Saturday, August 15, 2009

Health Reform Info 080809 - 081509


Friends, these are some recent Comments on various articles and blogs from the New York Times, Daily Beast, to the wonderful Wendell Potter. I post these here for you to take phrases or thoughts or info to be arrows in your quiver re the healthcare debate.
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081509
http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/item/obama-death-panel-argument-dishonest/health-care/?cid=cs:comments2#commentarea
Senator upChuck Ghastley is a slitherer. He *knows* that the insurance corporations operate under a "medical-loss-ratio" and that, my compatriots, really is a death panel. Wall Street considers *any* claim paid out to a sick person, a "medical loss." If your gigantic greedy insurance corporation has a ratio of paying out too many claims, it gets brutally punished by Wall Street. (Recently a 2% rise in claims-paid resulted in a 20% drop in the stock price. Google Wendell Potter, Cigna whistleblower.)

If you want to keep paying Aetna slitherer CEO Ron Williams' $24 million dollar annual compensation or slitherer United Wealth Care Corp Steve Hemsley's $102,741 dollar per hour compensation, please I beg you to do that. Be my bloody guest. I, thanks, would prefer a choice. I'd rather pay 4% administrative costs rather than 20%-24%. It's up to you. Let my choice be up to me. Hmmmm, sounds like liberty to me.
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2nd comment
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/opinion/08collins.html?_r=1
We all need to know that the Wall Street Orcs-in-Suits control your health non-care. Google Wendell Potter the ex Cigna big shot PR guy who's now a whistleblower (http://prwatch.org/user/35267/track) & you'll see that people like CEO Ron Williams of Aetna making $24-million-dollars a year are not going to moderate quietly. Mr. Williams is the Rescind-And-Purge=Evil champion of the Universe.

There's RAPE -- Rescind-And-Purge=Evil. If you get sick, that Mr. Williams of Aetna got the Gigantic Bucks because he fomented a computer program to comb any claims for the slightest pretext for the insurance corporations to rescind the coverage you thought you had. It's enough to gag a maggot.

Re Purge, if you're a small business and have a modest group plan, if one of your employees actually gets sick and needs to interfere with pure unfettered bloodsucking of premiums, your small business will get a huge increase in premiums to purge or force you from their rolls.

The unspeakable medical-loss-ratio means that a health-scam corporation's stock is flayed by Wall Street for any health care they actually pay out to sick people. Any claims paid are a "medical-loss" -- they want them premiums for stockholders, not for patients. Incredibly, payment for patients is considered a "medical-loss" by the Vampire Capitalism of our current Wall Street.

My mind reels at the deep ugliness of the system. This is Bernie-Madoff-League scamming, done by the best confusion & legerdelying that fathomless Big Bucks can buy.

If you want to keep paying an average of $14 million dollar annual medical-industrial-complex CEO salaries, be my guest. I'd prefer the choice of a public option where the money goes to help me or you. Gee, what a novel idea. (Self-employed, I haven't had health coverage since 1979 -- 262,800 hours waiting in line . . .)

LBJ said, "I will fight for Medicare as long as I have breath in my body." Our current leaders need an injection of LBJ-Fight. Speak boldly. …
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Saturday, July 4, 2009

M.E.O.W. .. the Moral Equivalent Of War


This piece will read best for you

if you read it with your mouth as if out loud

I daresay we've illuminated enough more of our enchanting consciousness now to assay a foray druidesquely into a wider context, beyond the strictly personal. This may be a shock. After the unassailable trust we've been revealing & forging between you and the whole wide AllElse worlds, to, with that opened mind, leap d'artagnan-like into understanding our druid duty toward W.A.R. is a shock. Pero c'est la vie verdad. But that is actual life and its juggling. Why you're learning to be an expert clown. Why we take so much Vitamin I.


What we have to figure out each of us is Meow MEOW, meow – meow is the mnemonic device for the Moral Equivalent Of War. An antidote to what A.Einstein in 1932 calls "the war menace"; "the dark places of human will and feeling"; to taking the "latent" hatred and destructive passion and raising it to "the power of a collective psychosis." S.Freud replies to A.Einstein that we cannot suppress "man's aggressive tendencies . . . -- what we may try is to divert ['the war impulse'] into a channel other than that of warfare." (My emphases.)


In 1906 William James called this kind of transmogrification "the moral equivalent of war." "War is the strong life," how men can exercise their "hardihood."


I can understand this dyspepsia against what James calls the "mawkish and dishwatery," a desire for life's more "bitter" and salty flavors.


What can we druids bring to the war on war? A quotidian discipline so exacting and eclectic and exciting that its very delicacy, its deftness becomes robust.


As a droll but instructive example of the interface between the empath's private necessity (Mutilated children are never collateral damage) and the batterings and buffetings of a frequently psychotic society, I had made up for me a teeshirt that says militant pacifist. Why? Because so many dear folk in the peace movement are so annoyingly 'mawkish & dishwatery.' I'd, say, swear like a sailor when describing our lunatic leaders. (If you make $50,000 a year, it's gone in four seconds in the Iraq debacle. That's nuts.) One of the treacly souls with whom I was sharing a lucid and pungent rant would give me the kicked-spaniel look and say, "Why can't you be nicer?" "Because I care zero about nice. What I care about is not-mutilated. Not-mutilated. In mind, heart, or body." …

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Saturday, June 13, 2009

Single Payer Urgent Action


In 1997 one million Italians sent a blizzard of postcards to their parliament demanding an anti-landmine bill. It worked.

We could send A MILLION POSTCARDS to Max Baucus, the quasi-Democrat who's in charge of the Finance Committee and who has a stranglehold against single payer or even a strong "public option." He claims that the "American people don't support single-payer" tho polls show that 64% do. (If it's easier for you to send a scribbled note in an envelope, do that. Do put PLEASE SUPPORT SINGLE PAYER on the outside of the envelope too.) I use "This American does want single payer!" om my postcard. Please forward this info to your friends.

Senator Max Baucus
511 Hart Senate Office Building,
District of Columbia 20510-2602
Phone: 202.224.2651
Fax: 202.224.9412
(As the Finance chair, he has not just the future of Montanans, but of all Americans in his hands.)

White House comment line
202.456.1111 (6AM-2PM Pacific Time)
(I use speaker & redial til I get a ring. Hold has never been longer than 5 minutes.)

Postcard:
• Maximum size is 6” long X 4 1/4” high
• Minimum size is 5” long X 3 1/2” high
.28 cents postage tho you can use a 42 cent or 44 cent.

Some background thoughts:

The Medical-Industrial Complex Insurance Corporations add what value to your healthiness exactly? The idea of profiting on someone's health care is sickening. Health rights are not a privilege of the rich or lucky in other modern countries. Currently we have insurance corporations' profit coming between you and your doctor.

I'm focusing on sending postcards to Senate & House committee chairs exhorting them to bring at least a representative of single-payer for health care to the table. (Single payer not public option is how you save the annual big $300 billions on insurance corporations' paper-shuffling costs.)

I thought of postcards (which don't have to be opened to be read) because I just read about the wonderful surgeon-without-borders Dr. Gino Strada stirring up !a million postcards! from Italian citizens in 1997 (each with a picture of a mutilated child) to exhort the Italian President to signatory a landmine ban. That year the Italian parliament passed "a law banning the production, use, import, and export of land mines."

The equivalent of EVERY man, woman, and child in the whole states of Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, New Jersey, Virginia, have NO health care in our United States of America. (Mnemonic: GINNV.)

Or you could say that the equivalent of EVERY man, woman, and child in the whole states of New York State, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Iowa have NO health care. (Mnemonic: NIPI.) Even more shocking & shameful put this way, isn't it? …
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Friday, June 5, 2009

The Real Pornography .. stynking synnes vile



Obscene Accumulation is the Real Pornography.

Back in the also-obscene nuclear-weapons accumulation days, I used to wail and rail, "Let them steal our tiny piggybanks to build enough nuclear weapons to obliterate all living things and reduce all human structures to vapor and/or pebble-sized rubble 5x over. I won't even squawk about that. I am willing to go that barkingly-mad far in assuaging their paranoid fantasies.


But the 6th world-rubbling? The 7th? The 10th?


No.


They have powerful inner demons that have to be fed. But they don't have to be fed our children's education and universal healthcare (certainly a jesusian idea) and a minimum wage which does not bring us shame. $14000 per minute for the fantasy Missile Crackpot Scheme aka StarWars? $50,000 every four seconds for the Iraq war?


Nope.


So, there is a sin of scale. SUVs seriously suck, but Hummers are an Express Ticket to Hell. (Arnold had 8 Hummers – you do the Math on how fast he gets to the 10th Circle of Frozen Tears.) SUVs are the vehicular equivalent of microencephaly – the smaller the brain (& no doubt the dawg), the more bizarrely enormous the vehicle.


I'm hoping to get us to think about not an Utopia, but rather an Buenopia – not perfect but good enough. In that world which will be wrought by the progressive work we begin and continue now, we will have solved the pathology of the Real Pornography: Obscene, Filthy Accumulation. How?


Well, a main task of artists is to show the Frantically Rich that those riches, like ole Midas did find out, don't ultimately satisfy. There is enough money that makes you and your family comfortable and safe. Massive Accumulations of Money that sit in your bank account fester spiritually. You don't earn or need $33 million dollars in some year. It's sick. You don't need $90,000 bucks a day. You don't need a tax break. You need prayer. That the poor sonsabitches whose lives and labor you hoovered all that lolly from don't wake up and think, "It's a lovely day for a Guillotine."


It absolutely earthquakes my mind that people are offended by a glimpse of Janet Jackson's bosom or the burning of a flag, and we are talking Mt. Everests of Bosom & Flag Dudgeon here and Congressional Hearings with pompous and pious speeches, -- and somebody gets 33 million bucks and the minimum wage is 7 bucks an hour and nobody twitches? My mind-heart struggles with the human Math – how much does what matter what? …

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Thursday, May 28, 2009



Cheney's Mistress,

Pamela Pitzer Willesford's Diary pt 2 ..

Pamela's Pomeranian


Pamela Pitzer Willesford was the Third Huntress on 2/11 When Dick Shot Harry on the vast Armstrong Ranches in South Texas. Indeed, Pamela P. Willesford, Ambassadress to Switzerland, was the closest witness to The Deed. Ms. Armstrong was so far away, she thought Mr. Cheney had been felled with a heart attack instead of his having blasted Mr. Harry Whittington in the face and chest with a shotgun.


Note: This material is extremely scurrilous and scatological, remarkably tasteless, and rife with raunch and contumely. If that ain't your cuppo tea, I implore you to skip it.


If it weren't of such excruciating historical significance I would never print such nouveau faux upperclass smut. And this is the redacted version. For the unexpurgated filth and mindblowing world domination schemes, enter your ycn, yocto-code-number in the usual place.

A copy of this was sent to me by Mr. Azul, a whistleblower in deepest cover as a servant for the Darth family. ('Darth' is the zetta-secret Knights of Jest cryptonym for Mr. Cheney.) Mr. Azul has been Darth's valet for decades. The mole of moles, it is the most dangerous job in the world. Like copying the Pentagon Papers, copying Pamela P. Willesford's Diary entails an ultra-risk that neither you nor I can shudderingly imagine.

Don't birdshot the messenger aka Don't be shooting the messenger – at least not in the face and chest. (read first Pamela's Diary, part 1 )


Pamela Pitzer Willesford's Diary pt 2 ..

Pamela's Pomeranian


How will anyone ever forgive me!!?!! This struggle between moi and GiganDick may incinerate the whole world, but I have my pride & GiganDick's horrid little henchmen have Marshmallow, my prize Pomeranian.


GiganDick wants disgusting favors to which I said No! and then they stole my fluffy sweetums Marshie. When GiganDick gets denied, his 'condition' gets exacerbated – he starts raving about dune snakes and Conplan 8022 and B61-11s (nuclear-tipped tac nukes). We were having one of our romps in the RBA Zentral Bank private vault knee-deep in Halliburton billions when he, buck-naked, a tripod, so visibly manly, looks at me with that sweet little sneer and says, "I'm gonna bust their bunkers and their balls over there in Tehran, Pammie, and ain't nobody gonna stop me. I will rain tac nukes down upon their sinning, heathen bunkers until they scream Uncle, Uncle, Uncle Sam!" When GiganDick gets moody, I know some country's got to pay.


I looked up the tactical nukes and my God, I'm very afraid. A tactical nuke is about 1/3 the yield of Hiroshima. Nobody, even Karl, as nasty a bit of business as I've known since I was born, dares speak up to GiganDick. Not even the Gorgon Babs Bush, who looks like she has fifty writhing snakes for hair and is the coldest, most self-impressed woman I ever met, dares naysay GiganDick.…

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Monday, May 25, 2009

Cheney's Mistress' Diary, part 1



Pamela Pitzer Willesford was the Third Huntress on 2/11 When Dick Shot Harry on the vast Armstrong Ranches in South Texas. Indeed, Pamela P. Willesford, Ambassadress to Switzerland, was the closest witness to The Deed. Ms. Armstrong was so far away, she thought Mr. Cheney had been felled with a heart attack instead of his having blasted Mr. Harry Whittington in the face and chest with a shotgun.


Note: This material is scurrilous, scatological, tasteless, and rife with raunch and contumely. If that ain't your cuppo tea, I implore you to skip it.


If it weren't of such excruciating & excoriating historical significance, I would never print such nouveau faux upperclass smut. And this is the redacted version. For the unexpurgated filth and mindblowing world domination schemes, enter your ycn, yocto-code-number in the usual place.


A copy of this was sent to me by Mr. Azul, a whistleblower in deepest cover as a servant for the Darth family. ('Darth' is the zetta-secret Knights of Light cryptonym for Mr. Cheney.) Mr. Azul has been Darth's valet for decades. The mole of moles, it is the most dangerous job in the world. Like copying the Pentagon Papers, copying Pamela P. Willesford's Diary entails an ultra-risk that neither you nor I can shudderingly imagine.


Don't birdshot the messenger aka Don't be shooting the messenger –- at least not in the face and chest.


Pamela Pitzer Willesford's Diary, Part 1

When I got the note from one of my secret love spies (Lottie Libby, Scooter's wife, who, by the way, steps out too) about GD's trip to Rolling Rock Game Club in Pennsylvania where he shot 70 semi-tame pheasants before lunch, I, ahem, dampened my Parisian couture panties. (Paris is so close to Bern, that capital of Swiss chocolates and more to the point my favorite Swiss bank.) I'm the one who nicknamed Dick, 'GD' as our love-code for Gigantic Dick (Truth isn't everything; staying alive is, as Eva would tell you.) The Secret Service even uses 'GD' now, as he includes quite a few of them in his harem.


GD has young George completely on a string. (Prezzie we call young Georgie when we giggle, GD & me, after you know what, our heads on the pillows and GD with his dentures out and his gums pinkly glistening.) Anyhow Prezzie begs to be one GD's mares, but GD tortures him by refusing this honor. Gigantic is so clever at torture. He was born to torture. In a past life he was Torquemada's shadowy more vicious advisor. So sexy. So sexy to hear him talk about the rack and the Iron Maiden, especially the ghastly impaling dirty version.


He calls me his Swiss Miss. It was my very veiled threat to go to the International Enquirer with 'Sex Secrets of Gigantic Dick' that won me The Plum – Ambassadress to Switzerland -- as they say in Ambassador Scam circles where the hardest decision any of us makes from day to day is between Krug Clos du Mesnil 95 and Cristal 1990 for that night's gala.…

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