Ruling the Roost

Want to know what that medical procedure will cost you in chickens? Here's a site that lays out the deets of Sue Lowden's healthcare plan.

Annual checkup: 24 chickens.
Appendectomy: 1019 chickens.
Hip replacement: 6549 chickens.

Egg on her face? Priceless.

Rob

She's Not Kidding

Last week, I posted about Republican Sue Lowden, the candidate who's running for Harry Reid's seat in the U.S. Senate. She'd mentioned that it could be possible to barter for healthcare. In my original post, I put an asterix next to her name, and intended to indicate that a subsequent statement seemed to imply that she's meant "bargaining," not "bartering." Somehow -- I think because when I went back to reread her statement, I discovered that it didn't explicitly disavow the bartering idea -- I never got around to writing that caveat. Bad blogger, me.

But it's just as well. Because bartering is exactly what Lowden meant.

"Bring a chicken to the doctor."

That's her plan. That's her fucking plan. "Bring a chicken to the doctor," and hope they'll treat you.


What, exactly, would a chicken cover? How many chickens would I need for knee surgery? Should I keep oxen in my yard, just in case? How many houses do I have to paint before I can get an MRI?

Look, the good old days of country doctors who treated people, in exchange for whatever they could pay, however they could pay it, is inspirational. Atticus Finch did some of his lawyering the same way. But it's case-by-case charity, not a plan for coverage. It's not a sound basis for a healthcare system. Chickens are cheap, and medical treatment is expensive. Most poor people don't have chickens, and most doctors don't want them.  It's just mind-numbingly stupid. We have money for a reason. We have insurance for a reason.

Attention, GOP. Your healthcare plan sucks. I mean, just between us chickens.

Rob

GOP Abandons the Dollar

This just in -- Republicans no longer have faith in the U.S. Dollar, and are suggesting that, when we can't pay cash for our medical expenses, that we barter with the doctor. Here's Nevada senate candidate Sue Lowden*, this past Tuesday.

"I think that bartering is really good. Those doctors who you pay cash, you can barter, and that would get prices down in a hurry. And I would say go out, go ahead out and pay cash for whatever your medical needs are, and go ahead and barter with your doctor."

"Bartering is really good." Not haggling, not bargaining -- bartering. As in, "I can only afford $100 for those blood tests, so how about I mow your lawn all summer to make up the difference? Or would you like some old comic books?" As in, "you're money's no good here -- we only take livestock."

This lack of faith in our currency is really disheartening. I wonder what could get them to respect the dollar again...? Maybe they're holding out until we put Jefferson Davis's face on it.

Rob

Transparency Versus Results

or "I know the secrets that you keep when you're talking on C-SPAN."

My brother sent me a message on Facebook with this video attached, wondering what I thought of it. (He adds that he's for universal healthcare.) The video was called "CNN is finally getting it" (I don't think by Tom). I'm embedding a YouTube video of the same broadcast, since Facebook won't let me transfer it directly.

I like Cafferty a lot, but I think he missed the boat with this clip. (Is it recent, by the way? It seems like the peak of these complaints would arise around the time of the first senate vote, with the Cornhusker Kickback, etc.)*

Obama made that promise, but he shouldn’t have. For one thing, the legislature is its own branch, and makes its own decisions on what to broadcast and what not to. But also, because the proposal sounds a lot better as a promise than it would work in reality. Broadcasting negotiations is pretty much counter to what negotiations need to be – at least in the modern world.

Politicians are taking strong stances to appease their voters. Republicans, in particular, get tons of heat (from the public, usually after being wound up by Rush or Beck) when they deviate from the party line. Democrats get it from the other side, from groups like MoveOn and DailyKos (nowhere near as powerful or influential as Rush, but they do exert some pressure). And neither side wants compromise of any sort – they treat any bending of principles as a deep loss.

But negotiation needs compromise. There needs to be a place where legislators can speak to each other off the record, so that they can each give a little without getting attacked by their respective bases. Broadcasting everything would have given the entire process over to the town-hall chaos of last August.

With healthcare, there wasn’t a lot of compromise between parties in the end. But from the start, the bill incorporated a lot of Republican ideas. If it hadn’t, it would have truly been government-run healthcare, a single-payer Medicare for All. That’s the liberal ideal, and it was compromised from the get-go, and compromised again with the loss of the public option. The individual mandate that some Republicans are now complaining about as unconstitutional is another Republican idea. The final bill looks a lot like what Mitt Romney instituted in Massachusetts; I’ve heard it also looks quite a bit like what Republicans counterproposed in the 90s as an option to HillaryCare, but I haven’t looked into that.

Anyway, I suspect that one of the biggest problems in Congress is that the whole thing is a stage, and there’s too little private time for negotiation and compromise. There are so many opportunities to shout, “Hell, no, you can’t!” and too few opportunities to sit down away from the cameras, and figure out how to make something work without either party losing face over it.

Which assumes that either party would want such a result; the big problem is that it runs counter to a guiding Republican philosophy, articulated by Reagan: That government itself is the problem. It’s hard to negotiate for success when one of the parties is founded on the notion that government can’t succeed, and must be stopped. (I’m sure Republicans have a similar narrative about why it’s impossible to negotiate with Democrats, but they sure seem to have an easier time finding Dems to back their bills than Dems do finding Republicans.)

As for Cafferty’s claim that Pelosi’s congress isn’t the cleanest in American history, fair enough. That’s another awfully big promise to have made, and like Obama's in many ways, one that's not entirely in her control. But even with the Rangel, Massa, and Paterson scandals (who isn’t in Congress, but lets throw him in), it’s certainly cleaner than the last Republican-run congress (with Foley, Cunningham, Ney, Lewis, Vitter, Craig, Ensign, and more, all the way down to the Professor and Mary Anne). I agree she should be more proactive in punishments, and get ahead of these scandals, but there’s little else she can do beyond that – other than not promising to be the “cleanest in history” again.

Then again, she just herded 220 cats – twice – to pass the most sweeping government program since Medicare. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t inclined to cut her a little slack. Process is nice, but results are what last.

Rob

*Actually, watching it again I realize that this was right after the Senate passed its bill (and, as I guessed, right around the time of all the anger at the last bit of armtwisting to get 60 votes was cresting). I’m not sure what Cafferty thinks the upside of negotiating publicly with the Republicans would have achieved at that point that couldn’t be more efficiently done by just allowing a staffer to hold up a sign that said “No!” every so often.

Ain't That America.

Naturally, I'm in a fine mood about Heath Care Reform being signed into law (fingers crossed for the reconciliation fix), but I'm not quite ready to talk about that. Instead, I wanted to look back at an idiom that I've had in my vocabulary since high school.

Sometimes, you just gotta Paint the Mother Pink.

Here's a commercial for a contest MTV ran in 1984, the MTV Party House, in which they gave away a house in Bloomington, Indiana, and, in honor of Bloomington native John Cougar Mellencamp's song "Pink Houses," everybody would get together and "paint the mother pink," as Mellencamp says at the end of the commercial. And because he says it so distinctively (and also, because calling anything a "mother" was rare on TV in 1984), it became a catchphrase of sorts.

The thing is, it also kind of merged with another phrase, extrapolated from Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Here's a passage about the Somebody Else's Problem field, which lets people ignore problems that aren't their own, since they conflict with reality as they expect it:

The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else's Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.

And lo, someone -- a buttonmaker at a sci-fi convention, no doubt -- shortened all that to "Paint it pink and call it somebody else's problem." And "Paint it pink" has sort of stuck around in that context, but among the first MTV generation? It's "Paint the mother pink."

Anyway, maybe that's why this is coming to me today. Healthcare reform has been signed into law, which, as Joe Biden reminds, us, is a "big fucking deal." And perhaps the biggest part of that big fucking deal is that, suddenly, for all of us who have health insurance that we're currently happy with, there are 30 million soon-to-be-insured Americans who are, astonishingly, no longer pink.

Rob

Oops!

Just for a second, Harry Reid voted no on healthcare reform.

Rob

Just What We Need, More Violent Idiots.

I truly believe the universal healthcare coverage is crucial to our remaining a just, humane society. I've believed it since the early 90s, when two things happened: a, the Clintons started selling their healthcare reform plan, so it became a topic of many conversations, and b, I got out of college and needed to get a 9-to-5 job to get health insurance before I aged out of my parents' plan. Everyone's advice to me about health insurance signaled that they were terrified of not having it. (I, as a 21-year-old and therefore immortal, couldn't have cared less.) No one should have to choose between crushing debt and their life and health, or the health of their family.

It seems to me that the moral high ground in that argument is pretty damn clear: there's very little to be said for putting the profits of giant insurance companies over the health needs of everyday people.

Well, it would be clear if idiots like this guy weren't biting people's fingers off. Yeah, he was punched. So what? Ideally, he should just take it. Find a cop, get the guy arrested for assault. Then it's a whole other story. (Another point: Ideally, you shouldn't provoke someone into punching you in the first place, which seems to have happened here.)

Plan B should be to punch back. Plan B is a bad, bad plan. It's especially bad if the guy punching you is a senior citizen. It's human nature to fight back, sure, but no good will come of it. It will potentially escalate the violence, and of course it brings you down to their level.

Plan C is to bite your assailant's finger off. Screw Plan C. There is no Plan C. Plan C changes the whole story. Suddenly, instead of a garden-variety jerk, you're a raving dirtbag psycho. What kind of idiot would think this is acceptable? I'm sure we'll find out later today, as an arrest is made and the media does its frenzied little dance. Plan C sucks... and worse yet, it obscures the high ground.

So bottom line, don't fight. Just don't. But if you must fight, fight like a man, not a goddamn dog.

Rob
(And if you must bite someone's finger off? Do it over a topic where the health and livelihood of so many people don't hang in the balance, m'kay? Maybe argue about the infield fly rule or something?)

Join the GOP Cult

Michelle Bachmann (R-Crazytown) is starting a cult, and she wants you to join!

"What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing," said Bachmann.

She's talking about healthcare reform. She doesn't like it, and she thinks we should all kill ourselves to prove it, apparently. Maybe there are no 10-hour lines in the emergency rooms in the tail of the death comet.

As ways to kill ourselves go, slitting our wrists at least seems a healthier alternative to poisoned Kool-Aid, which has all sorts of artificial colors and preservatives in it. So I'm with her there. And if we have any last-minute regrets? It's not the weekend. Maybe an ER doctor might be able to squeeze us in before we bleed out.

Rob

Shaddup Shuttin' Up.

Now that Congress is in recess, with the Senate soon to follow, congresspeople have gone home to their districts to meet with constituents and discuss healthcare reform. And those who are for it are getting ambushed right and left, as this Rachel Maddow video shows.

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Legislators are being shouted down at their town hall meetings, unable to make themselves heard. Even regular people who support reform are getting shouted down. These confrontations aren't spontaneous, and they're not local. It’s all part of the lobbying group FreedomWorks' tactics to gin up an angry mob whenever there’s a forum to address legitimate questions by people who have doubts about the plan: Intimidate the speaker, intimidate the questioner, and just shut down conversation altogether.

Now, this tactic—reminiscent of Bill O’Reilly’s “Shut up! Shut up!” tirades before cutting off a caller’s microphone—may backlash. As Jonathan Martin points out, those angry people holding up pictures of a congressman in devil horns and signs with Nazi SS lettering look crazy, and may become prevalent enough to paint the whole anti-reform crowd with that brush. (See also: hanging congressmen in effigy.) So this whole thing might collapse upon itself like the teabaggers (FreedomWorks' last project).

But letting things go far enough for a backlash to happen naturally would be a mistake. Especially since things have already gotten so bad that Fox’s wild-eyed rabble-rouser Glenn Beck has had to remind people to avoid violence in these confrontations.

So what can be done?

We’ve had a couple days of these things, now, and we have their playbook, so we essentially know how they work. While I’d love the see a vigorous crowd supporting healthcare reform at these meetings (and they are there, they’re just not shouting), it’s troublesome to add anything to an angry mob—things could get ugly fast if fire were fought with fire.

There’s the Bush solution, of course: Pre-screen everyone who comes, keeping anyone who disagrees outside, like he did in the 2004 election. This is problematic for two reasons. First, you can pretty much depend on the fact that anything which can be called “the Bush solution” is a bad idea. And second, the whole point of civic discourse is to have a conversation. You can’t do that without people who disagree with you.

I like Kevin Drum’s suggestion: Announce beforehand that an organized group is trying to disrupt the meeting so citizens with legitimate questions and comments can’t be heard or answered. It won’t stop what follows, but it might change the way it’s perceived.

Of course, that’ll only work for the people actually in the room. TV news broadcasts are much more likely to just show the angry shouts and hand-painted protest signs, the more garish, the better. So there needs to be a strategy tying these events together, showing that they’re part of a pattern, and this pattern is bought and paid for by lobbyists working for anti-reform forces like the insurance and pharmaceutical industries who make tons of money as long as the status quo is preserved.

I’m curious as to how the Democrats and the White House push back against these tactics. The first step, I think, is getting the word out. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next.

Rob

UPDATE: The White House is starting to respond.

Ask a Canadian

Comics blogger Christopher Bird (Mightygodking) examines the study that healthcare reform opponents are using to make the Canadian healthcare system look like a band-aid and a shot of whiskey. For a guy who has a strange attachment to Rex the Wonder Dog, he makes a lot of sense!

Rob