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Bimonthly on election and health care reform. Unsubscribe instructions at the bottom.
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eNewsletter #75
August 10, 2008
.No, this isn't just a Republican problem, it's both parties. We elect different politicians every cycle, what remains the same are the fat cats that fund the elections.
Please note my new email address is jelohman@gmail.com
In this issue:
1) Health Care
2) Campaign Reform
3) Politicians
4) Editorial
5) Tidbits
6) Give me a Break!
7) Book Recommendations
8) Contact Information
9) Unsubscribe Instructions
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Health Care |
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Want High-Quality Universal Health Coverage? Fix Medicare First and
Use It as a Model
Paying Doctors to Ignore Patients THE longstanding push-pull between Medicare and Congress has erupted again. Last week, Congress, overriding a presidential veto, canceled Medicare’s scheduled 10.6 percent cut in payment rates for doctors, and instead raised the rates 1.1 percent. But this action fails to address the problem with the Medicare payment system, which is not the amounts doctors are paid but the way their payments are calculated. Medicare pays doctors for specific services. If a patient has a checkup that includes an X-ray, a urine analysis and a physical, Medicare pays the doctor three separate fees. Each fee is meant to reimburse the doctor for the time and skill he or she devotes to the patient. But it is also supposed to pay for overhead, and this is where the problem begins. To Medicare, a doctor’s overhead (or “practice expense”) includes such items as rent, staff salaries and the cost of high-tech medical equipment. When the agency pays a fee to a doctor who has performed a CT scan, it is meant to cover some of the cost of buying or leasing the scanner itself. Services using more expensive equipment generate higher fees. See the complete article HERE Too many doctors define themselves as 'entrepreneurs' rather than as professionals. "This is an astute observation. When you read what doctors are saying on the blogs, they act like everything they have learned is 100% because of them and they should be allowed to do with it whatever they want, especially earning money. Unfortunately, when we start seeing ourselves as entrepreneurs, we betray the trust of the patients who got us where we are today. We betray the trust of the person who donated his or her body so we could learn anatomy. We betray the trust of all those patients in the hospital who obliged our clunky history-taking and exam skills because they knew they were helping us to learn to be better doctors in the future. We betray the trust of other physicians who opted to take academic positions as educators rather than settling into more lucrative private practice physicians. We only got to be physicians because of people who helped us get there. When we stop thinking of ourselves as professionals who have been entrusted with knowledge and education and start thinking of ourselves as businessmen it is to the detriment of our patients and our profession."
The morality of national health care: “So I just think if we’re concerned about 18,000 deaths each year from lack of health insurance, we’re actually obligated from a moral point of view to go with something that’s proven, which would be some form of nonprofit national health insurance. ” See the complete interview HERE |
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Campaign Reform |
What if public funding of campaigns were free to taxpayers?
by Jack E. Lohman
Well, it’d still have opponents. Their arguments go like this: It’s a “free speech” issue! If you limit funding by capping the campaign’s expenditures, it violates the Federal Constitution’s guarantee of free speech.
It’s a taxpayer funding issue! “I don’t want my taxes used to fund campaigns, especially those of candidates I don’t support.”
When politicians repay their campaign funders with favored legislation, it costs the state about $1300 per taxpayer per year. Thus even if we did have it taxpayer funded, as in Maine, the cost would be less than $5 per taxpayer per year. Quite a savings. It puts candidates at great disadvantage when WMC, WEAC or other special interests unload on issue ads against “clean” candidates.
I don’t want my candidates selected by my government!
But… but… I still don’t like it! Yeah, and that’s a problem. A politician problem. They don’t like it because it levels the playing field, and incumbents don’t like level playing fields. They don’t like “fair,” because that requires too much big money to offset, and that makes them look bad! And they don’t want to be labeled the “moneyed” candidate running against the “clean” candidate. It’s a tough life, but they can choose the other side. I don’t mean the other party, I mean the folks they are going to represent. Public funding of campaigns will eventually pass, but it will take a lot of pressure from the voters. It is currently opposed by the incumbents who deserve to be voted out of office, which is all of the Republicans and most of the Democrats. The nine legislators in the first column deserve re-election. The rest have to go. Now it’s the voter’s turn. See the complete blog article HERE and feel free to add your comments to the many....
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Politicians |
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Sensenbrenner is not delivering for his district by Jim Burkee (candidate for the 5th congressional district)
"In recent
years, Wisconsin has consistently ranked at
the bottom of the list of states receiving
its fair share of federal funding for roads,
bridges, education, research and more.
According to Wisconsin's Division of
Intergovernmental Relations, Wisconsin ranks
47th in the country in federal funds
received per capita.
What does this mean for residents of Wisconsin's 5th District?" See the complete blog article HERE and a your comments.....
The indictment of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens is good in some ways, it shines a light on congressional corruption, but bad in others. It makes people think “yea, our system of weeding out corruption works!” But it works only on illegal corruption, and our major problem is the legal corruption that occurs when congress gives away taxpayer assets in return for campaign contributions. Got to keep working on that. |
| Issues | Barrack Obama | John McCain |
| Gas tax holiday - Dumb idea, short-sighted. It would simply open up a hole that the petroleum industry would quickly fill and we'd be worse off in the end. |
 Opposes gas
tax holiday |
Favors gas tax holiday |
| Windfall taxes on oil profits. Dumb idea, short-sighted. These taxes will simply force prices even higher as the industry passes them on to consumers. Besides, how do you tax Saudi Arabia? | Favors windfall taxes |
Opposes
windfall taxes |
| Offshore Drilling, need it for long term stability and national security. It would be foolish to take it off the table until we have a solid option developed, not just conceptualized. | Opposes offshore drilling |
Favors
offshore drilling |
| Nuclear power, France has a pretty safe system and we should duplicate. We can solve the waste storage issue. And all other forms should be embraced: wind, solar, fuel cells, electric cars, wave power, clean coal, etc. Ethanol comes from food, and should not be in the picture. | Opposes Nuclear power |
Favors
Nuclear power |
| Social Security taxes |
Favors
increase of the cap on taxing wages (affects higher
wages only) |
Opposes (but waffling) |
| Taxes in general |
Obama
would increase taxes for the wealthy and would repeal
Bush tax cuts |
McCain opposes a tax increase for the wealthy and favors keeping Bush tax cuts in place |
| Health Care Reform, Neither are pushing single-payer Medicare-for-all, but a strong congress may force it through anyway. |
 Lousy plan, but
Economic Policy Institute prefers
Obama's
plan over McCain's |
Lousy plan, but you can afford that view when you have a first-class plan yourself. |
| Iraq -- I believe we were misled, maybe even lied to, but leaving too soon would be foolish. | Waffling, but wants fixed timetable |
Waffling,
but more stern on keeping troops there until Iraq is
more stable |
| Immigration -- Neither extreme is good. Sending them all home will empty 5 million homes, which we don't need. Keep the good ones and send the bad ones home. This one is a toss up. But we also must force Mexico to help with the costs. How about free oil? | Talks good, but typical politician speak. | Moved forward compromise legislation. |
| Pork | Conspicuously silent about pork. This seems to be a nonpartisan problem. |
Promises
to veto any bill that has pork in it. |
| Town Hall debates: Yeah, I know this was a strategic decision on the part of both candidates, but I'm disappointed that Obama refused. | Refused |
Supports |
| Public Funding of Campaigns | Up in the air; says he's for it but refused it for presidential race. Not a real good sign. He blew it bad. |
Supports
it and would likely sign it into law |
A small group of House Republicans returned to the chamber Monday to resume their protest against Congress starting its August recess without first addressing high gas prices.
Republicans began the effort midday Friday after Congress had shut down for the month. They hammered away at Democratic leaders for failing to take up GOP energy legislation to expand drilling and prodded Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., to call the House back into session.
The republicans are right on this one, no stones should be left unturned and we should not wait 10 years to find out that we should have started drilling in 2008. All options should be on the table. (And, yeah, I know it's because of massive ExxonMobil money, but it has to be done.)
See article HERE
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Editorial |
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Our complex problem is really pretty basic...
By Jack E. Lohman
First and foremost, ours is a corrupt political system that is fueled by campaign contributions. Get the private money out of the political system and much of our problems will clean themselves up. Conservatives argue against this; they like to give where the giving is good. But they are foolish; even labor has helped fuel the problem. Campaign cash buys government favors, like the deregulation that led to the mortgage crisis and huge taxpayer-funded subsidies. It began long ago, even before George Bush, and it is perpetuated by both political parties. Follow the dominoes: To satisfy his cronies Bush gave a tax cut to the wealthy, which converted our $300 billion deficit to a $600 billion deficit, which trashed the value of the dollar bill, thus devaluing houses and increasing the cost of oil, which now impacts every industry in the U.S. to the point that an even greater number of jobs have been sent to low-cost countries.
To get out of this mess we need:
To save the country, our politicians must take back from the wealthy some of that which they gave them. The people without money cannot fix this problem, only the wealthy can. Tax increases are necessary, as is the repeal of the Bush tax cuts. The time to reverse them is now.
Source: http://moneyedpoliticians.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/our-complex-problem-is-really-pretty-basic/
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Tidbits |
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This week, the long string of bad economic news continued. On Friday, the monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a rise in the unemployment rate to 5.7%, the highest in four years. In their Jobs Picture analysis, EPI economists Jared Bernstein and Heidi Shierholz noted that the buying power of weekly paychecks is dropping sharply, more part-timers want full-time work, and the unemployment rate of African American adult men jumped to 10%. "The persistence of job and real wage losses provides a very strong rationale for a second stimulus package," said Bernstein. A day earlier, numbers from the Commerce Department showed anemic growth in the gross domestic product--insufficient to keep the jobless rate from growing even worse, as EPI economist L. Josh Bivens wrote in the GDP Picture.
U.S.-China trade gap: Massive job losses for U.S. workers
When the bucks stopThe current financial crisis highlights fundamental failings in a global economy run for private profit rather than broader social opportunity. Jim Stanford explains how risky financial speculation created a bubble that has now burst, and argues that we need to refocus attention on a real economy founded on the production of actual goods and services. For the past year, the world’s financial system has been roiled by a cascading crisis of confidence. The consequences so far have included collapsed banks and brokerages, some $250 billion of officially declared losses by financial companies, a marked slowdown of real economic growth in several countries, and a recession in the US. More ominously, there may be a darker storm coming. Many observers, defenders of the current system as well as critics, fear this latest panic might just lead to ‘the big one’ – a structural conflagration that produces depression, chaos and dramatic change. Read the complete article at: http://www.redpepper.org.uk/when-the-bucks-stop Yes, I believe tasers can kill people. In the medical field if they want to purposely put someone into ventricular tachycardia -- a life threatening cardiac arrhythmia -- so they can then shock them out of it (for educational purposes), all they have to do is send a high voltage to the heart at a precise moment in time (on the T wave). Thus if a taser hits the victim when their heart is at the T wave, they stand a significant chance of dying. Check with your local cardiologist. Key Questions Voters Should Ask Candidates The following questions provide a framework for ensuring that candidates address some of the toughest choices they will face concerning the federal budget if they are elected. Background information is given to provide context and to help with follow-up questions, which should be asked whenever you believe that you have not been given a complete answer. See the complete Concord Coalition list HERE
America's Richest Will Pay More Under Obama's Tax
Plan
How Washington's Right-Wing Wrecking Crew Robbed
Us Blind
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Give me a Break! |
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Click here for
Interesting comparisons
Walking
can add minutes to your life. |
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Book Recommendations |
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Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich by Robert Frank (Author)
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Contact information
Lohman is a retired business owner that volunteers’ time on the issues of Election reform and Universal health care -
Contact: Jack E. Lohman
jelohman@gmail.com
or
jelohman@charter.net
Phone 414-477-8686
(cell)
http://MoneyedPoliticians.net
www.ThrowTheRascalsOut.org
www.WiCleanElections.org
www.BusinessCoalition.net
www.MoneyedPoliticians.com (my book: Politicians - Owned and Operated by Corporate America)
www.SmokeFreeDining.net (A searchable restaurant database)
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Disclosure: I am a center-right Republican that (regrettably) voted for Bush twice. But the Republicans look worse here because they (are/were) in power and the party blocking reform. Next year it may be the Democrats taking center stage. Were I to have a political choice it would be for a strong third-party reform candidate in all seats. I do not like our very costly and ineffective duopoly. Jack Lohman
See Lohman's complete disclosure
HERE.
1) Physician writes prescription
2) Patient buys at drug store, pays deductible
3) Drug store bills Medicare the balance
What? No insurance industry in the loop?
Obama health plan outperforms McCain plan in coverage and efficiency
By L. Josh Bivens and Elise Gould
Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have presented very different plans to reform health care in the United States. Last week, the Urban Institute/Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center (TPC) provided what appears to be the first evaluation of each plan's effect on costs and coverage outcomes.1 While the TPC findings are preliminary, there is a wealth of information contained in them; some of their implications, however, may not be immediately apparent even to those relatively well-versed in the U.S. health care debates. The punch lines of the TPC analysis can be stated relatively simply:
See the very useful charts HERE