The Hater-Entertainment Complex

Tell me: is there any way - any freakin' way - to slow down and maybe even stop altogether the Radical Hate Train that pulls out of Fox News headquarters every day? Conspiracy? Facism? Nazism? Murder, mayhem, mass hysteria, totalitarianism? It's all there, piled high in big manure mountains, waiting to be tossed, shovelful by shovelful, to the sad, gullible masses. How easily those poor little impoverished souls can be manipulated. Me, me, me; I want more, more, more, and I don't care about anyone else. If you tell me I can't have more, I'll call you a villain and throw you out of office. If you tell me we can't go on spending this way, I'll call you Hitler and say you're trying to squirm out of what you owe me. If you tell me that as Americans, it's only right that we should talk about creating a sustainable system that's good for everyone, I'll say you're a socialist. If you say let's figure out a better way, you'll say government can't do anything right.

And politicians are the problem? How about the immature voter? And the hater-entertainers who feed them? What could be their rationale? What visceral fear motivates them? Terrorists outside the U.S. don't scare me half as much as the terrorists within.

Health is the Problem, not the Solution

A newsletter I get, from Join Together, recently posted this article, about how some people think that the issue of personal responsibility should play a bigger role in the health care debate. Predictably - since this organization focuses on substance abuse and addiction - many readers cried foul, pointing out that addiction is a disease for which people can't be held responsible, at least not in the conventional way.

That question doesn't interest me near so much as the larger one of whether (or not) we're finally coming to understand that, in one way or another, we ALL pay for one another's health care. Yes, we're socialists, folks, whether we like it or not, whether or not the word makes us rip our eyes out and wail into the dark night. Therefore - because we're all unfortunately in it together - it would make sense for us to take some simple measures to keep ourselves healthy, not just for our own sake, but for society's sake as well. We can't avoid this distasteful financial intimacy, given that that's what insurance (public or private) is. Sorry, I'm just saying. It's not who issues the insurance. It's the very concept of insurance. You pay for mine, I pay for yours, and we all pay for the sickest. That's the way it is.

Anyway, in responding to the article, a woman named Carole points out that we're all just a bunch of goodie-two-shoers. It turns out that we can natter on about "prevention" and "responsibility" all we want, parrotting back the conventional wisdom about how health care reform will make everyone healthier and thus save us all a big pile of money. But NONE OF THAT'S TRUE, I now find out. Not seeing how it's healthy people (yes, HEALTHY people) who end up consuming the most medical care over a lifetime. It seems that, on the way to their high-cost nursing homes, they wheel their walkers over the corpses of those who died early from obesity or smoking - people who, in dying so prematurely, thoughtfully saved us a lot of dough.

So it's our relative health and lengthening lifespans that's the problem, eh? What do we do with this perhaps obvious bit of information? Encourage smoking and the consumption of trunk-loads of junk food? Well, maybe not. But since we've been hurtling toward this point for at least a century, it seems time that somebody dare utter it: we can't afford the long (and at the end, unhealthy and costly) lives we've granted ourselves. And making ourselves still MORE healthy isn't going to help; quite the opposite, conceivably. (Yes, I know. Healthy people are productive and pay taxes. Sick people on disability don't. That's another discussion). What now?

A New Job for Sarah

I hate people. No, it's not the first time it's occurred to me. It's just that this summer has been so completely depressing. I'm actually beginning to develop a conservative-like disdain of the Ideas of Others. Blah, blah, blah, they say. Blah, blah, blah. I'm supposed to be open-minded and patient; such are perhaps the only true virtues of the more liberal-minded. But, I'm tired of it all. Euthanize? There are several subpopulations of our society I'd love to euthanize, and whose timely death would, I think, only enhance our social discourse (not to mention our balance sheet). So run, ignoramuses, run. Sarah Palin, grab your high-powered, antelope-size rifle, board your helicopter, and turn your hand to the really important work of America. Come on, I know you can do it.

Arguing Some More About Health Care

E-mails between myself and my beloved Republican mate. This kind of bickering is what mixed marriages are all about (at least when the partners are thoughtful, and you want the whole thing to last). What I've concluded: conservatives don't believe problems can be solved - not necessarily, at least. Life is messy, they say, and some people are just going to get the short of the stick. Can't buy your insulin? Well, that's a bummer, but what can anyone do? The thing is, I don't entirely disagree - just mostly.

READ FROM THE BOTTOM UP

From me back to him:

Thu 3/6/2008 8:08 AM
Subject: re: our great system

Are you actually insane? ????? If we didn’t pour our money into middlemen’s pockets (i.e., the insurance industry), we’d be just fine. The point is, you dope, that here, in America, we have to have LOTTERIES for health care??? What is this, Calcutta?

From him back to me:

Thursday, March 06, 2008 7:40 AM
Subject: Re: our great system

"At its peak in 1995, the program covered 132,000 Oregonians. State budget cuts forced the program to close to newcomers by 2004, but it now has several thousand openings." Proving once again that we can't afford a government health care system.

Forwarded from me to him:

03/06/2008 07:33 AM
Subject: our great system

Oregon Holds Health Insurance Lottery
BYLINE: Sarah Skidmore; Associated Press
PORTLAND, Ore. -- Oregon is conducting a one-of-a-kind lottery, and the prize is health insurance.
The state will start drawing names this week for the chance to enroll in a health care program designed for people not poor enough for Medicaid but too cash-strapped to buy their own insurance.

More than 80,000 people have signed up since registration for the lottery opened in January. Only a few thousand will be chosen for the program.
"It's better than nothing, it's at least a hope," said Shirley Krueger, 61, who signed up the first day.

It's been more than six months since she could afford to take insulin regularly for her diabetes. That puts her at higher risk for a number of complications, such as kidney failure, heart disease and blindness.

Her part-time job leaves her ineligible for her employer's insurance plan and with too little income to buy her own.

"I'm worried about it. I know it's a death sentence," Krueger said.

An estimated 600,000 people in Oregon are uninsured, according to the Oregon Department of Human Services.

Those selected in the lottery will be eligible for a standard benefit program, which was once a heralded highlight of the Oregon Health Plan.

At its peak in 1995, the program covered 132,000 Oregonians. State budget cuts forced the program to close to newcomers by 2004, but it now has several thousand openings.

The program covers their most basic health services, medications and limited dental, hospital and vision services at little or no cost.

Kicking Them While They're Down

Digby, in her blog Hullabaloo, wonders why it is that conservatives so often seem intent on blasting to smithereens the character of anyone receiving public assistance.

She writes:

Ridenour's post (among others) reminds me of a well-off acquaintance of mine who agreed to give an aging relative a hundred dollars a month. He made sure that everyone knew how generous he was and then he would regale us all with stories about how he would go over to the old fellow's house once a month and inspect it to make sure he wasn't doing anything "bad" with the money. After all, he gave him a hundred bucks a month. He forced the old guy to stop buying cheap beer and made him quit smoking a pipe and pored over his bills to make sure he wasn't overusing the utilities. He had a right, you see. The man was taking his money.

The question to me when he would tell me this stuff was why this very well-off man (a Republican, by the way) took such pride at controlling the behavior of one sad old man through a meager offering of a hundred dollars a month. I could only conclude that it was because his sadistic joy at making someone else miserable was coupled with his inflated belief in his own goodness and pride in his superiority. He was allowed to deny this man his freedom in the name of helping him. The authoritarian's path to heaven.

In telling this anecdote, Digby is referring to the case of Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old boy recruited by Congressional Democrats to make the case for the S-CHIP program. Frost had had the misfortune to be in a car accident with his parents and sister; he suffered a brain stem injury, she a cranial fracture. Surely harrowing enough, right? But the point of his story was somehow a positive one: low-cost health insurance worked for his family. With an income of only $46,000, it was the only insurance they could afford. When catastrophe struck, they were covered. Whew.

But now, thanks to some over-the-top conservative bloggers, we need to hear about how the family should never have been eligible for this bit of social help, because after all, its kids all went to an expensive private school (though on scholarship, it turned out), and lived in a nice suburb in a decent house, and hey, why should we, the overburdened and much-abused taxpayers of America, have to pony up for people who aren't all that bad off? (And if they were bad off, it would no doubt be their own damn fault, but that's another issue.)

Aside from impugning the integrity of a family that has endured such unimaginable tragedy, this line of attack is notable because of what it says about our fundamental differences as human beings. What's the conservative-liberal split really about, and where does it come from?

Digby looks deep into the conservative psyche, finding the old Puritan need to control unseemly and unproductive behavior through social mechanisms. (Which often translates to financial mechanisms, of course.) The attitude goes thus: If poor choices and sub-standard behavior got you into this mess, I'm not bailing you out. Unless you change. And even then I'll humiliate you, because you're such a loser to have gotten into trouble in the first place.

And since conservatives don't like or believe in the social compact, their gripe is personal: My money belongs to me, and I really, really hate giving any of it to you.

But I think the real attitudes that lead to this kind of thinking are even more primitive, and are rooted in the tendency of each individual to cast himself either within a group or outside the group. We either acknowledge the reciprocal arrangements we have with one another, accepting that at any given moment some individuals will get more out of the deal than others, or we reject them, scrutinizing every social transaction as though the circumstances that necessitated it must by definition be pathological. Because we're not supposed to need each other. Are we?

Well, leaving the supposeds out of it, we in fact do need each other. That includes conservatives, who, in my experience, are perfectly happy to push their snouts into the government trough whenever they smell something tasty. In fact they do it all the time, pausing only to squeal when desperate parents with banged-up kids tap them on the haunch to get a nibble themselves.

So please. Let's get serious. Low-cost insurance is a good thing. Slam a 12-year-old with a brain stem injury if you like, but ... be sure to take a good look in the mirror while you're doing it.

George Draws the Line

From a Washington Post editorial:

To say that George W. Bush spends money like a drunken sailor is to insult every gin-soaked patron of every dockside dive in every dubious port of call. If Bush gets his way, the cost of his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will soon reach a mind-blowing $600 billion. Despite turning a budget surplus into a huge deficit, the man still hasn't met a tax cut he doesn't like. And when the Republicans were in charge of Congress, Bush might as well have signed their pork-stuffed spending bills with a one-word rubber stamp: "Whatever."

So for Bush to get religion on fiscal responsibility at this late date is, well, a joke. And for him to make his stand on a measure that would have provided health insurance to needy children is a punch line that hasn't left many Republicans laughing.

Bush's veto Wednesday of a bipartisan bill reauthorizing the State Children's Health Insurance Program was infuriatingly bad policy. An estimated 9 million children in this country are not covered by health insurance -- a circumstance that should shock the consciences of every American. Democrats and Republicans worked together to craft an expansion of an existing state-run program that would have provided coverage for about 4 million children who currently don't have it.

I'm a social worker; I care about kids and know something about the ways that poor kids live.

Myself, I'm firmly in the upper middle class. I have nice stuff, a nice house, a reasonable job, decent clothes in my closet and good food in my refrigerator.

I mentor a 10-year-old girl who doesn't have these things. She spends most of her time shuttling between a housing project, where she and her mom live (illegally) with mom's boyfriend, and a ramshackle house dominated by a sometimes-abusive grandfather. This girl is adorable, spirited, fun, appreciative. And she's poor. Before she met me, she'd never been in a movie theater. Never played miniature golf. Never gone ice skating. These are simple and inexpensive pleasures that middle-class kids take for granted. Not so for poor kids; they don't expect these treats and rarely get them. They just cost too much.

A couple of months ago my little girl fell when she was playing in a sprinkler and broke her wrist. The next time I saw her, she was wearing a cast. How did her mom afford the care? The state of New Hampshire's S-CHIP program. Without it, this girl simply wouldn't have had insurance. Would she still have gotten treated? It's hard to say. Probably eventually, and begrudgingly, and at high cost to her mother, who wouldn't have been able to pay the bills in any case. Luckily for her, she had the low-cost S-CHIP insurance, and nobody had to worry about it. She got to get the same medical care that richer kids would get.

Enough said. We're spending $333 million a day on Iraq. And children's health insurance is where we're drawing the budgetary line?

My live-in David is a Republican, which makes him a big anomaly in my life. My sort generally don't mix with his sort. But I've learned quite a bit from him about how conservatives think, and, shocking to admit, not all of it necessarily appalls me. In fact, I get some of it. I agree with some of it.

This is what David says about the Washington Post editorial. It doesn't specifically address the S-CHIP veto, which David hadn't been following and didn't know about. But it does speak to how conservatives are feeling about this president. (Yes, I know. We dislike our president for different reasons, but not even David is against insuring poor kids.)

I'm a life-long Republican who leans towards the Libertarian end of the spectrum. Politically, I operate on the principle that one votes for a party, not an individual. The party you select mirrors, in the aggregate, your personal values and beliefs. It is the coherence and discipline of a party that generally ensures that it’s members operate (and vote) in an expected fashion.

Something sad has happened to the Republican Party in the last dozen or so years. First, they lost focus on what they ought to stand for – what their core supporters expected. There was less and less to distinguish them from Democrats. This resulted from the repeated “triangulation” beatings administered by Bill Clinton. Then they fell victim to the natural pitfalls of being the party decisively in power (think Democrats in the '80s).

Over time, the Republican Party has drifted further away from me. George W. Bush embodies this drift. I voted for him – twice. The second time without enthusiasm. He has demonstrated a shocking lack of conviction or purpose. President Bush has consistently approved ever greater government spending of money we don’t have. He has encouraged monetary policies (first under Greenspan and now Bernanke) that promote debt creation, asset bubbles, and currency devaluation. None of this helps to maintain a healthy middle-class, a necessary condition for a healthy democracy.

I have become disappointed in President Bush and disillusioned with the Republican Party.

It's a Fat World, er, Country, But Don't Blame Us

This week, Gina Kolata of The Times continues her mission to assure us that if we're overweight, it's Not Our Fault.

It's not! Truly!

Don't even start with that nonsense about diet and exercise. Moderate exercise makes very little difference, she says, because our brains want us to be a particular weight and will make sure that we stay at or about it. And crappy calorie-packed food isn't the problem because American never ate all that well, when you think about it. So while diet and exercise matter somewhat, it's really a lot more complicated than that.

For instance:

According to several animal studies, conditions during pregnancy, including the mother’s diet, may determine how fat the offspring are as adults. Human studies have shown that women who eat little in pregnancy, surprisingly, more often have children who grow into fat adults. More than a dozen studies have found that children are more likely to be fat if their mothers smoke during pregnancy.

The research is just beginning, true, but already it has upended some hoary myths about dieting. The body establishes its optimal weight early on, perhaps even before birth, and defends it vigorously through adulthood. As a result, weight control is difficult for most of us. And obesity, the terrible new epidemic of the developed world, is almost impossible to cure.

OK, stop. I've had enough of this. While acknowledging that, hey, she's the science writer and I'm not, I'd like to ask a simple clarifying question.

Even given that everything she says is true, and I have no reason to believe that it's not, why is it that people in other cultures are thinner, and that Americans in earlier decades were thinner? Surely we modern-day Americans aren't so unlucky as to be walking around with post-modern, fitness-sabotaging brains, while everybody else gets the regular old brains that somehow allow them to stay within normal weight ranges? Same goes for pregnancy and any other biological factors that supposedly tip the scales, so to speak, against us. These factors aren't new, and aren't specific to our very fat American society. Something changed somewhere, and it seems pretty obvious what it is.

What I wonder is why Kolata, who's written a whole book on why we should accept our fatness instead of trying to fight it, is so interested in letting us all off the hook.

Polyps and the Holy Grail

From the NYT: Though President Bush has had episodes of mild vertigo in recent weeks, they have not interfered with his work, and he is in excellent health, the White House said yesterday in releasing findings from his annual medical checkup.

Well, excellent. It's been a summer of good news about President Bush, his vertigo, his ear infection, and his bowels, which happily are now polyp-free. That's quite a relief.

But, not to be a scold, I do want to underscore what others have already pointed out: the 'gold-plated' care our President is getting is simply unavailable to those millions without health insurance. Meaning that they'll go ahead and develop the full-blown diseases that happily will be prevented in him.

So what? If your main interest in life is money, consider that it's cheaper to prevent sickness than to treat it. And treat we will, even the fully diseased poor, because in the end, America just isn't quite callous enough to let people drop dead in the street. Our national compassion is of the last-resort kind, and that's the most expensive kind of all.

Why on earth don't Republicans get this? They're the bean-counters. If the options are to pay now, or pay more later, wouldn't it make sense to choose the former?

It's not health care alone that presents this basic choice, but given the looming national elections, it's the one we're going to be arguing about most. But here is what I've always suspected: saving money, surely the Holy Grail for conservatives, remains less appealing than that other Holy Grail: punishing those who haven't done well in our society. If everybody had access to the same excellent services, after all, how would we know who was worthy and who not? Who had worked hard, and who hadn't? Who was decent and fine and upstanding, and who wasn't?

And that, in a nutshell, is why we haven't and won't make any real progress on this issue. We can't admit that we don't want to grouped together, even for the simple purpose of ensuring minimal protection against needless suffering. We much prefer our current report-card society, where some of us get A's and some of us get D's and F's. And the people with D's and F's - well, for whatever reason, and sad to report, they just lose out. That's the real American way.

(By the way, it's true that we can't afford everything we as a country might want. My money-minded conservative consort has convinced me of this. And I get it, truly. But that's another topic.)