by Mary Pitt
June 13, 2009
Don't look now but your base is slipping! You may ask anyone involved in the Katrina disaster how important those few little grains of sand sliding off to the side can be. Nobody seemed to notice when the levees that held back the waters of Lake Ponchartrain began deteriorating but we all now know that they were the precursers to calamity.
In the same way, a few of your supporters were disgruntled when your first cabinet appointees were simply re-treaded from the Bush and Clinton administrations. We can appreciate that you needed a few key people with experience from Day One but, rather than they adapting to your point of view, you appear to have accepted their influence to shift your own views to coincide with that of the leaders for whom they previously worked!
Your persistence in continuing the bail-out process begun by the Bush administration dislodged a few small grains of sand. Many others are watching as tightly as possible for signs of success from your own domestic stimulus plan. Meanwhile, there are those who really care about the sexual-orientation discrimination in the military and are watching as some highly trained, capable, and experienced people are being lost to the cause of world peace.
But the storm is building, Mr. President! On the streets of the nation, you can hear the complaints of the common people who have lost or will lose their jobs as well as their health insurance. They were watching as you held the conference on health care "reform". With absolutely no input from the people most affected by the decisions that they and you might make, they can see less of the vaunted "hope" which you sold them on your road to the White House.
But all is not lost! You and Mrs. Obama are well known for your work with the people in the inner city slums and you have each visited in the stricken factory towns of the nation. Perhaps you should send your emissaries out into the "real world" of the small villages that are peopled by the elderly and the working poor where the only jobs in the area moved to the cities before the owners moved them offshore. The mean age of the populace increases because the young just can't wait to grow up and move away to where the good jobs may be found.
In these little backwater places, particularly in the South and Republican Central states, these people are simply ignored. When an important figure appears in the vicinity, they see only the very wealthy and the politically prominent while the people whose voices you should hear remain at home, convinced that nobody wants to hear their opinions. You must reach down and let them know that the care of which they were so convinced on election day was really from the heart. Faith does wear a bit thin when the belly is growling.
We know that you have to try to put the world back together before we can move forward but if, in the process, more lives are decimated the nation as we know it will cease to exist. It is obvious that having a majority of Democrats in Congress is not enough so long as there are still too many Blue Dogs and "moderates" in those Houses, (the same people who rubber-stamped the wartime ambitions of President Bush), and those people must be replaced with some who are more forward-looking and progressive-minded.
Those of us who still cling to the hope with which we sent you to that Oval Office want to see you taking an active part in the off-year elections of 2010. Forget the old Party war-horses who have grown into a sense of entitlement and help us to get a few more of them replaced with fresh minds and fresh ideas to match your own. You see, your supporters are not all traditional Democrats, either. Many of the votes that were eventually cast for you were from previous supporters of Hillary Clinton but many others had begun with their hopes invested in other candidates. Democrats like Cynthia McKinney and Dennis Kucinich had, (and still have), a very strong attraction with their proposals. Others leaned toward Ron Paul and Ralph Nader. These are voters who will not stand solidly behind you until 2012 if they feel that you betrayed them.
It is unfortunate that you cannot, despite the immense task before you, ignore the pressures brought about by the imminence of the next election but you will need more than four years to solidify the changes that you are trying to institute. You must tend those levees and reinforce those little grains of sand so that they remain solidly in place. You must fight for the needed programs and refuse the many "compromises" that are offered by the opposition in the attempt to cripple your programs and defraud the people. You must let Congress know that we insist on doing things our way or not at all, and then bring the problem to the people in 2010 and inspire them to give you a more progressive Congress. Otherwise, you may find that your carefully-constructed levee wall fail you in 2012 and the Obama Administration will become an obscure footnote in the history of our nation.
The author is a very "with-it" old lady who aspires to bring a bit of truth, justice, and common sense to a nation that has lost touch with its humanity in the search for "societal perfection".
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Listen Up, Buster
by Mary Pitt
June 6, 2009
We, the people, are sick and tired of hearing that "single payer is off the table" in the same breath with "health care reform". Attempting to "repair" a broken-down old vehicle without considering the possibility of a replacement as an alternative simply makes no financial sense. The same is true with trying to repair our broken health system.
We are besieged on all sides by all the profit-generated complaints about the evils of "socialism" creating waiting lines and people dying while waiting for health care as well as the specter of "paying for somebody else's doctor bills." That is pure malarkey and far from the situation as it already exists. Let's take a look at the model that is already before us.
A prime example is our existing Medicare/Medicaid system:
Nobody is required to get permission to see a doctor! You go to the same physician who has been your family doctor for years or, if you choose, you may pick one out of the Yellow Pages. You need no pre-approval. You go to the doctor. That's it.
There is no waiting line! When you call for an appointment, the receptionist will ask questions about your need based on your own complaints. If your need is urgent, most doctors will "work you in". If not, you may have to wait a few days.
There is no pre-approval required! Your personal doctor decides what you need. If you require a specialist with skills and training beyond his own, he may refer you to one. If your problem requires surgery, you will be sent to a surgeon who cares for people with that complaint, and the surgery will be scheduled. At no point is there anybody looking over his shoulder from whom he requires permission.
If necessary, you will enter a hospital at the convenience of the surgeon or physician! This will probably be a facility at which the doctor practices daily and will likely be not a great distance from your home. You will receive the same treatment as do all the other patients. (As you perambulate through the halls, you may see a private room at the end of the hall but pay it no mind. That is for somebody who thinks their station is too exalted to allow them to mingle with the Great Unwashed and are either there "on comp" or paying through their blue noses to satisfy their own egos.)
With those arguments out of the way, when you are restored to health, you will get a statement of explanation of the charges. You are not expected to pay in full, only to check the statement and to notify the insuring agency of any discrepancies that you may find. YOU are the first monitor of the honesty and accuracy of this billing.
A bit later, you will receive a second statement which will show the amounts paid by Medicare/Medicaid and any balance which you are charged with paying. Currently, if you receive both Medicare and Medicaid, you pay nothing at all. If Medicare only, there is now a system of "deductibles and co-payments" but, in most cases, you will find the care providers to be quite patient with the small partial payments which you can afford in your own budget.
There may be charges that deemed necessary to the care you required and are not covered. There is a schedule of maximum hospital time allowed to your particular surgery or problem. This may be appealed by your doctor due to unusual circumstances but they will seldom hamper your recovery or strain your wallet. In today's system, you will not be allowed to get free breast implants, abortions, face lifts, or even surgery to improve your vision, (except for cataracts), but those services such as cardiac surgery, appendectomy, or cancer, will be treated as routine.
This concept is not a foreign one to our free nation. Throughout our history, people have banded together and formed "cooperatives" in order to have a larger organization for purposes of bulk purchasing or marketing more efficiently. Even today, the land is dotted with "farm co-ops" which were founded for that purposes and, in rural areas, electrical power is still successfully functioning after having been begun by Roosevelt's Rural Electrification Agency. Many city people belong to "child care co-ops" where mothers exchange their labor to provide care for their children while they work and "food co-ops" flourish as people who prefer fresh, locally-grown produce to the canned, sterilized, and polluted stuff that is sold in the supermarket.
The purpose of these cooperatives is simple. That is to "cut out the middle man", the amorphous figures who produce nothing and provide nothing but profit from the work of others by controlling the access of human interaction and sharing. Our lives are full of them! We cannot go to an individual business owner to invest in their business. We must go through a stock broker who, in turn, deals through Wall Street and all the organizations represented there, each of whom takes a share of our money before it ever reaches its intended target. So it is with medical care. We go to an insurance company who takes our money, tells us to which doctors we may go to, then tells those doctors what procedures they may and may not do for us, keeping a share of our money at every step. They are not at all concerned with our health, only with the money they can keep for the privilege of brokering the services of our physicians.
Think of single-payer medical care as a giant cooperative where everybody pays in what they can afford, on a sliding scale, and each is allowed to take out what they need. This is the same principle on which we finance our government, pay for our public services, (from the bottom up), pay for our military, and even bail out our over-acquisitive banking system.
It's called "democracy" and it's the American Way! How dare they take it "off the table"?!?
The author is a very "with-it" old lady who aspires to bring a bit of truth, justice, and common sense to a nation that has lost touch with its humanity in the search for "societal perfection".
June 6, 2009
We, the people, are sick and tired of hearing that "single payer is off the table" in the same breath with "health care reform". Attempting to "repair" a broken-down old vehicle without considering the possibility of a replacement as an alternative simply makes no financial sense. The same is true with trying to repair our broken health system.
We are besieged on all sides by all the profit-generated complaints about the evils of "socialism" creating waiting lines and people dying while waiting for health care as well as the specter of "paying for somebody else's doctor bills." That is pure malarkey and far from the situation as it already exists. Let's take a look at the model that is already before us.
A prime example is our existing Medicare/Medicaid system:
Nobody is required to get permission to see a doctor! You go to the same physician who has been your family doctor for years or, if you choose, you may pick one out of the Yellow Pages. You need no pre-approval. You go to the doctor. That's it.
There is no waiting line! When you call for an appointment, the receptionist will ask questions about your need based on your own complaints. If your need is urgent, most doctors will "work you in". If not, you may have to wait a few days.
There is no pre-approval required! Your personal doctor decides what you need. If you require a specialist with skills and training beyond his own, he may refer you to one. If your problem requires surgery, you will be sent to a surgeon who cares for people with that complaint, and the surgery will be scheduled. At no point is there anybody looking over his shoulder from whom he requires permission.
If necessary, you will enter a hospital at the convenience of the surgeon or physician! This will probably be a facility at which the doctor practices daily and will likely be not a great distance from your home. You will receive the same treatment as do all the other patients. (As you perambulate through the halls, you may see a private room at the end of the hall but pay it no mind. That is for somebody who thinks their station is too exalted to allow them to mingle with the Great Unwashed and are either there "on comp" or paying through their blue noses to satisfy their own egos.)
With those arguments out of the way, when you are restored to health, you will get a statement of explanation of the charges. You are not expected to pay in full, only to check the statement and to notify the insuring agency of any discrepancies that you may find. YOU are the first monitor of the honesty and accuracy of this billing.
A bit later, you will receive a second statement which will show the amounts paid by Medicare/Medicaid and any balance which you are charged with paying. Currently, if you receive both Medicare and Medicaid, you pay nothing at all. If Medicare only, there is now a system of "deductibles and co-payments" but, in most cases, you will find the care providers to be quite patient with the small partial payments which you can afford in your own budget.
There may be charges that deemed necessary to the care you required and are not covered. There is a schedule of maximum hospital time allowed to your particular surgery or problem. This may be appealed by your doctor due to unusual circumstances but they will seldom hamper your recovery or strain your wallet. In today's system, you will not be allowed to get free breast implants, abortions, face lifts, or even surgery to improve your vision, (except for cataracts), but those services such as cardiac surgery, appendectomy, or cancer, will be treated as routine.
This concept is not a foreign one to our free nation. Throughout our history, people have banded together and formed "cooperatives" in order to have a larger organization for purposes of bulk purchasing or marketing more efficiently. Even today, the land is dotted with "farm co-ops" which were founded for that purposes and, in rural areas, electrical power is still successfully functioning after having been begun by Roosevelt's Rural Electrification Agency. Many city people belong to "child care co-ops" where mothers exchange their labor to provide care for their children while they work and "food co-ops" flourish as people who prefer fresh, locally-grown produce to the canned, sterilized, and polluted stuff that is sold in the supermarket.
The purpose of these cooperatives is simple. That is to "cut out the middle man", the amorphous figures who produce nothing and provide nothing but profit from the work of others by controlling the access of human interaction and sharing. Our lives are full of them! We cannot go to an individual business owner to invest in their business. We must go through a stock broker who, in turn, deals through Wall Street and all the organizations represented there, each of whom takes a share of our money before it ever reaches its intended target. So it is with medical care. We go to an insurance company who takes our money, tells us to which doctors we may go to, then tells those doctors what procedures they may and may not do for us, keeping a share of our money at every step. They are not at all concerned with our health, only with the money they can keep for the privilege of brokering the services of our physicians.
Think of single-payer medical care as a giant cooperative where everybody pays in what they can afford, on a sliding scale, and each is allowed to take out what they need. This is the same principle on which we finance our government, pay for our public services, (from the bottom up), pay for our military, and even bail out our over-acquisitive banking system.
It's called "democracy" and it's the American Way! How dare they take it "off the table"?!?
The author is a very "with-it" old lady who aspires to bring a bit of truth, justice, and common sense to a nation that has lost touch with its humanity in the search for "societal perfection".
Monday, June 01, 2009
The Political Future
by Mary Pitt
June 1, 2009
One may hear much speculation as to the future of the Republican Party as that once-august group find their following at a historic low and they have to turn for leadership to radio commentators and historic losers from their past. The most-asked questions in the television fora is, "Where is the future of the Republican party?"
The future of the Republican Party may be seen if one looks closely at the other side of the aisle in today's Congress as well as in secondary positions in the administration. After years of hearing references to RINO's, (Republicans In Name Only), we now are beginning to count the DINO's. A new President who was swept into office on a wave of Progressive support is finding his path to the restoration of our nation blocked by Senators and Representatives who profess to be of his own party.
The most prominent of these may well be Secretary-of-State Hillary Clinton. Her history since her failed attempt to establish universal medical care at the beginning of her husband's first term has been one of compromising and conceding to opponents the very heart of the principles which she professes to espouse. After eight years of watching her husband as his major successes were in the area of maintaining and improving the status quo to the benefit of the financial masters, she was so well schooled in the politics of survival as a politician that her record for supporting the policies of George W. Bush is all but unblemished. In the Senate, she diligently worked to become the leader of a "half-a-loaf coalition" that we may call the DINO's.
These DINO's are a combination of the Blue Dog Democrats and some almost-Republican opportunists who insist that we must cling to "the way we've always done it.". (If we have always done it right, why is it not working?) In coalition with a few "moderate Republicans", they have done an admirable job of foot-dragging and hampering the passage of President Obama's most progressive proposals. On the other hand, under the influence of Secretary Clinton and the many other re-treads from the Bush and Clinton administrations, the President too often has no choice but to follow their lead into the old tactics of compromise and coalition in order to make any progress at all.
The Progressive movement watches, aghast, as they are marginalized by the title of "fringe groups" and the "middle way" is presumed to be the proper path. The younger members of Congress are held in check by the seniority system which allows them little influence until they have become sufficiently "trained" to be allowed committee chairmanships and other positions which would allow them to assist in the needed reforms. There may be hope if the Progressives can continue to cling together in common cause through another election cycle or two and dislodge many of the bought-and-paid-for old veterans who like things just the way they are.
Both parties are represented in the House and the Senate but that may be misleading. There may well be the same sort of crisis in the Democratic Party as the Republicans now suffer. The result will be a lot of aisle-crossing as more Progressive members are added, pushing the "moderates" to the right and to the left as the parties re-align in an effort to keep their power. The future of both parties is currently represented in Congress but, with the continued efforts of "we, the people", the lines will be re-drawn. The war-mongers and mind-benders will be pushed out to the Libertarians and other militant parties, the present middle will be the right, and the Democrats will become more Progressive in their attempts to restore a nation that is free and democratic.
This occurance will be dependent upon maintaining the fervor of the common people to re-establish their power. With each election, as more young people are inspired to public service and more war veterans return home with the determination that nothing like the George Bush administration, ever happens again, we will become "a more perfect union". Then and only then will we be able to proudly boast of the government which was visualized by the Founders in forming our precious Constitution..
June 1, 2009
One may hear much speculation as to the future of the Republican Party as that once-august group find their following at a historic low and they have to turn for leadership to radio commentators and historic losers from their past. The most-asked questions in the television fora is, "Where is the future of the Republican party?"
The future of the Republican Party may be seen if one looks closely at the other side of the aisle in today's Congress as well as in secondary positions in the administration. After years of hearing references to RINO's, (Republicans In Name Only), we now are beginning to count the DINO's. A new President who was swept into office on a wave of Progressive support is finding his path to the restoration of our nation blocked by Senators and Representatives who profess to be of his own party.
The most prominent of these may well be Secretary-of-State Hillary Clinton. Her history since her failed attempt to establish universal medical care at the beginning of her husband's first term has been one of compromising and conceding to opponents the very heart of the principles which she professes to espouse. After eight years of watching her husband as his major successes were in the area of maintaining and improving the status quo to the benefit of the financial masters, she was so well schooled in the politics of survival as a politician that her record for supporting the policies of George W. Bush is all but unblemished. In the Senate, she diligently worked to become the leader of a "half-a-loaf coalition" that we may call the DINO's.
These DINO's are a combination of the Blue Dog Democrats and some almost-Republican opportunists who insist that we must cling to "the way we've always done it.". (If we have always done it right, why is it not working?) In coalition with a few "moderate Republicans", they have done an admirable job of foot-dragging and hampering the passage of President Obama's most progressive proposals. On the other hand, under the influence of Secretary Clinton and the many other re-treads from the Bush and Clinton administrations, the President too often has no choice but to follow their lead into the old tactics of compromise and coalition in order to make any progress at all.
The Progressive movement watches, aghast, as they are marginalized by the title of "fringe groups" and the "middle way" is presumed to be the proper path. The younger members of Congress are held in check by the seniority system which allows them little influence until they have become sufficiently "trained" to be allowed committee chairmanships and other positions which would allow them to assist in the needed reforms. There may be hope if the Progressives can continue to cling together in common cause through another election cycle or two and dislodge many of the bought-and-paid-for old veterans who like things just the way they are.
Both parties are represented in the House and the Senate but that may be misleading. There may well be the same sort of crisis in the Democratic Party as the Republicans now suffer. The result will be a lot of aisle-crossing as more Progressive members are added, pushing the "moderates" to the right and to the left as the parties re-align in an effort to keep their power. The future of both parties is currently represented in Congress but, with the continued efforts of "we, the people", the lines will be re-drawn. The war-mongers and mind-benders will be pushed out to the Libertarians and other militant parties, the present middle will be the right, and the Democrats will become more Progressive in their attempts to restore a nation that is free and democratic.
This occurance will be dependent upon maintaining the fervor of the common people to re-establish their power. With each election, as more young people are inspired to public service and more war veterans return home with the determination that nothing like the George Bush administration, ever happens again, we will become "a more perfect union". Then and only then will we be able to proudly boast of the government which was visualized by the Founders in forming our precious Constitution..
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