Public Health Before Wall Street Wealth
"There is an odd disconnect between the furious public debate over health
care reform, with its emphasis on the cost of an increased government role,
and the nonexistent discussion about the far more expensive and largely
secretive government program to bail out Wall Street."
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig: October 14, 2009
Wonderful. The 13 Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee get one faintly
rational Republican to join them in a meaningless stab at health care reform
and it throws the media into a titillated frenzy about what it all means. It
means very little.
The main thrust of the proposal is to forcibly submit even more customers to
the tender mercies of the insurance industry while doing nothing significant
to cut costs. Insurers will now pretend that the burdens on them are onerous
and will demand concessions to make this an even bigger boondoggle for the
medical profiteers than George W. Bush's prescription drug coverage
initiative.
The insurers' leverage with the few moderate Republicans and with
conservative Democrats will prevent the merging of the Baucus bill with the
more serious attempts at reform in other Senate and House proposals. While
President Barack Obama was celebrating Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, for
being "extraordinarily diligent" in working with the Democrats, she was
already proclaiming the exit strategy she will use if the bill becomes
worthwhile. "My vote today is my vote today," Snowe said Tuesday. "It
doesn't forecast what my vote will be tomorrow."
The health care debate has become a convenient distraction, for both
political parties, from the far more pressing issues surrounding the banking
meltdown. As important as health insurance is as an issue, representing 16
percent of the economy, and with so many uninsured, no sane person can deny
that the current system is a sorry mess that needs to be changed. But why
now and not after a growth economy has returned?
The answer is that politicians from both parties just love the health care
game because it allows them to assume reflexive but irrelevant postures in
that tired old debate about "socialized medicine" versus "free-market
choice" although it has nothing to do with either ideological fantasy.
Consumers do not have meaningful choices as it is-many have no coverage and
others are frozen into some company-sponsored plan-and it is insulting to
the social democracies of Western Europe to suggest that anything comparable
is even under consideration in the U.S. Congress.
The health care issue should never even have been brought up at a time when
the economy is reeling and we are running such immense deficits to shore up
the banks. Instead of fixing the economy by saving Americans' homes and
jobs, we are preoccupied with pie-in-the-sky rhetoric on a hot issue that
should have been addressed in calmer times. It came up now because, despite
all the hoary partisan posturing, it is a safer subject than the more
pressing issue of what to do with Citigroup, AIG and General Motors, which
the taxpayers happen to own but do not control. While Treasury Secretary
Timothy Geithner plots in secret with the top bankers who got us into this
mess, we are focused on the perennial circus of so-called health care
reform.
There is an odd disconnect between the furious public debate over health
care reform, with its emphasis on the cost of an increased government role,
and the nonexistent discussion about the far more expensive and largely
secretive government program to bail out Wall Street. Why the agitation over
the government spending $83 billion a year on health care when at least 20
times that amount has been thrown at the creators of the ongoing financial
crisis without any serious public accountability? On Wednesday, the Wall
Street Journal reported that employees of the financial industry that we
taxpayers saved are slated to be paid a record $140 billion this year.
If you want to know who actually runs this country, just look at the phone
logs, released by court order last week, revealing Geithner's nearly
constant calls to solicit the advice of the fat cats who caused the banking
implosion. It's the same as when he was chair of the Federal Reserve in New
York, before Obama appointed him to his current job. Only back then, as he
blithely ignored the impending financial meltdown, it was easier to have
lunch with the bankers as well as to chat by phone.
In an earlier Freedom of Information exposé, The New York Times reported in
April: "An examination of Mr. Geithner's five years as president of the New
York Fed, an era of unbridled and ultimately disastrous risk-taking by the
financial industry, shows that he forged unusually close relationships with
executives of Wall Street's giant financial institutions. His actions, as a
regulator and later a bailout king, often aligned with the industry's
interests and desires, according to interviews with financiers, regulators
and analysts and a review of Federal Reserve records."
Nothing has changed since then. Meanwhile, we all get in a tizzy about fake
efforts at health reform as immense decisions are being made to ensure the
health of financial institutions that should have been left to die.
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/opinion/13herbert.html?th&emc=th
Behind the Laughter
By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Op-Ed: October 12, 2009
Conan O'Brien has been making some pretty rough jokes about Newark, which
has led to a (mostly) mock feud between the late-night host and Newark Mayor
Cory Booker.
O'Brien joked that the mayor was establishing a program to improve the
health of the city's residents, then deadpanned: "The health care program
would consist of a bus ticket out of Newark."
He did a video bit in which he praised the city's "thriving arts scene"
(while showing a graffiti-scarred wall); its "four-star lodging" (shots of
abandoned, gutted, rusting vehicles); and its "world-class live theater" (a
peep show).
He threatened to form an alliance with the mayors of nearby municipalities,
thus "creating a geographic toilet seat around the city of Newark," making
it possible to flush the city down the figurative bowl.
The mayor came up with his own YouTube videos in response and, believe it or
not, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton weighed in at one point as a
mock peace negotiator.
Conan seems like a nice fellow, and I doubt that he harbors any malice
toward Newark. But he and his audience are having fun taunting a city that,
like many others across the U.S., is in a desperately tragic situation:
poverty-stricken, run down, often unsafe, its children and teenagers in too
many instances going nowhere fast.
Whether it's Newark, Detroit, parts of Chicago, South-Central Los Angeles,
Camden, N.J. - take your pick - we've looked the other way for decades as
the residents of hard-core inner-city neighborhoods struggled with
overwhelming, life-threatening problems and a chronic shortage of resources,
financial and otherwise.
We're having an intense national debate over whether to move ahead with
nation-building in Afghanistan and to continue protecting the population in
places like Kabul and Kandahar while all but ignoring the violence that is
consuming the lives of boys and girls in Chicago, America's third-largest
city.
Dozens of boys and girls of school-age and younger are murdered in Chicago
every year. One hundred were killed there last year, according to the
police. The blood of the young is spattered daily on the stoops, sidewalks
and streets of American cities from coast to coast, and we won't even take
notice unless, for example, we can engage in the ghoulish delight of
watching the murder played over and over again on video.
In Newark, where some of the streets do look as bad as the scenes that were
part of Conan's comedy bit, the unemployment rate is 14.7 percent. Keeping
kids in high school long enough to graduate is difficult. Drug dealing is a
fallback employment option for men and boys who can't find legitimate work.
Other cities have the same problems, some to a greater degree. So what are
we doing? While mulling the prospect of sending up to 40,000 additional
troops to Afghanistan, we've stood idly by, mute as a stone, as school
districts across the nation have bounced 40,000 teachers out of their jobs
over the past year.
That should tell you all you need to know about twisted national priorities.
Even as teachers by the tens of thousands are walking the plank to
unemployment, we're learning, as The Times reported last week, that one in
every 10 young male dropouts is locked up in jail or juvenile detention. As
if that weren't gruesome enough, we find that the figure for blacks is one
in four. What would it take to get the perpetual crisis facing these young
people onto the radar screens of the rest of America?
Conan was just trying to be funny, but the reality behind his late-night
humor is horrifying. In Detroit, the median sale price of a house has
hovered around $8,000. Seventy percent of all murders in the Motor City go
unsolved. Joblessness is off the charts. The school system is a catastrophe.
I remember driving around Camden, which is right outside of Philadelphia, on
a rainy afternoon. Young people with nothing to do - they had dropped out of
school and had little or no chance of finding a job - were gathered on
porches, saying little, staring the hours away. I had on a suit and was
driving a nice car. More than one person that I approached thought I was
either buying or selling drugs.
The inner cities have been in a recession for decades. They're in a
depression now. Myriad issues desperately need to be addressed: employment,
education, the foreclosure crisis, crime, alcohol and drug abuse, health
care (including mental health treatment and counseling), child care for
working parents and on and on and on.
Conan's jokes would carry a silver lining if they could somehow prompt more
people to think more seriously about what's really going on in cities like
Newark.
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