Sheila – Page 1084 – Sheila Kennedy

The State of Our Health

Governor Daniels has proposed a 25-cent cigarette tax to fund health insurance for at least some of Indiana’s children who are currently uncovered. It’s another proposed “patch” for our costly, byzantine and inefficient medical system, but it would be something. Real reform would never pass.

Americans don’t want “socialized” medicine—but of course, that is what we have now. Only we have socialized our system through insurance companies rather than through government, and have thereby managed to get the worst of both worlds—highly regulated care that is over twice as expensive as the next most expensive country’s.

Forty-six million Americans are currently uninsured; another forty million will experience lapses of a month or more in any given year. Half of all personal bankruptcies—costing businesses millions—are due to medical bills. Because we make medical insurance an employer responsibility, the cost of American goods is inflated—over two thousand dollars of the cost of each General Motors car covers health care.

What if we had a “single payer” system like several in Europe—a system that covered everyone, was funded through taxes and administered by existing insurance companies?

There would be an immediate payoff in economic growth. Health insurance (for companies that can still afford it) is the single largest “drag” on new job creation. Aside from the cost of the insurance itself, administering benefits consumes untold hours of HR time. Smaller companies—the real engines of economic growth—are increasingly unable to offer health benefits, putting them at a competitive disadvantage for good employees. If we de-coupled health insurance from employment, companies would be able to add workers and increase wages.

Individuals would save money, too, and not just on uninsured medical expenses. Automobile and homeowners insurance premiums would decline, because underwriting would no longer need to take the costs of medical care into account.

But what about the price tag? Most health economists believe the additional taxes needed would be minimal, and not just because there would be economies of scale. Right now, between programs like Medicaid and Medicare and coverage for public employees—police and fire personnel, public school teachers, and millions of municipal, state and federal employees—government is already paying for the health care of 45% of the American population. Just standardizing that coverage would save billions.

Medical costs in the U.S. include paychecks for thousands of employees in doctors’ offices and hospitals whose only job is to comply with conflicting insurer regulations, submit or reject claims and collect—or argue about—amounts due. (Thirty percent of total U.S. healthcare costs are administrative; meanwhile, much-maligned Medicare keeps its overhead under 3%.) Eliminating insurance companies’ marketing costs and negotiating with drug manufacturers and other medical vendors for lower prices would generate huge savings. Costs also decline when people get timely care, rather than costly emergency room attention when they can no longer ignore the problem.

A cigarette tax is like giving aspirin to someone whose appendix has ruptured. There’s momentary pain relief, but he still needs an operation.

Comments

A Turning Point?

The November elections delivered a long-overdue message to Washington—Americans are coming back to their senses. And whatever your political party preference, if you are reading this column in this newspaper, that message should have sounded sweet to your ears.

The repudiation of Bush Administration policies certainly relieved people like me, who have watched with growing alarm as Incurious George insisted upon driving America off a very steep cliff. But the real sign that “the times they are achanging” came in the results of various state referenda. Yes, several same-sex marriage bans passed, but the margins were considerably smaller than in previous election cycles, and for the very first time, one such ban was actually defeated at the polls. And in a red state to boot, as Arizona voters went to the polls and voted against that state’s proposed amendment.

The return to social sanity wasn’t confined to Arizona, or to same-sex marriage. A near-total ban on abortion was overturned in North Dakota, and voters in Missouri and elsewhere across the country refused to buy a “morality” that equates a mass of cellular material with a suffering human person, and supported embryonic stem cell research. Furthermore, by handing control of both the House and Senate to Democrats, and thereby changing legislative leadership, they effectively voted to take global warming and judicial selection seriously.

Most of all, the vote on November 7th signalled a retreat from the moral unilateralism and arrogance that have characterized this Administration, largely because those characteristics got us mired down in Iraq, but also because of a dawning recognition that moral arrogance and immature religiosity is the root cause not just of our diminished standing in the world, but also of much of our internal civic discord.

Little by little, it has dawned on Americans that genuine, authentic religion is characterized by humility and compassion and respect for the deeply held beliefs of others. Authentic religiosity is not compatible with the theocratic tendencies exhibited by many on the Religious Right that are so enthusiastically represented by the Bush Administration. Although by lumping all believers together, he painted with an unnecessarily broad brush, Sam Harris put it well in an acerbic exchange over “intelligent design”with right-wing apologist Dennis Prager. Responding to Prager’s assertion that “believing that the world just happened” is arrogant, Harris wrote:

“No one knows why the universe came into being. Most scientists readily admit their ignorance on this point. Religious believers do not. One of the extraordinary ironies of religious discourse can be seen in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while condemning scientists and other nonbelievers for their intellectual arrogance. … And yet, there is no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: The Creator of the Universe takes an active interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell…An average believer has achieved a level of arrogance that is simply unimaginable in scientific discourse—and there have been some extraordinarily arrogant scientists.”

Of all the harm done by those who exhibit such extreme versions of religiosity, the harm suffered by gay and lesbian citizens is arguably the greatest, because the religious right is willing and eager to use the power of the state to disadvantage those who offend their particular religious convictions. Don’t fool yourself into a belief that these religious warriors will be content with simply denying same-sex couples the right to marry. In states where their bans have been passed, they have then gone to court to argue for an expansive reading of those measures in order to deprive gay citizens of employment benefits, legal protections against abuse, and a variety of other rights. Scratch off the surface of one of these self-styled “godly” folks, and you’ll find a clone of Fred Phelps.

Any gay or gay-friendly activist who has debated one of these ideologues can attest to the frustration of that exercise. It’s like arguing with a brick wall. Policy arguments are met with self-satisfied, if unresponsive, retorts all of which boil down to “because the bible says so.” When confronted with biblical interpretations other than their own, these folks simply dismiss them as false. And how do they know which interpretation is true and which false? They “just do.” It’s breathtaking—and maddening. And these last few years, it has sometimes seemed as if these zealots were multiplying.

If I am reading the electoral tea leaves correctly, however, they not only aren’t multiplying, but the tide is turning. The pendulum is swinging. The grownups are reasserting control. Pick your metaphor.

As for me, I’m wallowing in an emotion that has been all too rare since 2000—a good mood.

Comments

Bipartisanship? Not so much..

In the wake of what he conceeded was “a thumping,” President Bush promised a renewed emphasis on bipartisanship, and a good-faith effort to work across the aisle with the new Democratic majority.

Activists on both sides of that aisle remain skeptical. The former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Harold Koh, now Dean of Yale Law School, spoke at a conference held just a few days after the midterm elections. Asked about the odds of bipartisanship during the remainder of Bush’s presidency, he quoted the psychiatrist who was asked to change a light bulb: “First, the light bulb really has to want to change.”

If Bush’s actions in the week following the election are any indication, change is a distant goal. First, the President sent John Bolton’s nomination to be U.N. Ambassador back to the Senate, where he had to know it would be dead on arrival. Bolton—named by Bush in a recess appointment after it became clear that he could not be confirmed even by a Senate dominated by Republicans—is widely considered an unmitigated disaster at a time when effective American diplomacy is an urgent imperative.

If the Bolton renomination wasn’t “in your face” enough, the President followed up by renominating a group of hard-Right judges who had previously failed to win confirmation for the federal bench.

For sheer chutzpah, however, nothing surpasses Bush’s appointment of Eric Keroack to head up family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services. In his new capacity, according to HHS, he will oversee $283 million dollars in annual family-planning grants “designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them, with priority given to low-income persons.”

Dr. Keroack previously worked at a Christian “Crisis Pregnancy” clinic that forbid its employees from referring patients to birth control providers. He has been widely quoted as saying that the distribution of contraceptives “demeans women” and “increases out-of-wedlock pregnancy.” He opposes not just abortion, but also birth control and sex education.

If individuals believe that birth control is immoral, that is their prerogative. Putting an implacable foe of family planning in charge of the United States government’s family planning programs is another matter entirely.

As many abortion opponents have noted, the most effective way to reduce abortion is to reduce unwanted pregnancies. Even if abstinence-based sex education programs were effective—and a multitude of studies suggests otherwise—they are manifestly inappropriate for married couples who want to plan their families. Rigid proponents of abstinence-based procreation doctrines are equally inappropriate choices to run government family planning offices.

The moral and religious beliefs of Americans are incredibly diverse. The genius of our constitutional system is that by keeping government out of arguments about religious doctrine and observance—by confining government to matters that require communal action—we have largely averted the sectarian disputes that have torn other nations apart. We have made bipartisanship and cooperation possible.

But first, we have to want to cooperate.

Comments

Bipartisanship? Not So Much.

In the wake of what he conceeded was “a thumping,” President Bush promised a renewed emphasis on bipartisanship, and a good-faith effort to work across the aisle with the new Democratic majority.

But first, we have to want to cooperate.

Comments

Scapegoating

A friend recently sent me an article that has been floating around the internet for a while—in fact, I’d seen it previously. But for some reason, re-reading it crystallized several themes I’d been mulling over.

The article itself was a reprint from Free Inquiry magazine. Lawrence W. Britt had undertaken to define the term “fascist” by making a comparative study of seven regimes that are widely acknowledged as considered examples of fascism: Nazi Germany, of course, but also Fascist Italy, Generalissimo Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’ Greece, Pinochet’s Chile and Suharto’s Indonesia. From his study, he “distilled” fourteen recognizable patterns, or characteristics, that were common to all seven regimes. Those were:

Continuing expressions of nationalism
Disdain for human rights
Intense propaganda targeting enemies and scapegoats
Militarism
Sexism (including homophobia)
Government control of mass media
Obsession with national security (where any questioning of tactics is considered unpatriotic)
Joinder of religion and government
Powerful corporations protected by law
Labor rights suppressed
Anti-intellectualism
Obsession with crime and punishment, and glorification of police
Rampant cronyism and corruption
Fraudulent elections

Needless to say, America (even under Bush-Cheney) is not a fascist state, nor even close, although in several of these areas over the last few years our movement has been toward, not away from, the elements Britt describes. No, I think the reason this list of danger signals struck me with particular force when I read it this time was because of the timing involved.

Just the week before, the New Jersey Supreme Court had ruled that “denying commited same-sex couples the financial and social benefits given their married heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate government purpose.” The Republicans responded with what I can only characterize as glee; given their gloomy electoral prospects, the New Jersey decision was a gift, and they immmediately elevated their already shrill attacks on the “homosexual agenda.”

Can we spell “scapegoating”?

This was just one more example of the unrelenting attacks on the gay community that have become almost reflexive on the part of the Republican party. Here in Indiana, in the last, heated days before the midterm elections, we saw vicious ads suggesting that Congressmen who had failed to vote for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage didn’t “share Hoosier values.” In Washington, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, one of the more “colorful” members of the GOP, moved to block Senate consideration of a Bush judicial nominee, because—hold on to something—she actually attended a public ceremony in which two lesbians pledged their commitment to one another. This was evidently so heinous that Brownback was willing to deviate from his oft-repeated insistence that every judicial nominee deserves an up-or-down vote, and put a “hold” on the nomination. There are so many other examples, they are too numerous to catalog.

I can’t help being nostalgic for the Republican Party I used to know. When I ran for Congress as a Republican, in 1980, my positions in support of gay rights created virtually no comment. I was considered a typical, conservative Republican—too conservative for many other Republicans, who voted instead for Andy Jacobs, my Democratic opponent. Today, that Republican Party no longer exists. I miss it—and I don’t recognize the party that has taken its place.

Reading Britt’s article reminded me why I left. Too many of the positions trumpeted by today’s version of the GOP are positions uninformed by the history he recounts, held by folks who don’t understand where such positions can lead.

If we aren’t eternally vigilant, it could happen here.

Comments