggest to any of you who are concerned about that, who are Republican, there are some great young Republican minds in Washington.”

She then went on to name a fistful of white Republicans. I mean.. really?

Today,I came across a blog and while I agree that what Congresswoman Jenkins said is no great crime I disagree with the bloggers reason and that of the Congresswoman on why it’s not a big deal.

Ms Tucker cuts the Congresswoman some slack because she doesn’t believe the Congresswoman understood the racial undertones of the phrase. This is also the Congresswoman’s excuse, she didn’t know what she was saying and what it meant.

I agree with this, I do not think Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins knew about the black heavy weight boxer from the early part of the 1900’s named Jack Johnson who was unstoppable, and thus had boxing enthusiasts looking for the “Great White Hope” to beat him.  There is no doubt in my mind that this congresswoman was oblivious to the origin of  reference she was quoting. But you can’t tell me she didn’t know what she was saying,if only because she used it correctly.  No, she didn’t know the origin of the phrase, but that doesn’t excuse what she said.

I do not believe she just chose her words wrong. Because in order for me to believe that.. I would have to believe that Congresswoman Jenkins  didn’t realize that the President was black when she was saying the Republicans need a “White” Hope to beat him.. It’s possible she didn’t know I guess, maybe they don’t get the news out there in Kansas?

Regardless, it really isn’t a crime and  just like we let off Mayor Dean Grose off the hook for his email because there was no great crime  there either.. (he.. uh.. he didn’t know that picture of  a watermelon patch outside the White House could be seen as racist.. because he was unaware of the racial stereotype that black people liked watermelons) … we will let Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins off the hook.  We will give her, Mayor Grose, the Tennessee  Republican legislative aide who sent the email of all the President’s pictures with President Obama’s just a black box and some eyes, to the ‘wrong people’ (we won’t ask her who the ‘right’ people were) and even  the GOP activist and former chairman of his state’s elections commission, Rusty DePass who said when he heard there was a gorilla on the loose  that it was probably one of Michelle Obama’s ancestors …  we will give them all the benefit of the doubt that they aren’t really racist for what they said or did. No, they’re not racists.. they’re just fucking idiots and that’s why it’s no great crime. We can’t control the idiots in our society, if we could Glenn Beck would be living on a retard farm weaving baskets instead of infecting other idiots with his stupidity. Stupid isn’t illegal (there’s a Sara Palin joke in there somewhere) so the only thing we can do is let them feel our stare, our stare that says.. “You know what you meant,and more importantly we know what you meant. But instead of getting to actually stand behind it, now we’re going to make you prove you’re a fucking idiot by saying … ‘I didn’t know’  and then we’re going to laugh at how stupid you really are.”

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As ironclad and inevitable as my logic seems to me when sealing the deal on an argument, I often find I have critics.  In this case, I’ve been accused of “lying” about some of the arguments I’ve made, particularly in my blogs about the Public Option and Rationing.  But, because I’m so fair minded I am more than happy to answer my critics and confront the accusation of lies.  To me the accusation of lying breaks down immediately and it seems like the “lies” are really just disagreements of opinion, not a conflict over the facts, although sometimes that comes up too:  In this case, my argument was the problem, not the facts:

the argument that we don’t want to be like Canada or Britain..
Because it’s the classic lie coming from the GOP…

what, is the lie?

That we will suffer the same consequences of these systems.. even tho this is NOT the system the Dems are trying to pass..

Well I would think that we can all agree that we don’t want to have the type of system that they have in the UK, but Canada has been held up as the gold standard of government healthcare by the American left for years.  But the problems that Canada has now were not evident immediately after they switched to their current system; it took years to outgrow the infrastructure that they had to reach the current position of having too few medical facilities and too few providers, resulting in long wait and appointment times.  We have the current medical infrastructure that we have, hospitals, urgent cares, outpatient surgery centers, even walk in clinics in Wal-Mart, because there is money in it.  Take the financial incentive out of the system and you are stuck with the infrastructure you have. 

The system the Democrats want to pass is one in which the germ of a government public option is available to eventually swamp over the current private insurance system.  The long term goal and result is to eliminate private health insurance, as The President and Democrats have been saying for years.  That would give us a system very much like Canada’s, with all that comes with it; shortages, long lines, months long wait for specialists and surgeries… no lie there.

Phrasing.. seriously.. I had to read it twice.. the placement of the word ‘uninsured’ makes it almost seem like you mean one those kinds of ppl getting breast or protate or any other cancer has a better survival rate here than anywhere else.. .. but thats simply not true is it.. because the survival rate you are quoting is only for those with insurance… those without of course, fare much worse than any other country don’t they..

I suspected that this wasn’t a valid issue to begin with, since counting only covered people would make the data fairly useless in determining actual survival rates worldwide.  That might be an interesting study in its own right, but there was nothing I could find in this study, regarding long term survival rates for cancer, that limited the pool to only covered people in the United States.  But I wanted to be sure so I went back to the original study, published in The Lancet Oncology, to review the methodology that was used in the study, and, as I suspected, health insurance coverage was not mentioned.  For an international study, that might not have even been a consideration when developing the data points for producing the study.  The NCPA’s analysis of the same study said that, “These figures reflect the care available to all Americans, not just those with private health coverage.”

Another “lie” seemed to be an interpretation of President Obama’s ABC Townhall on health care.  President Obama, in response to a question, said:

But what we can do is make sure that at least some of the waste that exists in the system that’s not making anybody’s mom better, that is loading up on additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care, that at least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what? Maybe this isn’t going to help.  Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.

To me, this sounds like an implicit support for rationing care to the elderly.   Of course we should eliminate waste in the system, but the President could do that now, without having a healthcare bill.  Medicare is losing 60 billion a year to waste, fraud, and abuse.  That is a worthwhile target to go after regardless of what happens to health reform.  It shouldn’t be held hostage to health reform.  In any case, there is nothing in the current HR 3200 that would attack this massive problem.  Instead, they use the example of trading off care. 

But President Obama, has made it clear, at least until the past few months, that he very much sees rationing as a method for cutting costs.  As recently as April in an interview with the New York Times Magazine, President Obama brought up the now infamous red and blue pill analogy:

So when Peter Orszag and I talk about the importance of using comparative-effectiveness studies as a way of reining in costs, that’s not an attempt to micromanage the doctor-patient relationship. It is an attempt to say to patients, you know what, we’ve looked at some objective studies out here, people who know about this stuff, concluding that the blue pill, which costs half as much as the red pill, is just as effective, and you might want to go ahead and get the blue one. And if a provider is pushing the red one on you, then you should at least ask some important questions.

That’s fine as far as it goes, everyone, from insurance companies on down, would prefer that you use generics if there are no specific medical reasons to use the “retail” pill.   But the President, who famously said last week that he did not want to kill our grandparents, seemed to have mixed feelings on his own:

I mean, I’ve told this story, maybe not publicly, but when my grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she got cancer; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip. It was determined that she might have had a mild stroke, which is what had precipitated the fall.

So now she’s in the hospital, and the doctor says, Look, you’ve got about — maybe you have three months, maybe you have six months, maybe you have nine months to live. Because of the weakness of your heart, if you have an operation on your hip there are certain risks that — you know, your heart can’t take it. On the other hand, if you just sit there with your hip like this, you’re just going to waste away and your quality of life will be terrible.

And she elected to get the hip replacement and was fine for about two weeks after the hip replacement, and then suddenly just — you know, things fell apart.

I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question.

Yes that is a difficult question.  And that’s exactly what is bringing the oldsters out to townhalls.  They are afraid, and not because of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or whatever boogie man lefties have, it’s because of the President himself.  The great communicator, if he is not in favor of rationed healthcare, sure likes to bring it up a lot.

I think my favorite “lie” is this one:

take for instance the argument of “It costs too much”.. well it costs more to do nothing.. But this truth is flatly rejected because there is no arguing it.. so it goes on the shelf labeled “Ignore at all costs”

I’m not sure how exactly this is categorized as a lie, but it’s a strawman argument.  There is no advocacy for “doing nothing.”  Neither Republicans, “villain” insurance companies, nor blue dog Democrats are arguing that it’s Obamacare or nothing.  There are multiple proposals for reform, and I’ve made a few myself for years.  But  arguing that Obamacare is actually going to cut costs is ridiculous.  The CBO is not buying it, and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence, other than President Obama’s say so, that his plan would cut costs, either in the short or long term.  It’s a money pit.  I wonder how in the tank to Obama you have to be to think that creating a major new entitlement program will reduce costs.

Anyway, I’m always open to respond to more “lies.”  Maybe someday I will actually get some.

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I told you I was going to be keeping an eye on this..When we left off it was looking pretty bad…

Umm, is there something they’re not telling us?

Catacombs could house flu victims

Old underground burial chambers in a Devon city could be used to store the bodies of swine flu victims if the outbreak worsens, a council has said.

the full story..

and from today on our side of the pond..

Military planning for

possible H1N1 outbreak

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The U.S. military wants to establish regional teams of military personnel to assist civilian authorities in the event of a significant outbreak of the H1N1 virus this fall, according to Defense Department officials.

The full story..

Just what the hell is going on here?

Now, it’s looking just a little but worse…For whatever reason, this is really sort of scary if you think out it.

National Guard drill at high school to prepare for possible H1N1 riot

PARIS — Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School will be the site of a National Guard riot control drill Thursday morning to prepare in the event of a panic over distribution of serum to treat the swine flu.

The school on Route 26 at the Paris-Norway town line has been designated by state officials as a distribution site for the H1N1 flu vaccine. The drill is to prepare for a worst-case scenario should the serum have to be transported from Augusta and people rush to get it.

The part that bothers me is this seemingly innocuous sentence

During the April conference, concerns were raised about a possible out-of-control rush on the serum,

What do they know? Why would there be an ‘out of control rush’ on the serum? There is only 176 residents of the entire state of Maine with H1N1.. what makes them think there would be any kind of rush, especially an out of control one that the National Guard  has to ‘drill’ for?

Combine this story with the others from earlier and this is getting very creepy. The potential for this flu season is almost.. not quite but almost the ‘Perfect Storm’ of viruses. You have the H1N1 which attacks not the weak,elderly and young… but seemingly healthy 18-30 year olds, and it doesn’t just make them sick.. it shuts down their entire system, killing them. Then you have the ‘regular’ strains of flu that we see every year which does attack the weak,elderly and young..those combination’s  alone could spell disaster, but add in a freakishly cold winter.. where more people are staying indoors huddled together, increasing the likelihood of spreading both strains exponentially and I have to ask; Could we be looking at a repeat of the 1918 flu season?

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During the August recess, while the Community Organizer in Chief is leading the charge against communities organizing against his health care agenda, I thought I would take another look at the details, which the devil is notorious for being in.  To me, the clearest long term effect is that the health care reform will end up in health care rationing.  Not as an unintended side effect, but as the long term goal.

But no, you say, scare-monger!  Trying to frighten people from the vision of The One!  Well, maybe people should be scared.  It’s astounding to me that this plan has gotten this far.  True, the plan would have been passed months ago if Obama had been savvy enough to drop it already written onto the laps of Congress in early February.  The country was in the throes of an Obamagasm and the President figured it would last enough to get this done in the summer.  It’s easy to see how he miscalculated.  All the major media organizations are still lounging in the bed, nude, and bathing in the afterglow. But much of the country either never got their promised release, or did, and afterwards felt sticky and thirsty, with a pounding headache coming on.

It’s a simple economic truth that in the broadest sense everything is “rationed.”  That’s what money does; it determines a value for anything that there isn’t an infinite supply of, which is practically everything.  Health care in the United States costs money, so if you have a lot of money, you can get as much as you want, or like most people who don’t have a lot of money, you have a third party payer pick up the tab.  In Canada and Europe, healthcare still costs money; only the someone who is picking up the tab is the government.  In the US, the third party payers (insurance companies) compete against each other for member’s and employer contracts.  In systems where the government is the only purchaser of healthcare, there isn’t competition, or making a profit off of providing healthcare like there is in this country, only a staggering cost and annoying patients.  Wait times often do the rationing, with patients waiting many months for care in limited facilities with limited medical providers.  That’s one of the key differences between a private and government health care system.  Building more facilities and hiring more staff helps to make money in a private system, so there is a powerful incentive to expand, but for the government, it’s merely a drain on resources.

The country had a bit of luck though in that President Obama’s first choice for Health and Human Services Secretary, Tom Daschle, was derailed by tax issues.  Daschle, who had spent the years since losing his senate seat mucking about Washington as a lobbyist-who-never-registered-as-a-lobbyist also had time to write a book on health care, Critical:  What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis.  The book lays out a plan very similar to what’s contained in HR 3200.  Daschle was quite open in how he wanted health care to be rationed; he proposed a Federal Health Board  to determine both clinical effectiveness and cost effectiveness, in other words, a board to determine approved courses of treatment in the same way that the Orwellian named NICE, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, does in the UK. 

NICE determines cost effectiveness based on a formula that says that a treatment is cost effective if it doesn’t exceed $34,000 per Quality Adjusted Life Year.  That means if an anti-cancer drug costs a cool 34K, but it will only increase your life span for 6 months, then sorry, go home and die.  This insures that only the older, cheaper, treatments will be used with any regularity.  That’s why the United States, with millions uninsured, has better long term survival rates on most common cancers, like breast, prostate, and colon cancer than the state supplied healthcare of Europe. 

Daschle isn’t the only one in the President’s orbit who wants to ration health care.  Dr.  Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, is a White House advisor on health care issues and has written extensively on various aspects rationing health.  His take on rationing healthcare is based on his Complete Lives System.   As Dr. Emanuel explains his proposal:

When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.

There is even a chart showing prime ages for using expensive medical treatment, and ages when…eh not so much eh?

      The gist of this proposal is that if you are between 15 and 40, you are considered a good bet to get high quality, expensive medical treatment, because these are the ages when you have the most value to society.  Under 15, not so much education or training has been spent on you, so there is no big investment.  Over 40, you are beginning the end of your highest value to society and now you are starting to cause nothing but problems, what with your middle aged health ailments. Oy!  As you can see from the chart if you are 60 or older, than it’s pretty much Soylent Green time.  Just go to the center, take your poison, watch an IMAX movie and “go home.”

Rationing is so ubiquitous among the supporters of government healthcare that there doesn’t seem to be any shyness in discussing it.  Apparently you can advocate health care rationing, just not use the word “ration” and that’s good enough.  For example, Senator Edward Kennedy wrote recently for Newsweek about The Cause of My Life:

We also need to move from a system that rewards doctors for the sheer volume of tests and treatments they prescribe to one that rewards quality and positive outcomes. For example, in Medicare today, 18 percent of patients discharged from a hospital are readmitted within 30 days—at a cost of more than $15 billion in 2005. Most of these readmissions are unnecessary, but we don’t reward hospitals and doctors for preventing them. By changing that, we’ll save billions of dollars while improving the quality of care for patients.

The problem with re-admissions of course, is that you can’t know they are un-necessary until after the patients are re-admitted.  How are you going to know which re-admissions are “unnecessary” until after they are re-admitted?  How is the government going to reward hospitals and doctors for not admitting patients to the hospital?

And of course, this goes all the way to the top, to the Rationer in Chief.  During the ABC Health Care Town Hall, President Obama made an astounding statement regarding that very subject, in response to a question from a woman who is a caregiver to her 105 year old mother, the woman told of her attempt to find a doctor to implant a pacemaker.  She finally found a doctor who found her mother to be worth saving, and the surgery was done.  Her question, would the government plan consider “a certain joy of living?” In determining who would get expensive medical care.

But what we can do is make sure that at least some of the waste that exists in the system that’s not making anybody’s mom better, that is loading up on additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care, that at least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what? Maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.

I don’t know why the President seems to think that doctors don’t already have to make those decisions, based on the health and ability of the patient to handle surgery.  Now of course, there will be a new wrinkle added, the government’s desire to pay for healthcare for the unproductive.

Rationing isn’t a joke or an over the top accusation.  It’s happening right now in other countries, and astoundingly there seems to be plenty of people who want to import the worst of socialized medicine to this country.  My wife’s grandmother is British, and at 92 has been denied the gall bladder surgery that she needs by the NICE regulations.  In this country, a 92 year old may or may not get surgery, based on the physician’s judgment that the patient is able to handle the surgery, not on government regulations and rules.

A British friend of my wife’s family, in his late 50’s was diagnosed a few months ago as needing bypass surgery and a shunt.  He has a home in Florida as well as in the UK, and wanted to fly back to the States for surgery, since he was told that he couldn’t be scheduled for surgery for months. However the National Health Service has forbidden him to fly.   In this country, go see a doctor and be told that you need open heart surgery and chances are you’ll find yourself admitted to a hospital the same day. So he is trapped in the UK, hoping he lives long enough for the scheduled surgery (hopefully by the end of August).

So this is how the government plans to “control costs.”    True, the United States spends more per capita on health care than any other nation, but that’s because, goddamn it, we want health care, and we’re buying it.  In other countries, healthcare is a line item in the national budget.  You can’t buy more of it if you want or need more.  You get what you’re allowed to have.  Why anyone would want to copy that kind of system is beyond me, but what I do understand is why the government wants it.  That’s in the nature of governments to constantly try to expand it’s power over us, and it has plenty of collaborators.

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There is a great discussion going on on the muchedumbre forum..

“Fear here… I got fear here… 1 trillion dollars… get your fear…“

sorry, 900 billion… like any of us really know the difference…

So, is Obama simply repeating the mistakes of Bush II by selling important things to the American people with fear?

fear here, fear now.. we must stop it.

Well, we must stop it when it is President Obama doing the mongering, when it is a Democrat’s agenda, when it is an issue that 70% of the country’s population want.

We are being led to believe that the ‘fear’ the President it ‘mongering’ on the rise of insurance prices, the crippling effect that the uninsured have on the medical system, and the eventual crash of medicare/medicaid  is just fanciful and over-the-top unnecessary rhetoric. But this isn’t about the country, this isn’t about helping the 70% majority get what they are begging for,the Republican’s  only goal here is to stop Obama by ending his hope of healthcare for everyone. The idea behind  stopping the healthcare reform the President is asking for is that it will  bring his popularity down enough for Republicans to  hope for a chance to win a majority of congressional elections is 2010. This isn’t about you or me to the Republicans, this is about beating Obama and winning congressional seats. Just ask Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). He isn’t afraid to admit the Republican agenda.

“When you tell people that the mortality rate in Canada is 25% higher for breast cancer, 18% higher for prostate cancer, you know, they say why in the world would we emulate a system like that?”

Of course they are telling them a lie, because that is not the system we are trying to emulate.. but what good is a little truth when your goal is fear. Why bother with the truth when the  the mortality rate for mortality is 3% higher in the United States than Canada? Because then, you lose your argument all together.

This idea of pretending that our healthcare system would suffer or the bonus-cuts the poor and destitute health insurance CEO’s would have to endure are not the issue, is ridiculous. The issue is to do what it takes to win at all costs.

“I just hope the President keeps talking about it, keeps trying to rush it through. We can stall it. And that’s going to be a huge gain for those of us who want to turn this thing over in the 2010 election.”-Sen. James Inhofe

The majority of us who support a public plan and are willing to pay for it, are sadly not as important as those who donate millions to coffers of our elected officials both Democrat and Republican. Oddly enough, the ones taking the most money from Phamra and Big Insurance are the one blocking reform by calling for bi-partisanship. Which in this case means a bill so watered down and useless that it will do more harm than good. And yet to call them on this, to explain the immediate need for reform, to try and give a democracy what it’s demanding.. is to be out there ‘fear mongering’ and scaring the public and this just isn’t to be born!

We had to wire-tap our own citizens for fear that the terrorists were  making covert plans over the wires.

We had to torture  subjects who were captured for fear that they might  know something. In order to do that though, we had to change the wording of strict Geneva convention guidelines to change these POW’s into ‘enemy combatant’ for fear that the laws may protect them.

We had to detain  combatants  in secret holding facilities all over the world for fear that they would escape or worse, join together and become a ’super-terrorist cell’.

We could not try these combatants  in our own courts on our own soil for fear that they would  get off and be released into the population and begin collaborating with one another on another attack.

We could not house these combatants in our own maximum security prison system for fear that they may do what no one else has done, and escape.. or for fear that they would join in with the other extremely dangerous inmates housed with them and created new terrorists  networks.

We were even told to vote for the Republicans because they tried  to make us fear that they were the only one capable of keeping us safe in these uncertain times.

It’s telling that when these issue were brought up and the fear mongering was pointed at as an unnecessary tactic, he reply from the same people complaining about the supposed fear mongering President Obama is spreading, was

“So the Prez tells you stuff that you don’t like and don’t want to hear, and for his trouble of actually treating you like an adult and not sugar coating it, you call it “fear mongering.”

or

It’s legitimate and warrants some extra consideration.“

That’s almost as “fair” as the people deciding the fate of the health reform being recipients of millions of dollars from the insurance companies… but not quite.

The scary idea that some Republicans are trying to make into some kind of truth, that once this reform is enacted, our elderly will be put out to pasture, is some of the most ridiculous and preposterous yet to be voiced in this debate. In country where a doctor is criminally punished for aiding terminal patients with only hours to live in excruciating pain, it’s asinine to believe that we would all of a sudden kill off an entire segment of our population. But fear is what the Republicans peddle to get their way, even if their way goes against what 72% of the population and 50% of their constituents are asking for.

The scariest part of all.. is that we and the Democrats in Congress will let them get away with it.

The only thing there is to fear here is the money Republicans and some Democrats will lose from the Health sector if they don’t get out and pimp for them now.

Oh…and to the Republicans who complain that bureaucrats should not be involved in the decisions between a doctor and patient, first I ask, is the  17 year old high school student working after school and weekends at the insurance call center denying  the care your physician is asking for now, doing that job any better?.. and then I say to those crying a whoa is me over politicians not being a deciding factor in the doctor/patient conversation.. Thank You for joining the ‘Pro-choice’ movement, the ‘Pro-medicinal marijuana’ movement and the ‘pro-assisted suicide’ movement, can we count on your support in 2010?

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