Category Archives: Home Truths

Items posted here are about observations on society

Healthcare in America : Journeys Large and Small

07 Monday Nov 2016

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Recently on Facebook, a friend I’ve known only a short while posted her story about the old days in America when any hope of health insurance was through employment.  Denise, I knew from the first time I met her, had been widowed at a young age with two little girls she needed to support.  It resonated for me as my own mother, widowed at 42, was suddenly thrown into a foreign world of trying to provide for my sister’s college education that was just one year done, my older brother who was struggling with 15 year old angst, and me at 10, emotionally devastated at what had happened.  When one parent dies, children often feel a knock-on effect as the survivor has to deal with the larger complexities of life and bills, as well as attempt to comfort all of us.

This is more of a tale about how we as a nation have argued back and forth about what should be the healthcare delivery system and insurance offerings.  There are a lot of problems with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) but for some of us, this imperfect and at times, aggravating bureaucratic system has been firmly a step in the right direction.  Denise wrote:

Just a quick story: I’m a widow who is a mom with two kids. When my husband was dying from cancer, his amazing employers helped us out. When we got the results, I knew we had to sell the house because I couldn’t afford cobra (health insurance) and my mortgage. I told him the day he got the worst news of his life that we were going to sell and fight for his life. Well I am still grateful that my husband didn’t work for a corporate company. They allowed him to die in peace and pain free while he fought his biggest battle. They sort of overlooked the insurance for a bit and allowed us to stay covered for the rest of the year. I went to college full time and the university allowed me to buy health insurance. I graduated in 2006. So I tried to buy insurance and discovered as a person with two part time jobs that not only I couldn’t afford it, but I was not able to purchase insurance. I had to join a self employed agency to purchase insurance for me, Lauren and Alexa. I had to pay 100 a month for that privilege. Then I went on to pay 1000 a month for catastrophic health insurance. What that means is we were not covered unless we were in dire, dire circumstances. I accumulated so much debt for our regular medical expenses and paid 100 percent for my daughters’ checkups. And when I was sick, I waited it out. I got really sick. I didn’t go because I didn’t want another financial burden for my family. ( do you see this insane juggle: my health, my life over money?). Justify that for me please. I waited it out and got fatally sick and probably caused more damage. I actually with a huge bill on my back survived. I had to leave my jobs but I survived. I’m grateful. But then I realized I still had children dependent on me and couldn’t work right away. But this time, I had a preexisting condition. That means my insurance alone was 1600 a month. And theirs, another 2600 a month with part time Jobs. 4200 month x 12. Today I have insurance. My daughters have it too. And when I see a deductible, I see it as a luxury. I don’t engage in conversations about health insurance because I’m incredibly emotional, mostly with gratitude, that it’s even a dialogue because there wasn’t one when I needed it most.

On the eve of a new president being elected in the U.S., it is fervently hoped that while a lot is not well with the existing system, largely due to the inherent flaw that allowed private health insurance get into the thick of it and rig it for their continued benefit and ineffective checks on cost and coverage, it is certainly hoped that we can avoid going back to the bad old days of being squeezed dry in the name of profits.

My own mother doesn’t seem to have had as much worry about our health in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which can only mean that the tipping point came within the frame of the Reagan Revolution of dismantling any government oversight in protecting consumers, through the “Greed is Good” era that still pervades today.

Without a renewed effort to make access to health care easy and guaranteed to all, we will weaken as a nation.  Even if we receive health care, the expenses will bankrupt most families.

Delegates, Schmelegates

09 Thursday Jun 2016

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There’s one primary left to go and neither Bernie Sanders nor Hillary Clinton have the required 2382 delegates secured for the outright nomination as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency.

This did not stop the media outlets prior to the big Tuesday primaries in NJ, California, Montana, etc. from crowning Hillary the nominee presumptive, based on the party elite known as super delegates who are scheduled to vote at the Democratic Party Convention on July 25th.  The lion’s share of these super delegates are indicated as backers of Hillary and therefore based on their status, they are presume to be casting their official votes on that date.

Maybe the media should use the phrase “nominee assumptive”, because that is really what it feels like.

A lot has been written about the history of the Democratic Party super delegates, how they came to exist.  The short version is that the 1968 contested convention would have seen the person with the most primary votes, following Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, was Eugene McCarthy who was a very far left individual, or as the mainstream party would like to think of him, a very scary person.  So the party quickly kluged together some rules to set the current Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey, as the party’s preferred nominee and despite that going horribly wrong, went on to ensure that this sort of democratic nonsense didn’t happen again.  So there are now a big wedge of party long-timers and office holders that make up one-third of the available delegate count.

And this is where I like to veer off since I have had too much time to watch the goings-on this election cycle (and waiting for the GOP to come up with their own super delegate process in light of the disaster that is Donald Trump).  The whole thing is really a farce because we really have gone back to the old smoke-filled rooms of party wheelers and dealers that decide who will be their nominal leader to run for the U.S. Presidency.

Because that is what this whole state primary crap has been about: it isn’t a Presidential Primary, it is a bastardized version of the UK’s parliamentary system where party insiders agree on who is the best leader among them strategically to get the population ginned up to vote for their parliamentary members.  Most people in the UK are automatically registered to vote, they don’t have to declare any affiliation whatsoever, UNLESS they want to be a part of the crowd who like to horse-trade and lay odds on who the best party leader might be to get them all into parliament.  The party leader then becomes the de facto Prime Minister (well, after a short visit with HRM at Buck House to be asked to form Her Majesty’s next government, while a corgi nibbles the PM-presumptive’s ankles).

Until about 80-odd years ago, this was how American Presidential elections were largely designed.  Then someone mumbled something about “maybe we should be more democratic and let people have a vote on this” and out popped the state primary system that kicked into high gear about 50 years later.  But the only thing that has really changed is the outrageous amount of money and time that this all now takes, a gravy train for the corporate media (who have clearly shown their preference for Hillary as a friendly politician, one who claims Wall Street investment bankers to be constituents equal to the struggling family of 4 who need to work several jobs just to keep head above water).  Sanders might have them see, oh horrors! the re-introduction of the Fairness Doctrine in reporting that was gutted by Reagan.

So, I think it is high time that we call these primaries for what they really are which are not Presidential at all but a selection of the party leader and if the great unwashed don’t get it right, well, let’s ensure that there are byzantine rules and a big clot of people we can trust who will reverse this silliness.

Hillary, under this system, was the nominee assumptive all along.  So it would have been far kinder to just say party members only can vote across the board on each side (as well as any formally designated other parties) and then have a general election against the pick of each.  Sanders could have run as his own party selection, and he has shown that with the right message and leadership, he could do it without a huge party treasury or other buyers and sellers of the people’s government.

Of course, this poses a problem for both parties–they’ve alienated so many over the past 40 years that most people refuse to be declared a party affiliate.  What to do?  Frankly, the actions of the Democratic Party in the past several months has probably only enhanced this effect, and the Republican Party is quite possibly already in hospice care.

Maybe we really are a democracy because it has long been said that democracy is a very messy process, and we certainly are in the biggest mess right now, hoping that what we did to get us here is what we try to use to get us out.

As Paul Hollywood of the Great British Bake Off might say when he sees a baking disaster ahead, “Good luck with that.”

 

 

American Exceptionalism or Bust

22 Tuesday Mar 2016

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I just posted recently about how much I felt enriched by the introduction to a fabulous book, The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby, by taking the time each week to tune into Bill Moyers program on PBS years ago.  Another epiphany came with a second book, The Limits of Power by Andrew Bacevich, who also appeared as a guest at a later point in the 2008 US Presidential election year–at the time, the election had yet to be held.  You can watch the complete interview in two parts, here and here

It was the first I ever heard of the phrase, American exceptionalism, and it continues to ring horribly in my ears because there are those who would still believe it after multiple military adventures in poor, primarily Islamic countries in the name of a War on Terror.  This is Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again”, painting a picture of a relentless army of angry, violent soldiers who will flood the world, including America itself.  Now, it is said that he probably isn’t REALLY going to do this, but do we really want to chance it?

The dilemma we continue to have in this country is beautifully summed up in this initial point made by Bacevich in this interview.  He says:

I think there’s a tendency on the part of policy makers and probably a tendency on the part of many Americans to think that the problems we face are problems that are out there somewhere, beyond our borders. And that if we can fix those problems, then we’ll be able to continue the American way of life as it has long existed. I think it’s fundamentally wrong. Our major problems are at home.

Ironically, he is pointing out something that really was recognized over 60 years earlier by none other than FDR, when he proposed his Second Bill of Rights.

What most people would like to think is that all can be good and it won’t cost anything in terms of taxes or other money, and I think this is where Bacevich completes the vision of FDR because there would be some degree of sacrifice among everyone to achieve a nourishing society for all. It ain’t cheap. But I think we can do without relying on cheap, tatty goods to make up for poor education, poor healthcare delivery systems, poor wages for the majority once the extremely wealthy are paying into the services that so many people need. Occasional charity is insufficient, it does not really build a solid society that has truly vibrant exchanges of goods and services, one that is sustainable.  What flummoxes me is how people point to Henry Ford paying his workers well enough that they could afford to buy his automobiles, and yet going into paroxysms of indignity to think that a school teacher earns more than $40,000 a year to start.  Seriously?  These teachers are often paying for school materials because the district budget has no money for them.

I will doubtless return to this topic when I can, it is too important to ignore.

Election 2016 and the State of Things

20 Sunday Mar 2016

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A day or so ago, I responded to a post by Robert Reich about the phenomena of Donald Drumpf followers who seem to have some sort of dissociative disorder when it came to seeing things as they really are in favor of the drumbeat of “Make America Great Again”.  I seem to have struck a nerve, and one of the readers pointed out what she really liked in my post which is this paragraph:

Seriously, I think a lot has to do with the deterioration of educational quality in teaching critical and nuanced thinking, the rise of money-driven media that cares nothing about truth, and fanatical religious preaching that is tinged, oddly enough, with views of Armageddon while in the next breath teaches people that God loves rich people. I suppose it also has a lot to do with individualism on steroids, that being islands to ourselves and acting like entitled two year olds in public is something to be proud of as opposed to caring about others. Every society has its outliers, like the Dutch right winger and Anders Breivik in Norway, however other countries don’t hold them up as examples to follow as a general rule. Europe has suffered a great deal at the hands of mavericks who would tear society apart for power and mostly have learned the lessons.

My words are really from my understanding from Susan Jacoby’s book, The Age of American Unreason, which I read several years ago.  I learned about the book while watching Bill Moyer’s interview with Jacoby which you can see here.  I learned from this conversation between these two people how the idea of the President as Commander-in-Chief has become ubiquitous in viewing the Presidency, and how it “militarizes” the leader of this nation, as though that person is just the über general of us all.  Sounds like a small country dictator who rules with absolute power over impoverished and poorly educated people.  Does that sound good?  I don’t think so and I see why Jacoby hates it.  I’ve grown to hate it too.

There is so much to be plumbed from Jacoby’s book that I would highly recommend it to be read, especially in this election year, eight years after it first appeared on the scene–just prior to another election when America rejected dumb (Sarah Palin) and her knight-errant, John McCain, for a fresh new look to the Presidency.

Jacoby book

If I had had my way, this year’s presidential candidates would each have to undergo a 2 hour one-on-one interview with Bill Moyers in place of the ridiculous series of “pseudo-debates” that have occurred.  He would have separated the fools from the worthy contenders in short order.  But like a tree falling in a forest, would anyone have heard it?