Anti-vaxers are making me cranky!

A handful of semi-random and in some cases minimally supportable thoughts on the anti-vaccination crowd, spurred by our recent measles "outbreak."

• I suppose there are some folks who haven't heard about measles in so long, they just assume there's no longer such a thing in the world to worry about.  And so they don't.
  
• Some people are against vaccinating their children because numbnuts like Michelle Bachmann have convinced them that vaccines cause mental retardation, autism, or whatever.  Unfortunately, too many Americans are simply not scientifically literate enough to evaluate these kinds of statements, and so they simply take whatever the numbnuts say as truth.  This is a failure of our educational system.
  
• And then, there's the cultural thing: The US's extreme independence training and accompanying lack of social responsibility.  It is out of this cultural tradition that we get what I call the right-libertarianism of people like Rand Paul, etc.  This folk model tells us that it's not only OK, but "American," to be what any objective observer would call selfish to the point of dysfunction.  Whatever we do–smoke, drive drunk, walk around carrying a gun, not vaccinate our kids, etc–is ok, because how these behaviors affect other people just does not matter.
  
• And of course, there's the religion thing.  For some, vaccination is in  defiance of God's Will: if God didn't want children to die from the diseases we vaccinate them against, He wouldn't have created those diseases in the first place.  Who are we to challenge Him?

These are all bad reasons for not vaccinating your children against what are essentially easily preventable diseases.  In a less independence-trained, and more dependence-trained society, people would care more about how what they do affects others.  Unfortunately, we do not live in that kind of society.

Anthony Weiner rocks!

Weiner to Rethuglicans: "Deal with it."

Thanks to the Commies, a little less cranky

Leave it to a Communist web site to take a reasonable perspective on our political goings-on...

Like some others, including former Vermont governor Howard Dean, I've been complaining about what's not in the so-called health care "reform" bill just passed in the Senate. Things like Medicare-for-All, or at least a reasonable public option, and so on. I've also been complaining about some things that are in the bill, like prohibitions against using federal funds to pay for abortions (why not prohibit the use of federal funds to treat people with smoking-related illness?). Anyway...

A post by Sam Stark at People's World puts some of this into perspective by calling attention to the original Social Security legislation passed in 1935 under probably our most progressive president ever, Franklin Roosevelt, and with large numbers of progressives in the House and Senate. Even so, the legislation was far from what these people really wanted, thanks largely to southern Democrats who made sure that the bill would disturb their antebellum world view as little as possible. It would be several decades before Social Security would look like the program most of us are familiar with.

The point, which this essay makes nicely, is that the legislation started out less than adequate and got better with time. Perhaps health reform will, also (Paul Krugman agrees). Perhaps someday the US will be a truly moral country, a country in which anyone who needs medical care will be able to walk into a facility and get it, no questions asked, no money changing hands, and  no health insurance industry death panel holding their life in its hands.

Health care: The crankiness continues

I only have time for a short note, but I need to get this unbottled.

I am becoming ever more disappointed, frustrated, even angered by the process that is supposed to be getting us toward a more rational way of distributing access to health care in this country. A bill passed the house a week or so ago. Good news? Only to those for whom the news is always bad.

For one thing, it passed by just five (5) votes. That's right, the difference between the representatives who want to make access to health easier for more people and the representatives who don't give a rat's ass about anyone but themselves and their corporate health insurance pimps was five votes!

But it's worse that that even. In order to pass this bill, the (relatively) sane and moral people had to accept an amendment that for most practical purposes vacates Roe v. Wade. So, women were shoved back into the alleys by men who hate women and women who also hate women and, presumably, themselves. It's a ghoulish march forward to the Middle Ages.

So now, in the Senate, they're trying to pull something together. Senator Reid yesterday made much of the fact that the bill they're writing will include a public option, but one that any state can choose to opt out of! In other words, if you live in a state ruled by whackaloons, and many of us do, your chances of participating in health care "reform" will be grossly undermined.

What is wrong with us? That's a rhetorical question: we know the answer. We are a nation dominated by selfish, ignorant, and viciously superstitious white men who will go to any length, toss any baby out with the bathwater, push anyone under the bus, to whatever they need to do to maintain their position of privilege and wealth, and especially their right to collect cash from Big Insurance and Big Pharma.

And the sad thing is, health care reform could be so easy. Just extend Medicare to everyone. In the process, eliminate the health insurance industry. Let them insure cars and houses and your collection of mint-condition Batman comics, but make them take their hands off health. Period.

Our health care system will only be moral and decent when nobody is making money from denying us health care.

I wish Al Franken were my Senator!

See, this is what we need more of: facts that challenge the made-up fantasy nonsense used by right-wing political hacks to discredit universal health care (or anything else).

A dose of irony

Today is the 42nd anniversary of the death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the young Argentinian physician who in the 1950s linked up with Fidel Castro and helped carry out the Cuban Revolution.

Guevara as prisoner, surrounded by Bolivian soldiers.

On this date in 1967 Che was executed after being captured along with members of his band of Bolivian guerrillas. The young Bolivian soldier who was ordered to do the shooting, and to make it look as though Che was killed in battle rather than sitting wounded in a chair, was named Mario Terán.

Now comes the irony part. A couple of years ago, a team of Cuban physicians working in Bolivia discovered Terán, now an old man, in need of eye surgery. They removed his cataracts, making it possible for him to see again.

So, the man who killed the person who helped establish the beginnings of Cuba's health care system was in turn given back his eyesight by that same health care system. For free.

Noam Chomsky discusses health care reform

Obama's speech; thoughts on the morning after

President Obama is an excellent speaker, appearing all the more excellent after the eight years we had of George Bush's mind-numbing oral flatulence. But he did not say what some, at least, of us needed to hear: that access to health care should be considered a right, not a privilege, a right that should be enjoyed universally.

In fact, the President's only use of the word "universal" in the speech came in this sentence:

For some of Ted Kennedy's critics, his brand of liberalism represented an affront to American liberty. In their mind, his passion for universal health care was nothing more than a passion for big government.

The right to health care for all people is contained in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which Article 25 (1) states:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Health care is, already, a universal human right. And yet, we here in the USA, mired as we are in a cultural system that glorifies independence training and hyper-individualism while at the same time vilifying any suggestion that it might be ok, even human, to depend on each other sometimes, can not say those words. And so, the plan to "reform" health care as outlined by the President, while certainly including some improvements, even major improvements, to what we have now, is missing the crucial step. That step is the elimination of the "health insurance" industry, the extraction of health care from the predatory capitalist "market" system altogether, so that health care becomes just as much a right as, say, public K-12 education.

To those imbeciles who scream "socialism" every time they hear a proposal like this, I can only wonder whether they would also prefer to get rid of the socialized law enforcement we already have, the socialized fire and rescue services, the socialized public libraries, and so on. And if they happen to be eligible for Medicare, one wonders if they also want to rid us of that socialistic program.

Meanwhile, our "tyrannical" neighbor to the South has this section in its constitution:

Article 50: Everyone has the right to health protection and care. The state guarantees this right;

• by providing free medical and hospital care by means of the installations of the rural medical service network, polyclinics, hospitals, preventative and specialized treatment centers;
• by providing free dental care;
• by promoting the health publicity campaigns, health education, regular medical examinations, general vaccinations and other measures to prevent the outbreak of disease.
• All the population cooperates in these activities and plans through the social and mass organizations.

That's right, this is from the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba. Maybe this is, ultimately, what it will take.

Sign this petition

If you admired Senator Edward Kennedy's struggle for health care reform, sign this petition:

PETITION TO THE SENATE: "Ted Kennedy was a courageous champion for health care reform his entire life. In his honor, name the reform bill that passed Kennedy's health committee 'The Kennedy Bill' -- then pass it, and nothing less, through the Senate."

Barney Frank does it right

Bill Kristol exposes his hypocrisy

Monday night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart coaxed hyper-conservative wingnut Bill Kristol into admitting that the US government runs the "best health care system in the country." He meant the health care that the US military provides our folks in uniform.

Perhaps more disturbingly, Kristol also insisted, despite the best Stewart could do to back him away from it, that other US citizens do not "deserve" to have such a fine health care system from their government. They have to pay for it.

Watch the whole interview:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Bill Kristol
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Joke of the Day

Presumably, Kristol's not imaginative enough to think that not only soldiers, sailors, and Marines, but also teachers, emergency workers, law enforcement personnel, bus drivers, librarians, public utility folks, and everyone else whose labor keeps the country humming along might "deserve" the best health care they can get.

Maher: "Not everything in America has to make a profit"

Last night on his HBO program Real Time, Bill Maher made a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit.

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Only the most marginalized proposals for health care, like HR-676, seek to take the health "insurance industry" out of the equation. And yet, this is the only way we can get to substantive, rather than mere cosmetic, reform. And, given the apparent unholy alliance between the Rethuglicans on the one hand and some "conservative" Demoncrats on the other, it doesn't look like we'll get anything much.

It's interesting to note that conservatives, for all their talk about morals and values, have no problem obstructing the reform of a system that denies millions of people health care.