Feed: Democracy for Utah - Democracy Begins With You - AggScore: 80.5

Harvard Med School study shows that lack of access to healthcare killed many more U.S. veterans in 2009 than the wars in Afghanistan (155 fatalities) and Iraq (~ 314):

The analysis produced by two Harvard medical researchers estimates that 2,266 US military veterans under the age of 65 died in 2008 because they lacked health coverage and had reduced access to medical care. The analysis uses census data to isolate the number of US veterans who lack both private health coverage and care offered by the VA. "That's a group that's about 1.5 million people," said [study co-author] David Himmelstein.... Himmelstein and co-author Stephanie Woolhandler, also a Harvard medical professor, overlaid that figure with another study examining the mortality rate associated with lack of health insurance.

Date Published: Nov 12, 2009 - 9:27 am

Props to Merrill Nelson, co-sponsor of the Fair Boundaries Initiative, for a great editorial in the Trib:

Rarely do Utah voters have the opportunity to make as significant an improvement to state government as that presented by the initiative petition to establish an independent redistricting standards commission.

Support for such an initiative comes from no less a political luminary than former President Ronald Reagan, who signed a similar petition in his home state of California in 1981... [Reagan] was concerned that partisan and self-interested gerrymandering of political boundaries "could damage fairness at the polls for a generation ...attacking the heart of our system of representative government." He also noted that partisan reapportionment "effectively disenfranchises large numbers of...voters" and is "unfair" not just to the minority party, "it's unfair to the people."

I'm with Howard Dean on this:

The bottom line on healthcare reform is that it is not worth doing if it is not done right....Subsidizing Americans to buy private health insurance without giving them the choice of a more rational and less expensive system is simply pouring money into a system that increases costs at twice the rate of inflation, serves preferentially those who don't need help, and offers no peace of mind to those at risk in difficult economic times.

Date Published: Nov 07, 2009 - 4:24 pm

Rep. Jim Matheson, pseudo-Democrat of Utah's 2nd Congressional District, announced Friday that he will line up with the rest of the Utah Congressional Delegation in voting against healthcare reform. KSL reported

Utah Congressman Jim Matheson planned a series of amendments to the health care reform bill. It was a last-ditch effort to make it better, he says. But Friday, Matheson abandoned those plans and said he will now vote no.

Matheson's amendments were virtual copies of elements of the Senate Healthcare reform bill, and as such were a transparent maneuver to look like he was actually doing something besides following the interests of IHC, who has donated handsomely to the campaign to get their boy Jim re-elected next year. To hear what real constituents think, listen to the podcast of KCPW's Politics Up Close for Friday Nov. 6. Judi Hilman, executive director of the Utah Health Policy Project, nailed the destructiveness of Matheson's tactics as anti-Progressive.

Today,Barack Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize!

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Date Published: Oct 09, 2009 - 6:54 am

Op-ed in the Boston Globe:

They're called micro-scripts, and they are the lethal weapons in any war of words or ideas. They work because people love to repeat them as much as hear them. [...] They're more than sound bites — they are idea bites. [...]

Consider some of the phrases the right is using to derail health care legislation: "Death panels," "pull the plug on grandma," "the efficiency of the post office with the compassion of the IRS," "rationed care," "socialized medicine," "government care," "it's the French plan," "Obamacare," and on and on.

And what is the left saying? Stuff like: "What they say isn't true. If you have health coverage today, your plan will not be worse." That isn't going to beat death panels.

Even after nearly everyone in the Democratic Party read the books on power language by George Lakoff and Frank Luntz, they still don't get it.

Moral hazard is the idea that when individuals and executives are protected from punishment for their bad judgments and risk-taking, they will continue such behavior in the future.

Moral hazard is repeatedly held up by Republicans and health insurance companies, as the reason that universal affordable healthcare is a BAD IDEA. The rationale goes like this:

If you think of insurance as producing wasteful consumption of medical services, then the fact that there are forty-five million Americans without health insurance is no longer an immediate cause for alarm. After all, it’s not as if the uninsured never go to the doctor. They spend, on average, $934 a year on medical care. A moral-hazard theorist would say that they go to the doctor when they really have to. Those of us with private insurance, by contrast, consume $2,347 worth of health care a year. If a lot of that extra $1,413 is waste, then maybe the uninsured person is the truly efficient consumer of health care.

Yup, our Legislature will argue with straight faces that we'd go to the hospital instead of playing golf, if they make healthcare too cheap.

Interestingly, Republicans and too many Democrats seem to be blind to moral hazard created by deregulation. For example: If the US Dept of Agriculture had the staff to test our ground meat processors and the mandate to shut down Cargill or Tyson after, say, two successive E Coli contamination events within 3 years, that might reduce the incentive to value profits over the health of the American public.

Were you under the impression that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspected the meat we eat? Or that hamburgers labelled "beef" contain only beef? Wrong and Wrong. USDA "allows [hamburger] grinders to devise their own safety plans", and merely "encouraged them to test the ingredients first."

Michael Moss's expose of commercial hamburger meat producers details the history of the hamburger that sent a 22 year-old dance instructor into a coma for 9 weeks and left her paralyzed:

Confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin.

Date Published: Oct 05, 2009 - 7:34 am

Op-ed from Robert W. Robertson Jr., M.D., in the LA Times:

1. The uninsured numbers are constantly increasing.

2. The unreimbursed expenses incurred by hospitals in treating those ever-increasing numbers of the uninsured are constantly increasing.
   
3. Hospitals must increase their charges in order to cover the ever-increasing costs of treating the uninsured.
   
4. Medical insurance companies must increase the premiums of those they insure in order to pay for the increased hospital charges when their insureds seek treatment.
   
5. Each time insurance premiums increase, another portion of the population opts out of carrying insurance. Individuals or companies reach a point, finally, when they can no longer afford insurance, and individual policyholders or employees of companies which drop their benefits enter into the pool of the uninsured.
   
6. More uninsured people = increased, unreimbursed hospital costs = increased hospital charges = increased insurance premiums = more uninsured people.... The upward spiral is incessant.

The pressure created by the ever-increasing number of the uninsured is the driving force behind the ever-increasing cost of medical care in the United States. That force is unrelenting. It can only accelerate. It has created a system which is unsustainable.

The only solution, Dr. Robertson says, is to bring all the uninsured into the system. But, I would add, health insurance has to be made affordable for those who currently can't afford it. Simply mandating that people buy insurance won't cut it. If you can't afford insurance, you can't afford the fine either.

Musings by Hunter at Daily Kos:

If health insurance companies ran the mail service, you wouldn't know what it would cost to mail a package, because nobody involved would be able to tell you, even if you spent the better part of a week on the phone with them. You would know what it cost you one only after you received the bill for mailing it. This bill would come one month later, but additional charges would be added a month after that, more additions would come two months later, the total would be revised again in four months, and would be adjusted again after six months. If you want to complain, knock yourself out, but chances are you won't even remember what it was you mailed back in the summer of 2008 or whenever-that-was. [...]

If health insurance companies ran the mail service, your contract to have packages delivered would stand a chance of being revoked if you actually mailed one. [...]

And your package delivery service wouldn't just idly sit by and send what you wanted them to send. They'd tell you want you wanted to send. Flowers are nice, but couldn't you just send a card? Cookies are a bit much, don't you think?

Paul Craig Roberts was an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, and is called the "Father of Reaganomics." He writes about The Healthcare Deceit at Counterpunch:

The current health care “debate” shows how far gone representative government is in the United States. Members of Congress represent the powerful interest groups that fill their campaign coffers, not the people who vote for them. The health care bill is not about health care. It is about protecting and increasing the profits of the insurance companies. The main feature of the health care bill is the “individual mandate,” which requires everyone in America to buy health insurance. Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont), a recipient of millions in contributions over his career from the insurance industry, proposes to impose up to a $3,800 fine on Americans who fail to purchase health insurance....

Date Published: Sep 18, 2009 - 8:29 pm

Salon:

By 1963, Skousen's extremism was costing him. No conservative organization with any mainstream credibility wanted anything to do with him. Members of the ultraconservative American Security Council kicked him out because they felt he had "gone off the deep end." One ASC member who shared this opinion was William C. Mott, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. Mott found Skousen "money mad ... totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends."

When Skousen aligned himself with Robert Welch's charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy," the last of Skousen's dwindling corporate clients dumped him. [...]

In 1981, Skousen published "The 5,000 Year Leap," the book for which, thanks to Beck, he is now best known. But it wasn't that Skousen book that made the biggest headline in the 1980s. Toward the end of Reagan's second term, Skousen became the center of a minor controversy when state legislators in California approved the official use of another of his books, the 1982 history text "The Making of America." Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen's book characterized African-American children as "pickaninnies" and described American slave owners as the "worst victims" of the slavery system. Quoting the historian Fred Albert Shannon, "The Making of America" explained that "[slave] gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains."

Beck and Skousen make Limbaugh look rational.

Right now a huge argument is going on about whether to include a public option in healthcare reform legislation. Policymakers should understand the views of U.S. doctors on this - and finally we have reliable information on how doctors view the public option. According to the New England Journal of Medicine Sept 14, the majority of U.S. doctors support a public option combined with private healthcare plans.

Over 5000 doctors were asked to choose between 3 options:

• public plus private options – people younger than 65 could choose to enroll in private plans or in a Medicare-like public plan
• private options only, with tax credits or subsidies to help low-income people buy private coverage
• public option only, eliminating private plans and covering everyone through a single Medicare-like plan

Interesting how upset the Mad TeaParty gets about the Trillion Dollar Deficit NOW, and how silent they were when the GOP was legislating that deficit. War costs keep on growing for a lifetime. Michael Winerip on the continuing drain on US healthcare from the Vietnam war four decades later:

On so many fronts, the country still pays for the Vietnam war. A veteran diagnosed with PTSD may receive over $3000/month if judged 100 % disabled. That stipend comes out of the veterans compensation and pension system, which this year is expected to pay $44.7 billion for ...benefits, with the biggest share going to veterans of Vietnam and the current conflicts.

Date Published: Sep 13, 2009 - 9:32 am

My anecdotal, small-sample poll of friends who are Utah Independents and mellow Democrats elicited extremely favorable reviews of President Obama's speech on his healthcare plan. He was specially praised for clarity ("he used short words and simple sentences") and being very effective in communicating exactly what his plan was - and what it was not. It was welcomed as an effective counter to the right-wing raving that's been dominating the news. This has cheered me up enormously. It appears that the President was very effective with an important target audience - independents and relatively disengaged voters who have health insurance.

BTW, for those who were mightily offended by Joe Wilson (R -SC) calling the President a liar, here's the link to contribute to his opponent in the midterm election. His opponent in the Congressional elections of 2010 is Rob Miller, a former Marine and Iraq war veteran. Hey, is he related to OUR Utah Rob Miller?