Like so many, I fell into the alluring trap of blaming the healthcare insurance companies for the state of the US healthcare system. The health insurers are doing nothing wrong. No, I haven’t suddenly swapped ends on the political spectrum. Think about it. Health insurers are private, for-profit companies whose goals and fiduciary duties to their shareholders compel them to make as much money as possible. And not that there’s anything wrong with that – as for-profit businesses, that’s what they do.
Health insurance companies’ aggressive, yet currently legal, business practices to maximize their profits include
(1) paying out as little as possible on claims by policyholders
(2) raising premiums as high as possible,
(3) not insuring people who have preexisting conditions as not to be paying for their medical bills from day one of the policy,
(4) getting rid of policyholders by any means possible once they start costing the company money with medical bills, and
(5) the exploitation of their exemption from antitrust laws allowing them to fix prices and carve up territories across the country.
Anyone with any business sense at all knows that these practices make eminent business sense by allowing the insurers to make as much money as possible for its executives and shareholders. Healthcare reform is a clear and objective threat to maximizing profit. In fact when healthcare reform hits a snag healthcare companies’ stocks rise. Insurance companies were not created to be altruistic. They have no public duty to serve the needs of Americans.
So let’s stop blaming the insurers and look for the real culprits. Who might those be? Those entities capable of regulating these for-profit companies for the public good. That would be the government. That would be the healthcare legislation still being batted about in Washington, DC as a political football.
Are you angry with the insurance companies? Tell your senator you want them reined in. Tell your senator that a public option will force private insurers to compete in rather than control the market.
Thank you to incisive MSNBC host Rachel Maddow for this lesson in capitalism. See her full segment (including Anthony Weiner’s stunning performance on the House floor) here:
The Republican Party is "a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry," Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) charged on the House floor. When Republican Rep. Dan Lungren (Calif.) objected to the accusation and took the extraordinary step of asking that Weiner's "words be taken down," Weiner pushed back.
"You really don't want to go here, Mr. Lungren," Weiner said. Asking that words be taken down is a move on the House floor that is rarely made and carries great weight.
Weiner, after a pause, asked to have his words withdrawn and said he'd substitute new ones. "Make no mistake about it. Every single Republican I have ever met in my entire life is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the insurance industry," Weiner clarified.
Somehow, that failed to satisfy Lungren, who asked that those too be taken down. After a long pause, before the chair ruled, Lungren withdrew his request.
The House was debating a bill to repeal the insurance industry's exemption from antitrust laws, which passed overwhelmingly. Nineteen Republicans opposed it, including House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). Lungren supported it.
Hardball’s big number today was 290 – the number of House bills backlogged awaiting action by the Senate. Why so many? Every bill moving to the Senate after House passage is subject to filibuster by the Senate Republican minority. Unless suited to Republicans’ tastes, the minority party in the Senate threatens to filibuster its passage – effectively wielding a veto over all Senate legislation. Public records show that no minority party in history has used the threat of a filibuster to an extent even close to that of the current minority party.
Why is that? The reason has been proudly declared numerous times: To stop this president no matter what it takes – in the name of the country, of course. This translates into voting as a bloc against administration and Democratic-sponsored legislation, subjecting it to filibuster requiring a super-majority no longer held by the Democrats to pass the legislation. The United States Senate, and thus the entire legislative branch of our federal government is being held hostage by the minority Republicans exercising a legislative veto to bring the Senate’s business to a grinding halt.
The Republican legislative veto does not serve the will of the American people. It runs contrary to the will of the American people who elected a Democratic president and Congress. Hence the “we won” argument against Republican obstructionism. The American people elected a Democratic president and Congress to lead the nation. America’s choice for leadership was not a slithering cadre of 41 Republican senators.
1. "As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where– where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border." --Sarah Palin, explaining why Alaska's proximity to Russia gives her foreign policy experience, interview with CBS's Katie Couric, Sept. 24, 2008 (Watch video clip)
2. "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil." –-Sarah Palin, in a message posted on Facebook about Obama's health care plan, Aug. 7, 2009
3. "All of 'em, any of 'em that have been in front of me over all these years." --Sarah Palin, unable to name a single newspaper or magazine she reads, interview with Katie Couric, CBS News, Oct. 1, 2008 (Watch video clip)
4. "Well, let's see. There's ― of course in the great history of America there have been rulings that there's never going to be absolute consensus by every American, and there are those issues, again, like Roe v. Wade, where I believe are best held on a state level and addressed there. So, you know, going through the history of America, there would be others but ―" --Sarah Palin, unable to name a Supreme Court decision she disagreed with other than Roe vs. Wade, interview with Katie Couric, CBS News, Oct. 1, 2008 (Watch video clip)
5. "We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. ... We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation." --Sarah Palin, speaking at a fundraiser in Greensoboro, N.C., Oct. 16, 2008
6. "[T]hey're in charge of the U.S. Senate so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better for Brandon and his family and his classroom." --Sarah Palin, getting the vice president's constitutional role wrong after being asked by a third grader what the vice president does, interview with NBC affiliate KUSA in Colorado, Oct. 21, 2008 (Watch video clip)
7. "They are kooks, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh was using satire ... I didn't hear Rush Limbaugh calling a group of people whom he did not agree with 'f-ing retards,' and we did know that Rahm Emanuel, as has been reported, did say that. There is a big difference there." –Sarah Palin, attempting to rationalize why it's okay for Limbaugh to use the word "retards" but not Emanuel, FOX News Sunday interview, Feb. 7, 2010
8. "Who calls a shot like that? Who makes a decision like that? It's a disturbing trend." –Sarah Palin, pushing a conspiracy theory that "In God We Trust" had been moved to the edge of coins by the Obama administration (the change was made by the Bush administration in 2007 and was later reversed by Congress, before Obama took office), West Allis, Wisconsin, Nov. 6, 2009
9. "Oh, good, thank you, yes." --Sarah Palin, after a notorious Canadian prank caller complimented her on the documentary about her life, Hustler's "Nailin Paylin," Nov. 1, 2008 (Read more about the prank call, watch the video and see the transcript)
10. "I think on a national level your Department of Law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out." --Sarah Palin, referring to a department that does not exist while attempting to explain why as president she wouldn't be subjected to the same ethics investigations that compelled her to resign as governor of Alaska, ABC News interview, July 7, 2009
Storytelling doesn't get much purer than this – a film with virtually no dialogue and not a minute that isn't captivating, either for the plot it pursues or the way director Jean-Jacques Annaud gets his ursine stars to do what he wants. The story deals with a young cub who, after his mother is killed in a landslide, bonds to a lumbering male Kodiak. The two of them then must cope with an invasion of hunters into their territory--and Annaud makes it clear whose side he's on. Aside from stunning scenery, the film offers startlingly close-up looks at bear behavior.
The Bear has all the marks of a classic. Lauded by animal rights groups for its respect for the integrity of all species, it manages to speak out eloquently against the senseless hunting of wildlife without having to depict killing to make its point. Instead, it emphasizes the ties that bind the human and animal worlds together.
Thursday night February 4, Former Republican Presidential candidate and congressman Tom Tancredo delivered the kickoff speech at the Tea Party convention. Tancredo told the Nashville crowd that because
"we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country, people who could not even spell the word 'vote,' or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama."
From a legal standpoint, passing a “civics literacy” test or any poll test before allowing a person to vote was banned by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Tancredo said his remarks at the convention in Nashville, Tenn., were based on his desire to ensure participation only from voters who understand the government. [AP Feb. 5, 2010] And whose understanding of that government must a voter understand? He does not say. I think everyone who votes should have my understanding of government but that doesn’t have a chance in hell either.
So we boil down Tancredo’s Tea Party kickoff speech gem to what it really is:
Republicans do one thing very well. Fear mongering. They did it during the 2008 presidential campaign, with healthcare reform, and now with the budget deficit. Choosing to avoid what is inevitably complex, sophisticated economic theory, the GOP has pointed to mind-boggling numbers to scare the American public.
When the Obama administration came into office it inherited a budget deficit of $1.2 trillion, a deficit run up by Republican George W. Bush with his 2 wars and tax cuts for the wealthy. In a town where a few billion here or there is pocket change, Obama administration spending in a time of economic crisis is, according to Paul Krugman and others, actually too little to heal the country’s economy.
Paul Krugman is a Professor of Economics and International Affairs at PrincetonUniversity, Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, former economics professor at Yale and MIT, and Ford International Professor of Economics while at MIT.
These days it’s hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on a news program without encountering stern warnings about the federal budget deficit. The deficit threatens economic recovery, we’re told; it puts American economic stability at risk; it will undermine our influence in the world. These claims generally aren’t stated as opinions, as views held by some analysts but disputed by others. Instead, they’re reported as if they were facts, plain and simple.
Yet they aren’t facts. Many economists take a much calmer view of budget deficits than anything you’ll see on TV. Nor do investors seem unduly concerned: U.S. government bonds continue to find ready buyers, even at historically low interest rates. The long-run budget outlook is problematic, but short-term deficits aren’t — and even the long-term outlook is much less frightening than the public is being led to believe.
So why the sudden ubiquity of deficit scare stories? It isn’t being driven by any actual news. It has been obvious for at least a year that the U.S. government would face an extended period of large deficits, and projections of those deficits haven’t changed much since last summer. Yet the drumbeat of dire fiscal warnings has grown vastly louder.
To me — and I’m not alone in this — the sudden outbreak of deficit hysteria brings back memories of the groupthink that took hold during the run-up to the Iraq war. Now, as then, dubious allegations, not backed by hard evidence, are being reported as if they have been established beyond a shadow of a doubt. Now, as then, much of the political and media establishments have bought into the notion that we must take drastic action quickly, even though there hasn’t been any new information to justify this sudden urgency. Now, as then, those who challenge the prevailing narrative, no matter how strong their case and no matter how solid their background, are being marginalized.
And fear-mongering on the deficit may end up doing as much harm as the fear-mongering on weapons of mass destruction.
Let’s talk for a moment about budget reality. Contrary to what you often hear, the large deficit the federal government is running right now isn’t the result of runaway spending growth. Instead, well more than half of the deficit was caused by the ongoing economic crisis, which has led to a plunge in tax receipts, required federal bailouts of financial institutions, and been met — appropriately — with temporary measures to stimulate growth and support employment.
The point is that running big deficits in the face of the worst economic slump since the 1930s is actually the right thing to do. If anything, deficits should be bigger than they are because the government should be doing more than it is to create jobs.
True, there is a longer-term budget problem. Even a full economic recovery wouldn’t balance the budget, and it probably wouldn’t even reduce the deficit to a permanently sustainable level. So once the economic crisis is past, the U.S. government will have to increase its revenue and control its costs. And in the long run there’s no way to make the budget math work unless something is done about health care costs.
But there’s no reason to panic about budget prospects for the next few years, or even for the next decade. Consider, for example, what the latest budget proposal from the Obama administration says about interest payments on federal debt; according to the projections, a decade from now they’ll have risen to 3.5 percent of G.D.P. How scary is that? It’s about the same as interest costs under the first President Bush.
Why, then, all the hysteria? The answer is politics.
The main difference between last summer, when we were mostly (and appropriately) taking deficits in stride, and the current sense of panic is that deficit fear-mongering has become a key part of Republican political strategy, doing double duty: it damages President Obama’s image even as it cripples his policy agenda. And if the hypocrisy is breathtaking — politicians who voted for budget-busting tax cuts posing as apostles of fiscal rectitude, politicians demonizing attempts to rein in Medicare costs one day (death panels!), then denouncing excessive government spending the next — well, what else is new?
The trouble, however, is that it’s apparently hard for many people to tell the difference between cynical posturing and serious economic argument. And that is having tragic consequences.
For the fact is that thanks to deficit hysteria, Washington now has its priorities all wrong: all the talk is about how to shave a few billion dollars off government spending, while there’s hardly any willingness to tackle mass unemployment. Policy is headed in the wrong direction — and millions of Americans will pay the price.
