A Few Hundred Bucks Will Get Some Attention

[w4rma]

Rest assured, nothing is going to be done about this, but the news is still worth some cogitation. The new figures are out, and they show that almost 44 million people are without health insurance.

It’s what you might expect when health insurance for a family costs $9,000 a year and is expected to top the $10,000 mark next year. The average family income is—just to put things in perspective—$27,000 per year, so unless an employer is picking up a healthy (no pun intended) chunk of the insurance bill, there is little choice but to do without this form of protection.
…
Howard Dean, an M.D. himself, has been reminding people at campaign stops that Harry Truman was asking Congress for a socialized medicine bill half a century ago. The call for action is even older. In 1929, Forbes magazine carried an article entitled "Gouged by Doctors: Hospital Costs Far Too High for Patients of Moderate Means—The Need for Business Leaders to Step in." Another Forbes article, called "When Medical Gougers Exploit the Sick," tells the story of a man who had to come up with $150 in cash before the doctor would perform an emergency appendectomy. The man in the latter article was able to borrow half the money for the operation from a neighbor. We are still staging neighborhood yard sales to pay for operations on small children in desperate medical and financial circumstances. As they say, the more it doesn’t change, the more it doesn’t change. What an unholy mess! People forced to buy prescription drugs of uncertain quality on the Internet. People declaring bankruptcy because they can’t pay their medical bills. Hospitals turning people away. Hospitals siccing wolfish debt collectors on dying cancer patients. Old people hoisting themselves onto buses to buy inexpensive drugs in Canada, and the American government—ever the stooge of the big drug companies—trying to stop the old people, who have to choose between taking their heart medicine and eating all seven days of the week.
…
Let’s hope that in addition to telling us to love ourselves (something few of us Americans really need to hear), he will also tell us that if the broad middle class continues to let the big rich—corporate and individual—pay for American politics, they are going to continue getting the shaft. It is possible that middle-class Republicans enjoy the feeling they get when their much-higher-income brethren administer their political pessaries, although there must be days when they, too, have their doubts. The Democratic middle class cannot be happy with the sale of their party on the political eBay to celebrities, AIPAC, trial lawyers, etc. Since nothing else is going to succeed, the people will have to buy back the political system and make it their own.

The middle classes—say those making between $40,000 and $150,000 a year collectively—can do it if they cultivate the habit of giving $200 or $300 every year, and some years even a little more. Aggregated, that makes the ordinary people competitive with the extraordinarily rich. Think of the donations as the rich people do—as bribes, as payoffs on getting the $10,000 insurance tab cut. You are buying "access," as the K Street fixers do. Once we get this going, we can give tax credits for small political contributions and gradually reintroduce into politics men and women who have something else in mind besides where they are going to snatch the next dollar.

The American political system cannot be redeemed, but it can be repurchased.
http://www.observer.com/pages/observer.asp#

[DuctapeFatwa]

1. There isn't that much middle class left

Middle class isn't about numbers, especially in an economy where the cost of the average apartment goes up a hell of a lot more every year than the earning power of the average earned dollar.

Middle class, or affluent, means having resources left over after basic needs are met. And basic needs have changed. It is not realistic to suppose that people can hold down urban and suburban jobs if they do not have not only electricity, but telephones, and yes, television, on which people depend for everything from finding out which highway is closed this morning to maintaining a minimum level of cultural and current events literacy to avoid seeming so out of touch that the bosses will take notice, and kids without TV and internet access are at a distinct disadvantage in school.

You can't meet basic needs unless your clothes look good enough to avoid getting called in to human resources for a "tactful talk," those depression area stories of "I had one shirt and washed it every night" were told by people who did not work at midlevel jobs at IBM.

Middle class means things like savings accounts, the time, money, and energy to bake cookies for the school bake sale, attend PTA meetings, be active on the Town Council, Mosque/Church/Temple groups, taking vacations, starting a home business, all those things that have traditionally made living in the US a different experience than living in Honduras or Brazil, just to name a couple of places.

People who were middle class a few years ago are struggling today.
One parent staying home with the kids is no longer something the middle class can afford. If you can do that, you aren't middle class, you're rich.


$40,000 a year does not buy today what it did even 5 years ago, and most families in that income range will tell you that every few hundred dollars they have is spoken for so many times that the things that people used to "save up" for, they now put on their credit cards, and an increasing number of people are putting regular budget items on those cards.

Health care of any kind is rapidly becoming a bona fide luxury item - even the vestigial indigent care that exists is not really practical for the working poor, who can hardly take their sick kid to a facility that gives out tickets at 8 PM to everyone who has been waiting since 8 AM, that will give them a better chance, but not a guarantee - that they will be seen by 8 PM tomorrow - if they come get in the line in time to be in the waiting room by 8 AM again.


And still, if you go into that Wal-Mart parking lot, and do an informal survey, you will find that the very people who are going without medical care will emphatically oppose "socialized medicine, by an overwhelming margin.

(You will obtain different results if you ask the people who do not have the transportation to get to Wal-Mart, nor money to purchase anything if they did).

It's too bad people didn't pay more attention to those Forbes articles back in the 20's.

The health care situation is just one more indication that things have reached such and extreme point that the likelihood of a political solution is so small as to be statistically irrelevant.

[benfranklin1776]

3. Quite true.

"And still, if you go into that Wal-Mart parking lot, and do an informal survey, you will find that the very
people who are going without medical care will emphatically oppose "socialized medicine, by an
overwhelming margin."

Isn't that the truth? The insidious effects of years of saturation right-wing programming. Still its shows the power of repetitive phraseology. If you repackaged it to them as personal health security they would be more receptive. The right wing, specifically pollster Frank Luntz, has corrupted and perverted the language for their own ends. I say we take it back.

[benfranklin1776]

2. That is a good idea since the aggregate can be a powerful counterbalance.

However I agree that unfortunately as the middle class shrinks and real wages decline the amount of money people have to spend to influence elections is dwindling.
Thus, I think ultimately there needs to be spending limits and public campaign financing or mandatory free air time to all candidates on federally licensed radio and television stations . It will take a constitutional amendment to overturn Buckley V. Valeo which struck down Congress's last great attempt to limit the expenditures of money to influence elections, but so be it.