From Brad Blog writer Earnest A. Canning:

Today, as I mulled over the legislative obscenity that Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and a former vice president of WellPoint spent months preparing — an insurance carrier wish-list that contains no public option, no means for controlling costs or abuse; a measure that does not merely protect but expands the already obscene wealth of the few by mandating that every citizen purchase insurance, with massive subsidies flowing into carrier coffers —

The amazing thing about this process has not been the cynicism of Baucus and the Democrats and the health insurance companies, but rather the willing gullibility of Democrats. The words above were written when Baucus introduced the bill. After a year of wrangling, what we have is exactly what was proposed in the first place!

There’s been no process. There’s been herding. It would be nice if a Democrat or two would rebel, but all we get are talking points so dripping with stupidity that a Tea Bagger would cringe to read them.

This is perfect – I mean perfect. Not good – don’t settle for good. The health insurance companies got everything they wanted. Perfection.

It is discouraging – after writing yesterday about how Dennis Kucinich was the lone wolf, one of the few who could stand up to power, he folded. He’s on board the Obama train now. Prepare now for some cowboy foreplay-“Brace yerself honey.” They are ramming this bill through.

This is a huge victory for Obama and the DLC Dems – they are rubbing our faces in it, teabagging us, letting us know that there is no place for progressives in their party. They will take a huge drubbing at the polls this fall because millions of us just won’t have the energy to vote for people so unprincipled. I suspect that matters less to them than the mere fact that they defeat any nascent progressive movement in this land.

This gives lie to the Democratic fall-back that the votes just aren’t there for true health care reform. The votes are there, and the means to get those votes has always been there. However, Obama and the Democratic Party leadership have never wanted reform. The bill they are passing, a corporate-written bill ushered through in a scripted process, has always been what they were after. And they are persuasive and powerful. No doubt Kucinich was reminded that he can be challenged in the primaries, that big money will go after him, that he would receive no support from the party. Maybe he’s been wiretapped, maybe he’s got a skeleton. There were probably some positive enticements too. Obama can be persuasive. Yet never once – never once! – has he used those powers in favor of true reform.

It’s disgraceful, discouraging. Kucinich was a man of honor in defeat. Now he’s just another mealy-mouthed Democrat. So his defeat at the polls, as with all the others, would be of no consequence.

As they say, a man who places faith in politicians is doomed to disappointment. Damned if I didn’t have faith in him.

The good news is this: Obama appointee and Wall Street/health insurance-funded Senator Michael Bennet was defeated in the caucuses last night here in Colorado by Andrew Romanoff, who appears to be somewhat progressive. In an obnoxious and heavy-handed move last month, Obama elected to interfere in a local primary in support of Bennet. The results last night are a slap to Obama, and a message to Bennet that if he wants to win, he had better hide his funding sources.

All in all, not a good day. Power wins a big one, loses a small one. No doubt Bennet’s people right now are crafting ads about how he’s a man of the people, and Kucinich is putting together a press conference to somehow salvage his manhood.
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PS: I suggest that anyone who calls or emails Kucinich to complain include the words “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.

Some time ago, maybe a year ago, a group 80+ of House “progressives” took a stand on behalf of the American public regarding health care. They said that they would not support any bill that did not contain a public option. Nancy Pelosi laughed out loud at the time – she (supposedly a progressive herself) knew that it was an expression of weakness, that they would be destroyed. The power they were up against was simply too much for them.

The Health Care “Reform” debate has been an impressive demonstration of power. Every one of those progressives caved but one: Dennis Kucinich still stands tall, but alone. Here is something really, really interesting – Marcus Molitas of Daily Kos says that Kucinich – Kucinich!!! is one who is now in need of a primary opponent.*

It is a good time again to examine, if only with a surface glance or two, the nature of power. The fact that 86 “progressives” folded their tents is not just a victory for the insurance companies and the White House – it is a not even just a staggering victory. It is shock and awe.

So let’s examine it further. How does one man get another man to become his servant?

In employment, it’s the paycheck. But the power goes deeper than that – the employee might be burdened by mortgages, kids, student loans and the inability to get health insurance somewhere else. Further, few employees are of such caliber that there is any meaningful competition for their services, so that a mere job-jump is not an option. Even if the employee gets so fed up that he makes that jump, he will face a period of unemployment, and with that will come inability to pay bills, loss of credit standing, debt, loss of social standing. (And, his résumé will be tainted if he is perceived as rebellious.)

So for most people, the power of the boss over the employee is complete and total.

Transfer this relationship to that of the office holder and the (generic) “lobbyist.” The lobbyist needs leverage. Where does he find it?

Money is part of it, and is a two-edged sword. Money given to an office holder is useful – he can use it to buy TV ads and get reelected. TV is the only pathway to the voter, who is generally not paying attention. But it is more than that, as the office holder must assume that any money he does not take will go to an opponent. So the power of money is magnified by the ability of the lobbyist to leverage it by offering it to an opponent too.

If it were only money, we would not be in such trouble, because the “lobbyist” has a weakness. He is up against other lobbyists, and while there is seldom significant differences on large objectives – wars, subsidies, tax breaks and the like, there can be competing objectives, so that the office holder can at times leverage one lobbyist against another.

So the lobbyist needs more than just money, though money is powerful and mostly legal. There are other legal ways of making the office holder behave.

One is the fact that most of our “mainstream” media is in fact owned and controlled by the elite moneyed sectors who hire the lobbyists. Office holders need access to this media to be considered credible. Bad actors like Kucinich or Bernie Sanders will never appear on a Sunday talk show. It is well-understood among office holders that a stint on Democracy Now!, the only true news show around, will not cement voter approval – and might even stigmatize them.

So lobbyists have further control over office holders by controlling, in a general sense (there is no one lever to pull, no one lever-puller), access to favorable media. Further, negative press is a weapon – if an office holder stumbles over his words and accidentally says something that is true, or gets a DUI, becomes confrontational or gets out of line, negative editorials will appear in his home district, footage might leak to YouTube – it is somewhat disheveled and disorganized, but office holders have to be careful never to say anything in affront to lobbyists for fear of bad PR.

But even that is not enough. There are yet other legal ways of controlling the office holder. There is so much money floating around this country and in DC that an office holder of low scruples can avail himself of it in many ways. He can accept lucrative employment after leaving office, as, for instance, former South Dakota senate minority leader Tom Daschle becoming a health insurance lobbyist. (Chris Dodd will be interesting to watch – even after announcing his resignation, he is still working on behalf of Wall Street lobbyists. Does lucrative employment await?)

There are also employment opportunities for family members, as with Joe’s son, Beau Biden, working for MNBA back in Delaware, and Evan Bayh’s wife drawing lucrative salaries from health insurance companies … if we had investigative journalists, it would be interesting to do some research on employment of family members in Washington.

In fact, most loyal office holders, even the lowly Conrad Burns, can turn to a career in lobbying after leaving office, and rewards will be there for the rest of their useful lives.

All of that is, unfortunately, legal. But there is yet more. During the Bush years we learned of the prevalence of the wire tap – certainly not new (nor has it been discontinued under Obama). Most members of the media had their phones tapped by NSA or other agencies. The same is most likely true of most members of Congress. If such a weapon were available, and we know it is, how could it not be used?

No matter what it is, whether tryst with a secretary or a drunken party in the Bahamas, somebody in DC knows about it, and such information will be presented to the office holder at some critical juncture.

If only it stopped there. But there is also “sheepdipping”, aka “ABSCAMming”, where an office holder can be made to look guilty or lured into a compromising situation. This happened to Gary Hart, and many years before, Wilbur Mills. John Edwards might be a victim, though he certainly merits no sympathy. Most recently, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, and before him, New York Governor Elliot Spitzer were “exposed.” The question that is not asked is “How many are culpable, but not exposed?”

These men were being watched – people were looking for dirt, and they found it. And even if the dirt does not turn up naturally, it can be planted. Any potential hire for an office holder can present a threat – she could be the next Donna Rice, Monica, or Linda Tripp.

So the control over our elected officials appears almost complete and total. A man has to be pure and innocent to be immune from such pressures. He has to forgo corporate money and lead a squeaky-clean life. Such a man is Bernie Sanders ….. but wait!

Sanders, Vermont’s socialist senator, seems a rogue, a man able to walk about freely and speak his mind. He’s not hobbled by the Democratic Party, and doesn’t take corporate money, so the regular levers don’t work on him. Yet, when the Senate Health “Reform” bill, written by the health insurance lobbyists, needed 60 votes to get out of the senate, he provided the 60th vote.

We had been treated to spectacles before where certain senators like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson used their “60th vote” status to leverage massive changes in the bill, preventing a public option, for instance. Senator Sanders, the 60th vote for that bill, had incredible power to command changes favorable to ordinary citizens.

And he did not do so. He did not use his power, meaning he did not have power.

What’s up with that, Bernie? Skeletons in your closet?
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*This is not hard to understand, on further reflection. Molitas made that statement while be interviewed on a cable news show. He would not have access to such forums if he held unworthy views. He has succumbed, and is probably a passenger on the ego train. He’s apparently been compromised in some fashion.

My thanks to Raj Patel for adding some clarity to all of this madness about us about “free markets.” The idea is like a virus, or maybe a parasite, as markets may yet destroy their host … our habitat.

Patel introduced me to the concept of “exclusion,” probably well-known to anyone in Econ 101. But as he describes it, exclusion is the nature of the marketplace itself – without it, we have only commons.

Say, for example, a town exists around a well, and all of the townspeople depend on it for water. Suppose that the local merchant ropes off the area, sets up guards, gets a court order behind him, and prevents people from using the well without paying him. The well has become his “property”, and the towns people, now excluded, are “free” to engage in commerce to get water.

Before they lost access to the well, they were freer than after it was excluded from the commons. But in the Orwellian parlance of our time, that is actually supposed to be a net gain in personal freedom.

In health, insurance companies have roped off medical care to limit access, excluding the poor and already sick and charging everyone else. As a result, we are now subject to huge fees for common services, and insurers make money off of us by the simple means of placement, like the merchant and the well. They “own” what was formerly our commons, access to health care.

Again, the free marketers call this freedom. They stand logic on its head. Exclusion is at the heart of servitude. Governments, which do not exclude people from services, but rather collect taxes and disperse them without discrimination, offer more freedom than markets. But the notion that governments enslave us while markets free us, the curse of our times, is dominant.
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I was listening to Dr. Marcia Angell interviewed by Bill Moyers this morning. Moyers, who is soon to retire, did another excellent show on health care. Angell wondered out loud whether Anthem Blue Cross, which is raising its rates by as much as 39% in California, is gaming us.

She calls it the “briar patch” game, as in “please don’t throw us in there.” In the scenario, Anthem, oblivious to public hatred and criticism, is rubbing our face in rate increases as a way of angering us to the point where we turn to the government to pass the health care “reform” bill.

That would be a good deal for Anthem, as the bill that is on the table, the one that Obama is (finally) fighting for, will bring Anthem millions of new clients, billions in subsidies, and with no public option, no threat of competition. All wiithout cost controls.

Who knows. We are practically owned at this point by the public relations industry – the whole health care “reform” process has been a game. This might be the ninth inning. Key Democrats are being forced out of Congress, others are surely feel the heat. Dennis Kucinich, a holdout, will surely have to endure corporate attacks in his district in the wake of Citizens United.

But it’s hard to know. Anthem is raking it in in our current system, so can’t be hurt either way.

Liberals and progressives fail to understand two things: 1) The Administration and the Democratic leadership is not “weak.” It is simply compromised and corporate. The apparent weakness is simply a perception management tool to avoid giving progressives and liberals what they want; and 2) the nature of power.

The health care bill is a horrible bill, a massive gift to the greed and avarice set that run the health insurance industry. Republicans could not pass such a bill, as Democratic opposition would gel and prevent passage. Because the bill is being pushed by Democrats, liberals and progressives are frozen in their footsteps, their herd instincts overriding their intellects.

This from Eric Massa, D-NY, who will now step down from office, clearing the way for passage of the bill:

“Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill, and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me and it will pass. You connect the dots.”

I listened to a discussion yesterday on NPR, Brian Lehrer, I think. Who really cares? (Contrary to popular belief, NPR is not “liberal”, but rather “mainstream”, i.e., “corporate.”) In this discussion, a representative of either the health insurance industry or the Obama Administration (a distinction without a difference) launched into a common-sense discussion about the coming mandate that we all carry insurance.

The mandate is misunderstood, we were told, because we don’t really understand insurance. It only really works as intended when there is full participation. When we have full participation, costs will go down.

I suppose in a perfect world, that would be true. But it is not a perfect world, and this is the United States of America, where only one set of opinions gets an airing on “mainstream” media. So I did an on-the-spot translation: The health insurance industry wants the government to mandate that we all buy their crappy products.

In return for the mandate, they will take the clients they currently reject, who are the poor and working class, by subsidizing the insurance industry to offer them crappy coverage. They will also agree to stop refusing coverage to potentially unprofitable clients (preexisting conditions), and will allow them to go to insurance exchanges to buy extremely expensive crappy coverage. If they can’t afford it, again, the government will subsidize the insurance companies. (Many state exchanges currently offer such coverage to insurance industry castoffs – it hardly qualifies as a Band-aid.)

There will be no cost controls. It’s win-win. For them.

The encirclement is almost complete now. Single payer is long gone, as is a public option. “Cadillac” policies, known in other countries as “basic coverage”, will be taxed out of existence. We will all be faced with higher premiums and lower coverage. (We citizens are, I am told, tempted by a “moral hazard” of demanding too much care, while insurance companies, who profit by exactly $1.00 by denying exactly $1.00 in coverage, suffer no such hazards. We are tempted towards immorality, and so they are protected from us. We are offered no such protection from them.)

In a final insult, I presume that Obama will “compromise”, and allow the Republicans two of their cherished “solutions” to the problem. One, he will allow tort reform, thereby curbing an important disciplinary tool often used against insurance companies. He will also knock down state barriers, allowing insurers to gravitate towards the states with the lowest thresholds for coverage.

Obama yesterday did his professorial thing, lecturing recalcitrant Republicans and knocking down some of their more lame talking points. But let’s not be fooled here. Obama is now an insurance salesman, and appears to be trying to put lipstick on a pig. He’s also a Republican. Or a Democrat. One or the other. I’m not sure. And it doesn’t seem to matter. Buy one, get one free.

Stella Liebeck was the winner in the infamous McDonald’s coffee case. She was awarded $2.86 million for serous burns and vaginal surgery she endured due to spilling 180-degree coffee in her lap. Coffee at that temperature can generate third-degree burns in two to seven seconds. (She only asked McDonald’s to pay the hospital bill, but they refused, ergo, the lawsuit.)

Few people understand why such an incident, even where there is negligence, should generate such a large award. The amount approximated the amount of money McDonald’s had made selling too-hot coffee over a two-day period. They wanted to punish the company, and so awarded “punitive” damages. It may be true that Liebeck did not endure damages anywhere near that amount- perhaps a civil penalty is a better route in these affairs. Nonetheless, the impulse is a good one – companies should not profit from antisocial behavior.

Jennifer Latham of LaFayette, Colorado, took out an individual health insurance policy from Assurant Health, also known as Time Insurance Company. Latham and her husband (uninsured) were subsequently seriously injured in an auto accident, not their fault, and she incurred $185,000 in medical bills. Saying that Latham had committed insurance fraud by not reporting an emergency room visit for shortness of breath and treatment for uterine prolapse on her insurance application, the company rescinded her policy and refused to pay the bills.

The jury awarded Latham $37 million in punitive damages. This is a crystal-clear case of insurance fraud by an insurer – the omissions on the application were clearly unrelated to the incident for which coverage was denied. But most rescission cases are a little bit grayer than this – people do commit insurance fraud, not that I much care. We don’t need health insurance companies, after all.

But the jury could have been a little more thorough – they could have estimated how much money Assurant has made from policy rescission over the last, say, 20 years, and awarded her that amount, which would have run into the hundreds of millions. After all, the company has employees who do nothing but rescission. Punishment in that amount would be appropriate, and might perhaps discourage Assurant from further antisocial behavior. As it is, they are chastened, but will likely carry on as before. Investors demand no less. Rescission is profitable.

Beyond that, they might have invoked the corporate death sentence. Since corporations are legal persons, they should do as all of us must do some day … die.

Latham and her four children are currently living on Social Security, and Assurant will appeal the decision. It will be years before they cut a check.

Footnote: Tort “reform”, or limiting of such damage awards, would further encourage the Assurants of this world to abuse the Lathmans of this world. Such an award, in a tort-reformed system, would not be allowed.

Sebastian Jones has a piece in Nation Magazine – David Sirota interviewed him this morning on his Denver talk show. Essentially, Jones is talking about a little-understood concept, the conflict of interest.

Suppose, for example, this this was a website sponsored by General Motors, and I did not disclose that fact, and then did safety and performance reviews of automobiles. If I were exposed and asked about it, I would likely say that my judgment is not compromised, and that I am perfectly capable of making informed judgments regardless of my source of income. It might even be true.

But that has nothing to do with “conflict of interest”. That expression refers to something else, the idea of serving two masters. It is inevitable that there will be a situation where the interests of one master, GM, will be at odds with the other, the general public. I cannot help but do a disservice to one or the other.

Jones’s first example is Tom Ridge, in service of the nuclear power industry but not saying so, and recommending that the Obama Administration go nuclear. If we were to ask Ridge about it, he would say that he is putting forth honest beliefs, and is therefore not conflicted. That is the standard response when people are exposed.

Over at Electric City Weblog, Dave Budge put up a link to an Atlantic article that cited a study done of 600,000 cases where people had or did not have insurance. The conclusion of the study was that having insurance does not affect health outcomes. He did not cite the funding source for the study, but with 600,000 follow-ups, it was surely very expensive. Without even glancing at the study, I told him that I knew the results were misleading, for one simple reason: People who have access to health care have better outcomes than people who do not.

But he insisted the study was objective, that it was a null hypothesis, and that I should restrict any comments to the study itself. Kind of pointless. Surely, somewhere in all of that nonesense exists a conflict of interest, and further, I should not be the one to search for it. It is the objective guy, the guy putting forth the study. Who funded it? No word.

But there’s a bigger conflict of interest at work in Washington right now- the Democrats and health care. Too many of them took too much money from AHIP and PhRMA to be objective. But the conflict runs deeper than just the money behind them. It is the private health insurance model itself. The Democrat bill that is being pushed does not deal with the conflict. Rather, it subsidizes the negative outcomes of that conflict. Republicans could not have passed such a horrible bill – such insults are usually dealt upon us by Democrats.

The conflict of interest that the Democrats want to subsidize works like this: We turn our money over to private insurers, they keep a portion of it, and use the rest to ration out health care. Each dollar they pay out in benefits reduces their profit margin. They have the stockholders on one side, and the policy holders on the other. They cannot serve one without harming the other. It’s classic. There is no way around it.

The free-marketeers are resolute and ideologically frozen in cement. They cannot fathom a market solution not working, and hence are blind to this obvious conflict. They have a conflict of thier own – married as they are to an obtuse ideology, they are at odds with reality. Hence they go into their shells, discuss these issues among themselves, and when people like me bring the conflict to their attention, they do what Budge did in this particular debate:

Back on subject. That’s nonsense, Mark. What we can or cannot see you cannot know. And when someone makes a point about an argument being made, an open minded person will take that argument on its merits – not on his ideals.

We know your position on a whole host of matters. We we don’t see is any new thought defending those.

The point of the study, funding aside, was supposedly simply bring to our attention an odd phenomenon, the apparent ineffectiveness of health insurance. It needs examination, I suppose, but let’s be frank: Budge’s purpose in highlighting it was to discredit a Harvard Medical/Cambridge Health study (no outside funding) the that found that 45,000 people die each year for lack of health insurance. He wants to disarm opponents of private health insurance. He has an agenda.

First, first they must deal with an old thought – the conflict of interest. How is it possible for insurance companies to serve two masters? I await an answer, from any of them. I pointed this out. There is no answer other than to eliminate private health insurance. The model does not work.

In a nice little post over at Daily Kos, Angry Mouse says “Anthem to Screw Customers in May Instead of March.. He’s talking about Anthem Blue Cross, a subsidiary of Wellpoint, and its plan to raise its rates in California by 39%. Strong and resolute Democrats are fighting now to delay implementation for two months.

Here’s the line that got me, from the article cited by Mouse:

“We have instructed the actuaries to review the rates with a fine tooth comb to ensure they comply with state law that requires that 70 cents of every dollar in premiums is spent on medical benefits.

That’s correct. California state law requires private insurers to hold their overhead down to 30% of each premium dollar.

It is hard to know science and pseudo-science, or what is science done in service of power versus science in search of truth. Perhaps that’s why so many of us are drawn to astrophysics – there is no agenda. It’s pure science. People simply want to know stuff.

Generally, one has to look to funding of a scientific study to judge its merits. It’s not that people are dishonest – we are more complicated than that – we are like kitty cats, cold-hearted hunters but keyed to survival and smart enough to know that the when the owner is pleased, there is food in the bowl. So when someone who is not disinterested pays for an “objective” study, it ceases to be objective and we get bad science.

So some dude over at Electric City Weblog cited an article in Atlantic that cited a study that showed that not having health insurance has no consequences in terms of living, statistically speaking.

Megan McArdle has a great blah blah blah article in The Atlantic addressing blah blah blah the oft cited statistic that so many people blah blah blah die from lack of health insurance blah blah blah

Ah, go read it yourself. It’s flatulence. It seemed logical that health insurance itself is not a determinant of life expectancy so much as access to health care. Also, a study that basically says that we’re all going to die of something anyway and that our health care system kills as many as it saves is really taking an unkind swipe at the best health care system in the world, isn’t it? I suggested as much to The Dude, along with citing a Harvard Medical study, and here’s the response I got:

Mark, a couple of things. First, where is the study you cite. If you’re going to assert good statistics you need to offer a gateway to the data. Secondly, if you think you’re right you suffer from a lack of epistemological modesty. But we already knew that.

The Dude was right. I cited a Reuters article, and not the study itself, from the Journal of Public Health (subscription wall), and written about in Harvard Science. The Dude does not know about the Google. But I had never been accused before of suffering from “lack of epistemological modesty. I looked it up, and sure enough, it exists, and it is a serious accusation. I needed a smart and quick defense of my position, something grounded in science. Fortunately, I was with my son and daughter, who are well-versed in epistemology as well as spirituality. I asked them for help with an appropriate response. Here’s what they came up with:

You can lecture me on epistemological deficiencies after we rip off your head and shit down your neck. Also, your insult very much reminds me of what your mother once said to me after I got off her (case).

Scientifically sound, even if crudely expressed. Thanks to my lovely children for helping me correctly analyze a study of the scientific method as it relates to covering the bare ass of our lousy health insurance system.