Public broadcasting took a hard shot on the integrity-chin the day they took their first corporate dollar.

National Public Radio has a founding charter that says its mission is to “serve groups whose voices would otherwise go unheard.” What a joke that is, unless those unheard voices belong to people with car problems, investors, people who like word games, or fans of the fluffy interview. I think of NPR as being just like ABC, but with better production values. (How many interviews have you heard on NPR with gurgling brooks or birds singing in the background?)

Back in the 1990’s, NPR did some good investigative work on the Archer Daniels Midland lysine scandal so well covered in the current movie The Informant. ADM did the logical thing – it started giving NPR money. End of problem.

Public Broadcasting System is to TV what NPR is to radio. It is mostly an investors’ network where Ken Burns gets to try out his stuff. They have done some good work in the past, and Bill Moyers has had slot there, and the Frontline show was once a solid investigative program.

T.R. Reid is a documentary film maker who did a show called Sick Around the World that took a close look at health care systems in France, The U.K., Japan and Taiwan. Frontline asked for a follow-up, and Reid made Sick Around America.

But if you watched the Frontline show on PBS, nowhere in the credits will you see T.R. Reid’s name. He pulled out and split with Frontline before it aired.

The reason: Reid noticed that other countries that have successful universal health care systems have outlawed for-profit insurance for basic care. Frontline would not let him air that fact.

Since that was pretty much the whole thrust of the documentary, that for-profit health insurance is at the heart of our problem, Reid decided that he could not be associated with it, nor ever again with Frontline.

Russell Mokhiber writes about this at Counterpunch. Amazingly, PBS went beyond merely undermininig Reid’s message. They completely contradicted it, airing instead the following interview with Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the lead health insurance lobby in the United States.

Moderator: Other developed countries guarantee coverage for everyone. We asked Karen Ignagni why it can’t work here.

Karen Ignagni: Well, it would work if we did what other countries do, which is have a mandate that everybody participate. And if everybody is in, it’s quite reasonable to ask our industry to do guarantee issue, to get everybody in. So, the answer to your question is we can, and the public here will have to agree to do what the public in other countries have done, which is a consensus that everybody should be in.

Moderator: That’s what other developed countries do. They make insurers cover everyone, and they make all citizens buy insurance. And the poor are subsidized.

No mention of outlawing for-profit insurance everywhere else in the world – instead, and American health insurance lobbyist pushing what would months later become the Baucus plan – mandated coverage without a public option.

The United States is badly in need of a public health care system, and a public broadcasting outlet, one that “serve groups whose voices would otherwise go unheard.”

This is from the headline story in yesterday’s Denver Post: 1 in 6 uninsured in Colorado:

The major driver appears to be low income. Insurance is not really a choice. Non-unionized retail clerks and shelf stockers can’t afford major medical policies, not even the high-deductible ones currently favored by the insurance industry.

Gary Horvath, managing director of the Business Research Division at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, said Aurora also has more lower-paying retail jobs that may not include insurance.

By contrast, Boulder has IBM and Jefferson County has Lockheed Martin as major employers, he said.

This is definitely a society where we have insiders and outsider, where insiders receive excellent care, where outsiders get little or no care and have to endure long wait times.

Denver city bus drivers, and area teachers, sanitation workers, police and fire fighters, though they are in relatively low-paid professions, have the advantage of being unionized and employed by government, and are therefore better insured than the average low-pay worker.

Saying things that are true will keep you off Time Warner subsidiary CNN.

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CNN, ever the corporate toadies, refused to run the above ad because it “singles out” one executive.

Here’s a Funny or Die video that singles out the insurance industry for special praise.

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This film was produced and edited by New Left Media’s Chase Whiteside (interviewer) and Erick Stoll (camera operator). Critics might suggest that they cherry-picked for the stupidest people they could find. That might be true. Nonetheless, it speaks to a larger phenomenon best described by Matt Taibbi at Smirking Chimp:

After all, the reason the winger crowd can’t find a way to be coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. That’s why even people like Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over. Beck pointedly compared the AIG protesters to Bolsheviks: “[The Communists] basically said ‘Eat the rich, they did this to you, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” He then said the AIG and G20 protesters were identical: “It’s a different style, but the sentiments are exactly the same: Find ‘em, get ‘em, kill ‘em!’” Beck has an audience that’s been trained that the rich are not appropriate targets for anger, unless of course they’re Hollywood liberals, or George Soros, or in some other way linked to some acceptable class of villain, to liberals, immigrants, atheists, etc. — Ted Turner, say, married to Jane Fonda.

But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.

This isn’t new in America – the art of public relations (now known as “corporate communications” – the PR people changed the name) is misdirection. Yes, ordinary people are angry. Yes, they are being fucked over. Yes, they know this …. and yet, as noted in the film, when it comes down to specifics, well, they really aren’t sure why. Just who.

It is true that there is racism as a subtext here, but that’s an expression of fear, nothing more. All of us hold out some reservations about other races- it’s part of our makeup. Setting this aside, the key here is that anger is cleverly channeled away from the true culprits – the Wall Street barons who so recently mugged us, the insurance companies who are leaching on our health care system, and the public relations (corporate communications) industry whose propaganda is the Vaseline that eases the pain of rape.

I sat down to read this morning and rested a cup of coffee on the arm of my chair. Then reaching out to grab something, I spilled the coffee on our beige area rug. Instant panic – I am a Philistine! I rushed to the kitchen for paper towels, and then later started dabbing with a mild solution of dish soap and warm water.

Folk wisdom says that Woolite® does not work as well as simple shampoo on wool, but costs five times as much. It might even damage wool. As I dabbed at the carpet, the thought ran through my head – go to the store you Philistine … you’ve stained her beautiful carpet … go to the store, buy some carpet stain remover… buy some carpet stain remover. I thought about the Woolite factor, the 5X$ factor, then I thought about Philistines in the chapel, and I got in the car and headed to the store.

Bill Press was on talk radio, and health care was again the topic. He had on some guest, some guy, and the guest remarked that the Democratic National Committee had put together a remarkable machine to bring voters out to vote for Obama, but that machine sat there idly during the health care debate.

How could they not see what was coming? How could they be that naive? Are they that dumb? Why did they not put the machine to work to get health care passed?

These are savvy liberal talk show guys, I remind you. Savvy liberals.

RESOLVE® Triple Action Spot Carpet Cleaner 1) Penetrates, 2) Breaks Down, 3) Lifts out. (Note that certain stains may cause discoloration even after cleaning.)

I paid $6.15 for a bottle of RESOLVE®. If you walk in our house today, your eyes might be drawn to the coffee stain by my reading chair.

Man, what an easy mark I am.

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?