"Check It Out" for Tuesday, March 3rd
David P. Wirt, MD writes at Counterpunch about removing the foxes from the health care hen house.
"The data and evidence are clear: to a scientific certainty, only a single-payer “Medicare-for-All” system of health care financing will solve the serious cost and access problems and achieve good, affordable health care for all in the United States. As a scientist and physician, this is my conclusion after studying the data for years.
"Americans are increasingly afraid that they can’t afford to get sick, and with good reason. About half of all personal bankruptcies are caused by medical expenses, and 76 percent of these individuals had health insurance when they got sick or injured. Those of us with insurance are paying a greater share of the premium and more deductibles and co-pays as well. Thus, not only do we have 46 million Americans without health insurance, but at least an equal number who are seriously underinsured.
"A majority of physicians (59%) and an even higher proportion of Americans (at least 62%) support single payer national health insurance or “Medicare-for-All”. In spite of this, virtually all we are hearing about today are mandate plans that would require everyone to buy the same private for-profit insurance that is already failing us.
"All of the incremental reform programs proposed --- tax subsidies, health savings accounts, individual or employer mandates, increased regulation of for-profit insurance companies --- keep these proverbial foxes in the henhouse and are doomed to fail to control costs and provide universal access.
"The data are in. Incremental reforms, mostly mandate schemes which retain the for-profit insurance companies have been tried in seven states over the past two decades: Massachusetts, Tennessee, Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Vermont, Maine. In all of these states the reforms have failed to contain costs.
"Most of the gain in Massachusetts has come from expanding Medicaid and subsidizing the purchase of private insurance; very few people have signed up for the unsubsidized but mandated private insurance. Not to mention that 7.1% uninsured is unacceptably high. Far from controlling costs, these mandate plans will add hundreds of billions of dollars to the nation’s health care costs.
"The United States spends about twice as much per capita on health care than other industrialized countries. Yet it is a myth that the United States has the best health care in the world. The United States ranks near the bottom of industrialized countries in terms of important morbidity and mortality outcomes (for example, life expectancy and infant and maternal mortality). Out of 19 industrialized countries, the United States ranks last in reducing deaths from treatable conditions (Health Affairs, 2008).
"Single-payer national health insurance for financing health care is NOT “socialized medicine”. Under a single-payer, “Medicare-for-All” system, delivery of health care remains private. The providers of health care remain private. Patients choose any doctor and any hospital. Parenthetically, replacing the wasteful for-profit insurance companies with a single-payer national health insurance program for financing health care in the United States would save enough money (more than $350 billion) to not only achieve universal coverage, but allow the coverage to expand and be more comprehensive, while not spending any more than we do now.
"A single-payer “Medicare-for-All” system --- improved and expanded Medicare --- is embodied in a bill currently in the U.S. House of Representatives, H.R. 676, sponsored by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and cosponsored by 93 other members of Congress in the last congressional session. Its features are: automatic enrollment for everyone; comprehensive services covering all medically necessary care and drugs; free choice of doctor and hospital, who remain independent and negotiate their fees and budgets with a public or nonprofit agency; processing and payment of bills by a public or nonprofit agency; promotion of job growth and the entire U.S. economy by removing the excessive burden of health care costs from businesses; coverage for everyone without spending any more than we are now."
Aziz Huq writes at The Nation about why the US detains the innocent and defies its own constitution.
"Last September, I wrote about the singular case of seventeen ethnic Uighurs detained at Guantánamo Bay, notwithstanding the fact they posed no threat to the US. Last week, a federal court of appeals in DC said those men can be detained indefinitely without hope of judicial remedy.
"That striking ruling has the practical effect of negating two Supreme Court opinions and rendering years of habeas corpus litigation an empty gesture. It also compounds the logistical problems of closing the prison, compromises US diplomatic efforts and reverses decades of positive development in constitutional law.
"The Supreme Court should speedily reverse the DC court's ruling--if the Obama administration fails to do the right thing by releasing the Uighurs into the United States.
"In a ruling by Senior Circuit Judge Raymond Randolph, the appeals court flicked those arguments away in two strikes. First, contending that the power to exclude aliens was "inherent in sovereignty," it said it could not interfere with the detentions. Second, and without any analysis, it said that neither the Due Process Clause nor any other law entitled the petitioners to judicial relief.
"...Judge Randolph showed eagerness to cut short democratic debate.
"This is not the first time that Randolph has ruled that Guantánamo detainees are beyond the (legal) pale. It is the fifth.
"He did so first in 2003--only to be reversed by the Supreme Court. He did so again in 2005, this time on military commissions--and was reversed again. Then in 2007, Judge Randolph had a third go--holding that the Constitution's habeas guarantee did not apply to Guantánamo--and was reversed a third time. Finally, in 2008, he joined an opinion by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson (who joined him here in Kiyemba), holding that the Due Process Clause did not apply to Guantánamo; this ruling was vacated in December for reconsideration.
"Judge Randolph's trail of error is more than evidence of mere inconsistency. It suggests an idée fixe about Guantánamo that trumps what the Supreme Court says, let alone what facts and the Constitution require."
George Monbiot writes at CommonDreams about the criminal curse of private, for-profit prisons in the US and UK:
"It's a staggering case; more staggering still that it has scarcely been mentioned on this side of the ocean. Last week two judges in Pennsylvania were convicted of jailing some 2,000 children in exchange for bribes from private prison companies.
"Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan sent children to jail for offences so trivial that some of them weren't even crimes. A 15-year-old called Hillary Transue got three months for creating a spoof web page ridiculing her school's assistant principal. Ciavarella sent Shane Bly, then 13, to boot camp for trespassing in a vacant building. He gave a 14-year-old, Jamie Quinn, 11 months in prison for slapping a friend during an argument, after the friend slapped her. The judges were paid $2.6m by companies belonging to the Mid-Atlantic Youth Services Corp for helping to fill its jails. This is what happens when public services are run for profit.
"It's an extreme example, but it hints at the wider consequences of the trade in human lives created by private prisons. In the US and the UK they have a powerful incentive to ensure that the number of prisoners keeps rising.
"The US is more corrupt than the UK, but it is also more transparent. There the lobbyists demanding and receiving changes to judicial policy might be exposed, and corrupt officials identified and prosecuted. The UK, with a strong tradition of official secrecy and a weak tradition of scrutiny and investigative journalism, has no such safeguards.
"The corrupt judges were paid by the private prisons not only to increase the number of child convicts but also to shut down a competing prison run by the public sector. Taking bribes to bang up kids might be novel; shutting public facilities to help private companies happens - on both sides of the water - all the time."
An article in AsiaTimes about Iran's dissatisfaction with the IAEA's "mismanagement."
"In his opening address to the IAEA meeting, Mohammad ElBaradei, the agency's director general, said that Iran's nuclear activities were being monitored and there was no evidence of military diversion, adding however that "Iran has not suspended its enrichment-related activities, or its work on heavy water-related projects. Nor has Iran implemented the Additional Protocol [of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty]. Iran has not permitted the agency to perform the required design information verification at the IR-40 reactor currently under construction. Such access, together with the sampling of destroyed and salvaged equipment and debris, is essential for the agency to complete its assessment."
"ElBaradei has been downplaying Iran's cooperation for some time, raising the ire of Tehran and leading some commentators to attribute this to, among other things, such extraneous factors as the new low in Iran-Egypt relations. This is in light of ElBaradei's Egyptian background and growing tensions between Tehran and Cairo over the recent Gaza war and Cairo's reported readiness to embrace the exiled Iranian opposition, the Mujahideen-e Khalq Organization, which is getting kicked out of Iraq.
"A Tehran University political science professor, expressing Tehran's growing dissatisfaction with respect to the IAEA's performance, asked: "Mr ElBaradei in his own reports has repeatedly confirmed that (a) 'The agency has been able to continue to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran' and (b) that 'all nuclear material in the country remain under agency containment and surveillance', so the question is why is he suddenly quiet on all that is positive in Iran's cooperation with the IAEA?"
"Another analyst at the Institute for Strategic Studies, a Tehran think-tank, told the author that ElBaradei, who went on record last October as stating categorically that Iran did not have enough low-enriched uranium to develop one nuclear bomb, may have been genuinely surprised by the results of the agency's physical inventory. He added, however, "Mr ElBaradei should have known there was the possibility of some discrepancy and we are surprised by his surprise.'
"From Iran's vantage point, the most irritating aspect of the IAEA "misplaying its cards on Iran" has to do with the likely negative effect on Moscow's nuclear cooperation with Tehran. The timing of the latest IAEA report, and all the sinister media spin on it, which emerged during a visit to Tehran last week by a high-level Russian delegation, may have something to do with the latter's turnabout on their pre-visit promise that they would be disclosing a specific date for the opening of the much-delayed Russian-made power plant in Bushehr in Iran.
"According to the Iranian press, [head of Russia's atomic agency, Sergei] Kreinko in his private meetings in Tehran conceded that "Russia has no more excuses for delaying the opening of Bushehr". Well, maybe no technical excuse, but plenty of political ones relating to Moscow-Washington relations that are obviously intruding here and much depends on the April summit between US President Barack Obama and Russia's President Sergei Medvedev."
Comments