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The Real Hoax Is Health Care
An attention grab that held millions of Americans transfixed. A story that seemed to be about life in the balance. It dominated the airwaves, the social networks, held Americans in its clutch. And then it turned out to have been nothing but a hoax. A play for attention that distracted the entire country.
Now that the Balloon Boy's story is blown, can we call out the health care hoax?
The anti-health care lobby is taking all our attention hostage. And a nation's hopes (and votes) for quality health care are floating away, leaving real lives in real danger.
If you're angry and feel played by the Heene family of Colorado, you'd better be furious at the private insurers.
If you want Richard Heene and his wife to be jailed and their kids taken into protective care - you better be fighting for all Americans to be taken out of the custody of abusive wealth-insurance companies.
We know now that the Heenes were smart about how to manipulate the media in part because they'd starred in two episodes of Wife Swap. Cigna, Aetna, United Health own the news. They and their guns-for-hire lobbyists underwrite just about every pseudo-news show. Call it "News Swap." (Theirs for the real stuff.)
And right now, with their House Republican pals they're planning to stop a health care bill by spending the next three weeks arguing over a phony-facts study that claims that the Democrats' measure will be a bad deal for small businesses, senior citizens, and women and children,"
At least the empty balloon that the Heene's floated was harmless. The anti-health care lobby is taking us all for a ride. Where is the sheriff when you need him? And where are the felony charges?
29 Comments so far
Show AllThere has been no real healthcare "debate" as much as many claim.....
There was never going to be any real "reform" which would address the structural problems in the current system allowimg all to get it.
This entire "debate" was a fraud from the start. The fix was in as early as March of 2009 led by Rahm Emanuel and his awful brother, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel.
"...Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama, is under scrutiny. As a bioethicist, he has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is part of a school of thought that redefines a physician’s duty, insisting that it includes working for the greater good of society instead of focusing only on a patient’s needs. Many physicians find that view dangerous, and most Americans are likely to agree....The health bills being pushed through Congress put important decisions in the hands of presidential appointees like Dr. Emanuel. They will decide what insurance plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have, and what seniors get under Medicare. Dr. Emanuel, brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research. He clearly will play a role guiding the White House's health initiative...."
"In the June 18, 2008, issue of JAMA, Dr. Emanuel blames the Hippocratic Oath for the "overuse" of medical care: "Medical school education and post graduate education emphasize thoroughness," he writes. "This culture is further reinforced by a unique understanding of professional obligations, specifically the Hippocratic Oath's admonition to 'use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment' as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of cost or effect on others."...Dr. Emanuel concedes that his plan appears to discriminate against older people, but he explains: "Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination. . . . Treating 65 year olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not....""
Rush is called racist and a liar for saying what you posted.
I don't care for Rush Limbaugh nor listen to his show....
I do not dismiss everything anyone says either.....I have an open mind....As a radical liberal, I am not fond of Obama's proposed healthcare bill short of single payer and the public option. I not a fan of Ezekiel or Rahm Emanuel either.
I do not know how anyone would be called a "racist" from what I posted though either.
Rush has said some very racist and sexist things in the past as well, I must add.
Since I do not listen to Rush, I have no idea what he says on his robotic radio show.
Contemporary Politics Law
Any consecutive attempt to clean up the consequences of one-sided legislation is doomed from the start, because no legislation is accidental and its future must be preserved at all costs. In case like health care, the mechanism to stop the reform was developed long time before the challenge actually came. When political candidates announce their agendas, it triggers the market forces hard work to make sure the challenge is disarmed.
In case of Cromwell Finances called Fed, the challenge isn't started even here, and the South America club of 9 don't have a clue how to integrate the population with the newly created currency and is building another bureaucracy turning elite down the road .
edweg
We shall never see honest government until we bury Corporate Personhood.
Laura Flanders ,i like your catch phase "wealth care" thats what we are being sold.Wealth care for billionaires.Mandated insurance for all,doesn't mean we will all have affordable holistic health care any time soon.That is certainly the real fraud,not the consciosness raising theatre of the Yes Men or a publicity stunt to pilot a Reality T.V. show with a balloon. peace
What would Flanders know about a hoax since she gets all of her information off the corporate owned news networks?
The real story about health care is that Obama and the Democrats control the Presidency, the Senate, and Congress, yet cannot pass a bill with a Public Option in it. Remember Single Payer? SP was taken off the table for a Public Option. Now appears all but dead because the Dems and Obama are more interested in capitulating to their corporate paymasters and Republican brethren. Flanders won't touch an authentic story with a black pole in her hands.
I like Laura Flanders quite a bit and don't share your view she is "pro-corporate news."
Wealth Care Reform...That's about right. Soon the Wealth care companies will be getting billions more of our tax dollars for their inflated crappy policies. That's about as good as DC is going to do for all of us. Force us and our kids to buy garbage at inflated prices or be fined. Some reform.
Some reform indeed, all the discussion to date has been about the financial aspects of our sickness care system, and nothing about the types of care offered.
We have a 60% majority with more wealth then they need or deserve, and the bottleneck is their desire for wars to continue that protect our plundering Empire USA, and their opposition to those most intelligent and wealthy having to pay for healthcare to those least intelligent and impoverished.
John,change "60%" to 10% ,"intelligent" to privileged ,and I would agree with your comment. peace
20% super intelligent super rich + 30% intelligent middleclass = 50%
10% of those laboring class are also self-absorbed, so total is 60%
Laboring class: the 50% of society without 12 years of formal education
It's amazing how the MSM stopped dead in its daily dribble to follow the "breaking story" of the floating balloon. What a joke. Where, I ask, is the same urgency by the MSM when there are real children dying everyday all across this wealthy nation because of lack of healthcare? Where is Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC? Where is the real serious coverage of stories that really do count and affect real citizens?
The "real serious coverage" is mostly in long-form print media.
Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, and ABC engage in little -- if any -- original reporting. To consider them part of the "news" media is ludicrous. They pander. They label a balloon hoax "breaking news." They are in the entertainment business with a daily soap opera of so-called "reality" programming that serves only to divert people from the real issues.
Shut them off! They are not to be taken seriously.
The Republicans will stop at nothing to block health care reform. I hope the Democrats will step on it and fight back. I thought I left the Republican Party not to enter another one some call Republican lite.
I want to like Laura Flanders, but she and the "majority" of faithful democrats, are living in the past.
Please wake up.
The "democratic" party long ago offered up the poor, working class, middle class, and almost upper class as a sacrifice to the god of WashingtonWallStreet - Capitalist Greed.
The fact that Obama immediately threw overboard the idea of single payer should have told us we were on a slave ship and whatever we were told about our destination was a LIE.
The democrats and the republicans merely take turns using the whip.
PLEASE. wake up.
Wake up and do what? Do you honestly think that Americans in large numbers are asleep? That they don't care? That they don't know they are getting shafted? Then you are not paying attention. They feel helpless and unrepresented. And all that the progressives seem to offer them is “I told you so” and calls for revolution supported by the argument that the system doesn’t work. Guess what genius, they know it better than you do.
So what then? What advice do we have? Create a third party that fulfills OUR aims? And how soon will such an entity rise to power and reform health care? And how many will have to die in the meantime? Or are they “others” that we, as usual, just accept as collateral damage in our “great march forward”? Most importantly, what are people smoking who think there will be just a third party? There will be dozens. And many of them will be Fascist.
The only defensible argument for a two party system is that it forces compromise. It pulls many views into two big tents who fight it out with large equally compromised electorates behind them. The Democrats and Republicans are all the same? Really? And whose faulty is that? Television's. Rupert Murdoch's? Bullshit. The media is a whore it will do anything for a rating. Just like politicians. If you don't support the system and participate in it actively, you are the cause. And if you give up on it just because it doesn't work instantly, you are worse than that, you are a spoiled American consumer. So now Obama and The Democrats are defective products we want to send back to the manufacturer? Too bad we ARE the manufacturer.
If we are really concerned about the number of dead mounting up while our government diddles with health reform, or the chock-full body bags coming out of the Middle East while the strategic geniuses in Washington ponder and wander trying to rewrite reality, or the NEVER mentioned invisible thousands, who die in poverty’s black hole of drugs and despair … maybe we should do what Alan Grayson did: Get out there and call it like it is. Organize. Demonstrate. Vote the bums out (every f’in one of them) and put newer, better, more visionary Democrats in. Better still be another Alan Grayson. Put your mouth where the money is. Run for office.
It always amused me that people bitch about the corruption in the Democratic Party and say we should take over the government when it is so much easier and more efficient to take over the Democratic Party!
Impossible you say? Then you are part of the problem.
It’s much easier to do that than to bring down the system, or for that matter to bitch on line while your fellow Americans DIE.
No offense. But really ...
I had the same thought about the ease of manipulation of the lap dog media by the ballon boy's family. However I believe Ms. Flanders falls short in her comparative analysis to the health care sham.
In my take on the situation, the majority of the Democrats -- including the President -- and all of the Republicans are staging a Potemkin contest, "fighting" over "public option" which is at best a million dollar program to dole out pennies to poor people who will then take the blame for the screwed up profit health insurance system.
The only real health care reform is HR676. It's some 30 pages long and it's "Everbody in, nobody out, no questions asked." Obama's fraud is more than a thousand pages long, incomprehensible (the way insurance companies like it), bails out and subsidizes the insurance, pharma and hospital industrial system while shafting patients, doctors and nurses.
No country needs health insurance, but everybody needs health care. We Americans are having the wrong damn discussion--we're chasing balloons inflated on false hope.
We would be doing ourselves a favor if we discussed instead how to retrain insurance agents, executives, underwriters, adjusters and lobbyists so they could begin doing useful work. Perhaps Mr. Obama could create a program in which undocumented workers could train insurance leeches how to serve tables, pick avocados, sweep streets, garden and wipe other people's babies' asses.
I agree with your comments in paragraphs 3 and 4.
Most of those in Congress are well-to-do capitalists,
and as capitalism is the unregulated freedom to compete
for excessive wealth, do not expect any change in our
butcher medical industry except greater profits.
Humbaba (10/19 7:30pm) is correct--Where did we put that darn amendment limiting political rights of corporate entities?
But the real hoax is refusing to talk about how to lower costs. Single payer will not save any money except insurance company profits and that will be more than eaten up by those newly insured. The AMA, FDA and Big Pharma must be dealt with first.
You will always have rationing. This is something the American public has not addressed and does not want to. The comments about Dr. Emanuel are disturbing. I'm a big supporter of not prolonging life and I believe physicians should consider these things and discuss them with their patients but this is a private decision. The last thing anyone should want is bureaucrats making these decisions.
No, first we must get Single Payer, mercy driven Medicare charity for all. Then with all money for healthcare coming from government, surely public pressure will force AMA, FDA and Big Pharma to end their corruption.
Yes insurance companies now ration healthcare. But once everyone realizes that over 90% of illness is caused by the average American diet being 50% fat, and after the government takes the proper corrective actions, then illness would drop by over 80% and no need would there be for rationing.
No, our worst hope of getting the truth on prolonging life is physicians, as virtually all retire millionares. And surely to trust anyone is darkness, as we all are greedy and love darkness.
Bureaucrats paid by government, bureaucrats that we can keep an eye on, they are the best hope for honesty in healthcare.
HEALTH CARE REFORM ---- NO WAY
Empire USA is ruled by the multinational rich, they have given up on
America and have shipped most of our wealth overseas, they have
destroyed our unions and we now are powerless.
So the three main reasons we will never get decent healthcare are:
(1) Keeping the people fearful, anxiety driven and insecure is the only
way a capitalist government can achieve submission to authority.
This is what our terrorizing healthcare system is all about.
(2) Capitalist medicine has double the excessive profit of any other
industry in America. Such excessive wealth has never been regulated
and most of those in Congress being well to do capitalists, it never shall.
(3) Danger of a good example. Surely the only way to end the harm in
profit driven capitalist medicine is to move it toward mercy driven government
medicine, such as Medicare charity. And the domino effect of this would be
a social democracy, total equality and the end of excessive wealth capitalism.
"At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without universal health insurance. . . Certain interests which think they would be adversely affected by health insurance have made the specious plea that it is an un-American interference with liberty."
The Progressive (magazine), January 1917
The "boy in the balloon" is the public option. The pharmaceutical industry knows that if it howls about a public option that can only be used by those who are not provided health insurance by an employer, they will never have to deal with single payer. Let's not forget that insurance companies must like the fact that under this "reform," millions of Americans will be forced by the government to buy their product. Of course, if they can weaken the reform even further, they will be even happier.
But lets not use the fact that insurance companies want and even more reactionary reform plan to obscure the fact that this plan is harmful to the people and helpful to the insurance companies. Disagreeing with Rush Limbaugh does not make you right, and I'm tired of the public option being defended simply because "those mean Republicans are hurting 'our' poor plan." (That was meant to sound childish). Seriously, we should stop playing a game that is rigged so that the people never win, the game that is electoral politics in this country.
The problem is us, not the US. We seem to be calling for health care 'reform'. Reform can mean anything. Sometimes words count. Reform - NO. Single Payer - YES.
'Reform' is just a word being used to sanitize the bills designed to enrich the insurance companies.
WARNING - size matters. Any health bill that is as long as those currently under discussion will have a lot of hidden loopholes that will prevent the system from being fair and effective. The government's role should be limited to the financing. All other decisions should be made by the patient and doctor. We need a short and sweet, simple bill - less than 10 pages in length. If the 10 Commandments can be written on an index card, a health care bill can be written on fewer than 10 pages.
PaulWM
Wake-up America! Your healthcare system is the worst in the developed world, but you don't seem to realise it!
In Australia we have both public and private healthcare, AND the health care insurers (if you need them to go private) are NOT FOR PROFIT organisations.
Our system, works exceptionally well and insures that EVERYONE gets looked after. NO-ONE in Australia goes bankrupt from ill health.
From a healthcare perspective the US is in the dark ages. Don't be fooled by billionaire capitalists, they ALWAYS have their own self-interest at heart. You need a proper PUBLIC healthcare system.
When all of government, and the entire economic structure, is geared in favor of the swindlers, pirates, usurers, and snake oil salesmen, hey, Whatchgonado?