Dems And Repubs Create Sneaky Backdoor to Privatize Medicare

Instead of looking to improve and expand Medicare as the majority in the U.S. favor, the Biden administration is using a back door created by the Trump administration to invite Wall St. to privatize it. Since this would be an unpopular move, a bureaucratic structure known as Direct Contracting Entities (DCE) has crept in behind the scenes.

In case you think the U.S. health care system already has too many middlemen raking in profits from people's illnesses, you ain't seen nothing yet.  

Doctors are enticed to sign up for a DCE on the promise that their revenues will go up. 

Then patients are opted into the DCE without their consent or even knowledge. They can opt out again and change doctors, but only if they know about it.

Physicians for a National Health Program has put together this explainer about the threat posed by DCEs -- which already exist in 43 states, including Maine. (It's a pdf so I can't embed it but I'll include a screenshot.)

Why would both Democratic and Republican administrations create a way for private investors to prey on the elderly or people with disabilities who currently receive Medicare?

Because when Wall St. says Jump, both Democrats and Republicans ask, How high? 

The big bucks that flow into campaign coffers on "both sides of the aisle" are what buys representation in this alleged democracy, while the people get fleeced with the government's cooperation.

We already spend the most on health -- enough and then some to fund universal health care -- and rather than good health we have lousy outcomes. The fact that we alone of rich countries have no public health system is a direct result of ultra wealthy health "insurance" corporations sponsoring our government.  

Commerce and health just don't mix.

A more in-depth discussion of DCEs is here on YouTube.

Join me in signing the PNHP petition to stop DCEs here.

Masses Demand Medicare For All, The Most Broken Campaign Promise Of Democrats

Today the 600,000+ people in the U.S. who died from COVID won't be marching for Medicare for All. 

Neither will many Democrats in Congress who campaigned on the most popular form of universal health care, a basic human right that people in the U.S. lack. 

My own congressperson Jared Golden co-sponsored M4A legislation last time around. Then he ran for re-election and took campaign contributions from big tech firms looking to expand into the for-profit health care sector. Guess who doesn't support M4A anymore? His rationale: he's heard from constituents that they want to keep their employer-sponsored healthcare. Really? Then why do Mainers call it the Unaffordable Care Act? 

Once you've been sick with your ACA mandated insurance you understand that Obama's deal with the insurance industry to guarantee their profits had nothing to do with providing you with a reasonable standard of care.

The so-called squad of progressive Democrats came under fire this year from lefty organizers who wanted them to withhold their vote to re-elect Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi until she agreed to put M4A to a vote. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, formerly the darling of people who yearn to believe the Democratic Party serves people rather than corporations, has fallen from grace over the "Force the Vote" issue. Progressive types see her coddling Pelosi, whose wealth has grown by hundreds of millions in office, and whose husband just raked in $5 million in profits buying tech stocks Congress was about to regulate. 

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14.6 million people lost their health insurance during the pandemic. Pelosi's response: continue enjoying the gold standard health care she has as a member of Congress while showing off her two refrigerators full of gelato. Together she and her husband have grown obscenely wealthy as she represented the interests of corporations rather than the people, and no one in the squad cares to oppose her. (Note: that's why electing women doesn't solve anything.)

Republicans are just as bad, but they're more honest about it.

It's clear that health care is a top priority for many voters. Inadequate insurance plus major illness is a leading cause of household bankruptcy and home foreclosures. Many of my friends are affluent enough in retirement to live in Mexico part of the year and receive their health care at affordable prices. Many of my friends are low income enough to be on MaineCare, a medicaid expansion program that applies to any children and some adults in my state. Many of my friends can only afford catastrophic health insurance because the premiums for comprehensive coverage are too high for the middle class to handle. 

That's why Democrats continue to run on promising to support M4A. 

A slew of so-called progressive Democrats claimed they supported it while campaiging, and then backpedaled as soon as they were in office.

Thus the marches today in big cities across the nation. Also the widespread campaigns to bring single payer health care at the state level.

I'm involved with both Maine's campaign to pressure Jared Golden to support M4A as well as the campaign to mandate that the legislature enact universal health care by a ballot initiative in 2022. And I support today's rally in Portland which will hear from Jess Falero, an advocate for the unhoused who will eloquently share just how much it sucks to be without housing AND health care.

But here's the reality as I see it: two things need to happen before the U.S. can achieve univeral coverage via M4A.

First, the Pentagon would have to be defunded to afford it. 

The reason we have warfare but not healthcare is that both are enormously expensive and members of Congress would rather keep their bread buttered than help their neighbors who are struggling. (Just yesterday the Senate voted to increase Biden's $715 billion Pentagon budget by another $25 billion to keep the weapons industry lobbyists happy.)

source: https://www.mic.com/articles/167192/general-strike-feb-17-what-will-happen-if-activists-stage-a-nationwide-strike-against-trump

Second, the workers of this nation will need to stage a general strike. 

As we saw from the pandemic, their labor is essential to turning the profits demanded by capitalists. Only withholding that labor would exert enough pressure on our elected officials to bend to the will of the people. 

ANGELA WEISS / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Here's hoping that today's marches display the desperation people feel around health care in this country, and bring together organizers who can make it happen, without being coopted by the Democratic Party.

Patriarchy Will End In Violent Explosions, Possibly Nuclear

Gender reveal party in Arizona that sparked widespread fires in 2017.

Another of those lame-brained gender reveal parties has caused considerable distress and damage, this time in New Hampshire, where an explosion big enough to crack nearby house foundations was set off by the expectant father.

Men have long suffered from womb envy, a disempowered feeling of jealousy at females' superior power to bring life into being. Knowing the science of reproduction, i.e. the role of the male in fertilization, has done little to address this. 

Males raised in our current violent, power-tripping society thrash about killing wantonly and setting off explosions that make other males very wealthy. 

Source: https://iranpress.com/content/37315/has-seen-mass-shootings-the-last-month

The modern proclivity to determine an unborn child's genitalia and then announce it to the world may also be a sort of backlash against the non-binary movement so threatening to traditional order-keepers. (I can remember my Christian fundamentalist grandmother and her peers being horrified when males began growing their hair long in the 60's "because you can't tell the boys from the girls." This always mystified me because I still could.)

This news on damaging property and frightening your neighbors "for fun", while distressing, was much less so than the overnight report from Israeli-occupied Jerusalem. 

Source:https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/4/23/dozens-of-palestinians-wounded-by-israeli-police-in-jerusalem  Israeli police officers stand next to a burning barricade during clashes with Palestinians [Ammar Awad/Reuters]

From a Jewish human rights activist I follow:

Jewish Supremacists carried out a pogram last night in Jerusalem, hundreds marching the streets chanting “death to Arabs” & assaulting Palestinians >100 wounded.The event was not an aberration, but the logical extension of a racist apartheid state

— Ariel Gold אריאל 🕎 ☮️🔥✡️ (@ArielElyseGold) April 23, 2021

History is doomed to repeat itself, apparently, with fresh victims in every generation. 

Should we be worried that the increasingly violent nation of Israel, a best buddy of the increasingly violent nation of the U.S., has nuclear weapons?

Yes. 

And we should also be worried that the U.S. military tweeted about its renewed commitment to nuclear war under a Democratic administration.

#USSTRATCOM Posture Statement Preview: The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option. pic.twitter.com/4Oe7xkl05L

— US Strategic Command (@US_Stratcom) April 20, 2021

Notice how it is "an adversary" that is supposedly threatening the nuclear ceasefire of sorts that has existed since Nagasaki. (I say "of sorts" because of the depleted uranium weapons used to this day by the Pentagon in its never-ending air strikes.)

Our least bad option would be to defund the Pentagon immediately. 

This would lead to a halt to encircling and menacing Russia on its European borders, and a halt to menacing China in the South China Sea. Both would significantly reduce the risk of nuclear war as both those nations have nuclear weapons but have not used them.

Defunding the Pentagon would lead to a jobs crisis as every state in the U.S. has deeply embedded building weapons systems into its economy. This could lead to the very welcome development of a Green New Deal conversion to building things we actually need, thus creating even more jobs with federal funding.

Defunding the Pentagon could also lead quickly to the conditions making universal healthcare possible. 

The primary reason people in the U.S. are suffering in poverty without adequate or even any healthcare is that the resources to fund Medicare for All are always given to the Pentagon and its contractors. 

Defunding the Pentagon would also be the model for defunding the violent police departments who appear determined to spark civil war in the U.S. by slaughtering people of color.

Including children and people on the spectrum and people with mental health issues and people with developmental disabilities. Yup, that's who the violent white supremacist regime of Germany slaughtered, too, while focusing their cruelty on Jewish Europeans.

Mark Twain said history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

You know what else rhymes? Live by the bomb, die by the bomb. And that's where the road we're on right now is headed.

Judging The Biden Administration Not By Words, But By Deeds

A displaced family in Marib, Yemen, carries a winter aid package back to their shelter. Source: UN

Those keeping an eye on the foreign policy scorecard for the Democratic regime just installed in Washington DC are noticing ominous actions which are only slightly concealed by soothing words.

• An announcement that U.S. support for the Saudi's brutal war on Yemen would end was couched in weasel words. Yemeni professor Shireen Al-Adeimi, who teaches in Michigan, teamed up with crack investigative reporter Sarah Lazare to parse the details of what this could mean for the long suffering civilian population of Yemen.

• One of the first acts of the new administration was sending more U.S. troops into Syria where the long running civil war/proxy war has already caused untold suffering. Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in space explains the context.

• The Pentagon sent troops into Norway for the first time but Norway then canceled the military exercises planned because of a spike in COVID-19 infections. As reported in Military.com: 

• "Last year's iteration of Cold Response, another major NATO exercise, was also significantly scaled back due to the pandemic. Training in and around the Arctic Circle has been a priority for NATO forces to counter Russia in the region." My comment: what could go wrong?

• The new administration announced this week they are keeping the Trump administration's Space Force as a new branch of the military. Of course they are.

Biden's cabinet and his pick for USAID are neoliberal and neocon warhawks so all of the above was entirely predictable.

Meanwhile, although Congress easily passed a $750+ billion Pentagon budget recently, they can't agree on pandemic relief for the millions teetering on the verge of eviction and starvation in the U.S.

And those of us who want the COVID-19 vaccine are still waiting. Ok, that one's not on Biden yet. A family member who works at a leading research hospital told me the general consensus is three months turnaround time for national level health care planning and execution to be guided by science. 

But most of us understand that, without reining in the military budget, we'll never get Medicare for All and, without universal health care, the pandemic is likely to be a very long event. 

As in, retirees like me may not live long enough to see the end of it. Or of the planned endlessness of the "war on terror."

International right wing death cult

Source: The Independent

There are two reasons I was relieved that Biden-Harris won the recent election. First, Black people (and Native people, and Latinx people) expressed how dangerous it felt to have the demagogue with bad hair urging violence against them by his disaffected white supremacist followers. (The fact that two architects of the carceral state and the ultra racist "war on drugs" represent relief for BIPOC is emblematic of the catastrophic racism foundational to our way of life in the USA. Not to mention the warmongering against brown people around the planet.)

The second reason I was relieved is that I am anticipating the end of headlines like this one from yesterday:

Source: Lewiston Sun Journal

At this point you may be wondering,

What do Maine's COVID-19 transmission rates have to do with who's in the White House?

Thinking about the campaign that just concluded, I am remembering several photographs and headlines:

Source: The Telegraph reporting on VP Pence's rally in Hermon, Maine Oct. 19

Mills ‘disappointed’ coronavirus guidelines weren’t followed at Pence rally

Hundreds gathered in Hermon on Monday for a ‘MAGA’ rally hosted by VP Mike Pence; Gov. Mills said she was “disappointed” and “saddened” by what she saw at the rally.

AUGUSTA, Maine — Maine Gov. Janet Mills voiced her disappointment of the Vice President over the “Make America Great Again!” rally in Hermon earlier this week, where hundreds—many not wearing masks—gathered for the outdoor rally.

At the Maine CDC coronavirus briefing on Tuesday, Mills said she was “disappointed” and “saddened” by what she saw at the rally—large crowds, little to no social distancing, and scant mask-wearing among attendees.

One rally causing that much of an uptick in COVID cases three weeks later? Hard to believe.

But of course it wasn't just one rally. Multiple rallies for GOP candidates in places other than Hermon like Bangor, Saco, Levant, etc. saw crowds gathering from around the state, unmasked, and not socially distancing. Most of the rallies were to secure that one electoral college vote from Maine's 2nd district. They succeeded, but was the price for the people of Maine worth it?

Source: Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center

Academic research has demonstrated that nations with authoritarian oligarchic governments, like the US, Russia and Brazil, have failed miserably at containing the pandemic. Meanwhile countries led by socially-minded governments like New Zealand, Australia, and China have done best.

Maine is still full of people defiantly unmasked despite the governor's executive orders intended to keep more of us healthy and alive. I'm home in the 2nd district now that my own campaign has ended, and I don't dare go into the local store or post office.

I'm not overly optimistic about the new regime's ability to get a raging pandemic under control because they are deeply committed to keeping the profit motive in our failed system of health care. Only people can change that, probably by mounting a general strike until they get universal health care like Medicare for All.

In the meantime, I believe epidemiologists. I'm willing to wear a mask, cancel social events, and take extra precautions because I want to live to see my grandchildren grow and thrive. Don't you?