“Government-Run” Healthcare Is Not Fascism (But This Bill Might Be)

Yesterday I was forced to debunk a right wing talking point near and dear to the hearts of the tea bag set which continues to go unchallenged by our punditry: namely, that the healthcare reform package is “government-run” healthcare.

Excuse me? True government-run healthcare is one in which the doctors are government employees and the hospitals, clinics, etc. are all government-owned. You know, like our VA. This healthcare reform package doesn’t do anything close to that. All it does is rein in some abusive health insurance company policies and provide access to health insurance for those who can’t afford it.

Indeed, while we do have a government-run healthcare system in this country, you must be in the U.S. military or a veteran to take advantage of it. And one might ask the tea bag set why a true government-run healthcare system is fine for our soldiers and veterans but not fine for the rest of us.

With that in mind I headed over to one of my favorite bloggers and saw that he, too, is discussing the “government takeover of healthcare” thing. So before I retreat back to my bat cave for another week of hard-core creativity, I thought I’d point people to The Search For Integrity for an interesting perspective on healthcare reform and why we need the public option.

The Reverend points out some very inconvenient truths about this healthcare reform package. For example:

One complaint is that a public option will have to be paid for with taxes, or, more directly, that the premiums paid toward such a plan amount to a tax. Sure. But at least those tax dollars go to the government, which is ultimately responsible, however unwieldy our system is, to the people. I can vote the decision-makers in and out of office, raise a public outcry to persuade people to join such a cause. Clearly Congress has the power, constitutionally, to raise taxes. But does Congress have the power to require people to put money directly in the pockets of private corporations? Money that is required by law to be paid out of people’s incomes is a tax, any way you cut it. Why should my tax dollars go, not to my government, run (however imperfectly) by people I can vote for or against, but to a company, whose primary motivation is profit, which has every incentive to provide denial of service to its customer (me), and which lives in a culture that thinks it is just fine to pay its executives millions or billions of dollars, and feels it must do so in order to retain such “talent”?

Directly taxing the people in order to enrich corporations is fascism. That’s what an individual mandate without a public option would bring us to.

Now, of course, it won’t be called a tax, it will be called a premium. I think that’s kind of funny, really. If it’s a payment required by law, it’s a tax, and if it’s a tax, it should go to the government. If instead of going to the government it goes to a private corporation, what does that say about who is really in charge here?

Someone needs to ask Senators Joe Lieberman, Mary Landrieu, Olympia Snow, Lamar Alexander, Bob Corker and all the rest why they support fascist healthcare system in this country. I thought they were against that sort of thing.

Anyway, I urge everyone to read The Reverend’s entire post over there because there’s a lot of good stuff and a lot of great food for thought.

How Not To Evangelize

Via Pith In The Wind we have an update on the “Not Religious? You’re Not Alone” billboard I wrote about here.

Now, as many of my regular readers know, Southern Beale is “religious.” However I’m as offended as the most avowed atheist at the way religion is used as both a marketing tool, get rich quick scam, and a political wedge in this country. In fact, there’s a lot about modern American religion that offends me these days. So when a secular group does a little old-fashioned billboard evangelism (and trust me, Nashville has seen plenty of the other kind--including, in answer to the lady who called, one at Harding and I-65 which said you will burn in hell if you don't believe in God), I think it’s a positive step. News flash to the churchy set: you got a little competition in the message wars.

Of course, some folks didn't like it. Here are the messages Secular Life received on their answering machine from a few of those people:

Stupak Stupidity

You know, I thought conservatives--Blue Dog Democrat and Republican alike--were against government interference in private enterprise.

Or a government bureaucrat coming between doctor and patient.

Yet it seems that is exactly what they are doing by jumping on board the Stupak bandwagon:

Sixty-four Democrats voted for Stupak’s amendment, without which the House healthcare bill would not have won final passage in a 220-215 vote.

Stupak’s language not only prohibits abortion coverage in the public insurance option included in the House bill. It would also prevent private plans from offering coverage for abortion services if they accept people who are receiving government subsidies.

Gosh, where’s the free hand of the market when you need it? I wonder if the Tea Partiers are concerned about this gross government intrusion into private enterprise? Aw, who am I kidding!

You know, I love it when my lady parts are turned into a political football. It makes me feel so very special. So much like ... gosh, what is the word I’m looking for? Oh yeah: chattel. Frankly, I’m a little creeped out Congressman Stupak is even thinking about my lady parts in a bill that does so much more to overhaul health insurance. It’s a little pervy.

Yes, this royally pisses me off. But you know, a reality check, people. Being a woman has been a pre-existing condition since, you know, forever. As I pointed out when I wrote about this last month, gender rating is widespread in health insurance markets (that’s where women pay more than men for identical plans). So, you know, what’s a little inequality among friends? We’ve only been allowed to vote for, what, 90-something years? Surely you didn’t think you’d have equal access to health services by now, too?

Here’s the thing. Abortion is still legal. Try as they might, the anti’s have yet to outlaw it, and they probably never will. We won that battle.

All they’ve got left are rather empty gestures like the Stupak Amendment, which applies to insurance coverage of abortion--something which, according to the Guttmacher Institute, only paid for 13% of abortions (or thereabouts) in 2001. And Stupak also only applies to insurance plans on the exchange, which itself affects a small percentage of people.

So, this all looks like a lot of hoo-hah over an amendment that would affect a relatively small number of women. Unfortunately, those women are the poor, the ones who need reproductive choice the most. Yes, it sucks. But since when does Congress care about the poor, anyway? Is anyone really surprised?

Take heart. If Stupak becomes law, you can still buy an insurance plan that covers abortion services. You just can’t be poor, or receive government assistance. And those more well-off can always pay for their abortions themselves, without a health insurance plan.

I’m trying to see how much has changed. Abortion services available for the well off, but not the poor. How is this different from what we have now? From what we’ve ever had?

Make no mistake: they’ve done a really shitty thing to women, treating us like second class citizens who aren’t entitled to the same health insurance options as penis-Americans. Am I pissed off? Yes.

But abortion is still legal. We can still get low-income women the reproductive health services they need in other ways. Start by donating to NARAL or Planned Parenthood, if you are able.

Is the Stupak Amendment worth scuttling healthcare reform over? I don’t think so. But it has been a tremendous reality check. It has shown us who within the Democratic Party thinks it’s their business to decide what insurance plans should be available to women.

Got that? Good. Now use that information.

More American Morans

From yesterday's Michelle Bachmann/Fox News-led "tea party" in Washington. You'd think after six months of protests they'd have figured out how to use spell-check:



One would also think that they'd have figured out there is no government run healthcare in anyone's future. But that's the low information voter for you: rallying to protest something that doesn't exist.

Morans.

Ask Your Doctor If Hiatus Is Right For You, v 2.0

How interesting that I first asked this question almost exactly two years ago. In the past two years I’ve learned a lot about this blogging thing, including that my original assessment was 100% correct: it is both cathartic and addictive. It can also be a huge time-waster.

So the time has come to set some boundaries. Mine is a temporary one: I’m about to embark on a creative project that will leave my time for blogging extremely limited. My project will take up most of my creative energies during November, so I hope you will indulge me the occasional cat photos, garden blogging and only sporadic rants. Hopefully I will be channeling my energies in a different direction, at least for the next several weeks. I should be back sometime in December, God willing and the creek don’t rise.

There are plenty of blogs out there so I don’t need to tell anyone where to go to scratch that liberal itch, but over the years I have come across some amazing unsung peeps whom I encourage you to check out:

Bouphonia; be sure to stop by on Friday for a weekly dose of Friday Hope Blogging. It’s the best way to end the week that I can think of.

Interested Citizen is a Nashville blogger, like me. I always see a story I hadn’t seen before over there.

Southern Female Lawyer offers some killer recipes as well as some kick-ass commentary.

John Shuck is pastor of First Presbyterian Church (PC-USA) of Elizabethton, TN. He’s a social justice warrior with a mission for GLBT equality. Lots of good stuff over there.

The Impolitic--that’s Libby Spencer and Cpt. Fogg. Two great bloggers, one from Detroit and one from Florida.

See y’all on the other side!

Love & Peace,

Southern Beale

Nashville Gets Secular

Christian fundamentalists looking for signs of the apocalypse might want to head to my part of town next week to see this new billboard:

Secular Life, a Nashville-area social network for atheists, agnostics, seculars and other nonbelievers, will unveil a new electronic billboard at 4102 Hillsboro Circle in Green Hills on Sunday.

It's aimed at the so-called Nones — the growing number of people with no religious affiliation.

The billboard, which coincidentally launches on All Saints Day, reads "Not religious? You are not alone,'' along with a phone number and Web site for Secular Life.

Now, this wouldn’t be newsworthy in a city like New York or Los Angeles. But here in Nashville, where religion is crammed down your throat at every turn--including on numerous billboards scattered all over town--a billboard advertising atheism and secularism is definitely an anomaly.

As a sidebar to this story, I am very familiar with this particular electronic billboard; when it first appeared (in place of an old-fashioned non-electronic kind) it raised a huge outcry among neighborhood folks who don’t like the increasing prevalence of these electronic thingamajigs. They are quite controversial irrespective of their advertising content, mainly because they are too bright, too loud, and too obnoxious for anyplace not Times Square (blogger S-Town Mike has given a lot of coverage to the issue.)

This one shows us the weather report and sports headlines in addition to advertisements. Personally, if I want to know the weather forecast I'm not looking at a freaking billboard. Thank you for turning what is a quiet retail/residential area into something that resembles downtown Tokyo. How sensitive to the neighborhood. Not.

This particular one, as I recall, doesn’t meet the existing code for where electronic billboards can be located. It was snuck in under the dead of night under the outdoor advertising industry’s favorite “let’s do what we want now and deal with the consequences later” ploy. Outdoor advertising companies like Lamar are huge bullies, in my opinion.

As I recall, Councilman Sean McGuire was supposedly working to get it removed, though that was a few months ago and I never heard any more about it.

Anyway, I’ve digressed far from the main topic. But it's interesting that a message advertising secularism has been placed on an electronic billboard supposedly destined for removal (though who knows ...).

So come on down and check it out while it's still there.

Told Ya So

Nobody could have anticipated this:

In a bid to generate excitement in a struggling condo market, developers of the luxury Terrazzo building in the Gulch plan to offer one-fourth of the building via auction at steep discounts next month — a move that critics say will hurt existing owners.

"This is horrible,'' said Betsy McInnes, who is listed as an owner of a $373,000 one-bedroom Terrazzo unit with her daughter, Waller McInnes. The daughter rents out the Terrazzo condo to a tenant and is trying to sell it.

The mother said her 28-year-old daughter owns three properties and has three mortgages.

McInnes said she's afraid the Nov. 21 auction will drive prices lower and further hurt values for people who have already invested a lot. "This is pretty depressing,'' the mother said Tuesday.

But developers of the Terrazzo insist the auction will help condominium sales recover and prove beneficial in the long run.

Really? How do you figure that? If I bought a $375,000 condo in a building where similar units are now going for half that amount, I’d be very ticked off.

Sadly, I predicted this nearly two years ago. If only someone had listened. In February 2008 I wrote:

Just give it a few weeks. I have no doubt we are headed for a massive real estate bust, with all of those fancy downtown condos the first to go belly up.

Yes, they overbuilt. Yes, there’s too much inventory--or rather, too much of the same inventory. How many $200,000-$1 million units do we need downtown? Who’s supposed to buy these things, anyway? You can still get a nice house in Nashville for that kind of money, you know.



Plus, Nashville has no “downtown living” infrastructure. There are no grocery stores, dry cleaners and parks downtown. Public transportation in Nashville is notoriously crappy. This isn’t Chicago or Manhattan. You can sleep and work downtown and eat in a restaurant and go to a hockey game, but for everything else you’re going to need a car to schlep to another part of town. Downtown “living” is something of a misnomer.



I’ve never understood the massive building frenzy that has resulted in Viridian, Velocity, Encore and Icon, not to mention Terrazzo, Exchange, Phoenix, Westin and the Signature Tower. I don’t understand why there wasn’t some kind of plan for more diversity of housing options, a wider variety of price points to appeal to a wider variety of buyers. Nashville has a critical housing shortage--but not in these high price ranges.

So, have we learned our lesson? I don’t think so. WTVF’s Jeff Tang just interviewed Terrazzo developer Bill Barkley. Said Barkley:

"Other cities have an overbuilt condominium market of thousands of units. In Nashville there are only 600 and something units in this downtown area. That’s not an overbuilt, that’s an undersold situation."

Ah, it’s always good news when you’re the developer (or the trade association president). That “600-some units available” figure sounds awfully optimistic, especially when you remember what's happening down the street:

Velocity celebrated its finishing touches and opened Monday with 263 units, about a block from the Terrazzo. Seventeen of those units have been sold, according to records with the Davidson County Register of Deeds.

Oh, ouch. And I’d love to know what “this downtown area” means. If it means "The Gulch," then they're screwed. It certainly doesn’t include all of the condos and townhomes available in the West End Avenue area, where single family homes have been torn down for condos like nobody’s business.

I’m sorry for Mr. Barkley and everyone else who lost their shirts during the “clap louder!” Overweening Oughts. The past decade has been marked by wretched excess, no more so than in the real estate market, yet when a few of us raised our hands and asked if such overkill was warranted, we were called Debbie Downers and Negative Nellies. We were called people who Wanted America to Fail.

Sigh. So, here we are.

You know, it’s quite a feat for a city to be overrun with luxury condos no one wants to buy, and an estimated 2,200 homeless people needing a place to live. If only we could somehow put these two together.

We should be so proud!

(h/t, Pith.)

Tell Us How You REALLY Feel

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sends the California legislature a memo:


Schwarzenegger's people deny the hidden F-bomb was intentional.

Okie dokie.

VietAfghaniNam

If ever I had a WTF moment, this would be it:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.

WTF?

I’ve been mulling an Afghanistan post for a while now; I’ve held back simply because I don’t know that I possibly have to add to the conversation. But this news makes me think ... WTF???!!!

I have no fucking clue what we are doing in Afghanistan. Controlling the poppy trade? I mean, other than what you can glean from looking at a map: Oh lookie, there's Iraq on one side, Afghanistan on the other, and wooopsie isn't that Iran caught in the middle? But other than that, what the hell are we doing in Afghanistan??!

So our CIA has been paying the brother of the president of Afghanistan to do dirty deeds. And the president of Afghanistan is a man regarded as a U.S. puppet, whose re-election is questioned by the people because of widespread fraud. I’m so shocked.

No, I haven’t forgotten 9/11. Remind me, how many Afghanis were on those planes that crashed into the twin towers?

There’s a very nefarious trend among our punditry to confuse the Taliban with Al Qaeda, and while no one would pretend the Taliban is an example of democracy, there are plenty of oppressive regimes out there in the world which America has chosen to do business with. It was so cute how a few years ago it was politically correct to say Afghanistan was the "right" war, hell I even said it, but now I'm just wondering... WTF?

Yes, Afghanistan is a cesspool of human rights abuses. I’ve seen those pictures of women being executed for no reason other than wanting to get an education or defying their husbands.

But is a military occupation the answer? It seems to me if ever there was a place where exercises in nation-building--schools, infrastructure, development--would yield positive results for everyone, Afghanistan is it. This is a country that every superpower has tried to occupy in the past century. I think the Afghanis are a little tired of it. So now our presence in there is fueling an insurgency. Who is surprised? And just what, exactly, are we accomplishing?

How much money have we squandered over there? What has our CIA done, in the name of U.S. citizens, that we don’t know about?

I do not like it. No I do not.

When Conservatives Come Between Me & My Doctor

I guess we women should be used to crap like this by now:

Approximately 40 House Democrats are prepared to block healthcare reform legislation from coming to the floor should the bill include federal subsidies for abortions, said Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) Friday.

Abortion has been the elephant in the room on the healthcare debate: the Right has been desperate to trot out its most favorite wedge issue; knowing this, the Left won’t touch the topic with a 10-foot pole. But it was inevitable that abortion would come up as part of the debate over the public option, so here ya go, folks.

Let the games begin!

Nothing demonstrates women’s inequality better than the use of abortion as a wedge issue to derail healthcare reform. The reality is, abortion is legal; most private insurance policies cover the procedure to some degree, just as they would cover any medical procedure involving lady parts. And it’s ludicrous to think a public health insurance option shouldn’t cover the same medical procedures as any private health insurance policy. We’re talking about insurance here, people; insurance is not healthcare, as I’ve said ad nauseum.

And trying to equate a public health insurance plan that covers abortion as anything close to “government funded abortions” is wildly off the mark and incredibly dishonest, preying on people’s ignorance and their fear. Insurance is not healthcare! Oh wait, I already said that.

I don’t get why this is so hard for people to understand or even controversial. Even more ironic is that it’s usually the same people harping about how “Obamacare will put a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor” who are trying to insert themselves between me and my doctor.

You don’t see me sticking my nose into their healthcare decisions, do you?

But this just highlights the vast inequality between men’s and women’s healthcare. I love it when pharmacists with a “conscience” think it’s okay to deny women birth control pills but have no qualms about filling Cialis and Viagra prescriptions for men.

Here’s a news flash: private health insurance is a discriminatory system! Insurance companies routinely treat women differently from men; “gender rating” (charging same-aged women and men different premiums for the same coverage), is widespread.

The National Women’s Law Center first looked at the issue in 2008; one year later, they’ve found little has changed:

• Gender rating remains rampant in the individual health insurance market and among bestselling health plans. NWLC examined the best-selling plans (generally the top 10) in each state capital and found that 95% practice gender rating, compared to 93% of such plans in 2008.

• Using the same random sampling methods as in 2008, NWLC found even more egregious examples of gender rating among 25-year-olds in 2009. At this age, women are charged up to 84% more than men for individual health plans that exclude maternity coverage.

• Despite the bleak landscape, two states made improvements since the Center issued its Nowhere to Turn report in 2008. In April 2009, Arkansas passed a law expressly prohibiting health insurance companies from using a woman’s status as a domestic violence survivor to deny coverage, and in October 2009, California became the eleventh state to ban gender rating in the individual health insurance market.

• New research revealed that, in most states, it is common for a female non-smoker to be charged more than a male smoker in the individual insurance market simply because she is a woman. [...]

• Maternity coverage remains largely unavailable in the individual market, with virtually no improvement in access. In 2009, 13% of the health plans available to a 30-year-old woman across the country provide maternity coverage, compared to 12% in 2008.

It seems some people are so accustomed to this kind of inequality that they think it's okay (and it takes folks like Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow to point out the obvious to troglodytes like Republican Sen. John Kyl.)

So now we have an interesting case where we have an unfair private insurance system that penalizes women because of their gender, charging them more for no reason and not covering certain services. And a group of conservatives want to build that same inequality into the public insurance system by having just some procedures covered for women, whereas all procedures will be covered for men.

Umm, no. The main point of the public option is to rein in the unfair and abusive practices of the private insurance industry (NOTE: On reflection that was a huge brain fart. The main point of the public option is to lower costs. But reigning in abusive insurance industry practices would be a nice ancillary effect.) You just can’t do that if your corrective element is going to be just as unfair and abusive and discriminatory.

The reality is, no one involved in this debate gives a crap about abortion or gender discrimination. They’re trying to kill healthcare reform. They’re using their favorite wedge issue to do it, and conservative Democrats are playing along.