Politics in the Zeros

Our health care system is so broken that people who desperately need medical help may not be able to get it. My blogging here has bee a bit irregular lately. That’s because we’ve been preparing for my wife Sue to have cornea transplant surgery. She has Fuch’s Dystrophy, which clouds the cornea and eventually leads to blindness. They did [...]

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Several years ago I sat next to a Frenchman on a flight from Paris to Washington DC. He stated that his country considered access to health care a human right and asked why my country didn’t provide it to its citizens. Two years ago we got a watered-down version officially known as the Affordable Care [...]

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Sixty-six percent of publicly-insured children were unable to get a doctor’s appointment for medical conditions requiring outpatient specialty care including diabetes and seizures, while children with identical symptoms and private insurance were turned away only 11 percent of the time, according to an audit study of specialty physician practices in Cook County, IL. “We found [...]

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It is easy to become lulled into intellectual somnolence by the seemingly gradual changes we are incurring in our weather. After all, just how bad can a couple of degrees be? Oh, we wake up every once in a while when our catastrophe leads media reports on some hurricane, flood or tornado, especially if the [...]

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Health care and health justice rap by Lonnie Ray Atkinson who says “This song is under the Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0. You are free to download this song and share it with as many people as you like (please respect and include attributions). I don’t want any payment for its use. I just want to [...]

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Recently a friend was rushed to Valley View Medical Center here in Cedar City UT by his wife after he became quite ill and was coughing up blood. They diagnosed him with pneumonia. His fever was very high. The hospital immediately filled him with liquids, antibiotics, and provided superb medical care. Three days later he [...]

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A U.S. District Court judge has ruled the “individual mandate” which says Americans must purchase health insurance by 2014 is unconstitutional. “An individual’s personal decision to purchase — or decline purchase — (of) health insurance from a private provider is beyond the historical reach” of the U.S. Constitution No specifically constitutional authority exists to mandate [...]

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(Polizeros welcome our new contributor, Will O’ The Wisp) Well, maybe on the tips of the tongues of those well-heeled, health-insured politicians. On the tips of the tongues of those whom health care reform is meant to assist? Food! Water! Shelter! Bills! Let’s go back to that first subject – Food. I admit, my friends, [...]

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Reps get spit on, windows broken, mysterious powder–and Palin blames the “lame-stream media”. House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) excoriated DNC Chair Tim Kaine and DCCC Chair Rep. Chris Van Hollen, for “dangerously fanning the flames” in using recent acts of violence and intimidation by anti-health-care reform opponents, “as a political weapon.” Was there spittle? [...]

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From SocialismOrBarbarism on the Left Business Observer listserv Obama at his “health care forum”–live, right now “Those people who go to emergency rooms aren’t getting ‘free care.’ They are being paid for by people with insurance. Their ‘free care’ makes other people’s care go up, uh, $1000. So we are paying for those [poor, sick [...]

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