From Private Health Insurance Must Go:

Medicare for All March and Rally @ Park Avenue
Tuesday, Sep. 29th, 2009
4:00 PM
Meet a 4 p.m. at 51st & Park Avenue, and at 5 p.m., march to 40th & Park Avenue (Aetna)

My son wants to know, how to argue with "liberals" who say, isn't it a good thing if we cover more people than we do now?

My son is a consummate liberal. He's tried to get me to give him good arguments.

My arguments:

The present plan may, in fact, insure a handful - a hundred thousand -- but at the expense of charging a hundred thousend.

It insures only half (maybe) of the uninsured by pouring money into into the for-profit insurance companies.

Why would any person calling him/herself liberal, want to pour even more money into the for-profit insurers?

Folks, my son wants to know. He's a son of a baby-boomer who has, so far, resisted giving in to generational resentment. All your input is welcomed!

Scienceblogger Zuska has recently been writing about her experience dealing with The Best Health Insurance System In The World!^TM

Zuska's mother resides in an assisted living facility, where a few weeks ago, her wallet was stolen, including her health insurance card. As a result, she was required to cancel her Blue Cross policy number and get a new card with a new number. In the meantime, it appeared to her health care providers that mom did not have health insurance. Merriment ensued.

[Information copied from handbills posted around the 'hood, and Healthcare-NOW.]

There will be a meeting to discuss Single Payer Health Care and HR 676, tomorrow, Wednesday 26 August, at 7 PM. Location: Holy Trinity Church, 20 Cummings Street, NY, NY. (One block north of Dyckman St. at Seaman Avenue.)

Jesse of Le Café Américain tells us why pretty much everybody is wrong about what is needed:

The most intractable part of the current financial crisis, and the ongoing problem of the US economy is the huge tax which is levied on the American public by its corporations, primarily in the financial and health care sectors, and a political system based on lobbyists and their campaign contributions.

An excellent post by Violet, with a great cartoon.

Teaser:

It’s not a question of trusting goverment. It’s a question of using government for what it’s best at, which is managing shared resources and doing things which require society’s collective action. Government is just society imposing its will as a group. Good for building roads (and pyramids and water irrigation channels and rockets to the moon), setting standards for food safety, pooling funds to pay for the indigent, making sure everyone gets healthcare. (That last thing is something we know from studying every other industrialized nation in the world; we don’t have to guess.)

These are the things for which private enterprise is not suitable or is inadequate.

Wish him a happy birthday and make a donation to the Clinton Foundation here.

[Photo of Bill Clinton on his 12th birthday, source: History Gets Real, originally from the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum]

Mystery solved!

"If the drug companies and the insurance industry are smiling, it can only mean that the public interest is being left behind. "

... and so much more. Man, he's good:

On the housing market.

Or pretty much anything.

Good catch by Tyler Durden.

Is it possible, in 21st-century America? Katharine Sharpe tried it. World's Fair Summarizes, with links.

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Note: video uses iframes and may be slow to load. Try reloading the page if you can't see the embed. Or try this direct link

[via zero hedge, of course!]

Space:

Frumination calculates that to replace the NYC subway system with private vehicles, we would need the equivalent of 200 new copies of Fifth Avenue in roadway, plus 3.8 square miles of parking. That's just considering the people who travel into the area of Manhattan below 60th Street.

The Congressional Oversight Panel reported recently that toxic assets continue to be a potential threat to the smaller banks, and more cleanup may be needed. Reuters:

"No one has a good handle how much is out there," Warren said. "Here we are 10 months into this crisis...and we can't tell you what the dollar value is."

Estimates are that "somewhere between $600 billion and $1.5 trillion in toxic assets (is) spread across the balance sheets of the small and the large banks," Warren said, adding: "That's a lot."

In a guest post at Naked Capitalism:

The Obama Administration cannot energize their health care reform because the public demands reform in the financial sector, and quite frankly Obama has lost the 'high ground' of the reformer by his inability to free his administration from the growing taint of scandal and conflicts of interest.

And what of the FKDP?

Welcome tp Appropedia page.

Looking through it: good stuff here.

via Douglas Rushkoff's Mediasquat. (Playlist with comments.)

A father's heartfelt open letter to Obama, as his health insurer will only pay for 4 of the 6 injections his diabetic daughter needs every day.

Until you tell me Mr. President what I am supporting I can not support you. I will not invest my energies to be taken for granted and dismissed or told to back off. I will not invest my energies in supporting bad legislation. I will support a strong public option. A platform you campaigned on.

via Mike the Mad Biologist

The same lobbying and PR firms:

The similarities between the campaign against mitigating the consequences of climate change and the campaign against health insurance reform go far beyond the use of distortion and fiction. The parallels are everywhere.

For example, those with vested (monied) interests in the status quo are turning to the same lobbying and public relations outfits to carry out the campaigns.

Hrynshyn concludes:

Paul Krugman today lays it all out: how Big Government has been what has stood between us and a 1930s-style Great Depression (even as he acknowledges that they could have done a better job of it). Some excerpts: (but read the whole thing!)

I heard you say that we aren’t going to have a second Great Depression. What saved us?

The answer, basically, is Big Government.

So the government fixed things? Does everyone go back to work tomorrow?

Just to be clear: the economic situation remains terrible. We haven’t yet reached the point at which things are actually improving; for now, all we have to celebrate are indications that things are getting worse more slowly.

[...]

Susie nails it.

Having bailed them out with billions of TARP dollars, we must now allow them to make even more money. Reuters:

Wall Street banks and lawyers could collect nearly $1 billion in fees from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and American International Group Inc to help manage and break apart the insurer, The Wall Street Journal said on Wednesday, citing its own analysis.

Morgan Stanley could collect as much as $250 million, the newspaper said, citing banking experts and documents released by the New York Fed.

Over at White Coat Underground, PalMD has posted a very nice three-part series on the problems that need to be addressed by health care reform (and most definitely not "health" "care" "reform") as he sees them, including some useful analysis from the physician's point of view.

Part I
Part II
Part III

Here is his conclusion:

Via Bridget Crawford at Feminist Law Professors:

Feminist Law Prof Darren Rosenblum has posted to SSRN his article, “Feminizing Capital: A Corporate Imperative.” Here’s the abstract: