a many-sided sword

The internet may be a sword of many sides.

Progressives draw line in sand to defend public health option:

The Gazetteer blog has a great piece today from YouTube in this regard:

http://pacificgazette.blogspot.com/

Lynn....

...I also had a post up last weekend in answer to the 'death panel' codswallop.

I called it 'My Grandma's End Of Life 'Life Panel'

Quite a few folks in the American ProBloggoDome found it useful.

Thanks for the link.

The Gazetteer.

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Red Menace seen in health care

Webster's New International unabridged 2d Edition defines "socialism" as "A political and economic theory of social organization based on collective or governmental ownership and democratic management of the essential means for the production and distribution of goods."

In that vein I have argued for 45 years that "Any federal or state/province or city tax dollar spent on any program of any kind in any amount = a form of 'socialism'. Schools are socialism. The armed forces are socialism. Libraries are socialism. Turnpikes are socialism. Taxpaid health care is socialism. Church tax exemption is socialism. National parks are socialism. Agriculture subsidies are socialism. Bank bail-outs are socialism. They're ALL a form of 'socialism'..." and that would include BC's famed P3's, too.

President Obama's ills stem from sloganeering nincompoops whose shallow depth inspires them to support socialized warfare but not socialized health care. The former reflects a "strong" country, they say, the latter a "weak" country.

The obit for Mr. Obama's health care initiative will no doubt read that it died from "audio mastication" -- death by sound bites.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/08/18/nbc-poll-myths-endure-on-health-care-highlighting-doubts-on-overhaul/

Is an interesting poll done by NBC and 45% of Americans believe there will be death panels...I am surprised Americans are that gullible to the fear mongering....

Dan....

....It's worth noting that progressives have forced the WSJ and NBC to actually revisit the weasel-wording of their healthcare reform polling that is likely skewing their numbers on the critical issue of a 'public option'.

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If the Public Option fails ...

... in the US, prepare for an unprecedented onslaught against Canadian single-payer non-profit medical services insurance.

Study Sun Tzu to learn techniques that will counter the strategies being used by the profit-based insurance corporations.

Learn to distinguish between life assurance and medical services insurance; they will sow confusion - learn to clarify and focus.

Learn the difference between a competitive market for consumer wants, and a captured market for citizen needs. Clarify why the rules that successfully govern each separate market are not interchangeable.

Propose solutions for the problems in Medicare before they take the media field with theirs. Propose extending Medicare to cover pharmaceuticals, rehabilitation care and home care/extended care.

Always challenge the mis-measure of cost
[difference between %GDP vs %govt expenditure]

"The highest warfare is attacking the enemy's plans; next best is attacking their alliances; worse is attacking the enemy."

'Progressive Americans' !

If they don't manage to do a good job with reforming their health-care 'system' the goal's obit will have to also refer to the peculiarly 'American' trait of being easily lulled into a sense of smugness- that the progressives & the masses they brought along to elect Obama are somehow assuming that everything will be alright now that they have a real leader, while the fact is 'America' is still down the tubes completely & the only two significant changes to how they manage things that just might offer some distant glimmer of hope of America ever reviving will be with health-care reform (the 'silver-bullet' actually), but only on top of a hugely/unprecedentedly ambitious approach to building a sustainable economy.
Anyway- anyway, I'm commenting here because (this is like, in BC that I'm saying this) with 'America' having become pretty much irrelevant in the world, how much does it matter anymore how well or poorly they do- it's interesting watching how Obama does though.

No-Care.

I use to watch Jay Leno, talking with people on the streets in the USA. It was called Jay Walking. These people where nuts. I always felt it was a setup that Americans could not be that stupid, but.........
How can an American fight to the death to bring so called freedom to people in other countries, but not want their fellow citizens to have access to a Doctor. I don't get it, and this is not the Leno show anymore, this is real life, and half the population seem insane. 18,000 American die every year because they don't have health insurance. Ya right good Christians, and they don't want to share that Loaf of Bread God gave to them all....

Sorting thru the mess.

The Webster's definition of Socialism as offered above by Badger Billy isn't the type of Socialism I espouse, inasmuch as it is only Communism with a thin veneer of Democracy bestowed by a popular vote. I was surprised to find that my Concise Oxford concurs with Webster's. I would never vote for such a Party.

I support, however, what is known as "Democratic Socialism", and agree with Badger Billy who quite correctly notes that every Democratic system in the Western world employs "Socialistic" State ownership and/or rigid control of various enterprises and resources when it is in the public interest. This is seen most vividly in times of War, when everything is controlled by the State.

Democratic Socialism recognises that Capitalism is not a political theory, but an economic one, since the closest it gets to social theory is promoting the belief that all human actions are driven only by the profit motive. This inevitably leads the Capitalists to become parasitic not only upon themselves, but upon their host country as well, as we are witnessing in the current meltdown.

So the current political debate is not shadow-boxing between Socialism and "Capitalism", but rather a no-holds-barred fight between Socialism and Fascism. The current US Health-care debate is emblemmatic of that, posing the values of the "public interest" against the unregulated pursuit of profit.

Obama is unlikely to come out the clear victor in this round, but he's got the Fascists running scared, for he's re-opening a serious debate which has remained unvisited ever since the last Depression.

Uninsured Americans do get free health care, sort of

As I understand it (a relative of mine works for an American insurer), an uninsured American can get critical injuries and the like fixed up at a hospital emergency ward. They'll be billed, but they won't be denied service based on a credit check in advance.

Of course, this is ridiculously expensive and has nothing to do with regular doctor visits for checkups and preventive care, which would ultimately be much cheaper for those who howl, not entirely without merit, about the pain of taxes.

It seems to me that Obama should come out for single payer/Canadian style and emphasize the business case. Humanitarianism is not really very American.

Yammer....

And the point made by one of the few Congress Critters that is actually doing what the overwhelming majority of his constituents wants, Anthony Weiner, is that those uninsured emergency visits actually cost the system a fortune.

Look.

The critical thing to realize here is that without a real public option and/or single payer provision, any healthcare 'reform' bill that gets signed into law will actually just increase costs because it all the new provisos will actually lead to massive profit increases to the private insurers.

Mr. Weiner makes that point too when he was interviewed recently by Chris Matthews.

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Insurance companies and cost reduction

Don't citizens of the USA realize that insurance companies have an army of people who are there to reduce costs by denying or deferring more expensive treatments? How are these any different from the mythical 'death panels' that would be in place under a government-funded scheme?

How can so many people be duped by such crap? (possible answer?? Apparently the typical Bush supporter was a mid-30s mid-Westerner, high school educated fundamentalist Christian)

Great comment on "No-Care", Bob Watts!

Organizing on the Web

I can't help but be amused as the Democratic agenda on Health Care and, increasingly, "cap and trade" is picked apart by, yoiks, grassroots organizing. ((And, yes, I have heard that there is money from assorted interests in behind that organizing - so what? Move-On was not exactly unfunded.)

Obama ran a huge internet operation in his election attempt. He and his people understand how powerful you-tube and blogs and tweets have become and how lame MSM has also become. But they were under the misaprehension that the left in the US had the same hammerlock on the 'net as it does the MSM.

They have been surprised by the strength of the right and populist push back. They shouldn't have been. There is a huge, successful and self-sustaining media/web matrix on the right in the US. As Bush was clueless about the net and the Republican Party barely grasped it, the right side has evolved without any gatekeepers or talking points. There is no "townhouse" list to keep the right on message.

Now, critically, the left side of the web has been - like many other elements in the Obama victory - hemorrhaging readership since the One was elected. But the right side has been growing fast.

Expect to see more tea parties and more populists all organized using things like Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Sort of community organizing for the 00's

Mr. Currie....

...When, exactly, did you succumb to codswalloparianism?

Not to mention false equivalencies.

"....yes, I have heard that there is money from assorted interests in behind that organizing - so what? Move-On was not exactly unfunded..."

Two things.

First, the folks in MoveOn never hid their true intentions as is being done by the folks backing the wurlitzering of the deathpanel/beware nazi programs/they're gonna take away our guns! screamfests of the stoopid.

Second, the 'not exactly unfunded', but overwhelmingly truly grassroots, citizen-by- individual-citizen fundraising of Move On was never generated in ways that led to groups like this or this.

OK?

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