Fuck you, Larry Summers

health, education and social protection need MORE capitalism...?

Lawrence Summers: We need smart reinvention not destruction

Lawrence Summers opens an FT series on the crisis in capitalism, its failings, challenges, weaknesses and the prospects for reform.

It is not so much the most capitalist parts of the contemporary economy but the least – those concerned with health, education and social protection – that are in most need of reinvention, he says.

why does this total disgrace to humanity keep getting a forum...?

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A headline to gag a maggot

gee... how nice for them...

Health Insurers Making Record Profits as Many Postpone Care

The nation’s major health insurers are barreling into a third year of record profits, enriched in recent months by a lingering recessionary mind-set among Americans who are postponing or forgoing medical care.

[...]

Yet the companies continue to press for higher premiums, even though their reserve coffers are flush with profits and shareholders have been rewarded with new dividends. Many defend proposed double-digit increases in the rates they charge, citing a need for protection against any sudden uptick in demand once people have more money to spend on their health, as well as the rising price of care.

it would be hard to swallow news like this under the best of circumstances but, reading this while sitting at my desk here in kabul, it's particularly nauseating... our super-rich elites continue to vacuum up every last teeny-tiny bit of money and power from the struggling masses and screw the common good and any semblance of "we're all in this together" thinking...

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"A naked attempt to redistribute yet more money to the country's rich at the expense of everyone else"

i don't recognize my own country any more... it's being run entirely by the super-rich, elites hell-bent on getting every scrap of power and money into their own greedy hands...

Government by People Who Hate You

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan put out a budget proposal last week that will leave the vast majority of future retirees without decent health care by ending Medicare as we know it. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis, most middle-income retirees would have to pay almost half of their income to purchase a Medicare equivalent insurance package by 2030. They would be paying much more than half of their income in later years.

This sort of broadside against the living standards of the middle class might have been expected to draw an outraged response in a nation that exalts the lifestyle and values of the middle class. Instead, the punditry rallied around Mr. Ryan's plan to deal with the problem of runaway entitlement spending, crediting it for being "serious" even if they did not embrace all the details.

If there is any doubt that our political system is controlled by an elite who is completely removed from the bulk of the population, this response to the Ryan plan ended it. There is nothing at all serious about the Ryan plan. It is a naked attempt to redistribute yet more money to the country's rich at the expense of everyone else.

why should we constantly be fighting off attacks on our livelihoods and the basic security of our lives that should never, ever be in question...? why are we having to fight for every micron of our dignity, our humanity, our future...? when did my country turn so terribly petty, so unconscionably mean, so totally focused on greed, power and money...? yes, i know it has always been that way to some extent - perhaps to a large extent - but now it's nothing but a bald-faced "fuck you, i've got mine" mentality...

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Using pharmacies as basic health care resources

i just love the way this article treats the using of pharmacies as basic health care outlets as some brand-new innovation that will revolutionize health care access while completely failing to point out that the rest of the world has been using pharmacies in that capacity for freakin' ever...

in my travels, i have had several occasions to drop by pharmacies in other countries to ask for a consult on some minor health problem and have always been treated to fast, accurate and free advice... not only that, but many medicines available only through a prescription in the u.s. are available over the counter in most pharmacies around the world, often at surprisingly low prices...

As the debate over health-care reform reveals extensive unmet needs for better basic medical services in the United States, an unexpected player with the power to drive significant change may be as close as the corner drugstore. With new incentives and business strategies coming into play to repair and improve the health-care system, local pharmacies are positioned to help meet the top two goals of reform: providing convenient, expanded access to medical care and controlling costs.

Pharmacies — many of them operated by large publicly traded companies such as Walgreens, CVS, and Walmart — have already begun to reach beyond their traditional role as pill dispensers to meet new demand from patients. Consumers, who have become more responsible for their own medical care in recent years, are turning to retail pharmacies for help in managing medical conditions and their out-of-pocket health-care spending. Walmart’s US$4 generic drugs program, for example, which offers a wide range of prescription medication and 1,000 over-the-counter medications at $4 for a 30-day supply, has had a major impact on making medication more affordable — especially because other pharmacies have quickly followed suit.

The innovation does not stop at pricing. Drugstores are experimenting with in-store clinics, wellness programs, health screenings, and disease management services. In one notable program, the city of Asheville, N.C., has been using local pharmacists to provide free counseling and coaching to diabetes patients, generating substantial savings and health improvement. More recently, the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration launched a similar experiment dubbed the “Patient Safety and Clinical Pharmacy Services Collaborative” in an attempt to integrate evidence-based clinical pharmacy services into the management of high-risk and high-cost patients.

it makes me crazy when i see publications and authors either deliberately or blindly ignoring reality and treating the u.s. as an island of all there is to be known... people in the u.s. have no idea just how backward we are in so many areas... the media should live up to its responsibility to present information in context and not to foster the kind of smug arrogance for which we americans have become famous around the globe...

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Domestic spending freeze...? Obama's jumped the shark...

when i first read the story about obama maybe, possibly, declaring a spending freeze, i thought it might be just a rumor... this morning's headlines made it official...

Obama to Seek Freeze on Some Spending to Trim Deficits

President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that, an initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit, administration officials said Monday.

i'm no fan of the ballooning deficit and i'm certainly no fan of an increasingly worthless fiat currency that's leaping off the printing presses so fast it's breathtaking... but, in the midst of a super-rich, elite-created economic storm in which businesses, states, and millions of citizens are suffering through furloughs, layoffs, foreclosures, unemployment and the complete wastage of the middle class, to put a freeze on domestic spending while still allowing free rein to our totally out-of-control defense and war spending is perhaps the most unconscionable thing done yet among the many disturbingly unconscionable things done by this president...

i'm glad to see krugman shares some of my utter dismay...

Obama Liquidates Himself

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks don’t count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.

this is one of the reasons i've slowed way down on blogging... my psyche is evidently too fragile at the moment to be able to regurgitate abominations of this magnitude...

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Obama received over $20M for the 2008 campaign from the healthcare industry, THREE TIMES more than McCain

ah... change... ya gotta love it...

Obama received $20 million from healthcare industry in 2008 campaign

While some sunlight has been shed on the hefty sums shoveled into congressional campaign coffers in an effort to influence the Democrats' massive healthcare bill, little attention has been focused on the far larger sums received by President Barack Obama while he was a candidate in 2008.

A new figure, based on an exclusive analysis created for Raw Story by the Center for Responsive Politics, shows that President Obama received a staggering $20,175,303 from the healthcare industry during the 2008 election cycle, nearly three times the amount of his presidential rival John McCain. McCain took in $7,758,289, the Center found.

The new figure, obtained by Raw Story through an independent custom research request performed by the Center for Responsive Politics -- a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics -- is the most comprehensive breakdown yet available of healthcare industry contributions to Obama during the 2008 election cycle.

Currently, the Center's website shows that Obama received $19,462,986 from the health sector, which includes health professionals ($11.7m), health services/HMOs ($1.4m), hospitals/nursing homes ($3.3m) and pharmaceuticals/health products ($2.1m). Miscellaneous health donations (from which Obama received $860,411) are also factored into the current total health sector numbers but are not accessible on the site.

ya see why my posting has all but dried up...? it's really hard to deal with the steady drumbeat of grim news... when the vast majority of the billions and billions of people in this world are desperate for principled leadership to empower them in their efforts to make their lives better, to help them put food on their tables and clothes on the backs of their kids, is THIS what we should be reading about the "leader of the free world"...? i don't think so...

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Obama’s faux populism

robert scheer...

Barack Obama’s faux populism is beginning to grate, and when yet another one of those “we the people” e-mails from the president landed on my screen as I was fishing around for a column subject, I came unglued. It is one thing to rob us blind by rewarding the power elite that created our problems but quite another to sugarcoat it in the rhetoric of a David taking on those Goliaths.

In each of the three most important areas of policy with which he has dealt, Obama speaks in the voice of the little people’s champion, but his actions cater fully to the demands of the most powerful economic interests.

With his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, he has given the military-industrial complex an excuse for the United States to carry on in spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined, without a credible military adversary in sight. His response to the banking meltdown was to continue George W. Bush’s massive giveaway of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, and his health care reform has all the earmarks of a boondoggle for the medical industry profiteers.

generally speaking, faux populism aside, obama started to grate on me quite some time ago... yes, the sell-out to wall street, the health care providers, big pharma and the corporate military industrial government complex is disappointing enough but when added to the dogged insistence on perpetuating virtually all of bush-era torture, detention, and surveillance policies it becomes positively galling...

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Greedy big pharma bastards

like they aren't already hauling in money fast enough...

Even as drug makers promise to support Washington’s health care overhaul by shaving $8 billion a year off the nation’s drug costs after the legislation takes effect, the industry has been raising its prices at the fastest rate in years.

In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992.

The drug trend is distinctly at odds with the direction of the Consumer Price Index, which has fallen by 1.3 percent in the last year.

check out this load of crap...

[D]rug companies say they are having to raise prices to maintain the profits necessary to invest in research and development of new drugs as the patents on many of their most popular drugs are set to expire over the next few years.

ya know what...? there's no longer even a graceful ATTEMPT to disguise naked greed... sure, the drug companies will put out the obligatory totally bullshit statement about WHY they're having to raise prices but it's all eyewash... they might just as well drop all pretense and give you and me the famous one-finger salute because THAT'S what they're really communicating...

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Some real data on U.S. healthcare costs - $800B annually and for WHAT?

reuters has actually done some research...

One example -- a paper-based system that discourages sharing of medical records accounts for 6 percent of annual overspending.

"It is waste when caregivers duplicate tests because results recorded in a patient's record with one provider are not available to another or when medical staff provides inappropriate treatment because relevant history of previous treatment cannot be accessed," the report reads.

Some other findings in the report from Thomson Reuters, the parent company of Reuters:

* Unnecessary care such as the overuse of antibiotics and lab tests to protect against malpractice exposure makes up 37 percent of healthcare waste or $200 to $300 a year.

* Fraud makes up 22 percent of healthcare waste, or up to $200 billion a year in fraudulent Medicare claims, kickbacks for referrals for unnecessary services and other scams.

* Administrative inefficiency and redundant paperwork account for 18 percent of healthcare waste.

* Medical mistakes account for $50 billion to $100 billion in unnecessary spending each year, or 11 percent of the total.

* Preventable conditions such as uncontrolled diabetes cost $30 billion to $50 billion a year.

"The average U.S. hospital spends one-quarter of its budget on billing and administration, nearly twice the average in Canada," reads the report, citing dozens of other research papers.

"American physicians spend nearly eight hours per week on paperwork and employ 1.66 clerical workers per doctor, far more than in Canada," it says, quoting a 2003 New England Journal of Medicine paper by Harvard University researcher Dr. Steffie Woolhandler.

notably not chronicled and all the more visible due to its absence: healthcare industry profits...

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Olbermann's extended Special Comment on health care reform

Part l

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

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And we would find this abominable state of affairs in the least bit suprising because...?

is the u.s. a great country or what...?

America's healthcare industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to block the introduction of public medical insurance and stall other reforms promised by Barack Obama. The campaign against the president has been waged in part through substantial donations to key politicians.

Supporters of radical reform of healthcare say legislation emerging from the US Senate reflects the financial power of vested interests ‑ principally insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms and hospitals ‑ that have worked to stop far-reaching changes threatening their profits.

The industry and interest groups have spent $380m (£238m) in recent months influencing healthcare legislation through lobbying, advertising and in direct political contributions to members of Congress. The largest contribution, totalling close to $1.5m, has gone to the chairman of the senate committee drafting the new law.

ya gotta love it... the super-rich elites sure do know how to get their needs met and screw the rest of us...

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We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon

gore vidal in the uk times via information clearing house...

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.” America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”

His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.” He retains some optimism about Obama “because he doesn’t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.”

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Vidal now believes, as he did originally, Clinton would be the better president. “Hillary knows more about the world and what to do with the generals. History has proven when the girls get involved, they’re good at it. Elizabeth I knew Raleigh would be a good man to give a ship to.”The Republicans will win the next election, Vidal believes; though for him there is little difference between the parties. “Remember the coup d’etat of 2000 when the Supreme Court fixed the selection, not election, of the stupidest man in the country, Mr Bush.”

[...]

America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

Vidal adds menacingly: “Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”

nothing i can add to this, that's for sure...

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Dear Senator Reid

Dear Senator Reid,

This communication is prompted by the recent Senate rejection of the public option in the health care reform bill, but it also expresses my profound frustration and outright disgust with both you and the rest of our country's so-called representative leadership in any sort of viable domestic policy.

Furthermore, I am writing you from a vantage point nearly 10,000 miles away in Kabul, Afghanistan, where I witness daily the abject failure of my country's foreign policy.

The United States was founded on the principle of honoring, protecting and ensuring the common good, not only for U.S. citizens but also, in whatever constructive and peaceful means we might have at our disposal, the common good of the rest of the world.

Senator Reid, the United States, on a daily basis, systematically demonstrates its complete and total rejection of that founding principle. What the United States honors, protects and ensures is the health and welfare of those who can pay the most for it. It is not democracy, it is capitalism run amok.

And it is not just you, sir. It is all of your Senate and House colleagues who have made it clear, time and again, that you do not have my interests nor the interests of any of the great body of your constituents at heart.

Do the honorable thing, sir. Admit you have forsaken your sacred duty to the country you purport to serve and step down. If there is indeed a god, perhaps your colleagues will follow your example.

Sincerely,

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Juan Cole's take on the health care situation

kinda tells you everything you need to know, doesn't it...?

Here is the ranking by health researchers of 19 industrialized nations by how well their health systems intervene to stop preventable deaths. The US is now dead last at number 19, below not only France and Japan but also Denmark and New Zealand.

The US has fallen four places in the past decade, so things are getting worse in this regard.

1. France (64.8 preventable death per 100,000 persons)
2. Japan (71.2)
3. Australia (71.3)
4. Spain
5. Italy
6. Canada
7. Norway
8. Netherlands
9. Sweden
10. Greece
11. Austria
12. Germany
13. Finland
14. New Zealand
15. Denmark
16. Britain
17. Ireland
18. Portugal
19. United States (109.7 preventable deaths per 100,000 persons)

The researchers concluded that the lack of access to health insurance on the part of 47 million Americans contributed to this dismal showing.

and there ya have it...

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A very personal take on Obama's health care speech last night

from a good friend in illinois...

I thought he delivered well on a complex issue. The Repubs. I felt were an embarrassing lot - or you can drop the "embarr" part. I do think that BO should refrain from hinting at dubya's faults though as he goes forward. That tain't going to play in Peoria too much longer. Let history speak for itself now - that will show George's incompetence soon enough. Liked how he ended it in speaking about how this issue defines our character.

I have a BIG stake in this. I lose my health coverage at the end of Oct. I've already tried to get it through AARP and Aetna. Told them I had RA [Rheumatoid Arthritis] and the person read a speech off a card how they were sorry, but they could not offer me insurance without an explanation. I told her to stop reading the speech and asked her if I was being denied due to my RA. She simply said "yes". So that means I'd have no access to the vital drugs I need in 6 weeks if something doesn't change and I'd be in severe pain that would eventually cripple me. Doesn't matter if I could afford to pay or not. And that's why these kind of changes are needed.

as a side note of interest, this is from a guy who voted for mccain...

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Alex Gibney and Bill Moyers on "Money-Driven Medicine"

as always, bill moyers manages to burrow in to the guts of what's really happening in contemporary issues...

here's a trailer for the documentary, money-driven medicine, that was offered on bill moyers journal in shortened form...



a snippet from the documentary's producer, alex gibney...

The fact is that, in a mixed system where private enterprise and public monies inhabit the same space, inefficiency and extravagance are profitable. Remember the military industrial complex? Private contractors make profits by charging the government for cost overruns. Defense contractors call this "cost plus." Pharma calls it "No Public Option."

Why is it that free marketeers are so afraid of competing with a government program which, in their religion, is inherently inefficient? Well who wants to compete with a public option that won't take 10-20% in overhead, lobbying costs, administration costs and profit? That's my bonus, dude. Whoops, I mean, I have a fiduciary responsibility to deliver the highest possible return to my shareholders.

watch it... read it... it's some truly infuriating stuff that unsurprisingly validates most everything we already know...

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Government of, by and for the corporations

thank god somebody can still muster some snark...





thanks to raw story...

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The health care public option for dummies

i just ran across this on daily kos...

thanks to engio and andy lubershane at youtube via tunesmith at daily kos...

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Lede to Krugman in the NYT: "There’s a growing sense among progressives that they have been duped by President Obama"

duped by obama...? uh, no shit... bait and switch is more like it... torture, indefinite detention, bailouts, toadying to republicans, obsessive dedication to bipartisanship when the opposition party is doing nothing but crapping down your throat... so far, obama is definitely the biggest disappointment in my soon-to-be 61 years...

paul krugman...

According to news reports, the Obama administration — which seemed, over the weekend, to be backing away from the “public option” for health insurance — is shocked and surprised at the furious reaction from progressives.

Well, I’m shocked and surprised at their shock and surprise.

A backlash in the progressive base — which pushed President Obama over the top in the Democratic primary and played a major role in his general election victory — has been building for months. The fight over the public option involves real policy substance, but it’s also a proxy for broader questions about the president’s priorities and overall approach.

[...]

[O]n such fraught questions as torture and indefinite detention, the president has dismayed progressives with his reluctance to challenge or change Bush administration policy.

And then there’s the matter of the banks.

I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing. But I’ve had many conversations with people who voted for Mr. Obama, yet dismiss the stimulus as a total waste of money. When I press them, it turns out that they’re really angry about the bailouts rather than the stimulus — but that’s a distinction lost on most voters.

So there’s a growing sense among progressives that they have, as my colleague Frank Rich suggests, been punked. And that’s why the mixed signals on the public option created such an uproar.

[...]

But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will “pull the plug on grandma,” and two days later the White House declares that it’s still committed to working with him.

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

it's official... i've just checked out of the hope hotel...

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Great googley-moogley...! Are the Dems finally getting the message...?

the message that, given the maniacal, obsessed, scorched earth crowd that dares to call itself the party of abraham lincoln, "bipartisanship" is a praiseworthy but totally empty concept...? after eight years of the bush administration where the dems rolled over and exposed their vulnerable bellies and jugular veins to the rabid, frothing repub attack dogs, even with a democratic congressional majority since 2006, followed by a disgusting encore of the same pathetic behavior since january, behavior encouraged and, in fact, championed by none less than a democratic president, do ya s'pose our dems are FINALLY getting tired of being patsies in the repub puppet theater...?

from raw story...

The White House and congressional Democrats, fed up with a failed effort to woo Republican support, may proceed without the opposition party in passing comprehensive healthcare reform, reports signaled Wednesday.

Speaking to the New York Times, White House powerbroker and chief of staff Rahm Emanuel declared that the Republican party was standing in the way of progress. His remarks seem to mark a shift from more conciliatory language previously being used by the White House.

“The Republican leadership,” Emanuel quipped, “has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama’s health care proposal is more important for their political goals than solving the health insurance problems that Americans face every day.”

Democrats can pass healthcare reform without Republicans using a rule that allows them to pass a measure with a simple majority, or 50 votes. This method was used to pass President George W. Bush’s tax cuts.

republicans...? fuck 'em, i say... let's try working for the common good of the american people... whaddaya say...?

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