We didn't get Single Payer. So now what.

We still don't have a health care solution. We still have politicians like John McCain talking about our having the best health care system in the world, even though the objective results of that system are not so good.

I listened to Shields and Brooks discuss this on the Newshour tonight. I thought David Brooks got right to the heart of the problem.

My fundamental problem is that it is a slow, gradual building on the current system. But the current system is so fundamentally messed up. The incentive structure is such that providers are penalized for being efficient. Everybody's got an incentive to get more and more care. We're all separated from the consequences of our choices, and that you can't build reforms on top of what is really a rotten set of incentives.

And so, at the end of the day, the question is, can you pass this and get toward real reform down the road? And I fundamentally don't think so. One of the Medicare actuaries reported I think last week or within two weeks that health care spending is just shooting upwards. Was 15 percent of the GDP. Now I think it's 17.7 percent of GDP. It will be up to 22, 24.

This bill will make it increase slightly faster, not slower. And if you care about things like preschool education, state spending on any other projects, that's all going to be swallowed up by health care. And if we don't address that problem, we have missed the central problem.

So, what are out Senators doing?

Boxer's web site provides a long list of prescriptions, all of which she tells us will not cost us anything. Or if it does, we can deduct it from out taxes... assuming we make enough to be paying taxes.

As for Feinstein, she gives us a list of priorities, but Health Care is not one of them.

Californians, this has been the major topic of discussion for most of the year.  The Senate appears now to be operating under the rule of filibuster, where every bill needs to have a 60 votes rather than a simple majority.  Neither of our Senators is really engaged in the process of making fundamental reform work. And all of the quasi progressive reformists tell us that they have to pass a bad bill because not passing it would be embarrassing.

I've had my differences with Dr. Henry Duke at times, but I think he has his sights in the right place on this one.

Corporate funded Democrats like Obama, Baucus, Clinton, Kennedy, Pelosi, are playing games with you and Obama/Baucus clearly decided in January that for health care reform everything would be on the table -- except single payer or the medicare-for-all real reform supported by a majority of Americans and American Nurses and  Doctors. The people behind this "urgent" blame onto Lieberman and the Republicans are these very same insurance company puppets and shock-troops.

HCAN or Healthcare for America Now is not for single payer, and you can bet they receive lots of Big Pharmacy, Insurance, and Hospital industry money laundered through non-profit 501c3 entities like the United Healthcare Foundation, California Wellness foundation, etc.

Good people but bad politics.

Lets break the co-dependency / addiction circle: ObamaCare, the Pelosi, Baucus, and Reid bill are all not reform, they're more bailout for big insurance finance requiring taxes and mandates for workers and consumers.

 I don't think either of our Senators can give us an answer without checking with their donor list.

Not the change you were expecting

NY Times columnist David Brooks used his election day column to express some of what I am feeling about the status of America right now.

In the next few years, the nation’s wealth will either stagnate or shrink. The fiscal squeeze will grow severe. There will be fiercer struggles over scarce resources, starker divisions along factional lines. The challenge for the next president will be to cushion the pain of the current recession while at the same time trying to build a solid fiscal foundation so the country can thrive at some point in the future.

I wondered if there were an answer, but I read one today that tells me Greens are the only hope.


The following is excerpted from comments by Lorna Salzman. The bold emphasis is mine.

Change doesn't come straight, on the rocks. It comes indirectly, because of the interplay of societal and individual values.If this weren't true, we would never have advanced beyond slavery. Human behavior doesn't exist in a vacuum. And politics doesn't either. They reflect and enhance each other.

What the USGP, the left and the liberals still haven't grasped, aside from their almost complete ignorance of and disdain for ecology, is that a change in one thing and in one direction often brings change elsewhere. This is why environmentally based policies and laws have the potential to bring about social change. This is why stopping global warming and developing a sane energy policy that halts fossil and nuclear energy will have enormous ramifications for society: in food supply, transportation, construction, community development, industry, employment, indeed in every aspect of our lives and society.

This is a lesson that environmentalists in the 1970s, myself included, learned early on but which was studiously ignored by the marxist ideologues, and still is. I still get emails from all parts of the world thumping the desk and crying out "socialism" as the answer. These guys never ask the right question though. That's why they will never get the right answer.

The notion that elected officials lead rather than follow is one of the most naive convictions of liberals and the left. So let us remind ourselves that in the area of environment, we do not have a constituency, much less a movement, that could force Obama or congress to carry out our wishes. We collectively allowed the achievements and exultation of the 1970s to carry us on through for a few years until the flame died out, the big enviros sold out, and issues over which we have no control (war, racism, israel) took precedence over issues over which we could have exerted influence.

Nowhere is this more true than in the US Green Party and the Nader campaigns, both of which steered clear of proposing an ecologically based paradigm shift for western industrial society and global capitalism, a shift that requires ending the fixation on economic growth and substituting sufficiency and regionalization of the economy.

I could not have written it better, nor do I have Lorna's experience with ecology. But this is the only way that makes sense.

We have become a society driven by consumerism and that is the most easily controlled behavior there is. It is so easy to say buy this, buy that, you aren't cool without your I-Pod. Just watch what our government is trying to do to perk us up. They want to give us money so that we go buy more things we don't need. This can not continue. One by one, stores are closing, people are losing jobs. Even the mighty Toyota announced a 69% drop in earnings this quarter. When people lose their jobs, they stop buying.

In Andrew Revkin's DotEarth blog today, he made this point about the world that expects Obama to lead.

President-elect Barack Obama on Jan. 20 will become the most important leader of a species that has exploded in just six generations from a total population of 1 billion (around 1830) to a point today when teenagers alone number 1 billion, a species that is on a path toward more or less 9 billion people by mid-century. In numbers, think roughly of adding two Chinas on top of the one that exists today.

Unless we start working to make ecology, sustainability the major focus of all that we do, the future that Brooks sees will last a long, long time.