Category Archives: Health Care

February 10, 2011 · 8:06 am

The GOP Unleashes a Horrifying Attack on Women | | AlterNet

I don’t think people are paying enough attention to this….

What’s shocking about all these attacks is that the GOP doesn’t even pretend to care about women this time around, as they sometimes do–instead, they’re waging an all-out war on women’s health. One of the most egregious salvos in this war on women is the treatment of “rape” exceptions to a proposed abortion funding ban. A massive outcry arose when the phrase “forcible rape” appeared in the notorious H.R. 3 bill–essentially redefining “acceptable” rape using an arbitrary term. It was a nasty bit of work, allowing for rape exceptions only if was the “right kind of rape.” Note to Republicans, women said: all rape is forcible. The bill’s sponsors claimed the offensive phrase had been removed. But according to reports on Wednesday, it was still there.

And yet another controversy has followed in this one’s wake, thanks to anti-choice congressman Joe Pitts (PA) who introduced a new facet to yet another awful bill, H.R. 358. This new provision would allow emergency room and other hospital and health personnel to refuse emergency care rather than perform abortion procedures they disagree with. As Dante Atkins at Daily Kos writes, “This modification is simple: it would allow hospitals to make a ‘decision of conscience’ to let women die.”

via The GOP Unleashes a Horrifying Attack on Women | | AlterNet.

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February 6, 2011 · 6:10 pm

Ronald Reagan’s Real Legacy: Death, Heartache and Silence Over AIDS : LGBT | POV

Excellent article about the real legacy of Ronald Reagan…

This is exactly how I remember it…

Hat tip to PamsHouseBlend.com for originally posting this….

America is gushing Sunday over former President Ronald Reagan in recognition of what would have been his 100th birthday. Produced by Reagan groupies, the long-weekend celebrations at the newly primped Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley are glitzy and reverent evocations of an imagined man.

In this white-washed version of history, Reagan, not Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev (remember “glasnost,”  “perestroika,” and the impact of Levis, Coke and “Dynasty”?) is credited with “tearing down” the Berlin Wall; the trillion dollars in debt Reagan wracked up during his “conservative” presidency is ignored;  “supply-side” or “trickle-down” economics” still works, even though theory-originator David Stockman says it doesn’t; the Reagan-approved secret Iran-Contra scandal was patriotic, not subversive; and he is still the “Great Communicator” – who conned working-class “Reagan Democrats” while catering to the rich, creating a huge surge in homelessness, reveling in unchecked deregulation and extolling union-busting with the mass firing of the over-worked, striking PATCO flight controllers – even before there were trained replacements.

AND:

For LGBT people, Ronald Reagan’s presidency was the far different “mourning in America.” And unlike Nixon who was forced to resign for covering up the political Watergate scandal, Reagan didn’t even bother covering up his cold disdain, his deliberate neglect, his abject refusal to help gay men stricken in 1981 by a strange new communicable disease that turned out to be AIDS. But there was no “AIDSgate” for Reagan; the White House agreed with the Religious Right that gays deserved what they got – they deserved to die.

Rev. Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, said, “AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals.” Patrick Buchanan, Reagan’s Press Secretary, said AIDS was “nature’s revenge on gay men.” Antigay Gary Bauer, Reagan’s domestic policy advisor, kept Surgeon General C. Everett Koop (selected because he was an anti-abortion Christian fundamentalist) away from Reagan:

”[In 1986] President Reagan asked the surgeon general to prepare a report on AIDS as the United States confirmed its ten-thousandth case. Leaders of the evangelical movement did not want Koop to write the report, nor did senior White House staffers who shared Koop’s evangelical convictions. As Dr. Koop related to me, “Gary Bauer [Reagan’s chief advisor on domestic policy] … was my nemesis in Washington because he kept me from the president. He kept me from the cabinet and he set up a wall of enmity between me and most of the people that surrounded Reagan because he believed that anybody who had AIDS ought to die with it. That was God’s punishment for them.”

 

via Ronald Reagan’s Real Legacy: Death, Heartache and Silence Over AIDS : LGBT | POV.

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February 6, 2011 · 12:26 pm

The Siege of Planned Parenthood – NYTimes.com

Great article by Gail Collins in the NY Times…

Here is a brief excerpt.  I encourage you to click the link to the full post:

As if we didn’t have enough wars, the House of Representatives has declared one against Planned Parenthood.

Maybe it’s all part of a grand theme. Last month, they voted to repeal the health care law. This month, they’re going after an organization that provides millions of women with both family-planning services and basic health medical care, like pap smears and screening for diabetes, breast cancer, cervical cancer and sexually transmitted diseases.

AND:

Planned Parenthood doesn’t use government money to provide abortions; Congress already prohibits that, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. (Another anti-abortion bill that’s coming up for hearing originally proposed changing the wording to “forcible rape,” presumably under the theory that there was a problem with volunteer rape victims. On that matter at least, cooler heads prevailed.)

Planned Parenthood does pay for its own abortion services, though, and that’s what makes them a target. Pence has 154 co-sponsors for his bill. He was helped this week by an anti-abortion group called Live Action, which conducted a sting operation at 12 Planned Parenthood clinics in six states, in an effort to connect the clinic staff to child prostitution.

“Planned Parenthood aids and abets the sexual abuse and prostitution of minors,” announced Lila Rose, the beautiful anti-abortion activist who led the project. The right wing is currently chock-full of stunning women who want to end their gender’s right to control their own bodies. Homely middle-aged men are just going to have to find another sex to push around.

via The Siege of Planned Parenthood – NYTimes.com.

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January 26, 2011 · 8:51 am

Raising False Alarms – NYTimes.com

Excerpt from a great column by Bob Herbert in the New York TImes…

I’m so tired of people beating up Social Security.  It’s definitely one government program that works well and it is not in crisis.

Irresponsible Congressmen and the Corporate Media want us to think it’s in trouble so they can move toward unnecessary benefit cuts and privatization.

Let me repeat:  Social Security is sound.  It is not in trouble.  What little concerns exist could be alleviated by increasing the taxable income cap for Social Security to over $106K.  Today, once your salary hits $106K, you don’t pay any more Social Security Tax, remove the cap and there is no more question of insolvency for Social Security.

I keep hoping the truth will win out and the GOP hypocrites move on to something else…

Mugging the nation’s grandparents by depriving them of some of their modest, hard-earned Social Security retirement benefits is hardly an answer to the nation’s ills. And, believe me, those benefits are modest. The average benefit is just $14,000 a year, which is less than the minimum wage would pay. With employer-provided pensions going the way of the typewriter and pay telephones, the income from Social Security is becoming more precious by the day.

“If we didn’t have Social Security, we’d have to invent it right now,” said Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future. “It’s perfectly suited to the terrible times we’re going through. Hardly anyone has pensions anymore. People’s private savings have taken a huge hit, and home prices have been hit hard. So the private savings that so many seniors and soon-to-be seniors have counted on have just been wiped out.

“Social Security is still there, and it’s still paying out retirement benefits indexed to wages. It’s the one part of the retirement stool that is working.”

The deficit hawks and the right-wingers can scream all they want, but there is no Social Security crisis. There is a foreseeable problem with the program’s long-term financing, but it can be fixed with changes that do no harm to its elderly beneficiaries. One obvious step would be to raise the cap on payroll taxes so that wealthy earners shoulder a fairer share of the burden.

The alarmist rhetoric should cease. Americans have enough economic problems to worry about without being petrified that their Social Security benefits will be curtailed. A Gallup poll taken recently found that 90 percent of Americans ages 44 to 75 believed that the country was facing a retirement crisis. Nearly two-thirds were more fearful of depleting their assets than they were of dying. The fears about retirement are well placed — most Americans do not have enough to retire on. But there should be no reason to believe that Social Security is in jeopardy.

The folks who want to raise the retirement age and hack away at benefits for ordinary working Americans are inevitably those who have not the least worry about their own retirement. The haves so often get a perverse kick out of bullying the have-nots.

via Raising False Alarms – NYTimes.com.

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January 24, 2011 · 7:38 pm

Daily Kos: CBS/NYT poll: Support for repeal of health care provisions nearly non-existent

I’ve always said the Dem’s lost the messaging battle here and once people knew what Health Care Reform actually entailed, they would support it…

As both Greg Sargent and Kevin Drum write, the recent CBS/NYT poll did a great service to those trying to make sense of the polling of repeal of the Affordable Care Act:

Greg:

The poll first asked people a straight-up question — should we do away with the law completely, or let it stand — and found that 40 percent favor repeal, versus 48 percent who want to leave it as is. That near-split mirrors virtually all other polls that asked the question this way — they all find some solid support for repeal.

But here’s where it gets interesting. The NYT/CBS poll then asked the pro-repeal camp whether they want to “repeal all of the health care law, or only certain parts of it.” Suddenly the number who favor full repeal drops to 20 percent — one-fifth — while 18 percent peel off and say they want to repeal “certain parts.”

When they actually asked about those certain parts, “8% are opposed to everything and 11% are opposed to the individual mandate. And that’s about it. Not a single other provision was opposed by more than 1% of the respondents. Not even higher taxes! Hell, a full 14% were supposedly in favor of repeal but couldn’t name even a single provision they disliked.”

This makes the piece-by-piece strategy the Senate Dems are devising very smart.

via Daily Kos: CBS/NYT poll: Support for repeal of health care provisions nearly non-existent.

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January 23, 2011 · 11:16 pm

Jack LaLanne Dead: Fitness Guru Dies At 96

A man who was ahead of his time…

Until the times finally caught up with him…

He had a fascinating life.  Click the link at the bottom of this excerpt for the full story.

LOS ANGELES — Jack LaLanne, the fitness guru who inspired television viewers to trim down, eat well and pump iron for decades before diet and exercise became a national obsession, died Sunday. He was 96.

LaLanne died of respiratory failure due to pneumonia Sunday afternoon at his home in Morro Bay on California’s central coast, his longtime agent Rick Hersh said.

Lalanne ate healthy and exercised every day of his life up until the end, Hersh said.

“I have not only lost my husband and a great American icon, but the best friend and most loving partner anyone could ever hope for,” Elaine LaLanne, Lalanne’s wife of 51 years and a frequent partner in his television appearances, said in a written statement.

Just before he had heart valve surgery in 2009 at age 95, Jack Lalanne told his family that dying would wreck his image, his publicist Ariel Hankin said at the time.

“He was amazing,” said 87-year-old former “Price is Right” host Bob Barker, who credited LaLanne’s encouragement with helping him to start exercising often.

“He never lost enthusiasm for life and physical fitness,” Barker told The Associated Press on Sunday. “I saw him in about 2007 and he still looked remarkably good. He still looked like the same enthusiastic guy that he always was.”

LaLanne (pronounced lah-LAYN’) credited a sudden interest in fitness with transforming his life as a teen, and he worked tirelessly over the next eight decades to transform others’ lives, too.

“The only way you can hurt the body is not use it,” LaLanne said. “Inactivity is the killer and, remember, it’s never too late.”

MORE:   Jack LaLanne Dead: Fitness Guru Dies At 96.

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January 23, 2011 · 11:45 am

Officials Fear Bath Salts Are Growing Drug Problem

Jesus Christ.  What will people think of next?

Of course, I’ve never understood taking drugs.  Not even in High School or College.  This was probably ingrained in me due to my Mother’s inordinate fear that if her children did drugs, they would run off and join the Manson Family, kill someone, get in the press and embarrass her in front of her friends.

Therefore, she always told us if we took drugs, we would lose our minds, pull out our eyeballs and eat them like she read about someone doing in Reader’s Digest.  That did the trick for me!

Like a good Southerner, I always preferred cocktails or wine  and I don’t even do that anymore…well, at least not since January 1st.

FULTON, Miss. — When Neil Brown got high on dangerous chemicals sold as bath salts, he took his skinning knife and slit his face and stomach repeatedly. Brown survived, but authorities say others haven’t been so lucky after snorting, injecting or smoking powders with such innocuous-sounding names as Ivory Wave, Red Dove and Vanilla Sky.

Some say the effects of the powders are as powerful as abusing methamphetamine. Increasingly, law enforcement agents and poison control centers say the advertised bath salts with complex chemical names are an emerging menace in several U.S. states where authorities talk of banning their sale.

From the Deep South to California, emergency calls are being reported over-exposure to the stimulants the powders often contain: mephedrone and methylenedioxypyrovalerone, also known as MDPV.

Sold under such names as Ivory Wave, Bliss, White Lightning and Hurricane Charlie, the chemicals can cause hallucinations, paranoia, rapid heart rates and suicidal thoughts, authorities say. The chemicals are in products sold legally at convenience stores and on the Internet as bath salts and even plant foods. However, they aren’t necessarily being used for the purposes on the label.

via Officials Fear Bath Salts Are Growing Drug Problem.

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January 22, 2011 · 11:13 pm

Jefferson supported government-run health care

Interesting…

This could make some heads explode…

From DailyKos.com

As I notedhere yesterday, the comparison between this 1798 measure and the individual mandate is imperfect. The 1798 act was a tax — mandatory for all merchant marine sailors to pay if they wanted to work — that was used to support the marine hospital system they used if they got sick or injured. But as Ezra Klein notes, this was in many ways similar to the system underlying the idea of Medicare-for-all — they paid taxes in exchange for government run insurance.

And it had the support of the Tea Party demi-God himself, Thomas Jefferson.

via Daily Kos: Jefferson supported government-run health care.

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January 9, 2011 · 11:34 am

The Conservative Constitution of the United States

Priceless- and scarily accurate…

From David Cole in today’s Washington Post….

Here are the Amendments.  I encourage you to click the link to see the actual “Constitution”.

AMENDMENTS

1. Congress shall make no law abridging the Freedom of Speech, except where citizens desecrate the Flag of the United States; respecting an establishment of Religion, except to support Christian schools, religious apparitions in food products and the display of crosses and creches in public places; or abridging the free exercise of Religion, except to block the construction of mosques in sensitive areas as determined by Florida Pastors or the Fox News Channel.

2. The right to bear Semi-Automatic Weapons, AK-47s or Bazookas shall not be infringed by background checks, safety locks, age limits or common sense.

3. The right of Corporations, Hedge Funds, Business Leaders and Lobbyists to spend endless cash on campaigns and influence-purchasing shall not be infringed. The so-called right of Unions to associate shall be denied as fundamentally un-American and contrary to the agenda of the Chamber of Commerce.

4. Marriage and the benefits thereof shall be restricted to the Union of a Man and a Woman, consecrated in a Christian house of worship, with vows to expose any and all progeny to daily viewings of Bill O’Reilly.

5. All persons born or naturalized in the United States are Citizens of the United States of Real America only if their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were Citizens, and only if they pledge opposition to Health Insurance Reform or New Taxation. Any Citizen convicted of providing material support to Terrorist organizations, wearing clothing bearing images created by Shepard Fairey, or displaying Nancy Pelosi bumper stickers shall be stripped of Citizenship.

6. Aliens, of this world or another, shall have none of the rights guaranteed herein to Citizens.

7. Corporations shall have all of the rights guaranteed herein to Citizens, and then some.

8. No White Male shall be denied equal protection of the law through Affirmative Action or otherwise. In keeping with the intent of the Framers, as discerned by the Honorable Justice Antonin Scalia, distinctions on the basis of sex shall not be deemed to deny equal protection.

9. The right to be uninsured and make other people pay the costs of one’s Health Care shall not be infringed under any circumstances.

10. Congress shall make no law limiting Americans’ right to warm the Planet by using all the energy they darn well please.

11. The Unborn shall have the rights to life, to vote, to bear arms, to practice Religion except in a mosque in Lower Manhattan (see First Amendment) and to make campaign contributions, but once the child is born, it shall have no rights if it is an Alien (see Sixth Amendment).

12. No one may be required to do anything He or She does not want to do. Ever.

via The Conservative Constitution of the United States.

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January 8, 2011 · 9:40 am

Misery With Plenty of Company – NYTimes.com

Great commentary from Bob Herbert in the New York Times.  I encourage you to click the link and read it in it’s entirety…

The politicians and the media behave as if the poor don’t exist. But with jobs still absurdly scarce and the bottom falling out of the middle class, the poor are becoming an ever more significant and increasingly desperate segment of the population.

How do you imagine a family of four would live if its annual income was $11,000 or less?

During a conversation I had this week with Peter Edelman, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a longtime expert on issues related to poverty, he pointed out that the number of people in that tragically dismal category has grown to more than 17 million. These are the folks trying to make it on incomes below half of the official poverty line, which is $22,000 annually for a family of four.

No one talks about these families and individuals living in extreme poverty. Certainly not the Republicans who were having a dandy time this week deliberately misreading the Constitution and promising budget cuts and other initiatives that will hurt the poor even more.

If you’re still having trouble deciding whose side the Republicans are on, just keep in mind that the House G.O.P. bigwig Darrell Issa sent a letter to 150 businesses, trade groups and think tanks asking them to spell out which federal regulations they dislike the most. These are lifeguards on the side of the sharks.

Scared to death of being outdone, President Obama and his sidekicks climbed into their spiffy new G.O.P. costumes and promised in humiliatingly abject tones to shower the business world with whatever government largess they could lay their hands on. The first order of business (pun intended) was the announcement that William Daley, the Chicago wheeler-dealer and former Clinton administration official who landed a fat gig at JPMorgan Chase, would become the president’s chief of staff. Mr. Daley was a loud critic of recent financial regulatory reforms and has been obsessed with getting Democrats to be more subservient to business.

The poor, who have been hurt more than anyone else in this recession, don’t stand a heartbeat’s chance in this political environment. The movers and shakers in government don’t even give a thought to being on the side of the angels anymore — they’re on the side of the millionaires and billionaires.

Nearly 44 million people were living in poverty in 2009, which was more than 14 percent of the American population and a jump of four million from the previous year. Anyone who thinks things are much better now is delirious. More than 15 million children are poor — one of every five kids in the United States. More than a quarter of all blacks and a similar percentage of Hispanics are poor.

via Misery With Plenty of Company – NYTimes.com.

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