Month: July 2009

Colbert Report On Taser Nation

by digby

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Current Events – Tasers
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Mark Sanford

I’m ambivalent about joking about tasers. When I see movies in which cops shooting people with electricity is a punch line I can’t say I find it all that funny. It’s not because I’m above slapstick humor, but because it further trivializes a coercive tool that our society is allowing police to use for trivial reasons. (And truthfully, when I see people screaming in agony, writhing spasmodically on the ground in pain, I’m afraid it turns my stomach rather than makes me laugh. I’m just funny that way.)

But this is different. It’s brilliant satire designed to expose the use of tasers for what they are. TGFC (thank God for Colbert.)

Maybe this issue is starting the seep into the mainstream. Unfortunately, I think it’s going to take the tasing of someone who important people feel is above such tactics to change things.

Update: This man isn’t one of those someones:

Police in Mobile, Ala., used pepper spray and a Taser on a deaf, mentally disabled man who they said wouldn’t leave a store’s bathroom.

The family of 37-year-old Antonio Love has filed a formal complaint over the incident on Friday.

Police tell the Press-Register of Mobile that officers shot pepper spray under the bathroom door after knocking several times. After forcing the door open, they used the stun gun on Love.

Police spokesman Christopher Levy says police didn’t realize Love had a hearing impairment until after he was out of the bathroom. The officers’ conduct is under investigation.

The newspaper says the officers attempted to book Love on charges including disorderly conduct, but a magistrate on duty wouldn’t accept the charges.

Good for the magistrate.

The increasing use of these things on the non-dangerous, mentally handicapped is medieval. Using them on the deaf, who obviously can’t hear their “orders,” is sickening. But it’s part of the culture which says that police can tase first and ask questions later because there’s no lasting harm in it. (Except for the ones who die, of course.)

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The Deficit Club

by digby

Bill Clinton says that Democrats shouldn’t fetishize the CBO because it’s often well … wrong.

Former President Bill Clinton, himself a victim of an errant Congressional Budget Office score or two, implied today that the agency wasn’t connected enough to the real world to know whether programs would save money or not. Speaking a few days after the CBO estimated that the White House’s latest “gamechanger,” an independent Medicare Advisory Commission to set prices, would save little money over 10 years, Clinton urged policy-makers — and here he means Democrats — to not accept the CBO’s scores without adding a dollop of common sense. ” I recognize that if you’re in that budget office, you’ve got to project the future,” Clinton said. But certain programs would realize savings “regardless of whether the mathematical rules they are now up with will prove it or not.” He said that those with a stake in changing the system “almost always get the short end of the stick” when it comes to budget projections. “In Washington, we strain a lot of gnats while we”re swallowing camels.” Lost in the debate about how much health care reform will cost, Clinton said, is the debate about whether the reforms will work. (I took this to be an implicit criticism of Blue Dog Democrats who focus near-obsessively with the impact of health reform on the deficit and of committee chairs who have imbued the CBO with near mystical powers.)

Of course, we shouldn’t forget that Obama is being hoist by his own petard with this by joining the fetish-fest over deficit reduction. He handed the industry the excuse they needed. Peter Orszag himself called Social Security “reform” a “test of manhood.” The fiscal scolds have been given many seats at the table and are highly respected members on the inside.

They are all members of the same club:

It’s easy to see why Orszag, 40, might be frustrated. As you might expect from somebody who makes a career out of churning budget numbers and hoping everything adds up to zero, Orszag, like Elmendorf, 47, places a premium on minimizing the federal deficit. You can imagine the two men joining the same chess club, or castigating a posse of tie dyed progressives for not appreciating the elegance and importance of a balanced federal budget. Though Orszag was mentored by liberal luminary Joseph Stiglitz and Elmendorf studied under conservative Martin Feldstein, Orszag eventually found himself under the spell of progressive bete noir Robert Rubin, many of whose views he appears to share. During the Bush era, he directed the Brookings Institution’s decidedly middle of the road Hamilton Project–a Rubin initiative, which Elmendorf himself briefly ran in 2008.

But over the last several weeks, at the requests of members of Congress, Elmendorf has crossed his natural ally, repeatedly zinging the budget king, and fueling the efforts of health care reform’s most entrenched opponents.

[…]

[W]ith so much on the line, it’s easy to see why the administration is losing its patience. This is ultimately a familiar story. During the budget wars of the early 1990s, it was a CBO report that many Democrats claim dealt Clinton Care its fatal blow. Like Orszag now, Clinton’s then OMB-chief, Alice Rivlin (a one-time CBO director herself) was furious with her successor, Robert D. Reischauer, for running the numbers the way he did.

What she couldn’t have known at the time, though, is that one of the analysts who contributed to that report would later bedevil health care reform efforts in a more public role. His name: Doug Elmendorf.

Today Alice Rivlin is working with Pete Peterson, rending her garments right along side him about the deficit spelling the end of the world as we know it. I’m sure Elmendorff (and Orszag) will have a good jobs waiting to do the same thing. They all end up in the same place.

In order to understand what this really means you you have to recall that there was no discussion, zero, when the last administration asserted without any debate that we were engaged in a war without end, for which costs could not be measured nor should they be. It was accepted by members of both parties as a simple imperative and no discussion of cost-benefit analyses were even on the table. But when it comes to directly benefiting Americans with a life and death threat of another sort, that’s all we talk about. This is not an accident.

Again, it’s not that deficits don’t matter. But they don’t matter more than everything else, certainly not more than the general well being of the people of this country. And if these people really cared about deficits, raising taxes would be a much bigger part of the conversation than it is and the kind of wreckless tax cuts and blind defense spending would have caused an uproar. What they all care about, in the end, Democrats and Republican, is ensuring that the Masters of the Universe are not disturbed by some perceived notion that they will have to pay more money to the government, that the government will borrow so much money that their personal profits are in danger, or that the rubes might get it in their heads that they are running things.

This little bipartisan club of wall street titans, industry magnates and deficit scolds are defenders of the status quo and enemies of the safety net because the status quo works for them and they don’t need a safety net. And the problem is that they have all the money.

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Baucus Explains Himself

by digby

here …

Update: I just saw Baucus briefly on CNN speaking to reporters in gibberish. You almost have to wonder if he’s on drugs. In fact, it was so odd that CNN broke away mid-sentence saying that he was “going into the weeds” and that was the end of that.

Very, very bizarre.

h/t to CH

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Smiles On A Summer Night

by dday

Meet the men and women determined to deny you quality health care:

The fate of the health care overhaul largely rests on the shoulders of six senators who since June 17 have gathered — often twice a day, and for many hours at a stretch — in a conference room with burnt sienna walls, in the office of the Senate Finance Committee chairman, Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana.

Mr. Baucus says his group will produce the bill that best meets Mr. Obama’s top priorities, broadly expanding coverage to the uninsured and curtailing the steep rise in health care spending over the long term, what policy makers call “bending the cost curve.”

Still, if the three Democrats and three Republicans can pull off a grand bargain, it will have to be more conservative than the measures proposed by the House or the left-leaning Senate health committee. And that could force Mr. Obama to choose between backing the bipartisan deal or rank-and-file Democrats who want a bill that more closely reflects their liberal ideals.

Already, the group of six has tossed aside the idea of a government-run insurance plan that would compete with private insurers, which the president supports but Republicans said was a deal-breaker.

Instead, they are proposing a network of private, nonprofit cooperatives.

They have also dismissed the House Democratic plan to pay for the bill’s roughly $1 trillion, 10-year cost partly with an income surtax on high earners.

The three Republicans have insisted that any new taxes come from within the health care arena. As one option, Democrats have proposed taxing high-end insurance plans with values exceeding $25,000.

The Senate group also seems prepared to drop a requirement, included in other versions of the legislation, that employers offer coverage to their workers. “We don’t mandate employer coverage,” Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine and one of the six, said Monday. Employers that do not offer coverage may instead have to pay the cost of any government subsidies for which their workers qualify. In the House, centrist Democrats have temporarily stalled the health care bill, many lawmakers want to see what Mr. Baucus’s group produces before voting on tax increases in the House bill.

I’d just like to dial everybody back for a second and note that this is the Senate Finance Committee. In practice this hasn’t been honored, but in theory the group has jurisdiction over the financing of Medicare and setting up the revenue stream for a health care bill. Since pretty much everything costs something, that mandate has expanded into writing an entire bill. But in an ideal world, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee would write the health care bill, and the Finance Committee would direct how to pay for it.

But that wouldn’t sit well with Presidents Baucus and Grassley and their kitchen cabinet.

As for the merits of the policy, Jacob Hacker is talking about House Blue Dogs in this op-ed today, but the points are largely the same:

The main worry expressed by the Blue Dogs is that the Congressional Budget Office has predicted that leading bills on Capitol Hill won’t bring down medical inflation. The irony is that the Blue Dogs’ argument — that a new public insurance plan designed to compete with private insurers should be smaller and less powerful, and that Medicare and this new plan should pay more generous rates to rural providers — would make reform more expensive, not less. The further irony is that the federal premium assistance that the Blue Dogs worry is too costly is the reform that would make health-care affordable for a large share of their constituents.

The Blue Dogs are right to hold Obama and Democratic leaders to their commitment to real cost control. But they are wrong to see this goal as conflicting with a new national public health insurance plan for Americans younger than 65. In fact, such a plan, empowered to work with Medicare, is Congress’s single most powerful lever for reforming the way care is paid for and delivered. With appropriate authority, it can encourage private plans to develop innovations in payment and care coordination that could spread through the private sector, as have past public-sector innovations […]

Many Blue Dogs fret that a new public health insurance plan will become too large, despite the CBO’s projection that the overwhelming majority of working people will have employer coverage and that the public plan will enroll less than 5 percent of the population. Their concern should be that a public plan will be too weak. A public health plan will be particularly vital for Americans in the rural areas that many Blue Dogs represent. These areas feature both limited insurance competition and shockingly large numbers of residents without adequate coverage. By providing a backup plan that competes with private insurers, the public plan will broaden coverage and encourage private plans to reduce their premiums. Perhaps that’s why support for a public plan is virtually as high in generally conservative rural areas as it is nationwide, with 71 percent of voters expressing enthusiasm.

What’s funny is that chucking the employer mandate will probably lead to employers dropping coverage if the costs become prohibitive, sending workers into the insurance exchange and, if it exists, the public plan. Under the Senate Finance proposal, however, the public plan is eliminated, and private markets make out like bandits. They force everyone to buy their insurance, and they get more individuals buying coverage, who have less bargaining power than group employers. And because of the obsession that the bill cost no more than $100 billion annually over ten years, that coverage may lack proper subsidies, have lower benefits or increased out-of-pocket costs for the individual.

It’s good to see these Senators so happy, however.

…Angry Bear:

“Officials also said a bipartisan compromise would not subject companies to a penalty if they declined to offer coverage to their workers. Instead, these businesses would be required to reimburse the government for part or all of any federal subsidies designed to help lower-income employees obtain insurance on their own.”

This would be the most regressive tax ever. If I am an employer and I don’t provide health insurance then my tax liability is higher if the family income of my employee is lower. More regressive than a poll tax (Baroness Thatcher must be put out that she didn’t think of it). What’s worse it depends on family income.

Let’s say I don’t provide insurance and have two job applicants, one who is a single mother and the other a man with a low salary but a high income wife (say Bill Clinton when he was working as governor of Arkansas for $30,000 per year). I hire the guy, because he can’t get subsidized health insurance, so I don’t have to give him insurance or pay him a dime.

This is the Baucus Grassley jobs only for people who don’t need jobs preliminary draft bill of 2009.

…This is also worth noting:

[I]t does strike me as worth noting that when you read a puff piece in The New York Times about the Gang of Six bipartisan dealmakers in the Senate that vast power is being wielded by people who, in a democratic system of government, would have almost no power. We’re talking, after all, about Max Baucus of Montana, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Susan Collins of Maine, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Collectively those six states contain about 2.74 percent of the population, less than New Jersey, or about one fifth the population of California. The six largest states, by contrast, contain about 40 percent of Americans.

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Come On

by digby

It’s almost as if Goldman is looking for reasons to make people hate them:

Goldman Sachs is using its new taxpayer-subsidized status to bring increased risk to the financial system, a group of House members charged Monday. They want to know why the Federal Reserve is allowing it.

The group on Monday sent a letter to the Fed asking for an explanation of why Goldman Sachs is being allowed to speculate wildly even while officially redesignating itself a bank holding company, which theoretically means stricter regulation. The bank designation gives Goldman access to dirt-cheap Federal Reserve loans.

Goldman initially applied for the new designation last fall, so that it could access bailout funds (since paid back). Because bank holding companies, unlike investment banks, have access to a host of valuable taxpayer subsidies, they are required to reduce the risk associated with their investment activity. But Goldman then applied to the Federal Reserve for an exemption to the rules, saying that it takes time to alter a business model. The exemption was granted in February — and Goldman went on to take even greater risks. Its Value-at-Risk model, a widely used measure of the risk of loss, recently showed potential trading losses at $245 million a day; in May 2008, it was $184 million a day.

The bets paid off in the most recent quarter as the market rose and Goldman posted stellar earnings. Morgan Stanley, meanwhile, was similarly given an exemption by the Fed but did what it said it would do and reduced its risk. The company lost money, largely as a result of that decision.

The likely result: Other players on Wall Street will follow Goldman back toward the cliff they dangled over just months ago. In announcing its lousy earnings, Morgan Stanley assured that it will increase the risk it takes in the future. Citigroup is racing to increase its exposure, too, handing another billion dollars worth of chips to its riskiest traders, bringing its hedge fund operations to close to $2 billion. On the brink of collapse, it had scaled such investing down to around $800 million.

As Wall Street follows Goldman, overall systemic risk is ramped up. Meanwhile, Congress is debating whether to give the Fed authority to regulate systemic risk throughout the economy. The congressional letter puts the Fed on the spot, demanding that it explain why it’s allowing Goldman to use taxpayer dollars to increase systemic risk.

“The only difference between Goldman Sachs today and Goldman Sachs last year is that today, the company is officially gambling with government money. This is the very definition of ‘heads we win, tails the taxpayers lose,'” reads the letter.

Nobody says that capitalism doesn’t require some risk. But playing Russian Roulette is really unnecessary.

Again, I suspect that nobody wants to stop them because everyone’s afraid that the American economy is a hollow shell without this activity. But that’s just my own paranoid guess. Maybe it’s really just a straight up scam designed to screw taxpayers and destroy the economy as some sort of master plan to take over the world, who knows?

But every day it becomes more and more clear that they are going to take every advantage no matter how blatant and outrageous. And except for a few lonely House members, Matt Taibbi and some bloggers, nobody seems to give a damn.

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Progress

by digby

They whooped and hollered when they heard about it:

Taser International unveiled its first new stun gun since 2003 on Monday, a device that can shock three people without being reloaded.

Older Taser stun guns, in use by 14,200 law enforcement agencies throughout the United States, have to be reloaded after one shot, which can be a problem for an officer who has missed a target or has more than one suspect to subdue.

Taser CEO Rick Smith and his brother, Chairman Tom Smith, unveiled the new device to hundreds of law enforcement officers and distributors at the Scottsdale-based company’s annual conference. They stood on stage, each holding two new Tasers, and fired six rounds a piece at metal targets to whoops and applause.

“This is as big a step as when firearms went from a muzzle loader to the revolver,” Rick Smith said later. “If I was a cop I’d want to carry one.”

[…]

While the device can be used against three people, it targets the same person more than once. Smith said each barb would deliver a separate shock.

Gosh, that is such a great improvement. Instead of having to reload to shock people multiple times while they are already compliant and in custody, they can do it in rapid succession. After all, it only leaves a couple of tiny marks.

I hear Taser is working on something really innovative: a chip that can be implanted in every citizen which can be activated by remote control to drop you to the ground writing in pain whenever the authorities perceive that you are being uncooperative. Wouldn’t that solve all of these problems? And seriously, what would be the principle against against it?

Oh, by the way, here’s some very special news:

He said the devices are in line the costs of other law enforcement tools, and that Taser hopes law enforcement agencies can tap tap federal stimulus funds.

I guess that’s one way to define “stimulus.”

This would be an outrage. Joe Biden has said they can’t spend stimulus money for public swimming pools. I can’t see how they can justify spending it on new and better torture weapons. But I won’t be surprised if they do it anyway. I think we’ve seen with the Gates controversy that the cops are now part of the “troops” — no Democrat will be allowed to do anything but bow and scrape before the badge.

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The Trillion Dollar Question

by dday

In my (bungled) attempt to look at drug company advertising, I noted that the House Ways and Means Committee looked at, then discarded, the option of cutting out their deduction for advertising as a business expense to help pay for reform. One commenter rightly observed that this is a function of having to scrape for cash anywhere it can be found to pay for a policy that must remain deficit-neutral within a 10-year budget window, despite numerous up-front costs, and a completely artificial ceiling placed on how much can be spent in those ten years.

For a while now, the conversation about health care has been all about costs–in particular, the cost to the federal government. Somewhere along the line, somebody decided that health reform shouldn’t involve the government sending out more than $1 trillion over ten years, even if we can provide that much money through some combination of higher taxes and savings in the medical care system.

There is no magic reason why $1 trillion should be the theshold. My colleague Jonathan Chait recently suggested that it’s all because of way our bodies look. If we all had twelve fingers and toes rather than ten, he said, the magic number would be $1.2 trillion. I guess that would mean it’s god’s fault.

My own theory is that conservatives and centrists complaining about the price of reform don’t think guaranteeing affordable coverage is really so important. I include among them a certain Democrat from North Dakota who runs the Budget Committee and keeps talking about what we can’t afford to do. To be clear, Senator Kent Conrad is not god, although I wonder sometimes if he thinks he should be.

The problem is that capping the cost of the bill at $1 trillion over ten years (and by the way, in that time America will spend something around $24 trillion annually throughout those 10 years on health care) has led to fiscal scolds cutting the kinds of things out of the plan that would increase access, like lowering the subsidies that would make insurance affordable to everyone, or shrinking the benefits package so individuals would have worse coverage and higher out-of-pocket costs.

“We are very concerned that [lawmakers] have that fixed and arbitrary total dollar amount and this is it,” said Stephen Finan, senior director of policy for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. “Either it’s not going to be enough to pay for adequate insurance or we just dumb down the level of benefits. We are concerned we could wind up with a package that is neither adequate nor affordable coverage.”

Lead fiscal scold Kent Conrad gets quoted in this article too, telling us that we all “have got to be realistic about what is possible” and “We can’t do everything we’d like to do and pay for it and bend the cost curve the right way.”

First off, this is actually untrue. A viable public option which didn’t firewall out those with employer coverage and has a provider network and rates similar to Medicare could bend that cost curve. As could giving Americans more choices in their coverage by breaking regional monopolies through an insurance exchange. The same with expanding access and eliminating the hidden fee of paying for costly ER visits for the uninsured. And empowering an independent board to make changes to Medicare rates and structures while partially insulated from the political process. And a host of other ideas where more reform, of the kind that people like Kent Conrad don’t want, can lower costs.

But this amounts to playing on the other side of the field. Americans trust Democrats on health care issues, for the most part, because they have traditionally emphasized more access to care and treatment. That’s not to say that the cost issue is meaningless – it’s actually in many cases complementary to the cause of access – but it’s a matter of emphasis. And the moral case for health care reform has been almost entirely extinguished.

This year, however, it’s not just been the opponents of the policy who have relied on the “mellifluous language of the standard economic theory of markets.” It’s been the advocates of reform. Ask yourself what the administration’s one-line goal is on health-care reform. Is it “equal treatment for everybody?” Is it “if every American is guaranteed a lawyer, why not a doctor?” Is it even “guaranteed health care for everyone?”

No. It’s “bend the curve.” And the problem with “bending the curve” is that it’s a broadly testable proposition. This is, in part, why the Congressional Budget Office’s skeptical assessments pose such a threat to health-care reform. If the White House’s primary objective was health care for every American, or guaranteed care that you could keep even if you lost your job, or choice of insurance plans for every American, you could spend a bit more on health care and say you were achieving your goal. But if you say that the point of health-care reform is to save money, and then the outfit charged with estimating such things says it won’t, that strikes at the heart of the project.

Now, we’re getting some better news from the CBO in the last 24 hours, as they have announced that the House bill will increase the number of people receiving employer coverage, and that a public insurance option can exist in tandem with private insurance. But the way the health care fight has played out, it has privileged these messages from the CBO. And to the media, they only matter when they matter anyway.

Somewhere along the line, Democrats in Congress and an Obama Administration obsessed with not following in the footsteps of the Clinton health care failure have forgotten to make the simple case that they support quality, affordable health care for every man, woman and child in the country. They’ve made a case about costs, but not a case about imperatives. There are plenty of economic arguments to make, but the moral arguments – about insurance companies denying coverage to those with a pre-existing condition, or dropping customers for the flimsiest of reasons when they ask to use their health insurance – but those have been pushed into the background. Health care is one of the more profound moral issues in public policy, and right at the moment that we’re nearing a major shift in policies, we’re talking cost curves and independent advisory boards. It’s all important, of course, but consigning tens of millions of Americans to the horrors of no medical coverage adds a certain oomph.

If this moral case were made, a true argument about the human consequences of delay, maybe that $1 trillion dollar number inches upward. And maybe some deficits are floated within the 10-year budget window. But we turned this debate into one primarily about costs. This played right into the hands of the fiscal scolds.

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Peaceful Coexistence

by digby

Strangely, the headline to this article doesn’t characterize this development as a devastating blow to Republicans and opponents of health care reform the way every other report from the CBO has been characterized as a devastating blow to Democrats, even though it punctures one of the industry’s central arguments against the public plan:

A new government health insurance plan sought by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats could coexist with private insurers without driving them out of business, an analysis by nonpartisan budget experts suggests.

The estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office — seen as good news by Democrats — comes as leaders pushed Monday to make progress on health care overhaul before lawmakers go home for their August recess.

I personally don’t like insurance companies and I’d be happy if we had a system where they weren’t necessary. But if they could be made to do their business in a fair and equitable manner, sell their products honestly and fulfill their obligations, then we could probably live with them. Rapacious greedheads making obscene profits on the backs of sick Americans, however, is an immoral and expensive arrangement that can’t be tolerated any longer.

If strict regulation and competition from a public option would force insurance companies to participate in universal health care as decent corporate citizens then I won’t complain. I also won’t care if a public plan does end up driving out those which insist that spending billions in compensation to their CEOs is necessary but fulfilling the terms of their policies isn’t. It’s really up to them.

That’s all a very big “if,” of course. If the public plan turns out to be some half-baked co-op wet dream then it’s unlikely to do much of anything; if it’s designed to be (or become) like the Hacker plan, with a strong dose of Wyden, then it could. It’s all about waiting for Baucus at this point.

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Living Like Refugees

by digby

Those of you who saw the ex-insurance industry PR executive Wendell Potter’s interview a couple of weeks back on Bill Moyers (you can read a story about him here) you know that his consciousness was raised when he went to a “health fair” in Virginia and saw a scene that you would normally expect to see in a refugee camp.

The same health fair was held again this past week-end:

It’s not yet 5 a.m., but people are emerging from their cars, a few scurrying to pack up tents and camp stoves, bustling to be ready, hoping to have the opportunity to receive health care.

As wisps of pink sunlight began coloring the clouds, the masses huddle at the gate under a misty dawn, waiting for their numbers to be called.

The grassy parking lot is full. Beyond the fence, the cars are stacked up for miles. A snake of headlights is visible in the semi-dark along the curvy length of Hurricane Road, waiting to access the Wise County Fairgrounds.

These are the modern-day breadlines: people desperate not for food, but for health care.

“We are working taxpaying jobs, paying taxes, and we can’t get insurance because we make $6.55 an hour,” said Laura Head, 32, of Rogersville, Tenn., the first person in line Friday for the first day of the Remote Area Medical clinic, an annual three-day event offering free medical care. “This is really a great beneficial thing, but it doesn’t have to be this way; we could all have insurance.”

A single mother of three who mows yards and moves trailers for a living, Head said she arrived at the fairgrounds Tuesday, to camp out at the fairgrounds until the health fair began Friday morning. Her motivation was simple: severe, constant pain.

Close to two years ago, her boyfriend smashed her teeth, she said – but, without the $6,000 needed to have the teeth pulled she has endured infection after infection, making literally 100 visits to the emergency room for antibiotics and pain medication.

[…]

The lack of access to health and dental care is not an Appalachian problem, he said – it’s a problem all across the nation.

“Emergency rooms act as the safety net in this system,” he said, “and that’s at the breaking point.”

Even as a national health care reform bill is prepared for debate in Congress, more than 1,400 volunteers descended on Wise on Friday, with hundreds more signed up for the weekend – but even they were not enough to help everyone seeking care.

“We’ve never had the traffic problem that we had this morning,” said Teresa Gardner, executive director of the Health Wagon, the local organization that coordinates the event. “It’s a record-setting day for sure.”

The work will continue today and Sunday.

Stan Brock, the founder of RAM, said 1,600 numbers were given out Friday to people seeking care – compared with 1,200 last year on the first day. He said the event here has grown every year.

“It’s been like this for years and years and years,” Brock said. “This is not a recent phenomenon, and it’s not peculiar to Southwest Virginia. … Two weeks from now we’ll be in Los Angeles, Calif. – same problem.”

People like Mitch McConnell insist that Americans have the best health care in the world. And he certainly does, as, frankly, do most working middle and upper class Americans. But God help you if you lose your job or happen to get sick. And even then, bankruptcy is a definite possibility if you find out your insurance is just a sham policy that really only covers a portion of your costs as many people are finding out today.

It’s lucky these good Samaritans are coming to LA, but I’m afraid they are barely going to skim the surface of the problem here (a problem which is going to get worse very quickly as the Mad Max Schwarzenneger cuts take effect.)

Approximately 2.7 million people in Los Angeles County (or about 28% of the population) have no health insurance. It is the third highest uninsured rate of 85 metropolitan areas in the nation. About 31% of all Los Angeles County residents age 64 or less are uninsured. Two million of Los Angeles County uninsured persons are adults, ages 18 to 64 (about 34% of the county adult population).

Can we call in Doctors Without Borders? I think we’re going to need them.

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Tax-Free Ads

by dday

The more we wade into this health care debate, the more we uncover things that simply astound. In an article about curbing prescription drug ads on television, there’s this nugget:

Meanwhile, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, has introduced a bill called the Say No to Drug Ads Act. It would amend the federal tax code to prevent pharmaceutical companies from deducting the cost of direct-to-consumer drug advertisements as a business expense.

“You should not be going to a doctor saying, ‘I have restless leg syndrome’ — whatever the hell that is — or going to a doctor saying, ‘I have the mumps,’ ” Mr. Nadler said in an interview. “You should not be diagnosed by some pitchman on TV who doesn’t know you whatsoever.” […]

Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said last month that legislators would consider ending the tax break for drug ads as a way to raise money to pay for the health care overhaul. But, after lobbying from broadcasters and newspapers, Mr. Tauzin said, legislators quickly abandoned the idea, concluding that such a measure would not raise significant money.

With lawmakers still fighting over how to finance health care reform, Mr. Nadler said he hoped his bill might find an audience.

“On First Amendment grounds, I am not going to say we will ban” drug advertising, said Mr. Nadler, who represents parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. “But they should not be able to get taxpayers to subsidize it.”

Meanwhile, Representative Daniel Lipinski, Democrat of Illinois, is pushing his own bill that would end the tax deduction for drug company spending on advertisements.

Drug companies get a TAX DEDUCTION for running ads for their drugs. Is this true of Frosted Flakes? Audi? Xerox? Does any other company in America get subsidized for airing commercials to get America to buy their products? It’s not “significant money,” though, so ending this direct payout from taxpayers to drug companies got shelved.

Set aside for a second the hypochondria that a nightly barrage of ads telling you that you have restless leg syndrome or iron-poor blood or any of a thousand ailments induces. Set aside the self-medication and the boiling down of complex medical issues into 30-second spots showing couples running through a field. Set aside how drug ads increase demand for medications and thus the costs. Set aside that some of these ads run before the Food and Drug Administration even completes their studies of the side effects. You mean to tell me that I’m helping PAY for these things, too?

Fun fact in the article: only the United States and New Zealand allow direct-to-consumer drug advertisements.

…and here’s the part where I revise and extend my remarks, as the deduction under discussion is about business expenses and not a straight tax deduction. Maybe I should put a big blinking banner at the top of this one saying IGNORE. They ain’t all gems, folks. I will take solace in the fact that, contra Mitch Albom, I know what marginal tax rates are. But just a little solace.

I think the point of having advertisements for prescription drugs at all can still be debated, however, for reasons described above.

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