Category: Congress

Stephen Amidon: Why I Love Britain’s Socialized Healthcare System

Posted on by TL

Stephen Amidon, an American from New Jersey, learned to appreciate the U.K.’s socialized healthcare system when his newborn daughter was born very sick in London.

From Salon.com:

I was initially skeptical about the NHS. I’d grown up comfortably in suburban New Jersey; good private healthcare was always immediately available through my father’s insurance. When my English wife became pregnant soon after we settled in London, I was alarmed by the idea of having our first child born in a system I had been told was underfunded, overstressed and inefficient. After all, healthcare in the UK was free. How good could it be? Friends and relatives back in the States were spending thousands to have children. If you get what you pay for, I was about to get a whole lot of nothing.

[…]

This, I learned, is what the NHS is about — common decency. It is about the shared belief that all the people who live in the United Kingdom constitute a society, and a decent society provides certain necessities for its members. Freedom from hunger is one. Police protection is another. Free healthcare from the cradle to the grave is simply one more item on this list.

I saw this decency at work countless times over the following decade, until my return to the United States. I saw it with the twice-daily home visits by community midwives for the fortnight after each of our newborn children’s release from hospital, and in the vouchers for free milk we were given for those babies. I saw it when our GP paid us a house call early one Sunday morning to treat our son’s spiking fever.

I saw it most clearly, however, in the treatment my in-laws received at the end of their lives…

Read more here at Salon.com.

Republicans Still Without a Working Web Site

Posted on by TL

Since May of this year, the Republican Party has been promising us a newly redesigned Web site.  Each week, believe it or not, I go online looking for the Republican Party’s response to President Obama’s Weekly Address.

Each week, I come up empty-handed.

Now, the Republican Party is asking your help, publishing a plea for Web designers to get involved and be part of the next generation GOP site.  The link on the Home Page opens a simple form asking your level of expertise: PHP, iPhone, Flash, .NET, Facebook or Blackberry.

Apparently they don’t need anyone with HTML experience.

There is another link where you can “Tell Us What You Think” of their new Web site.

Here’s what I think: The last time the Republican Party published their own GOP Response to the President’s Weekly Address was on February 7, 2009: RNC Chairman Michael Steele Delivers Weekly Republican Address.  The headlines to the stories on the GOP Blog are not linked to the story.  Instead, readers have to search for the tiny “…FULL POST” to read stories.

The most current blog post is still this breaking news from April 30, 2009, “The State of the Website,” with an update from May 15, 2009:

5/15/09 Update: What you see here is a placeholder between what was and what is to come for GOP.com. Don’t get too used to this page–the complete rebuild is around the corner. Soon we’ll have a new look and a more enjoyable, modern, open and participatory way to share our ideals with the Country.

On Friday of last week, we chose a vendor to rebuild our website and digital presence; the two are not the same and the distinction matters—a lot. It matters especially so for us.

The website you see today is difficult to update, hard to use, and locked in a Web 1.0 environment. It is also stale. It is in need of a massive spring clean. To be fair, my predecessor and good friend, Cyrus Krohn, and his team were on the way to changing all of this. Then, we elected a new Chairman, re-grouped, re-staffed and then, finally, we locked & loaded.

The project is underway.

You will soon witness some preliminary changes and, less soon—though, faster than I have ever seen done—you will see the new GOP.com in its entirety. This is where you come in.

I know for some of these guys and gals, the Internet is still a series of tubes, but, dammit, the GOP needs to step up.  In addition to being the party of, “No!” they’re also the party of, “No Useful Web site!”

If the GOP can’t build a simple, working Web site with articles less than three months old, why exactly is anyone listening to them on any issue much more complicated, like the economy, education, global warming, or, heaven forbid, health care reform?

Gov. Howard Dean: The Democrats Need to Grow a Pair

Posted on by TL

I had the privilege of attending Netroots Nation Friday as a member of the media for Turning Left. Former Governor Howard Dean held a town hall meeting at 9:00 a.m.  I’m currently working on transcribing his comments, and I’ll publish that story tomorrow.

However, I want to share one quote that Dr. Dean shared with me when I had the opportunity to speak with him during the book signing that followed his presentation.

I stood in a rather long line, and Dr. Dean was extremely gracious with each person who came for his autograph in the book Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform: How We Can Achieve Affordable Medical Care for Every American and Make Our Jobs Safer.  When I finally reached the good doctor, I shook his hand and thanked him.

I then told him, if I had the chance during the large town hall meeting, I would have asked him, “When are the Democrats going to grow some, stand up, and fight for health care reform?”

Dr. Dean responded by reiterating what he said to the larger group,  “The Blue Dogs are Democrats,” he said.  “They are Democrats.”

“Ideologically?”  I asked.

“They are Democrats,” Dean repeated.  “But, you’re right.  They do need to grow a pair.”

Those were his exact words.

In the town hall gathering, Dr. Dean told Netroots Nation that the “Conserva-Dems” have done us a favor in the health care reform debate.  Dean noted that the Conserva-Dems are the only group at the table truly representing conservative Americans.  The Republicans have removed themselves from the table, Dean said.  They have chosen to not participate in the health care reform debate.  The Conserva-Dems, or Blue Dogs, are the only truly conservative voice at the table.

That being said, Dean told Netroots Nation the Democrats have already compromised with conservatives in that single-payer health care is off the table.

“There will be no more compromise,” Dean said.

It’s time for the Democrats to fight for the change this country needs.

Stand up now, Dems! And grow a pair.

At Least 4 Democratic Congressman Receive Death Threats Over Health Care

Posted on by TL

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The fringe right wing of movement conservatism is dangerous.

Glenn Beck jokes about poisoning Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and gets to keep his show.

Congressman David Scott had a 4-foot swastika painted over a sign in front of his office.

Congressman Scott is black.

Watch Rachel Maddow in the video above, and be careful.

And speak the TRUTH in the face of these violent, desparate lies.

UK Newspaper Dispels Myths About National Health Care

Posted on by TL

I’ve had it with the fringe right-wing health-insurance-industry-paid screaming white lunatics screaming at congressional town hall meetings.  Homeland Security needs to keep an eye on these nuts and their racist-driven attacks.

Calmer minds are prevailing in the media.  The UK’s The Guardian has begun taking these arguments to task.  Even the United Steel Workers are standing up to unmask the lunatic fringe doing the bidding of the for-profit health insurance industry:

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley has claimed that U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, 77, would not be treated for his brain tumor if he was in Britain because he is too old.

The newspaper reports that this is just not true, according to Britain’s Department of Health. “There is no ban on anyone of any age receiving any treatment,” said a spokesman. “Whether to prescribe drugs or recommend surgery is rightly a clinical decision taken on a case by case basis.”

An e-mail circulating in the U.S. claims that in England, anyone over 59 years old cannot receive heart repairs, stents or bypass because it is not covered as being too expensive and not needed. The Guardian reports that this is totally untrue.

“Growing numbers of patients over 65 with heart conditions are having surgery, including valve repairs and heart bypass surgery,” says Professor Peter Weissberg, the British Heart Foundation’s (BHF) medical director. For example, the average age at which people have a bypass operation has risen from 58 in 1991 to 66 in 2008.

San Francisco-based thinktank Pacific Research Institute has been saying that in Britain, breast cancer kills 46 percent of patients, compared with 25 percent in the U.S. They claim prostate cancer kills 57 percent of the Britons it strikes, compared with 25 percent of American victims; and that Britain’s heart attack fatality rate was 19.5 percent higher than America’s in 2005.

Breast cancer does claim more lives, proportionally, in the U.K. than in the U.S., but no where near the difference some claim, according to the 2002 database run by the World Health Organisation’s cancer advisers. For example, 19.2 of every 100,000 Americans die of breast cancer disease, compared to 24 percent in Britain. With heart attacks, 40 percent of Britons who suffer one die from it compared to 38 percent in the States.

And there’s more.

The violent and threatening thugs are not mainstream America.  They are servants of the health insurance industry, and they are getting dangerous, bringing firearms to congressional town hall meetings.

And it turns out everything they say is laughably unscientific and false.

Clarence Page is Spot On with GOP Health Care Scare

Posted on by TL

Stop by the the Chicago Tribune.  Clarence Page wrote a column about the scare tactics the birthers and other GOP servants are spreading regarding any attempts at true health care reform currently before congress.

From Clarence Page:

They have been aided in this mission by a key figure in the killing of Bill and Hillary Clinton‘s proposed health-care reforms in the early 1990s. Former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, a conservative health-care specialist, lit the spark on various op-ed pages and talk shows, including former Sen. Fred Thompson‘s radio talk show.

There she told Thompson that “Congress would make it mandatory, absolutely require, that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner.”

McCaughey added that the bill “expressly says if you get sick somewhere in that five-year period, you have to go through that session again, all to do what is in society’s best interest or your family’s best interest and [basically] cut your life short.”

Nonsense. The provision would require Medicare to pay for advanced-care consultations, but it does not requireindividuals to take advantage of the benefit.

Nor does it require that a government bureaucrat intervene among the patient, the patient’s family or a doctor or nurse practitioner, as McCaughey insists it does.

Look: read Mr. Page’s column.  We have to stay on message.  We must reform health care.  This will not be a repeat of the Clinton-era attempts at health care reform.  We know those who object to reform for who they are: they serve the health insurance industry.

They do not serve the American people.

Angry White GOP Health Insurance Co. Thugs Disrupt Dems’ Town Halls

Posted on by TL

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Who are these angry white Republicans who are disrupting Democratic congressmen and women at their town hall meetings?

Turns out they’ve been sent to these meetings by D.C. lobbying groups with ties to the health insurance industry.  Shouting out spoon-fed talking points from the insurance industry, they’re defending the millions of dollars these for-profit companies take in over our dead bodies.

Olbermann unmasked the Dems and GOP members of congress on the take from the health insurance industry.  Now Rachel Maddow exposes the lying liars recently heard screaming for the corporations at these town hall meetings.

Watch this video closely.  The insurance industry is actually claiming the proposed health care plans before congress with mandate sex change operations.

Don’t believe me?  Let’s go to Conservatives for Patients’ Rights.  Here’s their list of congressional town hall meetings.  Conservatives for Patients’ Rights is a Washington D.C. -based lobbying organization that’s run by Richard Scott, a former hospital executive.  According to Rachel Maddow, Scott was forced out of that company in the midst of a fraud investigation that resulted in the company paying a $1.7 billion fine.

That’s who these angry white Republicans are taking tap dancing lessons from.  As Maddow reports, “This is a health care industry-linked lobbying group organizing uprisings at town hall events.”

Let’s look at Freedom Works, which gives instructions on how to scream and shout at town hall meetings for that perfect YouTube sound bite, ensuring there will be no discussion, no civil discourse, at these events.

Republican strategists are claiming these shouting matches are simply Democracy in action.  What they are in fact is the absence of Democracy, wild attempts to stop dialogue, to make sure no intelligent discussion takes place. They scream and shout when anyone with a view different from their own begins to speak.  They are the voice of the health insurance industry clamping down on Democracy and each and every one of us, the American people, doing everything possible to shove us down and shut us up, so the industry can pick our pockets at will.

We see them for who they are.

So we call out these GOP insurance-industry-worshipping know-nothings, and applaud the Democrats and Republicans in congress who are seeking true healthcare reform.

Olbermann Unmasks Dems and GOP Pols Owned by Health Insurance Industry

Posted on by TL

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Keith Olbermann at his best.  Disgusting how these pols take millions, and pretend we won’t notice when dance for their biggest donors.

Click through for the video if you’re viewing this via RSS.

You go, Keith.