Health Care: Five Rich Countries That Cover Everyone

Thanks to a Facebook friend of mine, I stumbled upon a year old segment of PBS’s “Frontline” entitled “Sick Around the World”. The episode highlighted, in a fair and balanced way, how health care is administered in five leading capitalist countries. Most of these systems have cost issues, not for the sick but for the government. Yet each country has prioritized the care of its citizens above fear of deficits. Below, from the PBS web site is a summary of the five systems:

United Kingdom

Percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) spent on health care: 8.3

Average family premium: None; funded by taxation.

Co-payments: None for most services; some co-pays for dental care, eyeglasses and 5 percent of prescriptions. Young people and the elderly are exempt from all drug co-pays.

What is it? The British system is “socialized medicine” because the government both provides and pays for health care. Britons pay taxes for health care, and the government-run National Health Service (NHS) distributes those funds to health care providers. Hospital doctors are paid salaries. General practitioners (GPs), who run private practices, are paid based on the number of patients they see. A small number of specialists work outside the NHS and see private-pay patients.

How does it work? Because the system is funded through taxes, administrative costs are low; there are no bills to collect or claims to review. Patients have a “medical home” in their GP, who also serves as a gatekeeper to the rest of the system; patients must see their GP before going to a specialist. GPs, who are paid extra for keeping their patients healthy, are instrumental in preventive care, an area in which Britain is a world leader.

What are the concerns? The stereotype of socialized medicine — long waits and limited choice — still has some truth. In response, the British government has instituted reforms to help make care more competitive and give patients more choice. Hospitals now compete for NHS funds distributed by local Primary Care Trusts, and starting in April 2008 patients are able to choose where they want to be treated for many procedures.

Japan

Percentage of GDP spent on health care: 8

Average family premium: $280 per month, with employers paying more than half.

Co-payments: 30 percent of the cost of a procedure, but the total amount paid in a month is capped according to income.

What is it? Japan uses a “social insurance” system in which all citizens are required to have health insurance, either through their work or purchased from a nonprofit, community-based plan. Those who can’t afford the premiums receive public assistance. Most health insurance is private; doctors and almost all hospitals are in the private sector.

How does it work? Japan boasts some of the best health statistics in the world, no doubt due in part to the Japanese diet and lifestyle. Unlike the U.K., there are no gatekeepers; the Japanese can go to any specialist when and as often as they like. Every two years the Ministry of Health negotiates with physicians to set the price for every procedure. This helps keeps costs down.

What are the concerns? In fact, Japan has been so successful at keeping costs down that Japan now spends too little on health care; half of the hospitals in Japan are operating in the red. Having no gatekeepers means there’s no check on how often the Japanese use health care, and patients may lack a medical home.

Germany

Percentage of GDP spent on health care: 10.7

Average family premium: $750 per month; premiums are pegged to patients’ income.

Co-payments: 10 euros ($15) every three months; some patients, like pregnant women, are exempt.

What is it? Germany, like Japan, uses a social insurance model. In fact, Germany is the birthplace of social insurance, which dates back to Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. But unlike the Japanese, who get insurance from work or are assigned to a community fund, Germans are free to buy their insurance from one of more than 200 private, nonprofit “sickness funds.” As in Japan, the poor receive public assistance to pay their premiums.

How does it work? Sickness funds are nonprofit and cannot deny coverage based on preexisting conditions; they compete with each other for members, and fund managers are paid based on the size of their enrollments. Like Japan, Germany is a single-payment system, but instead of the government negotiating the prices, the sickness funds bargain with doctors as a group. Germans can go straight to a specialist without first seeing a gatekeeper doctor, but they may pay a higher co-pay if they do.

What are the concerns? The single-payment system leaves some German doctors feeling underpaid. A family doctor in Germany makes about two-thirds as much as he or she would in America. (Then again, German doctors pay much less for malpractice insurance, and many attend medical school for free.) Germany also lets the richest 10 percent opt out of the sickness funds in favor of U.S.-style for-profit insurance. These patients are generally seen more quickly by doctors, because the for-profit insurers pay doctors more than the sickness funds.

Taiwan

Percentage GDP spent on health care: 6.3

Average family premium: $650 per year for a family for four.

Co-payments: 20 percent of the cost of drugs, up to $6.50; up to $7 for outpatient care; $1.80 for dental and traditional Chinese medicine. There are exemptions for major diseases, childbirth, preventive services, and for the poor, veterans, and children.

What is it? Taiwan adopted a “National Health Insurance” model in 1995 after studying other countries’ systems. Like Japan and Germany, all citizens must have insurance, but there is only one, government-run insurer. Working people pay premiums split with their employers; others pay flat rates with government help; and some groups, like the poor and veterans, are fully subsidized. The resulting system is similar to Canada’s — and the U.S. Medicare program.

How does it work? Taiwan’s new health system extended insurance to the 40 percent of the population that lacked it while actually decreasing the growth of health care spending. The Taiwanese can see any doctor without a referral. Every citizen has a smart card, which is used to store his or her medical history and bill the national insurer. The system also helps public health officials monitor standards and effect policy changes nationwide. Thanks to this use of technology and the country’s single insurer, Taiwan’s health care system has the lowest administrative costs in the world.

What are the concerns? Like Japan, Taiwan’s system is not taking in enough money to cover the medical care it provides. The problem is compounded by politics, because it is up to Taiwan’s parliament to approve an increase in insurance premiums, which it has only done once since the program was enacted.

Switzerland

Percentage of GDP spent on health care: 11.6

Average monthly family premium: $750, paid entirely by consumers; there are government subsidies for low-income citizens.

Co-payments: 10 percent of the cost of services, up to $420 per year.

What is it? The Swiss system is social insurance like in Japan and Germany, voted in by a national referendum in 1994. Switzerland didn’t have far to go to achieve universal coverage; 95 percent of the population already had voluntary insurance when the law was passed. All citizens are required to have coverage; those not covered were automatically assigned to a company. The government provides assistance to those who can’t afford the premiums.

How does it work? The Swiss example shows that universal coverage is possible, even in a highly capitalist nation with powerful insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Insurance companies are not allowed to make a profit on basic care and are prohibited from cherry-picking only young and healthy applicants. They can make money on supplemental insurance, however. As in Germany, the insurers negotiate with providers to set standard prices for services, but drug prices are set by the government.

What are the concerns? The Swiss system is the second most expensive in the world — but it’s still far cheaper than U.S. health care. Drug prices are still slightly higher than in other European nations, and even then the discounts may be subsidized by the more expensive U.S. market, where some Swiss drug companies make one-third of their profits. In general, the Swiss do not have gatekeeper doctors, although some insurance plans require them or give a discount to consumers who use them.

via FRONTLINE: sick around the world: five capitalist democracies & how they do it | PBS.

Of all the things that struck me in the “Frontline” episode, the most interesting was a comment made by a Taiwanese official who participated in vetting various health care systems in order to construct Taiwan’s. He said about American health care that it is “not a system you can copy, it’s a market, so if you let things happen, it will be like the United States.” In other words, we do nothing as a country to manage the health care of our citizens. We leave the health of our citizens up to the free market, like health is some commodity. Advocates of free market principles believe in just “letting things happen” with the theory that competition breeds quality and naturally controls costs. Well, we’ve seen these free market principles bite us in the ass in the overall market, so why would we put the health of our citizens in the hands of the market?

More than anything else, this program opened my eyes to our fundamental problem. We view health as something that can be bought and sold. If you cannot afford a color television, you don’t get to watch color TV. If you can’t afford quality health care, you don’t get it. You got a problem with that? Tough, you need to be a winner in the capitalist system and not a whiner. Work hard and you can buy your TV and your cancer treatments! Simple, huh?

America should be following Taiwan’s lead and studying other countries’ systems to cobble together the best of the best. Of course, we suffer from not-invented-here syndrome so we are publishing thousands of pages of legislation that will probably do too little too late. And of course, whatever we put together must be subordinate to our love for the almighty dollar. Why else do you think we will force thousands of people into the eager arms of the current health insurance companies?

I never dreamed I’d say this but maybe we do need the current health care reform to fail so we can start over and use the triumphs of other countries as our guide? I’m not a just-say-no Republican. I’m a let’s-do-it-right humanitarian.

Anyone who cares about health care reform owes it to themselves to watch the full PBS special online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/view/.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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The Only Decent Solution to the Muslim Problem

When Nidal Malik Hasan, a military psychiatrist allegedly opened fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood last week, it opened another chapter in the ongoing saga of whether or not Islam is a threat to civilized society. One of the most compelling arguments against Islam has been the assertion that no Muslim ever publicly condemns religious based violence. So I was eager to find some condemnation in the wake of the Fort Hood massacre. First, I saw a headline in the Huffington Post that gave me hope:

Muslim, Arab Groups Condemn Fort Hood Shooting, Brace For Backlash

Alas, the article was more about Muslim groups preparing for backlash than it was about them delivering an unqualified condemnation. Then on MSNBC’s “Hardball” there was an interview with the national director of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), Nihad Awad. The interview almost immediately descended into defensiveness and claims of victimhood with any condemnation of the violence being secondary. I was becoming frustrated. I was beginning to despair that the very vocal critics of Islam who frequent my blog were right and I was wrong.

Then on a subsequent edition of MSNBC’s “Hardball”, I hit pay dirt. Chris Matthews’ guest was Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. If you can ignore the host’s speechifying and focus on what Dr. Jasser has to say, this clip is well worth watching.

Here are some of the key statements from Jasser that resonated with me:

I will tell you, my parents came here. They taught me. And the reason I joined the military was, this country was able to give my family the protection, the freedom, the liberty to practice our faith like we could nowhere else in the world. …

However, that’s our Islam. There are other forms of Islam that are a threat. And we have to be careful that political correctness is driving us away from protecting ourselves from the enemy within and from the enemy abroad. And there is a political ideology that has masked itself within a theology that I love, but we can’t deny.

It’s time for Muslims to stop complaining and stop being victims, and say, you know, what we have to start within combating, no different than at the time of the American Revolution. They determined that there were Christians that were part of the Church of England, that were enemies of America, and there were Christians that believed in a country based on the Establishment Clause and based on freedom and liberty, that were about what the west was about.

… political Islam has made huge advances, while the West has been asleep against the spread of the, quote unquote, Islamic state movement. And I think clearly there are parts of the ideologies of hate of the West, of America, of conspiracy theories that this guy started to follow that were warning signs. via ‘Hardball with Chris Matthews’ for Monday, November 9 – Hardball with Chris Matthews- msnbc.com.

Without flinching, Dr. Jasser stated that there is a faction within Islam that is indeed dangerous. He confirmed my belief that the answer to our problem is for more Muslims who take messages of love and brotherhood from the Koran and discard the rest, to rise up and oppose the fanatical branch of the religion.

I am no authority on organized religion, nor a particular fan of it. However, history teaches us that reform within a religion is possible. Whether it is the Protestant reformation that strove to drive financial corruption out of the church, or the modern efforts of the Catholic church to wake up to an insidious pedophilia problem or the evolution of Mormonism to reject polygamy as a fundamental cultural phenomenon (albeit under pressure from the US government). There is no reason why Islam cannot be righted by peaceful, law-abiding and outspoken members of that faith.

There are those who want to deport Muslims from this country, stop immigration of Muslims, and essentially outlaw the practice of the religion within the US. Nothing could be more antithetical to the essence of what it is to be an American. The only decent solution to the problems that modern-day Islam presents us is to align ourselves with people like Dr. Jasser to ensure that the peaceful worship of Allah prevails and the barbaric violence of decadent Muslims comes to an end.

For more information on Dr. Jasser’s organization, visit the web site for the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Republicans Drink the Tea and Embrace the Hatred and Ignorance

I don’t have to write much tonight. The images and sound bites speak for themselves. The House Minority Leader stands in front of the latest Tea Party gathering in Washington and tacitly gives his support for distasteful and hateful messages. This was no ordinary Tea Party. This one was not instigated by right-wing think tanks or Glenn Beck. This one was organized by an elected official, a woman with whom we trust the important task of governing our nation, Michele Bachmann. Ms. Bachmann has gone from a punch line to a dangerous instigator as she encourages the crowd to walk the halls of Congress and confront supporters of health care reform, to look at them “in the whites of their eyes” in her words. Fighting words. Fighting words coming from an elected official who is sworn to uphold our Constitution and protect the citizens of this country. Instead, she instigates discontent and discord.

Usually, my focus on this movement centers around its sheer stupidity and ignorance. This was on full display as John Boehner, the House Minority Leader waved what he called the Constitution and then quoted from the Declaration of Independence:

Then as the “press conference” neared its end, Representative Bachmann gave the crowd its marching orders, inciting disruption within the Capitol:

But ignorance wasn’t the only thing on display today. Once again, we had a full dose of hatred, the most jarring example of which was this protest sign, which read:

“National Socialist Health Care, Dachau Germany 1945″.

This is your Republican Party, ladies and gentlemen. This is what John Boehner condones by his presence at this rally. This is what your Congressmen and women celebrate while people die from lack of health care, die defending our country overseas, and lose their homes because they can’t find a job. While we twist in the wind, this is what your Congress is spending their time on. Standing in front of the Capitol egging on a hate rally.

To paraphrase the attorney at the McCarthy hearings of the 1950’s, at long last have we lost all sense of decency?

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Lessons Learned from Election Night 2009

With 20/20 hindsight, nothing that transpired last night at the polls should have surprised anyone. Let’s look at some of the lessons learned:

It’s the Economy, Stupid

None of us can forget that day in late September of 2008 when John McCain said he would suspend his campaign until the economic crisis had passed. In particular, he was suggesting that his upcoming debate with Barack Obama be cancelled. Obama responded that a President needed to be able to do more than one thing at one time. Well, ten months into his first term, one has to wonder if Obama has taken on too much at one time. Last night’s election of Chris Christie in New Jersey and Bob McDonnell in Virginia signal that there is one overwhelming concern among average Americans and that is jobs, jobs, jobs. McDonnell ran with the moniker “Bob’s for jobs” and Christie promised to lower taxes. I think it’s fair to say that most people aren’t connecting health care reform with improving the economy. Unless we escalate our war on terror on a par with one of our old World Wars, we won’t see the “war industry” employing lots of people the way it did in the 30’s and 40’s. The push to go green has not yet produced substantial employment opportunities. So with Obama focused on health care, Afghanistan and climate change, many Americans are left scratching their heads on where the jobs are coming from. These gubernatorial elections should send a message to the White House that some economy/job focus needs to happen fast … and show results fast.

Don’t Take Moves from the Republican Playbook

2008 was the year of campaign silly season, led by the Republicans who threw every ridiculous charge at Obama that they could (charges that persist ten months after his inauguration). Sadly, neither the Corzine nor the Deeds campaigns learned that, particularly in serious times, you don’t run trivial campaigns. Corzine made fun of Christie’s weight and ran nasty ads about supposed criminal wrong doing gone unpunished. Deeds made a big stink about some paper McDonnell had written over 20 years ago. If you can’t battle your opponent on current issues, you ought not to be running.

Wash off the Wall Street Stink

This one is easy. Americans hate fat cat wall street veterans with a passion right now. Corzine’s history as head of Goldman Sachs might not have hurt him in his first run, but now it is virtually the kiss of death unless you have a very good story to tell in the “now”. With a very low approval rating, Corzine’s current story couldn’t wash away the Wall Street stink.

Don’t Embrace Endorsements from Ass Hats

In the NY-23 race, the minute Doug Hoffman got his Facebook endorsement from Sarah Palin, he should have known it was over before it started. Then Glenn Beck jumped on the band wagon. Before you know it, Hoffman was being lauded as the Tea Party Candidate. When Republican Dede Scozzafava got pushed out of the race, she had the good sense (and the courage) to back the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens. Hoffman didn’t understand that when people are hurting they want a serious representative to take up their cause in Washington. They don’t want a perceived wingnut. Of course, it is no surprise that Hoffman eagerly accepted the support of Palin. He was essentially a male version of Palin: totally ignorant about the local issues important to his potential constituents. Of course it didn’t help that he was a carpet-bagger. But even carpet-baggers like Hillary Clinton could succeed with hard work, learning about their adopted home, as she did with New York. Hoffman was not that smart.

The RINO You Have is Better than the Wingnut You Don’t

The fact is Newt Gingrich was right this time. Sure Scozzafava was not chosen in the ideal way (i.e. by primary) but the bottom line is no matter how liberal she was, she was unlikely to buck the Republican caucus in the House all that often. She would have been a reasonably reliable vote. Now thanks to the interference of Palin, Beck, Pawlenty, Armey and others, the 23rd district will send a Democrat to the House for the first time since 1873. This should be a wake up call to the GOP that moderation is not a bad thing.

Liberals are Lazy

Without the galvanizing motivation of putting a ground breaking President in the White House, liberals sat on their asses last night. You can’t win if you don’t play.

The Age of the Referen-dumb

If we had decided civil rights for blacks and women by referendum, we would probably still have a Jim Crow south  and women not voting today. Why in the world are the equal rights of homosexuals being decided by “popular” vote? The gay activist groups need to get this issue before the courts quickly so that eventually the Supreme Court can rule marriage discrimination unconstitutional and be done with it.

The overall lesson learned this year is that voters are not interested in right-wing or left-wing extremism or trivia. They are looking to people to solve problems and the biggest problem right now is finding employment and keeping your home. It’s a bi-partisan lesson that better be learned by both parties as we move into 2010.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Liz Cheney: The Chick of the Chicken-Hawk Should Just Go Away

First Obama is evil for wanting to send a positive message to our school children. Then he is evil for wanting to try to get the Olympics held here. Then he is evil for not outright rejecting the admittedly odd honor of the Nobel Peace Prize. Well, none of that should be too surprising since none of those issues reside in the sweet spot of conservatives. You would think though, that Obama honoring our war dead would be something that even our right-wing brethren could get behind.

Apparently not. On the radio, the former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, whom MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell called Dick’s “pet attack dog”, found fault with the President’s recent visit to Dover Air Force Base to honor the war dead on their final trip home. She seemed to find it unseemly that the President be there “with the White House press pool”. This stupid excuse for a “patriot” neglected to mention that unlike during her father’s time, families of war dead can now request that cameras be present at their deceased loved ones homecoming. She also neglected to mention that the families who gave and did not give permission for the televised homecoming were unaware that the President would be there.

But Lawrence O’Donnell, who subbed for Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s “Countdown” can tell the story much better than I can:

That’s right. Not only could Bush not be seen at Dover since he didn’t allow cameras there, but he was NEVER there himself to honor the war dead. Vice President Cheney, no doubt afraid to leave his undisclosed location, was also never seen at Dover in the seven years that he promoted the suicide mission that was the Iraq war. Liz says of the war dead that there is no greater sacrifice that someone can make to the nation. How would she know? Her father dodged military service not once but five times.

As I’ve suffered through the increasingly frequent appearances of Liz Cheney in the media, I got to wondering why we don’t ever see Cheney’s other daughter Mary. As you know, Mary is a lesbian. So I did some digging and found what I consider to be a very conflicted woman. With apologies to everyone who finds David Letterman’s recent behavior disgusting, I offer an unusually politically astute interview he did with Mary back in 2006.

Fascinating that Mary put her concern for national security above her own self-interest. Let’s face it, she supported an administration that wanted to amend the Constitution to outlaw same-sex privileges, not just marriage, but any legal protection for same-sex couples. In 2006, with her dad a lame duck VP, she then felt emboldened to write an autobiography calling for equal rights for gays and lesbians, when it was too late to really make a difference. I can’t criticize Mary because her dilemma was understandable. Just look at the brilliant defense her father gave her a year later when she announced she was expecting her first child:

While the Dick was delighted to be getting a new grandchild (who wouldn’t be?), he stopped short of denouncing his supporters who consider Mary Cheney an abomination. He accused Wolf Blitzer of dealing a low blow. Why couldn’t he have said Focus on the Family was full of crap? The organization insulted his daughter and he felt insulted by Wolf Blitzer! After several seconds of receiving the Darth Vader death stare, Wolf sheepishly backed off. I would have persisted. I would have asked Cheney why he was a lousy hypocrite. He cared so much for his grandchild that he would have supported legislation that made that grandchild an orphan upon the death of his daughter.
This is the twisted world of the Cheneys. Why haven’t we seen much of Mary lately? Has she wised up that her father is a disgrace to this country? Or perhaps, in her typically self-sacrificing way, she’s willing to let her “normal” sister do all the talking?  When it comes to talking, most ex-Vice Presidents, unless they are pursuing the Presidency, fade into the woodwork and certainly don’t disparage the current President on a regular basis. This goes double for Vice  President’s children.

Liz, take a cue from the former Vice President’s children whose names we don’t even know, and just fade away.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Clinton Tells Pakistan What They Need to Hear

Back in May, I wrote about my distrust of Asif Zardari, the President of Pakistan, who at the time was complaining that Americans let Osama bin Laden get away. While I have criticized the Bush administration for their ham-fisted handling of Afghanistan, I found Zardari arrogant, bitter, ungrateful and no friend of the United States.

With that as a backdrop,  I was thrilled to see Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tell the Pakistanis what’s what this week. Referring to high level Al Qaeda, such as Bin Laden, she said:

“I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to”

via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Has Intense Exchange With Students in Pakistan.

Then in an exchange with Pakistani students, Ms. Clinton added that the government has a choice on whether to be aggressive against terrorists or be apathetic:

“If you want to see your territory shrink, that’s your choice”

When criticized for the terms of money transfers from the US to Pakistan, Clinton told her audience they don’t have to accept our money.

During the campaign I was quite critical of Clinton based on what I felt were some underhanded moves on her part, but I must say I love Secretary of State Hillary ten times more than I loved candidate Hillary. As we send young men and women to die in Afghanistan, it is partly to keep the crazies from getting hold of Pakistani nukes. Pakistan better have some real skin in the game real fast and figure out who their friends are.

I doubt, from what I’ve seen of Zardari that we can trust Pakistan any further than we can throw them. It complicates our mission in Afghanistan greatly and makes the President’s imminent decision about our strategy there the most difficult one he has faced in his first year, and perhaps the most difficult one he will face in his first term.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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HCR: When is the Fight Worth It?

One of the roles of government is to make the country run efficiently and effectively. Unfortunately, government cannot be separated from politics. Politics, more often than not interferes with effective government. Such is the source of my dismay with the current health care reform (HCR) debate. There is much chatter about Obama needing a “win”. The suggestion is that any health care bill is better than none. With Joe Lieberman now endangering the prospects for passing the bill and with talk of an end run involving reconciliation, isn’t it time for us to take a sober look at what we’re fighting for?

A few nights ago, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow did a good job of articulating the various choices before us:

1. Robust public option: A government run reimbursement system similar to Medicare that forces private insurance companies to compete for customers.
2. The opt-out: Every state adopts the public option at first but gets a chance to opt out at a later time. (This creates the interesting scenario of seeing which states would have the balls to opt out after their residents have gotten a taste of the public option.)
3. The opt-in: Only states that want to use the public option have to. Does this go far enough to make affordable health care available to everyone?
4. The “trigger”: The public option gets enforced only after the insurance companies have had time to clean up their act and have failed to do so. Does anyone really believe the legislation could be written strictly enough for the trigger to ever get pulled?
5. No public option under any circumstances.

If the goal is to make insurance available to more people and at lower cost, then option 1 is really the only one that achieves this. Options 2 through 4 provide too much wiggle room to be effective. Option 5 is essentially the Baucus bill out of the Senate that simply puts more customers into the hands of a malicious insurance industry.

Has anyone noticed that all the debate is centered around expanding care to all at an affordable price but little debate revolves around reforming insurance “worst practices” such as exclusions based on pre-existing conditions.  Of course, this gets mentioned in Obama’s speeches and we hear story after story of insurance company abuses against their customers. But no one is fighting over that point. Maybe because only a callous fool would defend not insuring a baby because he was “too fat” or not insuring a woman because her pregnancy was considered a pre-existing condition.

What I fear is that while Washington fights over the money, we may lose important reforms that don’t cost us a dime (other than lowering insurance company profits a bit). I am no longer sure that I agree that any bill will do. I am not sure that the result we are awaiting is a flashy bill signing ceremony at the White House, another notch in Obama’s belt. Finally I am not sure that if reconciliation cannot get us option 1 (the only real option for availability and affordability) that it is worth it to go that route. To run an endgame around the system to get a sad compromise just increases the polarization in our government for no good reason, not to mention the fact that all these options don’t kick in for years to come.

I say if we don’t have the votes for option 1, then let’s strip out all of the affordability/availability legislation and draft a bill that simply regulates the insurance industry to stop abuses. Let’s make the regulatory legislation effective within 12 months. That will be a major step forward. With that done, we can build on that victory and get everything else we want down the line.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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My New Support Page

I’ve gone back  and forth in my head over the past year about how to monetize this site, if at all. A part of me likes the purity of a web site with absolutely no hint of financial motive. Another part of me knows that I put a lot of time into this, so a gratuity wouldn’t hurt now and then.

So, you’ll see a new option at the top of the page called “Support the RL Blog”. I’ve provided two ways to show your love financially. Either method is totally voluntary.

Thanks for your continued patronage and please don’t consider me a “sell out”.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

Welcome to Socialist Capitalism and Palin Parts the Red Sea

This week, the Obama “pay czar”, Kenneth Feinberg announced that he would be cutting the cash salaries of TARP company executives by 90% and total compensation by 50%. My first reaction to this was utter elation. The part of me that is fed up with arrogant corporate CEO’s who are oblivious to the economic suffering of this country, and their contribution to it, raised his fist in a defiant “screw the fat cats!” It’s about damn time!

Then I paused a moment and thought, wow, I’m no expert on socialism but isn’t this the government controlling the detailed operations of what used to be free enterprise? Well, yes it is. So should we all be wringing our hands saying that Limbaugh, Beck and Malkin were all correct? Is it socialism today and communism tomorrow?

No, I don’t think so. What we’ve got here is an odd mix of socialism and capitalism tossed together and only for the time being. The government doesn’t own a huge stake in these TARP companies, we do! We, the taxpayers own a large chunk of these companies and we should be very pleased that the government, our proxy, is making these companies accountable for their behavior. Once these companies (AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, GM, Chrysler and the two car company financing divisions) pay us back our money, then we will get out of their business. Until then, they should at least partially answer to us.

I call this socialist capitalism. It’s a free market system which when it breaks down based on abuses, stops being totally free and gets a good government slap on the wrist. It’s the answer to capitalism on steroids, which is what I believe got us into our current mess. As long as the government knows when to back off, I see no problem with this approach.

Let’s see what you think:

Republican Schism and the Palin Factor (or How Sarah Parted the Red Sea)

In a recent post, I warned of the imminent demise of the Republican party but I was wrong about how Sarah Palin could be instrumental in it. I’ve always seen Palin as pulling the party so far to the right that they fall off the edge of the Earth. What I didn’t count on was that our darling maverick would go completely rogue on the GOP and back a candidate opposing the Republican Party. But yes friends, that is indeed what has happened. In the 23rd congressional district House race in New York, Sarah Palin has endorsed Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman over Republican Party candidate Deirde “Dede” Scozzafava. By helping to dilute the conservative vote, Sarah may hand the traditionally Republican district over to Democrat Bill Owens on a silver platter.

Wonder how much the GOP loves Sarah now?

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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“Rogue” and “Rouge”: A Tale of Two Sarah’s

As if one needed any more proof of the media’s disdain for Sarah Palin, the editors of The Nation magazine have planned to release a book of essays, critical of the former Alaska Governor on the same date as her much anticipated auto-biography. For more details, check out the NPR article.

As a service to Palin lovers everywhere, here are the two book covers. Careful shopping folks. You wouldn’t want to end up buying the book that has the truth about Sarah Palin, now would you?

Going Rogue -- Harper Collins Books

Going Rouge -- OR Books

Happy reading!

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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