Slamming Stimulus Package But Happy To Take Its Money

Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor may be a GOP rising star, but he sure is a hypocrite.

How else to describe someone who is a leading critic of President Obama’s Recovery Act and yet also joins his congressional colleagues to urge Virginia’s Department of Transportation to apply for stimulus money for high-speed rail? If that isn’t two-faced, what is?

He’s also a demagogue: “Millions of jobs will be crushed by the administration’s policies.”

Say what? The stimulus may have been too small and overemphasized tax cuts, but it has helped states, including his own, with longer unemployment benefits, expanded food stamps, and subsidies for people who have lost jobs to extend their health insurance. It has also kept teachers in classrooms and cops on the streets, and gotten workers rehired.

Hours after Cantor recently delivered the GOP’s weekly radio address blasting the stimulus, Vice President Biden announced that $ 1.5 million of the bill’s money would go to the Richmond Police Department to retain officers. And $20 million is going to Chesterfield County – the suburbs of Richmond – to keep 275 teachers from being fired.

Virginia’s working men and women should remember that Cantor fought hard to cut a provision in the stimulus bill that was designed to help low-income workers.

As Obama marks his sixth month in office, his presidency will be judged by its laser-like focus on creating jobs, good jobs, and many of them. Double-digit unemployment is a ticking time bomb, and his economic team needs to work quickly to defuse it. But Cantor and his crew don’t care about creating jobs. They want to spin the debate about the economy so their party, which has absolutely nothing to offer working people, games the 2010 midterm elections.

It may be, as some argue, that the politics of getting a second stimulus through a Congress filled with GOP obstructionists and conservative Democrats is too tough at this time – especially with the battle for health-care reform in full gear. If that’s the case, what’s needed instead is a simple and comprehensive package that focuses on job creation.

In their article in the July 13 Nation, “Our Jobless Recovery,” Leo Hindery Jr. and Leo W. Gerard lay out a set of commonsense proposals for a job-led recovery.

“We can either focus our economic recovery efforts on creating full employment for the 150 million workers who are not part of the top 0.2 percent and on rebuilding the country’s manufacturing base,” they wrote. “Or, as we have been doing for nearly three decades, we can concentrate on policies that mostly just benefit the incomes of the wealthiest 300,000.”

The economic spin battle under way – disconnected from the real economy and working Americans’ lives – is filled with demagogic and alarmist rhetoric about out-of-control government spending and federal debt.

But in the absence of consumer spending and with banks failing to lend – even while they report record profits and hand out huge bonuses – government is the last resort. It must spend in order to avert a deeper recession.

But Eric Cantor and his crew just don’t get it. Instead of laying out job-creation policies, they whine. And they whine.

The question is, why are we still listening to people who broke the back of the middle class, engineered the largest redistribution of wealth upward to the very rich, and now dare to attack fairly modest government-led efforts to help working families weather this economic crisis?

Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editor and publisher of The Nation magazine

Canada: They’re Not “Dying By The Millions.”

You should have heard them: Three middle-age couples sitting around a breakfast table, complaining about glitches in the Canadian health-care system.

This was in a charming (of course) bed & breakfast in Victoria, British Columbia, about three years ago. My wife and I had slept a little late (of course), but the proprietor had (of course) kept breakfast warm for us. And the conversation was just heating up.

The three couples were from Canada’s east coast and upper (there’s no other kind) Midwest. For a few minutes we listened in silence to their cataloging of irritations, until finally I asked, “Well, would you like to switch over to the system we have in the U.S.?

To a man and woman, they looked aghast. Their vocal responses, to the best of my recollection, went something like, “Good heavens, no!” “Certainly not!” “No, no, no, no, no! and (LOUD GUFFAW).

Because in Canada, everyone is covered. No one worries about how they’ll pay for medical care, no one is afraid to leave their job because they’ll lose coverage, no one is bankrupted by medical bills, no one has to choose between a prescription drug and putting food on the table. The Canadian government doesn’t mandate or guarantee health insurance; the Canadian government mandates and guarantees health care. Doctors receive payment from, but are not employed by, the state. No “government bureaucrat” determines what test or treatment a patient will receive; if a doctor orders it, the patient gets it. Period.

Ginned-up horror stories notwithstanding, the landscape to the north is not strewn with the bodies of dying Canadians abandoned by cold, socialized medicine. Canadians live longer than Americans (80.18 years  there, 78.95 here), and fewer Canadian babies die in their first year of life (5.08 per 1,000 there, 6.3 here).

Ah, but surely they’ve bankrupted themselves by covering every citizen, right? Well, certainly there are problems with the Canadian system; they’re constantly squabbling about it. But what do they pay? A whole lot less than we do. Per capita, it comes to $2,931 per year. We pay – one way or another – $5,274. That’s while leaving around 47 million Americans without any coverage whatsoever.

Yes, Canadians frequently have longer waiting periods for elective surgery, sometimes even for procedures that seem only marginally elective, like hip-joint replacement. But the ads featuring lies spewed out by Shona Holmes about her supposed Canadian medical nightmare are scare tactics at its most vile and desperate.

Vile and desperate because the insurance companies, which siphon off 20-25 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S., are unspeakably vile and increasingly desperate. They make their obscene profits, and compensate their morbidly-obese-cat executives by denying care, not by providing it. Now, with President Obama’s public option for health care threatening their herds of cash cows and flocks of golden geese, they’re pouring tens of millions into fresh, new falsehoods in a last-ditch attempt to shoo Americans away from a path already chosen, and quite contentedly taken, not only by Canada but by every other developed country in the world.

That’s chosen by  every other developed country in  the world. It’s not as if a lineup of evil dictators cruelly running Canada, England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, et al, imposed harsh and uncaring systems on their helpless and suffering people. What happened was, elected representatives fashioned means (they vary) of providing medical care to every citizen in every one of these states.

They’re democracies; elections are free, open, honest, and held regularly. Any country wishing to trash “socialized medicine” and just let the free market determine who gets what care, and for how much — e.g., the non-system in the United States of America – has had decades to do so. Not one of them has.

If you want to know why, well, take a chance and talk to a foreigner. Or, ask a Canadian, Brit, Norwegian, Icelander, Dane — anyone from any of the countries mentioned above — to define “pre-existing condition.” You’ll get a puzzled look. That should tell you pretty much all you need to know.

Then, define “pre-existing condition” for them. The look you’ll get in response to that will tell you all the rest you need to know.

It doesn’t have to be this way. With any luck — and a lot of work — it won’t be for much longer.

Arthur Salm is an SDNN columnist.

Why Fiscal Conservatives Should Love Medicare-for-All

Call me old fashioned, but a true conservative is someone who conserves, dislikes wasting money and is offended by endless corporate bailouts by hard-working taxpayers. A fiscal conservative like me. As a public health professional, I want to see health dollars used to keep people healthy through public health and wellness programs, as well as provide medical care when it’s needed.

We have a health care crisis in the United States. Nearly 50 million people do not have health insurance, and they are our family and neighbors.

There are 500,000 medical bankruptcies every year. Most of these half million families had health insurance; at least they thought they did because every month they paid for insurance. Millions of people have learned the hard way that for-profit sickness insurance does not prevent financial ruin during a health crisis.

One of the worst lies thrown around every time Congress debates health care is that the U.S. will end up with socialized medicine. Socialized medicine is when the government owns and operates health facilities as well as pays the salaries of the doctors, nurses and the rest of the healthcare work force.

Let me say as clearly as possible — President Obama and the Congress are not discussing, introducing or enacting socialized medicine.

Good old-fashioned U.S. socialized medicine

Today, the U.S. already has socialized medical systems serving more than 20 million people. The current U.S. socialized medicine systems are very popular. The largest in terms of numbers of people is the Military Health System. The largest in terms of numbers of facilities owned and operated is the Veterans Administration health system. Two additional smaller U.S. socialized medical systems are the Indian Health Service and the federal Bureau of Prisons.

Despite being socialized medicine, the VA is ranked the highest in a national survey of patient satisfaction by the University of Michigan. U.S. taxpayers own the 155 VA hospitals and 881 clinics; we employ 289,000 people working in the VA including 16,000 doctors and 42,000 nurses.

Even the bastion of capitalism, Fortune magazine, is impressed by VA health care, stating, “The seamless integration of science, information, and compassion is the dream of modern health care. Scenes like these are not fantasies, however, but daily realities at the Veterans Health Administration.” (Fortune, May 2006.)

Let me repeat, President Obama and the Congress are not discussing, introducing, or enacting socialized medicine. Unlike the socialized system military and veterans enjoy, most health care services are provided through a private delivery system. All reforms will build on the existing private delivery system.

2009 health reform debate

So now that we all agree that the President and Congress are not expanding socialized medicine in the U.S., what are they proposing? There are two basic options and neither creates a nationalized or socialized health care system.

Medicare for all: The first choice expands Medicare eligibility beyond its current limitation to elderly (over 65) and disabled individuals of any age. This is the most conservative, least-disruptive and cost-effective way to cover more people; it only takes a simple change to an existing, very popular program. Every time the Congressional Budget Office scores the cost of Medicare-for-all type programs, they pay for themselves through two key business principles, the power of bulk purchasing and administrative savings though the elimination of waste in the system.

Mandated insurance: The second choice forces taxpayers to buy for-profit insurance despite a wasteful administrative cost of $1 billion a day. Yes, a trillion dollars every two and a half years just for paperwork, not a penny of that for health care. As a fiscal conservative, I do not want to pay a secret corporate bailout so that greedy CEOs make bonuses based on how good they are at rationing care to sick people.

In this expansion of the current failed system, the U.S. spends more than twice as much per person than any other country and the excess cost does not result in better outcomes. The U.S. is about 37th in the world for life expectancy, infant mortality, and other indicators of health status.

We have to walk away from corporate rationing to create a seamless system with the highest quality services for the best price. The easiest way to hold down costs is to have the largest purchasing group possible to get bulk prices — this is the single-risk pool.

Especially in this economic downturn it is essential to help people get access to health care. Being creative now gives us the chance to create a brand-new system, an All-American plan.

False conservatives will parrot the corporate line and continue to bail out the failed sickness insurance system. True fiscal conservatives who want to eliminate waste, hold down costs and improve outcomes will support Senate Bill 703 and House Bill 676. All the other bills transfer tax dollars first into needless paperwork and corporate profits and then dole out whatever is left for medical bills.

The choice is clear. We keep our doctors and hospitals in the current private delivery system but let one public insurance plan handle the paperwork and pay the bills.

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Carol Miller is a New Mexico public and rural health expert. She has public service in Washington, D.C., in both Republican and Democratic administrations, including the Clinton White House. In 1994 she was the health reform policy adviser for the National Rural Health Association and the New Mexico Secretary of Health. Miller, a former Commissioned Officer in the US Public Health Service, has used both the uniformed services and veterans health care systems.

Republicans: A Threat to the Republic?

Sarah Palin’s abrupt decision to resign as Alaska’s governor—and her rambling explanation—underscore again how the Republican Party over the past dozen years has put up candidates for top national offices who are unqualified or ill-suited for those sensitive positions.

Like Palin, George W. Bush was a charismatic underachiever who hadn’t accomplished much in life and showed little intellectual firepower but was nevertheless presented by the GOP as its candidate for one of the most powerful jobs on earth.

However, unlike Palin who lost her vice presidential bid, Bush took the presidency for two terms—in two dubious elections—with disastrous consequences for the nation.

Then, even amid the wreckage of the Bush administration’s final days, the Republican Party enthusiastically nominated first-term Alaska Gov. Palin to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, which they hoped would be filled by 72-year-old cancer survivor John McCain.
Shrill, baby, shrill

The Republican Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, was a glimpse into Crazy Town, with a national party gone giddy over the folksy Sarah Palin, who we were told could “field-dress a moose.” The dominant chant of the convention—sometimes led by Palin herself—was “drill, baby, drill.”

On the campaign trail, Palin tossed out the reddest of red meat, accusing Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists” and whipping angry white crowds into anti-Obama shouts of “kill him” and “traitor.” She seemed oblivious to the demagogic passions that she was unleashing—or she simply didn’t care about the possible consequences.

Palin finally unraveled with her simple-minded answers to simple questions during network TV interviews.

In trying to burnish her foreign policy expertise she famously declared, “you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.” In elaborating on the point, she later said, “As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska.”

As Palin flamed out, her defenders claimed that the “liberal media” was picking on her. On one radio talk show, a caller complained to me that CBS News’ anchor Katie Couric had asked Palin unfairly tough questions. I responded by noting that one of those “tough” questions was what newspapers Palin read, to which Palin couldn’t manage a coherent answer.

By the end of Campaign 2008, most American voters had concluded that Palin was simply not ready for prime time. But she remained beloved by many rank-and-file Republicans and had staunch advocates among the GOP establishment, including leading neoconservative voice William Kristol.

In looking toward Campaign 2012, political commentators counted her among Republican top-tier presidential candidates. (So, too, were Sen. John Ensign of Nevada and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford before those moral-values champions admitted to extramarital affairs,)

Now the impetuous Palin has decided not even to complete her first term as governor, quitting with 18 months to go. In her stream-of-consciousness resignation statement—that veered from self-righteous to self-pitying—Palin seemed to suggest that she was quitting so she could avoid the lame-duck temptation to take junkets.

“I thought about how much fun some governors have as lame ducks, travel around the state, to the Lower 48 (maybe), overseas on international trade – as so many politicians do,” Palin said Friday from her home in Wasilla, Alaska. “And then I thought—that’s what’s wrong—many just accept that lame-duck status, hit the road, draw the paycheck and ‘milk it.’

“I’m not putting Alaska through that—I promised efficiencies and effectiveness. That’s not how I am wired. I am not wired to operate under the same old ‘politics as usual.’ I promised that four years ago—and I meant it. It’s not what is best for Alaska. I am determined to take the right path for Alaska even though it is unconventional and not so comfortable.”

So instead of completing the job that the people of Alaska hired her to do—be their governor—Palin announced her decision to quit by the end of July. Amazingly, there’s still hope in some Republican circles that Palin will use her free time to mount a campaign for the White House in 2012. (Kristol said Palin may have been “crazy like a fox.”)

And given the GOP’s continued media clout and its sophisticated attack capabilities, it surely is not out of the question that the Republicans might regain the White House in the not-too-distant future with another high-risk candidate, possibly even Palin herself.
Democratic comparisons

While the Republicans send up light-weights like Bush and Palin, the Democrats generally select candidates with strong credentials in governance.

By comparison to Bush in 2000 and 2004 and Palin in 2008, the Democrats correspondingly put up Al Gore, John Kerry and Joe Biden. While those three men surely have their shortcomings, they all are highly qualified and deeply experienced individuals.

Even a Democratic newcomer like Barack Obama demonstrated a first-rate intellect and impressive organizational skills as a candidate.

Yet, the idea that the Democrats are the “responsible ones” and the Republicans are the “crazies” is disconcerting for someone like me who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in a Republican household with Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative on my nightstand.

Then, the Republicans were the party of Rotary Club businessmen who met payrolls, balanced budgets, led community charities and—while supporting necessary government investments in roads, schools and other public works—held a reasonable skepticism about Washington’s ability to solve all the nation’s problems.

Though there were imbalanced and dangerous GOP leaders then, too, like Sen. Joe McCarthy and Vice President Richard Nixon, the most powerful Republicans were generally solid characters like President Dwight Eisenhower and Sen. Everett Dirksen. Only over the past three decades has anti-intellectual anti-empiricism transformed the GOP into a modern-day know-nothing party that disdains facts and reason.

Ronald Reagan, with his loose relationship with reality, was an early version of this new Republican, but George W. Bush and Sarah Palin have taken Reagan’s tendencies to new heights. Over the past eight years, Bush and his neocon advisers treated information as something to be twisted and falsified, all the better to mislead a gullible public.

For Republicans, dogma regularly overrode reason. The GOP response to the federal debt and the growing gap between America’s rich and the rest of us has been to advocate tax cuts and more tax cuts, to let the wealthy consolidate an equity imbalance not seen since the pre-Depression days of the 1920s.

In the face of the record deficits spurred by Reagan and Bush tax cuts, the party simultaneously embraced the neocon agenda of expanding America’s global empire and settling international problems through the costly option of military force.

Despite the resulting harm to the nation’s economic health and to the stretched-thin U.S. military, the Republicans have refused to rethink either their tax cuts or their overseas military commitments. Instead they have opted for a political strategy of attacking anyone and any proposal that seeks even a mildly different approach.

And the pattern of rejecting science and objective evidence continues. Recently, during a House debate about cap-and-trade legislation aimed at reducing global warming, GOP members cheered a claim that the science regarding this deepening environmental crisis was “a hoax.”
Scaring Democrats, and journalists

Perhaps, the Republicans’ greatest success has been in intimidating Democrats, many of whom are scared away from charting a different course out of fear that they will be targeted by the Right’s potent attack machine.

Even in the midst of a budget crisis, worsening unemployment and the harmful disparity between the rich and the rest, mainstream Democrats won’t broach the idea of restoring the top marginal tax rate of 50 percent, which prevailed during most of Reagan’s presidency, compared to the 35 percent now.

The best the Democrats can muster is to sit back and let some of Bush’s tax cuts expire next year, letting the figure rise a few percentage points but not nearly enough to address the nation’s looming budget crisis. (During the Eisenhower years, the marginal tax rate – the percentage that the richest Americans paid on the top end of their income—exceeded 90 percent.)

Sometimes, it seems Democrats would prefer to see Obama’s reform agenda fail—and the United States careen toward bankruptcy—than face the prospect of more GOP attack ads accusing them of “tax-and-spend.”

Another key factor in this political dysfunction is that journalists in the mainstream media have their own career fears about being accused of “liberal bias” if they challenge right-wing canards or investigate GOP crimes.

With a few exceptions—like MSNBC’s experimental evening lineup of liberal hosts—the U.S. news media continues to cower before the Right’s demonstrated ability to destroy journalists who get in the way.

The American Left has contributed to the crisis, too, by failing to invest much in building media outlets that will stand up to pressures from the Right, even as pro-Republican financiers were pouring billions of dollars into the construction of a vertically integrated right-wing media apparatus ranging from books, magazines and newspapers to talk radio, cable TV and the Internet.

This combination of factors has enabled the Republican Party to guide a large portion of the American population into a never-never-land of made-up facts and raging paranoia.

And, as Palin’s bizarre resignation statement made clear, the GOP was excited over possibly handing the reins of national power to someone who was clearly unstable and unfit for high office.

After eight years of George W. Bush and last year’s nomination of Palin, the question must now be asked: Has the Republican Party become a clear and present danger to the security of the United States and to the future of the American Republic?

By Robert Parry

A Discussion On Health Care With Dr. Doug Greenwell

The North Fulton Democrats welcome Dr. Doug Greenwell, Chief Executive Officer of the Atlanta Regional Health Forum, an organization whose mission is to transform the health of the Atlanta region by encouraging, enabling, and empowering communities and individuals to achieve their fullest health potential.  Their strategic plan this year includes identifying and responding to strategic opportunities to eliminate disparities in health.  The state of the nation’s health care is at the forefront of the Obama administration’s agenda so you don’t want to miss this timely meeting.

Dr. Greenwell is a graduate of Georgia State University, a former director of the Georgia Department of Human Resources – Family and Children Services as well as a former director of President Jimmy Carter’s The Atlanta Project.  So please make sure to join your friends and neighbors Tuesday night, July 14, 7:30PM at our new meeting place – Unitarian Universalist Metro Atlanta North – just minutes away from our former meeting place!

11420 Crabapple Road, Roswell, GA 30075