18 Things that the Health Care Bill Does Right Now

Click here to read an excellent article on Huffington Post about 18 things that the health care reform bill does right now.

Republican Position on Health Care: 'I got mine, screw you."

Earlier this week we published a piece entitled "Whose Side Are You On?"You can read the prior post by clicking on the link in the previous sentence.

In that piece, we opined that if you aren't for health care reform, then you are with those who really don't care if 30 million Americans don't have insurance, or are denied medical insurance because of pre-existing condtions, or have their medical insurance policies rescinded when they make a claim.

This position led to a writer who calls himself/herself "Be Responsible" writing to protest that he/she doesn't fit into either of the categories that we set forth in our above menioned blog entry. Here is his or her's comments:

I am not on either side that you mentioned and either are millions of other citizens. Older people don't want their services cut by half a billion dollars as in the senate package and people like me and teachers want to keep their present health care coverage.

For example, I was sick 3 months ago, called my doctor's office at 8:05 AM, he saw me at 8:30, examined me, wrote a prescription, I paid my co-pay, and took my first pill before 9 am. Sorry, I don't want to lose that !

If anyone thinks that I will get that same care by adding 30 million people and subtracting all the doctors, like mine, who said he would quit, is fooling themselves. Yes, EVERYONE wants the Fraud and rates to come down.

What's wrong with making the insurance companies actually compete?

By opening up all 50 States to all the insurance companies watch the rates drop !!

And stop the ridiculous law suits with Tort reform.

We don't need another big inefficient bureaucracy.

And we can not add to the debt anymore or all our money will be totally worthless.

Be Responsible's comment is all about him or her. It is typical of the attitude that most Republicans have, "I got mine, screw everyone else."

Nowhere does Be Responsbile talk about the needs of those who have no medical insurance, or get denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, or see their medical insurance rescinded just when they need it most. Nowhere does Be Responsible talk about the thousands of people who are forced into bankruptcy because of a lack of medical insurance or the thousands of people who die earlier than they would have to if they had medical insurance.

Be Responsible talks about how tort reform and allowing medical insurance companies to sell insurance across state lines will somehow miraclously lower health insurance costs. Of course, what Be Responsible doesn't talk about is how the Republicans had both the Congress and the White House for six years. During that time, we didn't see national tort reform, we didn't see legislation passed to allow the selling of medical insurance policies across state lines. What we did see was an unpaid for expansion of Medicare drug benefits with absolutely no payment mechanism.

Here's question for Be Responsible and all the other Republicans who badmouth Obama's plan: What did you do for the six years you ran the national goverment to lower medical costs, or expand coverage, or increase competition in the medical insurance industry. Oh, that's right, not one damn thing.

So here is a news flash to Be Responsible: The lack of health care for every American is am moral issue, not just an economic one. It is a national shame that this country can't do what every other Western country, including Japan and Germany, our former enemies, have managed to do and that is cover every citizen with adequate health care.

All of the misery the present system is causing to millions of Americans apparently doesn't matter to Be Responsible as long as he/she has his/her medical insurance. Personally, we think that most Americans are bigger than that, but we shall see.

Job Losses Under Bush and Obama

Below is a chart prepared by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office showing job losses under Bush and Obama since December of 2007. The point is obvious: Fewer jobs have been lost since Obama took office as compared to the final year of Bush's second term. Since both the media and Republicans are factually challenged, we are not sure how much play this will get, but we thought we should share it with our readers.

Ol' Deficit Hawk George Does It Again

Today, January 28, 2010, the United States Senate took up the amendment to impose pay- as-you-go requirements on the United States Congress. This requirement, known as PAYGO, was credited by President Obama with helping achieve balanced budgets in Wednesday's State of the Union speech.

It works like this: If you are a Representative or a Senator and you want to propose a new Federal program, you have to come up the way to pay for the program. If you want to propose tax cuts, then you have to come up with spending cuts to balance out the tax cuts. Sounds simple, right? I mean if you were a deficit hawk, which is how George Voinovich describes himself, then you should love this idea.

Except, of course, George, along with the other 39 Republicans voted "Nay." Now why would they do that? Well, here's the situation they are in: They want to propose more and more tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, but they don't want to cut Federal programs to pay for the tax-cuts. Instead they want to keep running up the Federal deficit.

So once again, we see, just like we saw in 2001 and in 2003 with Bush's reckless tax cuts for the rich, which Ol' Deficit Hawk supported, that George Voinovich's claims to want a balanced budget are just so much Deficit Hawk bird poo.

Game Over in Massachusetts

Yesterday we published a piece called "Game On in Massachusetts". Well, as you can see from the headline above, the game is over in Massachusetts and we lost. Massachusetts AG Martha Coakley lost by about 2% of the vote. So now the junior Senator from Massachusetts is a Scott Brown who is determined to take America back to the Bush-Cheney years.

Now, part of the blame can be laid on Coakley herself. According to an online article, while Brown conducted 66 campaign events between the primary and election day, she only held 19. She came across as elitist and out of touch. Combine her campaign style with a bad economy, and it is easy to see why she lost.

Part of the problem is the way the Democrats handled health care. The Senate took way too long to pass the legislation; the need to get all 60 Senators who caucus with the Democrats to vote in favor of cutting off debate meant that conservative Dems like Nelson, Landrieu, and Lieberman had an enormous influence on the final product. This led to a dropping of the public option and pork-barrel politics that wasn't pretty to watch.

So was the refusal of the Obama administration to put the argument for the health-care reform issue in moral terms. For some reason, Democrats are reluctant to do that, while no such reluctance hinders their opponents. This is rather amazing because the moral argument is easy to make.

Studies from respected institutions like the Harvard Medical School put the number of Americans who die because of a lack of health insurance at 18,000 to 44,000 per year. This means that at least six times the number of people who died on 9-11 die each year because of how we structure medical care in this country.

So, this is what Republicans who oppose the Democrats on health care are for:

-Thousands of people needlessly dying
-Discrimination based on pre-existing conditions
-Medical bankruptcies
-Families devastated by uninsured illnesses

They recognize the political vulnerability of their position. You can tell it from the mantra they keep repeating, "We aren't against health care reform, we are just against this health care reform. We want to do it right." Which was exactly what Brown said last night during his victory speech. Only, guess what, he never tells you what that health care reform would look like because they don't have a plan. The shock isn't that Republicans campaign by being nihilists, the problem is that we don't call them on it.

George Voinovich Is At It Again

Once again, when there is a Democratic President who wants to spend money on people as opposed to giving tax cuts to the wealthy, George Voinovich becomes a "deficit" hawk. We saw this before during the Clinton and Bush administrations.

When Clinton was President, George Voinovich talked about the need for a balanced Federal budget. Although interestingly enough we don't remember a lot of praise for Clinton from Voinovich when the Clinton administration left a surplus for his successor to squander.

But when Bubble-Boy became President and wanted to pass his reckless tax cuts in 2001and then again in 2003, where was Voinovich? Well, ol' deficit hawk George was right there with him, agreeing to his cuts in 2001 and 2003. Now in 2003 the deficit hawk is given credit for helping to cut Bush's tax cuts in half, although half of budget busting tax cuts is still half too many. Ol' deficit hawk George, however, then voted to extend the expiration date of tax cuts which had the effect of undoing his work in 2003.

By this time you may be wondering why in the world we are ranting about George Voinovich on Martin Luther King Day. Let's face we could be ranting about the Massachusetts special election or talking about what King meant to America, why are we ranting about George?

Well, it is because we read this article in the Plain Dealer about how George is trying to cap off his career by helping create a budget commission to control Federal spending. Once again the PD is acting like the public relations officer for George's Senate office and telling us how great George is for caring about deficit and the Federal budget.

Although, come to think about it, at least in this article the reporter does point out how Voinovich supported Bush's tax cuts. That is something new for the PD, acknowledging, however obliquely, the hypocrisy of Voinovich on budget deficits when Republicans are in power.

Hey, no matter what happens in the race for the U.S. Senate seat from Ohio, at least we won't be treated to the PD creaming their jeans for Voinovich anymore. (See, and you probably thought this article was going to end on an angry note.)

Was Bobby Kennedy Right About Liberals?

Years ago I read a biography of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy in which the author wrote about Kennedy attending a liberal Democratic meeting on the West Side of Manhatten. After listening to them bicker among themselves for a long time, Kennedy, who had been invited there to talk about supporting a reform candidate for Judge of the Surrogate's Court, told one of his aides that he thought that his father had been right about liberals all along. What he meant by that was that his father believed that liberals demand too much perfection from candidates they support, and when they don't get it, they stop supporting them.

Flash forward to the 2010 special election in Massachusetts for the seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy. On the political blogs there is a lot of talk about whether liberals such as Jane Hamsher of Fire Dog Lake would rather have Martha Coakely lose then win. The reasoning goes that a victory by Brown, who is a very conservative Republican, and who is dedicated to stopping the health care bill, would actually be beneficial. Their thinking goes that the defeat of a bill they see as too corporate friendly would then lead the Democrats to somehow get together and pass a much more liberal bill, say, one that had a public option.

Here's my take on this issue. The defeat of the health care bill won't result in a better bill, it will result in no bill. Democrats like Nelson, Lincoln, and Bayh won't come for a more liberal bill, they will take the position that the status quo is what they should support. Why? Because they are not going to be persuaded that the loss of a Senate seat in Mass. means that people want a more liberal bill. They are going to think to themselves, "If freaking Mass. voters don't want a health care bill, then the residents of my state, which is far more conservative, don't want a health care bill."

I saw this in 1980, when liberal friends of mine supported first Kennedy over Carter and then John Anderson over Carter. What did that get them? Eight years of Reagan. Then in 2000, people like Nader said there was no difference between Gore and Bush. What did that get us? Eight years of Bush. Now, the same types are saying that there is no difference between Obama's health care bill and the status quo? What will that get us? More of the status quo.

If you are against this health care bill, and there is plenty of things I don't like about it, then this is what you are for:

1. Continued discrimination based on pre-existing conditions;
2. Continued caps on medical insurance benefits, which will result in more Americans going bankrupt;
3. The unavailability of medical insurance to the approximately 31 million people who would be covered by this plan; and
4. The continued deaths of 44,000 Americans per year because they don't have health insurance, according to a study from the Harvard Medical School.

That's your choice. The choice is not between some hypothetical health insurance bill that is never going to get passed, the choice is between the current bill and the status quo. That is what is at stake on Tuesday in Massachusetts.

Comparing Bubble-Boy's First Year vs Obama's First Year on Terror Attacks

Okay, so let's get this straight: During Bubble-Boy's first year of being President, his administration ignored a warning regarding al-Qaeda's plans to attack America and approximately 3000 Americans died. In Obama's first year of being President, according to the right-wing pundits, his administration ignored warnings about the Nigerian who attempted to destroy an American airliner and no Americans died. Yet, amazingly, according to the right-wing pundits, it is the Obama administration and not the Bubble-boy administration that failed the national security test in its first year.

Here's what Democrats need to start saying: In Bush's first year of being president we lost 3,000 Americans to organized terrorism. In Obama's first year of being President, we lost zero Americans to organized terrorism. That simple fact, repeated over and over, says everything that needs to be said about which administration did a better job of protecting the American people.

What Would Be Republican Response to a 9-11 Attack Today?

On September 11, 2001, the United States suffered a horrible attack under George W. Bush's presidency. Over 3000 Americans died. Democratic politicians in the House of Representatives and the United States Senate publicly supported President Bush. They didn't criticize him for the hours it took him to respond; for the fact that he flew around in Air Force One most of the day before returning to Washington, D.C.; they didn't call for investigations into what his administration knew before the attack; and they certainly didn't send out fund-raising letters in an attempt to raise campaign contributions from the death of thousands of Americans.

Nor did former Vice-President Al Gore issue denunciations of the Bush Administration's strategy for dealing with terrorists. Vice-President Gore did not emerge from some dark lair to say that all that mattered to the Bush Administration was getting tax cuts for their rich contributors and that this preoccupation had led to lax security for Americans. Indeed, given the fact that Al Gore had lost a presidential election because of a United States Supreme Court that was dominated by Republican appointees, two of which were appointed by his opponent's father, Gore's response was incredibly generous, at least by today's standards.

Now, contrast the Democratic response to 9-11 with the Republican response to the attempted attack on the airliner over Detroit. We have heard Republicans use the attack to try and score cheap political points at the President's expense and we have seen the sickening sight of Republicans using the attempted attack to raise campaign funds. We have seen the propaganda arm of the GOP, otherwise known as Fox News, criticize Obama for using words like "allegedly", as if using that word was somehow in itself a weakness.

And, of course, we have seen former Vice-President Cheney give at least one interview in which he claimed that Obama's pre-occupation with "transforming" American society had somehow led to the Detroit attack.

So here is my conclusion, and it was difficult for me to come to, but I believe that if a 9-11 attack took place under Obama, we would see a much different reaction from the GOP than we saw from the Democrats on that fateful day. We wouldn't see statements invoking national unity or calling for support for President Obama. We wouldn't see former Bush administration officials calling on Americans to support President Obama. Instead we would see Republicans Representatives and Senators rush to the studios of Fox News to denounce Obama. We would see campaign consulting firms grinding out fund-raising letters for Republicans even as Americans were burying their dead.

It pains me to come to this conclusion. I hope that we never have to find out if I am right, and if such a horrible tragedy occurs again, I hope that I am wrong about the Republican response. But given their actions over the last week or so, what other conclusion can I come to?

Medina County Vote Total Up in 2008 from 2004

The official count of the ballots cast in Medina County for the 2008 general election shows that 90,652 voters voted, which represented a turnout of 70.76%. In 2004, the number of voters in the general election in Medina County was 86,016, which represented 72.73% of registered voters.

In the 2004 general election, Bush received 48,196 votes and Kerry received 36,272 votes. In the 2008 general election, McCain received 48,189 and Obama received 40,924. Those figures would seem to indicate that nearly all of Medina County's growth in voters were Obama supporters.

Barack Obama Lays It on the Line for the GOP

According to this article that appeared in the New York Post, when President Barack Obama met with Republicans, he was very candid with them. Among the highlights: He told them that they can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh if they want to work with the Democrats in Congress and the new Administration; he reminded them that he won'; and he told them that he would "trump" them with his victory if they opposed his policies.

Here are some quotes from the article linked to above:

"You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done," he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.

In an exchange with Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) about the proposal, the president shot back: "I won," according to aides briefed on the meeting.
"I will trump you on that."

Not that Obama was gloating. He was just explaining that he aims to get his way on stimulus package and all other legislation, sources said, noting his unrivaled one-party control of both congressional chambers.

Here's a difference between Obama and Bush. At heart, Bush was inherently not self-confident, so he had to bluster and bully to make up for his lack of self-confidence. At heart, Barack Obama is extremely self-confident, so he doesn't feel any need to bluster and bully. Therefore, he can deliver messages such as those quoted above without coming off as being mean or rude. It is, all in all, a very important character trait.

Bushies Not Coping Well With GOP Defeat

From complaining about the tone of Obama's inaugural address to complaining about the stimulus bill not including their ideas, Bushies seem to be having trouble with one overriding fact: The Republicans lost and Democrats won. Get ready for Republicans' attempts to discredit Obama's win and insist that their policies haven't been repudiated by the American people. 

Here's how one Republican put it during the early part of this decade, before Bubble-Boy had screwed up the Iraq War, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and the American economy: "Elections have consequences." Well, he was right and one of those consequences is that the winners get to set the agenda for their term. 

Having lost control of two of the three branches of government, the Republicans are in for a rough ride. Probably the best thing they can hope for is that the economy doesn't improve and Democrats suffer electoral defeats in the 2010 and 2012 elections. If the economy does improve, however, they are in for a long period in the wilderness. 

Of course, their own incompetence brought this on their fate. Americans want government to be competent and Republicans have always insisted that they are much more competent than Democrats. Well, that myth, like so many others, was destroyed by Bush and his merry wrecking crew. 

Maybe if they had put some distance between themselves and BB during BB's tenure in office, they wouldn't have been routed in two consecutive national elections. But they didn't and they were. As mentioned above, in America, elections do have consequences.  

"Free at Last, Free at Last, God Almighty We are Free at Last"

After eight long years the national nightmare that was the George W. Bush Administration ends today. Eight years of trashing this nation's values, its government, its reputation, its financial future, and its legacy. Eight years of policies deliberately designed to divide Americans in the pursuit of political power. Eight years of turning our government over to the moneychangers who invaded the people's temple. 

The damage done by Bubble-Boy and his minions will take years to undo, but the process starts today. We have freed ourselves from the pettiness, the nastiness, the meanness, the vindictiveness of a self-indulged, vain man who has gone through life having the way cleared for him. 

Further, the election of Barack Obama wasn't just about getting rid of Bushism, as worthy a goal as that was, it was about showing the world that the best things about America haven't been lost. Things like our idealism, our commitment to democratic values, and our generosity of spirit. This is indeed the dawning of a new day in America.