Tag Archives: healthcare

What I’m Reading, February 19, 2015

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Blame the Muslims: how government and media stoke the fires of Islamophobia, Lindsey German, The Age of Blasphemy, February 12, 2015

Why are the approaches to different groups of terrorists so different? Part of the reason is racism: Muslims are portrayed as fanatics and extremists, caught in a clash of civilisations where the good guys are representatives of western civilisation while the bad guys are identified with backwardness, superstition and barbarity.

This dichotomy conveniently ignores western lack of civilisation, whether through two world wars and a holocaust or through the creation of empires which ruled over whole peoples – many of them the same who are being demonised here. It also ignores the record of Muslim culture historically.

There is one overwhelming reason why this happens however: the wars themselves. There is a refusal to link terrorism with the wars which have taken place over a decade and a half, and a refusal to see that one of their outcomes is a rise in Islamophobia.

There is a hideous symmetry in this: as the wars involving Britain and the US have become more mired in failure, so civil liberties have come under greater attack and the rise in Islamophobia has become more pronounced.

“The bills! The bills!”: A Japanese woman’s experience giving birth in the United States, Fran Wrigley, Rocket News 24, February 13, 2015 Continue reading →

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Parsing Santorum

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By Lars Karlsson (Keqs) (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

With all this idiocy, we need a bit of cute around here. Have some hedgehog.

Rebutting Rick Santorum isn’t exactly a challenge, but occasionally it’s fun. Here’s something he apparently said last week:

Speaking at a Young Americans for Freedom event on Friday, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) offered an unusual assessment of what happens when “the government is going to be the principal provider of health care for the country.” “It’s actually a pretty clever system,” the former presidential candidate explained, “Take care of the people who can vote and people who can’t vote, get rid of them as quickly as possible by not giving them care so they can’t vote against you.” [Emphasis added.]

The prevailing interpretation is that he’s saying nationalized healthcare is a way for the party in power to effectively kill people who don’t vote for them.

Look at what he said, though—while grammatically awkward, his statement allows for healthcare for “the people who can vote.” It’s the “people who can’t vote” who wouldn’t be getting healthcare, which makes no sense if the point is to stop them from voting. The only way this makes sense is if the people who aren’t voting for the party in power have already been disenfranchised somehow. Perhaps Santorum said too much here…

Or perhaps I’m overthinking the whole thing, and Rick Santorum is a fool talking out of his ass. Apply Occam’s Razor here.

Photo credit: By Lars Karlsson (Keqs) (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons.

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That Time the Heritage Foundation Promoted the Individual Mandate, Citing “an Implicit Contract Between Households and Society”

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Stuart Butler publicity shotIf you have the means to purchase insurance for yourself, but refuse to do so because freedom, the taxpayers of the U.S. will  foot the bill to treat you for catastrophic injuries, because we are fundamentally a decent people. Don’t take my word for it, though. The Heritage Foundation said so back in 1989, when its Director of Domestic Policy Studies, Stuart M. Butler, Ph.D., promoted the idea of an individual health insurance mandate:

Many states now require passengers in automobiles to wear seatbelts for their own protection. Many others require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance. But neither the federal government nor any state requires all households to protect themselves from the potentially catastrophic costs of a serious accident or illness. Under the Heritage plan, there would be such a requirement. This mandate is based on two important principles. First, that health care protection is a responsibility of individuals, not businesses. Thus to the extent that anybody should be required to provide coverage to a family, the household mandate assumes that it is the family that carries the first responsibility. Second, it assumes that there is an implicit contract between households and society, based on the notion that health insurance is not like other forms of insurance protection. If a young man wrecks his Porsche and has not had the foresight to obtain insurance, we may commiserate but society feels no obligation to repair his car. But health care is different. If a man is struck down by a heart attack in the street, Americans will care for him whether or not he has insurance. If we find that he has spent his money on other things rather than insurance, we may be angry but we will not deny him services – even if that means more prudent citizens end up paying the tab. A mandate on individuals recognizes this implicit contract. Society does feel a moral obligation to insure that its citizens do not suffer from the unavailability of health care. But on the other hand, each household has the obligation, to the extent it is able, to avoid placing demands on society by protecting itself.

(Emphasis added.)

Here’s a PDF copy of the lecture (source), in case the HTML page goes away.

Photo credit: By Stuart Butler [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Opinions Are Like A**h*les

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One tendency I’ve noticed, and that I may have been guilty of (hopefully only) in the past, is that some guys, almost invariably white guys my age or older, are so used to being able to spout their opinions with a minimum of criticism or blowback, however idiotic those opinions might be, that they react very poorly to being called out, particularly by a woman. I don’t think most of them are even aware of what they are actually doing, which almost makes it worse than if they would just admit that they don’t like being corrected in public by a girl.

People in general, but especially conservatives, have gotten very postmodern about their “opinions.” Any refusal to hear what someone else has to say is viewed as intolerance or closed-mindedness – an accusation that the speaker almost never levels at him- or herself, by the way. It never crosses their mind that you might not want to consider Fox News’ opinions because they have nothing to say that you haven’t heard, considered, and dismissed thousands of times before. Continue reading →

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The New York Times Says Something Mildly Critical of Profit-Driven Healthcare; Conservatives Predictably Lose Their Damn Minds

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983494_13007489From the din certain people on the right have been making, they apparently think that the New York Times has the unilateral power to set American domestic economic policy. Someone really needs to explain to some people the difference between offering an opinion on a matter of public interest and tyrannically imposing dictates. Newspapers generally do the former. Very, very, very few people do the latter.

The pages of the New York Times featured a rather poorly-sourced, polemical piece by Eduardo Porter entitled “Health Care and Profits, a Poor Mix.” He cites a 1984 study that found that for-profit nursing homes used far more sedatives on their patients than comparable nursing homes that were affiliated with churches, and therefore non-profit. The reason, according to Porter (citing other authors), was that sedatives are cheaper than caregivers, and it is better for the bottom line to dope up your residents as opposed to hiring trained staffers who can provide individual attention and treatment.

That sounds perfectly rational, actually. Is Porter right? Well, he only has the one study that was published during Reagan’s first term, along with a scattered assortment of other academic papers. That hardly builds up to a mountain of evidence indicting profit-driven nursing homes. There is a certain amount of common-sense appeal to the idea that nursing home administrators who are principally beholden to corporate shareholders have greater incentive to cut corners, and it certainly happens all the time. Nonprofit healthcare facilities, however, don’t exactly get to write blank checks for state-of-the-art care. Their motivation might be to stretch the money out until the next grant check arrives. Porter’s article raises some good questions, but does not give us enough information to state a definitive preference.

Of course, that doesn’t stop some people from going apoplectic. See, Porter committed the cardinal sin of saying something mean about the free market. The free market—sorry, the Free Market—is always right. Because shut up.

A Google search of the two authors of the 1984 study, Bonnie Svarstad and Chester Bond, yields a treasure trove of overreaction. (Incidentally, their paper, “The Use of Hypnotics in Proprietary and Church-Related Nursing Homes,” does not appear to be available online, so none of us can check Porter’s work.) Let us bring on the hysterics! Continue reading →

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