Would Healthcare Going Down Like Alcohol Prohibition Demonstrate As Much Guts?

Because in Prohibition an unrealistic intolerant enforcement was successfully rebelled against, leaving us serving virtual penance by continuing to punish ourselves for self-righteous immoralities. And yeah, what about subsidizing our opportunity deprived is in the way of whose success, really?  

Rein In Costs?

Soapbox View Soapbox View

Because "not working and can't be fixed" is usually enough assessment to walk away from, say, a cracked engine or something else beyond repair. But what about what must be fixed? Because doctors were already reduced to financial wastes of their time we pay for in actual lost productivity. Beyond the numbers that can be represented every-which-away on the page or screen. Who gets the sense there's something not quite professional happening and Dr. Marcus Welby, M.D. should start making neighborhood house calls again? Maybe install one of those obnoxiously redundant ice cream truck soundtracks if The Great Medical Debate ever begins? 

For a second forget character and that firmly planted notion the opportunity challenged are pure lazy which probably requires a lot more concentration than we understand because the human spirit still must be entertained which, as the saying goes, ironically enough, offends those luckily tied to the Rat Race. The re-written circumstances of the full American Dream? Yes, but because government shouldn't arrange people's lives, documenting our every breath is very intimidating when we should all be paying each other for our services? Exactly.  

In fact I side entirely with the hopeful conservative view that if properly operating the free market would solve everyone having insurance. And should have done so if that was the intention. But no. Gaps in the economy are for manipulation as the only heartless thing to do? 

If people weren't thrown in jail for driving without insurance do you think they would? Probably wouldn't except for those with enough money to afford to not be bothered by further inconvenience. No. Giving everyone a good lecture for driving without automobile insurance would be a mess. Kind of like an incomplete health system, huh? So now instead of fixing the disproportional pricing of medical care, we're going to require everyone be proper customers while people will probably go on not really knowing who their doctor is or will be. Still, like a chess game's moves back and forth between the serviced and served? Unlike the relationship many have with their hairdresser/barber. Folks, even doctors could admit patients' relationships shouldn't just be with their diplomas.

Because the economy isn't working exactly quite properly right, objections to socialism aren't credible? Moot? Flexible therefore expandable?

Once upon a time in an Address Before a Joint Session of Congress on Administration Goals, February 17, 1993, a president of the United States pledged, "We will reward the work of millions of working poor," and in the same speech applied the Democratic Party seal to Welfare Reform putting the freeloaders to work - poor. But maybe if the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is properly worked as capitalism it could be all the socialism the world ever needs? Besides Fire and Police, etc.

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Citing Efforts to Prevent Attack on Syria, Group Nominates Putin for Peace Prize 

The New York Times by David M. Herszenhorn, Oct. 1, 2013

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Applies To Many Political Officials

The Comical Conservative picture prompted Facebook comments setting the bar and tone for my, my my my, spec-u-lation.

Woman 1 wrote: Just curious, will you be keeping the insurance you already have or forced to have to take something inferior to what you now have? 

Woman 2 There will be no change in our insurance ... will all come out at once if and when he gets to go back to work. 

Woman 3 the president has to be the leader in believing it's good enough for his family, if it's not why is he pushing it on to us how could we benefit from this 

Woman 3 we should all get health insurance for free as senior citizens 

Woman 1 If you already have insurance, chances are you don't have to change anything either. My husband and I don't have to change ours. If you don't have any insurance because it's been too expensive in the past, I'd think anyone should be happy to be able to have some kind of health insurance that's affordable versus nothing.

Woman 2 As of right now my insurance remains available to me ... It doesn't pay regular yearly visits and deductible is 10,000.00... It's basically catastrophic insurance... I couldn't afford the 462.00 premium so I had to tweak it... Now I pay 272.00 a month and pay out of pocket for my visits... until I see what is in Obamacare I'll hang on to my insurance unless I hear otherwise. Once Obamacare is actually unveiled entirely, only then will we see how good or bad it really is... Saw an article this morning that one of their deciding factors for eligibility is your credit report. Not gonna be good for some people.

Charles M. Fraser If band aids cost the cents they are and patients compensated as research subjects that all Medicine is, then cost would be realistic. If universal healthcare goes down like Prohibition ya think it demonstrates Americans have as much guts? Thanks, having guts probably just stuck me with turning that sentence into an essay. I'm all for finding an economic balance in medicine but it still sounds like throwing a lot of money at the caretakers of the problem rather than fixing it. And you'd think a Congress that shut down the government while paying themselves would be the laughing stock of history, or at least spinning somewhere in the barrel? Dustbin?

The Soapbox View Satirical Twist pursuing the Twin Legacies

Andy Rooney and I.F. Stone?

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Are You Celebritized?

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Who Knows What Our Medical Industrial Complex Costs?

  Once upon a time, but this century, a Michael Moore documentary on health care aptly titled Sicko cited various methods for how people pay for, and are paid by, the medical system. There’s an audio clip from the Nixon Watergate tapes that records Mr. Nixon essentially saying he doesn’t care if the public is nickeled and dimed out of direct access to their doctors by the developing HMO system, as represented by the provider Kaiser Permanente. 

  Today The New York Times published a balanced story exposing that members of the Obama administration exchanged private e-mails promising Insurance Industry lobbyists that drug costs would not be lowered by importing cheaper foreign drugs. Republicans cry foul seeing the deal as hypocritical. “He (Obama) said it was going to be the most open and honest and transparent administration ever and lobbyists won’t be drafting the bills,” said Representative Michael C. Burgess of Texas, one of the Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee examining the deal. “Then when it came time, the door closed, the lobbyists came in and the bills were written.” 

  Democrats point to Republicans play the same game. “There was no way we had the votes in either the House or the Senate if PhRMA was opposed — period,” said a senior Democratic official involved in the talks, referring to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. The Times noted liberals bothered by the deal-making in 2009 now find the Republican criticism hard to take given the party’s long-standing ties to the pharmaceutical industry. 

  “Republicans trumpeting these e-mails is like a fox complaining someone else raided the chicken coop,” said Robert Reich, the former labor secretary under President Bill Clinton. “Sad to say, it’s called politics in an era when big corporations have an effective veto over major legislation affecting them and when the G.O.P. is usually the beneficiary. In this instance, the G.O.P. was outfoxed. Who are they to complain?” 

  Meanwhile the day before, June 7, The Huffington Post outlined statistics showing Republican Mitt Romney’s health plan, as Governor of Massachusetts, is similar to Obama’s and has not hurt that state’s economy. 

  It just takes a lot of money to survive in this world so we should be more understanding of the desperation to feed their families that necessitated pulling the rug from under the doctors’ feet. If doctors aren’t shrewd enough to have a slice of over-priced drugs it’s their own fault in the market economy. Yet what has that to do really with the doctor/patient relationship that today is reduced to a file a doctor may have time to possibly read sometime before you’re shuffled out of the office before your allocated ten minutes, or so, is up. The problem isn’t how to fix medicine, doctors might already have a clue. It’s how are all these people going to get paid.

6/6/2012

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Who Knows What Our Medical Industrial Empire Costs?

6/6/2012 concluded: The problem isn’t how to fix medicine, doctors might already have a clue. It’s how are all these people going to get paid.

June 21- 27, 2016

Escalating Rhetoric

  I believe the above conclusion reasonably sized up the equation. It's not just that we've come a long way to reach a point. But that we've reached this point for such a long time. It seemed obvious. Expand the, technically, socialism for the rich, insurance system. It's not confusing. Insurance started as a business and it and the medical profession went on for decades in collusion thinking that's capitalism when it shouldn't matter how much money a customer has. People should be able to afford a service. It sounds so much better off when a doctor would take a cow. What's called let the market decide, can't decide. Can't. This baby's been so bent, folded and mutilated the equation's not about market. I'm sure band-aids aren't costing what marketers charge just trying to grab purchasers off the street. Or Internet. No one made this mess. A grand result of collusion that was the way in so's it's the only way out too. Problem with Obamacare? Evolve it. Or keep making polished messes as was accomplished rehabilitating the poor. 

  Look into The Medical Machine by Noam Scheiber in The New York Times because people should be told what they don't want to know. As, like it or not, in sports vernacular, things must be sucked up. So, since, at least for this paragraph, complaining's in vogue. Where's Society's Oscar for being so narrowly drawn by lower shallow common denominators? 

Real life's the tragically animated cartoon.

  Hello Robert Caro. Your recent, quoted in The New York Times, citing of Robert Moses as "the most racist person I ever met," brought to mind what's happening right here and now in River City. As New York City propelled forward into the darling 21ST Century, whose leverage strengthened and who's kidding whom? Virtually everything, if necessary, of the city's increased wealth from the last decades should have gone into renovating the New York City Housing Authority buildings. Because reliable people knew and know those buildings were consciously and unconscionably constructed in a fashion to remind the inhabitants they're poor. Still standing, and I'm always seeing scaffolding projects on the buildings' outsides. Or is the plan all along been to renovate inside when the right sucker(s) come(s) along. After a marginal renovation to fulfill a contract so the purchase can go forward. I don't even have to close my eyes to see the Disneyfication of Riker's Island. 
  The problem isn't where money sits or doesn't stay. The problem's money's not really circulating. Caught upward in financial hurricanes swirlingly levitating the money far enough away from the unreachable social strata-s scapegoated as charity. 
  It's drably prisonesque corridors of virtual darkness in the bright of day in the Housing Authority's halls and I'm not kidding. The City should be feeling some Jacob Riis sized shame for that Robert Moses Legacy. The horror. The shame. Let's remember he built sound structures. But inside remains designed embarrassment. The shame.

Is The New York City Grit Gone & Fabulously Polished Up?

  The greatly amazing, splendidly magnificent,  super, extravagantly classy, fantastically wonderful, luxuriously superb, brilliantly incredible, terrifically tremendous sensationally fabulous new New York City filled with service industry employees who can't afford to live there unless bunked at exponentially higher rates than already happened. Our stacking's already been designed. The press full of praise for our upcoming adaptability to the new and improved boxed utopia. 

  Although, I'm speculatively sure, the same roughing it aspect, can be presumed to not resemble the lodgings of you-know-who's kids. But then I'm not one to lament the tops rise when eventually all boats will once the reckless veneer's worn down and off.

HARLEM

  Essentially traipsily riding the streets of Manhattan for a quarter century, I knew the city's outward appearance like the back of my hand. The perennial potholes etched against the rough grain that started to become paved over about the time I went into seclusion near Astoria, New York's Socrates Sculpture Park for the last five years to finish that novel I'd chased practically my whole life. Similar to Rip Van Winkle I've woken to a brand new world. Absorbing, up close, this new era of shinier, sleekly, taller dwellings as rewards for this new generation's elite. Like Rip must have, I thought how the hell did I sleep through that, though I didn't. I knew what was happening. But getting up close, the change is overwhelming. Why Disney joined rather than compete with this tourist trap. But anyway. Caro credits the last two pro-business mayors which is accurate to a degree. You could see it coming. They were just there for the credit for keeping the door open. The blight was a bargain.

  A month or so ago crossed paths with East Village Folk Historian Clayton Patterson whose leaving the city he'd lost has been documented. We'd met in 1987 when he visited the production studio for Fifth, Park and Madison about the bicycle labor force that carried business on its' back for solid decades and now basically brings everyone's food. 

  Ba dump bump. So. The counterculture's either buried or from their contributions commercialism matures, or ruthlessness will have won? Happy Landing. Because, as is, inflation is never caught. Ahead leverages behind such that even accurate books are cooked, to many, many degrees.

Has proving peace and love isn't the answer gotten us anywhere?

Britain votes, by 51.9%, for Scotland's leaving British Empire.

The Soapbox View Satirical Twist pursues the Twin Legacies

Andy Rooney and I.F. Stone.

First Wednesday in November Criticism of 2012 Presidential Election Winner

The New York Times Victory Speech Webcast

* * * 

Again our split in half nation seems to not have led to violent revolution? We are civilized? 

Next, to be clear, whatever criticism I have of either of the two major party ticketmen, who ran for president, is basically the same. Choice crafted to appeal to how Americans are trained to think, is just the public relations game and Americans' fault more substance isn't required. From the convenient polished soundbite, "change," to big promises void of care for the little things that make a difference, it's all about what we're led to keep thinking. Election Night commentators, in isolating how minorities didn't budge enough in the Republican direction, pointed out messages had to be re-crafted. Nothing about breaking down this invisible wall that keeps Americans feeling separate but better is how we win. Why we deserve to be put in an equal place with our brethren.

Neither candidate really differed on the Detroit automotive industry bailout, except in the order in which the money was rearranged. However magnificent the automobile highway system is, there's not enough shame for how the transportation business frayed and subsidies were, and are, not balanced in the public's favor. 

"A long campaign is now over," President/President-elect Obama said last night. And, "relieve ourselves of dependence on foreign oil." Really? It really makes a difference where and how money travels this small world? American companies don't extract a slice selling foreign oil? In a geo-political sense, yes we don't want to be dependent on foreign oil when spigots are shut off. But to think our entrepreneurs don't have hands on a lot of the cash misses the point. America is now less strong financially, the same as most strapped countries throughout the world where untaxed cash is offshore. But that doesn't mean Americans don't have it. Why my opinion is that it's futile to tax the rich more. Despite any regulations, if there is a method of losing less and getting more it will be found. So, despite billions in publicity, that will circulate where God only knows, politicians don't change how business operates from the top where the bottom is just invited to participate by purchasing with money they're less and less likely to see worth anywhere near the same again. Another extension of corporate welfare where it's hard to place where change can begin. 

It does make a difference where and how money flows. But whether foreign or local aristocracies store the money doesn't matter. When banks made mistakes, American taxes bailed them out, shoring them up, without our ability to harness that wealth beyond the suits finding comfort. Americans of a certain class, who were basically stolen from for houses they were manipulated to not afford, weren't worthy to share in the bailout, described as a lack of confidence, that's still just one more facet of greed that is good when wealth circulates. This mess is bad and presidents shouldn't claim to fix what Americans should fix themselves.

Kids idolize presidents before seeing they're fallible men. Adults shouldn't fawn over them. Understand? As great as we want leaders to be, the mistake is, as always, that their lives are better. One luxurious meal is more than many children eat in a week(s). But why businesses spend millions on the right address to appear the opposite of weak. Face it. Anything less than the medical insurance plan Congress affords themselves, that can't be salvaged for the country, is b. s. Find some way to pay doctors and nurses properly and maybe the skimming of the medical industrial complex profits won't continue perverting medical care as it already has the economy. 

Whites dropped from 74% to 72% of the electorate so we're on notice something must be done to save our country from the others. Yet our tribe's chiefs have had casinos for quite a while already. And except for a guy who rarely opens his mouth, pseudo-caucasions dominate the highest court and it has been shown anything can be railroaded through our highest court if the political price is high enough.

You'd think in a country where silly mistakes, such as Hugo Chavez's banning golf, aren't made, where the rich are kept separate and made to resent the lower classes more by having their golf taken away, we'd have enacted a lot more solutions by now. But I can't blame the President for mislabeling himself a socialist that was done in part for the purpose of the all-out jousting our political culture is. Our collectively paying for police and fire protection happened a long time before our current president was elected. 

Anyway, I should really express what I don't like about President Obama and again it's also what his opponent projects. That All- American wholesome image that's hard to imagine facing down Middle Easterners to tell them the resentment you've nourished yourselves on all these many years has to be given a rest. When just this week The New York Times reported Palestinians broke out in riots when the Palestinian National Authority President Abbas was quoted sounding conciliatory and contrary to the Israeli hatred they've been reduced to their whole lives. And vice-versa. How are our Howdy-Doody characters going to put their foot down? Through another decades-long war where the poor suffer the most and elites profit where they can? Maybe what we need is for the real Howdy-Doody to stand up? And apologize, you dope.

Because every leader needs to appreciate satire too.

So, to all our futures becoming brighter.

Good luck.

 November 7, 2012

Reuters 

 Wisconsin's first openly gay Senator Baldwin

Cuban Capitalism On Track To Protect Next Elite

     Fabulous, headlined, Former Cuban officials get prison terms for corruption, By Marc Frank, Reuters reports three former vice ministers in Cuba’s Basic Industry Ministry plus nine nickel industry executives have been sentenced to long prison terms for corruption, Cuban state media said on Tuesday. The officials and a former head of negotiations for Cubaniquel, the state-run nickel company, received sentences ranging from six to 12 years for “crimes associated with corruption during the negotiation, contracting and execution of the expansion of the Pedro Soto Alba (nickel) plant,” in eastern Cuba, according to the Communist Party newspaper Granma. The plant, the largest of three nickel processing plants in Holguin province, is a joint venture between the government and Canadian mining company, Sherritt International Corporation.

     There was no mention of Sherritt in the report and company officials were not immediately available for comment. How convenient. Cubaniquel and Sherritt are also partners in a Canadian refinery in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, where output from the Pedro Soto Alba plant is shipped for processing, then marketed by another joint venture between them.

     Meaning another set of books for the same business. Once again, on the surface no matter how corrupt the convicted are, they were trained to move finance around and, as happens in capitalist countries, could it possibly be someone with more Cuban financial pull wants their money too?

     The case, undertaken by President Raul Castro since he took over for his ailing brother Fidel in 2008, is one of a number of high level corruption probes, covering just about every sector of the Cuban economy. From street vendors to the already established elite, the capitalism that never was is being shaken and stirred for what benefit? Is the money that these newly minted convicts possibly stole going to filtrate through the economy now? Probably not. Capitalist Cuba always found a way to separate the elite from the population and will continue to play capitalists defending socialism, just as the world’s capitalists condemn that institution until as in the American Medical Insurance System, all the hands in the till have the doctors’ money.

     Several foreign companies doing business in Cuba have been shut down and their top executives detained or jailed in the campaign against corruption, which is so extensive on the island that Castro has termed it a threat to the socialist system. Entrepreneurial initiative will be judged corrupt until whose friends are in control? Well, at least Cuban power is learning the tricks of the game Cubans tried learning on their own without Big Brother’s help. And without the two party system in control bickering with each other enough that the general population can act on its’ own – when the people can get away with it.

     The Cuban nickel industry has been the subject of a number of investigations over the last few years as output declined, Reuters reports without diagnosing scapegoatism.

     Two years ago police dragged several officials involved in the scandal away in handcuffs from their offices in Havana, causing consternation among employees. Soon afterwards, police began arresting nickel executives in Moa, Holguin, heart of the nickel industry.

     The three vice ministers included Alfredo Rafael Zayas Lopez, who served in that capacity from 2004 to 2007, Ricardo Gonzalez Sanchez (2001-2004) and Antonio Orizon de Los Reyes Bermudez (1980-1999). Respectively, they received sentences of 12 years, 10 years and eight years. And judging by the years they reigned, whatever was going on was business as usual they now have to pay for while the judicial system no doubt has a few friends who could, maybe, quite possibly, start cleaning up from the scraps. What had always slipped through the cracks that government enforcement wants filled with – what? The next generation working at marginal rates decided by the government. Ha! No, the next guys will share and share alike for a time under sanctioned practices.

     Great Raul. Fine job once you get your commercialized prison system running well too, because no doubt that’s going to cost a bundle if you make the mistake of caring for the prisoners properly. But commercialized, the Americans might grow to love you as your rule becomes more like ours where the weak know their place. It’s all capitalism, Raul. All socialism. You know what your problem is? If the lawyers are paid well enough for all this law enforcement, you’re doomed. And the only thing that will work is the legal facade that was once called socialism, that face it, wasn’t really tried if doctors made close to nothing and you and your brother sat around smoking fat cigars which is how your legacy now reads no matter how much capitalist corruption is uncovered. Go get em Raul. Make the United States pay for defending mobsters’ right to exploit you. Teach the world what socialism never really was, capitalism as ran by two brothers sitting around comfortably smoking fat, smelly cigars. I’m being redundant? So are you.

     Because the Cubaniquel executive, Cristobal Saavedra Montero, was sentenced to six years in prison, when if the enterprise is under state direction why wasn’t it fixed before having to go through this. You’re not even running for office, Raul, and making scapegoats of an entire nation all over again. As the eight other executives received sentences of up to eight years, Granma said.

     That’ll teach them. What?

8/21/2012

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Cuban Capitalism On Track To Protect Next Elite

8/21/2012 concluded: Because the Cubaniquel executive, Cristobal Saavedra Montero, was sentenced to six years in prison, when if the enterprise is under state direction why wasn’t it fixed before having to go through this. You’re not even running for office, Raul, and making scapegoats of an entire nation all over again. As the eight other executives received sentences of up to eight years, Granma said.

     That’ll teach them. What?

Sept. 26 - Dec. 3, 2019

Truth-like

     It's somewhat surmise-able that however much system Cuba has, the leveraged decisions of personal relationships have control. The same difference between countries for the people and the autocratic ends that compromise the ideal of a thriving independence. How Cuba faces this, as usual, may, very well, depend upon whether the United States of America can. 

     Presently, racked by confusion, America's constant is its being overwhelmed by the political playbooks, from which analysis is chain-riddenly replicated, employing the tactic of exploiting facilitated ignorance, perhaps? Such that the claim to not play is the worst usage of all. 

     Imagine all the uses for which Public Relations is known, as vapid wastes of intellectual skill? When having a strategy is 99.9% of answering accusations. When admissions of truth are just parceled out numbed experiences. The best social manipulation money can buy can't possibly be the best of all possible world's reasoning? 

     Because! What if controlled public dialogue's only how discontent's steered away from violence? Especially when legitimate protest shouldn't resort to that particular brand of contesting the state. Usually provocateurs of all stripes are the instigators when violence ensues. Volunteering martyrdom is an idea, when the actual fact's usually not compulsion but compelled. 
     Imagery. Yes, so much about the world to see is real. While humanity's found space within all our minds to have shared existences loosely defined as culture. And the pretending to be on top of all our expanding heritages is what haunts all our lives.

VOYAGE

     Capitalism's nothing without the oh so many aspects of life that are done for each other for free. Right down to accomplishments by those clearing millions an hour, minute, or day even. Perhaps seconds. Nor is capitalism not socialism's driving force. Because Economics is a much broader mechanism than politically portrayed. No one admitting it's convenience of thought that circumvents everyone from imagining anything's possible. There's no traction. Just the images of maintaining positions. When neither's absolutely true, everything's fabricated and hardly the method by which humanity faces the future by facing the past. 
     Juggernaut of rhetoric, no? 

Getting Away With It

     Despotic dalliances. Taunting denials. Theatrical political performance smudged across the, ongoing, current, political plain. Or, perhaps, as accurate to suggest, political plane. Because jet-set thought's substitution for substantiation on the playing fields of divided spoils seems just a foregone conclusion. The admit nothing Roy Cohn Code. Ba dump bump. 

     Heard a commentator, on that radical radio station, WBAI, (The Golden Age of Radio), mention the Kurds' territories had no significance to American interests when the president has no (at the moment) hotels in the vicinity.  If it looks like a skunk and any analogy is past use now. The public over-burdened by the political publicists pizzazz. 
     Stalin had Trotsky labelled "The Opportunist." I think however much either were, current contemporary history finds them both outdone. Unless, of course, as the plan seems to control historical thoughts imbalanced balance is the best we're going to get. I am not amused.  

Myopic world view for everybody. Good grief.  

to conclude

Enjoyment of Spectacle  

     Spectacle more important than detail is what we're reduced to, or have been, for a very, very very, very long period of time.  

     So while riding over the bridge, to work, some minutes before the, above, picture, of the Bernie Sanders rally in Queensbridge Park, was taken by The New York Times photographer, I passed two huge humongous, exuberantly waved, flags from the lower level pedestrian/bike lane, in an immersively involved delirium. The radiating smile of the blonde flag holder bowled me over. Hence the title's lament that America's succumbed to spellbinding catastrophe. (Yeo, hope that's not how this ends.) Oh yeah, so you have to wonder what happened for the flag waivers to not appear in this picture. Strong arm convincing? Isn't there some type of free speech that's in violation? The sacredness of one's own martyrdom, perhaps? 

Still most upset about having to take a side.