04.19.09
Connecting the dots: From Tea Parties to taxes
Let’s skip the loaded debate over who benefited from Bush-era tax cuts, and move right on to the guts of the current question: 
are taxes unfair, and is a tea-bag an apt modern rallying symbol?
People having trouble making ends meet have reason to wish bank and credit-card fees were less onerous, and they naturally resent the inevitable burden of any tax they think is unfair. Yet nobody in the U.S.A. wants our local, state, or federal agencies to outright shut down the way they have in Somalia. We value the services the government provides even though we hope Obama can cut costs and reverse the run-away growth of the U.S. federal government that has characterized the beginning of this century.
Fair, easily understood taxes are a reasonable means to pay for public education, defense, bridges & roads, and so on – so long as they aren’t roads and bridges to nowhere that benefit some special interest that donates to a congressional campaign to win favors. Nobody doubts we need on-going investments to keep this country a great place to live, work, and raise families – yet amid the on-going economic meltdown there’s a natural anger when we hear about bailout money going to folks who earn more in a single bonus than most Americans earn in a lifetime.
So when we argue about tax cuts, let’s make sure we’re clear on just whose taxes are being cut. We’ve been giving tax breaks to oil companies, and now Exxon’s atop the Fortune 500 – it doesn’t take an accounting degree to know that’s not fair to people trying to pay for health care, college tuition, and the home they live in. Congress has been looking out for the already-rich at the expense of the rest of us by creating byzantine, opaque loopholes in exchange for campaign donations and junkets, and that has simply got to stop. People aren’t upset about taxes, they’re upset about not being sure if everybody’s paying their fair share.
In the late 1700s, in an era when nobody dared drink unboiled water, merchants and bureaucrats conspired to tax the tea sent to America – the tea that made getting enough fluid more palatable – at exorbitant rates. In a gesture not unlike cutting off their noses to spite their own faces a boycott was enforced – and a message sent – by vandalizing private property, thus insuring that the captains had no merchandise to sell and no collected taxes (or profits) to take back to England. Naturally coffee filled in the gap in the colonies for some time. (The U.S. didn’t immediately become a coffee nation, though. That change is usually tied to the tea embargo during the War of 1812.)
In modern terms, tea is considerably more central to the daily living of people in Europe and Asia. The fact that every student of U.S. history learns about the “Boston Tea Party” apparently made it seem a catchy sound-bite as behind the scenes operatives sought to foment a movement timed to use as a media event on April 15th,
but the effect of the media coverage seems to have given us more sense of Alice’s Mad Hatter than colonial rebels battling distant rich despots. The President’s shining success at the Summit of the Americas further diminished the amount of attention the story got in various media.
Curiously, in hindsight the naive echoing of the slang-term “tea-bagging” by conservative pundits probably drove more web traffic to Google and the UrbanDictionary than the actual events. It certainly detracted from impact of the hype leading up to the not-so-grassroots parties.
I’m betting the folks with Google Ad Sense terms tied to those searches, and “astro-turfing“ are enjoying a brief bonanza of exposure.
04.03.09
Did you know Duke Medical system has one billing clerk per bed?
Single-payer national health insurance isn’t socialized medicine (and if it was you can bet most doctors in the U.S. wouldn’t support it.) Single-payer is simply a streamlined system in which a single agency organizes health-care financing and payments: delivery of medical care remains essentially as it in in the U.S. today – largely private
. All that’s lost is the red-tape and restrictions.
Who’s against it then? Insurance companies, because they profit enormously from the current system – even though they add no value. In fact, many people will tell you that insurance companies make it hard to get what they deserve and pay for with the premiums. That’s why it was such a major focus of Obama’s campaign in 2008: he proposed that modern health care should include giving everybody in the U.S. coverage.
To get there we need the freedom to choose between keeping private insurance—for those lucky enough to have any—and opting into a universally available public health insurance option (something like Medicare.) Ultimately, by reducing the number of agencies handling the payments we simplify the task for hospitals and clinics – less of the time and money goes to red tape, and more goes to actual medical services.
Ultimately that also means diminishing the power and profits of the private insurance companies currently siphoning their lavish earnings off your health care payemnts. They make money off the red tape, and by letting non-medical personnel decide what should and should not be prescribed to treat patients, and that’s a large part of what has caused costs to soar while coverage just shrinks.
It’s time for a reality check. Insurance companies profit from the current system, so naturally they’re opposed to changes that hurt their bottom line and their corporate bonuses. What value do they add to the process?
Money Talks
Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, a physician and the “chairman emeritus” of the DNC, is now on the pointy end of the stick in this battle against the entrenched big money interests trying to preserve our utterly inadequate for-profit insurance system. Big money is lobbying hard inside the D.C. beltway, and money talks.
One way to talk back is by showing D.C. many are watching the fight. If you haven’t already done so, click here to stand with Dean. Add your name, then spread the word to your friends, family, and co-workers.
Send email with the link; use your Facebook status to tell people about the campaign; write a blog post, twitter, do whatever you do to rattle your network of friends – we have seen that when D.C. realizes they’re in the limelight the roaches scatter and politicians realize that self-preservation means answering to the electorate, not the lobbyists.
“The reason we spend more and get less than the rest of the world is because we have a patchwork system of for-profit payers. Private insurers necessarily waste health dollars on things that have nothing to do with care: overhead, underwriting, billing, sales and marketing departments as well as huge profits and exorbitant executive pay. Doctors and hospitals must maintain costly administrative staffs to deal with the bureaucracy. Combined, this needless administration consumes one-third (31 percent) of Americans’ health dollars.“
That’s not just my opinion. It’s not Dean’s rhetoric or President Obama’s take on it either. 
That quote is drawn from the Physicians for a National Health Care Program. They want you to urge Congress and the President to enact a single-payer system - a comprehensive National Health Insurance (NHI) Program – now. I know it’s fashionable in certain circles to say government can’t get things done – but insurance companies aren’t getting it done right. Let’s put an end to insurance companies deciding what’s best in terms of medication and treatment now, those decisions should be left to doctors and nurses, not accountants and CEOs.
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