I never thought I’d defend Rush Limbaugh on anything
Read my posts. I usually wax nothing but profuse progressive. I’m not going to defend Rush’s comments individually other than to say, for the most part, that I think most Americans perceive “shock-jock” radio for what it is: Entertainment for the masses in traffic jams, with a skosh of thought provocation thrown in.
Somebody anonymous responded in very direct fashion to my last post and correctly called me out on gross a misstatement of fact. So I promptly approved their comment and revisit the topic here. The commenter was completely right. Apparently during the Fluke testimony it was stated that she must pay $1,000 per year for contraceptives. I think, in fact, many of us are scratching heads as to where both media and congressional common sense went on this one. Classic case of media going after the ratings. The media swung wayyyy to far to the left here; and it was all for ratings. What gets me really upset is how the media AND the public focused with laser-intensity on the name-calling; and nobody seems to give a crap for what healthcare truly costs. FORGET CONTRACEPTIVES. You can watch Pelosi completely dodge a very valid and direct challenge by a reporter here. (1 minute in length. The reporter suggests Fluke should be paying less than $200 a year and he pulls the price off shelves at Target). The truth is: This whole testimony/hearing was a stupid distraction and they all should be called out on wasting our money with the talk.
To Wit: Contraceptives aren’t, and never were the issue. Other very important healthcare costs ARE consuming 18% per year of GDP in aggregate and climbing. I resent Congress for wasting time with this testimony. I resent liberal media and thin-thinking liberals and progressives for attacking Rush so aggressively on this story…mainly because it is a stupid conversation to begin with. They stole the spotlight from truly meaningful discussion of healthcare costs. Yes, women are far too often treated unfairly. This was not the place to dive headlong into that discussion; because right now healthcare is the central topic and NOBODY seems to be observing that this an idiotic line of questioning in a topic that warrants real, cogent dialogue on real, excessive costs. I want to know why the hell Congress was not putting Multiple Sclerosis patients on the stand to discuss the over 13% annual price rises that Biogen has stuck its customers with for 14+ years running.
So, dear commenter with the very appropriate handle “FACTS:” Thank you. You were right. I apologize for a really silly post.
I’ll toss this question out there to anyone who may be more informed than I on the question: Has anyone seen an MS patient called to testify before Congress > on the cost of injectible and infuseable interferons which now across the board exceed $40,000 annually for patients who desperately need them? Minding the facts that: (A) The manufacturers have never lost money on them and we are well into a second decade of market use and (B) The very clear fact that manufacturers have been leveraging a rigged insurance system for YEARS prior to the Affordable Healthcare Act in order to gouge very desperate patients by escalating their prices ceaselessly and ruthlessly aggressively year on year for well over a decade. This example is the poster-child for what has been happening FOR MORE THAN TWO DECADES for all healthcare costs: A rigged insurance system. Has the CEO of Biogen, to anyone’s knowledge, been subpenaed to testify before Congress? Would it even matter? Congress can be great at slapping the wrists of CEO’s publicly while doing absolutely nothing to change things.
Why don’t we all get back on track and discuss some costs that ARE meaningful? I have not had time to parse the entire healthcare industry in granular detail; but I suspect manufacturers of other products for chronic and very debilitating illnesses are pulling the same crap. And I suspect the insurance companies that seemingly got through the Affordable Healthcare Act WITHOUT deeply meaningful reform have been involved. In the case of interferon manufacturers like Biogen the evidence is incontrovertible. Your very long history indites you.
I am still waiting for the 2013-2014 market reforms to kick in to see whether these companies actually do start COMPETING. Nobody seems interested in seeing what will happen there. Many have been blaming Obama, for continually escalating costs that had already been in play for more than 20 years; and for which Congress had repetitively kicked the can down the road…through both liberal and conservative administrations.
And Rush, sorry, I’m not a huge fan but the media frenzy was way out of line and a destructive distraction from the real topics at hand.
…but the media frenzy and all of the massive celebrate over Limbaugh’s short-term(?) demise points to a bigger flaw with American politics: Our obsession with personalities instead of issues. The truth is, nothing about the Fluke testimony or Rush’s objections address WHY healthcare costs are out-of-control and helping smash the middle class against rocks. 18+% of GDP and climbing like a rocket out-of-control is NOT gonna be fixed by giving contraceptives to college kids.
We like loving and hating media personalities. We love it when bloggers and press go into a frenzy over unjustifiable or just plain mean use of the word “slut”…we love “reality dramas” that don’t make us think too hard. When it comes to diving into the real issues: We’re lazy. Nothing I’ve read about the Rush-Fluke drama tells me how we’re going to fix healthcare. We’d rather twitter about how many sponsors Rush has lost.
I want to see the healthcare cost problem contained…in a way that serves ALL Americans (not just the rich).
It’s no fluke why contraceptives are so expensive….
Sandra Fluke basically said to Congress, “Contraceptives shouldn’t cost me $3,000 a year.” She has a point but the problem should not be rectified by insurance. The press run around in hysteric, ratings generating circles over Limbaugh’s clearly miscalculated remarks. EVERYBODY MISSES THE POINT, the real reason contraceptives cost so damn much: All healthcare is RIGGED BY INSURANCE, by tying health insurance inextricably to big business, and giving health insurance access to costs that the rest of us don’t receive. If producers of female contraceptives start having to COMPETE for business instead of being handed big checks via chummy insurance contracts, they will drop prices!!!
Big insurance: (A) SHOULD NOT BE LINKED TO BIG BUSINESS and (B) SHOULD NOT GAIN ACCESS TO PRODUCT PRICES THAT INDIVIDUALS DO NOT RECEIVE. Basically, healthcare manufacturers should have to offer the same prices to everybody on a 1-off basis. You WATCH how fast prices come in line.
Healthcare manufactures of contraceptives, biotech drugs, prosthetics, you name it…should have to COMPETE FOR BUSINESS.
What your state legislators are up to.
Unless you want a government “Of the Corporations, for the Corporations, and By the Corporations” to continue: Pay attention to your state legislators carefully and share their activity. Governments should be transparent. Not behind closed doors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdG9VRU3bAQ
This Youtube was put up July 2011. First time I’ve had a chance to watch it.
The world gasped, held its breath, and moved on: The Threshold of Real Destructiveness
On the bright side: My gut says we may still be a generation or two from completely trashing the global Eco-system. That’s only my own intuition; and it’s predicated on Mother Nature’s ability to relatively quickly adjust to our abuse.
On the other hand, in just the past decade, we’ve begun to very rapidly elevate environmental destructiveness to a new level, a scale that makes earlier efforts look like child’s play. What fascinates me, in particular, is our human capacity to blindly follow the herd and ignore or shrug off significant warning signs. We totally avoid comparing our slip-ups with history. We’d much rather hop in SUV’s and trot off to kiddies’ soccer games than contemplate the pain we may create for our children’s grandchildren. We view each successive news story of more egregious infractions as independent. We ignore the larger pattern of destructiveness that may be unfolding. I see this pattern emerging, for example, when collectively viewing the Fukushima Meltdown, the Deepwater Horizon Spill, and Hurricane Katrina, just three events in less than 6 years. There are others. We’re getting way quicker at this sort of thing.
First, examine each independently from a distant perspective. In the case of Fukushima, believe it or not, the Japanese government secretly drew up plans to evacuate Tokyo as the disaster ensued. Far more telling, however, was the detection of Fukushima radiation in Western U.S. cow’s milk months after the disaster. The radiation was of a short-term, quickly degrading sort. The point I’d like to focus on here is that unforeseen consequences for a reactor in Japan, a facility comprising just a few scant square miles of real estate, included nuclear fallout repercussions in other countries thousands of miles away. The world gasped, held its breath a moment, contemplated its mortality, let out a collective sigh, and then completely forgot and moved on. Japanese reactors have, on average, three times the backup battery capacity of those in the United States. Many U.S. reactors lie on fault lines. Nobody talks about Fukushima anymore. It competed with “American Idol” and “Survivor” for ratings for a couple months and then grew stale.
Moving on to the Deepwater Horizon. Fully 1/3 of the U.S. seafood supply was placed in jeopardy. Please contemplate that. We really don’t know how much petroleum is now in the fish we eat. They test with “trained human smellers,” kinda like when they research new fragrance designs for deodorant. Except for our courtroom “Perry Masonesque” fascination with BP’s legal damage penalties, nobody seems interested in discussing this disaster anymore. The tiny perforation that caused all the commotion was scarcely 24″ in diameter. I can stretch my arms wider than the hole that was drilled in the bottom of the Gulf and yet for many months one of the world’s largest and most profitable corporations could not wrestle the out-of-control-beast into submission. They had opened Pandora’s Box and they simply could not contain the demon. They tried and tried and had no way of stilling the plume of gunk that spewed from the base of our kitchen table. The primary cause was later determined to be a design flaw in the blowout preventer, not a manufacturing or implementation flaw. And even though a later reliable blowout prevent design had not yet been developed, we very quickly proceeded to approve subsequent drilling after the disaster anyway. BP was the first to proceed! Millions of dollars were being lost daily. The world gasped, held its breath a moment, contemplated its mortality, let out a collective sigh, and then completely forgot and moved on.
Looking back at Hurricane Katrina, a similar devastating circumstance was created by humans inadvertently “designing” risky circumstances. In the case of Katrina, yes environmental consequences were involved, to be sure, but less consequential from a global perspective. The main reason Hurricane Katrina jumps to mind for me, is simply as just one more brilliant example of our ability to blindly create human-based disasters on rapidly growing scales by ignoring and failing to assess risk. The flooding that occurred was unquestionably the result governments and engineers collectively ignoring decades of evidence that the below-sea-level New Orleans was at risk. In fact a very good friend of mine pointed out to me a couple years back that our “six sigma” quality culture appears incapable of accurately measuring true “six sigma” risk for such extreme circumstances, basically where risks are very large costs we can dismissively defer. We attach complex MBA level and PhD level words to the statistics and decide together that this conversation requires far too much gray matter for most mere citizens. Unless you have one of these 3-letter acronym attached to your name you’re not even qualified to discuss it. The events are for your entertainment only. The MBA’s and PhD’s are where they rightfully belong: firmly entrenched in academia and the corporate bowels of the world. And so, a few months after Katrina had passed the world gasped, held its breath a moment, contemplated its mortality, let out a collective sigh, and then completely forgot and moved on.
How can we possibly accurately measure risk for disasters that have not yet occurred? The Fukushima Reactor was a “six sigma” event. It wasn’t even supposed to be possible. The damage that occurred was supposed to have been accounted for. The Deepwater Horizon’s last defense was a flawed preventer design. The latest news article discussing preventer designs that I could manage to Google up was March 2011…and still does not guarantee me a better blowout preventer design. I think maybe we’re assuming methods of capping spills has improved. Maybe on the next round we can manage to hold the deluge to only a few million gallons that spew into our food supply. This time I’m sure we’ve accounted for everything. In the case of Katrina, I suppose I’m mostly compelled to contemplate the thousands of families that lost everything, lifetimes of building, because nobody wants to pay taxes or worry about mitigating serious collective risk. All productive efforts must focus on building the economic engine and growing it as quickly as possible. Worry about consequences later. Defer all costs that can be obscured or made cloudy.
The lesson? Very very simple: Human ingenuity and technology is proving capable of creating unforeseen disasters on rapidly growing scales. But if you live in North Dakota, London, or Singapore you should not bother yourself with what’s going on in Fukushima, the Gulf of Mexico, or New Orleans. Your primary responsibility as a human being is to create economic value and to be as relatively happy as you can be for as low a cost economically to the titans of the world as possible. Those disaster events were created for your entertainment value only. As for CO2: Yeah yeah, so the past two centuries have shown a monstrous shift in rate of CO2 change never before witnessed globally. So what?? You can’t see CO2. You can’t smell CO2. We’ve had lots before, millions of years ago. So it’s nothing for you to be concerned with. You are small and your opinion does not matter unless unless you agree with the profitable side. Unless you run one of the largest corporations or economies your thoughts do not weigh in. Corporations are far more critical to rights and global well-being than you (Citizens United – Supreme Court). As long as you create a very modest, incremental slice of GDP you are doing everything you can and should be doing as a human. If your buddy on Facebook says CO2 does not matter you’d best agree with him. To disagree would not be human. More “plantlike” (hence the accurate phrase “tree hugger”).
(PS…Just in case your pattern recognition skills are beginning to perk up a wee skosh please note: Two of the aforementioned disasters above involve energy production.)
So which did come first? The chicken or the egg? If you subscribe to the notion of evolution, which I do, then the egg almost certainly came first. The reason is because the egg is a pretty complex structure/mechanism that most likely existed in previous versions well preceding the moment that the chicken-like-bird-dinasaur-thing that preceded chickens actually became a chicken. Somewhere between T-rex and now, some featherless, dog-sized ancestor of the chicken was already giving birth to its young via the methodology we collectively know today as “egg.”
So the next time somebody attempts to cleverly ask you “which came first? Chicken or egg?” Simply smile, knowingly, and say flatly, “Easy, Egg! For very obvious reasons, Egg.” If they persist with the useless line of questioning then simply direct them to this blog: “Go visit sevencell.wordpress.com. It will explain everything.”
BS Meter: Hard Right vs. Hard Left regarding Athabasca Oil Sands
Didn’t really know much about the “Athabasca Oil Sands.” Can’t necessarily say I know a lot now either. So I ran across this http://www.leftistmedia.com artical, http://www.leftistmedia.com/obama-gives-the-unions-a-slap-down-over-pipeline/
Perhaps the most telling quote:
The problem is that tree hugging dirt worshipping obstructionists have convinced President Obama that the Ogallala Aquifer is much more important then the 200,000 construction and manufacturing jobs and generate more then 585 million in new taxes for states and communities.
(Hint: Go look up the word “aquifer” in a dictionary) So I googled and dipped my toe into the first hard-left looking article I could snag, http://kellylowenstein.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/andrew-nikiforuks-outrage-about-the-tar-sands-of-alberta/
And the line of reasoning went a little more like this:
The particular type of oil drilling involves digging deep into the tar sands and then separating the bitumen from the rest of the material that is extracted. This is the equivalent to an environmental triple whammy, in that the land is destroyed and tremendous amounts of natural gas and water are required for the cleaning process. The environmental consequences are just part of the problem, though…
At this point, my BS meter is beginning to tilt in a specific direction. Shhhhhh, I won’t spoil the ending and tell which direction yet. I wanted to see exactly what the “Athabasca Oil Sands” looked like, so I went to google, typed “Athabasca Oil Sands” in quotes, searched, and then clicked the google “images” button at the top: Google Images.
We used to get our oil this way:
The Uncivilized Way
But we’ve gotten more efficient. Now advanced technology allows us to do it this way:
Advanced Technology is Super Cool
But who am I kiddin’? This is AMERICA. You REALLY don’t want to read about EITHER side of this shit do you?? Work was hard today! Just gimme my iPhone uplink, my hulu, and I’m golden, right?? Sorry about that. Carry on. This wasn’t directed at you anyway. You’ve only got the baby Hummer. (Oh dear God, I’m having flashes…today I literally saw some kid that looked like he was 12 driving mommy and daddy’s baby Hummer down a state highway in Georgia…Welcome to America. Sing it with me, “And I’m Proud to be an American where at least I…know I can give my kid the keys to my Hummer so he can impress his little girlfriend…. Sing it LOUD. Sing it PROUD. THIS is your America. This is precisely your America.)
American Healthcare = Indentured Servitude for the Middle Class
The notion that we should continue to link healthcare to large companies…is nuts.
Let’s step back and look, as much as possible at job creation over the past 3 decades. Most of it continues to occur at small companies despite the fact that health care costs have increased disproportionately for small employers over that time-frame:
Prior work from the Ewing Marion Kauffman
Foundation has shown that, since 1980, nearly all
net job creation in the United States has occurred in
firms less than five years old.
But in America…if you have a family…if you want to cover your loved ones at a reasonable cost (nothing’s really reasonable these days, but comparatively speaking). What is your only choice? You are expected to suck it up and beg for a job at a big company that has been cutting back employment for 3 decades straight now. Or more accurately to beg for a job at big companies that have been consistently shipping jobs overseas for 3 decades straight now. And the insurance industry continues to insist that a system tied to big employers is better…Now why is that???
It angers me…absolutely infuriates me, that statistics comparing actual job creation are almost impossible to come by. Do a Google on “large employers” “small employers” comparison, or similar. Almost all links you find are comparisons on health care costs. No comparisons on who (large vs. small) is actually creating the jobs over multiple decades, over the very long-haul. Why is this information so difficult to find? Because Robert Reich is substantially correct. Corporations in America have taken death-grip stranglehold on Washington politics (and on press spin as well as collegiate research) with another result that any long-term unfavorable comparisons for corporations as a whole are largely avoided at all costs.
And all the while the health insurance industry obstinately insists on propping up its business at large employers: Profitable and low-risk.
So here is the result: The most experienced employees, the 40-somethings and 50-somethings, the ones with families sick of working 70 and 80-hour weeks just so they can beg for the chance to work another week and not loose their job to India, THE EMPLOYEES WITH THE MOST PRACTICAL BUSINESS KNOWLEDGE THAT MIGHT CONTRIBUTE TO CREATIVE NEW COMPANIES AND HENCE TO BURGEONING JOB GROWTH: These employees are terrified of looking for jobs where jobs are growing. They are indentured servants to large corporations in America, held hostage by a health-care system that only makes costs reasonable to employees of large employers. Additionally, because experienced employees tend to seek employment with large employers because of the benefits, large employers enjoy these employees at a comparative discount. In essence since the health care benefit differential offers larger employers a “free pass” to cherry-pick the talent. A perpetual, happily silent, convenient pass to rob small companies of smart employees. That is NOT free market and that is NOT good for the economy under any conditions. Larger employers should NOT automatically gain access to reduced systemic costs simply because of their size; because then they get access to talent without earning it by creating net new jobs with higher wages.
I am single. I have two daughters. My wife died. She had a preexisting condition. No one would cover her. The last three years of her life were a substantially fear-driven ride straight through Hell. We played by the rules until we finally ran out of Cobra…paying ridiculous costs WHILE UNEMPLOYED. I will never work for another large company as long as I live. They are culturally by and large the most disloyal enterprises I have ever contemplated when viewed over the past 30 years. I am finished begging for a job with fucking big companies just so I can cover my family. Done. Any income from this day forward will be at my own companies. If it puts ME into the grave. So be it. I worry for my family…but this system has proven it will not create a stable employment condition for me. I’ll work for myself.
So when you insist that tax breaks are needed for job creation…I’ll grant the discussion may be worthwhile with regard to small companies; but if you think any large companies will behave substantially differently than they have on the balance since 1980; then you are stupid. They have displayed the pattern for 30 years. Tea Partiers: Stop pandering to corporate America. Stop demanding tax breaks for companies that don’t increase wages OR jobs over the long-haul and stop propping up the health insurance industry by clinging desperately to a band-aided system that is collapsing. Stop kissing the asses of the likes of the Koch Brothers, Tea Partiers. Stop kissing big oil’s ass, health insurance’s ass, stop kissing the corporate ass. Then we can chat together as friends. But as long as you continue to behave with all the vision of a myopic Pitt-bull who only foams at the mouth over taxes…We have nothing to talk about.
Kill the link between insurance and large companies before that link kills America. If you start there, other meaningful solutions will follow. That link is far more insidious and destructive than a federal deficit. WWII debt was far far higher than today…and the 50’s wound up being one of our most profitable decades ever. The insurance/corporation link…is progressively eroding America’s capacity to shift talent to where it is needed most. There is a hard brake, a very hard resistance, on getting smart people to small companies where they belong, creating jobs. Get a clue, Tea Party. It’s not about taxes and it’s not about the deficit. It’s about the link between corporations and Washington and between corporations and insurance. And you…you just rock right on sniffing Koch butt. It’s all you can do to focus on one thing.
Washington DC and the Press are disgusting. Republicans are hypocritical; the press is badly biased; and the Democrats are either too cowardly or too excessively supercilious to circle the wagons and protect their own. Take your pick. They’ve got no common sense. The Democratic Party is still letting the hard right run roughshod over the middle class like a whipping boy.
So on Meet the Press…David what’s-his-name lets Reince Priebus get away with responding that David Ditter is “old news.” Mmmm. “OK,” David says, “Old News…Good enough for me. Let’s get back to bashing Anthony Wiener.”
That is the useless press for you. David Ditter BROKE THE LAW. He’s a criminal and he should resign. The “American Idol” spectacle that the press has turned Anthony Wiener’s escapade into is pathetic. His constituents wanted him to stay. Who cares about constituents? Gee, “Let’s use the Twitter pictures for the highest ratings we can get for a couple weeks and get back to peddling Washington to corporations. I think next the Supreme Court should rule that corporations are MORE human than humans. Now that they ruled (Citizens United case) that corporations should have the same rights as individuals. Maybe we can find a conservative enough justice on the next round.
Middle Class, bend over and kiss your arse goodbye. The media and the Republican Party are hell-bent on doing you in. As long as there are far less expensive middle class workers in India and China…corporations will forcefully continue to siphon off and sell overseas any value generation schemes you can create. Don’t kid yourself. Ditter thinks family values are a joke. He’s totally for sale; and this whole Wiener thing is about gutting the loudest liberal voices in DC whenever and wherever possible.
SevenCell 