In Voting Rights, Scalia Sees a Racial Entitlement : The New Yorker.
Justice Antonin Scalia, during oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, said that the Court had to rescue Congress from the trap of being afraid to vote against a “racial entitlement”—the “entitlement” in question being the Voting Rights Act.
Anyone else mad yet?
Most of the news reports I’ve read and seen on television reporting the US Postal Service’s decision to stop Saturday letter delivery have one common theme – that the USPS’s “red ink” is correlated to dwindling first class mail revenue and changing times, as people use e-mail and pay bills online.
This is wrong – this isn’t why the Postal Service has lost billions. It’s because of a 2006 law passed by Congress that required the Postal Service to prefund health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years within 10 years.
This required the USPS to set aside billions of dollars to pay health care benefits for employees it hasn’t even hired yet and won’t for DECADES. This legislation is unprecedented – never before has the government mandated that any business or government agency fund such payments for such a period.
In other words, this is a problem that Congress created. an American institution is suffering, and American citizens are seeing a service they’ve counted on for generations get unnecessarily diminished.
“l’homme sensible, comme moi, tout entier à ce qu’on lui objecte, perd la tête et ne se retrouve qu’au bas de l’escalier” – Jacques Necker
“Treppenwitz.” – Germans
Resignation Suggests Rift Between CNET and CBS – NYTimes.com.
“CBS has nothing but the highest regard for the editors and writers at CNET, and has managed that business with respect as part of its CBS Interactive division since it was acquired in 2008. This has been an isolated and unique incident in which a product that has been challenged as illegal, was removed from consideration for an award. The product in question is not only the subject of a lawsuit between Dish and CBS, but between Dish and nearly every other major media company as well. CBS has been consistent on this situation from the beginning, and, in terms of covering actual news, CNET maintains 100% editorial independence, and always will. We look forward to the site building on its reputation of good journalism in the years to come.”
If this isn’t yet another screaming condemnation against corporate media control, I don’t know what is.
I’m very disappointed but not surprised that the corporate media has reported Hostess’ demise as an uncooperative union refusing to budge rather than vulture capitalists intent on wringing as much money as they could out of a company already in trouble when they took it over.
The leveraged buyout firm that bought Hostess had already pilfered the pension fund and had previously gotten huge wage concessions out of the baker’s union. To position this now as the fault of the union is a bit like saying that a woman shouldn’t have let her throat be cut after refusing to be raped again.
Not to mention that Hostess’ top management, fully aware of what was coming, did its best to line its own pockets by dramatically changing its compensation structure in the year before the shutdown.
It sickens me almost as much as binging on a box of Twinkies would.
Over the past several years, I’ve gradually replaced the kids’ older Macs with newer models. And with each of them, I’ve gone the Mac mini route instead of getting another iMac. They’re less expensive but they’ve been solid upgrades for what the kids need, and I haven’t regretted it. Mostly.
Robert was first to get a Mac mini; he got one in November, 2009 when his Power Mac G4 bit the dust. I got him the high-end model for that season, a 2.53 GHz model with 4GB RAM and a 320GB hard drive – much faster and more capable than the aged tower he had. I got AppleCare, too, as I routinely do for new Macs.
And I’m glad I did. Because we’ve had to bring that thing in three times. Each time, the local Apple Store (Derby Street in Hingham, Mass.) diagnosed it as a hard drive failure. Robert would try to launch apps and have them go nowhere, restart, and be faced with an Apple logo but it would never reach the desktop.
A few days ago I tweeted that I had to bring in Robert’s Mac mini for service at the Apple Store because its hard drive had failed again. The problem presented exactly the same as it had before. The last time it was in – just this past June- the Genius told me that there was no longer a 320GB replacement drive available, so they bumped us up to the next best thing: a 500GB model made by Toshiba.
OK, I thought, this should take care of the hard drive problems – a complete different model.
Robert’s mini failed again, one day before its three-year AppleCare warranty was due to expire, so I wasted no time bringing in to have it serviced. At first the Genius wanted just to replace the hard drive. Their service routine showed the hard drive was faulty but wasn’t able to find any other issue. I wasn’t not convinced it’s an actual hard drive problem, based on the computer’s service history. So the Genius got a manager involved to see what else the Apple Store could do.
The manager agreed to swap out the Mac mini, and replaced it with a new, comparable model (a SuperDriveless 2.5GHz version with 4GB RAM running Mountain Lion). What’s more, the unit retails for less than Robert’s system did, so he applied the difference to a new AppleCare protection plan. The net result? I paid less than $50 for a brand new computer with three-year warranty.
Everyone I dealt with, from the guy who signed me in to the Genius who took my system in for service, the one who called and the manager I spoke with, were all singularly focused on making my repair experience the best possible customer service experience it could be. I certainly explained my position a few times, but never once had to raise my voice or speak even slightly stridently.
It’s one of those cases where I know I wouldn’t get customer service like this from just about any other company out there, and it’s one of those circumstances where I’m very happy to be an Apple customer.
Today’s the first day since mid-August that I haven’t had to drive to the wound care center I’ve been going to for hyperbaric oxygen therapy. It’s a weird feeling, because it’s been such a routine. It’s been this reliable block of four hours when I knew what I had to do, where I had to go and what was expected of me.
10:15 – Leave for the wound care center.
10:45 – Arrive. Wait until the hyperbaric tech was ready to prep me.
11:00 – Change into a hospital johnny. Get a blood glucose check, get a blood pressure check, and depending on the day and the doctor on hand, get my ears and breathing checked.
11:15 – Go into the chamber. Be wary of equalizing the pressure in my ears for the first ten minutes or so of each session. Constant swallowing, yawning and blowing into my nose while pinching my nostrils.
12:45 – Repeat the equalization process as the tech decreases the pressure in the chamber. Get another blood glucose check (damn, but their glucometer needs a lot of blood compared to the one I have at home), another blood pressure read, sometimes ears and breathing, then get changed again and be on my way.
Typically I’d get home between 1:30 and 2:00 PM
That same routine, day in and day out. Except for Thursdays, when they’d ask me to come in in the afternoon so the doctor could check my foot.
There were a few days that I didn’t do it – like the time Bonnie and I had to take James to the oral surgeon to have some teeth extracted as part of his orthodontia; or one day when I just flaked and decided I didn’t want to (the hyperbaric tech tells me that happens pretty frequently, so I didn’t feel too bad about playing hooky). But I was scheduled for thirty treatments and I did the vast majority of them, finally getting the clearance to stop from the doctor who’s been treating me since I was discharged from the hospital.
Now, to be clear, I haven’t totally recovered. There’s still a wound on the bottom of my foot that requires me to wear a dressing and use a special shoe and take a walker or cane with me wherever I go, and they still want me to elevate the foot constantly (I think the actual order is “five times a day”). But I’m confident – and so is the doc – that it’ll heal without surgery, so I’m just taking it day by day at this point.
I won’t miss this four hour void in my schedule that’s been absorbing my late morning and early afternoon every day. Most of it was interminably boring: the treatment involves laying in a lucite tube on a mattress that’s too thin to be comfortable, doing nothing but either napping or staring at a TV screen as the compartment is flooded with pure oxygen at high pressure. Nothing to do but breathe.
The hyperbaric oxygen therapy has been disruptive to me personally and professionally, and I complained about it regularly. But at the same time, the routine of it gave me a sense of purpose and a structure to my day that I found very reassuring. And it was something that had been missing from my life for a while.
Some Republicans like to imagine there are people who want an easily life of living on the dole. Anyone who’s ever actually *needed* public assistance will tell you that it’s not easy.
Simply qualifying for basic assistance is an endless slog, a miasma of paperwork and bureaucracy that’s gotten gradually more complicated as more disparate services are offered. Coordination of care and service requires very advanced logistical skills, and you need to constantly renew your credentials whenever you’re asked in order to continue to qualify for help.
You’re also advised repeatedly that if you get gainful employment or any sort of windfall, you risk the services and assistance that you’ve spent in some cases weeks or months getting to begin with. And if you do lose services, you’ll have to start over at square one.
So is it any wonder that once people are in the system, they’re very reluctant to get out?
Last week I wrote about my experience with state-mandated health insurance – how it probably saved my life and without question saved my family from bankruptcy. Making health insurance affordable solves one problem faced by many Americans today – it keeps them from suffering catastrophic financial ruin in the event of a major medical crisis. But it doesn’t do a thing to actually reduce the cost of that care, which has spiraled out of control over the past few decades.
A recent article in The Boston Globe certainly drives this home.
“Of more than 3,000 Massachusetts adults surveyed in fall 2010 — the most recent survey data available — 17.5 percent reported having problems paying medical bills in the previous year. Twenty percent said they were carrying medical debt and paying it over time. Those figures changed slightly from 2006, but researchers said the difference was not statistically significant.”
Contributing factors include medical insurance plans with high deductibles and lapses in coverage.
Certainly having insurance coverage helps reduce the financial strain on families who undergo unexpected and catastrophic medical expenses, but if your budget is already stretched to the limit just trying to meet your family’s basic needs, it doesn’t take many high deductibles or hidden expenses to push you over the edge.
There’s a huge problem with a lack of transparency when it comes to the cost of coverage. Patients can run up huge bills without realizing it, even if they’re insured.
But a bigger problem – and one that Massachusetts has yet to solve in any substantive way – is what happens to a lot of lower-income families like ours:
“Low-income people commonly lose insurance for brief periods when they move from one state assistance program to another. Others can get lost in a maze of eligibility requirements.
“The state is developing a website meant to streamline the enrollment process. Meanwhile, bills can add up during those gaps in coverage.”
There’s a huge problem with a lack of transparency when it comes to the cost of coverage. Patients can run up huge bills without realizing it, even if they’re insured. That’s precisely what happened to us last December when my daughter was hospitalized. She had insurance, but the insurance wasn’t good enough to cover non-emergency ambulance transportation from one hospital to another – required because the hospital she was brought to didn’t have the inpatient services needed to treat her effectively. We ended up getting a bill for the ambulance that drove her, to the tune of almost $2,700.
We’re still fighting that one. But it’s not like we were given the choice between taking her to the other hospital ourselves or footing the bill for the ambulance. It wasn’t until months after the incident that the issue of the bill even came up.
The bottom line is that insurance improvements in Massachusetts and the Affordable Care Act both help to make sure that catastrophic illness won’t be a death sentence for the financial stability of families living at the edge or below the poverty line. But both services stop dramatically short of actually correcting many of the cost problems that make health care in the United States such a big problem for so many people. For that, we’re going to need much more dramatic changes to the way that hospitals, pharma companies and others do business.
Greg Knauss’ recent blog posting “Bugged” describes his experience in the hospital when his son’s bug bite turned into something much worse. As it turns out, without insurance, he would have been expected to fork over almost $24,000 in medical expenses. Knauss’ comments have encouraged me to write more about my recent hospitalization, because I was in a different place all together: If it weren’t for government-mandated affordable care, I would be dead or bankrupt.
Knauss makes the point that the Affordable Care Act – “ObamaCare” as it’s known in political vernacular – will provide a safety net to many Americans who don’t have health insurance. If you’re insured, or if you can afford a lengthy hospital stay, it’s easy to poo-poo this as yet another government “entitlement.” But until you’re staring this situation in the face, you cannot possibly understand how terrifying the prospect of going without insurance really is.
As some of you know, I spent the last part of June and the first week of July in the hospital because of a foot infection. I had stepped on a sharp piece of plastic that punctured the bottom of my foot. I went to the doctor shortly after noticing swelling in my foot, but an infection had already set in. Bonnie brought me to the ER at the local hospital two days later; I was admitted and surgery was performed immediately. I ended up spending a week and a half in the hospital recovering from that.
Unlike Knauss, I didn’t have COBRA coverage. Anymore.
For the uninitiated, COBRA enables workers in the United States who lose health benefits to continue them temporarily. It isn’t an “entitlement” – you pay the entire premium for the insurance, up to 102 percent, actually.
For a family like us, COBRA was absolutely vital: my daughter’s been hospitalized several times, some of us take expensive prescription medications, and I suffer from chronic health problems that require drugs and regular monitoring from doctors. I’m an insurance risk, just the sort of risk that companies love to reject, similar to how Greg describes himself. But going without insurance would quite literally be a death sentence for me, and possibly for other family members too.
I paid out of pocket for COBRA every month I could after I lost my job. I was happy to. It was the continuation of services that kept us healthy and alive during my ten-year tenure at my previous employer.
It was only when the eligibility period ran out that I was finally forced to go without.
Fortunately, I live in a place where there is a safety net. I live in Massachusetts. In 2006, our governor signed a health care insurance revision bill into law. The law mandates that Mass residents can obtain a minimum level of healthcare insurance coverage, and makes sure that you can get free health care insurance if you earn less than 150 percent of the federal poverty level.
That governor was Mitt Romney, and the law I’m referring to is colloquially known as “RomneyCare.” It’s also been widely described as inspiring large parts of the Affordable Care Act.
The bottom line is that the vast majority of the residents of Massachusetts – an estimated 98 percent – have some sort of health care coverage, even if it’s the bare minimum needed to cover catastrophic events like hospitalization. Thanks to RomneyCare.
It was this insurance that I was able to get. I’m sorry to admit that those Federal poverty guidelines pertain to me, so I got the free coverage. Quite frankly, the economy and the publishing industry have not been kind to me since losing my last full-time job.
Without RomneyCare, I probably would have put off getting to the doctor or the hospital until I’d been much worse. And I’d be footing the bill for that ten day hospital stay. For the surgery, and the anesthesia. For each and every pill I took, every bandage I used, every linen that needed to be washed. For the bags of antibiotic administered intravenously. For the nurses, doctors and technicians who treated me every day. For the months of followup treatment I’ve required – a month and a half of IV antibiotics, more pills, daily visits to a wound care treatment facility for hyperbaric oxygen treatment, a visiting nurse who comes once a week to check on my progress, the specialized bandages and medicines I must use to keep infections at bay.
Two months later, it’s still not over. All this, because a piece of twisted, sharp black plastic less than two centimeters long got stuck in my foot.
I have little doubt that without RomneyCare I’d be declaring bankruptcy at this point, because I have barely the money to keep the lights on right now, let alone pay for a ten-day hospital stay to treat septicemia. Let alone the months of specialized post-surgical treatment I’ve needed to recuperate.
It was a totally unexpected event that I couldn’t have reasonably planned for. And even if I had, it would have required me to be able to afford to pay the expensive insurance premiums which are totally beyond my reach right now. I take no pride in admitting that. And to reiterate: I paid for private insurance as long as I could. I didn’t want to burden the system if I didn’t have to.
The system isn’t perfect. Premiums and service costs continue to rise into the stratosphere. There’s still a serious need for health care reform in Massachusetts and throughout the United States, and the Affordable Care Act doesn’t change that.
Knauss writes:
We can make this work. We have to make this work. A bug bite cannot be the thing that draws the line between a middle-class life and poverty, between opportunity and the stagnant dead-end of could-have-been. Our friends, our neighbors, our children, the future of this country as a cohesive society — as an endeavor where we see each other as more than opponents, as more than comptetitors [sic] — depends on it.
There are millions of Americans who can’t afford routine medical treatment, much less catastrophic care. Many seniors and others on fixed incomes have to decide from month to month whether they pay their utility bills or get the medication that keeps them healthy. Expecting friends, relatives, churches and charities to help them all is ridiculous. Expecting them to barter chickens for doctor visits is insultingly stupid.
And current “entitlement programs” – many of which inadequately cover the needs of these people to begin with – are being eviscerated by legislators who use the guise of reducing government spending to conceal their craven pandering to corporate interests and lobbyists.
I find it inconceivable that we’re still having a national discussion about health care as a privilege only for the wealthy or those lucky enough to work for an employer who offers affordable insurance. We need to recognize it as a fundamental human right if we’re to ever evolve as a compassionate society that actually wants to uplift its population to prosperity. We’ve heard a tremendous amount of lip service from the political right in this country about that, but their actions to dismantle the ACA and Medicare are completely counter to effort.
RomneyCare saved my life. And it kept our family out of bankruptcy.
The system worked.