healthcare reform

Republicans Try to Convert America into Pottersville

Leo Gerard — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 08:20:41 -0500

In the iconic Christmas film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” an angel offers the beleaguered main character, George Bailey, the stark choice between a hometown named for a cruel banker or one created by and for the middle class.

The banker’s town, Pottersville, is filled with bars, gambling dens and despair. The people’s town of Bedford Falls is made of hope, hard working middle class families, and their homes financed by the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan.

The film’s happy ending is the people of Bedford Falls banding together to rescue George Bailey and the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan that had given so many of them a leg up over the years. Republicans seek a different conclusion. They find middle class cooperation and community intolerable. They want the banker, Henry Potter, with his “every man for himself” philosophy to triumph. In the spirit of their self-centered mentor Ayn Rand, Republicans are trying to disfigure America so she resembles Pottersville.

A building and loan association, like the Bailey Brothers’, uses the savings of its members to provide mortgages to the depositors. Members essentially pool their money to give each other the opportunity to buy cars and homes. At one point in the film, George Bailey explains this concept to frightened depositors who are trying to withdraw their savings during the panic that led to bank runs in 1929.

Bailey urges the townspeople who had crowded into the building and loan office to withdraw only what they need, not empty their accounts. “We have got to stick together,” he tells them, “We have to do this together.” A building and loan doesn’t function without trust and cooperation.

It works well for Bedford Falls. The mortgages it provides help working people move out of the Potters Field slums and into Bailey Park, where homes well kept by their owners increase in value. Despite the success, Potter condemned this practice, saying it was based on “high ideals without common sense.” He criticized the Bailey Brothers Building & Loan for granting a taxi driver a mortgage after Potter’s bank had rejected his application. Potter scoffed at such practices, asking if the building and loan was a “business or a charity ward.”

This is exactly what Republicans do. They describe beloved American programs like Medicare and Social Security as charities – using the euphemism “entitlements.” Like mortgages from the Bailey Building & Loan, Medicare and Social Security are not charities. They’re the American people depositing and pooling their money for the benefit of the American community.

The GOP tries to destroy programs like these that aid the middle class, the vast majority of Americans – the 99 percent – while Republicans protect tax breaks and special perks for the rich – the one percent, the Henry Potters.

This time last year, Republicans demanded extension of tax breaks for the 1 percent, contending tax breaks stimulate the economy.

For the past three months, however, Republicans have fought extension of payroll tax cuts, contending a break benefiting 160 million middle class Americans did not stimulate the economy.

All year, Republicans have demanded an end to programs the middle class created to aid the majority, the 99 percent. The GOP wants to reverse the new banking regulations that were passed in an attempt to prevent another economic collapse caused by risky Wall Street practices. The GOP tried to to rescind the healthcare reform law that prevents insurance companies from terminating coverage when beneficiaries get sick and prohibits the practice of refusing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

Influential Republicans this year have called for repealing laws forbidding child labor, laws guaranteeing minimum wage and laws protecting the environment. They’ve demanded elimination of federal funding for organizations like the Public Broadcasting System that educates preschoolers, Head Start, which provides opportunity to poor children, and Planned Parenthood, which uses 97 percent of its funds to provide general, obstetrical and gynecological medical care to women, many of whom are rural and poor.

Republicans have decided to be the party of Henry Potter, the “meanest man in the county,” a man about whom George Bailey’s father said: “he's a sick man, frustrated. Sick in his mind, sick in his soul, if he has one.”

Like Potter, Republicans deride compassion and community as character defects.

In the Republican world, where greed is good, it was appropriate for Henry Potter to keep the $8,000 in Bailey Building & Loan money that George Bailey’s uncle, Billy Bailey, accidently handed him.

Republicans are attempting to impose that selfish belief system on the selfless American people, people like the citizens of Bedford Falls who rush to the rescue of neighbors.

It won’t work, just like it didn’t in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Republicans will fail in their attempt to make America Pottersville because the 99 percent believe avarice is a sin, not a value. The GOP will fail because greed is not the American way.

2 words to banish from healthcare

Louis S Revesz — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:55:33 -0400

Say you’re a betting person. If someone gave you great odds to get rid of the words “recission,” and “pre-existing condition,” in the healthcare debate, would you take it?

If you would, you’d be skunked by the obvious.

It seems like a given that any healthcare reform legislation will make insurance companies invoking pre-existing conditions and cancelling their contractual obligations with policyholders through recission illegal. But let's agree to remember egregious examples of these practices as evidence of past barbarism.

So, what’s the first word we must absolutely ban? Consumer.

After all, we don’t really consume health care the same as we “consume” Skittles or nacho corn chips. Only people in the thrall of a sugar imbalance or addicted to the fifth taste, umami—a meaty or savory taste produced by several amino acids and nucleotides—consume Skittles, nacho chips, and other snack foods. Ordinary people may occasionally eat Skittles and nachos. They may also eat high-fat charbroiled burgers and French fries created by food flavorists for various fast food brands. Some people may also eat lots of antioxidant-loaded fruits and vegetables created by nature, although sadly, they’re probably in the minority.

And most prudent people seek professional care from doctors when they get sick; unfortunately, we’re a hearty species and can punish our bodies, minds, and spirits for years before we suffer a crisis that threatens us with death and debility. It’s usually at this point that even the poor seek medical assistance to return to a state of health, and hence, the term, healthcare.

To use the word “consumer” in the context of healthcare is to flatten the value of regaining health to the accountant’s ledger or the businessman’s abstraction. And yes, I realize this is not a new insight—yet it remains significant—especially if we consider Professor George Lakoff’s message to progressives to frame debates to reflect their values—or lose the argument.
(See: http://www.truthout.org/082009B )

To say you “consume” healthcare is to tacitly agree that it’s okay to regulate its consumption—and to profit from its consumption—much in the same way as you might profit from the utilization of widgets or any unit of production. The word “consume” is bloodless, which is extremely convenient since people denied access to treatment can end up very bloody indeed, and even dead.

Besides, do insurance companies produce healthcare? No, they’re middlemen who determine access to various systems of acute care and create quotas for levels of consumption based on business alliances and so-called cost-cutting measures. If you seem to have disease x, you can get tests a and b, but only from a preferred provider. But forget about getting procedure c anywhere, it’s experimental. Or if a healthcare professional (HCP) doesn’t know which disease you have based on your symptoms—your insurance company will allow you to “consume” tests d and e. But if that doesn’t nail it, tough noogies, you’re over your widget quota anyway, and don’t switch jobs or it’ll become a pre-existing condition. That’s if you haven’t already been kicked off your plan for having zits as kid that you didn’t fess up to during enrollment, i.e., you’re a victim of recission.

Okay, so do physicians produce healthcare? Of course not! Nobody produces healthcare. Caring for people who are ill is, at best, a service. Caring for the ill professionally—i.e., minding people who’ve manifested a disease through evidence-based medicine requires close attention to their lifestyles, knowing the latest research, being a good diagnostician, and having an intangible factor that comes from interacting with people. None of which is ever really possible when healthcare is a commodity, because the doctor isn’t there for the patient, he or she gets 5 minutes tops to prescribe meds and order tests to be consumed.

Does anyone remember that when the now much-maligned health maintenance organizations came into being in the 70s, it was with the supposed raison d'être that prevention of illness or maintenance of health is ultimately cheaper than expensive acute care for disease? Of course, that was before we’d heard the Nixon-Ehrlichman conversation on Michael Moore’s SICKO and were let into the insurance scam of denying care and still making money! (See: http://www.alternet.org/movies/55049/sicko_is_michael_moore's_best_and_most_powerful_documentary/ )

But let’s take a deeper look. Say you manage to get access to affordable healthcare in a humane medical system and the doctor cures your illness, does that mean you’re well? Probably not. So there are 2 choices you can make. Sometimes when you’ve been cured, the disease will scare you into changing behaviors that may have, might have, even remotely could have contributed to getting sick, and soon enough, you’re feeling good because you’re living cleanly. And that’s what’s called “wellness.” Of course, there’s another choice, and that’s doing nothing, or ignoring all the behaviors or lifestyle choices that contributed to your illness in the first place—and that means you’ll stay chronically ill—with continual drugs to suppress symptoms and tests to “detect” the next acute breakdown. And nobody can call that “wellness.” No one should call it health, either, although it’s the best we can hope to get under a reformed system that doesn’t address prevention. Nope, without dealing with the cause of illness, this state is more of hellish Limbo where you wait for the inevitable shoe to drop.

Any healthcare system that really stands a chance of limiting costs and increasing wellness must address all of the slings and arrows of our outrageous environment—from factory farming that dumps pesticides into depleted soil and sells infected meat, to giant corporate food businesses that inject preservatives and chemical flavors into high-fat, high-sodium, high sugar and low fiber food products that starve our bodies of nutrition and force them to adapt through inevitable chronic illnesses such as obesity, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and various autoimmune diseases, to name just a few. It’s a life of self-created pestilence to increase the profits of shareholders. Save money. Live better? We should all look more closely at the high cost of low prices.

Maybe the biggest environmental outrage is perpetuating the flatland of values that enshrines laissez-faire, the-market-always-knows-best, blind capitalist’s valuing profit above all else. What such a flatland ultimately does is create a mega-frame impervious against all arguments for human decency, the public welfare, and just plain, old good common sense.

So here’s the other word we need to ban from the healthcare debate: profit.

Kate Thomas

Kate Thomas2 — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:45:05 -0400