Can We Be Optimistic About Health Care Reform? Obama DECIDING On Afghanistan, Massacre In Mindanao

November 23rd, 2009 - by: danny

WP: “BREAKING NEWS:” President Obama has finished gathering information about troop options in Afghanistan and will likely announce his decision in an address to the nation next Tuesday, administration officials said.

NYT: President Obama is facing criticism from Democrats over the war’s cost, the size of the U.S. commitment and the reliability of allies.

NYT: Hundreds of prisoners could be exchanged for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, and officials said the deal would likely include Marwan Barghouti, a popular West Bank leader.

SCHUMER WAXES OPTIMISTIC
TAIBBI SAYS ‘FERGITABOUTIT”
BLACK CAUCUS PUSHING FOR FINANCIAL RULES

We start today on a note of optimism, or is it blind faith?

(AP) WASHINGTON — Failure is not an option on health care, a leading Democratic senator said Monday, even as Republicans turned up the heat on moderates who hold the fate of the legislation in their hands.

“We’re not going to not pass a bill,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. With or without Republican support, Democrats will get it done, Schumer said, because a health care system that leaves nearly 50 million uninsured and spends more than any other is clearly broken.

ALAS, THINGS DON’T HAPPEN BECAUSE THEY SHOULD!

Months ago, back in September, Matt Taibi wrote about what’s really going on with this bill in Rolling Stone. It’s not very encouraging:

Sick and Wrong: How Washington is screwing up health care reform – and why it may take a revolt to fix it

“Let’s start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It’s become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment – a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn’t be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn’t work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it’s a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they’re sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable – and that’s the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won’t get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

Over the course of this summer, those two failed systems have collided in a spectacular crossroads moment in American history. We have an urgent national emergency on the one hand, and on the other, a comfortable majority of ostensibly simpatico Democrats who were elected by an angry population, in large part, specifically to reform health care. When they all sat down in Washington to tackle the problem, it amounted to a referendum on whether or not we actually have a functioning government.

It’s a situation that one would have thought would be sobering enough to snap Congress into real action for once. Instead, they did the exact opposite, doubling down on the same-old, same-old and laboring day and night in the halls of the Capitol to deliver us a tour de force of old thinking and legislative trickery, as if that’s what we really wanted. Almost every single one of the main players – from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Blue Dog turncoat Max Baucus – found some unforeseeable, unique-to-them way to fuck this thing up. Even Ted Kennedy, for whom successful health care reform was to be the great vindicating achievement of his career, and Barack Obama, whose entire presidency will likely be judged by this bill, managed to come up small when the lights came on.

Jane SlaughteR, LABOR NOTES, Labor Bargains for Too Little on Health Care, Gets Even Less

Liberal Group Pressures Sen. Reid for Reconciliation on Public Option: Nationwide Petition Calls for Majority Rule; Corrupt Dems do Bidding of Big Insurance, Holding Healthcare Hostage

PETITION

Washington DC — FDL Action, the political arm of the leading blog firedoglake.com has launched a hard-hitting national petition to pressure Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to support the government-run public option during the reconciliation process of the Healthcare bill by holding a majority vote if the public option does not make it to the final bill.

“Make no mistake, Senator Reid, and Senator Reid alone, controls the fate of the public option and whether or not millions of Americans get coverage without the stranglehold of Big Insurance Corporations,” said Firedoglake President Jane Hamsher. “If the country ever needed leadership from its Majority Leader, now is the time.”

Here is the link to the petition:

CJR: Sen. Ron Wyden is one of the few politicians willing to admit that the current health reform proposals will likely still leave millions of Americans unable to afford insurance. In an interview with CJR’s Trudy Lieberman, Wyden talks about affordability, cost containment, and the issues the press *should* be writing about.

The Public Health Care Plan Will Cost More Because It Will Attract Sicker Patients

The Washington Post told readers that: “according to the Congressional Budget Office, a government plan as outlined in both the Senate and House bills would cost more than private coverage and, as a result, attract few customers.” It would have been helpful to point out that the reason CBO projects that the plan will have higher costs is that it will attract less healthy patients.

The reason is that CBO assumed that private insurers would find ways to effectively cherry pick their patients (in violation of the law) so that their patient pool will be healthier than the population as a whole. Less healthy patients would opt into the public plan because they would get better treatment. While the CBO analysis shows that the public plan would have higher costs because its patients are sicker, because it projects that the public plan will be more efficient than private plans, it would still lower costs for the health care system as a whole

IN NEWS OF THE WORLD

MASSACRE IN MINDANO

Dan Murphy, CSM: Philippines political violence on Mindanao leaves 35 dead

By Buluan town Mayor Ebrahim Mangudadatu: “This is a gruesome massacre of civilians unequaled in recent history.”

Philippines politics has often been marred by bloodshed. From the 1983 assassination of Senator Benigno Aquino on the tarmac of the Manila airport by agents of the country’s then dictator Ferdinand Marcos to the hundreds of lesser known regional candidates and their supporters murdered in the provinces over the years, the gun has frequently been an ingredient of Philippines politics.

But the kidnapping and murders of 35 supporters (according to the Philippines Inquirer) of a candidate for governor in the southern province of Maguindanao has shocked even jaded Filipinos.

[SNIP]

In the murky politics of The Philippines, wealthy families have almost feudal control over poorer voters in their districts, nowhere more so than in Maguindanao, which has been a hotbed of Muslim and Marxist insurgency against the Catholic-dominated central government for generations.

Twelve journalists killed on Mindanao island in “dark day for press freedom”

At least 12 journalists were killed today in Maguindanao province (on the southern island of Mindanao) by armed men, including two policemen, linked to the province’s governor, a supporter of President Gloria Arroyo. More than 30 other people were murdered. Some of the victims were beheaded.

AFGHANISTAN: OH, THE LURE OF THE “MIDDLE GROUND”

WASHINGTON — The White House said President Barack Obama could use an unusual evening war council session Monday to lock in his long-awaited decision on whether to commit tens of thousands of new U.S. forces to the stalemated war in Afghanistan.

Military officials and others said they expect Obama to settle on a middle-ground option that would deploy an eventual 32,000 to 35,000 U.S. forces to the 8-year-old conflict.

Jeremy Scayhill, BLACKWATER’S SECRET WAR IN PAKISTAN

Embattled Pakistan president suffers after amnesty revelation

UN WIRE: Authorities from Pakistan’s state department released a list of more than 8,000 names of politicians who benefited from the National Reconciliation Ordinance, a sort of amnesty issued in 2007 by former President Pervez Musharraf to bring about the return of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto from exile. The revelation comes as a blow to President Asif Ali Zardari as many of the dropped charges of corruption and abuse belonged to members of his Pakistan Peoples Party. The New York Times (11/22)

BESERKISTAN: Chuck Norris: Copenhagen Talks To Forge “One World Order”

When United States of America loses a very real war on the battlefield, as in Vietnam, to save the honor of the country, Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone win wars in the imagination of cinema.There is a difference, but it helps…

Infowars.net, Thursday, Nov 12, 2009. TV star and political commentator Chuck Norris has voiced concerns that the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, beginning December 7, represents an attempt to further an agenda to create a “one world order” at the expense of national sovereignty.

“I really think he is going over there to try to create a one world order.” Norris said of president Obama during an appearance on the Fox News show Your World with Neil Cavuto.

“My big worry is the fact is that we as a nation, if we start having to be obligated to other countries,” Norris said.

“In this conference, they’re going to try to take our money and send it to third-world countries because of, since we spend so much oil and these other countries have suffered, then we’re going to give our money to these third-world countries.” he continued.

CPI Report Uncovers Culture of Secrecy Surrounding Sexual Assault on College Campuses Around the Country: Litany of Barriers Leaves Students Feelings Victimized a Second Time

Washington, DC – On Tuesday, December 1st, the Center for Public Integrity will host a press call and webinar to release a report on the culture of secrecy surrounding sexual assault on college campuses across the country. Speakers will detail the results of a nine-month investigation that uncovered a host of institutional problems surrounding sexual assault and how it is handled by school administrations.

Nearly half the students interviewed by the Center reported they unsuccessfully sought criminal charges — leaving them to deal with a campus judiciary system shrouded in secrecy. Those students who do come forward can encounter mysterious disciplinary proceedings, closed-mouth school administrations and off-the-record negotiations. At times, official school policies lead to dropped complaints and, in some cases, gag orders later found to be illegal.

The News Dissector