The Uninsured and Health Care Reform in the US!
WW,
The main stream media use of the 47+ million Americans who are currently uninsured may be worthy of criticism. But your claim that the actual number of Americans who CANNOT get insurance is approximately 12 million people is demonstrably false. Your number is derived from an easily refuted misrepresentation of the 2007 Census Bureau telephone survey estimates that has been floating around the web for a few years. I will now detail the flaws of the so-called analysis.
The Census Bureau report issued in 2007 numbers are legitimately subject to interpretation. The 47 million figure is inclusive and is not a definitive measure of the number of American's whose health is at risk because they do not have access to affordable coverage.
I assume you recognize that the thrust of the national effort to reform the US health insurance system led by President Obama and supported by many business, labor and consumer interest groups, focuses on, not one, but, three key issues - the portion of Americans without any coverage; the practice of the insurance firms to deny coverage to classes of citizens and / or arbitrarily drop clients and refuse to pay for covered procedures; and the skyrocketing costs of coverage that threaten both businesses who share the burden of covering their employees and all insured Americans who are forced to spend a greater share of their income on premiums.
Whether the number of uninsured is 47, 37, 27 or 7 million people, that is only part of the problem, the fact that the current system is unsustainable is what must concern everyone whether or not they have coverage. There should be little debate on whether the current system is broken or whether it can be sustained over time without a major overhaul. You don't address that key concern, but rather provide debatable interpretations of the 2007 Census data.
First, the 2007 numbers are out-of-date, as they do not reflect the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs in the current crisis and their family members.
Second, the length of time that it now takes for newly unemployed to find work is far longer that the four month average of 2007 due to the current recession and many replacement jobs are part-time and / or do not offer health care. There is little doubt that the US employment picture will remain dim for a long time.
Third, the 2007 Census data counts 9.487 million people who are "not a citizen." Those numbers include both legal and illegal aliens. Legal "non-citizen" residents work, pay taxes and contribute to the general welfare of the nation just like all other citizens. They have contributed a fair proportion of US troops in The Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Many are in the process of filing for full citizenship. Any of their children born on US soil are full citizens. Their legal status entitles them to the same treatment as full citizens.
The Census data on insurance does not break down the proportions of the uninsured "non-citizens" that are legal versus illegal aliens. Opponents of health care reform lump them together so as to state that the number of uninsured "Americans" is only 37 million. They argue somehow all 10 million uninsured "non-citizens," including legal aliens, should be ignored in the healthcare debate. That argument - to be generous - is anti-immigrant jingoism designed to delegitimize the call for health insurance reform.
Fourth, who can or cannot "afford" health insurance is not easily calculated, as it would be a function of both the ability to pay and the cost of the coverage. So arbitrary numbers used by either side on the health care "affordability" debate are not true and reliable measures of the extent of the difficulty Americans have in meeting their health care needs.
The 2007 Census report, estimates 8.3 million uninsured people made between $50,000 and $74,999 per year and 8.74 million made more than $75,000 a year. The opponents of health care reform extrapolate from those figures that the 17 million people in those categories ought to be able to "afford" health insurance, because they make substantially more than the median household income of $46,326. That is a point of view, not a statement of fact.
Average family health insurance premiums have risen from $5,791 in 1999 to $12,680 in 2008 and are expected to possibly double by 2020. Wages which have been stagnant through most of the Bush years are unlikely to double by 2020. So the future "affordability" of health insurance is a serious issue for every income group, as is the current status for even the fairly well-off middle class.
Maybe every family with an annual income of $50+k can now "afford" to pay up to 25% of that income on health care premiums for policies that have high deductibles and co-payments, as well as exclusions on covered procedures. Maybe many can't - depending on a variety of factors from regional costs of living, tax burdens, number of children, etc. As factored against their specific insurance costs.
If wages remain stagnant and insurance costs double as projected, a family with an income of $50k could face annual insurance costs of up to 50% of their earnings. Would anyone claim with a straight face those middle-class Americans could still "afford" health insurance.
WW - do you think, perhaps, the insurance, pharmaceutical and related health industry firms whose profit margins far exceed most general industry averages could "afford" to lower the prices they charge? Or would that be a mortal capitalist sin?
Do you think it is a good idea, as the health care reform bills move through Congress, to include the insurance industry-supported version that would guarantee a 35% profit margin? Interesting idea - have the federal government guarantee industry profit margins while refusing to guarantee health care for its citizens!
Is it possible that excessive rewards issued in malpractice law suits are similar to excess industry profits? Or is it just wrong when trial lawyers try to make a buck?
WW - I am afraid your ideology, disdain for those you disagree with, reliance on biased sources to support your preconceived notions and tendency to shoot from the hip won't get you a gig as the Argentine Rush Limbaugh, but if Faux News needs a local correspondent you could be their go-to guy. I will provide a reference if they call!
(By the way, your lame, little inference on my hands and hips could be construed as a anti-gay prejudice, but why would that surprise anyone?
Afganistan or Aphganistan
I don't know what would qualify as the most pointless 1) the French and USA trying to dominate SE Asia 2) the USA and few allies going into Iraq 3) the USA and a few allies going into Afganistan.
There is not one chance in the world that we are going to have any better luck in governing or creating a government in Afganistan than Alexander the Great had. For Christ's sake, Afganistan is not even a country. Afganistan is a collection of tribes.
We can leave Afganistan now or leave Afganistan later but it is a given that we will leave Afganistan in the same shape that Alexander the Great left Afganistan, Ghengis Khan left Afganistan, Timberlane left Afganistan and Russia left Afganistan. Afganistan will always be a collection of ungovernable tribes.
Getting back to the question in the first paragraph. I vote for Iraq becuase Iraq had a successful secular government which, although not a democracy, was probably more western (womans rights etc) than any of its neighbors.
The hanging of Saddam Hussein was, in my opinion, one of the most disgraceful, disgusting and shameful acts in the history of the United States.
Now I have to put in the mandatory paragraph of Obama bashing. My question is, if Obama isn't going to get us out of Afganistan, who is (big clue, we are going to have our butts kicked out of Afganistan by tribal members who have not had one day of formal education, can't add 2 plus 2 and have no idea who Jackson is or how to log on to ArgentinaPrivate )
P.S. I forgot a tried and true option that has worked before in the United States as well as in Argentina. We could look upon the people of Afganistan the same way Indians were looked upon in the United States and Argentina i.e the only good Indian is a dead Indian.
Then we would have a vast expanse of territory that would need to be populated by guess who.
How did I not pick up on your subliminal signals?
WW. For the record I neither need nor would rely on DNC talking points. As a former staffer for a US President, Senator and Governor, I do my own research, construct my own arguments and, as at least Alamo has observed, can handle the written word.
I regret to observe that despite my bestowing the old Irish blessing on you, it appears the wind is not at your back, but continues to emanate from a part of your anatomy in that general area.
I have no idea if you are a racist, anti-Nevadan, anti-dead. Antigay, pro or anti Elvis, a John, Paul, George or Ringo Beatle fan or a Keith Richards wannabe or wear a tin foil hat. Nor do I care. But if you found my critique of your post reminded you of a "bitchy, disapproving wife" - my feminist friends would find the sexist handle pretty apt.
Rather to try to refute my talking points, I would recommend you familiarize yourself with the views of Wendell Potter, the former CIGNA PR executive, on how the health insurance industry creates and disseminates its talking points. That might help you to get beyond the pre-packaged flotsam mixed in the backrooms of the insurance industry think tanks and pimped to their wholly-owned subsidiary - the Republican Party and to the False News show anchors.
Or maybe we just forget it all.
Bame Mata raises an obvious point about the futility of what Barney Frank - my old buddy - would term arguing with a dining room table!
Citizen Walleye - stay well in your self-built log cabin. Now Alamo lets talk Wars
Alamo --- you make some very valid points.
Remember James Madison (one of Walleye's revered Founding Fathers) wrote in 1795 - "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. Known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
I agree that the Iraq War represents the dumbest foreign policy decision in my lifetime, with Vietnam a distant second (except for the 50+k dead US troops, tens of thousands of physically and mentally damaged veterans and the millions of dead or damaged innocent Vietnamese)
The greatest irony of Vietnam to me is that the loss of that war occurred over seven years of the Nixon presidency and the admission of defeat came when President Ford ordered the US retreat from Saigon, yet antiwar Democrats have always carried the blame for the US defeat. Because they were right that the "domino theory" was about as valid as the "Saddam has WMDs" horse shit, they had to be discredited. Because the US military industrial / political complex and their bat boy Henry Kissinger was wrong, it had to seize and change the factual narrative – which it did very effectively at the end of the 1970s and through the Reagan years.
The reality was papered over, that the Vietnam War could never have been "won" in any humanly acceptable definition of that term or any feasible commitment of US forces, even if we had followed US Air Force General LeMay's advice and bombed all of Vietnam back to the Stone Age. The unfair and inaccurate narrative that the Democrats wouldn't let the War be won became accepted wisdom by many. This is sadly understandable because Americans have a very, very hard time accepting that with the exception of the two World Wars, their country has very often been both wrong and ham-handed, as it throws its' weight around the world. And for three decades, most Democratic office holders have engaged in political posturing rather than speaking truth to power on defense matters to avoid the charge of being "soft on national security." Remember Hillary the Hawk against Obama the "wuss" in the late 2008 primaries?
Little wonder that the US is the world's biggest military spender, accounting for 48% , or almost half, of the world's total; more than the combined spending of the next 45 countries; 5.8 times more than China, 10.2 times more than Russia, and almost 55 times the spending on the six "rogue" states - Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.
As for Iraq there are two primary points. First, the war that was supposed to bring a wave of democratic revolutions across the Middle East has only firmed the grip of the anti-democratic power holders in every Middle Eastern country. While the Shia-led rulers in Iraq are quite likely to move closer to Iran, once the US presence is gone. Second, Maliki who we installed in office shrewdly engineered a plan to kick us out of his country and the Bush Administration went along when it signed the Status of Forces agreement that requires the full US withdrawal by 2010. Obama is carrying out the agreement as written.
The Pentagon is willing to accept this outcome rather than stay stuck in an unpleasant and dangerous hellhole and thus will support Obama as he fulfills his campaign promise. Occasional up-ticks in violence may affect timetables, but not the eventual outcome. So three trillion US taxpayers dollars, over 4000 troop deaths and 30,000 wounded will be the cost of a nine year conflict that failed to fulfill any of its initial objectives.
Moving onto Afghanistan, I also agree that the effort has become a misadventure that can do serious damage to Obama and his ambition to rationalize US foreign and military policy, unless he plays the game more shrewdly than it appears on the surface at this early date in his presidency.
Obama inherited a festering wound. You might notice when Dick Cheney claims the Bush policies kept America safe, he never mentions Afghanistan, because like the Iraq misadventure, the Bush war objectives were never met. After seven years, the operative question is what should Obama do?
With lingering uncertainty about the amount of steel in the spine of Democrats, Obama – as he completes the Iraq withdrawal - is effectively precluded from just pulling up stakes in Afghanistan. As noted above, Bin Laden remains at large, al Qaeda has not been completely defanged and the Taliban is resurgent. If he had began his Presidency by withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan, nationwide impeachment rallies would make the health care town halls look like Episcopal prayer meetings.
Obama's rhetoric notwithstanding; he knows he stands no better chance of turning Afghanistan - "the graveyard of empires" - into Kansas than the Russians, Bush or Genghis Kahn. It is hard to imagine the Pentagon suckering him into a huge, long-term escalation of troop levels and of cave-to-cave combat in Afghanistan, no matter how much the Generals need a hot war somewhere to keep the threat of Islamic terror in the news and to justify big budgets.
There are recent signs of Obama's hesitancy. First is a leaked complaint from an un-named senior Pentagon source stating: "I think they (the Obama administration) thought this would be more popular and easier. We are not getting a Bush-like commitment to this war." Second, is the Administration's latest decision not to increase the number of troops in the country. Rather, in order to execute the Pentagon's more aggressive approach on the ground, combat units will be sent to replace exiting non-combat units.
The most politically palatable exit strategy for Obama out of the Afghan box Bush left him will be to bow to the ground swell of antiwar popular opinion, the widespread calls for us to cut our losses, with conservatives ironically leading the "cut and run" charge. George Will is the first conservative out of the box. Next time he sees Obama he may get kissed!
The best bet is by the end of his first term, although it will take a lot of finesse, Obama will have maneuvered the US presence into a lower profile in Afghanistan. That may require proof that Osama is dead and news on that front can pop up any day. Drone planes may still be targeting al Qaeda bases. But there won't be 300,000 US and Nato troops on the ground, or even 100,000. The Pentagon won't make this easy. Still, Republicans will not be able to attack Obama for following both the will of the American people and much of their own intelligentsia.
Now let's not be naive, if Obama leaves both Iraq and Afghanistan, should a bomb go off in an empty parking lot and be attributed to al Qaeda, Republican calls for his impeachment will follow as the day follows night.
You heard it here first!
Statistics and other lies
"Here's some more stats from that 2007 census. In 2007, those in the top 1% of income in the United States paid 40% of all income taxes collected. Those in the top 5% of income paid 60% of all income taxes collected. Stated another way, the top 1% paid more than the bottom 95% combined."
Framing the numbers in that manner is highly misleading.
In 2007 top 10% took in 49.7% of total wages. That's a wider gap than in the gilded age and even during the stock market boom of 1928.
Between 1993 - 2007 the top 1% captured literally half of the economic growth.
[url]http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/[/url]
Because income is so very concentrated at the top, saying "the top 1% paid more than the bottom 95% combined" doesn't really mean anything. Of course they did.
Stan da Man - Your judgment is fairly good in my eyes with a few caveats.
You argue substance rather than hurl insults, slogans or obvious distortions. I'll make a few points though - one in line with Bame Mata.
Before I do, I admit Alamo may well be right and Obama plan or not, the current US system is fucked for the long haul.
(I am a satisfied OSDE member who loves leaving my doctors offices with a warm hand shake rather than a stiff bill!
First, as of today there is no official detailed "Obama" health insurance reform plan, just a set of principles along the lines I mentioned. There are numerous competing plans that have come out of or are being debated in the involved Congressional committees with a wide range of specifics. For good or for ill, Obama has recognized that under the Constitution, Congress writes the laws. Whether a good, fair or disastrous plan ends up on his desk is still an unknown, which makes so much of the over-the-top rhetoric of his detractors more than suspect.
Ironically the loudest citizen voices against changing the existing health insurance system are the people who aren't in it. The elderly on Medicare! The classic was the gentleman who yelled at his Congressman "Keep your stinking government hands off my Medicaid!"
Unfortunately, there is no Republican reform plan or a Republican set of principles that have been offered to address the core problems with the current system. The Republican plan is "just say no." That may be smart strategically, but I find it irresponsible.
I agree the government doesn't do things all that well – including fighting wars these days. But a pretty compelling case can be made, that in regard to US health care, the current private sector model is hardly the best of all possible alternatives.
The US does offer superb health care to the wealthy, but to average Americans not so much. The efficacy of the current system is on a downward slope as costs escalate and the general health of most population groups has not kept pace with that of other countries with different systems.
Unfortunately, recent history has taught us a few lessons about letting business self-regulate. (To paraphrase an old slogan – "Are your equity holdings better off today than they were four years ago?") And if government can't be trusted to do its job, what's the alternative? Churchill might say "government regulation is the worst way to curb dangerous corporate practices, except all others."
You are an obviously intelligent and pretty well informed guy. Accordingly, I am a bit surprised that you buy into the charge that Obama poses an existential threat to America capitalism. The details of his tax ideas do not support the charge he wants to "soak the rich" unless you want to hang that petard on each President from Eisenhower to Clinton.
The tax burdens for high income people that Obama has suggested are far less onerous than what was in place during the go-go years of the 1950s, 60s and 70s and no more onerous than what was in place under Reagan and Clinton. Where in the world does all the hyperbole on this come from? Bet you can guess.
Bame Mata is right about bending statistics. The statistics used in debates over tax burdens become impossibly confusing because of the range and mix of taxes people pay from payroll to corporate to capital gains to estate to property to sales to local and state and the deductions and exemptions that are allowed in each category. Measuring what level of taxation that is confiscatory is like asking, "how's your wife." The answer is compared to what!
I used to work for the infamous "Queen of Mean" Leona Helmsley, whose daily income was in excess of half a million dollars. With lousy accountants she may have paid the maximum 35% corporate tax or $175k a day (but I doubt it seeing as she famously observed "only the little people pay taxes!") Her workers at the Empire State Building had average wages of around $30,000. If they paid the 15% standard tax rate, it would take 38 of them to match her burden! At the end of the year, she would have paid $6.4 million and her 38 employees $171,000. Now that may seem a bit unbalanced. However, at the end of every day, she had $325k to spend or invest and each worker had $70. Looked at that way, maybe the progressive tax system isn't such a bad idea!
I wonder if an economy where the gap between the richest and everyone else keeps getting wider is the best model for sustained growth and social stability? As a unashamed liberal I just say no (oops that sounds Republican!
