Mid-Weak
I missed doing an entry for Tuesday, but such spare energy as I had ended up going into some email to friends. Having found myself worn all week -- catching myself falling asleep, almost falling forward out of my chair, several times Monday and Tuesday -- I tried to get to sleep early Tuesday night.
Still, here it is in the wee hours of Wednesday and I'm up again. I took care of the dishes and the bare edge of some kitchen clean-up, and thought I'd do a quick post while trying to wind down again for a few more hours of sleep.
While I could not stomach the man sufficiently to watch Bush's State of the Union address live, I would like to direct any interested parties to a video resource the people at ThinkProgress.org have put together: an annotated State of the Union.
There one can watch the sickening affair in its entirety, or skip to sections of the speech by selecting from the scroll of facts and rebuttals offered below the inset screen.
Probably not the best topic for me to touch on while trying to wind down, but I did want to point it out, especially with him not only pushing more disaster in Iraq as thousands more are being thrown into the meat grinder in an attempt to salvage Dubya's legacy, but in coming up with supposedly helpful health initiatives that flatly ignore the realities of acquiring health insurance for people who already have health issues.
The insurance industry must be kissing photos of the shrub today as they contemplate the soaking they'll give the US public as millions potentially line up, one by one with no leverage, to see what inadequate health coverage they can negotiate for themselves. This is a sham and a national shame. A responsible government, a government in touch with the reality of its citizens, would easily see the merits of a single-payer system in which the federal government takes the role currently set on the business-owner and uses the awesome leverage so many millions of people represent to negotiate the best plans for every citizen. Health care should not be some job perk.
Those who insist that this would mean the government administering our health care are, to be kind, grossly ignorant and apparently highly open to suggestion by lousy media outlets and the talking points of some big money interests. They would be no more administering our healthcare than our current employers are, and unlike our current employers the federal government would have and immensely longer and more powerful lever with which to secure for us the best deals. Instead, Bush offers almost meaningless tax cuts and a plan that will leave each of us isolated.
A push towards Health Savings Accounts, much like the attempts to scuttle Social Security and replace it with by your own bootstraps individual retirement plans*, is the rhetoric of the healthy and the wealthy and those who've bought into this as a false point of pride. Please, don't be tricked into seeing these things as matters of personal worth, as if we're talking about "hand-outs." That message is originating with the people who have the most to lose, both directly in wealth and indirectly in status.
It's frustrating. It's aggravating. It's appalling.
...and it's not the way I'm going to settle myself in for a scant few more hours (at best) of sleep.
Sure, this should have been posted on my political blog -- and I may re-post most of it there, too -- but this is what's on my mind at the moment and so is a legitimate post.
*I'm not dismissing the value of individual retirement accounts to help secure a brighter future -- I'm in a retirement plan myself, with money being withheld from every paycheck -- but the promise of Social Security should not be systematically marginalized until it, a withered husk of what it once was, is buried by the powerful minority who never had much use for it.
Tags: national disgrace
I missed doing an entry for Tuesday, but such spare energy as I had ended up going into some email to friends. Having found myself worn all week -- catching myself falling asleep, almost falling forward out of my chair, several times Monday and Tuesday -- I tried to get to sleep early Tuesday night.
Still, here it is in the wee hours of Wednesday and I'm up again. I took care of the dishes and the bare edge of some kitchen clean-up, and thought I'd do a quick post while trying to wind down again for a few more hours of sleep.
While I could not stomach the man sufficiently to watch Bush's State of the Union address live, I would like to direct any interested parties to a video resource the people at ThinkProgress.org have put together: an annotated State of the Union.
There one can watch the sickening affair in its entirety, or skip to sections of the speech by selecting from the scroll of facts and rebuttals offered below the inset screen.
Probably not the best topic for me to touch on while trying to wind down, but I did want to point it out, especially with him not only pushing more disaster in Iraq as thousands more are being thrown into the meat grinder in an attempt to salvage Dubya's legacy, but in coming up with supposedly helpful health initiatives that flatly ignore the realities of acquiring health insurance for people who already have health issues.
The insurance industry must be kissing photos of the shrub today as they contemplate the soaking they'll give the US public as millions potentially line up, one by one with no leverage, to see what inadequate health coverage they can negotiate for themselves. This is a sham and a national shame. A responsible government, a government in touch with the reality of its citizens, would easily see the merits of a single-payer system in which the federal government takes the role currently set on the business-owner and uses the awesome leverage so many millions of people represent to negotiate the best plans for every citizen. Health care should not be some job perk.
Those who insist that this would mean the government administering our health care are, to be kind, grossly ignorant and apparently highly open to suggestion by lousy media outlets and the talking points of some big money interests. They would be no more administering our healthcare than our current employers are, and unlike our current employers the federal government would have and immensely longer and more powerful lever with which to secure for us the best deals. Instead, Bush offers almost meaningless tax cuts and a plan that will leave each of us isolated.
A push towards Health Savings Accounts, much like the attempts to scuttle Social Security and replace it with by your own bootstraps individual retirement plans*, is the rhetoric of the healthy and the wealthy and those who've bought into this as a false point of pride. Please, don't be tricked into seeing these things as matters of personal worth, as if we're talking about "hand-outs." That message is originating with the people who have the most to lose, both directly in wealth and indirectly in status.
It's frustrating. It's aggravating. It's appalling.
...and it's not the way I'm going to settle myself in for a scant few more hours (at best) of sleep.
Sure, this should have been posted on my political blog -- and I may re-post most of it there, too -- but this is what's on my mind at the moment and so is a legitimate post.
*I'm not dismissing the value of individual retirement accounts to help secure a brighter future -- I'm in a retirement plan myself, with money being withheld from every paycheck -- but the promise of Social Security should not be systematically marginalized until it, a withered husk of what it once was, is buried by the powerful minority who never had much use for it.
Tags: national disgrace
Comments
I'm not talking HSA, or a Health Savings Account. I'm talking about a Health Flexible Spending Account, funded by Federal tax dollars. Send each American tax payer a shiny Federal FSA debit card preloaded with, say, $25,000 that will not roll over from one year to another. The FSA's I help administer all day long are already set up this way; most of our participants have these cards. They are restricted and can only be used to purchase eligible medical services and supplies, but the employers fully prefund the accounts for the full yearly election, and the participant pays the employer back with pretax payroll deductions.
In the case of a Federal FSA, the money would be 'paid back' through, essentially, the same payroll deductions people are already seeing on their checks. I'm not suggesting any new taxes, although, certainly, those of us with FSAs probably wouldn't mind seeing that money go to the Feds instead to pay for this.
I'm thinking a lot of people could use a tax funded $25,000 yearly line of credit for health care. Those with an insurance plan where they pay mostly copays for services would benefit most, but it would be something even for the uninsured.
Anyway, that's my bright idea for the year.
It would be a wonderful way of rounding out the system for those who have the health coverage -- and for the rest it would certainly beat what millions are currently facing -- but it still wouldn't address the lack of structure. It would almost inevitably lead to a wild west explosion of schemes and scams tap into as much of each person's $25K as possible - the only ways to prevent it would be to become extremely restrictive in how it's used or to spend huge sums of money on an approval/review system for cases, but then again any system that's concocted will have con artists scoping out ways to abuse it. I would expect that the insurance companies would try to tap into it to get higher co-pays -- figuring that the consumer won't care enough to fight it since it's just numbers in an account and not money directly from their pocket -- and the pharmaceutical companies, constantly on the prowl to turn every twinge and anxiety into a "disorder" or "syndrome" will be fighting hard to get some bites in.
As an experimental supplement/interim solution it's not a bad idea. It may be necessary to set it up slightly differently for those who have health insurance and those who don't, if for no other reason than those without coverage need to be brought into the healthcare system to the extent of a more or less annual exam, to help get people into a preventive medicine frame of mind.
What would need to be set up with that is some kind of overarching Federal insurance policy structure, which would establish payments and co-pays and coverage and all that good crap, that the cards would function within. But, essentially, what we should have is taxpayer funded universal health care coverage, and getting people into that mindset, and getting the card framework set up, would be a good first step.
Eventually, you could put other stuff on the card, too. We already have FSA cards with multiple 'buckets' on them, for things like health care and commuter, with daycare coming sometime in the next few years. Imagine if you could put someone's WIC allotments, or Unemployment payments, on this kind of card. It would be amazingly handy.