What Are The Odds The Bush Administration …
By NoQuarter on July 25, 2007 at 10:50 PM in Al Qaeda, Current Affairs, Food Safety/FDA, Intelligence, Iran, NIE, Soldiers/Veterans
By SusanUnPC
What are the odds the Bush administration … will heed the admonitions of “[c]urrent and former intelligence officials [who] say the Bush Administration’s National Intelligence Estimate regarding terrorist threats to the United States does not provide evidence to support its assertions and may have inflated the domestic threat posed by the Lebanese political and military group Hezbollah, perhaps because it receives financial support from Iran”? (For her Raw Story article, Larisa Alexandrovna interviewed numerous intelligence experts on and off the record, including Robert Baer.)
… will enact recommendations by a presidential commission on veterans’ healthcare — even though former senator Robert Dole (R-Kansas) today told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that many of the simple but dramatic changes for veterans’ disability claims and care can be instituted immediately by the executive branch, without need to pass legislation?
… will act on the recommendations of its just-appointed food safety panel (oh, lord, another panel, which I swear is all about kicking the can down the road)? Particularly with “the benign neglect, if not outright dismantling, of government agencies designed to oversee food safety” and “the situation represent[ing] a disaster waiting to happen”? (This is such a damn fine editorial — and frightening — I insist you read it: “Nation had better make food safety a high priority again.”)
What do all of these crises have in common? They’re victims of the Bush administration’s systematic politicalization of information and its systematic starvation of federal agencies.
The systematic starvation includes the privatizing of Medicare. Writes Congressman Pete Stark today:
A decade ago, Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich suggested he’d like to see Medicare “wither on the vine” and cease to guarantee quality health care to our seniors and people with disabilities. Today, Republicans are putting Gingrich’s plan into action. They’re fighting to continue massive overpayments to Medicare’s private plans at the expense of the traditional Medicare program.
Thanks to years of Republican “reform,” private insurers receive, on average, 12 percent more than the government pays for care in traditional Medicare. That’s what every independent, objective and non-partisan organization that has taken a look at Medicare’s payments policies has found.
Why then do Republicans insist on continuing these overpayments? Because their holy grail is privatization, not “fiscal responsibility.” The more private insurers are paid to provide Medicare’s benefits, the greater their profits and the bigger their incentive to sign up beneficiaries. And the more people enrolled in private plans, the easier it will be for Republicans to pursue full-fledged Medicare privatization.
Republicans hope to turn all of Medicare into a voucher that seniors and people with disabilities could use to purchase private insurance. This would eliminate Medicare’s guaranteed benefit and force beneficiaries to fend for themselves. The result will be higher costs, fewer benefits, and less health care for Medicare’s beneficiaries.
Unfortunately, Republican efforts are already bearing fruit. Thanks to overpayments, the number of Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in private plans has skyrocketed in recent years. Today, nearly one in five seniors and people with disabilities are enrolled in the private plans Republicans misnamed “Medicare Advantage.” This despite “Medicare Advantage” plans’ ability to charge seniors and people with disabilities more than traditional Medicare for a whole host of services – everything from hospital stays to home health care and chemotherapy drugs to durable medical equipment.
The ongoing Republican effort to privatize Medicare, in other words, is very different from their failed attempt to privatize Social Security. While the Republican attack against Medicare lacks the pomp and circumstance of their effort to privatize Social Security, it is much more deliberate, much more successful, and just as dangerous!
A neighbor of mine is disabled and surviving on just over $1,000 per month. The neighbor is about to become eligible for Medicare, and is scrambling to find policies to fill all the gaps in Medicare. I sent him to a friend who has expertise in health plans, and she helped him through the confusing, conflicting information he’s getting. He can’t get state help because he receives about $400 per month too much. He gets Medicare’s Plan A but must buy Plan B (for doctors’ visits and tests) for $94.00 per month.
He is looking for a prescription drug policy, but can’t find one that will cover all of his medications, even though all come in generic form. He will probably buy a plan that costs him about $30.00 per month and he must pay another $90.00 per month to the pharmacy. By the way, he could renew his Costco membership, get a ride with me, and buy all his drugs for 1/4 to 1/3 what Medicare is paying the drug companies, but he realizes no savings from buying his drugs for less money. That’s because the less he pays for his drugs, the longer it will take him to get past the deductible. Is that nuts, or what? But the Republicans made sure their lobbyist buddies in the pharmaceutical industries got their wallets padded first.
He’s also looking for a Medigap policy, which can cost anywhere from $135 to $644 per month, depending on which insurance agent he talks to. He’s probably going to get one of the cheaper Medigap plans, for about $145 per month.
So, with that Medicare that Newt Gingrich disdains so much, even in its present form, his monthly medical insurance and medications are going to cost him at least $355 per month. That’s not counting any overages his doctors and a hospital may charge him. That leaves him just over $600 per month for rent, utilities, telephone, car insurance, gas — oh, and food.
Veterans are reporting similar expenses, and they must also cope with traveling long distances to get to a veterans health care facility.
I have some ideas for what we can do about all this, but I’d like to hear yours.
To wit:
From AJR’s “Health Highlights” — that’s a site I’m going to bookmark
From the same site, more fallout from the paranoia about immigration:
Yeah start regulating lobbyists and close the gaps in campaign funding…..and watch the results…..
From Health Highlights:
Apparently at the press conference, Bush praised the panel but didn’t commit to anything.
from the Raw Story article
gee, why am i not surprised?
What would you all think about a socialized medicine enviroment….take the best of the other country’s soc. med. programs and work on somethng for us all to have?
It’s a wonderful idea, Brenda. And you know the difficulties of the U.S. medical system better than most since you’re a professional. No system will ever be perfect, but it’ll be more fair.
Such a plan will be attacked so viciously, it’ll make our heads spin. The drug and insurance companies will go all out, and the ‘wingers will issue dire warnings about socialized medicine. But to them we can say, hey, buy an extra insurance plan if you are so worried.
Our representatives in Congress have socialized medicine on the taxpayer dime, and I’d like to have it too. It’s a mystery to me why people get more upset about providing healthcare to all our citizens than they do about wasting billions on nuclear weapons and fighting unnecessary wars?
Here’s a devastating review by Chalmers Johnson of the new book on the CIA’s history which insists it’s been a disaster for the U.S.:
http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=11343
Now we have dueling books from both the left and the right charging that the Agency thwarts Presidents and Congress and is unaccountable to anyone but themselves. Anyone who has ever worked on the inside realizes that the Agency only does the bidding of the President, is heavily overseen in detail by Congress, and that either could shut the Agency down totally in a New York minute if they wanted to. But Weiner from the left and Scarborough from the right are both making big bucks stoking the ignorance of those between them. And money for Weiner and Scarborough, in the end, is what it’s really all about.
While there are some things I’m sure that I wouldn’t agree with as to what the CIA is probably doing that is likely unlawful, I think our country needs the CIA for the National Security of our country.
What the fourth branch of government is doing through the OVP is far worse in my opinion than anything the CIA might do.
I don’t understand how the Republicans can stand by this administration who has violated the Constitution from day one. Does there oath before man and God mean nothing? Do they no longer support our Constitution? It sure looks that way.
When they swear an oath to the President instead of the Constitution they become Traitors to everything our forefathers shed their blood for and even died for.
We need to impeach and remove them before we end up in World War III.
God Bless.
Food safety? Yeah, I remember that. Old time concept, like tail fins and Dumont TV’s.
Then the Addled Puppet Reagan went about, “…getting the government off business’ back…” and gutting the meat inspection programs, insisting that the meat industry would police itself because to do so would be better business than to NOT do so.
So, let’s see. How many times did we hear about meat recalls or consumers getting sick and dying from bad hamburgers BEFORE Dutch?
And how often AFTER?
Business needs to get the government off its back. After all, look at what Deregulation did for the Savings and Loan industry!
Same odds Cheney’s former Ambassador to the Vatican, Tony Blair, or Silvio Berlesconi do time for the Niger forgery.
Well, Berlesconi has set a precedent of sorts…
I might drop a note to the good folks at the citizen-times, suggesting that with the like of Grover Norquist loitering about the executive branch, hawking bathtub-drowning snuff videos, there’s no need to refer to the neglect as “benign.”
One benefit of universal coverage, citizens and non, is that it does indeed establish a paper trail that can be references in the NSL design on traditional request lines.
Just a side effect, and not the intent of said legislation.
I’ve discussed more of it, in terms more to the topic of health care than of security, at the Edwards blog.
http://blog.johnedwards.com/story/2007/7/24/53246/4698
As for Hezbollah, the item of proximity is reference to Al Qaeida, which gets most if its funding from the Saudi interests of Pan-Sunni militancy and most of the insurgency membership was initially from there.
Elements along the border of Iran may have a response in favor of pan-Shi’ite response. Most often these end up being returning support from refugees as well.
Thus it is items beyond Iran’s control, it is a wide regional and cultural conflict.
That the NIE contradicts the various alliances and motivations of complex societal interaction, and often confuses specific tactical methods related to the sourcing of likely support, is another warning flag.
The Sunni militants supported in Lebanon have been highlighted as a greater regional concern on the whole with regard to our allies, Israel in particular. Also elements of the original Kurdish resistance we helped support, spilled over into Turkey from resulting refugee and resource crises resulting from the war.
There is a larger pattern activity logistical detail that started the entire regional crisis west of Iraq. Key points of it perhaps point back directly to the people doing the forgeries that were used to start this war, and to specifically attack Israel.
The Bush Administration won’t heed the admonitions, they will exploit them.