Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Health Care Tuesday Evening: callous, cruel, Coburn

QOTD, commenter Paul at Political Animal:
Well, for everyone who thought that even people like Coburn wouldn't be willing to look people in they eye and say "Your loved one deserves to die in terrible pain, and you and the rest of your family deserve to suffer with them until you're bankrupt", here's the counterexample.
Josh Marshall: A Question for Steele

From TPM Reader SM ...

A question for Mr. Steele. Three months ago I had routine surgery for a hernia and was asked three times in the week leading up to it if I was interested in creating a living will. Was Columbia hospital corporation trying to talk me into committing suicide?!
Ezra Klein's Lunch Break

Insurocorp would like to thank you for defeating socialism, and it has some other ideas for socialist institutions that should be defeated. Act now, and they'll give you 10 percent off in our new privatized utopia!


Not health care, but relevant to the mindset of the right.
C&L:
Reportage you'll never see on Fox: MSNBC's Contessa Brewer explores extremist rhetoric and right-wing violence
[H/t Heather]

Yesterday MSNBC's Contessa Brewer tackled the rantings of Pastor Steven Anderson down at his strip-mall church in Tempe, Arizona, and examined the common-sense connection between this kind of hate-filled rhetoric and the people bringing guns to events featuring President Obama, as well as the various acts of domestic terrorism and right-wing violence that have accompanied the rise in this kind of talk.

The segment featured Evan Kohlmann, an NBC terrorism analyst, who remarked:

Kohlmann: Yeah, it's amazing that this kind of rhetoric is allowed if you're a certain kind of person, if you're a patriotic American you can say whatever you want, no matter how far along the line it comes to inciting people to violence towards other innocent people. It's completely unjustified.

But but but but ... doesn't Kohlmann know there is no connection whatsoever between the people who fill crazy people's heads with crazy, provably false ideas and the violent and insane actions that follow? That's what you always hear from the right-wing pundits at Fox, at least.

Which is why you'll never see this subject discussed at Fox -- except, perhaps, in dismissive tones designed to make excuses whenever the violence does inevitably erupt.


David Waldman (Daily Kos): This doesn't make any f-ing sense, and I'm not gonna do it.

Maybe I'm just not sufficiently wonky on the health care subject, and after all, this isn't likely to happen to me right away, because I have insurance through my wife that I'm pretty sure we're keeping as long as we can. But I don't get how you can possibly hand me a health care bill with an individual mandate and no public option. If I'm uninsured or poorly insured, and the answer coming out of Congress is that I now have to buy crappy insurance from some private company that has no plan to actually help me pay for my health care without raking me over the coals, then I've gone into this fight an ardent supporter of strong reform, and come out a teabagger.

You're going to force me to pay an insurance company for shit insurance that as a free market actor I decided not to even try to buy?

Fuck the hell out of that. Come and get me if you want my money. Paying the government against my will I can understand. It's the government, and it takes things. I might not like it, but I get it. Now, "libertarians" will no doubt scoff haughtily at that, but look, we differ on how much intrusion we'll tolerate. BFD. Welcome to Earth. But if I'm gonna lose that money one way or the other, to my mind it had damn well better be to pay for insurance that actually covers something, and not to be burned on executive bonuses, advertising, or 30% overhead when there's a 4% plan on the market.

Paying an insurance company whose product I don't want? That makes no goddamn sense to me whatsoever, and I want nothing to do with it.

Now, it should come as no surprise that the dingbats at Third Way are pushing this nonsense as a "compromise." As you may have heard me say, I don't believe in a third way. When the chips are down, all third ways are just new excuses for voting for one of the two ways you're allowed in Congress: yea or nay. And while Third Way may get warm in the shorts over a "compromise" that keeps the mandates and chucks the public option, I note that it's once again the DLC and their allies that come up with the plan that has me ready to turn my back on the Democratic Party's Big Plan of the Day.

But keep this in mind: that mandate is already in the bill. It was written in right alongside the public option. So the mandate isn't Third Way's invention, it comes from and has the tacit support of Congressional Democrats, both progressive and otherwise. But if you ask me, it only made sense in a context that included the public option. For Third Way or anyone else to suggest it makes sense all on its own is insanity, and I won't play.

You want your money, you can come and find me and try to take it. But I'm not just going to send it to you, postage paid.

Sensible? Not at all. But I am not sending it to you.

McJoan (DK): Obama Admin Hits Back at "Death Book" Claim

Perhaps finally having had enough of the rightwing mainstream Republican lies about government health care, the administration is fighting back with a detailed rebuttal.

The rebuttal includes a detailed fact sheet and a timeline, both of which were sent my way by an administration official and may be sent widely to reporters later this morning....

The claim — the right’s latest effort to frighten the vulnerable about Obama’s health care intentions — is that the manual steers veterans towards "predetermined conclusions" about "end-of-life choices." It’s gotten tons of right wing and even traditional media play.

The rebuttal points out that the manual, which is called "Your Life, Your Choices," is not an "advance directive" and "does not promote limitation of life-sustaining treatment, assisted suicide, or euthanasia." Rather, its goal is to help veterans "consider the types of health care they would want to receive if they were unable to make decisions for themselves" and to "think about and discuss their preferences" with family, friends, and doctors.

The fact sheet does note that the manual was determined under Bush to be in need of revision, and that it may be "too negative in tone and not sufficiently sensitive" to pro-life or disabled veterans. But the rebuttal strongly contests the core "death book" claim, and notes that the author of the original Op ed has offered a competing book, which is for sale.

You'd think they couldn't get more despicable in their lies than trying to convince old people that Democrats want to kill them, but this did it. And, as usual, it's full of Republican hypocrisy--they didn't particularly care about the sanctity of our troops' lives when they were cheerleading for Bush's Iraq debacle, an unnecessary war of choice that's taken thousands of American lives and left thousands and thousands more horribly damaged. Seems that the right's concern for the troops and our veterans only arises when there's a political gain for using them.

It's worth saying again--the Republicans' only hope for political survival will be killing comprehensive, real, healthcare reform, and they will go to any lengths to do so. There can be no "bipartisan" solution that's worth doing. Hopefully with this latest bogus attack, that reality has dawned on Obama.

Benen: CLASSIC COBURN....

We're probably past the point at which one concerned American asking one question at a single town-hall forum can change the nature of the larger health care debate. But this clip, posted by Zaid Jilani, struck me as both powerful and illustrative.

For those of you who can't watch clips from your work computers, CNN's Rick Sanchez aired an exchange yesterday between a woman desperate for health care assistance and Sen. Tom Coburn (R) of Oklahoma. The woman in the clip struggles to even speak through her tears, but she explains to her right-wing senator that her husband has traumatic brain injuries. Their family's private insurer, she said, won't cover some of his treatments. "We left the nursing home," she said, "and they told us we are on our own." She breaks down, pleading for help.

Coburn's response was fascinating. "Well, I think, first of all, yes, we will help," the senator said. "The first thing we will do is see what we can do individually to help you through our office. But the other thing that's missing in this debate is us as neighbors helping people that need our help."

When that generated some applause, the Oklahoman added, "The idea that the government is the solution to our problems is an inaccurate, a very inaccurate statement."

This struck me as interesting for a few reasons. The first, which Rick Sanchez noted to viewers, is that Coburn said his office would try to help this woman's family, right before saying government isn't the answer. Sanchez asked, "Isn't he the government?"

Second, the idea of "neighbors helping people" sounds very nice, and it's always heartening to see neighbors lend a hand to struggling families. But there are tens of millions of Americans with no health care coverage, and millions more, including this family in Oklahoma, who are under-insured or who will lose their insurance when they need it most. The vast majority of them don't have neighbors who are oncologists, surgeons, nurses, obstetricians, or rehabilitation experts who would be willing to work for free.

Coburn's answer represents mindless, reflexive opposition to government, for opposition's sake. It's a worldview that's as shallow as it is destructive.

Is government intervention always the answer to every societal problem? Of course not. But health care is critically important -- literally, a life-or-death issue -- for just about every single person and family in the country. It's a basic public service -- not unlike police protection, fire departments, roads, or schools -- that every industrialized democracy manages to provide its citizens, expect us, thanks to "leaders" like Coburn and those who share his ideology.

Government, in this case, is obviously the solution. We've left it to the private free market, and it's failed spectacularly, producing a nightmarish system that costs too much and covers too few. The most effective parts of the U.S. health care system -- the VA and Medicare -- just happen to be the two parts intertwined with the government.

I'll never understand the right's obsession with hating the government, but for Coburn to lecture that woman in dire straits about the evils of government intervention in the health care system is callous, cruel, and exactly the kind of twisted thinking policymakers will have to reject to pass real reform.

  • from the comments:

    Well, for everyone who thought that even people like Coburn wouldn't be willing to look people in they eye and say "Your loved one deserves to die in terrible pain, and you and the rest of your family deserve to suffer with them until you're bankrupt", here's the counterexample.

    Posted by: paul on August 25, 2009 at 2:18 PM


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