Originally Posted By: Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man
so far works for medicade and the VA. it's working in the UK.
Not all doctors take Medicade patients, and VA doctors work for the government, usually associated with the military itself. If you put everyone on government controlled insurance, you'll more than likely see a great decrease in doctors (as they would not be able to make enough money to justify the expense of becoming a doctor) or they would shut their doors to all but the ones who have better insurance or pay in cash (i.e. the wealthy) causing an even greater load on the doctors who actually participate and give them less time with each patient.
whomod said: I generally don't like it when people decide to play by the rules against people who don't play by the rules. It tends to put you immediately at a disadvantage and IMO is a sign of true weakness. This is true both in politics and on the internet."
Originally Posted By: Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man
so far works for medicade and the VA. it's working in the UK.
How many people are in the UK again? What percentage fall into income brackets where government assistance might be needed?
Paying for veterans' health care makes sense. They've directly contributed to the future of their society. If you make too many withdrawals and not enough deposits, though, it won't take very long for the red ink to start to accumulate.
nice doomsday scenarios and cynicism. despite the fact that it does work in other forms and we can adapt and adjust as needed. it's better than nothing. and it can be shaped into something that helps a lot of people.
Originally Posted By: Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man
nice doomsday scenarios and cynicism. despite the fact that it does work in other forms and we can adapt and adjust as needed. it's better than nothing. and it can be shaped into something that helps a lot of people.
It's how things are in the US right now. It's not inconceivable or even an inflation to believe that it may occur at a higher rate. Why are there so many lawyers in the US (more than there are possibly needed)? Because people can make a shitload of money as one. Those who don't either become ambulance chasers or change careers. I think the best way to have government insurance that is adaptable and better suited to individuals is to do it (yes, I'll say it again) at the state and local levels.
whomod said: I generally don't like it when people decide to play by the rules against people who don't play by the rules. It tends to put you immediately at a disadvantage and IMO is a sign of true weakness. This is true both in politics and on the internet."
it could really work if run locally with federal funds. like public schools. which do run well, it's really the number of obnoxious kids getting higher that makes it dificult.
Yeah, that makes sense. Have the federal government give block grants to states to set up health insurance programs, but the states make the call as to how the money and programs are implemented.
Knutreturns said: Spoken like the true Greatest RDCW Champ!
With the party taking a bit of a beating over its resistance to expanding access to healthcare for low-income children, Republicans on Capitol Hill apparently have a new idea: they’ll introduce a universal healthcare plan of their own.
Under fierce attack by Democrats over the children’s health insurance plan, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner said Sunday Republicans will unveil their own health care plan over the next few months.
Quote:
“Republicans are working on a plan that will provide access to all Americans to high quality health insurance, make sure that we increase the quality of insurance that we have in American, and we want to foster a sprit of innovation,” said Boehner on “Fox News Sunday.” “This is a plan we’ll see over the next coming months where we put the patients in charge of their health care.”
It’s obviously too soon to say what features might be included in such a plan, though it’s safe to assume the policy won’t amount to much, won’t actually help the uninsured, and will be structured in such a way as to help the party’s corporate benefactors.
But frankly, I don’t care. The leading Republican in the House is prepared to unveil a plan that will offer universal access to “high-quality health insurance.” Whether the plan stinks is irrelevant — a proposal like this would be a breakthrough.
For years, the notion that Washington could (and should) create a framework whereby all Americans have healthcare coverage was the purview of one side of the aisle: the Dems’ side. Republicans resisted the idea that there was a problem, resisted the idea that officials in DC were responsible for addressing the problem, and resisted any approach predicated on the suggestion that all Americans deserve coverage.
And yet, there was the conservative Republican leader of a conservative Republican caucus on a conservative Republican network bragging about a universal healthcare plan the GOP is going to unveil.
It reminded me of a Kevin Drum post from January, after Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mitt Romney pushed UHC plans of their own.
Quote:
Democrats should understand what this means: (a) universal healthcare is no longer some lefty fringe notion, and (b) the plans from Schwarzenegger and Massachusetts’ Mitt Romney are now the starting point for any serious healthcare proposal. Any proposal coming out of a Democratic policy shop should be, at a minimum, considerably more ambitious than what’s on offer from these two Republicans.
Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.
I’m well aware of the fact that the Republican plans for universal coverage aren’t going to be very good. That’s not the point. It’s more important to realize the big picture — we’ll soon have Dems and Republicans arguing not over whether to have every American insured, but how best to have every American insured.
The state of play is in flux, and it’s shifting in the Dems’ direction.
Well, the devil is always in the details but as I posted above, it certainly looks as if the debate has certainly shifted in the universal health care camp. It'll be interesting to see what Boehner's plan would actually consist of though..
Some promising news on Universal healthcare from the Carpetbagger report... Under fierce attack by Democrats over the children’s health insurance plan, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner said Sunday Republicans will unveil their own health care plan over the next few months...it certainly looks as if the debate has certainly shifted in the universal health care camp.
Ironically, there is some indication that the public actually supports the Bush position in this matter. A USA Today poll shows that the public by a 52-40% margin favor limiting SCHIP to families at 200% of the poverty line, just as Bush wants to do.
In addition, the article goes on to say: "Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have said they're willing to talk if Thursday's veto override fails, as both sides expect."
Accordingly, while polls aren't the be-all and end-all, it is interesting that at least one gauge of public opinion would seem to show a majority is with Bush, not the Democrats, on this particular issue.
You almost start to think they're patting the GOP on the back and then this little gem:
Quote:
It’s obviously too soon to say what features might be included in such a plan, though it’s safe to assume the policy won’t amount to much, won’t actually help the uninsured, and will be structured in such a way as to help the party’s corporate benefactors.
Well, it was a partisan blog after all... and then they added that regardless of what the plan does or does not include, the point is that the debate has shifted dramatically. Which judging from Boehner's comments, is true actually..
I think the distrust comes down to how vehemently the right has opposed Universal health care. And to suddenly be all for it> It's understandable (to me anyways) why people would be wary of this.
Originally Posted By: Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man
so far works for medicade and the VA. it's working in the UK.
Not all doctors take Medicade patients, and VA doctors work for the government, usually associated with the military itself. If you put everyone on government controlled insurance, you'll more than likely see a great decrease in doctors (as they would not be able to make enough money to justify the expense of becoming a doctor) or they would shut their doors to all but the ones who have better insurance or pay in cash (i.e. the wealthy) causing an even greater load on the doctors who actually participate and give them less time with each patient.
Originally Posted By: Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man
nice doomsday scenarios and cynicism. despite the fact that it does work in other forms and we can adapt and adjust as needed. it's better than nothing. and it can be shaped into something that helps a lot of people.
Many dentists abandoned Britain's publicly funded health care system after reforms backfired, leaving a growing number of Britons without access to affordable care.
....
Though private treatment by dentists is available, the tradition of publicly funded care means most people rely on it. But now there are fewer dentists to see patients.
In April 2006, the government reformed National Health Service dentistry in an effort to increase patients' access to treatment and to simplify payments. Dentists objected, complaining it reduced income. Some dentists cut the number of health service patients _ or stopped taking them altogether.
Forty-five percent of dentists surveyed said they no longer accept National Health Service patients.
....
The study released Monday by the commission contained no figures detailing the National Health Service dental shortage. But earlier this year, then-Health Minister Rosie Winterton told Parliament more than 2 million people were unable to find an NHS dentist.
....
"These findings indicate that the NHS dental system is letting many patients down very badly," said Sharon Grant, chairman of the Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Health, the independent body that commissioned the study.
The survey found nearly 20 percent of patients have gone without dental treatment because of the cost. Thirty-five percent of those not now using dental services said they cannot find an NHS dentist near where they live.
....
"Access is a big issue in the United States," Albert said. "Even if you have medicaid coverage, finding a sufficient number of dentists that accept it is difficult."
....
In the British study, 78 percent of private dental patients left the National Health Service because their dentist stopped treating NHS patients or they could not find an NHS dentist. Only 15 percent claimed they switched to get better treatment.
Doesn't really seem to be working 100% in the UK.
whomod said: I generally don't like it when people decide to play by the rules against people who don't play by the rules. It tends to put you immediately at a disadvantage and IMO is a sign of true weakness. This is true both in politics and on the internet."
Survey also finds that Americans are pessimistic about the direction of the country and are dissatisfied with Bush and Congress.
By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Janet Hook, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers October 25, 2007
WASHINGTON -- Democratic ideas for fixing the healthcare system to cover the uninsured enjoy more support among Americans than proposals coming from Republicans, a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll shows.
The poll also found that a restive public was pessimistic about the direction of the country and that voters were dissatisfied with President Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress. Congress was shown to be more unpopular than Bush: Its approval rating was 22%, the president's 35%.
Healthcare is widely seen as the top domestic issue in next year's presidential race.
Two of the main proposals advanced by Democrats received majority support in the poll.
Sixty-two percent said they supported requiring large employers to help pay for coverage whereas 31% opposed it. And 51% said they favored a mandate that individuals purchase health insurance, much as drivers are required to carry auto coverage; 39% disagreed.
Tax breaks to make insurance more affordable -- a leading Republican idea -- more closely divided the public, with 44% backing that approach and 45% opposing it.
In one of the most politically significant results, the poll finds that independents and moderates were generally lining up with Democrats in the healthcare debate.
The survey also suggested an explanation for the emerging alignment: Independents were most likely to complain about "job lock" -- the view that they are stuck in jobs they don't like solely because of health benefits.
In all, 20% of independents said they or someone in their household were forced to stay in a job because it provided healthcare, compared with 13% of Democrats and 5% of Republicans.
"Independents are more insecure in terms of the issue of 'job lock,' " which causes them to lean more toward Democrats on the healthcare issue than Republicans, said Robert Blendon, a public opinion expert at the Harvard School of Public Health. The poll found that Americans were divided on one of the basic questions surrounding the healthcare debate: who should bear the main responsibility in securing health insurance.
Twenty-nine percent said it is the responsibility of government; 23% said employers; 24% said individuals should take care of themselves, without help from government or employers; and 19% said it is a shared responsibility.
The survey, conducted Friday through Monday, was supervised by Times Poll Director Susan Pinkus. The questions were asked of 1,209 adults, and the margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
The healthcare debate is unfolding against a backdrop of deep public disaffection with government and with leaders of both parties.
Even among Democrats, 65% disapproved of the job Congress is doing. That partly reflects a belief among party members that Congress has not succeeded in blocking Bush's policies on the Iraq war and other issues. A majority of Democrats -- 52% -- said Congress was supporting Bush's agenda too much.
"I feel like they are not standing up to the president as I think they should," said Sinjaporn Lacy, 41, a Democrat who lives in New Hampshire. "They are not worried about the people that put them into office."
Sarah Feinberg, spokeswoman for the House Democratic Caucus, said she expected that Congress' image would improve if Democrats did a better job of publicizing what they had achieved since taking control of the House and Senate after the 2006 elections. Legislation signed into law includes an increase in the national minimum wage and a large boost in college aid money.
"We have some more work to do so people will know about our accomplishments," Feinberg said.
On healthcare, the leading Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, support some form of requirement that large employers help pay for coverage.
Clinton and Edwards also favor a requirement that individuals get health coverage, with government subsidies for those who cannot afford it. Obama favors requiring coverage for children but stops short of a mandate for all.
An estimated 47 million people in the United States are uninsured.
The candidate with the most experience with the insurance mandate issue is Republican Mitt Romney. As governor of Massachusetts, he advocated and signed into law a bill requiring individuals to get coverage.
Yet Romney has backed away from that plan as a national solution; he instead is calling for tax breaks and other measures to make insurance more affordable. GOP front-runner Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, favors using tax credits to help people buy private coverage.
Linda VanDruff of Kansas City, Kan., a political independent, said she was not comfortable with the idea of tax breaks for health insurance.
"A tax credit is just a tax credit," VanDruff said. "You get that just once a year, and it is not going to cover the cost to you for health insurance."
VanDruff, 52, said she was forced to retire from her job as a crane driver three years ago because of lung disease and is now covered by Medicare.
"If you are rich-rich, you can afford it, and if you are poor-poor, they'll help you with it," she said of health insurance. "But if you are that in-between guy, you are in trouble."
The survey found that 53% supported the idea of extending Medicare to cover all Americans, creating a government-run system; and 36% opposed it.
But Blendon, the Harvard expert, said that finding was suspect because the poll question did not make clear that such a system would be financed by taxes.
Thought this was funny and quite frankly true a good bit of the time.
Edit-not the stereotypes on the map but the representation of how America sees the the rest of the world.
"Batman is only meaningful as an answer to a world which in its basics is chaotic and in the hands of the wrong people, where no justice can be found. I think it's very suitable to our perception of the world's condition today... Batman embodies the will to resist evil" -Frank Miller
"Conan, what's the meaning of life?" "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!" -Conan the Barbarian
"Well, yeah." -Jason E. Perkins
"If I had a dime for every time Pariah was right about something I'd owe twenty cents." -Ultimate Jaburg53
"Fair enough. I defer to your expertise." -Prometheus
The threat of a veto looms. Democrats vow to cover 10 million children; Bush opposes higher tobacco taxes to fund the program.
By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer October 26, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The House on Thursday approved a revised children's health insurance bill that Democrats said addressed Republican concerns, but President Bush again threatened to veto it.
The 265-142 tally fell short of the two-thirds needed to override a veto, but it raised the stakes in the political confrontation over children's healthcare.
Both sides have moved in the direction of a compromise since the House failed last week to override Bush's veto of the original bill. Yet there have been no direct negotiations between the administration and the legislation's congressional supporters. Each side blames the other for the impasse. Most Democrats and dozens of Republicans, including many senior GOP senators, back the bill.
"If you feel as though we've been here before, it's because we have," said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), an opponent.
At issue is the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which now provides coverage to 6 million children nationally whose parents earn too much money to qualify for Medicaid but too little to afford private insurance. The state-federal partnership, which in California is known as Healthy Families, must be renewed this year.
Congress approved a five-year, $60-billion bill that would have covered an additional 4 million children and given states the option of helping uninsured children in some middle-class families.
Bush originally insisted on a $30-billion program that analysts said would not have been enough to cover the current caseload. The administration wanted to limit eligibility to children in families making about $41,000 for a family of four, or about twice the federal poverty level.
Administration officials now say the president is willing to spend about $45 billion on the program and -- under certain conditions -- allow coverage of uninsured children in families making about $62,000 for a family of four, or three times the national poverty level.
House Democrats said they have also made significant concessions. Their revised bill includes citizenship verification requirements and would bar states from using federal funds to cover children in families making more than three times the national poverty level.
"We think we tried to respond -- and we did respond, we believe -- to the concerns you raised," House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) told Republicans during the debate.
But Democrats say they will not yield on the goal of covering 10 million children. And administration officials say that Bush is adamantly opposed to the hike in tobacco taxes that Congress wants to use to pay for such an expansion.
With Senate approval, the bill could land on Bush's desk as early as next week. Should he veto it, an override vote would likely occur close to the Nov. 16 deadline when temporary funding for the program expires.
Democrats say they see some opportunities to get Republicans to switch on an override vote. Thirty-eight House Republicans signed a letter last week indicating that they would like to see the stalemate resolved.
Ten members of the California delegation -- all from areas affected by the wildfires -- did not vote Thursday: Republicans Brian P. Bilbray of Carlsbad, Ken Calvert of Corona, David Dreier of San Dimas, Elton Gallegly of Simi Valley, Duncan Hunter of Alpine, Darrell Issa of Vista, Jerry Lewis of Redlands and Gary G. Miller of Diamond Bar; and Democrats Susan A. Davis of San Diego and Bob Filner of Chula Vista. Rep. Mary Bono (R-Palm Springs) joined the rest of the Democrats in voting for the bill; the remaining Republicans were opposed.
ricardo.alonso-zaldivar @latimes.com
the entire point of compromise is that one side gives a little, then the other side does and finally you come up with something that is agreeable, not perfect, to both sides.
I think the message of this article is that Bush just doesn't want so many kids to be insured!
This story was outstanding because it brings this debate out past the slogans and again shows how this debate impacts REAL people in rel ways. The 1st and 3rd parts are about this family and the 2nd part is the debate itself summarized:
Wes Wirkkala is an independent contractor and wife Sophia is a stay-at-home mom to Vincent (in arms), Nicholas and Olivia. A national political fight, one middle-class Southern California family . . . What the debate about children’s health insurance looks like up close.
By Susan Brink, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer November 26, 2007
AMERICAN dream scene: a gorgeous Southern California day. A car-free cul-de-sac on a hilltop overlooking a canyon. A boy and his father, shooting hoops. But stark reality intruded for a brief moment last summer when 40-year-old Wes Wirkkala tripped, stumbled and almost fell. "Dad, what are you doing? Be careful!" his son Nicholas shouted. "We don't have health insurance."
At 8, Nicholas knows his family cannot risk any visits to the emergency room. He's been told a hundred times, as he dashes out the door with his skateboard, to be careful, to fall on his butt if he has to fall at all because there's no money for broken arms.
Wes Wirkkala, father of three, heard his son's words in front of their Dana Point home and felt shot through with shame. He didn't want this particular family deficiency broadcast through the neighborhood. "It was embarrassing," Wes says. "It kind of makes me feel that I'm not providing everything I should be."
The Wirkkalas, with an income that for five years has hovered around $70,000 and a home they bought in 2004 for $535,000, are a family many would call middle class. But they have been priced out of the private health insurance market, and their circumstances illustrate the core of a political battle over how much a family can earn for their children to qualify for a federal-state partnership called the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP. If the outcome of Washington politics goes one way, the children could remain uninsured. If it goes the other way, the children might get health insurance.
Sophia and Wes Wirkkala decided, despite his embarrassment, that they should tell their story of how difficult it can be for a family of modest, middle-class means to maintain health insurance. Sophia is not ashamed, just fearful for her children and angry at a system that has pushed health insurance premiums out of reach.
She lies awake at night, worrying about the health of her three perfectly healthy children. "We're in the boat we're in because I'm a stay-at-home mom," she says. "We chose to have children, and we planned that I would stay home with them and home-school the kids. We want to raise kids that are going to grow up and be great adult citizens. We question that decision all the time. You look at your children sleeping, and you say, 'I'm not providing healthcare for these kids.' "
The Wirkkalas are, by most definitions, doing all right. They live in a four-bedroom house in Dana Point that was starting to sag toward the canyon depths when they bought it three years ago. Because Wes knows what to do with a power saw and a nail gun, the house has been shored up and improved with beamed ceilings, antiques incorporated into bathroom vanities, and a granite-countered modern kitchen. An independent contractor, he says: "This home is my business card."
From the patio that fronts the canyon, one can catch a glimpse of the Pacific. "You look at our home," Sophia says, "and you think, 'They probably have everything.' "
It does not look like the home of a family who cannot afford health insurance. And it's only recently that their insurance has lapsed, canceled one month last year when they simply could not make the premium. They thought it would be temporary, but they haven't had the money since to pick it up again.
Even without employer-sponsored health insurance, the couple managed, for most of their married life, to buy health coverage for the family.
At first, they bought a policy with a $2,500 annual deductible that cost them about $250 a month. As the premiums kept steadily rising, to more than $400 a month, they switched to a policy with a $5,000 deductible. The premiums were lower at first, but continued to rise, despite the fact that no one in the family had major health problems. And preventive care wasn't covered. Every time a child needed a vaccination or a trip to the pediatrician for an earache, the fee came out of their pockets.
When the monthly premium reached $450 last year, the couple decided that the payments were unsustainable.
Sophia thinks herself in circles over medical care. Is it better to try to save up to buy health insurance by skimping on preventive visits to the pediatrician? Once Nicholas had an earache, and they went to an urgent-care center. He was treated, and their bill was about $200. He needed the care, but if the family could count on not having those kinds of outlays, they might put some money aside to pay for a policy.
"When you're trying to save a lump amount to buy insurance, you don't want to spend money on going to the doctor," she says. So the youngest child, Vincent, 2, is behind in his immunizations. And when Nicholas or Olivia, 6, do typical kid things, their parents hold their breath. "When you see your son hop on a skateboard, or your daughter doing cartwheels, you're a nervous wreck," she says.
The children don't qualify for SCHIP, the program now being debated in Congress. Under current rules, the family's income is too high.
By most accounts, the SCHIP program has been a 10-year success story. The number of uninsured children dropped steadily from 11.1 million in 1998, the year after the program began, to its lowest level of 7.9 million in 2004, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. But the number of kids without insurance grew by about 1 million from the beginning of 2004 through 2005, and according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, half of the newly uninsured children came from families earning from about $40,000 to about $80,000 a year (based on a family of four). "It increased in the last year, probably because both adults and kids are losing job-based coverage," says E. Richard Brown, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.
Some of those newly uninsured children qualify for SCHIP but their families are unaware of the program. In some cases, states with budget shortfalls have stopped enrolling children. And when a family loses employer coverage, their children must go through a waiting period of a year, extended in August by the Department of Health and Human Services from three months, before being eligible.
What's certain is that SCHIP-insured kids get their checkups. Children in the program are more likely to receive preventive healthcare, specialty care and dental care than uninsured children, and their parents report fewer financial burdens, unmet medical needs and less worry about their children, according to a report in the August 2007 journal Health Services Research. "It has provided access to kids who wouldn't have had coverage," says Brown. "It's cheap, and it'll help produce healthy and productive adults. I don't know what more we could ask for."
The total cost of insuring a child under SCHIP is about $85 a month. Families pay a portion, but no family, regardless of the number of children, pays more than $45 a month. The program insures children, not their parents, with rare state exceptions.
The political fight over its renewal for the next five years caught a lot of health policy experts by surprise, on both sides of the argument. "I think conservatives originally thought it was a good thing to expand coverage for children," says Robert B. Helms, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a business-oriented think tank. "Children are relatively cheap to insure. They're young and healthy."
Yet both sides are duking it out ideologically. "Most people didn't anticipate it would become this big political issue," says Len Finocchio, a spokesman for the California HealthCare Foundation, a philanthropy that funds healthcare research and programs in the state.
The ideological divide
On one side are mostly congressional Democrats and a number of Republican colleagues who want to insure additional children under SCHIP. (In California, both Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and a majority of the California Legislature want to expand the program.)
On the other side are some congressional Republicans, led by the Bush administration, who argue that it's not the government's responsibility to go beyond covering the poorest and most vulnerable children. "It's kind of fundamental," Helms says. "Conservatives see this as another way of expanding government health programs. Everyone agrees that this is a good program, but some people say that we've got to draw the line." It's a line that, if crossed under the most generous congressional proposals, could increase spending on the program by $47 billion, to a total of almost $72 billion, over five years.
"I think both parties are using this as an opportunity to put a stake in the ground," Finocchio says. "Democrats are saying that we have to at least be responsible to provide healthcare for our children. Republicans are saying we shouldn't be covering kids whose parents make a lot of money."
The main point of contention is deciding who makes too much money for their children to get help, and the argument boils down to how many multiples of the federal poverty guidelines should entitle children to health insurance -- two (200%), 2 1/2 (250%), or three (300%). Current federal guidelines say that children whose families earn up to twice the poverty level qualify, and the Bush administration wants to largely hold it to that. Congressional plans would allow states to raise that level to up to 300% and, in a compromise provision, discourage states from going beyond that level by reducing federal matching funds if they did.
Federal guidelines define poverty for an individual, in 2007, as an income of less than $10,210. Except for Alaska and Hawaii, which have slightly higher numbers, the figures are national and don't account for cost-of-living differences across the country. The income number rises with additional family members. A family of four, for example, is defined as poor if their income is below $20,650. Most of those children qualify for Medicaid, called MediCal in California, the health insurance program for the poor.
The intention behind SCHIP was to insure additional children, not just those at the very lowest poverty level. (Exceptions are the children of illegal immigrants. Children of legal immigrants qualify after living in the U.S. for five years.) Nineteen states cover children with higher family incomes and, in California, families can qualify for the SCHIP program if they earn 250% of poverty guidelines.
Funded at $25 billion over the last five years, the SCHIP program would be increased to $30 billion over the next five years under the Bush administration's 2008 proposed budget. Theoretically, income levels could go up to 250% of the poverty level, or $51,625 for a family of four. But there are stiff conditions. Before approving higher-income children, the administration proposes that states first be required to prove that they have enrolled at least 95% of children below the 200% level. No voluntary health program, whether Medicaid or the Medicare drug benefit for seniors, has ever reached a 95% enrollment rate, Brown says.
If Congress fails to act, or even if funding is held to present levels, or increased to administration-recommended levels, the California HealthCare Foundation estimates that up to 600,000 children in California could lose their health insurance beginning in 2008. Because of healthcare inflation, California and many other states would have to begin closing off new enrollments and disenrolling some insured children, according to the foundation's projections. "The funding wouldn't allow California to maintain its present caseload, and keep up with inflation," Finocchio says.
With Washington at a stalemate, the program, which expired in September, is being extended at current funding levels, month by month, with the latest program expiration deadline set at Dec. 14. Until politicians sort it out, a California family of five, under the SCHIP program called Healthy Families, can still earn up to $60,325.
The Wirkkalas make too much money.
But if the Democrats' plan passes, and the governor's and state's legislative proposals are enacted, benefits could extend to children in California households earning up to 300% of poverty levels, or $72,390 for a family of five.
For now, the family falls through what appears to be a comfortable crack, they say. They aren't holding their breath waiting for government help. Wes spends hours at websites, plugging in income numbers, family demographics and preferences for the kind of care he might anticipate his family needing. "You punch in what's important to you," he says. "I've done that, and the number comes back $900 a month. That wouldn't fit."
What he's looking for is more than just catastrophic coverage, which takes care of tragic illnesses or accidents. The family already knows that the high deductibles in such plans mean they end up paying for all routine visits to pediatricians and run-of-the-mill childhood illnesses in addition to the premiums. He has not been able to find what he believes the family needs -- coverage of major medical episodes as well as preventive care -- at a price they can afford.
So they go without, and they worry and feel guilty.
Their situation has a few similarities to that of the family of Graeme Frost, a 12-year-old Baltimore boy who delivered the Democratic response to a radio address by President Bush on Sept. 29. The Frosts, earning about $45,000 a year, easily qualified for SCHIP for their four children. Graeme, who along with his sister had suffered brain injuries in a car accident, talked about how much that coverage meant to him and his family. Opponents of an increase in coverage took issue, saying that with a nice house, and an income many would consider middle-class, the Frosts should not expect government help.
But like the Wirkkalas, the Frosts' nice home reflected carpentry skills, not high income. And like the Wirkkalas, the Frosts made a decision that the husband would work for himself rather than a company while the wife would stay home with the children. As American dream-like as they appear, the decisions did not fit with the country's health insurance system.
Already, the Wirkkalas have borrowed from the equity in their home for the $5,000 co-payment, when they still had insurance, for the birth of Vincent. "We've cut out everything. We've cut out cable, canceled magazine subscriptions, redone our auto insurance, cut up our credit cards," Sophia says. "My budget for the week for gas, food, field trips for the kids, is $200. Look in the refrigerator. There's fruit and yogurt. Not much extra there."
Wes Wirkkala works six days a week -- weekdays on job sites and Saturdays on bids. But he's home for breakfast and dinner every day, and for lunch most days. The couple has decided not only that Sophia would stay home with the children but also that Wes would work independently and spend as much time as he can with his family.
They're still shocked to realize that family-focused decisions have cost them access to healthcare. At their sunny kitchen table with a view of the canyon and the ocean in the distance, Sophia Wirkkala ponders their dilemma. "This is America!" she says. "I grew up being told this was the greatest country in the world. I don't think I can put 'the greatest country in the world' and 'children without health insurance' in the same sentence."
susan.brink@latimes.com
And that final sentence summarizes just why this is a losing issue for Republicans. People are at the breaking point already and no amount of ideological debating and spinning can compete with harsh reality facing too too many people. Poor and middle class alike.
Johnathan Alter of Newswek commented the day after THIS remarkable moment occured at the AFL/CIO debate:
Quote:
OLBERMANN: I saw that man, Steve Skvara, downstairs this afternoon in front of the NBC bureau here. He has to have a friend deal with the media. I offered him our congratulations and our condolences. And he said it was entirely worth it and he wished the AFL-CIO would do this every month because it put a human face on the conditions in the country right now. That was the moment of the debate, correct?
ALTER: I absolutely agree. I had my nephew and my 16-year-old son with me last night and after that, I turned to them and I said, this is not sports. We tend to look at this as if it‘s a contest, a horserace, you know, boxing match. Yes, on some level that helps makes politics fun to cover and fun for people to watch, but this is about real people‘s lives. And he drove that home.
The importance of what we are talking about—when people say forget politics, who cares about any of this, there are real people out there who are really suffering because of policies that are made in Washington. This was a reminder of it. And I think it was—it will be seen as one of the highlights of the whole campaign season. - Countdown W/ Keith Olbermann Aug. 8
Health care is THE issue facing us today. And compassion and assistance is needed not academic debates about big government or whether or not people make "too much" . People without insurance (and even those WITH insurance TIED to their jobs) don't give a damn about that. All they care is that they or their loved ones can't afford health care.
And Graeme Frost, this family in the article, Steve Skvara, [and as it relates to the Iraq war] individual soldiers, the coffins of dead soldiers etc personify that. This is why the right wing detests these people. They like things in the abstract. Where one can argue ideology and not reality. Once it becomes about REAL people not just statistics, real soldiers, not just "the troops" then they just come off as callous insensitive, monstrous.
And i sincerely hope Wonder Boy can appreciate the family in that articles plight because they made the kinds of choices that he thinks too many people do not. He blames femenism of course but it's about economic reality today. They chose to devote time to family and raising their kids in a traditional way. And sadly, those choices lead to unnecessary hardship. I wish it were NOT the case.
They chose to devote time to family and raising their kids in a traditional way. And sadly, those choices lead to unnecessary hardship. I wish it were NOT the case.
Interesting "trap" whomod sets here.
He brings up the actions of the parents and their lifestyle choices. However, if we question or criticize their actions, is there any doubt he will then tell us we are out of line for "attacking" the children and/or their parents?
The only people "trapped" IMO are the people without any insurance. I wasn't trying to set up any "trap" for anyone. But I'm wondering as to why you see one.
Is it because of my prior point about them being REAL people and not just faceless ideological debates?
I found this essay worth mentioning and posting because it brings to life a big talking point of the right. About how if you make a certain amount of money that means you can afford insurance. It really doesn't mirror reality for this family and for many others. And in the first part of the article in the prior page, it detailed that point.
Again..
Quote:
OLBERMANN: I saw that man, Steve Skvara, downstairs this afternoon in front of the NBC bureau here. He has to have a friend deal with the media. I offered him our congratulations and our condolences. And he said it was entirely worth it and he wished the AFL-CIO would do this every month because it put a human face on the conditions in the country right now. That was the moment of the debate, correct?
ALTER: I absolutely agree. I had my nephew and my 16-year-old son with me last night and after that, I turned to them and I said, this is not sports. We tend to look at this as if it‘s a contest, a horserace, you know, boxing match. Yes, on some level that helps makes politics fun to cover and fun for people to watch, but this is about real people‘s lives. And he drove that home.
The importance of what we are talking about—when people say forget politics, who cares about any of this, there are real people out there who are really suffering because of policies that are made in Washington. This was a reminder of it. And I think it was—it will be seen as one of the highlights of the whole campaign season. - Countdown W/ Keith Olbermann Aug. 8
I suppose some of this is subjective but where there's smoke...
A tragicomedy of errors
In an excerpt from his new book, The Fall of the House of Bush, author Craig Unger details how Bush is, well, screwing up the world
By: CRAIG UNGER
It was not until after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were narrowly re-elected that many Americans began to realize that the Iraq War represented a dangerous moment in American history, a turning point both in terms of America’s place on the global chessboard and, domestically, in terms of its fate as a constitutional democracy. Gradually, the horrors of the war, its related scandals, and its ramifications began to reveal themselves.
On November 7, 2004, five days after the election, it was reported that thousands of surface-to-air missiles that had once been under Saddam’s control were unaccounted for because the US-led force had not secured all the weapons depots in Iraq. The next day, US-led forces moved in to clear out Fallujah, a stronghold for Sunni insurgents, launching a ferocious 10-day battle that killed at least 1000 insurgents and left 54 Americans dead and more than 400 seriously wounded. Colonel Gary Brandl led his troops into battle with words evocative of a Holy War. “The enemy has got a face,” he said. “He’s called Satan. He’s in Fallujah and we’re going to destroy him.”
During the assault, a marine deliberately shot and killed an unarmed Iraqi civilian in a mosque, and the videotaped incident was televised across the world. In response, violence raged across Iraq. On November 9, militants kidnapped three members of interim prime minister Ayad Allawi’s family. A few days later, in the north, saboteurs set fire to four oil wells northwest of Kirkuk. Astoundingly, despite having the second largest oil reserves in the world, Iraq was forced to import oil from nearby Kuwait because of lack of refining capacity and hundreds of terrorist attacks on its facilities.
By now, repercussions from the war were also being felt throughout the entire Middle East. Iraqi authorities had already captured Saudis crossing the Saudi border into Iraq to fight the United States. In response to Fallujah, 26 prominent Saudi religious scholars urged their followers to support “jihad” against US-led forces. Militant Islamists from America’s oil-rich ally had now taken up arms against the United States.
Paradoxically, even though their policy failures were finally evident, the neocons had become empowered as never before. Just before the election, Bush had quietly dismissed Brent Scowcroft as chairman of PFIAB [the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board] — without even bothering to speak to him personally. Cheney and Bush had both known that the phenomenally popular Colin Powell was crucial to their re-election chances. But now he, too, was expendable. On November 10, eight days after the election, Powell got the phone call from White House chief of staff Andy Card. He was out.
Doing everything possible to put a good face on his resignation, Powell told reporters at a November 15 press briefing that “it has always been my intention that I would serve one term,” and that he and Bush “came to a mutual agreement that it would be appropriate to leave at this time.” But Frank Carlucci, a former secretary of defense himself during the Reagan administration, who was close to both Powell and Cheney, and who continued to think highly of Cheney, was more forthright. “Colin has been used,” he said.
Bush and Cheney reshuffled the cabinet, strengthening the neocon hand. Condoleezza Rice replaced Powell. Much to Scowcroft’s dismay, she had proven to be less a voice for the realists than an enabler and repeater of others’ formulations, in effect a neocon fellow traveler. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, a Cheney ally, in turn took her old job as national security adviser. As for intelligence, Porter J. Goss, a former Republican congressman from Florida, who had become the new CIA director before the election, issued a memo to CIA employees that instantly confirmed his reputation as an administration loyalist: “As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.” The memo added that their job was “to support the administration and its policies in our work.”
With Rice, Hadley, and Goss in key positions, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had consolidated control over national security to an unprecedented degree. The notion that America’s $40 billion intelligence apparatus would speak truth to power had become a pipe dream. State Department veterans desperately fantasized that Scowcroft, former Secretary of State James Baker, or even Bush 41 himself would somehow soon ride to the rescue.
Purple fingers, blue in the face Meanwhile, in both Iraq and Washington, the dream of spreading democracy throughout the Middle East continued to be mocked by the brutal realities of war. On January 30, 2005, 58 percent of the Iraqi electorate defied threats of violence to vote in the first elections since Saddam’s ouster. After reaching the polls, Iraqis proudly displayed their ink-dipped purple fingers as indications that they had voted. In Washington, Republican congressmen flaunted purple fingers as a sign of solidarity with Bush and pride at how the United States had brought democracy to Iraq. “Giving Terrorism the Purple Finger,” read a headline. “Purple finger” cocktails were concocted, consisting of grenadine, cassis, black currants, and vodka.
After nearly two years of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations in Iraq, at last the White House had a concrete achievement to celebrate — one that no one could deny. In his 2005 State of the Union address on February 2, President Bush proudly saluted the Iraqi voters and the American soldiers who had made the election possible, introducing as his special guest Iraqi human-rights advocate Safia Taleb al-Suhail: “Eleven years ago, Safia’s father was assassinated by Saddam’s intelligence service. Three days ago in Baghdad, Safia was finally able to vote for the leaders of her country — and we are honored that she is with us tonight.” At last, Bush said, Iraq had turned the corner.
The speech also showed that Bush had been reading from the neocon handbook — he proclaimed to the world that his administration’s goal was the promotion of “democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”
“This is real neoconservatism,” Robert Kagan, a leading neocon, told the Los Angeles Times. “It would be hard to express it more clearly. If people were expecting Bush to rein in his ambitions and enthusiasms after the first term, they are discovering that they were wrong.”
Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center, a conservative think tank that hewed more closely to realist policies, had a different point of view. “If Bush means it literally, then it means we have an extremist in the White House,” he said. “I hope and pray that he didn’t mean it.”
To anyone who believed in democracy, the sight of Iraqis voting was potentially inspiring. But the political reality on the ground was starkly different. Yes, Shi’ites flocked to the polls in huge numbers. But the Sunnis, alienated by America’s de-Ba’athification policies, which removed members of the largely Sunni Ba’athist regime from government, angry because they had lost jobs and security when the United States disbanded the police and the military, and enraged by the American assault on Sunni mosques in Fallujah, boycotted the election in droves. Even before the elections were held, Brent Scowcroft had warned that voting had “great potential for deepening the conflict” in Iraq by exacerbating the divisions between Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims, and that it might lead to a civil war. As the Bush White House basked in the glory of having shown the world it could create a new democracy in the Middle East, it soon became clear that Scowcroft had been prescient.
The Shi’ites took office, but the Sunni insurgency went after new targets. US forces had protected its own bases, including the Green Zone, but not the general population in Baghdad or any of the major cities. “When we did not secure the population,” General Jack Keane told PBS’s Frontline, “the enemy realized that the population was fair game. . . . All through ’05 they exploited it. They began to kill people, take them on. . . . In ever-increasing numbers they began to kill more and more of the Iraqis. . . . They were exposed.”
Immediately after the election, the Sunnis struck back with a vengeance. On February 3, bombs killed at least 20 people in Baghdad; insurgents stopped a minibus near Kirkuk and gunned down 12 of its occupants; gunmen ambushed and killed two Iraqi contractors near Baghdad; others overran a police station in the town of Samawah — not to mention innumerable assassination attempts, car bombs, and the like. On February 17, a string of attacks killed at least 36 people, mostly Shi’ites. The next day, at least eight suicide bombings and other attacks targeted Shi’ite worshippers observing the religious festival of Ashura. By the end of the month, suicide bombers targeted crowded marketplaces near Baghdad, killing as many as 115 people with one bomb.
Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden had ordered his supporters to attack Iraqi oil facilities — which they had begun to do with considerable success. Terrorists had begun an all-out war against the country’s oil facilities, costing it billions in lost revenue.
Having put so much stock in the Iraqi elections, the Bush administration now had another problem. Like it or not, the administration was wedded to a Shi’ite government led by Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Islamic Dawa Party, one of two major Shia parties in the ruling coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance. A militant Shi’ite Islamic group that had supported the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and that had received support from the Iranian government during the Iran-Iraq War, the Dawa Party had moved its headquarters to Tehran in 1979. There, according to Juan Cole, professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, it “spun off a shadowy set of special-ops units generically called ‘Islamic Jihad,’ which operated in places like Kuwait and Lebanon.” The party, Cole wrote, was also “at the nexus of splinter groups that later, in 1982, began to coalesce into Hezbollah.” Moreover, the party had been founded by Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, the uncle of Moqtada al-Sadr, the powerful Shi’ite leader of the Mahdi Army, which has been tied to ethnic cleansing of Sunnis.
One by one the contradictions behind America’s Middle East policies emerged — and with them, the enormity of its catastrophic blunder. Gradually America’s real agenda was coming to light — not its stated agenda to rid Iraq of WMDs, which had been nonexistent, not regime change, which had already been accomplished, but the neoconservative dream of “democratizing” the region by installing pro-West, pro-Israeli governments, led by the likes of Ahmed Chalabi, in oil-rich Middle East states.
Now that Chalabi had been eliminated as a potential leader amid accusations that he had been secretly working for Iran, and the Sunnis had opted out of the elections entirely, the United States, by default, was backing a democratically elected government that maintained close ties to Iran and was linked to Shi’ite leaders whose powerful Shi’ite militias were battling the Sunnis.
Professing to train Iraqi soldiers to “stand up,” so Americans could “stand down,” the United States was in fact training soldiers who were loyal to the Shi’ite cause, rather than to any concept of Western democracy. “[T]hey weren’t really Iraqi security forces,” explained journalist and author Nir Rosen. “They were loyal primarily to Moqtada al-Sadr, to Abdul Aziz al Hakim [the Shia leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq], but not to the Iraqi state and not to anybody in the Green Zone.” As shown in a PBS Frontline documentary, Gangs of Iraq, Iraqi soldiers, even when accompanied by Americans who were training them, intentionally kept the Americans away from large weapons caches that could be used against the Sunnis. Unwittingly, America was spending billions of dollars to fuel a Sunni-Shi’ite civil war.
Even worse, in the larger context of the region, by deposing Saddam and supporting the Iran-leaning Shi’ites, the United States had inadvertently empowered Iran, its biggest foe in the Middle East. And Iran’s ascendancy posed problems for Israel and Saudi Arabia as well. Potentially, the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict could spread throughout the entire region.
By 2005, for tens of millions of Americans, it was increasingly impossible to ignore the realities of what was happening in Iraq — the absence of WMDs, the escalating sectarian violence, the vast expenditures of blood and treasure in pursuit of a mission that was unclear at best, constantly changing, and had never been accomplished at all. Polarizing the nation more profoundly than at any time since the Vietnam era, the war had become a litmus-test issue that defined and linked whole sets of belief systems — red state America versus blue; evangelical Christians, anti-abortion activists, NASCAR dads, and other denizens of the Bible Belt versus the secular, post-Enlightenment America that has long been on the cutting edge of science and the embodiment of modernism. Those who questioned US policies in the Middle East, as their foes saw it, were cut-and-run traitors who aided and abetted the enemy. On the other side were Neanderthals waging a holy war in the Middle East, shredding the Constitution, destroying civil liberties, rolling back not just the New Deal but the Enlightenment, all in the name of God.
Hate filled the air, at times evoking the specter of McCarthyism, the hate and fear mongering of Father Coughlin, and even the assault against reason undertaken by the Puritans. Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter expressed her regret that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh “did not go to the New York Times building.” Americans who did not vote for Bush, she said, were “traitors,” her critics, members of the “Treason Lobby.” To Rush Limbaugh, Democrats “had aligned themselves with the enemy” and were “PR spokespeople for Al Qaeda.” To Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, the American Civil Liberties Union were “terrorists” who were almost as dangerous “as Al-Qaeda.” Thanks to the neocons and religious conservatives, the radical right was driving America as never before.
With the Republicans still in control of Congress, Bush’s critics vested their few remaining hopes for retribution in Patrick Fitzgerald, a newly appointed federal prosecutor who had recently taken charge of the Valerie Plame Wilson–CIA leak investigation. But in many respects, it seemed as if the nation had regressed to the era of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Tens of millions of people in the only country that had put a man on the moon, that had unraveled the human genome, now questioned whether evolution was real. A Creation Museum was under construction near Cincinnati, Ohio, to demonstrate that it wasn’t. Tourists to the Grand Canyon were treated to creationist tours assuring them that geologists had been wrong, and that one of America’s greatest wonders had not been formed slowly over millions of years, but was God’s creation dating “to the early part of Noah’s flood.” The Kansas State Board of Education held hearings about redefining the word “science” to remove bias toward “naturalistic” (nontheistic) belief systems. Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum — who believed that states should be able to arrest gay lovers in the privacy of their bedrooms — backed an amendment to allow the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative theory to evolution.
The Bush administration and the religious right declared war on science. Slogans that had once been bumper stickers — JUST A THEORY — became government policy: global warming is a hoax; condoms don’t work; intelligent design is legitimate science. The administration’s initiative to fund AIDS programs in Africa was hailed by the press, but information about the benefits of condoms was removed from government Web sites. The global-warming section of the Environmental Protection Agency was dropped entirely. In deference to the Christian Right, morning-after contraceptive sales were banned, even after having been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. According to Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and 2004 Democratic presidential hopeful, a National Cancer Institute fact sheet was “doctored to suggest that abortion increases breast-cancer risk, even though the American Cancer Society concluded that the best study discounts that.”
And when it came to dealing with the “liberal” judiciary, Pat Robertson sought help from God during a prayer retreat, and the Lord told him, “I will remove judges from the Supreme Court quickly, and their successors will refuse to sanction the attacks on religious faith.” Asking his television audience to pray that three liberal Supreme Court justices retire, Robertson said, “I don’t care which three, I mean as long as the three conservatives stay on. . . . There’s six liberals, so it’s up to the Lord.”
If the once powerful Christian Coalition had become moribund — and it had — that was because it had been replaced by a far more powerful institution: the Republican Party. Indeed, in 2004, no fewer than 41 out of 51 Republican senators voted with the Christian Coalition 100 percent of the time. When the new Congress took office in early 2005, it included Tom Coburn, newly elected senator from Oklahoma, who believed that doctors who performed abortions should be executed. Asserting that global warming was a hoax, Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) compared environmentalists to the Nazis. He argued that American policy in the Middle East should be based on the Bible, that Israel had a right to the West Bank “because God said so.” And on the Senate floor, in a speech about the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, he displayed an enormous photo of his extended family, and told the august assembly, “We have 20 kids and grandkids. I’m really proud to say that in the recorded history of our family, we’ve never had a divorce or any kind of homosexual relationship.”
Meanwhile, the White House sought extraordinary means to get its message across. In late January 2005, a man named James Guckert showed up at a presidential news conference using Jeff Gannon as a pseudonym, and lobbed softball questions to President Bush. “Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the US economy. . . .” he told President Bush. “Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there’s no crisis there. How are you going to work — you’ve said you are going to reach out to these people — how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”
Gannon’s questions were so friendly, critics suspected that they might have been planted, and found out that he worked for Talon News, an apparent front for the conservative website GOPUSA. More titillating, Gannon had appeared naked on several gay-escort sites, such as hotmilitarystud.com, and was reported to be “a $200-an-hour gay prostitute.” More titillating yet were reports that Gannon visited the White House regularly, often on days in which there were no press conferences. Was it possible that he might be part of what was known in Washington circles as the Lavender Bund, the coterie of closeted right-wing gays who helped the religious right and the Republicans advance an agenda that was often explicitly anti-gay? Later came revelations about Congressman Mark Foley and his suggestive e-mails to young congressional pages, and Ted Haggard, head of the National Association of Evangelicals, who had a relationship with a male prostitute.
As the culture and political wars continued, they took a toll on the White House’s credibility. In March 2005, Republican politicians and the religious right — most of whom, theoretically at least, had been proponents of States’ rights — ignited a national controversy when they tried to intervene on behalf of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman in a persistent vegetative state, to prevent the removal of her feeding tube.
In April, federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald continued to investigate the leak of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson’s name. But journalists Matthew Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of the New York Times refused to divulge their sources. The question of who in the Bush administration had leaked her name was both a Washington parlor game and a profound inquiry into what was really going on in the White House.
Bled dry Meanwhile, two years into the war, America’s all-volunteer military force was being drained. With ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there were not enough boots on the ground. To replenish their forces, officials raised the age limit for enlistment from 34 to 40. Tours of duty for soldiers were extended repeatedly, leaving many of them feeling tricked and demoralized. In particular, the military relied on call-ups from the National Guard, many of whom were “weekend warriors,” middle-aged men wrenched away from their families and jobs, at great sacrifice.
And what about Osama bin Laden — the all-but-forgotten villain behind 9/11? “We’re on a constant hunt for bin Laden,” Bush reassured America. “We’re keeping the pressure on him, keeping him in hiding.”
But Bush’s promises were wearing thin. The administration’s practice of transferring prisoners from Guantánamo to other countries where they might be tortured was called into question. There were multiple reports of brutal treatment of detainees by the government. Likewise, attorneys for Guantánamo detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who had been Osama bin Laden’s driver, argued in court that their client must be afforded the same legal protections that American citizens have. The numbers of wiretaps and secret searches soared.
By late spring of 2005, approximately $200 billion had been spent on the war in Iraq. Tens of thousands of people had been killed. Countless more were wounded or living as refugees. There were no WMDs. Iraq’s oil riches were being destroyed by saboteurs and stolen by terrorists. A report prepared for the UN Human Rights Commission showed that malnutrition rates in Iraqi children under five had nearly doubled since the US invasion.
Yet the administration continued to assert that victory was around the corner. “The level of activity that we see today, from a military standpoint, I think will clearly decline,” Cheney told Larry King in May 2005. “I think that they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”
But by the end of June, more than 1700 Americans had been killed in Iraq. Baghdad’s mayor decried his city’s crumbling infrastructure. The Iraqi capital of more than six million people was now plagued by shortages of electricity and fuel, incessant bombings and suicide attacks, and did not even have adequate drinking water for its residents. With one revelation after another about the Bush administration’s secret rendition policies, detention of prisoners without rights at Guantánamo, and Abu Ghraib, America, rather than Saddam, had become known for torture and abuse.
Then, on July 7, 2005, four terrorist explosions rocked London’s transport system at the height of rush hour, killing at least 33 and wounding roughly a thousand others. A group calling itself the Secret Organization of the Al-Qaeda Jihad in Europe later claimed credit for the attacks, and asserted that the attacks were payback for Britain’s involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The bombings sent a ripple of dread through Americans, especially New Yorkers. Many people could not help but wonder if the war in Iraq might induce such attacks on American soil rather than prevent them.
President Bush had argued, “If we were not fighting and destroying this enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our own borders.” But the London bombing proved that exactly the opposite was true. According to a study published in Mother Jones by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, the net effect of the Iraq War was that it increased global terrorism by a factor of seven. “The rate of terrorist attacks around the world by jihadist groups and the rate of fatalities in those attacks increased dramatically after the invasion of Iraq,” said the study. “A large part of this rise occurred in Iraq, which accounts for fully half of the global total of jihadist terrorist attacks in the post–Iraq War period. But even excluding Iraq, the average yearly number of jihadist terrorist attacks and resulting fatalities still rose sharply around the world by 265 percent and 58 percent, respectively.”
Four days after London, a suicide bomber in Baghdad killed 23 people outside an army recruiting center in Baghdad. Among other victims that day were nine members of a Shi’ite family. It was all but official. As Iraq’s former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi now asserted, Iraq was facing a civil war, and the consequences would be dire not just for Iraq but for Europe and America. A long-time ally of Washington, Allawi said, “The problem is that the Americans have no vision and no clear policy on how to go about in Iraq.”
As if the situation in Iraq were not enough, the neocons still had their eyes on Iran. To that end, in July 2005, House intelligence-committee chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan) and committee member Curt Weldon (R-Pennsylvania) met secretly in Paris with an Iranian exile known as “Ali.” Weldon had just published a book called Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America . . . and How the CIA Has Ignored It, alleging that the CIA was ignoring intelligence about Iranian-sponsored terror plots against the US, and Ali had been one of their main sources. But according to the CIA’s former Paris station chief Bill Murray, Ali, whose real name is Fereidoun Mahdavi, fabricated much of the information. “Mahdavi works for [Iranian arms dealer and intelligence fabricator Manucher] Ghorbanifar,” Murray told Laura Rozen of the American Prospect. “The two are inseparable. Ghorbanifar put Mahdavi out to meet with Weldon.”
In a similar vein, in a speech before the National Press Club in late 2005, neocon Raymond Tanter, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, recommended that the Bush administration use the MEK [the Mujahideen e-Khalq, the Marxist-Islamic urban guerrilla group of Iranian dissidents who had been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States] and its political arm, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), as an insurgent militia against Iran. “The NCRI and MEK are also a possible ally of the West in bringing about regime change in Tehran,” he said.
Tanter even suggested that the United States consider using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. “One military option is the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, which may have the capability to destroy hardened deeply buried targets. That is, bunker-busting bombs could destroy tunnels and other underground facilities.” He granted that the Non-Proliferation Treaty bans the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, such as Iran, but added that “the United States has sold Israel bunker-busting bombs, which keeps the military option on the table.” In other words, the United States couldn’t nuke Iran, but Israel, which never signed the treaty and maintains an unacknowledged nuclear arsenal, could.
If the MEK was being cast as the Iranian counterpart to the INC [Iraqi National Congress], there were more than enough Iranian and Syrian Ahmed Chalabis to go around. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah, who was installed by the United States but had lost power as a result of the Islamic Revolution, was shopped around Washington as a prospective leader of Iran. And Farid Ghadry, a Syrian exile in Virginia who founded the Reform Party of Syria, was the neocon favorite to rule Syria. Ghadry has an unusual résumé for a Syrian — he’s been a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the right-wing pro-Israel lobbying group — and has endured so many comparisons to the disgraced leader of the INC that he once sent out a mass e-mail headlined, “I am not Ahmed Chalabi.”
Nevertheless, according to a report in the American Prospect, Meyrav Wurmser introduced Ghadry to key administration figures, including the vice-president’s daughter Elizabeth Cheney, who, as principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs and coordinator for broader Middle East and North Africa initiatives, played a key role in the Bush administration’s policy in the region.
The biggest blow of all to Bush came on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated the gulf coast of Louisiana and Mississippi, killing more than 1836 people and causing more than $81 billion in damage. It was not the storm itself, of course, but the monumental incompetence of the Bush administration and its inability to manage the disaster that devastated New Orleans. Under Michael Brown’s aegis, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) failed to heed warnings that the city’s levees might be breached, failed to evacuate the city, and failed to bring housing and relief to the victims after the storm. Disengaged and ineffective, Bush, most memorably, told the director of FEMA, “Heckuva job, Brownie.”
With Katrina, whatever myths were left about Bush’s presidency had been shattered. His approval ratings plummeted to 38 percent. When New Orleans needed the National Guard, the National Guard was in Iraq. Only 34 percent of the public approved of Bush’s handling of Iraq — roughly the same percentage who had approved of LBJ’s handling of Vietnam in March of 1968.
By this time, any chances that American forces could prevail in Iraq were gone. Less than a year after the marines’ horrific siege, Fallujah had morphed into a police state patrolled by thousands of Iraqi and American troops who lived in its bombed-out buildings. But the Sunni insurgency there had somehow survived. In a 12-day stretch in late summer, 48 Americans died. They would not be the last. Bush’s fate was sealed. His presidency was an irrevocable failure.
I suppose some of this is subjective but where there's smoke...
A tragicomedy of errors
In an excerpt from his new book, The Fall of the House of Bush, author Craig Unger details how Bush is, well, screwing up the world
By 2005, for tens of millions of Americans, it was increasingly impossible to ignore the realities of what was happening in Iraq — the absence of WMDs, the escalating sectarian violence, the vast expenditures of blood and treasure in pursuit of a mission that was unclear at best, constantly changing, and had never been accomplished at all. Polarizing the nation more profoundly than at any time since the Vietnam era, the war had become a litmus-test issue that defined and linked whole sets of belief systems — red state America versus blue; evangelical Christians, anti-abortion activists, NASCAR dads, and other denizens of the Bible Belt versus the secular, post-Enlightenment America that has long been on the cutting edge of science and the embodiment of modernism. Those who questioned US policies in the Middle East, as their foes saw it, were cut-and-run traitors who aided and abetted the enemy. On the other side were Neanderthals waging a holy war in the Middle East, shredding the Constitution, destroying civil liberties, rolling back not just the New Deal but the Enlightenment, all in the name of God.
Hate filled the air, at times evoking the specter of McCarthyism, the hate and fear mongering of Father Coughlin, and even the assault against reason undertaken by the Puritans. Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter expressed her regret that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh “did not go to the New York Times building.” Americans who did not vote for Bush, she said, were “traitors,” her critics, members of the “Treason Lobby.” To Rush Limbaugh, Democrats “had aligned themselves with the enemy” and were “PR spokespeople for Al Qaeda.” To Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, the American Civil Liberties Union were “terrorists” who were almost as dangerous “as Al-Qaeda.” Thanks to the neocons and religious conservatives, the radical right was driving America as never before.
With the Republicans still in control of Congress, Bush’s critics vested their few remaining hopes for retribution in Patrick Fitzgerald, a newly appointed federal prosecutor who had recently taken charge of the Valerie Plame Wilson–CIA leak investigation. But in many respects, it seemed as if the nation had regressed to the era of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Tens of millions of people in the only country that had put a man on the moon, that had unraveled the human genome, now questioned whether evolution was real. A Creation Museum was under construction near Cincinnati, Ohio, to demonstrate that it wasn’t. Tourists to the Grand Canyon were treated to creationist tours assuring them that geologists had been wrong, and that one of America’s greatest wonders had not been formed slowly over millions of years, but was God’s creation dating “to the early part of Noah’s flood.” The Kansas State Board of Education held hearings about redefining the word “science” to remove bias toward “naturalistic” (nontheistic) belief systems. Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum — who believed that states should be able to arrest gay lovers in the privacy of their bedrooms — backed an amendment to allow the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative theory to evolution.
The Bush administration and the religious right declared war on science. Slogans that had once been bumper stickers — JUST A THEORY — became government policy: global warming is a hoax; condoms don’t work; intelligent design is legitimate science. The administration’s initiative to fund AIDS programs in Africa was hailed by the press, but information about the benefits of condoms was removed from government Web sites. The global-warming section of the Environmental Protection Agency was dropped entirely. In deference to the Christian Right, morning-after contraceptive sales were banned, even after having been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. According to Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and 2004 Democratic presidential hopeful, a National Cancer Institute fact sheet was “doctored to suggest that abortion increases breast-cancer risk, even though the American Cancer Society concluded that the best study discounts that.”
And when it came to dealing with the “liberal” judiciary, Pat Robertson sought help from God during a prayer retreat, and the Lord told him, “I will remove judges from the Supreme Court quickly, and their successors will refuse to sanction the attacks on religious faith.” Asking his television audience to pray that three liberal Supreme Court justices retire, Robertson said, “I don’t care which three, I mean as long as the three conservatives stay on. . . . There’s six liberals, so it’s up to the Lord.”
If the once powerful Christian Coalition had become moribund — and it had — that was because it had been replaced by a far more powerful institution: the Republican Party. Indeed, in 2004, no fewer than 41 out of 51 Republican senators voted with the Christian Coalition 100 percent of the time. When the new Congress took office in early 2005, it included Tom Coburn, newly elected senator from Oklahoma, who believed that doctors who performed abortions should be executed. Asserting that global warming was a hoax, Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) compared environmentalists to the Nazis. He argued that American policy in the Middle East should be based on the Bible, that Israel had a right to the West Bank “because God said so.” And on the Senate floor, in a speech about the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, he displayed an enormous photo of his extended family, and told the august assembly, “We have 20 kids and grandkids. I’m really proud to say that in the recorded history of our family, we’ve never had a divorce or any kind of homosexual relationship.”
Meanwhile, the White House sought extraordinary means to get its message across. In late January 2005, a man named James Guckert showed up at a presidential news conference using Jeff Gannon as a pseudonym, and lobbed softball questions to President Bush. “Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the US economy. . . .” he told President Bush. “Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there’s no crisis there. How are you going to work — you’ve said you are going to reach out to these people — how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”
Gannon’s questions were so friendly, critics suspected that they might have been planted, and found out that he worked for Talon News, an apparent front for the conservative website GOPUSA. More titillating, Gannon had appeared naked on several gay-escort sites, such as hotmilitarystud.com, and was reported to be “a $200-an-hour gay prostitute.” More titillating yet were reports that Gannon visited the White House regularly, often on days in which there were no press conferences. Was it possible that he might be part of what was known in Washington circles as the Lavender Bund, the coterie of closeted right-wing gays who helped the religious right and the Republicans advance an agenda that was often explicitly anti-gay? Later came revelations about Congressman Mark Foley and his suggestive e-mails to young congressional pages, and Ted Haggard, head of the National Association of Evangelicals, who had a relationship with a male prostitute.
As the culture and political wars continued, they took a toll on the White House’s credibility. In March 2005, Republican politicians and the religious right — most of whom, theoretically at least, had been proponents of States’ rights — ignited a national controversy when they tried to intervene on behalf of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman in a persistent vegetative state, to prevent the removal of her feeding tube.
Bled dry
Meanwhile, two years into the war, America’s all-volunteer military force was being drained. With ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there were not enough boots on the ground. To replenish their forces, officials raised the age limit for enlistment from 34 to 40. Tours of duty for soldiers were extended repeatedly, leaving many of them feeling tricked and demoralized. In particular, the military relied on call-ups from the National Guard, many of whom were “weekend warriors,” middle-aged men wrenched away from their families and jobs, at great sacrifice.
And what about Osama bin Laden — the all-but-forgotten villain behind 9/11? “We’re on a constant hunt for bin Laden,” Bush reassured America. “We’re keeping the pressure on him, keeping him in hiding.”
But Bush’s promises were wearing thin. The administration’s practice of transferring prisoners from Guantánamo to other countries where they might be tortured was called into question. There were multiple reports of brutal treatment of detainees by the government. Likewise, attorneys for Guantánamo detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who had been Osama bin Laden’s driver, argued in court that their client must be afforded the same legal protections that American citizens have. The numbers of wiretaps and secret searches soared.
By late spring of 2005, approximately $200 billion had been spent on the war in Iraq. Tens of thousands of people had been killed. Countless more were wounded or living as refugees. There were no WMDs. Iraq’s oil riches were being destroyed by saboteurs and stolen by terrorists. A report prepared for the UN Human Rights Commission showed that malnutrition rates in Iraqi children under five had nearly doubled since the US invasion.
Yet the administration continued to assert that victory was around the corner. “The level of activity that we see today, from a military standpoint, I think will clearly decline,” Cheney told Larry King in May 2005. “I think that they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”
The biggest blow of all to Bush came on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated the gulf coast of Louisiana and Mississippi, killing more than 1836 people and causing more than $81 billion in damage. It was not the storm itself, of course, but the monumental incompetence of the Bush administration and its inability to manage the disaster that devastated New Orleans. Under Michael Brown’s aegis, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) failed to heed warnings that the city’s levees might be breached, failed to evacuate the city, and failed to bring housing and relief to the victims after the storm. Disengaged and ineffective, Bush, most memorably, told the director of FEMA, “Heckuva job, Brownie.”
With Katrina, whatever myths were left about Bush’s presidency had been shattered. His approval ratings plummeted to 38 percent. When New Orleans needed the National Guard, the National Guard was in Iraq. Only 34 percent of the public approved of Bush’s handling of Iraq — roughly the same percentage who had approved of LBJ’s handling of Vietnam in March of 1968.
By this time, any chances that American forces could prevail in Iraq were gone. Less than a year after the marines’ horrific siege, Fallujah had morphed into a police state patrolled by thousands of Iraqi and American troops who lived in its bombed-out buildings. But the Sunni insurgency there had somehow survived. In a 12-day stretch in late summer, 48 Americans died. They would not be the last. Bush’s fate was sealed. His presidency was an irrevocable failure.
Awesome and somewhat dispiriting account of the past seven years. You can find much of this here in the Deep Thoughts section of the RKMB's. Seeing it all summarized like that was overwhelming. What a waste. What a tragedy. What a CRIME.
I dunoo.. The parts I quoted were the hardest to swallow. Iraq and Iran and the misinformation and outright propaganda is one thing but as a civvie, it really didn't affect me like it did you and people you know (with the exception of my wife's nephew who did briefly go to Baghdad as an Air Force mechanic ). But the entire domestic nightmare, all refreshed like that, it's fucking maddening as well as saddening. That such people can still try to poison the atmosphere as well as reason itself is tempered by the fact that they don't have many customers left anymore.
I like the way your piece ended with Katrina. BECAUSE it was so catastrophic and so needless, That was the moment it all turned around and righted itself in this country. Thank God eternally for that. Sanity reemerged in that horrible moment of tragedy. At least some good came of it.
Mike Huckabee responded to the Steve Skavera clip that I posted yesterday:
Now THAT is the kind of rhetoric we need more from Republicans. They've lost credibility gradually on account of their overt fealty to big business and the corruption therin. Not to say the Dems aren't tied to big business and big money, but they at least they and their constituents show concern for the working public. It's not all rhetoric about lazy union members and people wanting handouts etc.
The plight of average Americans should not be a partisan issue. And concern for THEM should be the job of every elected representative. It's amazing to me that corporations demand the same rights as individuals but scoff at assuming any of the responsibilities.
Your comparison is invalid. There's a diffrence between saying bush is evil/stupid/bad and blaming him for every singe thing that's bad which is what WB does with Liberals.
