Category: Political

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

In imperial Vietnam, when a scholar could not in conscience continue his life at court he would petition the emperor for permission to return to his home village, where he would raise medicinal herbs & teach the local boys their basic Han characters & the rudiments of Confucian thought.

It’s uncanny but Joseph Duemer has reflected much of what is on my mind today about the situation in Iraq. Like him, I too am reduced to …digusted silence, and would prefer to just putter around my photos and my walks and the writing that remains uniquely me.

I feel at times, though, that I’m letting down those who need our support by showing flowers when children are dying. But I think what matters more is that you hold the dead in your heart, and their memories in your head, and you don’t forget, especially when it’s time to show you haven’t forgotten.

If I felt some satisfaction in the writing, I would continue, and gladly. But all it does is leave me frustrated, and instead of eloquence, I am reduced either to rhetoric, thinly disguised, or bitch slapping war bloggers. As for these fine folk, left or right, see me in a couple of years, and we’ll see who remembers Atrios or Reynolds, Kos, or LGF. The most eloquent of us cannot continue saying the same thing, over and over again, before even the most dogmatic goes mad.

I cannot convince anyone to change their mind, or feel the horror of a world out of control if they truly believe all is well. I cannot make the dehumanization of the worker force by corporate interests that much more clear; the degradation of the environment that much more frightening; the isolation of those made different, or the pain we’ve inflicted on those harmed that much more compelling; nor will I be able to hasten Bush’s departure from the White House more quickly.

For now, I opt for herbs.

The clinic I’ve been going to this last month is a very efficient organization. Labs and X-Rays are handled in the basement, people get checked in at the main door, and each suite of doctor’s has a waiting room with a person seated at a desk to handle all the patient insurance accounts.

The woman who manages the accounts for my doctors, we’ll call her the Receptionist for want of a better word, is a very friendly woman, probably in her early 50’s. As she works on the paperwork, she chats with people in the room, and I don’t think she does it as part of her job–I think she just likes people.

This week while I waited to see the doctor, there was just her, an older guy in his 60’s, and myself in the room. She and he were chatting about paperwork and how it worked when they started talking about the upcoming changes to Medicare based on the recent bill passage in Congress.

The Patient was curious about the Medicare changes because though he still works part-time and has full insurance through his company. he has Medicare as secondary coverage. The Receptionist talked about how people are having to register but there’s a lot of confusion about how it works. The Patient asked when the changes would go into effect and she didn’t know for sure. At that point, tired of rubbing my back against the wall to get at the itch, I mentioned that there is a real possibility that the bill would have to be returned to Congress as unworkable because there was some serious concerns about both the costs and the benefits.

(I was hesitant to give even a mild criticism of anything that was related to Bush because unlike other parts of the country, you never know if you’re going to run into a strong pro-Bush person in Missouri.)

The Receptionist agreed emphatically that the bill did need re-working, it was an obvious political move on the part of Bush. The Patient said that was to be expected from Bush, he hadn’t done anything right since he started office. The Receptionist then pointed out how lousy the economy has been, and how another company in town just laid off workers. The Patient agreed and talked about the price of gasoline, and how Bush’s foreign policy obviously hasn’t helped us at the pumps. Gas was now up to 1.79 a gallon.

I mentioned that it was 1.59 now, and the Patient replied he’d have to drive around his car until it was empty enough to fill.

*laughter*

The Receptionist gave as her opinion that the reason why gas goes up and down so much is so that when it does go down to something like 1.59 a gallon, we think we’re getting a deal because it’s not 1.79; forgetting that last year it was a 1.29 a gallon. And all those boys in Iraq were dying for nothing, if we thought we’d get better deals on gas because of this war.

The Patient asked if we had seen the news this weekend about all those poor people killed in Iraq–soldiers and civilians. The Receptionist and I both agreed, and he continued with there was no reason for us to go over there by ourselves, without the UN. No rush either, and now look where we’re at.

The Receptionist replied with how we’re now in the worst debt in history, and there was no end to the war in Iraq in sight.

*solemn head shaking*

The Patient mentioned he was voting for Kerry, and didn’t understand why anyone else would. The Receptionist agreed. I mentioned how Bush still has a lot of support with the morality folks. The Patient turned in his chair, faced me, and said, “I think that some issues are best left between a woman and her doctor and the government shouldn’t intervene.”

At that point the nurse called me in to see the doctor.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I read in comments associated with another weblog this weekend that some Libertarian’s don’t believe that everyone has the right to basic health care in this country. I will admit I was surprised by this. I had assumed that we are all agreed that health care should be accessible to all people, but disagreed in how it would be provided. I wasn’t aware that there was a group of Libertarians who believe that basic health care is not a right.

When Ashcroft was diagnosed with gallbladder problems a couple of weeks ago, I was reminded of my own problems with a large (undiagnosed) gallstone that went untreated for close to two years until I had insurance and could have my gallbladder removed. As I watched all the fuss being made over Ashcroft, I thought about how different the situation would be if he was uninsured, and even considered writing something about this.

Luckily, Dan Frosch at AlterNet did a much better job than I could have:

While it’s almost impossible to figure out the exact figure on Ashcroft’s bill, one can estimate. Five days in an ICU unit alone at Providence Hospital in Washington, for example, would run up to $30,000. And then there’s the laparoscopic gall bladder surgery and the five days in recovery – which could cost an additional $28,000 (according to Fairview University Medical Center in Minneapolis). But there are still all the expert doctors who’ve visited him daily and have their own separate charges. That price tag might run Ashcroft as much as $5000 for the ten days he’s in the hospital, says Dr. Quentin Young, PNHP’s National Coordinator and former Director of Medicine at Cook County Hospital. Using such rough estimates, Ashcroft is told he’ll have to fork over at least $63,000.

According to this article, over 18,000 people die every year because they don’t get the medical attention they need until it’s too late. Hard to believe when this country prides itself on the medical care it provides to other nations.

What didn’t surprise me about the conversation is how ill-informed these people were about the state of health care in this country. There were assumptions that the only people who don’t have health care were poor; that anyone needing health care could get this at some ‘local charity clinic’; that COBRA coverage was available to everyone; that only five percent of the American people don’t have health care coverage (it’s closer to 20%).

There was also the usual discussion about socialized medicine being inefficient.
I have to laugh at this because my bill for my dental surgery I had in the beginning of December still hasn’t been paid, this with the ‘efficient private care sytem’ we so enjoy in the United States.

What happened is the company I have COBRA through changed providers unexpectedly, and I had the surgery three days after the switch. When the doctor put in the claim, it was denied because there was …a mixup in the paperwork at the time. When I got the bill from the doctor with the note that the claim was denied, I called the insurance company and they reprocessed the claim. About a month later I got a cc letter from the company asking my doctor for x-rays; the claim wouldn’t be processed until they had the x-rays. I called the doctor, and they said the x-rays had been sent…with the original claim. Most likely tossed out, too, by the insurance company.

At this moment, almost four months later, the bill still hasn’t been paid while the Catch 22 game is played between the insurance company and the doctor, and now I’m being told by the doctor that I’ll most likely have to pay the bill, even though I was insured, because it is ..my problem.

Now, what was that about the efficiency of socialized medicine?

Returning to the comments from this weekend, in the end the discussion kept coming back to a belief that no one has a right to basic health care.

I am reminded of the earliest form of home insurance in this country. Homes so insured had metal plaques nailed to the sides of the homes, and if they were to catch fire, the subscription-funded fire department would put out the fire. However, if the house was not insured, it would burn down to the ground white the department watched.

If we believe that basic health care is not a right, then basic fire protection and other emergency services shouldn’t be either. Seems fair to me, and just think how much those Libertarians would save on local taxes.

(Thanks to Feministe for pointer to the story).

I’m not a regular reader of Joel on Software, but he’s started a new “Ask Joel” forum that’s been generating some interesting conversations.

One is on Offshoring and features the usual offshoring is evil discussion, and a bit too much sucking up to Joel, but it also has some additions from people who work within the offshore companies, as well as other discussions about programming being a commodity, and globalization.

I particularly like the idea of bringing together developers from countries that have lost jobs with developers in countries who have gained jobs due to globalization – would be an interesting chat, wouldn’t it?

The second thread that interested me personally was Joel talking about his new book with Apress . Book branding is one topic in the thread, and both Tim O’Reilly and Gary Cornell from Apress add comments. What caught my attention, though, was a statement Joel made:

Whenever I’ve had any kind of issue no matter how tiny Gary always laid down the law: the author is always right 😉

The …author is always right. I’ll have to remember that.

I imagine that the forums will degenerate quickly, as these things do, but I found the discussion today of interest.