The Tribune reports that the jury in the Dan De Vaul case (Sunny Acres and state fire codes and various county violations) returned a mixed verdict: guilty on three misdemeanor counts, acquittal on two others and deadlocked on five others. The DA is considering whether or not he’d refile on the undecided five charges and start this whole thing over again.
So, here’s the same question that needs to be asked of both the County and Dan De Vaul: Do you want to do something to help homeless people turn their lives around or do you want to be right?
Yes, Tax Them Froot Loops!
Here’s a two-fer one proposal: slap a tax on sugar and high fructose corn syrup, remove all federal subsidies and import protections for “foreign” sugar and for homegrown regular sugar (and, while you’re at it, slap mitigation fines on the huge agri-business, conglomerate Florida cane growers for the environmental damage done to the Everglades by their agricultural practices), then slap an extra tax on sugary soft drinks.
I understand there’s a new public interest ad out, similar to the ones being run against tobacco, that visually illustrates the problem by equating drinking sodas with drinking Big Gulps full of liquid, oozing yellowish liquid fat (Eeeuuuuuuu) in hopes that teens (and others) will think twice about the amount of nutritionally zero soft drinks they daily pour down their gullets. That’s a delicious idea and a good start.
Part of the tax collected could go to financing more such public info ads and other informational, educational formats, much like the tobacco tax goes for education efforts to prevent smoking. And the rest of the tax money collected could help offset the cost of medical care brought about by all the fat too many of us are carrying around as a direct result of swilling down too many soft drinks (not to mention inadvertently consuming all the hidden sugar and high fruit corn syrup that’s been put into nearly everything on the supermarket shelf.)
Oh, I know, Grover Norquist And His Cult Of No Tax Republicans, all of whom have signed a blood oath to him, will have cow. But they simply need to view the “tax” as just another cost of doing business. Some products cost more than others because some ingredients cost more than others. No big deal. If sugar is more costly, then that’s simply a part of doing business and the customer has a clear choice; to buy or not to buy. And isn’t CHOICE, (except for a woman’s control over her reproductive rights) something conservatives love to preach about? Well, nobody, not even a “nanny government” is forcing you to drink a soda. You have a choice and you're free to make that choice based on health issues or simply price issues. Just like you do all other products. Let’s see, do I have a Coca-Cola for $2.50 or do I have a bottle of water for $1.65. Hmmmm. . . let me think.
Go Ahead, Carbon It! I Dare You!
It’s finally time to get serious about a carbon tax. Cap and trade just moves the problem around. A nice, flat, across the board carbon tax would be a good start. Then remove all subsidies from all carbon based fuels, you know, nice tax breaks and depreciation allowances and such like for oil producers. Might even start billing a pro-rata share of the military budget needed to protect that oil while it gets from places like Iraq and keep it safe on the high seas via our wonderful Navy. The military can send the oil producers a bill for their services. Don’t frown, it’s simply the cost of doing business.
Then take that nice carbon tax money and use it to fund R&D and subsidize non-carbon based energy systems. (Hey, don’t squawk about Nanny Government. We’ve subsidized carbon fuels for years, not to mention farm products – all that nice government cheese—as well as any number of “protected” businesses and products. That’s nothing new. And if the government can subsidize cheese, which, to my knowledge does not threaten the future of the world, surely it can subsidize efforts to save the world for future generations, who can then be around to eat all that saved cheese.)
Then let’s get busy setting up a nationwide Rent-A-Roof program. Utilities, whether public or private, could contract with willing homeowners to install solar panels on their roofs. The utility would maintain the unit, supply the house with X amount of power, and capture the keep the rest and send it back to the grid. Win-win. Homeowner gets a lower (or even zero) energy bill, utility gets more power to sell, can delay building more expensive power plants, and already “disturbed,” non-environmentally sensitive urban habitat would become huge solar arrays one roof at a time, thereby delaying the need for screwing up wilderness areas with huge single arrays.
Yoo-Hoo, PG&E. Gotta roof right here. Be happy if y’all’d come put a few solar panels on it. We’ll do a fair deal on the energy produced so we both benefit. Whatya say? Call me. We gotta talk.
Public Option?
Why in hell is Congress pulling their hair out over re-inventing the wheel in the form of a “public option” for health care reform. It’s already been invented and is sitting there ready to be turn-keyed. It’s called Medicare. Simply make Medicare available to anyone under 65 who wants to opt in on a pro rated basis. And make sure the law as it’s being written allows anyone to buy in if they want to, even people who have health care at their place of employment. There, done.
If Medicare can offer what they offer at the price they offer it, surely private insurance companies can do the same, can’t they? And if they can’t, then they can’t compete and they go out of business. Isn’t that what capitalism and competition and choice is all about?
But to make a public option work, people need to be free to buy into the public option any time they want. The way the quasi-completed proposed bill has it, employees will simply be captives to whatever health care policy their employer foists off on them at whatever price the insurance company wishes to charge. That’s not choice. That’s not competition. That’s government mandated captivity.
Weirdly, all Republicans and some Democrats have been violently opposed to any kind of “public option.” Which means they are in favor of no choice and no competition and want to make all Americans captive to private insurance companies?
Well, that makes sense since Congress is a fully owned subsidiary of Big Pharma and Big Insurance. I guess they’re simply following the old dictum: Ya gotta dance with them what brung ya. And clearly, the American people didn’t brung the Congresspeople they thought they were voting into office to dance with them.
Ah, Well, Dear Sweet Voter. . .wrong on that one . . . sucker!
Showing posts with label public option. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public option. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Bend Over, Grab Your Ankles, Don't Call Me In The Morning And Never Mind About The Aspirin
Calhouns Can(n)ons for August 27, 09
The headline in the August 24, L.A. Times said it all: “Healthcare insurers get upper hand.” This was followed up with, “It’s a bonanza,” said Robert Laszewski, a health insurance executive for 20 years who now tracks reform legislation as president of the consulting firm Health Policy and Strategy Associates Inc.”
Lazewski is also quoted as saying that the insurers’ “reaction to early negotiations boiled down to a single word: ‘Hallelujah!”
I’ll say. At this point the health insurance companies own congress and have been remarkably adept at public outreach via various Republican Talking Points, as well as multiple press, talk radio, TV and Astroturf ad campaigns. The media blitz has apparently convinced a growing number of Americans that the government wants to kill their Grannies, install a government bureaucrat in their doctor’s office to make medical decisions for you, and that any “public option” will mean “socialized medicine,” followed by Communists taking over the country.
Gone missing from the Granny-killing fear-mongering is this telling tidbit: According to the Times story, “ . . the senate Finance Committee discussed requiring that insurers reimburse at least 76% of policyholders’ medical costs under their most affordable plans. Now the committee is considering setting that rate as low as 65%, meaning insurers would be required to cover just about two-thirds of patients’ healthcare bills.”
Translation: In general, Medicare reimburses 80%. If the insurance companies get their way – and who’s doubting that they will? – private mandatory health insurance could only cover 65% of medical costs. So there’s the perfect scam: Americans will be required to buy insurance from private companies that will make sure that their customers will pay top dollar while only receiving the lowest possible coverage, thereby shoving more and more of the financial burden back on patients and their families. And with no viable “public option” as competition, we’re back in the land of Harry & Louise’s “No Choice” choice.
In short, this is shaping up to become The Great American Love story: The American people and their elected representatives clearly love medical insurance companies so much that they will go to any lengths to keep them in business. Indeed, they appear willing to believe the most arrant nonsense so they can continue to pay more for less in order to make sure that their favorite companies will continue to receive those magnificent profits and so be able to reward their CEO’s with those breathtaking yearly salaries.
And since love is blind, that’s probably why Americans haven’t been able to bring themselves to ask these few simple questions: Exactly what do the private, for-profit insurance companies bring to the table that a not-for-profit type Medicare For All and/or Single Payer System does not? Administrative costs are far higher for private plans, and since the prime focus of the medical insurance industry isn’t to deliver quality health care, it’s to deliver profits to their stockholders, just how does that benefit the consumer? And if a not-for-profit “public option” turns out to be cheaper and/or delivers better healthcare to consumers, and some companies that can’t compete with that go out of business, why is that a bad thing? Isn’t that what “the wisdom of the marketplace” is all about?
Well, love can make people do crazy things. If millions of starry-eyed Americans refuse to take a cold shower and then start calling their Congressfolk, “The insurers are going to do quite well,” said Linda Blumberg, a health policy analyst at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. “They [the private insurance companies] are going to have this very stable pool, [us captives] they’re going to have people getting subsidies [from the taxpayers who also have to cough up for their own private policies] to help them buy coverage and . . they [the insurance companies] will be paid the full costs of the benefits that they provide – plus their administrative costs [which are about 3-5 or more times the administrative costs of Medicare for example].”
For insurance companies, it doesn’t get any better than this: Year ‘round Christmas plum pudding for them, while the American consumer will get nothing but coal in their stockings. But isn’t that sacrifice is what true love is all about?
The headline in the August 24, L.A. Times said it all: “Healthcare insurers get upper hand.” This was followed up with, “It’s a bonanza,” said Robert Laszewski, a health insurance executive for 20 years who now tracks reform legislation as president of the consulting firm Health Policy and Strategy Associates Inc.”
Lazewski is also quoted as saying that the insurers’ “reaction to early negotiations boiled down to a single word: ‘Hallelujah!”
I’ll say. At this point the health insurance companies own congress and have been remarkably adept at public outreach via various Republican Talking Points, as well as multiple press, talk radio, TV and Astroturf ad campaigns. The media blitz has apparently convinced a growing number of Americans that the government wants to kill their Grannies, install a government bureaucrat in their doctor’s office to make medical decisions for you, and that any “public option” will mean “socialized medicine,” followed by Communists taking over the country.
Gone missing from the Granny-killing fear-mongering is this telling tidbit: According to the Times story, “ . . the senate Finance Committee discussed requiring that insurers reimburse at least 76% of policyholders’ medical costs under their most affordable plans. Now the committee is considering setting that rate as low as 65%, meaning insurers would be required to cover just about two-thirds of patients’ healthcare bills.”
Translation: In general, Medicare reimburses 80%. If the insurance companies get their way – and who’s doubting that they will? – private mandatory health insurance could only cover 65% of medical costs. So there’s the perfect scam: Americans will be required to buy insurance from private companies that will make sure that their customers will pay top dollar while only receiving the lowest possible coverage, thereby shoving more and more of the financial burden back on patients and their families. And with no viable “public option” as competition, we’re back in the land of Harry & Louise’s “No Choice” choice.
In short, this is shaping up to become The Great American Love story: The American people and their elected representatives clearly love medical insurance companies so much that they will go to any lengths to keep them in business. Indeed, they appear willing to believe the most arrant nonsense so they can continue to pay more for less in order to make sure that their favorite companies will continue to receive those magnificent profits and so be able to reward their CEO’s with those breathtaking yearly salaries.
And since love is blind, that’s probably why Americans haven’t been able to bring themselves to ask these few simple questions: Exactly what do the private, for-profit insurance companies bring to the table that a not-for-profit type Medicare For All and/or Single Payer System does not? Administrative costs are far higher for private plans, and since the prime focus of the medical insurance industry isn’t to deliver quality health care, it’s to deliver profits to their stockholders, just how does that benefit the consumer? And if a not-for-profit “public option” turns out to be cheaper and/or delivers better healthcare to consumers, and some companies that can’t compete with that go out of business, why is that a bad thing? Isn’t that what “the wisdom of the marketplace” is all about?
Well, love can make people do crazy things. If millions of starry-eyed Americans refuse to take a cold shower and then start calling their Congressfolk, “The insurers are going to do quite well,” said Linda Blumberg, a health policy analyst at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. “They [the private insurance companies] are going to have this very stable pool, [us captives] they’re going to have people getting subsidies [from the taxpayers who also have to cough up for their own private policies] to help them buy coverage and . . they [the insurance companies] will be paid the full costs of the benefits that they provide – plus their administrative costs [which are about 3-5 or more times the administrative costs of Medicare for example].”
For insurance companies, it doesn’t get any better than this: Year ‘round Christmas plum pudding for them, while the American consumer will get nothing but coal in their stockings. But isn’t that sacrifice is what true love is all about?
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