This started as a response to Kitsap River's excellent diary, but as usual when commenting on someone else's diary, I developed diarrhea of the word processor. Since my Kaiser plan doesn't cover that, I brought it here.

One of the best arguments I can think of in favor or single-payer UHC is the one the right-wing free-marketeers drag out all the time:  No business entity is, itself, entitled to exist or to be profitable in the first place. The "hand of the market" determines which businesses survive and which fail.

Sounds great to the laissez-faire crowd, when Wal-Mart swoops into a town and wipes out half the other businesses. But apply the same allegedly axiomatic principle to for-profit health care insurance corporations, and watch their heads explode.

I just read what I could find about the new bipartisan congressional act to save America's housing. The thing that really stood out to me was the raising of the legal Government debt ceiling to 10.6 Trillion US Dollars. That's an 800 Billion dollar increase in the debt ceiling to handle what Government officials are saying is only a perhaps 25 Billion dollar problem. Now, does that sound right to you? I suppose desperate home owners are relieved at the prospect of keeping their homes. Lenders should be happy to know that they can keep their scandal ridden sub prime mortgages on the books and keep that money flowing. The roses are back in bloom and everything is just roses, roses, roses.

In yesterday's post on a case of an ambulance driver's "moral refusal" of taking a woman in severe pain to a women's clinic, a frequent criticism came up: "But wouldn't the EMT get in trouble if she died?  Surely they could revoke his license?"

This, sadly, can no longer be assumed.  In at least one state--Mississippi--the scenario of an EMT conducting a "moral refusal", the woman dying as a result, and the EMT getting off scot free is an unfortunate possibility.

Even worse, Mississippi's law is now considered a model "moral refusal" statute--as we'll see below.

In Part 2 of the miniseries which we began yesterday, we discuss how "moral refusal" clauses are increasingly going far beyond just doctors and pharmacists, and are now extending to the most basic thing we associate with healthcare--the trip in the ambulance to have emergency surgery.

Yes, you're reading this right--dominionist ambulance drivers are now refusing to take people to women's clinics just because the woman needs a medically necessary abortion.

And at the end of the post--because I never like to just bring bad news without discussing ways to fix what's broken--I present some possible solutions to the problem of "moral refusal".

I have written rather extensively on Talk to Action regarding dominionists and reproductive health--one of the larger issues being the spread of so-called "moral refusal" clauses that do not just ban medical abortion but go towards banning the pill and even go so far as refusing reproductive health services to LGBT people and refusing prescriptions outright--including for antibiotics and prenatal vitamins--because they came from a women's clinic.

Now, in an end-run against "must dispense or refer" laws in several states, dominionists are now expanding the large "parallel economy" to a new area--namely, the dominionist-run pharmacy not providing contraceptives at all...and there are disturbing indications that a prediction I made re broad "moral refusal" clauses may have come to pass.

Gadzooks — here is a non-candidate diary. How about that? Issues!

This past week, my office dutifully wasted time. Instead of going about heaps of work piling up, we all met in a room and, for more than an hour, discussed our health plan. I work for a small non-profit and the benefits are great, lots of vacation time, bicycling for work reimbursed like it was driving, transit passes. In addition, it's the first full-time job I've had out of college and the first time I've had to deal with health insurance through my place of employ. But our rates are going up, so we had to figure out what to do.

I don't want to get in to why the rates are rising (20%) but I think it's because someone was injured last year and our group suffered. So we got to stare at sheets of information about tiers and plans and maxima and minima and co-pays and such, and that we'd all be making slightly more of an offering to the benefits gods — splitting the difference with the organisation — in order to keep our coverage. Then, we also discussed filling out new forms detailing our health histories to try to apply for new healthcare. So we spent another hour (and our HR person quite a bit more) aggregating all this.

 I wish I could say I am sorry about being so blunt, but in truth, I am not. I think we are forgetting why we are progressives as we fight the good fight. The Clinton/Obama bashing of each other. (there is enough sin to go around) has a) made us all look like fools, I am right there in that mix and b) made some us forget why we HAVE to have a Democart win the white house. Why we have to win the senate back and why we need more in the House.
 This election is (to me) about THREE things; the war, cleaning up Washington DC, Health Care/Ecomony. That my friends covers alot of the social injustices done to women, blacks, whites, children, working class, vets and nation. So having each other just FIGHT back and forth about who bashed whom first is stupid and we need to call and call and call on the two to go back to talking about what is fucking important.

This is a weak ad. If this is the strongest Clinton can attack with, it's no wonder she's bleeding staffers, supporters and cash.

If you're going to attack, ridicule harshly. She did her paper on Alinsky after all, so she knows what works best on her opponents having practiced the Rules For Radicals for years.* This comes across more like a finger waggling while claiming, "I wanna fight on TV with you. Why won't you let me?"

Clinton needs to finally out the answers to those long-standing questions we all have for her:

Today at the health benefits presentation at my work, we were introduced to our new choice of health care plans: Option A, or Option A. Actually, there was an Option B, but it came from the same company as Option A, only it was ridiculously expensive. Option A was only a mild rip-off.

You know, growing up I used to have this idealistic notion of capitalism: it was worth it to society for the private sector to provide services in competition with one another because we consumers would end up with the better menu via choice and competition. But what the health care system now is not capitalism, it's a freakin' Beast!

One of the most underreported (or non reported) stories in the corporate media is the murder of millions of Americans each year by spreadsheet.  Nowhere is this crime more evident than in the health care industry, where insurance bean counters and HMO Bureaucrats kill or seriously injure millions of Americans each year with their corporatized medicine.

But there's a solution to this problem and that solution is already law in every state.  It's called serious jail time for those who practice medicine without a license.

Michael Moore is saying that HMOs were born when Edelman talked Nixon into it with the argument that Kaiser in California had come up with a way to deny care to people and make a greater profit.  I'm wondering....

Getting out of Iraq is a must for our country and luckily the public is completely supportive of an end to the war. There's another war going on in America. It's between insured Americans and the HMO's. Americans are fighting to get their insurance companies to pony up for treatments and surgeries while the HMO's are fighting to keep their money. They'll do anything to get out of paying up, and they've got a system in place to make sure sick people don't get coverage. I'm calling this a war because thousands die each year because they can't get the health care services they need. I've chosen a side in this war, and I'm with the people, how about you?

In this continuing series on the dominionist "parallel economy", we've so far focused on dominionist business directories and dominionism's corporate sponsors; today we focus on a new facet of the dominionist "parallel economy"--the dominionist doctor.

Not only are there dominionist doctors and dominionist healthcare clinics, but entire dominionist medical associations--associations with far more lax standards than the typical mainstream medical association; with dominionist groups pushing hard to get them sanctioned officially as alternative certification boards for licensing, not only is the spectre raised that entire categories of people can be denied medical service, but that certification mills may be a future possibility.

We go through everything from non-dominionist employees being cast out of a dominionist pediatrician's group, to the dominionist "parallel economy" alternative to mainstream pediatricians, to a lesbian couple's unfortunate discovery that their HMO referred them to a dominionist doctor, to implications for not only your safety--but the safety of kids in abusive households--right after the cut.

Who has the Power in the Country?
Is it the CEO making the 400 to 500 times more that their average worker?

2006 Trends in CEO Pay (Chart)

http://www.aflcio.org/...
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I wrote  "Damaged Care, Damaged Caregiver" in the late 1990's. After ten years in private family practice, I had called it quits. I sold my busy, successful medical practice and became a stay at home mom, something I had never considered doing--until managed care made the profession I loved a nightmare. Medicine, which had been a rewarding profession during my medical training, residency and first eight year of practice had become a mine field. Though I had never been a soldier or stepped foot on a battlefield, I felt shell shocked.

Here is a link to the book in which I write about managed care in general and detail my own experiences in the chapter entitled "The Intervention."

http://www.nationwide.net/...

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


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We're here today to discuss the impact SiCKO is having on the health care debate in this country.  To date, we have appeared in Congress to discuss the need to get rid of private health insurance.  We testified before the legislature in California in support of a reform effort to protect Californians from for-profit health insurance.  We have done events with mayors, with leading members of Congress, on Wall Street and with progressive groups.  We have stood shoulder to smock with the
2.9 million California Nurses, as well as other working Americans such as the U.S. Steelworkers - the people who have helped build American beam by beam, rivet by rivet, floor by floor.

And to date the public has responded to our collective action.  We opened in over 400 theaters last week and had a great turnout.  More impressive, over the last five days the momentum has continued to grow - while others have gone down in the box office - we have actually gone up - which is virtually unheard of.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane & My Left Wing


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