“For Halloween my husband asked me to dress up as a
nurse, ‘cause that's one of his fantasies: That we have health care.”—Comic
Wendy Liebman, October 28, 2012 tweet
Showing posts with label Health Care. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Health Care. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Friday, March 19, 2010
Quote of the Day (Senator Feinstein, on Losing)
"Winning may not be everything, but losing has little to recommend it." – Attributed to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)
This might be the most admirably candid quote about American politicals that you’ll read this year. It accounts for so much—the endless, nitpicking partisanship on every blessed thing; the rampaging egomania that makes Presidential candidacies bloom constantly; the ceaseless hunt for money.
Naturally, it was said before the current debate—and coming vote—on President Obama’s health-care proposal.
Earlier this year, Senator Feinstein got into trouble with MoveOn.org just for admitting the obvious: that Obama’s plan, up to that point, simply did not have enough votes for passage.
After the projected vote on the mammoth proposal on Sunday, we’ll see which party is the bigger loser. It’s not going to be pretty, folks.
Obama has to win this vote. That’s it. Do or die. He can’t be seen as having devoted so much in terms of time and resources, to the virtual exclusion of darn near everything else, and come away with nothing.
As for Republicans, do they care at this point about losing? The fight has energized the base and given them an opponent they can unite against.
Of course, “winning” might not do either side the kind of good it guaranteed in the past. A “no” vote would seal the GOP reputation as needlessly obstructionist. But a “Yes” might only set in stone, among a certain part of the population, the Democrats’ reputation for salting otherwise worthy legislation with unwholesome deals.
This might be the most admirably candid quote about American politicals that you’ll read this year. It accounts for so much—the endless, nitpicking partisanship on every blessed thing; the rampaging egomania that makes Presidential candidacies bloom constantly; the ceaseless hunt for money.
Naturally, it was said before the current debate—and coming vote—on President Obama’s health-care proposal.
Earlier this year, Senator Feinstein got into trouble with MoveOn.org just for admitting the obvious: that Obama’s plan, up to that point, simply did not have enough votes for passage.
After the projected vote on the mammoth proposal on Sunday, we’ll see which party is the bigger loser. It’s not going to be pretty, folks.
Obama has to win this vote. That’s it. Do or die. He can’t be seen as having devoted so much in terms of time and resources, to the virtual exclusion of darn near everything else, and come away with nothing.
As for Republicans, do they care at this point about losing? The fight has energized the base and given them an opponent they can unite against.
Of course, “winning” might not do either side the kind of good it guaranteed in the past. A “no” vote would seal the GOP reputation as needlessly obstructionist. But a “Yes” might only set in stone, among a certain part of the population, the Democrats’ reputation for salting otherwise worthy legislation with unwholesome deals.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Ridiculous Headline of the Day (Investor’s Business Daily, Alarmed About Obamacare)
“SOCIALISM CREEPS IN AS AMERICA SLEEPS”—editorial headline in Investor’s Business Daily, December 22, 2009
Puh-leez. “Creeping socialism”—can’t the opponents of universal health care come up with something other than a cliché to describe their opposition to a bill that, even now, on the brink of passage, is heavily compromised and scarcely resembling what was originally advertised?
(Oh, and why does socialism always creep? Why can’t it gallop? Or at least make the phrase alliterative, Spiro Agnew-style, and say that it slithers?)
Few Capitol Hill participants in the health care debate have crowned themselves with glory, but throughout this entire process the GOP, to its shame, has been a uniquely obstructionist force. All it can do is stand there and mouth scare words or phrases, such as “Socialism.”
Go ahead—name me one concrete proposal the Republican Party has made this year toward extending coverage to the desperately uninsured. You can’t, can you?
That’s because the party hopes, with its hopeless intransigence this time around, to do what it did in 1994 against Bill Clinton: use a legislative debacle to jump back into the political game following an election where they lost the Presidency and both houses of Congress. This electoral revanchism is all part of what The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait calls “The Rise of Republican Nihilism.”
I write this sadly, as someone who believes that neither party has a monopoly on anything close to the truth, and that the two-party system is a necessity for keeping assorted rascals from running completely unchecked. Nevertheless: The Republicans are playing a dangerous game—increasing the cynicism of ordinary Americans, even while further endangering (as if they hadn’t done enough in this direction under the prior administration) the economic security of everyone.
Let there be no mistake: in our extreme medical insurance environment, affordable health care has not become so much an economic issue but a moral right. Yet the GOP has decided to get on the wrong side of history, unlike 1964, when enough of its members joined with Democratic liberals to enact landmark civil-rights legislation.
Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) is supposed to be written by journalists, who are supposed to be trained to avoid clichés. But keep enough company with multiple members of a certain type and you become infected with groupthink.
So now the editorial writers at IBD are parroting a business and right-wing party line dating back more than a century. A sidebar to Chait’s article, “Women’s Suffrage and Other Visions of Right-Wing Apocalypse,” lists some choice examples of such ostrich-like rhetoric.
Here’s my favorite, from a figure who remains an inexplicable conservative darling, Ronald Reagan, carrying a 1961 attack on Medicare to what can only be termed the realms of sci-fi fantasy:
“The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.”
What???!!!!
To be sure, significant problems exist in the current health-care legislation. And Mitch McConnell and Co. have a point: a nearly 2,000-page bill, rushed through committee, with only a handful of senators and White House aides understanding the fine points, is not a well-thought-out package.
But they’d sound a wee bit more credible if they’d subjected the similarly prodigious, rushed-through Patriot Act to the same level of scrutiny.
It’s not enough to be against something; you have to say what you’re for. If the GOP wants to be trusted with the responsibility of governing again, they need to step up and explain their positions. On health care, they haven’t, they won’t, and they deserve to pay the price at the polls for their willfulness.
To understand what’s at stake as Congress approaches its moment of truth, consider the following searing piece from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, inspired by an anguished visit to a loved one at the hospital, and especially this passage:
“This is the only economically advanced nation where people can go bankrupt from medical bills. This is the only rich nation where people can die from lack of medical care—because they can’t afford it or because it’s not available."
At Christmas, the mind turns inevitably to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Bob Cratchit’s family in that holiday tale represented the kind of people—living on the knife-edge between survival and grief—who are becoming more and more prevalent today.
In Dickens’ time, the Cratchits (in Scrooge’s midnight nightmare) would have fallen into their personal abyss simply because not enough people recognized the consequences of massive, impersonal economic forces, such as the schools, the workhouses, the jails, and the courts.
Where is the contemporary novelist who would do to the U.S. health care system what Dickens did to Victorian Britain’s legal system in Bleak House—i.e., capture the beast in all its Brobdingnagian, soul-crushing complexity?
Well, below—again, from Cohen—is a good place to start:
“Behold the uninsured. Look at them in their terror. See their faces as they are denied coverage for pre-existing conditions or their look of despair because they cannot afford any insurance at all. Watch them ignore symptoms of sickness, pass up examinations or wait, often for hours and hours, for free medical services.”
I would love to see what Dickens would have done with the pundits and politicians who scream about “creeping socialism.” They’re a novelist’s—even a caricaturist’s—dream.
Puh-leez. “Creeping socialism”—can’t the opponents of universal health care come up with something other than a cliché to describe their opposition to a bill that, even now, on the brink of passage, is heavily compromised and scarcely resembling what was originally advertised?
(Oh, and why does socialism always creep? Why can’t it gallop? Or at least make the phrase alliterative, Spiro Agnew-style, and say that it slithers?)
Few Capitol Hill participants in the health care debate have crowned themselves with glory, but throughout this entire process the GOP, to its shame, has been a uniquely obstructionist force. All it can do is stand there and mouth scare words or phrases, such as “Socialism.”
Go ahead—name me one concrete proposal the Republican Party has made this year toward extending coverage to the desperately uninsured. You can’t, can you?
That’s because the party hopes, with its hopeless intransigence this time around, to do what it did in 1994 against Bill Clinton: use a legislative debacle to jump back into the political game following an election where they lost the Presidency and both houses of Congress. This electoral revanchism is all part of what The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait calls “The Rise of Republican Nihilism.”
I write this sadly, as someone who believes that neither party has a monopoly on anything close to the truth, and that the two-party system is a necessity for keeping assorted rascals from running completely unchecked. Nevertheless: The Republicans are playing a dangerous game—increasing the cynicism of ordinary Americans, even while further endangering (as if they hadn’t done enough in this direction under the prior administration) the economic security of everyone.
Let there be no mistake: in our extreme medical insurance environment, affordable health care has not become so much an economic issue but a moral right. Yet the GOP has decided to get on the wrong side of history, unlike 1964, when enough of its members joined with Democratic liberals to enact landmark civil-rights legislation.
Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) is supposed to be written by journalists, who are supposed to be trained to avoid clichés. But keep enough company with multiple members of a certain type and you become infected with groupthink.
So now the editorial writers at IBD are parroting a business and right-wing party line dating back more than a century. A sidebar to Chait’s article, “Women’s Suffrage and Other Visions of Right-Wing Apocalypse,” lists some choice examples of such ostrich-like rhetoric.
Here’s my favorite, from a figure who remains an inexplicable conservative darling, Ronald Reagan, carrying a 1961 attack on Medicare to what can only be termed the realms of sci-fi fantasy:
“The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.”
What???!!!!
To be sure, significant problems exist in the current health-care legislation. And Mitch McConnell and Co. have a point: a nearly 2,000-page bill, rushed through committee, with only a handful of senators and White House aides understanding the fine points, is not a well-thought-out package.
But they’d sound a wee bit more credible if they’d subjected the similarly prodigious, rushed-through Patriot Act to the same level of scrutiny.
It’s not enough to be against something; you have to say what you’re for. If the GOP wants to be trusted with the responsibility of governing again, they need to step up and explain their positions. On health care, they haven’t, they won’t, and they deserve to pay the price at the polls for their willfulness.
To understand what’s at stake as Congress approaches its moment of truth, consider the following searing piece from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, inspired by an anguished visit to a loved one at the hospital, and especially this passage:
“This is the only economically advanced nation where people can go bankrupt from medical bills. This is the only rich nation where people can die from lack of medical care—because they can’t afford it or because it’s not available."
At Christmas, the mind turns inevitably to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Bob Cratchit’s family in that holiday tale represented the kind of people—living on the knife-edge between survival and grief—who are becoming more and more prevalent today.
In Dickens’ time, the Cratchits (in Scrooge’s midnight nightmare) would have fallen into their personal abyss simply because not enough people recognized the consequences of massive, impersonal economic forces, such as the schools, the workhouses, the jails, and the courts.
Where is the contemporary novelist who would do to the U.S. health care system what Dickens did to Victorian Britain’s legal system in Bleak House—i.e., capture the beast in all its Brobdingnagian, soul-crushing complexity?
Well, below—again, from Cohen—is a good place to start:
“Behold the uninsured. Look at them in their terror. See their faces as they are denied coverage for pre-existing conditions or their look of despair because they cannot afford any insurance at all. Watch them ignore symptoms of sickness, pass up examinations or wait, often for hours and hours, for free medical services.”
I would love to see what Dickens would have done with the pundits and politicians who scream about “creeping socialism.” They’re a novelist’s—even a caricaturist’s—dream.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Quote of the Day (Chris Jones, on the Unlikely Optimism of Paramedics)
“I expected to find a bunch of burnouts dragging through the graveyard shift, broken men and women who dipped into the blue bag so they might find sleep. But paramedics are a surprisingly sunny bunch. They understand that it's all so much randomness anyway, a cosmic confluence of vectors….Paramedics… know what a genuinely bad day really looks like, and they know that day will come for them, too, but today is not that day.”—Chris Jones, “The Strange Happiness of the Emergency Medic,” Esquire, August 2009
This evening, returning home from Mass, I saw a man on the steps outside church, with what appeared to be a relative and paramedics around him. It reminded me of just how unexpected medical emergencies can be—and of how much we owe paramedics.
Several times over the last few times, I’ve had reason to thank God that calm, knowledgeable, deeply kind volunteers were there when a close relative had a health emergency.
Jones’ first-person account (later used in the Aug. 28-Sept. 4 issue of The Week Magazine) of serving with a local Canadian ambulance corps (or, as they call it up there, “the truck”) shows, in riveting detail, what life can be like for those who serve in this capacity—from the “barrel-over-the-falls effect” that can overwhelm unwary rookies, to the calls that keep these workers awake for hours, to the exhilarating feeling after some calls that somehow, they had “turned a man’s heart back into a pump and his lungs back into oxygen tanks.”
This past week, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article on how, one year after the market meltdown, young people are rethinking the value of a career in finance. How many of these people, however, have thought about helping in the kind of capacity filled by a paramedic? It may not be remunerative as the world sees it, but what, I ask you, can be more valuable than saving a life?
This evening, returning home from Mass, I saw a man on the steps outside church, with what appeared to be a relative and paramedics around him. It reminded me of just how unexpected medical emergencies can be—and of how much we owe paramedics.
Several times over the last few times, I’ve had reason to thank God that calm, knowledgeable, deeply kind volunteers were there when a close relative had a health emergency.
Jones’ first-person account (later used in the Aug. 28-Sept. 4 issue of The Week Magazine) of serving with a local Canadian ambulance corps (or, as they call it up there, “the truck”) shows, in riveting detail, what life can be like for those who serve in this capacity—from the “barrel-over-the-falls effect” that can overwhelm unwary rookies, to the calls that keep these workers awake for hours, to the exhilarating feeling after some calls that somehow, they had “turned a man’s heart back into a pump and his lungs back into oxygen tanks.”
This past week, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article on how, one year after the market meltdown, young people are rethinking the value of a career in finance. How many of these people, however, have thought about helping in the kind of capacity filled by a paramedic? It may not be remunerative as the world sees it, but what, I ask you, can be more valuable than saving a life?
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Quote of the Day (Fr. Michael Place, on the Right to Health Care)
“In Catholic theology, access to health care is a fundamental social good, because health is essential to human flourishing and the preservation of human dignity; as such, health care is an aspect of the common good. Society and the state have a dual obligation to protect the right to health care and to provide the means necessary for its fulfillment.”--Fr. Michael D. Place, “A Time for Reform: How the Catholic Tradition Can Shape the Health Care Debate,” America, August 17-24, 2009
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