He Knew All The Words

It’s hardly surprising, but it’s undeniably sick, that after 35 years not one goddamned thing has changed in this debate. Republicans in 1974 were looking for a big giveaway to insurance companies, and they are still doing so today. Democrats in 1974 were lacking the balls to get done what every other industrialized nation in the world has done, and they are still lacking the balls today. I hate every single damn one of them. Not only am I paying the outrageous premiums for my own health insurance and that for each of my employees, I am also paying — and so are you, dear taxpaying reader — the premiums for every one of those asshole Senators who have a terrific health plan (except Sen. Brown from Ohio, who nobly refused his health benefit until all of his constituents can have the same. Bravo, Sir!).

In this video, if you changed the camera work and neckties to be more of today’s style, there would be no difference between this 1974 report and today. Except, of course, that there are tens of millions more Americans with no insurance whatsoever.

[nonmobile]
[/nonmobile]

[mobile]National Health Insurance Debate Under Nixon[/mobile]

[nonmobile]
[/nonmobile]

[mobile]
[/mobile]
The last great Senator has died. He was also one of the last few sane Senators, of the current lot. Who will we turn to now as that non-democratic body holds the fate of our nation’s health in its hands? A very sad day for the country.

With Hurricane Bill parked off the coast and causing our rain storms to stay put for the time being, and with having to be in the city for a morning haircut, Saturday seemed a good day to go to MoMA for a whole bunch of new exhibitions.

I’d heard from some people that Song Dong’s “Projects” installation, “Waste Not,” was terrific. But I just kind of shrugged at it. The artist has arranged (quite brilliantly) the complete contents of her mother’s house. The belongings were kept under the concept of wasting nothing, so like a hoarder the artist’s mother has collected clothes and basins and tools and toys and every other manner of household junk. It is an interesting display, filling the floorspace of the huge second-floor atrium. And it is a work that exists within a well-established tradition of artists inventorying their entire lives (see Mark Fox’s Dust and Charles Ray’s All My Clothes for two quick examples). But does it do anything besides cleverly fill space? Not to my eye. MoMA is having a hard time justifying that second-floor atrium. I can imagine it was greeted with wows and big ideas when it was first proposed by MoMA’s architect. But it’s too vertical, too big, too broken with doorways at the corners, and too much in the way of the building’s natural traffic flow. And so most everything that gets put in it is physically dwarfed and conceptually diminished. Song Dong’s new project included.

I was excited to finally get to the big James Ensor show that I seem to be the last to have seen. I hated it. There’s a reason why minor artists are minor. Ensor’s work is interesting, but it’s all over the place in terms of quality and I felt frustrated halfway through and streaked the rest really fast. There was one painting I loved because it made me laugh out loud — a self-portrait in which the artist dons a lady’s hat. It’s true that this artist was ahead of his time. I mean, Christ’s Entrance into Jerusalem looks like a political rally, which I suppose it was. But for everything I liked, there were two or three that I either didn’t like or that had nothing even interesting within them. Maybe it all went over my head, but I found this uneven exhibition to be more like a curatorial grad student’s work than a real live MoMA exhibition.

On the up side, I was totally enthralled with In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976, a wonderful exhibition about some very cool artists and their home and home-away-from-home relations with Amsterdam. I loved the works by Allen Ruppersberg, Sol LeWitt, Bas Jan Ader, and Hanne Darboven. And there was a stunning installation by Gilbert & George — an 8-part drawing of the artists in the Tuileries, with a large multi-panel mural on the wall with drawing-upholstered furniture in front of it. Wild and great.

As I left the museum, the sky opened up and a downpour drenched everyone on the street. Except for me, who had somehow slipped into the door of The Modern and took refuge in a cocktail until the rain subsided. I love MoMA.

Roger Ebert has written two eloquent blog entries about health care. Having spent the last few years fighting cancer, and coming close to losing that fight a few times, he is in a good position to talk about health. And because his job is to take a story (as present on film) and dissect it, he’s well-trained to taking the story of the on-going health care reform battle in America, cutting it open, and revealing to us all exactly what’s going on. He’s unabashedly liberal. And he’s got soul. Bravo, Mr. Ebert.

1. “Death Panels.” A most excellent term.
2. I’m safe on board. Pull up the life rope

It’s about time the House leadership started acknowledging reality. If you think my frantic efforts to get people to call their Reps, their Senators, and the White House are a waste of time, think again. This positive statement from Pelosi is possible because the progressive grassroots got the progressive members of Congress to take a stand. Please, everybody, STAY INVOLVED.

I don’t know what I hate more: having to continue blogging about health care reform (especially when most new developments are so rotten) or paying $65,000 a year to my company’s insurance provider. Okay, I do know that I hate the latter more, but I’m so tired of thinking about this thing day and night. And yet, here we are again.

If you’re not already cynical about this issue, please take a few minutes to read Glenn Greenwald’s devastatingly clear-eyed take on what’s been going on. In short, he posits that the administration is getting what it wants — which is a bill without a public option. And the reason they want it without a public option is so that they can a.) have the political victory of passing “reform” while b.) not alienating the insurance and drug industries and thereby keeping their dollars squarely out of the election committees of Republicans. In other words, stay in power for power’s sake, rather than using that power to actually do the right thing. Greenwald does, finally toward the end of the piece, provide some optimism in that we actually do have shot, however slim, of winning this battle. Still, it’s a pretty depressing piece.

At the end of his column, Greenwald updates with a link to Jane Hamsher at the blog FireDogLake. Hamsher has been the progressive netroots leader in organizing in support of the public option. Her blog entry that Greenwald links to is just as clear-eyed as his, and is even more specific in it’s follow-the-money logic. While both of these columns are chilling in revealing how daunting the task before us is, they are also bracing for being so absolutely clear and insightful. I strongly urge you to read both.

Also mixing the regretful with the inspirational is George Lakoff’s take on what’s gone wrong so far, and what we can do about it. He destroys the administration’s approach to the entire issue — both in what they’re saying and in how they’re saying it. His writing is denser and more complex than Greenwald’s and Hamsher’s, but certainly worth a look, especially by anyone who’s interested in building out effective communication for progressives over the long-term, no matter what comes of health care.

Back in the real world, I am still struggling to figure out how to adjust our company’s insurance to roll back the almost 10% increase they’re trying to stick us with this year. (In a past post, some of you guessed up to 40% increase… trust me 10% is problem enough. Over the last 10 years, it’s more than doubled). I’ve got some new numbers which consider changes to various parts of the plan. Should I increase the patient co-payment? That seems fair, in that those who use the insurance the most pay a bit more while those who go to doctors less do not feel the impact. Do I allow the UCR limit to drop from 80% to 70%? That’s less appealing because if someone gets into a long, complicated medical situation the insurance could end up covering quite a bit less than if I leave the UCR at the high end. (UCR is the Usual Customary Reasonable rate for any given procedure — so the plan has 80% the insurance would cover $8,000 of a $10,000 fee, versus a $7,000 coverage if it’s 70% — the impact can be quite high if we’re talking about any kind of major in-hospital procedures…). Another option would be to raise the out-of-network deductible from $2500 to $5000. But it sickens me to think of paying $65,000 a year for coverage that doesn’t kick in until the patient has paid $5000. But every option is still on the table: adding a pharmacy deductible before the prescription plan kicks in, upping the cost of prescriptions, even adding an in-network deductible (which is oxymoronic if you ask me). Anyway, I’m going to pick a combination of measures that allow us to not just avoid an increase in premiums, but to produce a bit of savings. It’s one of the more frustrating tasks I’ve had to tackle in a long time. And yes, I’m cynical about it and sick of it and pissed off about it all at once.

Right now I’m tuning into the President’s Organizing for America teleconference town hall. Given the links above, I’m really feeling cynical about him. But we’ll see. I refuse to believe that we can’t make this happen — and if that means fighting the administration tooth and nail then so be it. We put him in power and if we have to make knock him down a few pegs to get what we want then lets do it. At some point later I’ll give my take on this town hall. And hopefully I’ll have some more calls to action for you to lend a hand to the effort…. In the mean time, I’ll just keep a cynical frown on my face and my nose to the grindstone.

UPDATE: 3:30PM
So far in this forum it seems as if Obama’s new talking point is “consumer protection.” He’s used it five times already. It’s an improvement over “keeping the insurance companies honest” but it’s a far cry from the term “American plan” that Lakoff proposes (see link above).

UPDATE 10:00PM:
I think the president’s town hall today was a waste of time. Nothing really happened except for him testing out his new “consumer protection” talking point. The forum was all supporters, so naturally all the questions were really soft. I mean, “you and Michelle are so fit! How do you see nutrition and excercise contributing to Americans’ wellness?” !!!!!!!!! We’ve got real issues to go over, in both politics and policy, and some woman is complimenting him on how fit he is. Holy shit, I hate people. So it was mostly a feel-good session, though it did give Obama the chance to reiterate support for the public option. He did that, but would not go so far as to say it is a requirement. So there it is… the struggle continues…

Aunt Joyce sent me these awesome pictures of Luke’s first birthday. So cute. Happy Birthday, Luke!

[UPDATED} …And the cuteness continues with pictures from Adrienne!

The arguments and strategies concerning health care reform are moving quick. Every few hours there are new articles, and lots of interesting stuff is out there. Here’s some of what’s caught my eye today:

1. The progressive netroots have been trying for a good while to get progressive House members to pledge to vote against any reform legislation that does not include the public option. It seems to be the only way we’re gonna get the White House’s attention. Jane Hamsher of the blog FireDogLake has been one of the leaders of this progressive push. She has a somewhat positive update on Huffington Post today.

2. Howard Dean was on Joe Scarborough’s show this morning. He’s trying to tell us about a grand scheme to pass the bill in the Senate without the public option and then reconcile it with the House bill that will have the public option. If that happens, the reconciled bill cannot be filibustered and can therefore pass with 51 votes instead of 60. I love Dean, but I have no confidence that this plan is actually afoot. What may be happening, of course, is that Dean is trying to get people to believe in this process and force Congress’s hand. It does work hand-in-hand with Jane Hamsher’s approach above (see #1). So perhaps the good Doctor is doing his own subtle connecting-of-the-dots.

3. Say what you want about Nancy Pelosi and House Dems — and believe me, I’ve got some sharp-tongued words for her on plenty of issues — but so far the House is toeing the line on the Public Option. Today we have Pelosi offering a statement regurgitating some of Obama’s own language and standing strong. I wish she would go one step farther and say the House will not approve of a reform bill without the public option, but perhaps that should wait for the reconciliation endgame. Sounds like Dean, Pelosi, and Hamsher have all been talking to each other, no?

4. Finally, the blog Docudharma has a great post reminding what’s really at stake with the public option. If we allow a reform bill to go through with mandates (a requirement that individuals have insurance) but without a public option, then it’s basically forcing 47 million people into becoming paying customers of the already corrupt insurance system. All to the insurers’ profit.

5. How awesome is it that my dad is forwarding me link to videos on blogs like Crooks & Liars? Too awesome. He and I agree that the media is a BIG part of the problem right now. Take a look as Bill Moyers discusses this issue with Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Drew Altman. Calm, cool, and thought-provoking.

6. Money talks. This is all you have to know:

7. I don’t know if you saw the asinine op-ed by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey in the Wall Street, but it was a stupid piece of shit (with an epigram of no one less than Margaret Thatcher!). His anti-union positions have bugged me for years, but this just made me commit to abandoning his stores for good. The best take-down of it is this terrific analysis by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post. He compares our food program (welfare & food stamps) to our proposed health care reform — and suggests Mackey stop being such an elitist. Smart.

1-202-456-1111

If you voted for Obama, it is important that your vote not be your last step. It is imperative that we all hold this president’s feet to the fire. One reason the Bush administration moved so far to the right, after campaigning as moderates, is that the far right wing was relentless in forcing Bush’s hand. We need to be just as fierce with President Obama.

My view is that Obama is failing across the board in keeping his campaign promises.

LGBT rights: He promised to be a “fierce advocate” for the gay community. Instead, there’s been nothing but foot-dragging and a back-and-forth blame game with the Senate about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which keeps rolling on and dismissing people like Arabic translators because they happen to be gay. And then there’s the administration’s disgusting defense of the Defense of Marriage Act which is filled with right-wing talking points.

Regulatory reform: The economic crisis we’re in is the direct result of deregulation of the financial sector. Obama promised to implement tough new regulations. Then he picked a bunch of Wall Street insiders to run his Treasury department and we’re still waiting for regulations which I am certain will never come.

And now health care:
As early as May 2007 candidate Obama was promising us a public option. The New York Times reported at the time:

Mr. Obama would create a public plan for individuals who cannot obtain group coverage through their employers or the existing government programs, like Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Children would be required to have health insurance. Subsidies would be available for those who need help with the cost of coverage.

He would also create a National Health Insurance Exchange, a regulated marketplace of competing private health plans intended to give individuals other, more affordable options for coverage. The public plan would compete in that Insurance Exchange, advisers said.

Compare that to today’s New York Times:

The White House, facing increasing skepticism over President Obama’s call for a public insurance plan to compete with the private sector, signaled Sunday that it was willing to compromise and would consider a proposal for a nonprofit health cooperative being developed in the Senate.

CALL THE WHITE HOUSE RIGHT NOW: 1-202-456-1111

It took me 50 dials to get a ring instead of a busy tone. DO NOT GIVE UP. KEEP DIALING UNTIL YOU GET THROUGH, and then HOLD UNTIL YOU GET A COMMENT OPERATOR. And then speak slowly, and speak angrily. Your talking points:
1. You are angry that the White House is now signaling it’s willingness to drop the public option.
2. Reform without a public option is a giveaway to the insurance industry.
3. Obama promised real reform.
4. We delivered huge majorities in both the House and Senate. There are no excuses for him not to be fighting for us.
5. We will not support his re-election if the public option is dropped.
6. No more broken promises.

It is so important we all take 10 minutes to do this. Each one of us – married couples do it twice, once for each of you.

And then please check back here soon for more details about calling the your House Representative.

The New York Times has two interesting op-eds today:

1. Barack Obama (the author’s by-line at the bottom reads Barack Obama is the president of the United States. (!)) writes a defense of his health care reform package. Unfortunately, he and his administration have mishandled this process to the point where he’s now playing defense. He offers nothing new, and frankly, nothing all that specific, in this new op-ed. It may help to calmly sway some undecideds, but it will do nothing to counter the rabid, crazy right-wingers who keep insisting there will be government “death panels” to kill the elderly. My newest thought about all this is for Congress to form a non-partisan panel of experts — historians, scholars, legal experts, legislative experts — to simply translate the various bills into plain ol’ English for the American people. The media has not only been useless at doing their job of turning a skeptical eye toward either the reform plan or its opponents, they’re actually harming the whole process by simply hyping the emotional storyline. They’re fanning the flames of ideological divide in this country and in doing so they are causing real harm to both individuals and to democracy itself. Let us not forget that the media is almost wholly owned by huge corporations, who’s owners have a vested interest in squashing this reform.

2. Author Danny Heitman writes an op-ed recounting the auto industry’s embrace of one of America’s greatest poets, Marianne Moore, back in the 1950s. It’s sad that poetry does not have a place in everyday American life anymore. The idea that a huge company like Ford would turn to a poet to help generate language for a new product is unthinkable in today’s world. But let’s just imagine Walmart asking John Ashbery for some marketing ideas…. “Noncents around your collars” … etc….

I tend to avoid gay-for-gay’s-sake theater and other cultural endeavors. “Naked Boys Singing” is not really up my alley, so to speak. So it was with some trepidation that I accepted Laura’s invitation to join her and few other gay male friends to see Slipping, a new play by Daniel Talbott. The New York Times review by Andy Webster said the play

might well be titled “Gay Rebel Without a Cause,” packed as it is with adolescent angst and starring a handsome leading man, Seth Numrich. If there is a cause, it’s the hero’s quest to find love and heal wounds left by an earlier affair. That’s as deep as it gets, although there’s plenty of gay wish fulfillment too.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement right in the opening paragraph. But it sounded like it might be at least watchable and it was certainly the right off-off-Broadway price: $20. So off we went, and as with my experience of Burn The Floor, low expectations once again win the day.

Slipping was more than watchable. And it was involving and angsty in good ways, though ultimately only for the mind and not the heart. The actors were all good in their roles, at least when the text would allow them to be more than stereotypes. The focus of the story is on Eli, an 18-year-old fish-out-of-water San Franciscan who’s moved with his mother to Iowa. He’s indeed a rebel without a cause, lost in his own inner turmoil, for which the audience is given no source whatsoever. His father is recently deceased, his mother is distant and selfish, he wallowed in an abusive love relationship with another boy (which we see in flashbacks), he’s struggling to develop a new relationship with someone much more mainstream than himself and his ex, and he smokes, sulks and cuts himself. If we can accept all that as a given, without asking why, then the play works as a character study of the period in life when a boy becomes a man.

Directed by Kirsten Kelly, who uses a light touch to keep such a dark text from overpowering the tiny Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, the production never drags, which is usually a good thing, but when you realize that the episodic nature of the text seems at times as if Talbott couldn’t sustain any single scene beyond its first conflict, then you begin to see why Talbott refers to the play in his program note as “this latest draft.” But Talbott does a good job of organizing all these little scenes to produce an overall story arc that does hold together.

Seth Numrich plays Eli just right — expressing all the conflicting adolescent qualities of exterior toughness shielding a fragile (or broken) soul. It’s not Numrich’s fault that the play, despite it’s emotional themes, is never touching, never forcing the emotions through the fourth wall and into the audience’s hearts. So while I could sit and watch this play with interest and even plenty of enjoyment, I never felt moved to more closely identify with the characters. And I never felt moved emotionally at all.

Given that my favorite Google-hit for this blog this week was someone searching for “Harry Reid jerk” — ha ha I kid you not — I think I’ll just be blunt here and now: Max Baucus is an asshole.

From the front page of DailyKos:

Sarah Palin Setting Finance Committee Policy?
by mcjoan
Thu Aug 13, 2009 at 04:46:03 PM EDT

Isn’t this special?

The Senate Finance Committee will drop a controversial provision on consultations for end-of-life care from its proposed healthcare bill, its top Republican member said Thursday.

The committee, which has worked on putting together a bipartisan healthcare reform bill, will drop the controversial provision after it was derided by conservatives as “death panels” to encourage euthanasia.

“On the Finance Committee, we are working very hard to avoid unintended consequences by methodically working through the complexities of all of these issues and policy options,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement. “We dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly.”

So Max Baucus has ceded policy making not only over to Chuck Grassley, but to Sarah Palin, because only in their minds was the end-of-life consultations (note, Hill reporter, NOT end-of-life care, but end of life counseling) controversial. Or euthanasia.

Where’s the White House on that one?

Obama better get this train back on track, or else I have a feeling some upcoming Google-hits I get at this blog may include “Obama one-termer.”

Coming soon, the sorry tale of my business’s health insurance premiums. Let’s play a game: take guess in the comments how much you think our premiums are being increased this year (in percentage). In my next entry we’ll see who comes closest….

I was in Union Square tonight, so I found the Big Gay Ice Cream Truck again. This time I had a dish of chocolate ice cream, dipped in chocolate, with cayenne pepper on top. Mom, you were right — hot and sweet can’t be beat!

It’s critical to get people to stop believing all the lies that are being told about health care reform. We’ve got politicians talking about euthanasia for the elderly, news commentators talking about “socialized medicine,” and red-in-the-face assholes of every stripe showing up at their Representatives’ town halls to shout down anything that resembles the truth and to shut down debate about this issue altogether.

The White House has launched a new website to try to address some of the lies. Called Reality Check, it features calm, well-spoken, and well-produced videos about six of the lies that are getting the most traction. Here’s the most important one:

[nonmobile]

[/nonmobile]
[mobile]The Truth About Health Care Reform[/mobile]

It’s really important for us all to take some responsibility to get this information out there. We all know unreasonable people who will never be persuaded, but we also all know some people who are simply (and rightly!) cynical about government, and who may not be paying enough attention to sort out the truth from the lies. If someone repeats one of the lies to you, it is imperative that you try to correct them. If not immediately, then email them a link to the Reality Check site, or email them the Youtube link for the video that addresses their concern. Certain things cannot be repeated enough, mainly the mantra of “If you like your doctor, and you like your insurance plan, you can keep them exactly as they are. Reform will only mean that the cost of your insurance and the cost of your prescriptions may go down.”

Of course, this is only one side of the battle. The other side is to get the Congress to actually pass something meaningful. The Baucus Debacle should not be allowed to pass. Reform without a public option is not reform at all. Find your Representative’s town hall meetings and please go and make your voice heard. Call them, call your Senators, and call the White House. Everyone who voted for Obama has got to pitch in. Please.

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been updating the links in my blogroll to include some new blogs and sites that I like to check in with regularly. All the links in the “Others” department to the right are worth checking out every now and then, but these are the three that I’d love you to see right away…

Do go take a look at Jessica Fenlon’s new video on the homepage of her site drawclose. She’s doing something she calls “datamoshing,” which is taking the messiness of data compressions — known as data artifacts (or artefacts), you know, those weird effects you see in digital video that’s been compressed wrongly — and creating something new from them. Of course, Fenlon’s just doing what she always does: taking the ugliness of the world, filtering it through her unique vision, and feeding it back to us as something beautiful.

A new find for me is And I’m Not Lying, the blog of storyteller Jeff Simmermon. No only is he a very smart and funny observer of life and New York City (and life in New York City) but he’s also been telling his story of fighting testicular cancer, which he does with grace, humor, and touching insight. Go back a few pages into his archive and read forward. It’s very worth the time.

Indexed is the brainchild of Jessica Hagy. She takes the whole world and sorts it out for us in very witty, mathematical charts and diagrams. It’s like math nerd heaven, but you don’t actually have to be a math nerd to enjoy it. Go there every weekday morning for a laugh or an “ah-ha” moment.