Public Policy and Governance – Page 46

Why Women Will Save America

A million years ago, when I was in law school, I wasn’t a committed feminist. I didn’t become a lawyer so that I could challenge the rules keeping women second-class citizens; rather, I wanted to be a lawyer, and to the extent existing rules got in the way, I opposed them.

Over the (many) ensuing years, I’ve become increasingly opposed to anti-woman social norms–and laws based upon those norms. They aren”t just outdated. They’re unjust, unAmerican–and stupid. (Denying women equality is unjust and unAmerican because such measures ignore differences between individuals in favor of imposing disabilities based on group identity. They’re stupid because they keep women from contributing to the general welfare.)

Over the past decades, as women, African Americans, LGBTQ citizens and other marginalized folks have improved their status in society, the White Christian males who view that improvement with alarm–seeing it as a loss of their own paternalistic primacy–have increasingly resisted.

A couple of recent examples:

Southern Baptists are rebelling against the very notion that women might be pastors in that denomination. In our recent book, Morton Marcus and I explored the immense role played by fundamentalist religion in keeping women subservient and defining “women’s place” as necessarily and permanently subordinate. The linked article, published on June 13th, reported:

Southern Baptists will have the opportunity to vote on a measure that would enshrine a ban on women pastors within the denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee decided Monday.

The decision by the SBC Executive Committee ahead of the 2023 SBC annual meeting doesn’t guarantee the eventual passage of the measure, which is a proposed amendment to the SBC constitution. The amendment is one of several major decisions facing Southern Baptist voting delegates, called messengers, that will permanently affect the status of women pastors in the SBC.

The vote was triggered by appeals from two congregations that had been ousted for having women pastors. (Update: women lost that vote. Resoundingly.)

Then there’s the radical Right organization, Turning Point USA. Turning Point recently sponsored a truly bizarre “Women’s Leadership Summit.” (Speaking of bizarre, the conference offered “bejeweled” guns for sale….pictures at the link…)

Speakers like TPUSA influencer Alex Clark, Fox host Laura Ingraham, and The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens both covertly and overtly discouraged the audience of young women from pursuing high-powered careers,” she reports. Clark railed against the young women in the audience for using birth control, blasted “day care,” and take-your-pick.

Clark claimed, “The feminist movement is in large part to blame for the fracturing of the traditional home, where women were coerced outside of their natural roles as mothers into the workforce.” She went on: “The feminist movement gave way to the notion that a woman could have her cake and eat it too. You can have the career you want and you can raise your children in a positive, educational environment, aka day care.” She described it as “a lie to tell women that we can have it all.” Just because day care is “normal or common doesn’t mean it’s right,” according to Clark

Fundamentalist podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey opened day two of the conference. She, unsurprisingly, struck a notably more pointed Christian extremist tone than the other speakers, though religious rhetoric was ubiquitous throughout the conference. “I can tell you what your highest calling is,” she said. It’s not to have a career, “it’s not even to be a wife and a mom, as wonderful as those things are. Your highest calling is to glorify God.”

Her version of God, of course…

This “summit” provided unambiguous evidence of the real purpose of contemporary assaults on reproductive choice. If women can choose if and when to have babies, they will be tempted to pursue “callings” that are inconsistent with “Godly” subservience to men.

Over the last 100 years, women have made remarkable progress—from laws that essentially made them the property of their fathers or husbands, to today’s almost-equal legal parity with men. In the years since I was in law school, that progress has increasingly infuriated the White Christian “culture warriors” who see women’s advancement toward equality as an existential threat to their social dominance–a dominance they have convinced themselves is divinely ordained.

The elections of 2024 will decide many important issues, arguably including the continued viability of American democracy.. Our constitutional democracy requires (among other things) the right of American women to bodily autonomy–something men have long enjoyed.

Women’s civic equality is impossible without that autonomy–and women know it.

In 2024, electoral choices about choice will be clear. Republicans at the municipal, state and federal levels are all committed to the GOP’s anti-choice position, while Democrats are pro-choice.

Which is why I predict women will vote Blue and save America.

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The Power Of Malevolence

Situations I am powerless to change make me crazy. Like most “control freaks” (my children’s all-too-accurate accusation), I’m okay with life problems that are fixable; tell me the only way to solve X is to climb mountain Y, and I’ll pull on my hiking boots. But the problems that most frequently make their way onto this blog are of a different order.

I think I have a lot of company among the ordinary citizens of this country and world. Unlike the self-styled revolutionaries on the radical Right, who far too often think possession of an AR 15 makes them powerful, we see ourselves as well-meaning individuals with very limited abilities to effect social or political change–as small cogs in the machineries of our respective societies.

Some individuals, however, do exercise disproportionate power–and the ways in which they do so illuminate an important imperative– the need to dismantle global oligarchies. For every “nice” billionaire whose philanthropies the powerless applaud and encourage, a darker mogul is making the world a much worse place.

Rupert Murdock is a prime example. A while back, an essay by Thom Hartmann in Common Dreams enumerated the multiple ways in which Murdock has worked to destroy democracy worldwide. Here’s the lede:

What country in its right mind would allow a foreign entity to come into their country, set up a major propaganda operation, and then use it to so polarize that nation that its very government suffers a violent assault and its democracy finds itself at a crossroads?

Apparently, the United States. And we’re not the first, according to former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of The New York Times) Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his rightwing news operations “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”

“The uncomfortable truth is,” Rudd wrote, “since the coup of June 2010, Australian politics has become vicious, toxic and unstable. The core question is why?”

Hartmann points out that Murdoch’s empire isn’t really a news organization–that it most resembles and operates as a political party, “acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far-right ideological world view.”

Brexit–which is currently wreaking economic havoc in the UK–would never have passed without the propaganda promulgated by the newspapers and media owned by Murdock in that country.

In the U.S., Fox News has from its inception been the political echo chamber of the far Right. It’s unlikely that the GOP’s devolution into the Trump party would have occurred without Fox’s deliberate campaigns of misinformation and propaganda.

Murdoch’s positions aren’t at all ambiguous, Rudd noted. They’re simply pro-billionaire/pro-oligarch and thus, by extension, anti-democracy.

“In Australia, as in America,” he wrote, “Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism.
“Given Murdoch’s impact on the future of our democracy,” Rudd added, “it’s time to revisit it.”

Hartmann quotes Steve Schmidt, former advisor to George W. Bush and John McCain, and now a “Never Trumper”:

“Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the poisoning of our democracy and the stoking of a cold civil war. There has never been anything like it and it is beyond terrible for the country. Bar none, Rupert Murdoch is the worst and most dangerous immigrant to ever arrive on American soil. There are no words for the awfulness of his cancerous network.”

What Hartmann’s essay does well is illuminate the danger oligarchies pose to the planet and those of us who live on it. When a few people control the overwhelming majority of wealth and power in a society, it is suicidal to simply hope for their benevolence.

What Hartmann’s essay fails to do is offer a remedy–and that brings me back to my opening admission. What do we do–what can we do– about the cancer of Fox “News” and its clones? Past comments have stressed the importance of education in critical thinking, and that is surely part of the long-term answer.

If we make it to the long term.

We need to cut the oligarchy off at its knees sooner rather than later–and that will require a significant increase in tax rates for the oligarchs, along with an international effort to eradicate the various tax havens that allow these predators to hide their assets.

That won’t happen in the U.S. until the mindless cult that was once a political party is resoundingly rejected. At this point, our overriding need is to defeat the GOP monster that Murdock’s excessive power has created and maintained.

All individuals can do is work to get out the vote. It will have to be enough.

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One More Time….

The American Prospect sends out a regular newsletter, titled Kuttner on Tap, in which the author, Robert Kuttner, addresses a variety of issues.

Kuttner is a longtime journalist– currently a professor of social policy at Brandeis University.. He co-founded and co-edits The Prospect, which (according to Wikipedia) was created in 1990 as an “authoritative magazine of liberal ideas.” He is also a co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute.

Given Kuttner’s background, his preference for national health care is unsurprising, but a recent issue of the newsletter really resonated with me, not just because of stories like the one I shared last Friday, but because it mirrored my own experience with England’s National Health Service (NHS).

Kuttner was in London when he felt ill.

Yesterday, I had some odd health symptoms that suggested a visit to a doctor. This being Britain, off I went to the walk-in clinic of the nearest hospital of the National Health Service. What happened next is enough to make an American progressive weep.

I arrived at St Thomas’ Hospital, one of London’s busiest, at 10 a.m. By 10:20, I had been through a courteous triage process, filled out a basic form, and was scheduled with a GP. The doctor saw me at 11:00, took a history, examined me, performed a couple of tests right in his office, assured me that this was not serious, and shook my hand.

“Do I need to check out?” I asked.

“No, you are free to go,” he said. Less than 90 minutes after arriving, I was on my way.

Bill: zero.

As I said, this account mirrored a personal experience. A few years ago, my husband and I were on a cruise to England when he developed upper respiratory symptoms. By the time we got to Nottingham, where our oldest granddaughter was living at the time, he was really unwell, and she insisted we go to the nearby walk-in-clinic.

After a very brief wait, we were called back to the nurse practitioner. She took a history, examined him, and called an ambulance to take him to Nottingham University’s hospital. (She said she might be “over-reacting a bit–I hope so” but “better safe than sorry.”) The ambulance was there almost immediately, and I rode with him. I can’t say enough about how efficient and caring the EMTs in the ambulance were.

We were taken to A and E (Accident and Emergency). Again, we were impressed with the efficiency of the process; first, an evaluation and a number of lab tests, then further tests based upon the initial results. Throughout the (very long) day, personnel kept us informed of where we were in the process, and why they were doing what they were doing.

The fear was a pulmonary embolism; fortunately, the scans ruled that out. However, what the ship’s doctor had shrugged off as a cold or allergy turned out to be a heart problem that hadn’t been detected by his cardiologist on his visit a week before our trip. The NHS doctor explained that his symptoms were the result of fluid accumulation–probably the result of unusual activity on the trip. He was admitted for a short stay so that they could eliminate the additional fluid.

Only when he was released were we asked whether we had insurance, since we weren’t British citizens. (The ultimate bill was $1900.–for all the tests, and a two day hospital stay. And Anthem–our insurer at the time–bitched about that and delayed payment.)

As Kuttner wrote,

NHS is far better, fairer, and more cost-effective than our system. Britain is a poorer country than the U.S. but has an average life expectancy almost four years longer (80.9 years to America’s 77.3).

Because the NHS is true social medicine with salaried doctors and nurses, the money and time wasted in the U.S. on parasite middlemen, coding and billing, rapacious insurance companies, hospital profit-maximization strategies, and excess lucrative procedures, is simply not a problem or a drain in Britain. All the money goes to patient care….

In this fiscal year, the entire NHS costs 152 billion pounds, or about $180 billion. That’s close to two-thirds of all of Britain’s spending on health care. By contrast, the U.S. spends a staggering $4.4 trillion.

Relative to GDP, Britain spends about 12 percent and covers everyone. We spend just under 20 percent, and tens of millions of Americans have no coverage while tens of millions more are woefully underinsured and must pay exorbitant sums or do without.

Other Western countries have other versions of national health care. All of them deliver better results for many more people for far fewer dollars.

It turns out that it’s very costly to refuse care to “undeserving” (i.e. under-resourced) people…..

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Speaking Of Punitive…

One of the cases the Supreme Court will decide this term is a lawsuit brought by Republican Attorneys General opposed to cancellation of a portion of student loan debt. Evidently, Indiana isn’t the only Red state with a despicable and arguably dishonest Attorney General, as a Brookings Institution study documents.

The AGs aren’t the only opponents of giving students some fiscal breathing room –the House of Representatives recently voted to repeal the program. But as Brookings researchers write in the linked New York Times essay, the lawsuit brought by six Republican-led states has received inadequate scrutiny.

So we decided to do the fact-checking ourselves. We filed public records requests and reviewed almost a thousand pages of internal financial documents, emails and other communications from the parties in the case, as well as court filings and the transcript of oral arguments at the Supreme Court in February.

We found that the states’ most fundamental justification for bringing the case — that canceling student loans could leave a Missouri-based loan authority unable to meet its financial obligations to the state — is false. As our research shows, and the loan authority’s own documents confirm, even with the new policy in place, its revenues from servicing loans will increase.

That this claim is manufactured–that it is a lie– is important.

Unlike legal systems that permit advisory opinions, in America, if there’s no injury, there’s no right to sue. The legal term is standing, and according to Brookings, the plaintiffs don’t have it. They simply said they did. (With our current Court–a Court that demonstrably privileges litigants with status and power –that may be enough.)

As the researchers note,

The ease with which the state attorneys general were able to make claims that contradict basic facts, void of any rigorous stress testing, is all the more striking when compared with the endless hoops that ordinary people have to jump through to prove their eligibility for financial aid or debt relief. This is what the sociologist Howard Becker calls the “hierarchy of credibility”: Those at the top of the social hierarchy don’t have to prove their claims; they’re just taken for granted. But claims made by those on the bottom are burdened by skepticism and demands for proof. In this instance, that difference may deprive millions of people of much-needed relief….

Compare that with the lengths that normal people must go to in order to prove they are eligible for debt relief. They have to submit mountains of documentation. Their claims are often denied for the most trivial of technicalities — a form filled out with green ink instead of black or blue, an electronic signature instead of an inked one.

Applicants for the older Public Service Loan Forgiveness program have to get paperwork signed from employers they had a decade ago. If a loan servicer transfers the account, the borrower may lose her payment history, and therefore her eligibility for relief. People who attended predatory for-profit colleges have had to submit extensive applications for relief, documenting their schools’ false allegations and misrepresentations. Even the Biden plan required an application.

The linked essay goes into detail, thoroughly debunking the damage claims that support plaintiffs’ standing, and I encourage you to click through and read that analysis. But I want to focus on a different–albeit related–question: what policy position does this dishonesty serve?

To put it another way, why are so many Americans–mostly but not exclusively Republicans–so opposed to relieving student debt?

In the final paragraph of the linked essay, the researchers write that an affirmation of the plaintiff’s claim would

effectively be confirming a fake plaintiff, false facts and an unjust claim. Falsehoods about falsehoods would be a hard way to lose the debt relief the president promised to 43 million Americans and their families. And a Supreme Court that doesn’t scrutinize basic facts would be a further disgrace for a body already plagued by scandal.

I’ve previously noted how punitive today’s GOP has become. Here in Indiana, we’ve seen our Attorney General wage a petty vendetta against a doctor who legally aborted a ten-year-old rape victim. We’ve seen legislators go out of their way to harm trans children and dismiss the very notion that women are entitled to bodily autonomy and effective health care.

Nationally, we’ve witnessed GOP efforts to punish the poorest Americans by curtailing social welfare programs (while protecting the rich against attempts to audit them or–gasp!–make them pay their fair share.)

American lawmakers used to argue about the “how”–what’s the most effective way to help this or that population, or solve this or that problem? But “how” has given way to “why”–why would we want to help the less fortunate?

When did the cruelty become the point?

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Fed Up Yet?

Americans are understandably distracted by the current cultural battles that are, at their base, efforts to halt the steady erosion of White Christian male privilege. I spend a fair amount of time analyzing and discussing those battles, and ignoring a much more substantial disagreement about what a society/country owes its members/citizens.

It’s the question inherent in that old Amex commercial proclaiming “membership has its privileges.”

As I’ve noted previously, in the United States, the “privileges” of citizenship do not include health care or financial security. Our approach to social welfare has been and remains punitive–and as a result, the “systems” we’ve built incentivize greed over good works.

A recent report from the New York Times focused on the reality of America’s approach to health care.

Many hospitals in the United States use aggressive tactics to collect medical debt. They flood local courts with collections lawsuits. They garnish patients’ wages. They seize their tax refunds.

But a wealthy nonprofit health system in the Midwest is among those taking things a step further: withholding care from patients who have unpaid medical bills.

Allina Health System, which runs more than 100 hospitals and clinics in Minnesota and Wisconsin and brings in $4 billion a year in revenue, sometimes rejects patients who are deep in debt, according to internal documents and interviews with doctors, nurses and patients.

Although Allina’s hospitals will treat anyone in emergency rooms, other services can be cut off for indebted patients, including children and those with chronic illnesses like diabetes and depression. Patients aren’t allowed back until they pay off their debt entirely.

Companies like Allina–theoretically “nonprofit”– get huge tax breaks for providing indigent care in their communities. An investigation by the Times found that almost all nonprofit hospitals have– for decades– fallen short of that charitable mission.

Allina cuts off patients who owe money for services received at any of its 90 clinics. Written policies instruct staff on how to cancel appointments for patients with at least $4,500 of unpaid debt– how to lock their electronic health records so that staff can’t schedule future appointments.

“These are the poorest patients who have the most severe medical problems,” said Matt Hoffman, an Allina primary care doctor in Vadnais Heights, Minn. “These are the patients that need our care the most.”

In 2020, less than half of 1 percent of Allina’s expenditures were for charity care, well below the pathetic national average of 2 percent for “nonprofit” hospitals, despite the fact that its annual profits since 2013 have ranged from $30 million to $380 million. In 2021, its president earned $3.5 million–and it recently built a $12 million conference center.

It’s estimated that 100 million Americans have medical debts. Those debts make up approximately half of all the outstanding debt in the country, and are responsible for half of all personal bankruptcies.

Some 20 percent of hospitals nationwide have debt-collection policies that allow them to cancel care. The most expensive “health care system” in the world doesn’t seem very focused on health.

Then, of course, there’s what Jamelle Bouie calls a “twisted view” of the social safety net, most recently illustrated by the GOP’s insistence on work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries.

As Bouie notes, there’s plenty of evidence that work requirements don’t lead to more employment–that their only effect has been a loss of benefits by poor Americans.

Work requirements don’t work, but Republicans still want them, so much so that they threatened to crash the global economy to get them. Why? The obvious answer is that work requirements are an effective way to cut programs without actually cutting them. With a little extra paperwork and another layer of bureaucracy, states can keep thousands of people who qualify from getting access to benefits.

To add insult to injury, It cost states tens of millions of dollars to implement work requirements. In Arkansas, for example, implementation cost close to $26 million; in Iowa, the cost of administering the new rules was $17 million over three years — far more than the state would have spent on SNAP during that period.

We keep hearing that America is the richest country in the world. Not only could we afford to be less punitive to the people who most need a hand up, we could actually save money in the process. Tax dollars already pay some 70% of the country’s medical costs, and those dollars would probably cover 100% if CEOs weren’t overcompensated and we saved health insurer overhead.

I’ve previously argued that a Universal Basic Income would solve significant social problems– Whatever the pros and cons of a more expansive, less punitive view of “membership,” stories like these should remind us of the multiple deficits of what passes for current health and welfare policies in “rich” America.

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