Just got back from the doctors’ this morning. One is helping me with a back problem, the other is my GP who is currently helping me with ocular migraines. Both required an MRI, so I had two taken this morning–one of my back, and one of my head. After meeting with the back doctor (the other I consult in about a week), I picked up my prescription for the medicine helping with my herniated disc. Took all of two hours for the whole thing.

Total cost: about $135 for two MRI’s, a doctor’s consult, and a month’s worth of medication. The medication is working, BTW, just like it did last time–helps with the pain while I recover.

Socialist health care is actually quite good.

When I was a kid, I accidentally burned the retina in my right eye. It left a small but permanent scar on the retina, right near the center of my vision; thanks to the magic of the brain, however, my mind edits it out, making it invisible except when I close my left eye. Think of it as similar to the blind spot everyone has–same principle. Still, it does pop up when floaters or whatever obscure the vision in my left eye, and leaves me worried that if anything happens to the vision in my left eye permanently, it could seriously impair my ability to read.

When I was in high school, though, I got a huge scare: suddenly, the blind spot was in both eyes. That alone made me worry like hell. After a few minutes, I began to panic as the blind spot started to grow bigger.

I excused myself from class and called home. As I waited for my mom to pick me up, the blind spot just kept getting bigger and bigger. It went from being a spot to becoming a very large spot, a round blotch off-center to the left. It was affecting both eyes equally. I thoroughly believed that I was going blind on the spot. After my mom got me and we were driving home, however, something greatly encouraging happened: as the blind area grew, I regained vision in the center of the spot. From that point, the blind area took the form of a ring, which slowly began to move toward to edge of my vision. Before an hour had passed, it had completely fled my field of view, and my vision was normal again.

That was my first ocular migraine, also called a “scintillating scotoma.” A form of migraine headache, it mercifully does not come with the pain usually associated with such an attack. I get these periodically, but not too often–maybe once every 3-5 years. They last about 30-45 minutes, and thankfully are benign. Though they scare the crap out of you the first time, they leave no damage–it is happening in the brain, not the retina, ergo the fact that it affects vision in both eyes (strangely, that is a reassuring symptom, when you know what’s going on). After the first few times, the visual aura was less a ring and more of a semicircle, always arcing and growing to the left.

I blog on this because it happened again today, as Sachi and I took the train to meet with Maruko and her family. As usual, it begins as a small distortion near the center of vision, and is hard to discern; I usually mistake it for the kind of distortion one might suffer with an afterimage of a very bright point of light. For the first five or ten minutes, it’s indistinct enough to make it hard to recognize as a migraine, and so I have to worry through that until I can see that the distortion is both growing and is truly in both eyes; after that, I relax and wait for it to take its course.

There’s no easy way to represent this, but here’s an attempt. Keep in mind that it’s moving; the blind area is kind of dark, kind of sparkling–I get similar images when I squeeze my eyes shut real hard for a bit, I don’t know if you get the same thing. This is what it looks like late in the event, not too long before it moves out of the field of vision.

Anyone else get these? From what I read, they’re not too common, especially the kind that comes without any pain.

Invited by talented artist Chrisann Brennan, Sachi and I visited a local health sanctuary touching on spirituality as a means of catalyzing the healing process. Sachi and I were very impressed by the center. It is a beautiful retreat that we both wished we could stay at for a few weeks or months.

The institute is situated on Skyline boulevard, in the forests of the mountains separating the San Francisco peninsula valley from the ocean. It’s a beautiful area, and a beautiful drive up (though the mountain roads require as much time to travel as from Palo Alto to San Francisco, almost). Intended for educational purposes as well as healing, it focuses on alternative healing methods. The center has many rooms with twin double beds in simple, elegant rooms:

Surrounding the main building are the “treehouses,” buildings on stilts with two apartment rooms per structure (one above the other), surrounded by the trees (alive with birds!). Imagine waking up here in the morning:

You can see what I mean by wanting to stay there for weeks on end: the facility is solidly built, casual yet luxurious. It doesn’t cater to whims as much as it simply lets you relax, unimpeded, unpressured. There is a spa with message rooms, meditation rooms, and a saline pool:

Upstairs is the “Great Room,” with wonderful hand-blown glass chandeliers and a very comfortable, no-shoes, lodge-type feeling.

Sachi and I envisioned this as a potential tie-in with her desire to teach Reiki healing. She would get together with friends involved in Zen healing and hypnotherapy, or other like alternative healing philosophies, and offer a week-long seminar that would cover everyone’s room fees for the center, using the week to educate their clients in the various arts they have to offer. The fees are not cheap, but for people wishing the best environment in which to learn such things, I couldn’t think of a better location.

That’s the very large quartz crystal at the foyer, by the way. Some local bird life from the few minutes I had to whip out the zoom lens:

So, what to think of the health care bill? Perhaps it could best be summed up by the word, “meh.” Having been disgusted with the bill’s progress, and, like so many other liberals, in contempt of the Democrats’ weakness and ineptitude in getting the bill passed, I have stopped paying close attention to it all. It should have been much stronger to start with. It should have been “Medicare for all” and the negotiations should have started from there. Obama should have put forth two versions, one for “bipartisanship” and the other in case Republicans didn’t want bipartisanship, and when Republicans of course showed no interest, Obama could have switched to the stronger bill, declaring that the GOP had rebuffed his bipartisan outreach. Democrats should have strong-armed the Blue Dogs more instead of begging at their feet. Democrats should have began with reconciliation instead of dumping it.

Coulda, shoulda, woulda. So how about now? As far as I can tell, the bill stinks. However, compared to the fetid, steaming pile of insurance the country now has, it stinks somewhat less. But I see no way to really keep down costs for the consumer, something even more important now that coverage will be more or less mandatory.

A big question will be, if and when it is passed, then what? Politically, I mean. Will Democrats reap the rewards? Well, they pretty much shot themselves in their collective feet on that one: everyone, including (especially!) Democratic voters, now see them as weak and ineffective. The only thing keeping Democratic voters on their side is that the alternative is to go with the batshit insane people who spent the last eight years destroying the country. I can imagine centrist voters being like Bugs Bunny in that cartoon where he opened one of two exits and sees a monster; screeching in horror, he runs for the other exit, opens it and sees another monster; screaming again, he closes that and runs to the first exit; when he opens it and sees the first monster, he rubs his chin and say, “Oh, yeah…”

The real problem here is that while Democrats have spent the last several months disheartening their own voters, the Republicans have spent the same time firing up theirs. There is that Kos poll from a few week s back which showed that while Democratic voters were not interested in voting in the midterms, right-wing voters couldn’t wait to do so. Not a good sign.

The irony is, if Dem voters got their act together and came out just as strong and voted aven more Dems into office, that would probably break the barrier needed to bypass even the Blue Dogs and get stuff done. But the way things are, Republicans will probably gain seats, and things will just go straight to hell from there. Which is frightening, as this pretty much looks like hell now.

Sometimes I am glad I live in Japan. Makes it a bit easier to ignore this stuff. Just a bit.

According to the non-partisan CBO, the Democratic plan insures tens of millions more Americans than the Republican “plan”; it saves tens of billions more dollars, and makes it illegal for insurers to deny people for pre-existing conditions, whereas the Republicans would allow insurers to keep on discriminating.

Is this even really a choice? What are the Republicans running on? Are they saying, “Our bill will cost more, insure a lot fewer people, and keeps the worst insurance policies alive! Vote for us!”

More likely, they’re simply doing what they do best: lying, and making people vote against their own best interests by scaring them.

I’m not the only one feeling confused by Obama and the Democrats’ eagerness to get the single Senate vote of Olympia Snowe. Sure, she might have pulled one or two other moderate Republicans (although, how many are left now?) along with her, but frankly, I doubt it–Republicans are far too partisan on this issue. Even Snowe’s vote was not assured, for crying out loud.

Now that Reid had come to his senses and has put his money on the Opt-out Plan, Snowe is deeply disappointed:

Snowe issued a statement Monday, saying she was “deeply disappointed” with Reid’s decision on the public option. She argued that a decision in favor of a trigger “could have been the road toward achieving a broader bipartisan consensus in the Senate.”

Oh, please. Your single vote is not “bipartisan.” Nor would even a few more. More than a dozen Republicans voting for it, maybe.

But you know what? The bill is already bipartisan. Remember that in the days of GOP control, there would be none of this “bipartisan” talk at all. Nothing. The GOP would write the bill as they liked and shove it through Congress, screaming bloody murder if the Dems even hinted at a filibuster.

What we have today is far different: despite the Dems holding a 60-seat supermajority, a Republican filibuster is assumed, and instead of rants and tirades and threats of the “nuclear option,” the Dems have been bending over backwards to try to get Republicans on board. Instead of pushing it through quickly like the GOP would have done, they allowed for delay while knowing full well it was for no other reason than to allow Republicans to take their best shot at savagely attacking the bill.

Already a host of compromises have changed the legislation, and that’s why it’s a bipartisan bill even if every Republican votes against it. Partly because the Democratic Party already includes a number of conservatives, but mostly because Republicans have had their say and have helped shape the bill. Were is truly a “partisan” bill, it would be single-payer Medicare-for-Everyone. Just because the Dems started from a position that was already bipartisan does not mean that that bipartisanship doesn’t count.

The GOP can wail and rant and kick and cry, they can hold their collective breath till their collective face turns blue (or, more appropriately, red), they can vote as a solid block against the bill with not a single “yea” vote–but the bill is bipartisan already.

Bipartisanship means giving voice to the other party; Republicans never gave this to Democrats, but Democrats have given full voice to Republicans. Bipartisanship means allowing compromise and coming to a point well away from what you want in order to appease the other side and address their concerns; Republicans never gave Democrats an inch, but Democrats have given Republicans a mile.

Just about everything the Democrats have done so far smacks of bipartisanship; just about everything the GOP has done so far smacks of strident partisanship.

Suck on it, GOP: you played dirty as hell while the Dems tried to placate you, but you lost. Now go cry in your milk before you start your attempts to smear and sabotage the health care reform that will pass.

The Public Option is now in. Senate and House both have the “Opt-out” plan, which strikes me as a win-win for Dems, as it mollifies the “Moderates” (read: somewhat-less-radical conservatives) while not really giving away anything. Unless the states themselves will be setting up Public Option plans and/or paying for them, I see no reason why anyone would want to opt-out–and the Republicans who do can be vulnerable for denying their constituents cheap, effective health care. Is my read on that right?

Now, Republicans in Congress have a tough choice: when it becomes inevitable that the health care reform bill will pass, how will they vote? If they stick with opposition and the plan proves popular–as is probable–it’ll look bad for them. Right now they’re not opposing the bill because they really believe it’ll lead to Socialism or Death Panels–they’re opposing it because they want to make Obama fail and to follow industry lobbyist direction. When the bill’s passage becomes inevitable and they risk looking like partisan industry shills who opposed what is most likely to be a very popular law, how many will switch?

Of course, the GOP is not only extremely partisan right now, its members are very strictly controlled, almost the opposite of the Democrats. Likely they will stick to their opposition, and simply try their hardest to paint the law as destructive in the 2010 midterms, before it will have had enough time to prove that it works. After that, they’ll just try to take credit for it.

More warm and fuzzy news about the kind, sweet people at health insurance companies, this time about how they are abusing rape victims. The short version: a woman who was raped took anti-HIV medication as a precaution. Result: she is now uninsurable, as the insurance companies don’t want to risk taking on someone who might have AIDS. The message: if you get raped, don’t try to prevent HIV or else you’ll be uninsurable.

I thought that the whole idea of insurance was to spread out the cost of health care by having healthy and unhealthy people covered. The healthy people cover the excess costs of the unhealthy people, on the chance that they might someday join the ranks of the unhealthy. What an idiot I am–it’s not about something stupid like that. Rather, it’s about insuring only healthy people and taking the excess as profits. What was my addled Socialist brain thinking?

This story seems to be covered only locally, but should be a national story:

OXFORD — Friends say the Miami University graduate who died this week after reportedly suffering from swine flu delayed getting medical treatment because she did not have health insurance.

News of Kimberly Young’s death Wednesday, Sept. 23, came as a shock to those who knew the vibrant 22-year-old who was working at least two jobs in Oxford after graduating with a double major in December 2008.

Young became ill about two weeks ago, but didn’t seek care initially because she didn’t have health insurance and was worried about the cost, according to Brent Mowery, her friend and former roommate.

Mowery said Young eventually went to an urgent care facility in Hamilton where she was given pain medication and then sent home.

On Tuesday, Sept. 22, Young’s condition suddenly worsened and her roommate drove her to McCullough Hyde Memorial Hospital in Oxford, where she was flown in critical condition to University Hospital in Cincinnati.

“That’s the most tragic part about it. If she had insurance, she would have gone to the doctor,” Mowery said.

The story is nationally relevant for two reasons: first, that lack of health insurance was the primary reason she died. Second, her representative in Congress is John Boehner, a Republican leader and opponent of health care reform.

In better news, the public option is making a comeback, especially since a CBO report made it clear that the public option would save a lot of money, making the Blue-dog Democrats back down, and not helping the Republican cause a whole lot. If Obama and the Democrats can simply catch a hold of this swing and deliver the bill for a vote while the conditions are right, we might actually see a health care reform law which actually does good.

Great to see Obama calling out the Death Panels, Illegal Alien insurance, and government-funded abortions as lies. Not just “misrepresentations” or “distortions,” but flat-out lies.

Some of people’s concerns have grown out of bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost. The best example is the claim, made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts, but prominent politicians, that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Such a charge would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple.

There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false - the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally. And one more misunderstanding I want to clear up - under our plan, no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.

It badly needed to be said at exactly so prominent a venue.

And I love the “prominent politicians” reference. Bite it, Palin. If only the media would have half the guts to hold her and anyone else who spreads this lie to the facts, not giving them any slack until they admitted that it was false.

Paul Cox has a very good, easy-to-read post on the Public Option and why it’s a great idea.

The Public Option:

• saves money by not advertising like private insurers do;
• saves money by not having as high administrative costs as private insurers do;
• saves money by not taking profits like private insurers do;
• passes these savings directly on to you, the consumer;
• and finally, the obvious: it’s an option, you can ignore it if you like.

And this is really what shows up the non-thinkers who oppose socialized medicine: they recoil from such plans solely because of fears that are not only false but are laughably so, fears of socialized medicine leading to a socialist government (which is kind of like fearing that community centers will lead to communism) and because they have this deluded idea pounded into their heads by the right wing that the government screws up everything it touches. Because Social Security, Medicare, the Interstate Highway System, the Space Program, and all those other government programs were such huge failures. The major failures in government come primarily when the right-wingers get their hands on an organization, pilfer its resources, riddle it with corruption, and appoint agency leaders who are proactively opposed to the agencies’ principles.

What amazes me is that all of these people who oppose the Public Option seem so afraid that a dollar will be added to their taxes that they’re willing to shell out five dollars to private industry instead. By eliminating the Public Option, they are essentially saying that they want to pay for advertising for insurers, they would rather pay extra for less-efficient private administrative costs, that they think it’s somehow cheaper for them to add large sums of money to their premiums that will pay for nothing except profits to shareholders or bonuses to executives.

The best thing about the Public Option–one of the main ideas behind it–is that it stands to slash health care costs so much that private insurers will be forced to streamline their administrative systems to become more efficient, cut their profit margins to reasonable levels, and fight to find ways to save money for their customers. How evil!

And then there’s the “fear” that the Public Option will be so cheap that private insurers won’t be able to compete, and they’ll fail. Then all we’ll have left is that evil Public Option!

One can only hope.

Somehow I don’t see Norm Coleman doing things this well. Just explaining the facts. Granted, the Tea Party people there are listening respectfully while disagreeing–a refreshing sight after seeing so many examples of people shouting down any opposing voice.

ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC will all carry Obama’s address to Congress on health care. Guess which network will not carry it? Not hard to figure that one out, is it? While the Republican Party’s propaganda machine will refuse to carry the speech, Republican leaders nevertheless are demanding that they be given network time as well.

At this point in time, it is looking more and more like Obama will wuss out and pass on the public option. One wants to hold out hope that Obama will discover his spine and use the address to pull an American President: tell the nation that the opposition is no longer credible, that there have been too many bald-faced lies, too much opposition for partisan political purposes, that he tried everything he could within reason and got nothing in return–no return of good faith, not even a gesture–just more attacks, smears, and lies. So he’s putting back in everything he thinks is right, what the nation needs–and if the Republicans want to block the bill, they do so at their peril, with the responsibility for failed health care reform on their heads.

He won’t, of course. He’ll take the whipping the right wing has been giving him with forced praise for their in-fact-non-existent “bipartisan efforts,” remove even more major stuff the right wing has been objecting to, and call for a weakened, watered-down bill that will be reform in name only. And the Republicans will not thank him for it–they will take it for the sign of weakness it is, and only ramp up their lies and attacks. They will use Obama’s concessions as a rallying point, taking everything and giving nothing, and then start attacking even more of what little remains of the bill, only heightening their cries against anything Obama puts forward.

Let’s face it: Obama doesn’t have the guts to abandon the whole bipartisan angle even after the right wing has made it painfully clear that they will object to anything for the sake of winning midterms next year.

And let’s face another fact: Obama blew it. He let the health care bill wander into Congress slowly, and let it linger for so long that Republicans were able to beat it to a bloody pulp. He should have worked out most of it behind the scenes, quietly working out major details with Democratic leaders, and then presented it up-front as a vital, lives-are-at-stake issue which has to pass within just 2-3 weeks. And every time the Republicans objected, all he’d have to do is pull two or three names from the large pool of people who died because they didn’t have insurance, have their families stand behind him, and remind the nation that every day the Republicans delay, they are killing more and more Americans.

He should have known full well that he’d never get Republicans to go along, and could have used their back-stabbing on the stimulus bill to (a) point out that bipartisanship would not work because the GOP had precluded it, and (b) he was right on the Stimulus, it worked without Republicans, and if he has to pass health care reform without them too, that was their choice–he would do what he knew was right. Even if there was a huge outcry, Obama still could have gotten away with it, with midterms being so far away.

Instead, Obama fumbled, bumbled, tried to appear bipartisan long after that dog died, and continued to let the right wing flog him while he smiled and took it. And nobody, no one on the left, right, or center will respect him or give him any credit for it. What the hell is he thinking?

I still hold out that faint hope for him to grow a pair and take a leadership role this coming Wednesday. But I fully expect for those hopes to be dashed.

Holy crap.

Sometimes, even in the best of health care systems, you get horrible doctors. I originally had an expert eye doctor to help me with a problem I was experiencing, but he was pretty far away from home. So he recommended me to another expert at a local hospital who was pretty good.

However, I was unable to catch this doctor one time (she was on vacation) and got stuck with another doctor who I found less talented, but acceptable. As he was treating a new condition, I agreed to a second appointment with him. That was today.

The wait for the doctor was unusually long–one of those situations where they slip people ahead of you. You know, you’re fifth in line to see the doctor, and then after five people are called in, you are third in line. People came in well after I had settled to wait and went in ahead of me. That’s annoying enough, and I wound up having a wait time of 90 minutes for what was supposed to be a pre-set appointment time.

But what was really bad about today was the doctor. Instead of the substitute doctor, I was assigned to a third doctor whom I had never heard of before. When I finally got to see her, she was very abrupt, almost to the point of being rude. She took a quick glance at my record, not even close to long enough to understand what I was in for, asked no questions, and simply went ahead with an exam–during which she damn near tore my eyelids off.

Now, as I have explained, I have seen three other doctors before this and was examined for a variety of reasons, and never before have I ever experienced anything like what this doctor subjected me to. She did not even warn me; she took my upper right eyelid (the problem with with the lower left), grabbed the flesh of it, pulled it out, and then twisted it. It was so severe that out of reflex I yanked my head backwards. I figured that she slipped or something, but no, she intended to do that. When I had taken the relatively inoffensive, standard puff-of-air-on-the-eyeball test with the assistant an hour earlier, she warned me about the puff of air despite it being a test they give you every time. This doctor nearly yanked my eyelid off my face without so much as an “excuse me.” It hurt like hell–and then the doctor acted all put off and offended at my reaction, saying, “Well then, I just won’t check your eyes, is that OK?”

After she finished, she just half-shouted “ALLERGY!” at me like I was an illiterate moron–despite the fact that I had come in for something completely different. I tried to explain my previous problem–as she seemed to think it unnecessary to study my file to find out herself–but she persisted in focusing on the “allergy” problem, despite the fact that I told her that (a) my eyes did not itch and felt OK (at least they did before she abused them), and (b) the problem I needed help with was specific to one eye and not related to allergies. She then insisted that I had allergies, probably because I was “reading too much”–is that even possible?

I asked what happened to the doctor I had been scheduled to meet; she simply said that he quit. I then asked why I could not see the original doctor I had been assigned to, and she told me it was a scheduling problem–which, when I pressed her on, she admitted it was not, apparently having made up that excuse.

So I just made an appointment to see my original doctor and ignore everything this one did and said. But sheesh, I do not recall ever meeting a worse doctor, except possibly for the dentist who destroyed one of my teeth and then blamed me for it.

Let me just say that this was a very atypical experience. Usually the waits are much less than an hour, the doctors are competent, the service good. I just happened to get shuffled to a terrible new intern or something.

At least this visit only cost me eight bucks. But after an hour, my eyelids still hurt.

This NYT article lead-in is horribly written:

Conservatives See Need for Serious Health Debate

By JIM RUTENBERG and GARDINER HARRIS
Published: September 2, 2009

WASHINGTON — The roiling debate over health care this summer has included a host of accusations from opponents of the plan that have been so specious that many in the mainstream news media have flatly labeled them false.

First of all, the headline: “Conservatives See Need for Serious Health Debate”? Are you freaking kidding me? That’s the last thing that most conservatives “see” or want. It’s what high-level conservatives claim, which would be a more honest way of expressing it, but it’s is most decidedly not even close to what they actually want. More to the point, the article is not actually talking about conservatives in general, but instead a small minority of health care experts on the right–which shows up the headline as starkly misleading.

The next problem: the first paragraph, shown above. It seems reasonable until you catch on to the fact that it is a subtle understatement as to how reluctant the media is to speak the truth about conservative dishonesty. It plainly implies that the media will not report that Republicans are lying unless the lies are so egregious that they cannot help but call them for what they are. And even then, stark lies are, at worst, sometimes timidly referred to as “false,” as if they are too fearful of pointing out any of the blazingly obvious intent to deceive.

While the article in general leads into a serious discussion on health care reform, the thesis that conservatives are somehow the responsible party when it comes to talking about health care is so outrageously misrepresented that it isn’t even funny. Sure, I don’t doubt for a moment that there are some prominent conservative health care experts who would prefer to have an honest debate. But that’s not what the article’s introduction suggests, nor does it obviate the fact that you have to go pretty damn far down the conservative line before you get to these relative voices of reason.

This BBC story shows how the American right-wingers are using a lone extremist British politician and duping British citizens to support the completely false impression that British health care is (a) ineffective and (b) reviled in Britain, when in fact it provides complete coverage to all Brits at half the relative cost (as % of GDP) Americans pay and is widely loved despite its flaws.

My belief is that no private-sector entity can survive over a long period of time competing against the government. The public option will be written by politicians. It will be generous. Nobody in my business worries about the bottom line.

– Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

So, conservatives hate socialized medicine because it will cover everything and private industry will not be able to compete.

No, wait a minute–I thought they were against it because with socialized medicine there couldn’t possibly be enough money to go around, meaning we’d get rationing and “Death Panels”:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Talk about playing both ends of the field. Of course, both are wrong. We’ve had Medicare for more than 40 years and it hasn’t gone the way Graham is saying such plans would; as for “rationing,” Graham is more correct in that government plans would be more generous than private insurance–but wrong in his contention that this would break the bank. By removing the profit margin for private corporations, you can give more care and save money. Instead of paying huge amounts to private insurers, you simply pay a lot to the government. More for less, and it works. Ask the Rest of the Planet.

And Stephen Hawking, by the way, is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. That’s Cambridge, England, not Massachusetts. Hawking, as Josh Marshall points out and anyone who knows anything about this esteemed man knows well, has lived in England all his life. Somehow he avoided the Death Squads regularly sent out by the Socialized Death Care Ministry to kill of anyone with a disease. Pretty nimble for a guy in a wheelchair.

Oh, wait! Obama is set to present Hawking with the Presidential Medal of Freedom tomorrow! It must be a secret plot to euthanize him! Someone warn him!

When, by the way, will the media stop pretending that these people are not lying imbeciles?

This is exactly the kind of post I wish I had thought of. Brilliant. Stroszek at DailyKos says we should make the following concessions in the health care bill:

1. We will not euthanize your grandmother.
2. Rahm Emanuel’s brother will not kill Sarah Palin’s baby.
3. The government will not nationalize hospitals and other health service providers.
4. We will make the health care reform bill available for all Americans to read as soon as possible.
5. We will not subsidize abortions with your hard-earned tax dollars.
6. We will not allow the government to have direct access to your bank account.
7. We will not provide illegal immigrants with unlimited free health care.
8. Private health insurance will not be eliminated.
9. You will not be issued a “National Health Insurance ID.”
10. There will be no super-secret-awesome health care program for ACORN employees.

Stroszek outlines each in detail in his post. I would add that Barack Obama must cease the creation of his enemies list, and Democrats add a provision promising that the Constitution will not be amended to turn the country into a Communist dictatorship. I know that these are not directly related to health care reform, but a lot of the same Americans seem to be worried about these things, so might as well be on the safe side.

This whole concessions idea is so absurdly ironic that I honestly think that Democrats should, in all seriousness, propose such amendments to the actual bill. Since so many right-wingers out there actually seem to believe that these things are true, they might actually be satisfied to see them “taken out” of the bill. And of course, the whole point of the irony is that Democrats would not be giving up a single thing. Republicans, on the other hand, would be not only be put in the ludicrous position of voting on a measure that calls attention to their own insanely paranoid-schizophrenic lies, they would also be robbed of all their favorite talking points, and would have to work hard to come up with all new ones.

This would also probably garner a lot of attention in the press, highlighting the absurd lies which the media currently presents as “one side of the story,” as if they were actually possibly true. Such provisions actually entered into legislation would attract a lot of attention and would be a pretty funny story–something the press would recognize more as “news” than, oh, say, saving the lives of millions of Americans with affordable health care.

Seriously, I think this is brilliant and Democrats in Congress should make it official. I’m not kidding.

That is the question that right-wingers and health-care opponents are forwarding; you have probably heard the claim that Obama’s health care package would lead to the euthanization of seniors.

So, where does this claim come from? One front stems from the fact that Ezekiel Emanuel, noted bioethicist and Chair of the Department of Bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health (and, least importantly, Rahm Emanuel’s brother) has been tapped as an advisor for the health care reform project. While right-wingers call him “top advisor to Obama,” he is in fact “Special Advisor to Peter R. Orszag, Director of the Office of Budget and Management (OMB),” which means that he’s on a panel of people who are providing input which will shape health care policy.

Why is this even an issue? Well, Dr. Emanuel, as a bioethicist, has naturally written papers on bioethics. When social health resources are limited, triage must be performed–for example, when there are ten candidates for a liver transplant but only one liver is available, who gets it? This is always a controversial subject, and I doubt it is possible to write anything specific which cannot in some way be easily twisted to suggest that the writer is a cold-hearted villain for denying a life-saving procedure to nine people. The fact is, we must choose–the very real application of the question “if you see ten people drowning and must save only one, how do you choose?” You have probably been asked that question at some point in your life and have had to think about how we prioritize life, but for you it was almost certainly a purely academic question. Not so for bioethicists.

The right wing is getting its ammo from a couple of papers written by Emanuel, in which he advocates a triage system which favors younger patients. In a paper titled “Where Civic Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy Meet” (PDF, hosted on a right-wing site) written 13 years ago, Emanuel wrote [emphasis on words highlighted by critics]:

This civic republican or deliberative democratic conception of the good provides both procedural and substantive insights for developing a just allocation of health care resources. Procedurally, it suggests the need for public forums to deliberate about which health services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed. Substantively, it suggests services that promote the continuation of the polity-those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations-are to be socially guaranteed as basic. Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia. A less obvious example is guaranteeing neuropsychological services to ensure children with learning disabilities can read and learn to reason.

This has been taken to mean that Emanuel is suggesting that all health services should be taken away from the elderly and they be allowed to die. A bit of a stretch, of course; while Emanuel’s words “not guaranteeing health services” seem to suggest the removal of all health services, a read of the entire article suggests that he is talking about public-funded health care services which treat the specific irreversible illness–not euthanizing those with illnesses like dementia. Nor is it proffered as an absolute, but rather as a triage device when one must choose between providing government-subsidized care for one person or another in the context of preventing public health care from encompassing every single medical service available and thus breaking the bank (something that conservatives would demand).

A key point here is that the charge is one-sided, and completely ignores that there is a choice being made. The accusation that Emanuel is suggesting we do not provide public medical care for people at the end of their lives suffering from irreversible illnesses could be turned around, and the accusers could be characterized as wanting to deny treatment which could save the life of a child in favor of providing care to someone who is incurably ill and is going to die anyway. They’re baby-killers! Those bastards!!

This is why bioethics is sticky, and is easy fodder for politics: it deals with heart-wrenching decisions that we cannot avoid, and can easily taken out of context and used to wrongly accuse someone of being a cold-hearted killer.

Then consider that this is not being forwarded as the official policy of Obama’s health care plan, but rather is an opinion forwarded by one of many advisors to someone writing the plan in a paper written thirteen years ago. Emanuel is not fully in charge of the plan, is not dictating terms, and there is zero proof that what critics are blasting him for is being adopted in the plan currently before Congress.

A source of more hysterical right-wing frenzy on this is a provision in the health care bill which would add funding for extra optional counseling of people facing end-of-life circumstances:

… such consultation shall include the following: An explanation by the practitioner of advance care planning, including key questions and considerations, important steps, and suggested people to talk to; an explanation by the practitioner of advance directives, including living wills and durable powers of attorney, and their uses; an explanation by the practitioner of the role and responsibilities of a health care proxy.

In essence, the section provides funding for seniors, if they so choose, to meet with health care providers about how to plan for their twilight years, to prepare for death and its consequences. The idea is to give people near the end of their lives all the information necessary to face their situation–not to give up fighting, not to surrender health care. In fact, quite the opposite–this would be an expansion of services for people nearing the end of their lives.

Right-wingers have twisted this into a “mandatory” counseling with government bureaucrats who will tell seniors “how to end their life sooner.”

Not exactly the same thing.

So, as it turns out, the criticisms are completely bogus. Obama is not out to hack grandma to pieces to save a few bucks.

Surprise!

Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly, as always, has a good handle on the issue. The essence: if the bill passes, then as many as 100,000 people per congressional district who now are not covered would get coverage–and if Obama and the Democrats get credit, there will be a lot of grateful people out there.

This puts the Republicans in a risky position: if they defeat the bill, then they gain a victory similar to the one they realized in 1993. But if the bill passes, then not only do Obama and the Dems get credit, but there is the added dimension that the Republicans tried their hardest to kill it–and worse, they were too weak to stop it despite putting their full weight into it.

So the Republicans have a lot on the line, but in the end, the sad thing is that they have pitted themselves against the best interests of the American people. Not a great position to be in, but in some respects, seeing as how for them the greatest issue is power, they didn’t have too much of a choice. Their only hope to avoid disaster here is to sell the American people on the idea that Obama’s health care reform bill is dangerous–which, of course, is their current message. That sales pitch will get harder to make if the bill passes and millions of Americans find they are fully covered where they were not before, and millions of others find themselves with more choices and, if it works, lower costs overall.

The state of health care in the U.S. is so abysmal that it would be hard to believe that almost any well-intentioned plan, even a bad one, would not look good in comparison. The hitch: Republicans have shown that they are fully willing to label any Democratic success a “disaster” and work 24/7 to sabotage it. Note how they have been straining like mad to block stimulus money from getting through.

So Republicans, in addition to fighting Obama’s plan, may also have to work to destroy any chance of it working if it passes. And they’re good at that–destroying effective government agencies and then saying, “See?! Government can’t do anything right!”

Fortunately for them, they have a powerful media machine in place to sell the fictions that serve them–at least 30% of the nation will drink the Kool-aid regardless, and those people will make lots of noise, just like the Birthers now do.

The GOP is no longer just the “Party of No”; they are now the Party of “Destroy America First in Order to Save Our Political Asses.” Sad, sad; you can grant them with being strong-willed and unafraid to fight, but you cannot grant them any measure of love of country. Love of party, absolutely; but their definition of country is their party and nothing else; their definition of patriotism is to gut the country if anyone else is in charge.