WHERE LESS IS LESS

So yesterday I felt great. I even posted a tweet that it was the first day since my sinus surgery that I felt better than I did before the surgery, which was proof enough to me that the surgery did some good.

Today I went to the doctor for a follow-up. He had the pathology report finally. Turns out they found some cancer cells in among the other gunk they scraped out of my head. I was afraid that might be the case, but was hoping for the best. Still hoping for the best. It's hard to get satisfactory resolution any more. Everything wants to drag on forever.

Too bad really, since now I'm in a race with the Romney/Ryan campaign and the Republicans to get as much done as possible before they overturn ObamaCare and take my pre-existing condition insurance coverage, which I pay for btw, away from me. I tell you Romney/Ryan, or as I like to call them, Voldemort/Vader, will never be mistaken for compassionate conservatives...whatever that means.

The Tea Party Dream Ticket

Oh, well...they got pretty close.

REPEALING COMPASSION: TRUTH, JUSTICE, AND THE AMERICAN WAY

I guess if they replace it with RomneyCare,
like in Massachusetts, we won't notice much difference.
That would actually be okay...but why bother?

I wrote the other day about my newly minted access to almost affordable health insurance...thanks to the Affordable Care Act and no thanks to any Republican. This has been a boon to me because my cellular systems had been in rapid deterioration since my COBRA benefits expired. The problem was that no insurance company was going to enroll me for medical coverage because of my preexisting conditions.

Too late, Mitt. I'm already sick.

Now, because of the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) mandated in ObamaCare, I can get rudimentary health coverage (80/20 with a $2,000 deductible) for $376 per month. Republicans are hell bent to repeal ObamaCare as quickly as possible. Mitt Romney says it will be the first thing he does on his first day as Oligarch-in-Chief.

Apparently these bozos think that enabling me to have insurance is somehow un-American. They preferred the system in which the private insurers served as gatekeepers to diagnosis and treatment, and the surest way to save money was to deny coverage to those who most needed it and to deny the claims of those who dared to get sick. Trouble was they didn't pass those savings on to their policy holders. Instead they passed them on to their executives or spent them on lavish self-congratulatory parties in posh resorts. That, so it seems, is the American Way.

Well, is it Fascism or Socialism?
I need to know what kind of un-American
I am for supporting compassion.

A lot of people who ought to know better agree with this bunkum. They have been persuaded to regard me and 30 million other uninsured citizens as a shiftless, lazy mob trying to needlessly burden the federal budget with entitlements it can ill afford. That tens of millions of them are a couple of paychecks away from joining our mob doesn't dissuade them very much from holding us in contempt. This is American Social Justice.

What no one on the other side of this seems to realize is that saving money by denying coverage is a false economy. The money is not actually saved. It's just paid by someone else. 'Who cares,' I can hear them ask? 'As long as the government's not footing the bill, it's not being added to my tax burden.' Well...maybe not your tax burden, but it is likely to be a burden, and no one is immune.

Let's just take me for an instance. I've got insurance now, which has allowed me at least to find out what is wrong with my sinuses. I know I've got a lot of polyps up in my nose. I know they are going to require surgery. I know that they are so severe that they have started to erode the bone tissue of my skull, especially around my eye sockets.

Were it not for the new PCIP insurance, which I pay for by the way, I wouldn't even know that much. Now, just for argument's sake, let's say my condition is even more serious than I know. Let's say that one of these polyps growing inside my head and giving me headaches and preventing me from sleeping through the night—any night—is malignant. Worst case scenario—let's also imagine that I don't have insurance.

Now the Republicans and their Tea Party shot-callers think I should just go quietly. 'Shuffle off and die already. Quit whining about it while we're trying to watch the Real Housewives of New Jersey.'

I actually tend to agree. I'd rather go peaceably. I'm tired of all the anxious suffering.

I know that's not going to happen though. My family is not going to allow it—not even the Republicans among them.

They are going to insist that I get as much treatment as they can afford. They're just like that. They're going to take care of me. I'd take care of them. That's how family works. Here's the fallout though—the hidden cost the Republicans can't see, the dirty little economic fact that puts the lie to any Tea Party Republican idea about fiscal austerity.

Whatever my family spends on my medical care is money that they're not going to spend on new cars, or furniture, or vacations, or any one of hundreds of things they might spend their discretionary income on if they don't have to spend it keeping me alive.

That's just one instance, and I'm just one guy among 30 million who didn't have insurance and won't have it again if the Republicans have their way. So while the rest of you might not be paying for our medical care, you will be paying, in some measure, for the economic fallout of our not having insurance. You were paying for it before. You just didn't know it. This is the American Truth.

Government austerity is a false economy. In fact it's no economy at all.

There was a woman at the doctor's office the other day...same time as me. She needed to commiserate with someone, and since I was the only other person in the waiting room it fell on me. She was having more issues than she had time to deal with because she'd had to take her 42 year-old mentally challenged son out of a day program he was in because our Republican governor had cut the program's funding in half.

Now where do you suppose the money that the governor saved by trimming this program went? It didn't go anywhere really. Ostensibly it reduced the state's deficit, which means that it was money that the state wasn't going to get anyway. Government shouldn't spend money that it doesn't have. Fiscal responsibility.

The problem is that the money is going to be spent anyway—maybe not by the government, but someone, somewhere, is going to end up burdened by the state's savings. It just won't be as equitable a solution as it would have been if the government borrowed the money for cheap and paid it back when the economy turned around and tax revenues went back up.

Here's how it really works. The retarded guy's mom has to now pay to provide her son with the kinds of activities he used to get in the program. I don't pretend to know what they are, but I do know that that woman is now doing what the state used to do. She is less well equipped to do it, and she's had to give up her part time job and a lot of other things including her own medical care to make it happen. So instead of having one burden, day care for the mentally challenged 42 year-old son, the state is now faced with the prospect of having two people on welfare.

Maybe the state isn't actually going to pay for these two burdens where there used to be one, but someone in the state is...one way or another. Maybe it will be when the mother gets carted by ambulance to the hospital for a stress related heart attack. She won't have insurance because she quit her job to take care of her son, who will now have to go into a foster care program or become a homeless vagrant—take your pick.

The hospital will have to raise its rates to cover the cost of her indigent care. The insurance companies that cover those Florida citizens who still have health insurance will raise their premiums to cover the hospital's higher rates. The employers who pay those premiums will not be able to pay bonuses or give raises to their remaining employees because their health insurance costs are too high to allow it. But you know what? At least it's not a tax.

Fact is costs don't go away just because government doesn't pay them. Society still gets left holding the bag. Society just doesn't have to blame the guys who took the benefits away. After all they saved us a bunch of money.

They'll be able to tally it all up and show us charts and whatnot to prove what a marvelous job they did getting government spending under control.

The economy will still be in the tank, people still won't have jobs, and 30 million of us will still be uninsured, but that will all be someone else's fault—probably the shiftless, lazy mob of folks like me who would rather bitch about our lot in life than do anything constructive.

Meanwhile the Republicans can take all the entitlement savings and spend them on tax cuts for their rich friends. The rich friends will make campaign contributions to candidates who are closer to Voldemort than Ronald Reagan, fund scurrilous PAC attack ads, contribute large sums to fancy prep schools where they can incubate more of themselves, and give enough money to the Mormon Church so it can start buying up Vatican treasures. A lot of this is characterized as charitable giving, so, you know, it's comforting at least to know that they are not buying fuel for their yachts either.

Day 297 – Confessions of a Former Voldemort Republican

          I put a tweet up yesterday in which I referred to myself as a Voldemort Republican. I’m really not anymore—probably I never was—but I still think the concept is incredibly funny. I got it from a t-shirt/bumper sticker ad I saw during the last presidential election, but it seems that the concept actually originated with an online comic strip called Goats, which is written and drawn by Jonathan Rosenberg.

          That the humor has been embraced, one would think mostly by Democrats, speaks volumes about the low esteem in which Republicans were generally held leading up to the election of Barack Obama as president. Voldemort is of course the principal antagonist from the Harry Potter franchise. Voldemort is the embodiment of overarching patrician conservatism suffused with an unrelentingly callous evil. This is pretty much the way a lot of people still talk about George W. Bush.

          I always liked George Bush. I thought he was naïve at times, maybe even a little stupid, but I never regarded him as evil. He’s an affable, down-home kind of goof-ball born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He’s a contradiction and an occasional buffoon, but he is not evil. By the same token I do not think that Barack Obama is a Nigerian Islamic communist. I do not think he has an agenda to take my money and redistribute it to the poor and disadvantaged. I do no think he is pursuing a reverse racist agenda.

I think each of these presidents did or is doing the best they can, given their particular ideological proclivities and extremely difficult circumstances. I’m giving them a break. This doesn’t mean I agree with the policies of either of them. In fact, just the opposite. I think they’ve both made a lot of mistakes. I’m just not about to presuppose that I, or anyone I know or know of for that matter, could do any better.

          I’m tired of the slash and burn rhetoric from both sides of the political equation. I’m tired of congressional votes that divide along party lines. I’m tired of the no-quarter-taken-and-none-given lack of compromise on all sides. Republicans were only too happy to give $1.5 trillion to GM, Chrysler, AIG and 13 banks when they thought the world as we knew it would come to an end if chips fell where they may. Now they don’t want to part with a few paltry billion in unemployment benefits because they’re afraid the world as we know it might come to an end unless the chips fall where they may. If they are truly interested in making the country a better place for its citizens, they have chosen an odd place to draw the line on stimulus.

          Just as bad, the Democrats were determined to pass health care reform just to prove that they could, but they couldn’t be bothered to listen to anyone else’s ideas, so we got reform that isn’t and cost savings that don’t. Is there anyone out there who is interested in actually fixing some of our formidable problems? All our politicians and all our pundits act like fundamentalist evangelists who would rather prove that their own personal interpretation of scripture is correct than to actually lead a soul to salvation.

          A few days ago (August 12) there was an article posted at the Fox Forum by John Lott blaming the Democrats for a recent, and nearly insignificant, spike in unemployment claims. Lott believes, along with a lot of other people apparently, that unemployment benefits create unemployment claims. This theory has been debunked nearly as many times as the flat earth, but still it persists. It persists because people are afraid that someone undeserving is going to end up with some of their money. They are afraid some lay-about like me is going to use extended unemployment benefits to fuel my yacht and stock my liquor cabinet with high dollar single-malt scotch. They are afraid that the Democrats are orchestrating a massive shift of wealth into the hands of the poor who are, after all, poor for a reason.

          A person calling himself ‘webedun’ who commented on Lott’s post put it most succinctly: “It's the ‘CLOWARD & PIVEN STRATEGY’ they've had in the works since the '60's. Google it. Glenn Beck saw this coming something like a year ago. Just look it up and learn. You'll see the Progressive's plan to take down the Government.” Well I did Google it, and I have to say that I don’t think that ‘webedun’ looked it up himself. He just took Glen Beck’s word for what Cloward and Piven were all about, and then he tried to apply it to a case where it doesn’t really fit.

          The Cloward and Piven Strategy was a proposal by two sociologists back in 1966 for a massive registration of qualifying poor people in order to create a welfare crisis and thereby force the Democrat controlled Houses of Congress to pass something like a guaranteed national income. It was folly then, and it remains folly today. Anyone who would posit it as a viable political agenda, a strategy to be either feared or embraced, would necessarily have an IQ hovering around their hat size. It is ridiculous, and yet there it is on the Internet, touted rather seriously as something I need to look up and guard against.

          The irony is that while Glenn Beck and his minions are worried about a massive shift of middle class income to poor, unemployed, illegal Mexican immigrants, shiftless African American welfare cheats, and secret cells of Muslim terrorists, there has in fact been a massive shift of middle class income. It went the other direction. Instead of going to the poor it went to the rich. We watched it happen and we were too dumbstruck to say anything about it.

          It didn’t have anything to do with Democrats or Republicans either…or liberals or conservatives…or George Bush or Barrack Obama. We were fleeced by our banks. Not only that. They’re still at it. Our banks robbed us of our prosperity. They stole our future. They bet our farm, lost, and got reimbursed for the loss…by us. We paid twice. They lost our stuff and then they got us to pay them for losing it. It’s not over either. They’re going to get us to pay for it a third time. All that lost value, all those toxic assets we heard so much about, they’re still there—still secreted on and off the banks’ balance sheets at inflated values. They haven’t taken the losses we already paid them for yet. They are waiting until they have enough profits to offset the unrealized losses on their books.

Where are they going to get these profits? From us. They are going to charge us fees for doing things they ought to do for free. Citibank is talking about charging a fee if you want to talk to a teller. They are going to charge exorbitant interest rates to loan us money that they get for free. The more trouble they get us into, the more they are going to charge us. They will justify this because we are bad credit risks, and we will be getting worse. We will be overextended.

Sadly, I think, if we don't stop them, we will deserve it.