Denver area readers didn't get to see El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa's full response. Also, it seems that the Gazette reporter and the Heritage Foundation comedian, James Carafano, have never read the National Response Plan (NRP - the Nation's real Homeland Security policy) and are totally out of touch when it comes to the concept of preparedness and local response.
One of my most memorable duties was to clear the way at Fort Carson for the Colorado National Guard to move the M-577 Armored Command Post vehicle that responded to the Columbine tragedy. Even that process took hours for authorization and travel time.
It is absolutely commendable that local law enforcement has found 52 missions for the vehicle. That proves to me that it is multi-functional and that El Paso County Sheriff's Deputies and Colorado Springs Police are fully trained to use it. In the horrible event of another large-scale hostage crisis I'm more confident that they are ready.
This is a disappointing piece of reporting that seems pre-disposed to criticize the cops. Rapid response by local first responders is a key factor in the NRP. There's no doubt in my mind that this BEAR could respond very quickly to any hostage or large-scale shooting incident between Pueblo and Fort Collins.
Trying to imply that this is a boondoggle and waste of Federal funds is irresponsible. Of course the new operators of the vehicle needed training. That's just being thorough and responsible. Mechanical adjustments for high altitude operations are far from design flaws.
Pity what Ms Zubeck and Mr. Carafano would have as comments for the hundreds of Modification Work Orders (MWOs) that are applied to US military vehicles of all types every year. Without a doubt this "BEAR" should be in Colorado Springs and not some Federal Depot waiting for FEMA to decide it's OK to use it for a state or local purpose. Read More »
Current mood: inspired
Category: Life
Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
(WAR = EVIL)
THIS IS MY FAVORITE ONE......
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
NO I LIED....these next two are my favorite ones...... I so would go to jail if I had too!!!!
An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
A man can't ride your back unless it's bent.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
A man who won't die for something is not fit to live.
Bottom line: Members of Colorado's Republican delegation are far out of the mainstream of their own party, and are not representing Colorado's interests in the least.
For example: Read More »
BUT Udall vs Schaffer
get your tix now and ask questions--all info on this link:
http://www.9news.com/rss/article.aspx?storyid=94369
An open letter to Nancy Pelosi:
To Nancy Pelosi:
TIME to leave your position in disgrace - YOU are a disgrace to your office and your gender. You were the FIRST to break that glass ceiling and you have become a joke. A sad, cruel joke for those of us who had so much hope.
A change that was to be brought in with the election of 2006
But that all changed. We hear it over and over and over again. Any challenge to the cruelties, the evils, the horrors brought by this administration is met with the same standard; Any response or action that is morally correct or ethically right. You take it "off the table" or it is "not an option". Read More »
UNAFRAID is the title of my latest book. Its subtitle is A NOVEL OF THE POSSIBLE, and it's my effort to lift up our absurdly low level of expectations about politics. It's possible, and if we don't we are NOT going to take our country back, no matter how many campaigns and candidates say we will.
What do I mean? Well, for starters, please spend a minute sampling the book. You'll get it in an instant. Then tell me what you think...
A study published in Health Affairs (6-10-08) documents a sharp (60%) increase in numbers of underinsured between 2003-2007. Underinsurance rates nearly tripled among those with incomes above 200% of poverty. Consequently, 42 percent of U.S. adults were under- or uninsured in 2007, reporting high levels of access problems and financial stress.
Even among those with incomes over 400% of poverty, 15% are underinsured. The study indicates that the move toward greater consumer cost-sharing for minimum benefit insurance policies in recent years is pushing millions of insured non-elderly adults toward spending large shares of their incomes on health care. The clear impact is to increase the share of families at risk for medical debt and loss of savings for retirement, college, or other long-term needs.
Our current insurance system is working well only for the wealthy, who can afford high costs. Politicians' promises that "you can keep the insurance you have" also apply to the wealthy. Read the Report
Following is a 650-word piece I wrote about the failure of profit-centered health care that has been picked up by several newspapers around the state.
Failure of U.S. profit-centered health insurance
Spending almost twice as much, the U.S. has worse health outcomes than other industrialized nations. Uniquely, U.S. health care is dependent on over 1200 for-profit health insurances, functioning as gatekeepers. Underwriting – the art of risk evaluation and avoidance – insures profits by covering the healthy and rejecting everyone else as a "pre-existing condition."
Profit is a perverse incentive for quality health care: imagine for-profit fire or police protection. "Market-driven" health care treats health as a commodity, to be negotiated like a car or a house. The free market has also spawned "designer hospitals," offering only the most profitable specialties, e.g., cardiac procedures, and eliminating less profitable services, e.g., emergency and mental health.
No reform proposal by current presidential candidates addresses the failure of the private health insurance industry, characterized principally by decreasing benefits and greater costs and risks shifted to consumers. In turn, more are subjected to underinsurance and unpaid medical bills – now the leading cause of personal bankruptcies. Premium increases of 87 percent over 6 years have outpaced both cost-of-living and median family income increases.
Incremental reform proposals demonstrate lack of political will – the same failure to confront corporate profit-taking by insurance and pharmaceutical industries that wrote Medicare prescription drug reform with billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies and inflated profits to benefit their bottom lines.
Commercial health insurance is the 800-pound gorilla, responsible for over 25% of health care dollars siphoned to excessive administrative costs, lobbying, marketing, CEO salaries and profit-taking: $30 billion annual health insurance profits; $32 billion insurance underwriting and marketing costs (McKinsey Group, 2007).
Gaming the system for profit has given rise to the annual $20 billion business of "denial managment" – health insurance middlemen who search claims for excuses to delay, deny or renege on reimbursements.
Responding to double-digit premium increases, more employers are opting to move employees into underinsurance – high-deductible catastrophic plans. Simultaneously, the American Hospital Association reports that both family out-of-pocket health expenses and unpaid medical bills have risen approximately 60% over a decade – still more costs ultimately shifted to taxpayers and consumers.
Notably, more than 20 federal and state studies since 1990, including the 2007 Lewin Group evaluation in Colorado, have demonstrated that single-payer health insurance is the only reform model that can both save money and provide comprehensive health care benefits for all. Indeed, the single payer model is the only truly efficient, equitable, and sustainable financing system, enabling universal coverage by spreading risk across the entire population.
Contrary to assertions by the "free market" choir, only single payer insurance permits true choice of pubic and private providers; private insurance is limited to "in plan" doctors. Only single payer provides comprehensive benefits and protection against medical bankruptcy.
Rather than comprehensive health care reform, most current proposals revert to a Massachusetts-style nostrum, preserving insurance profits and requiring an individual mandate to purchase minimum-benefit insurance, subsidized by taxpayers as needed. It is a formula for continued inflationary consumer health costs and decreasing benefits.
National single payer bill, HR676, calls for a progressive 3 to 4 percent employer and employee payroll tax to replace all health deductibles and premiums. Full-coverage costs for a family of four earning $40,000 annually would drop to $110 a month, from recent levels of $273/month for employer-sponsored coverage, or $489/month for an individually-insured family (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2007).
A political class dependent on corporate money (and privy to 70 percent-taxpayer-subsidized health coverage) sidesteps meaningful reform. Nevertheless, polls by Pew and others have revealed increasing numbers – 54 to 65 percent of people – support a national single-payer health care plan. A recent survey reports that 59 percent of U.S. physicians now support national health care, up 10 percent from 2002.
A grassroots movement and political reforms, including publicly-financed campaigns, may be necessary to instill the political will for meaningful reform. We have everything to gain from quality-, saftey-centered universal single payer health care to replace U.S. dependence on profiteering health care gatekeepers.
I realized that this is a very positive development. I'm looking for more "lasts" of anything and everything for the coWH. The case against the mis-administration regarding Iran is particularly damaging.
It's clear that since entering office that the coWH has acted against the best interests of the United States on relations and policies towards Iran; the jumbled focus of his European tour sound bite script. Rather than advancing the best interests of the US, the current mis-administration has consistently played to the advantage of Ahmadi-Nejad and the ruling Iranian radicals. Read More »
Heads-up Colorado Springs and Northern Colorado. Beyond the fact that I've been working pretty hard for months to get this off the ground, it's just gonna be great! This issue has been ignored (or at least danced around the edges) for too long.
A Conversation with Rand Beers Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
Keeping Our Promises: Veterans, Soldiers and their Families
Rand Beers, President and Founder of the National Security Network, former senior White House national security staffer and Vietnam-era Marine, will be the featured speaker at two town hall forums on issues facing the military community: repeat deployments for members of the active-duty Armed Forces, Guard and Reserves, the needs of a growing new population of disabled veterans, and the burdens on military families. Beers combines front-line experience (Rifle Company Commander in Vietnam and 10 years in the White House) with years of briefing our nation’s political leaders and, with the National Security Network, trains and advises candidates and advocates on how to address these issues in today’s political environment. A question and answer session will follow.
1:00 – 3:00pm
UCCS: The Upper Lodge
1420 Austin Bluffs Parkway
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80918
6:30 – 8:30pm
Bill Reed Middle School
370 West 4th Street
Loveland, Colorado 80537
RSVP: rkeenan@nsnetwork.org
Read More »
Have you thought about the carbon footprint of powering SDS' massive pumps operating 24 hours a day? Roughly, SDS electrical requirements will exceed 25% of today’s current residential power use in the city. Read More »
CheneyCare -- We taxpayers pay 70% of guaranteed coverage for VP Dick Cheney and 2 million federal legislators and employees.
Link: Bill Moyers' Journal 5/9/08 -- California Nurses' campaign for "CheneyCare" for all. Read transcript or view program: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05092008/transcript1.html
Video "Who the Health Cares?" gets straight to the point: Presidential candidates will not determine health care reform -- the ball is in the court of Congress. http://www.moblogic.tv/video/2008/04/30/who-the-health-cares/
For-Profit Health Insurance and Pharmaceutical Industries -- scary statistics
1) Melody Peterson's book "Our Daily Meds" reveals that the benefit of medicines marketed by pharmaceutical companies "has become secondary to how much it will bring shareholders in profit"...due to constant pressure by Wall Street for drug companies to exceed profits made the year before; Big Pharma employs 2 lobbyists for every Congress member.
2) Tests show that placebos often work as well as the drugs being marketed to the public.
3) 100,000 Americans die annually from taking prescribed drugs as prescribed (FDA reports).
4) U.S. experiences 75,000-100,000 preventable deaths annually, ranking 19 out of 19 nations. (Recent study, Ellen Nolte & Martin McKee, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine)
Please join Be the Change-USA & Health Care for All Colorado
for an exciting, engaging and fun event May 31
Are We All Really Covered? Closing the Gaps in Health Care
12 noon - 7:30 PM, Sat., May 31, 2008
First Plymouth Congregational Church
3501 S. Colorado Blvd. (Hampden and Colorado Blvd)
Englewood, CO
Registration: Full program: $35; Dinner & evening speakers: $25; Evening speakers only: $10. Discount for Seniors, students, veterans, BTC and HCAC members: $5
Special program features:
1-3 PM Providers and Patients Panel: "How did we get into this mess, and how can we get out?"
3-5 PM Presentations by CO elected officials and candidates: "Will Colorado begin to close the gap?"
5 PM Dinner "Legislative Grill" -- Members of Congress and candidates and representatives of Presidential campaigns: "Will Congress or our next President begin to close the gap?"
6 PM Evening Keynote speaker: Elizabeth Kucinich
More info: www.BTC-USA.org or www.healthcareforallcolorado.org or call Dick Barkey, 303-808-8504, or Eliza Carney, 970-416-0636
To register online: www.BTC-USA.org
What is wrong with the funding for important public policy think tanks on the progressive/liberal side?
Rockridge is most associated with its co-founder and nationally known promoter of "framing," George Lakoff. But we came to know that it had a wonderful, committed, intelligent staff that tirelessly worked on helping to gain the high ground from right-wing think tanks by creating strategies for asserting progressive values in a manner that was cogent and persuasive.
Unfortunately, we learned on April 21 that Rockridge must cease its work due to lack of sufficient funding. It is a dilemma faced by many innovative efforts to counter the right-wing rhetoric and think tanks. There has been some growth in investment in long-term progressive infrastructure -- beyond the immediacy of the political races themselves -- but not nearly enough.
I can only see that money is what matters.
"Today's continuing success of the Hoover Institution is in large part attributable to the huge contribution of the Volker Fund, an endowment of tens of millions of dollars that support the domestic research programs of the Institution," said Raisian. "As chairman of the Volker Foundation, Morris Cox was key in arranging for a gift of $7 million which has grown tenfold today."
And this:
The market value of Hoover’s endowment as of August 31, 2004, was $276 million, with an additional $15 million of current reserves held in endowment.
Look at the expenditures and revenue for the American Enterprise Institute, which does not include it's internal endowment:
AEI enjoyed another year of very solid financial performance in 2006, with revenues of $28.4 million and $23.6 million in expenditures.
Now look at the Heritage Foundation Annual Report for 2007:
Assets:
196,846,298
Operation Expenses:
48,783,325
Operation Revenue:
48,783,325
Operating Surplus:
429,078
What am I missing...an inspirational think tank co-founded by George Lakoff yet it goes under because progressive/liberal deep pocket funders cannot see beyond the next election cycle? Is that it?
There has been much discussion on the part of some people on the left on developing a "pipeline" that is the equivalent to what the right has. I.e., recent graduates from higher education are hired by institutions like the Hoover Institute, American Enterprise Institute, etc. and then will be able to write and publish at their endowed chairs because the right's deep pocket funders are able to understand that in order to develop the intellectual part of a social movement it is necessary to spend money over long time frames.
This is the biggest weakness that developing a left wing counter part has been so far unsuccessful to do because there is no consistent stream of money to fund insitutions beyond the election cycle.
Will it be up to small donors to fulfill the gap and have the persistence of vision to make it work?
How would you make the financials work that is people powered rather than have a few "fat cats" pulling the strings?
Why spend our time protesting in DC to be ignored? Unless we get in the streets outside our rep.s personal residences- who is going to care?
We need to mobilize locally- & demand national action. Few of us could go to Washington- but many of us- can go to our city halls or state legislatures- or local Congressional offices.
Tell the government that we're fed up with war, torture, corruption, & special interest funding our elections & our media.
Strikes have brought civil rights in the U.S. & around the world. Help make our voices louder than the mainstream media & corporate dollars.
9/11/08 to ? HOWEVER LONG IT TAKES!!
The initial question is who will check the President and his or her people? During a time of national fear, who will hold the Executive accountable for its national security abuses or, perhaps more important, prevent them from occurring? More particularly, who will hold the President accountable for lies aimed at legitimating or covering up abuses of power?
There are two quick answers, found in most civics books. The first is the electorate -- it can vote out the President at the next election. But that often is years later, and only if it is the President's first term and if executive dissembling is publicly revealed and constantly criticized. The second quick answer is the Judiciary. It is the role of the courts to hold the Executive to constitutional dictates.
But what is the reality? The simplistic answer, that the judiciary checks the executive, is rooted in a widely-held fallacy -- that as a separate co-equal branch of government it is politically independent and that its judgments are necessarily neutral and objective. Bush v. Gore and Korematsu v. U.S. are just two of many cases that starkly reveal that fallacy by exposing the political underpinnings of judicial decisionmaking in controversial cases. It is not that nine black-robed men and women simply vote their personal and political preferences. The legal method imposes decisional constraints. To maintain public legitimacy judges have to speak in the language of statutes, rules, and case precedents. As many commentators have observed about Bush v. Gore, however, the moorings of the legal method are a weak tether in hot political cases. The intricacies of stare decisis and the complexities of the three-tier standard of equal protection review, for instance, are manipulable by sophisticated, politically attuned judges.
As illuminated by the Hamdi and Padilla "enemy combatant" cases and the prosecution of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, public advocacy emerges in two realms. The first realm is critical legal argument by lawyers and civil and human rights organizations aimed at shaping judges' threshold selections of the level of judicial scrutiny, and ultimately the judges' responses to the specific legal challenges to executive actions. As a complement to usually narrow traditional legal arguments, this kind of critical legal advocacy aims to reveal what is really at stake, who benefits and who is harmed (in the short and long term), who wields the behind-the-scenes power, which social values are supported and which are subverted, how political concerns frame the legal questions, and how societal institutions and differing segments of the populace will be affected by the court's decision.
The second realm of advocacy is a species of public education: journalist essays, pundit commentaries, public letters to the editor, clergy sermons, scholars' op-ed pieces, community workshops and school forums, all critically analyzing and advocating the need for the courts to carefully scrutinize the Executive's national security actions.
The goal is to create in the public culture a compelling sense that it must be the courts that exercise "watchful care" over our constitutional liberties -- that the Executive is charged with protecting our people and institutions from threats from without, and in turn that our courts are charged with protecting our liberties from threats from our own institutions.
The timing of both kinds of public advocacy is crucial. Advocacy of accountability is imperative at the "front end" and at the "back end" of apparent national security abuses:
Every single one of the members of congress and the cabinet and all the national "leaders" should have gone on general strike themselves the day they heard about waterboarding.
We can allow them to get away with it or we can send a clear message to the next president that ENOUGH is ENOUGH!
So I'm asking my fellow citizens to join me in a GENERAL STRIKE this September 11th 2008 in a series of protest to bring down the two-party hypocrisy.
"It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error".
U.S. Supreme Court, in American Communication Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 442
In order to get involved, here are the five best steps to take now:
1) Sign up with your email address HERE in order to get updates,
e-alerts@votestrike.com
2) Mark the day on your calendar and plan to be at a protest in your community,
3) Send this URL to all your friends, post it to forums, put it on your personal pages, http://www.votestrike.com
4) Take the time to help organize a protest. We'll send news on coordinators in your community,
5) Take the lead and help organize a protest on 9/11.
The Dow Jones goes for broke with your money. Dow rises on Friday:
Citigroup, the nation's biggest bank, encouraged investors with results that didn't contain any big surprises. The New York-based bank reported a loss of $5.1 billion during the first quarter because of poor bets on mortgages and leveraged loans, but the loss was half the $10 billion recorded for the preceding quarter.
So what am I missing? The biggest bank in America posts a huge loss because of the poor bets (read bundled mortage debt into SIV, etc.) yet the stock brokers seem to have a fairy tale belief in "happy endings" for their financial institutions.
Subodh Kumar, global investment strategist at Subodh Kumar & Assoc. in Toronto, said:
This is the first week of earnings reports, and the marquee companies in general have been able to report good earnings, and the banks have been able to raise capital, and the market is responding to that.
But, wait, doesn't Mr. Kumar have a direct stake in how the stock markets will be affected? He certainly is not biased.
Again, "Helicopter" Bernanke has used his position as Fed Chairman which is opposite of what the Fed's tradition mission is as George Will writes:
The Fed has no mandate to be the dealmaker for Wall Street socialism.
But who is going to bear the burden of this meltdown? It is not going to be Wall Street but the taxpayer, us, the little guys.
Walkaways are becoming the norm for the people who bought into the housing boom as a means of investing (read flipping properties) and it was those investors who began to send mortagage banks "jingle" mail instead of checks. Catherine Reagor, of the Arizona Republic, writes:
Investors started the walk-away trend, but it has spread to the typical homeowner.
Duncan Black, Eschaton blog, writes:
Also, there's a pretty big gray area between "don't want to pay" and "can't pay." There are people who are fairly financially sound but who need to move. If the bank won't accept a short sale, they're either stuck or they're going to mail in the keys.
Here is the hard data not on the sub-prime mess but on the speculative housing market by people who are ranked as Alt-A for mortagage loans. gJohnsit, Dailykos.com, crunches the numbers and comes up with this:
Now let's look at Alt-A's.
Total Alt-A mortgages U.S.: 2,384,592
Slightly smaller than subprime, but...
Average Alt-A balence U.S.: $299,117
Alt-A mortgages are nearly twice as large as subprime mortgages.
Total Alt-A owner-occupied U.S.: 1,722,861
Nearly 28% of Alt-A homes are not owner-occupied (aka speculators). Only about 9% of subprime loans aren't owner-occupied. If you don't live there you are much more likely to walk away from a home you can't afford.
Number of Alt-A mortgages with a current payment U.S.: 1,499,030
This is a very scary number. This means that 37% of all Alt-A mortgages are delinquent. However, very few of them were delinquent by more than 60 days. Thus we are looking at the early stages of massive foreclosures in Alt-A's.
Percentage of Alt-A with no or low documentation U.S.: 73.1%
Alt-A is the home of the "liar loan", unlike subprime where less than 30% were liar loans.
Now put "liar loan" together with "speculator" and you get a witches brew of trouble.Percentage Alt-A with cash out refinance U.S.: 38.2%
They didn't extract their equity quite as fast as the subprime borrower, but a large percentage of them did.
Average Alt-A loan to value at origination U.S.: 89.85%
That means that even more Alt-A borrowers, nearly all of them, used 100% mortgages than subprime borrowers did.
So what is going to happen? A severe recession. The housing/real estate meltdown has just begun and it has taken the international community to stave off the very first wave of economic bad news. If globalization has tied the financial system into one than the govenments are forced to lend money to those institutions to stave off the entire system from collapsing. From what I've been able to glean from newspapers the entire bail out for the biggest banks by governments is to the tune of at least $250,000,000,000 USD. That's right the governments of the Unites States, Britian, France, Germany has bailed out their financial institutions on the order of one quarter of a trillion dollars so far.
But will the entire finacial system be overwhelmed by the next, and larger, wave of real estate/housing collapse?
Remember even "Helicopter" Bernanke had to go back to school and learn about the various financial insturments being created by banks to repackage mortage debt to investors.
Couple it with the collapse in trust of the U.S. dollar and you have the makings of a "perfect storm". Thomas Tan, CFA, writes:
It shows the deterioration of the trust in US $ by the world which the US $ is depending on for its support. The only reason the US $ became the world reserve currency is because people trusted it. With this trust, the US can issue all its papers to the world and pay for all the cheap oil, raw material, finished goods around the World, with foreign central banks holding these papers to finance the high US living standards.
Now why would the world start to lose trust in the US? Could it be due to the reckless fiscal and financial policies by Mr. Bush and his cohort? Could it be due to the way this nation has a off the books accounting for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which was perfectly mirrored by Enron/Arthur Anderson accounting practices? Could it be that there is something to hide by Mr. Bush by the fact that much financial information is not being reported by Treasury anymore?
When the people of America lose their trust in government and the international community lose their trust in our currency what will happen? It will not be a "fairy tale" ending.
A key piece of Gov. Ritter's economic development plan is switching corporate tax reporting to the so-called "single-sales factor," and it's quietly making its way through the legislature.
It's really unclear what impact this can actually have on economic development, and how it would actually create jobs. In states that have it, there's no evidence to suggest that this is some critical element to job growth. While a bit complicated, the bill explicitely creates winners and losers, carving out benefits for a few and penalizing many. This Rocky Mountain News column, "Tax proposal likely to cost businesses," outlines the potential for this to really backfire.
How is this good progressive tax policy, to reward some businesses and finance it on the backs of the other 70 percent of businesses in the state? And more importantly, how does it help the 250,000+ Colorado households struggling to make ends meet?
The U.S. spends on average twice as much on health care as other industrialized nations, and has overall worse outcomes. Paul Krugman’s & Robin Wells’ commentary ("The Health Care Crisis and What to Do About It," The New York Review of Books, 3/23/06) attributes the U.S. health care crisis to high dependence on fragmented, for–profit private insurances, hospitals and numerous middlemen that add health costs without adding value. Noting "the strange persistence, in the teeth of all available evidence, of the belief that the private sector can provide health insurance more efficiently than the government," Krugman and Wells remark that free-market ideology is "wholly inappropriate to health care issues." As many observe, health is not a commodity, like a car or house.
Factors of declining U.S. health care:
- -Washington and the Bush administration are in thrall to insurance and drug industry lobbyists.
- -The privatization-for-profit increases the fragmentation of U.S. health care, swelling the ranks of the uninsured.
- -Commercial insurance has abandoned the principle of shared risk, shifting more risk to consumers, and has adopted the principle of adverse selection to guarantee profits for shareholders.
- -Private insurances continue to skim over 20 percent of costs for profit and CEO salaries.
Employer-provided health coverage is unraveling, as U.S. health costs rise twice as high as inflation and 4 times faster than wages, prompting more employers to reduce/eliminate health coverage.
Medicaid rolls grow, as Medicaid picks up the slack from the unraveling system of employer-based insurance.
- -Medicaid is particularly vulnerable as a means-tested program – its consituency is not politically powerful.
- -Authors: "Funding for Medicaid depends on politicians' sense of decency, always a fragile foundation for policy."
- -States fund an average 40 percent of Medicaid – unable to operate at a deficit, states are squeezed by growing Medicaid costs.
- -Attempts to privatize Medicaid for profit – states like South Carolina are seeking federal waivers to offer recipients vouchers for purchase of private insurance – certain to be inadequate for many.
So-called ‘consumer-directed’ health plans requiring higher out-of-pocket medical expenses are not a cure.
- -Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) serve as a tax break for the rich, but do nothing for the lower income.
- -HSAs undermine employment-based health care, encouraging adverse selection – HSAs are attractive to healthier individuals, tempting them to opt out of company plans, leaving them less healthy individuals.
The authors cite a large body of evidence indicating that public insurance of the kind in many European countries achieves equal or better results at much lower cost.
Unfortunately, political will is lacking. Krugman and Wells call it "politically smarter" and "economically superior" to educate voters about the huge advantages of a single payer system, than to merely attempt to coopt the drug and insurance lobbies by writing them into compromise plans that they will likely oppose anyway. Alternatively, say the authors,"things will have to get much worse before reality can break through the combination of powerful interest groups and free-market ideology."
Everything speaks to the need to grow a grassroots movement in order to overcome the powerful insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies that write policy, as they did Medicare prescription drug reform, with billions of dollars of subsidies and inflated profits to enhance their bottom lines.
Hey! Is anybody going to the 60th Annual Conference on World Affairs?
The Sixtieth Annual
Conference on World Affairs
University of Colorado at Boulder
April 7– 11, 2008
The Conference on World Affairs was founded in 1948, originally as a forum on international affairs. CWA expanded rapidly to encompass the arts, media, science, diplomacy, technology, environment, spirituality, politics, business, medicine, human rights, and so on. Roger Ebert, who holds a record of thirty-seven consecutive years of participation in the CWA, refers to the event as “the Conference on Everything Conceivable.”
Each April, 110 participants representing a wide range of backgrounds gather in Boulder—a beautiful college town at the foot of the Rocky Mountains—for what The New York Times calls “a week-long extravaganza of discussion and debate” on over 200 non-academic, interdisciplinary panels, plenaries and performances.
Conference participants discuss issues on an impromptu basis—a refreshing alternative to the specialized gatherings of academia and the business world. Molly Ivins, a frequent participant over 25 years, wrote that CWA offers “whole new ways of looking at old questions and information that can transform the way you look at things.”