Dear Senator!

Please stand up to the bill that Sen. Baucus has presented.

The current system murders people (and no, that's not too strong of a word), and this bill does nothing to address the needs of anyone but already wealthy and powerful insurance companies.

There is not enough regulation in this bill to fundamentally change how these companies work. Few people currently uninsured - including my two college-age sons, regretfully - will find a way to afford the ever-increasing costs to by fundamentally-flawed coverage. These insurance companies will continue to have clear ways to deny service paid-for by existing companies, and to deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.

The only way to relieve this horrible tax on small employers and the self-employed, the only way to keep people out of the clutches of corporate bureaucrats, the only way to return medical caregivers to the art of healing from the task of accounting, the only way to make our exceptional health care available to all regardless of wealth, is a single payer system.

You know this and I know this.

Cowardice and avarice are the only things keeping the status quo. Politicians' immediate political needs are murdering people. Politicians' immediate needs to feed from lobbyists' troughs are murdering people.

A single payer system is the only way to get the indemnity pool large enough to bring costs down, coverage broad, and to deliver quality care.

Please stand up to this bill.

Please do what you can to deliver a bill to the President's desk by the end of the year that sets in stone immediate, meaningful fundamental change in our healthcare.

Real Life 'Norma Rae' Murdered by Her Insurance Company to Get Chemo | Crooks and Liars

'Norma Rae' Dead at 68 After Struggle With Her Insurance Company to Get Chemo | Crooks and Liars

The woman whose life inspired the 1979 film Norma Rae has died of cancer after struggling with her health insurance company, which had delayed her treatment.

Crystal Lee Sutton was 68. She had struggled for several years with meningioma, a form of brain cancer.

Name the company.

Charge their CEO, each and every Board member, and each bureaucrat who delayed and denied coverage with murder.

Commentary: Don't cut our (public) health care - CNN.com

Commentary: Don't cut our (public) health care - CNN.com

"We worked hard to get it and we're going to keep it," said Nancy Snyder, one of the protesters attending this summer's health care town meetings.... she was interviewed by Michel Martin on National Public Radio's "Tell Me More."

When asked how she had insurance coverage, Nancy explained that because her husband was a retired coal miner, they received insurance and care through the United Mine Workers. She attended the town hall because she said she had "had enough of the government interfering with our lives, after working hard all of our lives, especially to get the health care."

As employment declined and mining families struggled in the 1960s, mineworkers launched widespread protest demonstrations and traveled to Washington to lobby for federal support of UMW hospitals. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson responded with the Area Redevelopment Administration, the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act, the Appalachian Redevelopment Act, and of course, Medicare.

Government stabilized and expanded the miners' health system. Miners were proud beneficiaries of Johnson's Great Society -- today so much maligned by the conservative talk show hosts. Miners continued their pressure, leading to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, marshalling public force to protect their health in the private workplace.

If Nancy Snyder "did not pay one penny" for her husband's cancer treatment or her surgeries, it's because government subsidized that care since Robert's early days as a miner.

This is the story of thousands, if not millions (sorry idiot Michelle Malkin, it wasn't even close to millions who marched on Washington last weekend, and the ones who did represent a constituency not large enough to elect a small-town city council seat) who's lives depend on the balance of public and private programs. They are renentive enough to hold onto words shrieked by radio entertainers, yet don't apply critical thinking and accept the conclusions of these media shriekers as fact.

Let's help each other build a strong foundation of fact, so we can all understand the current situation with our healthcare system in the United States. Only from there can we together make a bold step towards high quality affordable healthcare for all.

How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? - NYTimes.com

How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? - NYTimes.com

Economists got it wrong by:

Believing their own bullshit. Economy, as a science, is really a belief system. These mere mortals think that they are masters of the universe.

Politicizing their beliefs. Economists used the political tactic "if you repeat a lie (or a belief) often enough, people will start to believe it.

They forgot the definition of insanity - doing something repeatedly and expecting the results to change. Every strong Republican/supply-side/trickle-down administration has plunged the country into recession. Standing this ground on idealogical feet makes no sense, except to a complicit media and a public willing to accept lies.

Shreiking, Panicing, Pathetic Poster Boy: Rep. Joe Wilson!

(R) SC

Healthcare Reform - Now More Than Ever!

Universally available
No recsission
Coverage with pre-existing conditions
Highest Quality
Lowest cost
No Bankruptcy from high medical bills
Transportability

We can't afford not to!

Students - take responsibility for your education, set goals and do everything you can to succeed.

Today is a great day for students, parents, and educators to start to take education seriously.

Republicans to offer rebuttal of President Obama's Message to Students

Republicans plan to urge students to take no responsibility for their own education, to set no goals, and to not stay in school and never make the most of it.

No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick

Corporations are not Persons! Money is not speech!

Constitutional amendment! Outlaw corporate personhood and pay-for-politics forever!

U. S. Healthcare is Broken! Let's Fix It! 2

Here are some more:

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-321175.html

5. Doctors are rewarded for prescribing drugs. Big pharmaceutical companies are known to hand out “consulting agreements” worth more than your annual salary to doctors who prescribe their drugs like candy. And unlike contributions to political candidates, there is no way to track what doctors are considered “top-performers” and receiving the most lavish gifts. This is one of the worst practices I can think of that drives a stake right through the heart of healthcare’s credibility.

4. Big Healthcare, i.e. pharmaceutical companies, hospital networks, insurers and their support industries, spend hundreds of millions each year lobbying Congress to make sure there are not major changes to the business structure we call healthcare. They have a vested interest in keeping things the same (again, see #1) which is good for some and bad for many.

3. Tens of millions of healthy people choose not to pay for health insurance, putting the financial solvency of the system at risk. This leaves those that do pay into the insurance system paying more. The concept of insurance is to spread the cost so that when you need help, you are not buried under steep bills that you could not possibly afford to pay back. So those who opt out are cheating everyone else. Including, probably, their own family and friends.

2. We are killing ourselves. Our choices bring on diabetes, heart-attack-inducing high blood pressure and cholesterol, obesity, chronic illness, and the like. We eat crap. We supersize it. We consider the walk from the parking lot to our office exercise. We only see the doctor when we get sick. Even then, we only listen to the prescribed advice about half the time. And we’re totally aghast at the increasing costs of care when we get really sick.

And the #1 reason healthcare in America is broken...

1. The current system is set up to reward sickness. Doctors get paid when you see them. And you only see them when something’s wrong, right? Hospitals get paid when someone gets injured or is sick. Pharmaceutical companies make outrageous profits when their drugs are prescribed (and they lavish gifts worth more than your annual salary to the doctors who prescribe the most…see #5). Insurance companies take in more money when there are more sick people to cover. Everything revolves around us being sick.

U. S. Healthcare is Broken! Let's Fix It! 1

-We pay more per-capita for healthcare than other industrialized nations, and this is growing far faster than inflation
-We receive low quality care, ranking 37th in the world according to the WHO
-appx. 47 million people in the US lack healthcare insurance. These people can get medical treatment from free clinics, emergency rooms, and other sources, but these costs are socialized
-the cost of treating the uninsured is paid by the insured, from higher hospital/doctor fees and socialized costs
-among the insured, most bankruptcies are caused by healthcare expenses
-among the insured, treatment is often denied by corporate bureaucrats
-among the insured, coverage is often denied if you want to buy insurance and have a pre-existing condition
-nearly 30% of us are covered by socialized medicine
-the insured pay from 5-30% more than the socialized programs, from higher administrative costs at private insurers
-employers are laying off workers, taking less profit, and going bankrupt from increased group medical insurance costs
-our manufacturing industries are globally uncompetitive without socialized healthcare
-for-profit medical providers often choose procedures and treatments based on how much revenue they can derive, not on the best outcome for the patient
-standards for medical practice are different and not portable between states
-we have the best-quality treatment in the world available, yet often these treatments are available only based on the ability to pay, not on need or potential outcome
-dental care is expensive and not covered in many cases, yet it has a direct effect on patients' overall health: inflammation from gum disease is often a major contributor or cause of cardiovascular disease
-more, more, more

60,000 More California Children Without Healthcare

Are you happy now California Republicans?

Giving internet access to seniors is like giving whiskey to Indians...

(to paraphrase P. J. O'Rourke)

healthcare is tyranny, and war is peace

Do you think healthcare for all is not for our greater good?

If so, you're a self-hating idiot.

Impeach Clarence Thomas!

Supreme Court makes age-bias suits harder to win - Los Angeles Times

...if a worker could show age was one of the factors in a layoff or demotion, then the employer was required to prove it had a legitimate reason for its action apart from age...

Supreme Court rules DNA tests for prisoners not a constitutional right
The court's conservative majority, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, threw out this two-step approach. Instead, the court said, workers bear the full burden of proving that age was the deciding factor in their dismissal or demotion.

This is the most egregious example of an activist Supreme Court legislating from the bench in a generation.

Federal and State law, long-standing court decisions, and just-plain common sense tell us that this decision is very very wrong. Yet, the tyranny of a few politically motivated Supreme Court justices is threatening protections that should be common to all of us as a matter of human rights, in so many ways including this decision.

Let's hope that Congress can correct this soon.

Soak the Rich, Lose the Rich - WSJ.com

Soak the Rich, Lose the Rich - WSJ.com

Laffer and Moore are idiots. Or treasonists.

America was at its strongest when our tax rates on the top earners (and on capital gains) were at their highest.

Nothing in history suggests a downturn or negative effect by reasonable progressive taxation in times of need. Nothing in history shows any significant improvement in the lives of the vast majority of our citizens when we game the system to let the extremely wealthy retain more of their extreme wealth.

Yet, politicians and jerks like Laffer and Moore have repeatedly been able to con a significant percentage of voters into supporting economic policies clearly against our self-interest.

Time to build a strong middle class - this is the only way America can survive and prosper.

California Reckoning - WSJ.com

California Reckoning - WSJ.com

Fundamental misunderstanding of the political and economic situation in California leads to ignorant editorials like this.

Repeal Prop 13! 13 Was not a populist tax revolt. No grandmothers were being kicked to the curb as their property taxes increased with their property value. 13 was simply a power and money grab by state politicians and already-wealthy interests, and led to fundamental changes in both residential real estate and local government.

The boom and bust cycles that followed 13 in CA, although not unprecedented, have simply led to exclusion - the majority of residents of much of CA can't afford to buy a home here, something people from out of state or insanely out of the middle-class, like Murdoch's minions. When your neighbor, simply by staying put, pays 1/10 of what you do in property taxes for the same 1959 tract home, something's fundamentally wrong.

When CA goes from the top of the heap in education and other hallmarks of society to nearly the bottom, something's fundamentally wrong.

It's the state's voters who have voted away local power and local jobs. When we give this to a state legislature but also tie their hands with restrictive proposition after restrictive proposition, it is us who drove into this gridlock.

Yes, vote down these initiatives, except for 1F as a symbolic gesture (in my opinion, legislators should work for no pay until they get the state working reasonably again). But we will all need to suffer , and pay more, for our shortsighted devotion to the insane Jarvis extremists.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124199933659205011.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

Copyright Critics Rationalize Theft - WSJ.com#mod=djemEditorialPage

they
repeatedly assert, copyright is an unjustifiable tax, a monopoly, and a bar to
creativity, why wouldn't they or anyone else be against it, as in fact they are?

Copyright is no more a tax than the price a merchant charges for an item in his shop or what a laborer receives for his labor. Nor is it a monopoly any more than you have a monopoly on the sale of a watermelon you might grow in your garden


Mark Helprin is an idiot, and shouldn't be allowed to write about a subject which he obviously does not understand.

Who suggests copyright is a tax? No one. It is an exclusive Right to Copy, on par with other rights established in our constitution. It is a Right with exclusions. These exclusions limit who owns the right, how long the right is, what can be protected, etc.

These exclusions have always been designed to be the balance between monopoly and chaos, and our congress, imbued with the power to regulate copyright, has a tough task to enforce a position of balance between the free creation of works and the free commerce of works.

The Statutes of Queen Anne wouldn't work anymore, since the technology to distribute is not concentrated to a wealthy and powerful few, but freely available to each creative artist.

Calling infringement theft and infringers pirates do nothing to encourage more, and better, works of the creative arts. The theives and pirates are in-fact the best customer of the creative artists - every distribution entity knows this, yet won't address it because they have an infantile need to hold on to how they have done things in the past.

Us vs. Them arguments simply serve to secure a hierarchical distribution system rooted in past technology and a revenue distribution system clearly benefitting the already-wealthy few. We need to protect more-firmly the ability of each creative artist to derive direct revenue from his or her work.

Helprin, read copyright law and the constitution, and grow a creative heart, and get back to us.