As reported by The Hill, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took a shot at Senator Max Baucus, saying that K Street had a copy of his bill before the White House saw it.

Gibbs said he was told that “K Street had a copy of the Baucus plan, meaning, not surprisingly, the special interests have gotten a copy of the plan that I understand was given to committee members today.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he had not seen Baucus’s draft either, when asked during a briefing at the White House after a meeting with Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

This is no surprise, but interpretations may vary. As my son said in a post below,

Max Baucus was never, ever, ever negotiating with Republicans.

That, most likely, was mere political theater, a stall to delay passage of any bill until the insurance industry had time to mount a good propaganda campaign. Hence, all we witnessed in August, aided and abetted by Max Baucus.

But far more likely, K Street lobbyists had a copy of the legislation long before Baucus did, as they are the authors of the proposed legislation.

Those of us who have lived through the evolution of the modern Congress are well aware that legislation these days is usually written by lobbyists and the money people behind them, and handed over the various sponsors for passage. Members of Congress do not write bills – they are merely carriers. Baucus and his Gang of Six did not write this bill. K Street did.

That much is painfully obvious.

It has been apparent from the beginning of the health care debate that the private health insurance industry has been pulling the strings. As the charade plays out, it is becoming even more apparent that in the future we are going to be more under the thumb of private insurers that ever. So the question I ask is this: Is private for-profit health insurance a moral undertaking?

Within the framework of right wing thought, of course, it is absolutely moral. Within the framework of left wing thought (mine, anyway), it is highly immoral.

Say that an observer is looking down at our planet from a spaceship. From his view, everything we do on this planet is amoral – nothing is right or wrong. We are, after all, living beings that need to eat other living beings to survive. “Evil” is a human construct. In nature, the wolf will attack an elk calf and kill it, and then share it with the rest of the members of his pack. All the wolves in that pack will benefit. Within the pack, the activity is necessary for survival of wolves, and might therefore be considered “moral”, so far as wolves are concerned. Elk might disagree.

A grizzly bear will attack an elk calf for his own nourishment. He will start eating it while it is still alive, inflicting horrible pain on it during its last surviving moments, and forever traumatizing the mother. The killing is necessary for the bear’s survival, though not the suffering the bear inflicts on the calf. Nonetheless, we don’t call it evil. It all as part of life and death on this planet.

Killing within our own species is usually frowned upon – the Christian Bible says that it is wrong. And yet the Catholic Church and other Christian sects accept the concept of “just war”, wherein we have the right to defend ourselves against aggression. We have a habit of defining everything we do as self-defense, but what it really means is that there are no constraints against killing people in other countries. “Thou shalt not kill” really means “Thou shalt not kill your own kind.”

Within each country, killing citizens of that country is frowned upon, except in self-defense. The death penalty is sometimes meted out, but only after thorough legal review of the circumstances surrounding the crime. We are very constrained about killing our own kind.

So this is our moral posture: It is wrong to kill your own kind, except in self defense.

By the means outlined above, we have attempted to introduce a bit of kindness into our cruel world. Call it morality, if you must.

Hannah Arendt in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil described atrocities committed by a lowly and uneducated man, Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. She wondered how a man who behaved well within his own society, and who (supposedly) felt love and compassion for his own family and friends, could commit mass atrocities.

The answer lies within our societal structures. We delegate the responsibility for committing evil acts to subordinates, and insulate ourselves from having to witness those acts or their effects.

In the military, chain of command is essential to success of military operations. Orders given above must be carried out below without question. Otherwise the military enterprise cannot succeed. Within large corporations, the same structure exists, though less rigid, as employees have more options before them than soldiers. Nonetheless, the control exercised from above is critical to the success for both corporations and the military. (I might add that since the American military is really an agent in service of transnational corporations, that the military chain of command is subordinate to the corporate chain of command.)

So officers in large organizations have the ability to give orders and not be exposed to the consequences of those orders. A man can sit at his desk in Washington, DC, and order a bomb launched into a marketplace in Baghdad,and go home that evening to enjoy dinner with his children and sex with his wife, as if nothing horrible had happened. He is a “desk murderer”.

By unplanned circumstances health insurance in the United States came under the purview of large for-profit corporations. During calmer times, when costs were less and greed was not worshiped, it wasn’t much of a problem. But in 1965, 40% of senior citizens were without health insurance. Government stepped into cover their costs. That program, known as Medicare, now serves every citizen over age 64 in this country.

The plight of seniors in 1965 was indicative of a problem with private health insurance. It was internally contradictory – since it was a for-profit enterprise, payment of claims resulted in lower profits. Old people tended to have more claims, and so health insurers avoided them. To be profitable in the health insurance business, companies have to avoid sick people and avoid paying claims.

So by its very nature, for-profit health insurance has untoward effects. People die for lack of care, can’t get insurance at all, and even have their coverage taken away when they get really sick. This is all the result of decisions made by corporate executives who do not see or feel the pain and anguish they inflict on others. They are insulated. Because 20,000 people die each year in this country due to treatable and preventable diseases and injuries, responsibility for those deaths lies with the executives who made the decisions to exclude, deny, and rescind. They are desk murderers.

From the right side of the political spectrum, this is all a natural byproduct of the natural distribution of wealth, and is therefore a moral outcome. If private citizens want to help those who cannot help themselves, fine. But for government to do it, as with Medicare, is wrong. Right wingers fought Medicare from the beginning, and many still oppose it as immoral: in order to provide care, government must first take money from other people. That is, on the right wing, the original sin.

Medical care has gotten more expensive over the years, and now millions of people, either by choice or circumstance, do not carry health insurance. An ethos of greed pervades our society today, and for-profit health insurance companies are as caught up in it as any Wall Street financial house. Where once their executives might have been gray and dour upper-middle class suburbanites, today they are overpaid millionaires leaching on our health care system. There will be no getting rid of them soon or easily, as they have stitched themselves to the butt of the political system as well.

From the left side of the spectrum, this is immoral. Health care, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (to which the United States is a signator) is not a privilege. It is a right. The consequences of lack of care, denial of care and rescission of coverage is death. The sentence is carried out in silence, the perpetrators protected from any exposure to suffering. This is the nature of Arendts “banality” of evil, or desk murder.

Other countries developed differently in the wake of World War II. The idea of profit-seeking in the field of health care was defined from the outset as immoral, and systems were constructed to provide health care for citizens without private for-profit health insurance. The result was universal coverage, and, oddly (from a right wing perspective anyway), much lower costs.

I have thought for years now that the essence of right wing thought can be boiled down to Social Darwinism. The idea that someone is not entitled to health care, that economic performance should dictate level of care, has at its root survival of the fittest. This is the Post War era, and we don’t talk like that anymore. Eugenics is condemned, as are master races, but survival of the fittest, as defined by the marketplace, is still the ethos of the right wing. It is immoral.

From our moral perspective, health care is a right. Health insurance corporations interfere with this right – in fact – seek to profit from our need for it, and are therefore immoral organizations.

We on the left seek to eliminate not the health insurance corporations, but rather the underlying profit motive. We want to offer quality care to all who need it, using the entire population as the premium base and the tax system as the funding mechanism. We do this not as economic beings, but as caring and compassionate and moral beings. We will not be harmed by use of government force in this area any more than the hundreds of millions of people in other industrialized countries who have universal health care.

For-profit health insurance is an immoral undertaking that facilitates killing of people in our society for profit. The executives of these companies are desk murderers. They should be punished, and their activities ended.

Re. Bart Stupak (D-MI) held hearings in June of this year on the practice of “rescission”, wherein holders of individual insurance policies are told, after they become seriously ill, that the insurance company has canceled their policy and will not pay benefits. He uncovered over 20,000 cases of rescission by three major insurance companies in five years, and said that insurers routinely look to rescind policies if customers get sick with heart conditions or cancer, or 1,400 other serious conditions.

The practice logically stems from the concept of “preexisting conditions”, that device by which insurance companies avoid insuring people who might get sick, thereby protecting their bottom lines. People often lie about their health when they apply for insurance – it’s a no brainer: On one hand, they can’t get insurance, on the other, they only risk losing their insurance later. (I wonder if an insurance company, when it rescinds a policy, refunds all premiums paid.)

I was just listening to a radio show here in Colorado this morning on which a nurse called in, and said that while on the job she had developed breast cancer. She had insurance at the time, and recovered, but could no longer work as a nurse since she didn’t have that kind of energy anymore.

Guess what? Welcome to America. She’s had cancer. She can’t get health insurance. This is one f****** barbaric system we have here.

This reminds me of the supposed “death panels” the righties were all chirping about. When you carry private health insurance, if you get seriously ill, insurance companies look for ways to legally to kill you. They do this by exploring every legal (and questionably legal) avenue they can to rescind your insurance.

That is not a death panel. That’s a killing system.

Here’s an article from the Washington Post by T.R. Reid called “5 Myths About Health Care Around the World”. It should be required reading for every right winger who is afraid of single-payer or a public option, or of placing severe regulations on health insurers.

Reid tackles five common myths:

1. It’s all socialized medicine out there. It would not bother me in the least if it was, as socialized medicine does a better job than for-profit, but let’s be rigid in our definition: Great Britain has a socialized system, as do our own veterans. Every other industrialized democracy has some form of single payer or public/private hybrid.

2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices and long lines. Generally speaking, not true. Other countries generally allow choice of doctor and hospital, and wait times for emergency and serious conditions are virtually nonexistent. But waiting lists are a problem in Canada, generally in Ontario and Quebec provinces, for some reason. But other countries often outperform our own in the area of wait times.

Which reminds me – my Dad was undergoing treatment for a wide range of maladies in his final days. One doctor asked if he was a veteran, which he was, and suggested we go to VA for our medicines. I thought “Oh God – here we go – long wait, crappy care.” In fact, we got in in less than a week, had a very good doctor, and got our prescriptions filled free of cost. It was a pleasant surprise to find them to be so professional and efficient.

3. Foreign health systems are bloated, inefficient bureaucracies. Actually, nothing like ours. All other systems are less bureaucratic and inefficient than us.

4. Cost controls stifle innovation. Interesting conundrum – cost controls often drive innovation. Example:

In the United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And Japanese labs still make a profit.)

In addition, there are many innovations in use here developed elsewhere, artificial knees and hips, for example.

5. Health insurance has to be cruel. Indeed, American health insurers are cruel, and even have “death panels”, which they call by other names. In other countries, health insurance companies must operate on a non-profit basis for basic care, and are not allowed to turn away or rescind applicants. In return for these restrictions, they are given a guaranteed clientele, as coverage is mandatory, and subsidies for those who cannot afford care.

Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has “the finest health care” in the world. We don’t. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.

Given our remarkable medical assets — the best-educated doctors and nurses, the most advanced hospitals, world-class research — the United States could be, and should be, the best in the world. To get there, though, we have to be willing to learn some lessons about health-care administration from the other industrialized democracies.

A little humility would go a long way here, along with some willingness by right wingers to get out and see the rest of the world. That could dispel most of the mythology,and free us up to fix our own system.

PS: Here is a film done for PBS by Reid called Sick Around the World.

I face a dilemma faced by many: My current health insurance costs $700 a month for a policy that has a $2,500 deductible, $5,000 maximum out of pocket costs, and a 70-30 split for expenses in the donut hole between $2,500 and $5,000. “Routine” costs, such as checkups, are not covered. Maximum coverage is $1 million.

So here is how it pans out: I am guaranteed to spend at least $10,900 before I have one nickle of coverage. For the $2,500 after that, I will pay $750, so that for the first $13,400 in costs each year, my insurance will pay $1,750. So my out-of-pocket each year is guaranteed to be $8,400, and can go as high as $12,150 without regard to routine expenses.

Typically my actual costs run less than a thousand dollars. If I have a complaint, I always weigh what I am already paying against and know that I am 100% out-of-pocket. So unless I am seriously ill, and I never have been, I usually opt not to see the doc. Most things take care of themselves. I have a blood test twice a year, and beyond that, not much.

Here’s the problem, and I know it is one that every self-paid insured person wonders about: Given good health, is it worth a guaranteed expense of $8,400 a year, and a total exposure of $11,650 each year when actual costs are probably only going to run a thousand or so? I can do a lot with that $8,400 in premiums I pay, including getting checkups and paying for injuries. Even when I am most at risk, when I drive, I’m pretty much covered, as insurers are liable for 100% of my costs if I am not at fault. I’ve never caused an accident.

Of course, the insurance is to cover all of the people who exceed the thresholds – the cancer and heart patients. I could be one of them, but I am in in pretty good shape, running ten miles a week, lifting weights and hiking. My mental outlook is healthy.

I have been thrown into a pool that attracts people with very high risks, and excluded from the normal risk groups due to a preexisting condition.

My temptation is just to go bare. I think about it. Alot. Knock on wood?