HYDROPHOBIC HYSTERIA: Back during the waning days of the reign of Crawford Texas’ village idiot most of the brain dead, consumerist, greedy, self absorbed Americans figured out what the wise knew in 2000- and Bush’s “popularity” hovered at about 20%.
Most progressives saw this as an encouraging development in that three-in-five of the US’ ditto-headed, brain-dead fat-tubs-of-lard that pass themselves off as human beings had wised up after being been beaten silly for almost eight years due to their own actions at the ballot box.
But really it the most astonishing part of the poll was that there were still 20% of hard core dim-witted knee-jerk “too stupid to live” left tucked away in mega-churches and mini-malls of America the country.
“Who are these people?” we wondered but more importantly “where are they?”
Well we found them this month- the hard core, “don’t confuse me with the facts”, chest-pounding twits- raising gorilla dust at the various health care reform town meetings held recently.
And even though they probably represent only half of those die hard knuckleheads that argued among themselves whether Bush was “a great president or the greatest president”, the media- in their typical “’both’ sides of the issue” coverage- still cling to the notion that this “movement” is really about health care and not just a diminishing clique of white people who see their majority status in the land they stole from brown people slowly disappearing and want to wrest back control of “our” country back from the hands of a black president.
Perhaps the thing that baffles the pea-brained pundits most is where are those 80% of Americans- as polls indicated earlier this year- that demand real health care reform?
Well what the press hasn’t grasped is that those of us who understand that the only form of reform that can demonstrably be launched fully formed- the single payer “Medicare for all” format- gave up on true heath care reform months ago when it was conveniently taken “off the table” by the president and congress.
The noisiest of squeaky wheels have not only gotten the grease they’ve provided the context for lazy, simplistic, easy-answer-seeking reporters to file stories defining the “opposition” as those shrieking drivel in the non-sequitor, talking-point Hannity/ Limbaugh/ Beck echo chamber, as they spew high decibel inanities at their cameras.
The corporate media refuse to think through why there is seemingly little of no support for the “single payer is off the table” non-reform that we’ve been offered.
With their Hobson’s choice loaded-question, in true corporate governance bought-and-paid-for style, it’s just a matter of how much they will allow the insurance industry to continue to screw us in the butt, essentially asking us whether we want our sh-t sandwich on white or wheat.
And they expect us to enthusiastically show up and fight the “keep the government away from my Medicare” crazies for, at best, a kinder gentler insurance industry (yeah, that’ll happen).
The fact is, unless you’re still one of those among the delusionally naive Obama-as-messiah sycophantic minions- a group whose numbers are shrinking daily as they meet the new boss’ war-mongering corporate-kow-towing style- you’ve given up on the centrist Democratic Party’s “bend-over” opposition to the slack-jawed, wing-nut creationist, gun-toting Republicans.
The ribbon placed on the repackaging of the old-boss is but an illusion that we who’ve long since rejected the duopoly warned of when, as always, Tweedledum ran against Tweedledumber.
Health care reform is dead. It died when all the members of congress decided we couldn’t have the only reform that would and could be fair, affordable and cover everyone as we detailed last month because the other 534 corporate lackeys had been bought off by the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
Don’t expect us to stand up and defend the insult to our intelligence that the Democrats are trying to substitute for basic human right to heath care we all want deserve and could have had.
Showing posts with label health care. Show all posts
Showing posts with label health care. Show all posts
Friday, August 14, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
PAGING SENATOR HOWARD, SENATOR FINE, SENATOR HOWARD
PAGING SENATOR HOWARD, SENATOR FINE, SENATOR HOWARD: The so called “debate” over health care is peaking but anyone who thinks we will actually get the meaningful system the public has demanded is either naive or a moron.
Fully 70-80% of Americans, depending on the poll, demand single payer, government run, “Medicare for all” health care according to dozens of polls. Yet the self-absorbed inside-the-beltway media continues to kow-tow to the two duopolistic corporate parties that were already bought and paid for years ago to make sure we will never get the same health care system that the rest of the world enjoys.
The media debate centers around the circle-jerk promulgated by the president and congress and completely ignores the fact that people don’t want anything like the proposed insurance-industry laden health care system- not for the reasons concocted by the right-wing-nuts but because it isn’t the single payer system they thought we were finally going to enact.
According to every mainstream media (MSM) outlet it’s a political battle between a Democratic Party bullsh-t, corporate-endorsed system of tinkering around the edges of a broken system and an even more bullsh-t Republican campaign of fear mongering, misrepresentation and outright lies to stop even the meaningless changes Dems have proposed.
The pundits and reporters fail to even discuss that the real grounds for the lack of popularity of the “Obama Plan” is because both sides embrace what nobody wants- more insurance company control over healthcare... a ghoulish system that reaps profits at the expense of people’s health and even lives.
The die was cast when earlier this year the “word on the street”- presumably Pennsylvania Ave.- as reported by the MSM, was to forget about single payer because no one in congress would ever vote for it.
And yes- ask any senator or representative- they admit it. It’s “politically impossible” they say, to have single payer because the campaign contributions from insurance companies, pharmaceutical giants and their assorted corporate shills have bought off congress.
Oh- so you’re admitting you’re bought and paid for Senator? Well no, it’s not me. I would vote for single payer in a moment. It’s all the others... I just can’t fight them all.
Seemingly both no one and everyone has been legally bribed, eh. If every “not me” was really not them we’d have “us” covered with single payer.
The problem is that the people who support single payer, “Medicare for all” or whatever we’re calling it this week are for the most part Democrats and will take anything Obama and the majority congressional Democrats shove down their throats.
It happens every time. They don’t want to be seen as opposing their own, so it doesn’t matter what kid of crap they’re eating because it’s their crap and they’re willing to hold their nose and swallow it even if it’s not the meal they ordered, just to maintain the apparently useless power they’ve gained.
Their silence in demanding real heath care reform- not that ersatz substitution currently on the table- is deafening.
That leaves the Republicans free to argue against single payer without having to even risk the realization of it. They’ve been planning this PR campaign for years and will attack whatever is proposed as if it were single payer, by making up anything they want to.
The media laps it up because it fits their lazy “black or white”, “A” or “B” sound-bite driven, news delivery system. They prefer to play up the corporate-sponsored and devised attacks as the reason why people don’t like what they’re hearing instead of recognizing the lack of a single payer plan as the raison d'être for the public’s ambivalence.
So what are those lies about single payer and who are the lying liars who lie about them?
First of all is cost. Everyone’s talking taxes and deficits and such trying to squeeze out nickels from Medicare Medicaid and the like that have been bled like an orange for 20 years already.
The facts are that the main cost of health care is insurance company profits and administrative fees.
The real numbers are staggering- the administrative costs for insurance companies is a full 30% of revenue while the administration of Medicare costs 3%. And that 30% doesn’t include their profit which run as high as 25%, sometimes more.
That’s literally half the cost of health care. Eliminate those costs and all the under and uninsured can be covered and then some.
That doesn’t even include the savings to providers in the streamlining of paperwork that one form, one reimbursement system and one payer provides. That’s without the financial costs to everyone inherent in the current insurance system through bankruptcies, foreclosures and resultant unemployment, welfare payments and other governmental costs. And it doesn’t account for the amount the we pay now for the uninsured by paying for acute and emergency treatment, paid at an even more astronomical cost than the insured pay.
And it doesn’t include the savings by having one entity representing everyone which will have the leverage and bargaining power to impose reasonable costs on pharmaceutical and medical supply companies.
None of those savings can or do exist under the insurance company model.
If “paying for health care” is an issue, single payer is a no brainer. The reason why Republicans can attack Democrats for lack of cost control is because Democrats gave up on the system that would provide enough savings to pay for a system of means-tested fees to provide medical care for all.
Another related and similarly idiotic argument is that we’d have to increase taxes to pay for single payer.
We all heard that the Congressional Budget Office found the proposed non-plan would cost a trillion dollars.
But guess what- the statistic we didn’t cite above and no one seems to mention is that we’re already paying inordinate amounts for “insurance”.
If you’re stupid enough not to realize that and complain that you don’t want to pay what would be, at most, the same amount in a “tax”- or presumably less when all the insurance company skinning is taken out of the equation- you’re obviously semantically challenged and need to buy a clue or some critical thinking skills.
So put away the tea bag and do the math.
If we as a county are paying “X” for health care right now including employer contributions, Medicare and Medicaid and of course payments by individuals and we add all the savings single payer provides we’d be paying X minus a small fortune.
Call it a “tax” or call it the current portion of your paycheck noted as an “employer contribution” and “deduction for insurance”- that’s simply a differentiation without a difference.
So where are we... single payer is a no-brainer for cost control and you’re already paying up the wazoo now so you can only pay less no matter what you call it when we take it away from insurance companies.
But even more absurd are some of the characterizations of the single payer delivery systems in place in every other industrialized nation on earth.
Let’s start with this insane notion that some of these “horror” are worse in those single payer countries than under our insurance companies.
Anyone who claims the people there don’t like their system is lying. They may not like some delivery particulars but when you look at any general gripes, they’re even worse here.
Rationing of care? Having to wait for a doctor’s visit? Having to wait for elective procedures?
If you haven’t experienced this under insurance companies you either don’t have insurance, have never had misfortune to really need it or are rich.
Have you tried to make an appointment with a doctor for a non urgent matter in America? You’ll be lucky to get an appointment in a month, a fraction of any clamed wait in Canada or England that opponents love to lie about. Seeing a specialist? How about getting an MRI? Elective knee surgery? Try months- or never if the insurance company says so.
In fact, we not only wait longer here, the determining factor isn’t how sick we are but how much it costs.
Transplant? Experimental procedures? Whereas everyone qualifies under single payer systems, under insurance companies you’re just denied treatment over and over until you’re dead or told you have a “preexisting condition”- including things like not reporting you had a headache in 1987 or some similarly absurd and unrelated minor omission on your application- making you eligible for nothing but having your claim denied, having your premium made more unaffordable than it is now or, more likely, being dropped entirely by your insurance company.
And the questions “do you want a government bureaucrat making a decision on whether you can have care?” is absolutely vapid. Would you rather have an insurance company bureaucratic operative- who gets rewarded financially for denying you care- making the decision?.. well that’s what you’ve got now.
At least under a government system there would presumably be a transparent methodology of approval, based on medical need not someone’s bottom line.
Under most single payer systems across the world there is virtually no such thing as a denial of an established service when a doctor orders it. The claim that there would be such as restriction under single payer is just another fear mongering distortion by those beholden to the insurance companies.
Anyone who saw Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko” knows the horrors of having profit as a motive for granting or denying care. It’s another no-brainer for most of us, even in the face of the health insurance industry’s admitted massive disinformation campaign regarding the film and whistleblower revelations regarding their practices.
One of the more mind-numbing contentions made by Republicans and unrefuted by Democrats- because they won’t stand up for single payer and have already given up the anti-insurance company fight- is that people like the coverage they have now.
There are two types who like their coverage now- those who have never been really sick and those who can afford gold-plated coverage. They may like the standard of care American clinics and hospitals provide- something that isn’t going to change under single payer delivery system- but they don’t like to pay insurance companies half their paycheck to get it.
But for all the Republican obfuscation, PR spin, outright lies and idiocy, it’s the Democratic rank and file who are really to blame for letting their leaders get away with selling our basic human right- yes right- to health care down the river before we even began.
It’s typical of Democrats- they’re willing to swallow the same crap they wouldn’t accept when the Republicans were in charge, just because they don’t want to criticize their side.
And that’s the problem- that silence within the Democratic Party faithful that allows the leaders to ignore the members allows the horse-race. “he said- she said” reporting press to say there are only two “sides”, neither one of which is the side of the people who require health care.
Many think that this idiotic “public option” is way to finagle the single payer they want.
But that’s not gonna happen. The insurance companies have already made it their prime directive to the bought and paid for Dems and Repubs- if there is a public option the final legislation will prevent any evolution to single payer.
If we believe that politicians won’t do what they are saying they’re going to do- make sure single payer is “off the table”- we are officially insane.
The pattern is familiar, especially among Democrats. “Oh, they’re just saying that to get it passed” is just a refrain of the old “they’re just saying that to get elected”. But guess what?- we’ve seen over and over that’s not true and different outcomes never spring from doing the same thing.
We have no one but ourselves to blame when, led by the rings though our noses we button our lips and let them compromise away our rights until the end product is the same no matter who is in charge.
The current deliberation is nothing but a fake debate and hardly bares the attention being paid. Health care will be more expensive and more unattainable under any scenario being considered right now.
The only thing that seems to be agreed upon is that we will now be mandated to pay even more than we’re paying now to insurance companies for the same crappy lack-of-comprehensive coverage we’re getting now.
What you see is what you get. When in the near future we see people dropping like flies all around us because this so-called health care reform was an insurance company scam, it will only be because, by buying into the frame of the current health care debate, we’re established the fact that we’re too dumb to live.
Fully 70-80% of Americans, depending on the poll, demand single payer, government run, “Medicare for all” health care according to dozens of polls. Yet the self-absorbed inside-the-beltway media continues to kow-tow to the two duopolistic corporate parties that were already bought and paid for years ago to make sure we will never get the same health care system that the rest of the world enjoys.
The media debate centers around the circle-jerk promulgated by the president and congress and completely ignores the fact that people don’t want anything like the proposed insurance-industry laden health care system- not for the reasons concocted by the right-wing-nuts but because it isn’t the single payer system they thought we were finally going to enact.
According to every mainstream media (MSM) outlet it’s a political battle between a Democratic Party bullsh-t, corporate-endorsed system of tinkering around the edges of a broken system and an even more bullsh-t Republican campaign of fear mongering, misrepresentation and outright lies to stop even the meaningless changes Dems have proposed.
The pundits and reporters fail to even discuss that the real grounds for the lack of popularity of the “Obama Plan” is because both sides embrace what nobody wants- more insurance company control over healthcare... a ghoulish system that reaps profits at the expense of people’s health and even lives.
The die was cast when earlier this year the “word on the street”- presumably Pennsylvania Ave.- as reported by the MSM, was to forget about single payer because no one in congress would ever vote for it.
And yes- ask any senator or representative- they admit it. It’s “politically impossible” they say, to have single payer because the campaign contributions from insurance companies, pharmaceutical giants and their assorted corporate shills have bought off congress.
Oh- so you’re admitting you’re bought and paid for Senator? Well no, it’s not me. I would vote for single payer in a moment. It’s all the others... I just can’t fight them all.
Seemingly both no one and everyone has been legally bribed, eh. If every “not me” was really not them we’d have “us” covered with single payer.
The problem is that the people who support single payer, “Medicare for all” or whatever we’re calling it this week are for the most part Democrats and will take anything Obama and the majority congressional Democrats shove down their throats.
It happens every time. They don’t want to be seen as opposing their own, so it doesn’t matter what kid of crap they’re eating because it’s their crap and they’re willing to hold their nose and swallow it even if it’s not the meal they ordered, just to maintain the apparently useless power they’ve gained.
Their silence in demanding real heath care reform- not that ersatz substitution currently on the table- is deafening.
That leaves the Republicans free to argue against single payer without having to even risk the realization of it. They’ve been planning this PR campaign for years and will attack whatever is proposed as if it were single payer, by making up anything they want to.
The media laps it up because it fits their lazy “black or white”, “A” or “B” sound-bite driven, news delivery system. They prefer to play up the corporate-sponsored and devised attacks as the reason why people don’t like what they’re hearing instead of recognizing the lack of a single payer plan as the raison d'être for the public’s ambivalence.
So what are those lies about single payer and who are the lying liars who lie about them?
First of all is cost. Everyone’s talking taxes and deficits and such trying to squeeze out nickels from Medicare Medicaid and the like that have been bled like an orange for 20 years already.
The facts are that the main cost of health care is insurance company profits and administrative fees.
The real numbers are staggering- the administrative costs for insurance companies is a full 30% of revenue while the administration of Medicare costs 3%. And that 30% doesn’t include their profit which run as high as 25%, sometimes more.
That’s literally half the cost of health care. Eliminate those costs and all the under and uninsured can be covered and then some.
That doesn’t even include the savings to providers in the streamlining of paperwork that one form, one reimbursement system and one payer provides. That’s without the financial costs to everyone inherent in the current insurance system through bankruptcies, foreclosures and resultant unemployment, welfare payments and other governmental costs. And it doesn’t account for the amount the we pay now for the uninsured by paying for acute and emergency treatment, paid at an even more astronomical cost than the insured pay.
And it doesn’t include the savings by having one entity representing everyone which will have the leverage and bargaining power to impose reasonable costs on pharmaceutical and medical supply companies.
None of those savings can or do exist under the insurance company model.
If “paying for health care” is an issue, single payer is a no brainer. The reason why Republicans can attack Democrats for lack of cost control is because Democrats gave up on the system that would provide enough savings to pay for a system of means-tested fees to provide medical care for all.
Another related and similarly idiotic argument is that we’d have to increase taxes to pay for single payer.
We all heard that the Congressional Budget Office found the proposed non-plan would cost a trillion dollars.
But guess what- the statistic we didn’t cite above and no one seems to mention is that we’re already paying inordinate amounts for “insurance”.
If you’re stupid enough not to realize that and complain that you don’t want to pay what would be, at most, the same amount in a “tax”- or presumably less when all the insurance company skinning is taken out of the equation- you’re obviously semantically challenged and need to buy a clue or some critical thinking skills.
So put away the tea bag and do the math.
If we as a county are paying “X” for health care right now including employer contributions, Medicare and Medicaid and of course payments by individuals and we add all the savings single payer provides we’d be paying X minus a small fortune.
Call it a “tax” or call it the current portion of your paycheck noted as an “employer contribution” and “deduction for insurance”- that’s simply a differentiation without a difference.
So where are we... single payer is a no-brainer for cost control and you’re already paying up the wazoo now so you can only pay less no matter what you call it when we take it away from insurance companies.
But even more absurd are some of the characterizations of the single payer delivery systems in place in every other industrialized nation on earth.
Let’s start with this insane notion that some of these “horror” are worse in those single payer countries than under our insurance companies.
Anyone who claims the people there don’t like their system is lying. They may not like some delivery particulars but when you look at any general gripes, they’re even worse here.
Rationing of care? Having to wait for a doctor’s visit? Having to wait for elective procedures?
If you haven’t experienced this under insurance companies you either don’t have insurance, have never had misfortune to really need it or are rich.
Have you tried to make an appointment with a doctor for a non urgent matter in America? You’ll be lucky to get an appointment in a month, a fraction of any clamed wait in Canada or England that opponents love to lie about. Seeing a specialist? How about getting an MRI? Elective knee surgery? Try months- or never if the insurance company says so.
In fact, we not only wait longer here, the determining factor isn’t how sick we are but how much it costs.
Transplant? Experimental procedures? Whereas everyone qualifies under single payer systems, under insurance companies you’re just denied treatment over and over until you’re dead or told you have a “preexisting condition”- including things like not reporting you had a headache in 1987 or some similarly absurd and unrelated minor omission on your application- making you eligible for nothing but having your claim denied, having your premium made more unaffordable than it is now or, more likely, being dropped entirely by your insurance company.
And the questions “do you want a government bureaucrat making a decision on whether you can have care?” is absolutely vapid. Would you rather have an insurance company bureaucratic operative- who gets rewarded financially for denying you care- making the decision?.. well that’s what you’ve got now.
At least under a government system there would presumably be a transparent methodology of approval, based on medical need not someone’s bottom line.
Under most single payer systems across the world there is virtually no such thing as a denial of an established service when a doctor orders it. The claim that there would be such as restriction under single payer is just another fear mongering distortion by those beholden to the insurance companies.
Anyone who saw Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko” knows the horrors of having profit as a motive for granting or denying care. It’s another no-brainer for most of us, even in the face of the health insurance industry’s admitted massive disinformation campaign regarding the film and whistleblower revelations regarding their practices.
One of the more mind-numbing contentions made by Republicans and unrefuted by Democrats- because they won’t stand up for single payer and have already given up the anti-insurance company fight- is that people like the coverage they have now.
There are two types who like their coverage now- those who have never been really sick and those who can afford gold-plated coverage. They may like the standard of care American clinics and hospitals provide- something that isn’t going to change under single payer delivery system- but they don’t like to pay insurance companies half their paycheck to get it.
But for all the Republican obfuscation, PR spin, outright lies and idiocy, it’s the Democratic rank and file who are really to blame for letting their leaders get away with selling our basic human right- yes right- to health care down the river before we even began.
It’s typical of Democrats- they’re willing to swallow the same crap they wouldn’t accept when the Republicans were in charge, just because they don’t want to criticize their side.
And that’s the problem- that silence within the Democratic Party faithful that allows the leaders to ignore the members allows the horse-race. “he said- she said” reporting press to say there are only two “sides”, neither one of which is the side of the people who require health care.
Many think that this idiotic “public option” is way to finagle the single payer they want.
But that’s not gonna happen. The insurance companies have already made it their prime directive to the bought and paid for Dems and Repubs- if there is a public option the final legislation will prevent any evolution to single payer.
If we believe that politicians won’t do what they are saying they’re going to do- make sure single payer is “off the table”- we are officially insane.
The pattern is familiar, especially among Democrats. “Oh, they’re just saying that to get it passed” is just a refrain of the old “they’re just saying that to get elected”. But guess what?- we’ve seen over and over that’s not true and different outcomes never spring from doing the same thing.
We have no one but ourselves to blame when, led by the rings though our noses we button our lips and let them compromise away our rights until the end product is the same no matter who is in charge.
The current deliberation is nothing but a fake debate and hardly bares the attention being paid. Health care will be more expensive and more unattainable under any scenario being considered right now.
The only thing that seems to be agreed upon is that we will now be mandated to pay even more than we’re paying now to insurance companies for the same crappy lack-of-comprehensive coverage we’re getting now.
What you see is what you get. When in the near future we see people dropping like flies all around us because this so-called health care reform was an insurance company scam, it will only be because, by buying into the frame of the current health care debate, we’re established the fact that we’re too dumb to live.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
BUT IT MAKES ITS OWN GRAVY
BUT IT MAKES ITS OWN GRAVY: Another day another “casualty” as we move toward a world where people won’t have anything in which to wrap fish or train puppies.
But of course you wouldn’t know that the demise of the corporate press is self-inflicted due to the friendly fire death of solid investigative content combined with a penchant for printing truth and lies side by said and calling it objectivity.
In the Honolulu Advertiser’s version of the story of the 23 layoff at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and MidWeek, Rick Daysong writes
The layoffs come as the nation's newspaper industry has lost thousands of jobs because of economic conditions and advertising revenue due to the Internet.
Yup- blame it on the economy and the internet, even though the problems started long before the current conditions and the fact that it is the newspaper industry’s own greed and competitive nature that has stopped them from micro-charges for the on-line news- probably because no one would pay for either the pap or articles that promote the corporate version of events they publish these days.
Sometimes you wouldn’t even know you were hearing about the same source content when you read the corporate version and the alternative or independent press reports,. as when the articles describing a study of the effects of sonar on dolphins was released recently.
Today the Advertiser’s “Military Writer” William Cole has an article headlined (what did you expect?) “Sonar's effect on dolphins minimal”..
He rotely regurgitates the apparent military press release version of what the study found:
In a study replicating Navy sonar, the Hawai`i Institute of Marine Biology found that a captive bottlenose dolphin had to remain relatively close to a high-intensity sonar source for a prolonged period to experience even temporary hearing loss — a finding the Navy seized upon to say it "may have vastly overestimated impacts of mid-frequency active sonar on marine mammals."
But the day before independent reporter Joan Conrow reported on the study in her reporting blog quoting an Associated Press article on the study as saying
When the pings reached 203 decibels and were repeated, the neurological data showed the mammal had become deaf, for its brain no longer responded to sound.
You’ll want to read Joan’s entire entry. Turns out the “study” was done in what amounts to a swimming pool with short bursts, negating the effects on behavior such as rapid surfacing, which is how many marine mammals deaths have apparently occurred due to sonar.
So how far does the clutches of corporate press go?
Well in the broadcast realm the “news” is usually even more worthless than the modern “objective” newspaper.
Thank goodness we have PBS, eh?
Not so fast.
A couple of Monday nights back we watched “Sick Around America” on PBS’s program “Frontline”, public broadcasting’s signature, award-winning, investigative series.
And while we were stuck with the usual liturgy of horror stories about insurance companies killing their clients to make more money- similar to the stories in Michael Moore’s disturbing movie "Sicko"- the program quite blatantly pinned the whole problem on the fact that there are “uninsured” who are not paying into the system until they get sick and, therefore, promoting the Massachusetts model of “mandatory insurance”.
Though the first half of the program seemed to lead to the obvious conclusion- one that polls show the vast number of American’s hold- that only eliminating insurance companies from the equation and implementing a single-payer so-called “Medicare for All” system will really do anything about what all acknowledge is our “healthcare crisis”.
So it was with great interest that we read a piece by Russell Mokhiber of Corporate Crime Reporter entitled Something is Rotten at PBS.
He detailed how Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid had done a Frontline piece called “Sick Around the World” a few years back and Frontline had asked him to do another on America.
But when he turned in his work and the producers did their editing he found that “this is not my beautiful documentary”.
The article describes how apparently instead of presenting Reid’s work presenting the well known horrors of insurance company coverage and reaching the obvious conclusion that getting the profit motive out of the equation is the sensible way to proceed, the produces went 180 degrees on him.
As we said they stressed the “mandatory coverage” model saying the problem of high costs wasn’t due to insurance company greed and need to maximize profit but due to people not paying the insurance companies to be covered when they’re healthy..
The article tells the sorry tale in Reid’s own words:
.
“We spent months shooting that film,” Reid explains. “I was the correspondent. We did our last interview on January 6. The producers went to Boston and made the documentary. About late February I saw it for the first time. And I told them I disagreed with it. They listened to me, but they didn't want to change it.”
Reid has a book coming out this summer titled The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care (Penguin Press, August 2009.)
“I said to them -- mandating for-profit insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world,” Reid said. “I said I'm not going to be in a film that contradicts my previous film and my book. They said – I had to be in the film because I was under contract. I insisted that I couldn't be. And we parted ways.”
“Doctors, hospitals, nurses, labs can all be for-profit,” Reid said. “But the payment system has to be non-profit. All the other countries have agreed on that. We are the only one that allows health insurance companies to make a profit. You can't allow a profit to be made on the basic package of health insurance.”
“I don't think they deliberately got it wrong, but they got it wrong,” Reid said.
As you can imagine the producers tried to defend themselves. The next week Mokhiber wrote that they accuse Reid of being the one with a bias and actually tried to deny that they promoted the mandatory converge model even though the whole second half hour essentially did nothing but present the case for it.
The single payer Medicare for all model was never even mentioned except in passing and then as being a political impossibility.
In reality PBS is nothing but a non-commercial version of the corporate press these days except the corporate world just pays them directly, using the phony term “underwriting” instead of “bought and paid for programming”.
Although there used to be a strict PBS rule forbidding underwriting for a specific program by a company who had any “interest” directly or even indirectly in the subject they abandoned that almost 20 years ago- a move which encouraged other non commercial media such as public access TV and community radio like KKCR on Kaua`i to justify doing the same and abandoning all pretense of lack of commercial control over content.
While the newspaper industry keeps up the drumbeat of their supposed investigative reporting being essential to a democratic America, the examples of it cited recently are few, far between and generally weak, especially when compared to the 99% of the fare consisting of essentially free advertising and “he said- she said” shilling for the same politicians they should be- and aren’t- investigating.
Instead of actually improving their product to be once again a commodity people will pay for, their penny-wise pound-foolish methodology is to fire more reporters and say they can’t afford to do real journalism any more out of one side of their mouths while claiming they are worth saving because they are still doing it out of the other.
As Conrow concluded in her blog piece today, where she links to her two excellent articles in the Honolulu Weekly- one on the Reinstated Nation’s case regarding their trip to Kaho`olawe and one on GMO's in Hawai`i- “Support your independent newspapers!”
The press is dead- long live the press.
But of course you wouldn’t know that the demise of the corporate press is self-inflicted due to the friendly fire death of solid investigative content combined with a penchant for printing truth and lies side by said and calling it objectivity.
In the Honolulu Advertiser’s version of the story of the 23 layoff at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and MidWeek, Rick Daysong writes
The layoffs come as the nation's newspaper industry has lost thousands of jobs because of economic conditions and advertising revenue due to the Internet.
Yup- blame it on the economy and the internet, even though the problems started long before the current conditions and the fact that it is the newspaper industry’s own greed and competitive nature that has stopped them from micro-charges for the on-line news- probably because no one would pay for either the pap or articles that promote the corporate version of events they publish these days.
Sometimes you wouldn’t even know you were hearing about the same source content when you read the corporate version and the alternative or independent press reports,. as when the articles describing a study of the effects of sonar on dolphins was released recently.
Today the Advertiser’s “Military Writer” William Cole has an article headlined (what did you expect?) “Sonar's effect on dolphins minimal”..
He rotely regurgitates the apparent military press release version of what the study found:
In a study replicating Navy sonar, the Hawai`i Institute of Marine Biology found that a captive bottlenose dolphin had to remain relatively close to a high-intensity sonar source for a prolonged period to experience even temporary hearing loss — a finding the Navy seized upon to say it "may have vastly overestimated impacts of mid-frequency active sonar on marine mammals."
But the day before independent reporter Joan Conrow reported on the study in her reporting blog quoting an Associated Press article on the study as saying
When the pings reached 203 decibels and were repeated, the neurological data showed the mammal had become deaf, for its brain no longer responded to sound.
You’ll want to read Joan’s entire entry. Turns out the “study” was done in what amounts to a swimming pool with short bursts, negating the effects on behavior such as rapid surfacing, which is how many marine mammals deaths have apparently occurred due to sonar.
So how far does the clutches of corporate press go?
Well in the broadcast realm the “news” is usually even more worthless than the modern “objective” newspaper.
Thank goodness we have PBS, eh?
Not so fast.
A couple of Monday nights back we watched “Sick Around America” on PBS’s program “Frontline”, public broadcasting’s signature, award-winning, investigative series.
And while we were stuck with the usual liturgy of horror stories about insurance companies killing their clients to make more money- similar to the stories in Michael Moore’s disturbing movie "Sicko"- the program quite blatantly pinned the whole problem on the fact that there are “uninsured” who are not paying into the system until they get sick and, therefore, promoting the Massachusetts model of “mandatory insurance”.
Though the first half of the program seemed to lead to the obvious conclusion- one that polls show the vast number of American’s hold- that only eliminating insurance companies from the equation and implementing a single-payer so-called “Medicare for All” system will really do anything about what all acknowledge is our “healthcare crisis”.
So it was with great interest that we read a piece by Russell Mokhiber of Corporate Crime Reporter entitled Something is Rotten at PBS.
He detailed how Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid had done a Frontline piece called “Sick Around the World” a few years back and Frontline had asked him to do another on America.
But when he turned in his work and the producers did their editing he found that “this is not my beautiful documentary”.
The article describes how apparently instead of presenting Reid’s work presenting the well known horrors of insurance company coverage and reaching the obvious conclusion that getting the profit motive out of the equation is the sensible way to proceed, the produces went 180 degrees on him.
As we said they stressed the “mandatory coverage” model saying the problem of high costs wasn’t due to insurance company greed and need to maximize profit but due to people not paying the insurance companies to be covered when they’re healthy..
The article tells the sorry tale in Reid’s own words:
.
“We spent months shooting that film,” Reid explains. “I was the correspondent. We did our last interview on January 6. The producers went to Boston and made the documentary. About late February I saw it for the first time. And I told them I disagreed with it. They listened to me, but they didn't want to change it.”
Reid has a book coming out this summer titled The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care (Penguin Press, August 2009.)
“I said to them -- mandating for-profit insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world,” Reid said. “I said I'm not going to be in a film that contradicts my previous film and my book. They said – I had to be in the film because I was under contract. I insisted that I couldn't be. And we parted ways.”
“Doctors, hospitals, nurses, labs can all be for-profit,” Reid said. “But the payment system has to be non-profit. All the other countries have agreed on that. We are the only one that allows health insurance companies to make a profit. You can't allow a profit to be made on the basic package of health insurance.”
“I don't think they deliberately got it wrong, but they got it wrong,” Reid said.
As you can imagine the producers tried to defend themselves. The next week Mokhiber wrote that they accuse Reid of being the one with a bias and actually tried to deny that they promoted the mandatory converge model even though the whole second half hour essentially did nothing but present the case for it.
The single payer Medicare for all model was never even mentioned except in passing and then as being a political impossibility.
In reality PBS is nothing but a non-commercial version of the corporate press these days except the corporate world just pays them directly, using the phony term “underwriting” instead of “bought and paid for programming”.
Although there used to be a strict PBS rule forbidding underwriting for a specific program by a company who had any “interest” directly or even indirectly in the subject they abandoned that almost 20 years ago- a move which encouraged other non commercial media such as public access TV and community radio like KKCR on Kaua`i to justify doing the same and abandoning all pretense of lack of commercial control over content.
While the newspaper industry keeps up the drumbeat of their supposed investigative reporting being essential to a democratic America, the examples of it cited recently are few, far between and generally weak, especially when compared to the 99% of the fare consisting of essentially free advertising and “he said- she said” shilling for the same politicians they should be- and aren’t- investigating.
Instead of actually improving their product to be once again a commodity people will pay for, their penny-wise pound-foolish methodology is to fire more reporters and say they can’t afford to do real journalism any more out of one side of their mouths while claiming they are worth saving because they are still doing it out of the other.
As Conrow concluded in her blog piece today, where she links to her two excellent articles in the Honolulu Weekly- one on the Reinstated Nation’s case regarding their trip to Kaho`olawe and one on GMO's in Hawai`i- “Support your independent newspapers!”
The press is dead- long live the press.
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