A HEALTHCARE STRATEGY FOR THE AGES

Every once in a while, you do something that is so stupid that even your best friends wonder if your head is screwed on straight. And sometimes, rarely but sometimes, things turn out better than you could ever have imagined. You stepped in the poop and only through good luck and the grace of God you came out smelling like strawberries.

Many of us wondered why Obama didn't push for Medicare For All when he had the votes in Congress back in 2009. Single-payer healthcare had been proven throughout the industrialized world to provide better health outcomes, had been proven to be cost-effective - half the cost per capita of the American insurance-based system. How could Obama cede America's first stab at universal healthcare to an industry that had strangled the life out of the American economy for far too long? Insurance exchanges? Subsidies for insurance companies?

Madness.

Crazy.

Crazy like a fox...

If there are not enough votes for Medicare For All, get as many people covered as possible. Cash in as many chips as you can. Even lure in the insurance companies. But get people covered. And guess what. Once people get coverage, they don't want to lose it.

So, for seven years the Republicans screamed REPEAL. More recently, REPEAL AND REPLACE. Now? HOW DO WE FIX THIS THING. And there really is only one way to fix the ACA. The states - those places that the Republicans are fond of calling the labs of democracy - the states that went for expansion of Medicare are leading the way.

MEDICARE FOR ALL

Obama. Smarter than all of us.

RANDOM THOUGHTS #10 - CONFEDERATE FLAG, JONI MITCHELL, SUPREME COURT

CONFEDERATE FLAG

To be clear, the followers of the Confederacy were insurrectionists, traitors. And they were racists. The Confederate States Constitution explicitly institutionalized slavery. And the Confederacy lost the Civil War. So...

If the Confederate flag is, as many Southerners like to proclaim, symbolic of their heritage, of who they are, then they are traitorous racist losers. But if they want to identify themselves that way, who am I to argue? Just don't fly that rag in a place of honor in public.

JONI MITCHELL
David Crosby says that Joni has suffered an aneurism and cannot speak. I send my best wishes. The soundtrack of my life has been dominated by two women - Joni and Grace Slick. Grace for those times that I needed a kick in the pants. Joni for the quiet times.

Peace and Love, Ladies!



SAME-SEX MARRIAGE
Historic SCOTUS Week #1

SCOTUS really had no choice. Why? Because the country is clearly divided in a way that could not stand. With an estimated 70% of the population living in states where same-sex marriage has been to some extent institutionalized, married gay and lesbian couples from those states would increasingly find cause for action in those states that refused to recognize those marriages and denied, for instance, such rights as hospital visitation or intestate inheritance. The only parallel that comes to mind in American history is the organization of the country into free states and slave states.

Forget Scalia's rant. Scalia thinks that the debate isn't over until his side wins. But SCOTUS did not subvert democracy with this ruling. The scales had already tipped. Hundreds of thousands of legally married gay and lesbian couple exist. If tomorrow, several thousand of them move en masse from Massachusetts to South Dakota - a state whose Constitution bans same-sex marriage, civil unions, and any marriage-like contract between unmarried persons - have those legally married couples in essence given up their rights? Or is it incumbent in our federal system to protect those rights? 30% of the country had failed to get on board before this week. Should that 30% have been allowed to define the rights of the other 70%? As a nation of laws, one of our legal system's duties is to protect the minority from the majority. But in this case, majority rules.

OBAMACARE
Historic SCOTUS Week #2

SCOTUS held that the purpose of the ACA was clear, that denying subsidies to those who lived in states opting for federal exchanges clearly subverted the intent of Congress, and that, even as written, the Act could be construed as including the federal exchanges. (That last a direct swipe by Roberts at Scalia's childish dissent.) If you write 500 page bills, there will almost certainly be typos and/or internal inconsistencies. If you write five page bills, people will argue endlessly over the details. You can't win. Except in this case, we did. Congressional intent was clear and two-thirds of the Court acted responsibly.

EBOLA, CLIMATE CHANGE (GLOBAL WARMING), ISRAEL, PROGRESSIVES, PAUL RYAN & STUFF

Every once in a  while I get worked up over politics and just have to write about the silliness that surrounds us. For instance, Paul Ryan was quoted recently as having excoriated the Affordable Care Act's over $700 billion in cuts from Medicare. How terrible! Yet he certainly can't have forgotten that his own budget proposals contained approximately the same amount of cuts to Medicare. I suppose what bugs Ryan is that while he proposed to cut benefits to consumers, the Affordable Care Act cut payments to providers. Thus, in one little tidbit, behold the definition of politics, Count on the average voter to have the memory retention capabilities of a fruit fly (with apologies to fruit flies) and be shameful in exploiting that fact.

Of course, this tactic is not confined to Republicans. (I almost typed conservative Republicans but that would be a double negative.) For instance, Elizabeth Warren was a registered Republican for about as much of her adult life as she has been a Democrat, a fact that does not appear in her bio on such sites as Huffington Post. One site, however, does quote her as saying that she began (emphasis mine) voting Democratic in 1995. Does that mean that she managed to reconcile herself to voting for Reagan twice? One interviewer claims to have asked her that question and claims further that she declined to answer. Protecting her right to privacy, was she? Or protecting her newly-minted Progressive image? I would love to hear how anyone who claims the Progressive mantle managed to find sufficient reason to vote for Reagan over Carter at a time when Reagan was as far to the right of center as Ted Cruz is today.

So, the expediency of the moment abounds on both sides of the political fence.

Allow me one more shot at Progressives before I take aim at Republicans. During the recent Israeli incursion into Gaza, many of my Progressive friends were appalled. I get it. It was a hot, ugly mess. But in expressing their outrage, they not only questioned Israel's tactics of the moment, but Israel's very right to exist.

Where to begin? While Columbus was accidentally discovering the New World, Europeans back home were hunting down and killing Jews with great vigor as part of the Inquisition - not really a Spanish invention at all but sanctioned a couple of centuries previously in Rome. Russian progroms refined the art of Jewish genocide generations ahead of Hitler. And well into the 20th Century in the US, one of the Ks that the KKK wanted to eliminate in America, in addition to Koons and Katholics, was Kikes.

So even if you don't view Israel as being as legitimate as so many of the other European-sponsored constructs in the Middle East, even if you don't accept the argument that the Palestinians who left in 1948 weren't so much chased as invited to leave by Arab armies who promised a triumphant return after the Jews were driven into the Med, even if you blame the horrid conditions in the camps on the Jews rather than the indifference and/or nefarious self-interest of their Arab hosts, it seems that there's as much of a Progressive case to be made for reparations to Jews as there is on behalf of African-Americans, as is the current Progressive fashion.

On to Republicans, who are not scientists. What's with that? Are only farmers allowed to vote on farm bills? Was John Glenn given carte blanche to determine NASA's budget as the only astronaut on Capitol Hill? This is simply ludicrous. The 80s were warmer than the 70s, The 90s were warmer than the 80s. And so on and so on. You don't have to be a scientist. You just have to have blood flow to your brain. And whether or not you believe that human activity is a contributing factor, how can you legislate against the Pentagon planning for the appearance of new sea routes through Arctic or the effect of sea-level rise on existing facilities? Yet that sort of silliness managed to get written into the House's version of the Defense budget this year. One expects that sort of thing from a state like North Carolina, which has banned basing coastal development policies on scientific predictions of how much the sea level will rise. But the US House? C'mon man...

And then there's ebola. I personally like the viral internet meme: More Americans have been married to Kim Kardashian than have died from ebola. But if it bleeds, it leads. Fortunately, polls are showing that 'bleeds/leads' is turning off Gen Y to mainstream media. That's a hopeful trend. Unfortunately, Gen Y is not well represented in Congress. Brain dead people are fully represented, however. Take, for example, the Congressman who suggested that the Surgeon General should head Washington's response to ebola rather than Obama's appointed ebola czar. When it was pointed out to Congressman Chaffetz that Senate Republicans have held up the confirmation of Obama's choice for Surgeon General, leaving the post vacant, Chaffetz tried to backpedal. But read the transcript. You can't fix stupid. (I have to stop using these pop culture callouts...)

I leave you with a quote from the movie An American President:

We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you (Insert Politician's Name Here) is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it, and telling you who's to blame for it. 

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS EXPLAINED

Now that I live in France, I'm often asked about American politics. HERE is a quick primer on American political parties that appears on the Political Page. It's basic but it's a start.