Motley Moose – Archive

Shortly after the massacre at Sandy Hook, I heard from a lady lawyer with a story to tell about trying to get inpatient mental care for her severely ill, very young son. It must have been extraordinarily difficult for her to write, but she wrote it and shared it with me several weeks ago. It is today’s offering for KosAbility at the GOS, and it’s too good not to give y’all a link.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

(This is a cross-post of my final diary as moderator of KosAbility)

I wrote the kick-off diary for this group three years ago next month, and I have been the Sunday moderator almost every week since.  

Many of us old-timers who considered KosAbility to be a labor of  love have moved on. CJ (ulookarmless) passed away. Father John-Mark (jgilhousen) has a new ministry. Scottie Thomaston (formerly indiemcemopants) has a full-time job. Homogenius has a job and a busy life. Peter (plf515) is still an occasional contributor and remains my rock, but his business is growing. Me? I’m tired. Three years is a long time to give up every Sunday afternoon.

We’ve done great work with this group. Before KosAbility, you didn’t see people getting donuts for comments like “retard” or “take your meds”. We earned a deserved place on the Daily Kos masthead, one of only five groups named as “Featured Groups”.  Almost 1200 diaries bear the KosAbility tag, and most of our scheduled diaries have been on the site’s Recommended List. A lot to be proud of; a great tradition for someone to carry forward.

That someone is my friend postmodernista. I was about to post a diary last week looking for a volunteer when Jill called me out of the blue and, when I told her what I was doing, she offered to take my place. It was as if the universe were handing me a gift! We’re both here today, me to say goodbye and Jill to say hello to those who don’t know her. I’ll let her have the space below the squiggle to introduce herself.

I want to thank everyone in the community for helping make KosAbility such a success – our writers, our commenters, our moderators, and our board. You guys are the best of the best. ♥

Today’s KosAbility diary is written by the funny lady Clytemnestra. Here’s the link: http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

If you missed last week’s offering on post-polio syndrome, I regret to inform you that parts of the diary were plagiarized, a first for our group. The writer has been banned and the post removed.

Clytemnestra, on the other hand, is completely original – in more ways than one!

Some of the Obama’s more incoherent detractors have labeled his health care plan as “socialized medicine.” It is assumed, naturally, that socialism is Bad (with a big B).

While socialism may be less effective in many industries and fields (just look at the Soviet Union’s fate, after all), the insurance industry as a whole is rather different. Think for a moment – how is capitalism supposed to work? The company that makes the most profit wins. Companies make profit by selling goods and services to consumers; the better the product, the more consumers buy it, the more money said company makes, and the more effort said company puts into making an even better product. Society as a whole benefits from this invisible hand.

With insurance, on the other hand, companies don’t make profit by selling consumers the best product. Instead, they make money by denying insurance claims from consumers. The incentive is perverted; the insurance company that does the best denies the most claims. And because one has to begin with a lot of preexisting money to start an insurance company, it is very difficult for competition to emerge. Meanwhile, the customer is trying to make insurance companies pay for something (a medical crisis, for instance) he or she could not afford on his or her own. It is as if both sides are continually trying to rob the other.

Obviously, this is Bad (with a big B) for society.  

One of the most important health care reforms would be to get rid an inefficient, outdated tax exemption that is still a fundamental part of U.S. policy.

This is how it works. If a company provides health insurance to its employees, the federal government does not tax the health benefits that are being provided. Say you have an insurance policy worth $5,000. Said company deducts a part of the employee’s salary – say, $1,000 – for “health insurance.”  But the majority of the cost – the other $4,000 – is hidden, because the company negotiates with health providers itself. This is an enormous tax exemption, amounting to the biggest the federal government gives.

On the surface, it sounds like a good idea. Who wouldn’t want to encourage a companies to provide health insurance?

The problem lies in the unintended consequences of this tax exemption.

More below.

Obama is a Corporatist Sell Out! seems to have become one of the battle cries on the liberal blogosphere at the moment, and partly  inspired by Al Giordano’s excellent article We Have Met the Corporation and It is Us (hat tip to Happy in VT for the link) this seems worthy of a wider moose moot. I was hoping to write something more linked and substantial and elegantly argued, but given the holiday season, thought it best to get this modified comment out there, sooner rather than later.

You may disagree but, from this transatlantic perch, it seems that there is some justice on focusing on the role of commercial and corporate interest in the US legislative life. As the Health Reform process has made quite clear, the US system of campaign finance, legislative checks and balances, is quite prone to effective lobbyists, paid handsomely by their corporate clients, surely because they get results.

But to go from this recognition of corporate influence, to a conspiratorial Chomskyite hegemony and argue that ‘everything is about corporate power’ seems to be – as Al Giordano says – to both state the obvious and miss the point.

The House is holding court leading up to the likely vote on healthcare this weekend – perhaps even today.  Will healthcare reform pass into law in the foreseeable future?  Will it look like something that most people can be happy with?

Consider this an open thread for following and discussing the pertinent happenings.

Michael Steele and the GOP sent me another survey today.  This time asking for my opinions about the state of healthcare in America.  As anyone who has read my thoughts on the topic would know, I am a hesitant supporter of reform and am generally fraught with concern about the implications of any solution to the current dilemma, so I am precisely the kind of moderate voter that the GOP should be trying to win over to its side on this issue.

Let’s see how well they do.

When you wake up in the morning and rub the sleep out of your eyes are you surprised to find a great shadowy figure in the room? We are past the Fourth and the “let’s celebrate America” holiday feeling only to find that the lobbyists continued to move forward while we were distracted by fireworks and speeches.

The Wapo points out this morning that a large number of former inner-office employees of Max Baucus and Charles Grassley and other active Congressional committee members are being snatched up by lobbying organizations:

Today President Obama signed into law the new State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) bill.  This bill extends healthcare coverage to 4 million uninsured children beyond the original 7 million covered by the program.

As a “downpayment on (his) promise to cover every American” it isn’t a bad start.  Those 4 million kids are about 9% of the 45 million uninsured Americans.  The bill passed the House overwhelmingly today as it has twice during George Bush’s presidency – the only difference being that it was not vetoed this time.

If we can get that much done in the first fifteen days of this new administration, perhaps we can get more done in the next 1,400.