From the New York Times:

Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House

By CARL HULSE and ROBERT PEAR

[Excerpt]

Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement.

After a daylong clash with Republicans over what has been a Democratic goal for decades, lawmakers voted 220 to 215 to approve a plan that would cost $1.1 trillion over 10 years. Democrats said the legislation would provide overdue relief to Americans struggling to buy or hold on to health insurance.

“This is our moment to revolutionize health care in this country,” said Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and one of the chief architects of the bill.

One can hardly argue that the country needs some health care reform.  First among the reforms needed is medical malpractice reform.  The bill includes a provision to allow states to “experiment” with tort reform, but prohibits caps on awards.

I’ve never been a fan of government run health care though I’ve always believed in the necessity of the government health care programs that have existed here: Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration’s hospitals, and the military health care system.  Although these programs are necessary for their respective constituents, they are bloated bureaucratic nightmares, inefficient, expensive, and with the exception of the military hospitals and clinics – riddled with fraud and abuse.

The government does a poor job with the programs it already administers, now they are trying to created yet another to serve even more.  Our law makers are not good at seeing the unintended consequences of their edicts, and the Health Care Reform bill is chock full of potential future unintended consequences.

Will the premiums my husband and I each pay go up because their is now a codified minimum percentage employers must pay?

From the Wall Street Journal [excerpts]:

What the Pelosi Health-Care Bill Really Says

Sec. 412 (p. 272) says that employers must provide a “qualified plan” for their employees and pay 72.5% of the cost, and a smaller share of family coverage, or incur an 8% payroll tax. Small businesses, with payrolls from $500,000 to $750,000, are fined less.

Currently, our separate plans are split at roughly 90/10%, where we pay the 10%, give or take a few percentage points.  Our plans are from two different employers [my husband's under his retirement benefits package from the City of Charleston and mine from my employer].  Interestingly, both of our plans are “self-funded.”

Will the cost saving “self-funded” plans become untenable under the new bill?

Another snippet from the Wall Street Journal article:

Sec. 303 (pp. 167-168) makes it clear that, although the “qualified plan” is not yet designed, it will be of the “one size fits all” variety. The bill claims to offer choice—basic, enhanced and premium levels—but the benefits are the same. Only the co-pays and deductibles differ. You will have to enroll in the same plan, whether the government is paying for it or you and your employer are footing the bill.

A snippet from Bloomberg.com’s House Passes $1 Trillion U.S. Health-Care Legislation [Kristin Jensen and James Rowley]:

The bill would make large businesses that self-insure their employees pay $2 billion in fees over the next decade. And it adopts a Senate proposal to set a $2,500 limit beginning in 2011 on contributions to tax-advantaged Flexible Spending Accounts used to pay out-of-pocket medical costs. [Emphasis added]

I have a lot of questions and an equal number of concerns about the H.R. 3962 but I admit I’ve not yet read the bill.  For those who would like a bit of self-abuse this Sunday morning OpenCongress.org offers access in a user friendly format.

I comfort myself with the knowledge that the Health Care Reform act still has to go to the Senate where it will go through changes and voted on.  There is still a good chance that this will all go down in flames.  Many bills pass the House of Representatives that do not pass the Senate.  Of course, I said that very thing about the Stimulus package of earlier this year and much to my horror it passed the Senate with relative ease.

We would all do well to recall Winston Churchill’s words…

“True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.”

There is a lot of hype, misinformation, shrill rhetoric, uninformed elation coming from just about every outlet, few of which are free from one form of self interest or another.  A 2,000 page bill affords a great deal of space to bury truly worrisome things.  The size of the bill also affords an opportunity to “stretch the truth” about what is in there and what is not… who’s going to actually read those 2,000 pages to fact check an item?

If you read something alarming do not automatically assume it is correct, or mostly correct after “interpretation”, make the attempt to confirm the information.  We are empowered by the internet in this “Information Age” and this issue is worth being informed on because the “potentials” – good and bad – are many.

A thoughtful write up of the Law of Unintended consequences  can be found at The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

Unintended Consequences

by Rob Norton

[snip - the last paragraph]

One final sobering example is the case of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. Afterward, many coastal states enacted laws placing unlimited liability on tanker operators. As a result, the Royal Dutch/Shell group, one of the world’s biggest oil companies, began hiring independent ships to deliver oil to the United States instead of using its own forty-six-tanker fleet. Oil specialists fretted that other reputable shippers would flee as well rather than face such unquantifiable risk, leaving the field to fly-by-night tanker operators with leaky ships and iffy insurance. Thus, the probability of spills probably increased and the likelihood of collecting damages probably decreased as a consequence of the new laws. [Emphasis added]

… 2,000 pages … <groan> ……

NSFW: After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth

by Paul Carr on November 7, 2009 [Excerpt]

I’d probably feel slightly smug, if I didn’t feel so sick.

Smug that after two weeks of me suggesting that social media might not be an unequivocally Good Thing in terms of privacy and human decency, the news has delivered the perfect example to support my view.

Unfortunately it’s hard to feel smug – hard to feel anything but sadness and nausea – when thirteen innocent people are dead.

I’m talking, of course, about Thursday’s Fort Hood shootings. Better informed and more sensitive commentators than I have written about the massacre itself and what it means for the US army, and in particular for the thousands of Muslim soldiers currently fighting – and dying – for this country. How do you even begin to process the idea of an American soldier shouting the takbir, before mowing down his comrades in arms? On American soil? At the home base of the Combat Warrior Stress Reset program? Yes, that’s definitely one for the experts to parse.

And yet, the first news and analysis out of the base didn’t come from the experts. Nor did it come from the 24-hour news media, or even from dedicated military blogs – but rather from the Twitter account of one Tearah Moore, a soldier from Linden, Michigan who is based at Fort Hood, having recently returned from Iraq.

[SZ: Please follow link to continue this important piece from Paul Carr.  Yes, even if you are someone who rarely "clicks through" - it's THAT important.]

Social media is an evolving technology that we are adopting at a staggering pace.  In many ways it opens the world to us and connects us with people we would not otherwise ever come to know, or contribute to our personal growth, even if it is only in some small measure.

Social media can keep us informed.  It can entertain us.  It can expand our personal horizons and potentials.

It can also be terribly destructive, harmful, and hurtful.  I say that as someone who loves social media, as someone who considers herself a “citizen journalist” [via PandemicChronicle.com].

Another snippet from Paul Carr:

And that’s precisely the problem: none of us think we’re being selfish or egotistic when we tweet something, or post a video on YouTube or check-in using someone’s address on Foursquare. It’s just what we do now, no matter whether we’re heading out for dinner or witnessing a massacre on an Army base. Like Lord of the Flies, or the Stanford Prison Experiment, as long as we’re all losing our perspective at the same time – which, as a generation growing up with social media we are – then we don’t realise that our humanity is leaking away until its too late.

The Stanford Prison Experiment he mentions and links to is also worth the time to read.  I read it afresh, along with Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil because of my pandemic advocacy [of all things].  Carr’s reference was anything but casual or capricious.

So go read already….

I am a stealth hardcore SciFi fan, something not exactly common for my demographic.  Even given my already gleeful anticipation, the political junkie in me began to salivate when I read this piece from the Chicago Tribune:

[Excerpt]

Imagine this. At a time of political turmoil, a charismatic, telegenic new leader arrives virtually out of nowhere. He offers a message of hope and reconciliation based on compromise and promises to marshal technology for a better future that will include universal health care.

The news media swoons in admiration — one simpering anchorman even shouts at a reporter who asks a tough question: “Why don’t you show some respect?!” The public is likewise smitten, except for a few nut cases who circulate batty rumors on the Internet about the leader’s origins and intentions. The leader, undismayed, offers assurances that are soothing, if also just a tiny bit condescending: “Embracing change is never easy.”

So, does that sound like anyone you know? Oh, wait — did I mention the leader is secretly a totalitarian space lizard who’s come here to eat us?

Please do hop on over and read the entire article, regardless of your political “flavor” it offers some great insight, both into the show – and into our political hearts.

A funny thing  though, in that sadly pathetic kind of way, is that there are people who really do believe the earth is infiltrated by “Reptilian aliens”,  that they walk among us and are the puppeteers of the “power elite” of the world.

The show inspired a bit of personal discomfort when I realized that I would probably be one of the many who are hoodwinked in our fictitious television drama.  I do believe that somewhere out there in the vastness of the universe other intelligent life exists.  I believe that life, or some of it anyway, is vastly more advanced than we. And, I hope that they will one day introduce themselves to us – to our benefit.

A hope not unlike that of many religious folk who hope that the God of their understanding will come forth and set the world aright, right as judged by their beliefs that is.  I don’t want aliens to come to earth and set us straight, to right all our wrongs, etc.  I just think it would be cool in the extreme to know we are not alone and that there is hope that we will evolve past the “let’s kill each other” phase.  Highly advanced, beneficent aliens would be affirmation that is possible, even if only remotely so.

A few years ago I asked myself if my wish for confirmation on advanced alien life [of the good kind] was, perhaps, inspired by my suspicions that human beings are genetically incapable of not bringing about our own mass extinction.  My answer to myself: Probably.  The history of the last few years has done nothing but reinforce that belief.  It went from a vague suspicion to a rather well entrenched belief.

As such, as I said, I would no doubt be among the “adoring clueless”.  But, I said the same thing to my husband the first time we watched Independence Day.  I’d be like that exotic dancer that made a sign and went to a gathering at the top of a tall building to welcome the aliens — then the aliens vaporized the building just as the dancer realized the foolishness of her naivete.

But back to V.  When things are tough and unpleasant we want someone to swoop in and make them all better.  Who can argue that things are pretty tough and unpleasant for an awful lot of people?  That alone was a large part of Obama’s mass appeal. Young, charismatic, attractive, he promised to sweep away all the old detritus and cut away all the dead tissue so healthy tissue [a healthy society, a "fair" society] could grow in its place.  I won’t get into the stuff about all the broken promises and incompetence, as those are topics for another post.  But, not only has he failed to make things better — he has made them worse, or empowered others to make things worse.  Like humanity is scheduled to find out in V – the beneficent problem solvers are really here to eat us.  You can’t get much worse than that.

Below is the pilot episode, embedded from Hulu.com just in case you haven’t seen it yet and are unfamiliar with how to navigate Hulu.  By the way, Hulu is a wonderful thing indeed.  I get to watch the other ABC show I’ve become hooked on this season, FlashForward.  Both of these new shows have a lot to say about human psychology in the best traditions of fictional drama, and they’re entertaining to boot.

My mind screams for order, even in random happenstance, demands to understand.  I’m sure there are smart people  who understand what brings a person to the sort of indiscriminate violence Hasan unleashed, but I am not one of them.

I’m sure there are other smart people whose job it is to come to understand the “why” of it.  Fortunately, that’s not my job.  I don’t really even want to understand, or attempt to arrive at understanding.

What I do want to understand is how the military missed the danger Hasan was.  The military is all about “being a round peg in a round hole“.  Conformity.  Conformity is the one argument used by the military to bulwark their stance against homosexuals serving.

Homosexuals are a supposed danger because of what they might do to occupy their private time and private relationships.  This danger is viewed to be so great it earned a military person a dismissal from said military [until very recently when President Obama announced his intent to stop the "Don't ask - don't tell" policy].  If a person is suspected of homosexuality investigations are mounted and hearings held.  It is deemed a very serious thing, this “private matter” of sexual orientation is.

Barring homosexuals from service in the military has never made sense to me.  It is a private matter.  In fairness to the military, they also have regulations against extramarital affairs and one can be court martialed  for such.

The military has never been shy about its “interest” in the private lives of those who serve our country.  Right, wrong, or indifferent — the military sees nothing “private” in the lives of active duty military personnel.  Nothing.  Every second of every day is the “military’s business”.

Yet, I find myself asking: did Hasan remain “unmolested” by investigations and hearings because of another “private matter”, his religion?  Political correctness has reached its poison tendrils into the very bastions of political incorrectness that is our military.  It is the height of political incorrectness to even think that a practicing Muslim could also hate his or her country and act counter to her best interests.  After all, everyone knows that Islam is a religion of peace and love.

Islam may be a religion of peace and love, but there are factions of the Islamic faith that are decidedly anything but.  Each of the “Three Biggies” of religious faith, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, have their radical sects.  Factions so outside the mainstream that they are a general embarrassment and public relations nightmare to the overwhelming majority of the adherents of the umbrella faith [Christianity, Islam, or Judaism].  And some beliefs are just not compatible with service in the U.S. military, no matter how politically incorrect that may be.

Unlike a sexual act that occurs during “off duty time”, behind the privacy of four walls, and among consenting adults, a belief that murder and mass murder are justified – even demanded – acts in the service of that belief, demands scrutiny, demands excising from the ranks of our military.

A mass murderer walked among us.  A mass murderer worked with and along side men and women, many of them barely into legal adulthood, who took their oath seriously, unlike Hasan.

The oath Hasan swore to [the commissioned officer's oath]:

I, ____________, do solemnly swear, or affirm, that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

The oath states “…I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation…”, “… I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.” “So help me God.”  Powerful words.  Unambiguous.  A sacred vow.

Hasan’s commanding officers failed to uphold their solemn oath, perhaps not willfully, but failed just the same.

Congress and the President failed to uphold their oaths as well, they need to empower the military to ferret out those in uniform who hold radical beliefs, ferret them out with all the cold precision employed to ferret out homosexuals.  Innocent and non threatening as sexual orientation is in reality aside, we at least know the military is capable if there is a policy and will to do so.

It is tragic enough when this nation loses a brave son or daughter in uniform to enemy fire or tragic accident in the performance of their duty, it is inexcusable to lose them to religious zealotry coexisting among them.  Religious zealotry known to espouse violence and murder, even violence and murder of random innocents.

My sincere sympathies to all of those suffering the loss of a loved one or someone held in the “gentle fondness” of colleague or friend.  My thoughts are with those still struggling with the injuries they sustained at the hands [and weapons] of Hasan, my thoughts are with the worried families of the injured.

Nothing anyone can do now will bring the fallen back to us. Nothing we can do now can undo the injuries of the wounded, those will have to wait for time and medicine to heal as best it can.  What we can do is do everything within our power and ability to prevent an incident like this from repeating in the future.  We can — and must — LEARN from the errors that laid the foundations for the Ft. Hood massacre.

To do less would not only be an insult to the victims of the Ft. Hood massacre, it would be a willful failure to uphold the oath sworn to by each officer of the military, our federal elected officials, up to and including the President of the United States.; a willful act of dereliction of duty.

Rid our military ranks of religious radical zealots and all those who view the United States as the enemy and the problem.

Republicans Are Poised for Gains in Key Elections .

[Excerpt]

WASHINGTON — Republicans appear positioned for strong results in three hard-fought elections Tuesday. But isolated, off-year contests aren’t always reliable indicators of what will happen in the wider federal and state races held in even-numbered years.

Then there’s this from the New York Times:

In Iowa, Second Thoughts on Obama

[excerpt]

WILLIAMSBURG, Iowa — Pauline McAreavy voted for President Obama. From the moment she first saw him two years ago, she was smitten by his speeches and sold on his promise of change. She switched parties to support him in the Iowa caucuses, donated money and opened her home to a pair of young campaign workers.

But by the time she received a fund-raising letter last month from the Democratic National Committee, a sense of disappointment had set in. She returned the solicitation with a handwritten note, saying, “Until I see some progress and he lives up to his promises in Iowa, we will not give one penny.”

“I’m afraid I wasn’t realistic,” Ms. McAreavy, 76, a retired school nurse, said on a recent morning on the deck of her home here in east-central Iowa.

“I really thought there would be immediate change,” she said. “Sometimes the Republicans are just as bad as Democrats. But it’s politics as usual, and that’s what I voted against.”

Promise the world and people expect actual results.  Not fudged results.  Not a lack of results.  Not backsliding.  Real actions that produce real results.

However, just because there were people who thought that by electing Mr. Obama to the office of President of the United States would cure all the world’s evils and make their personal troubles and struggles magically vanish into thin air, doesn’t mean that we should be unduly harsh of President Obama’s failure to produce on those unrealistic expectations.  One man, not even the President of the United States can do everything that needs to be done.  It takes everyone else to effect change.

We can draw our inspiration and leadership from the President, but the President is extremely limited in what he can do personally.  Said another way: He can’t be the only one rowing in the boat that is the United States.

I have disagreed with most of President Obama’s initiatives and agenda, some of them “energetically”.  But, I disagreed with a lot of the initiatives and agendas of every previous President as well.  It’s not a “party thing”.  And just as I’ve said previously elsewhere on the internet, our President may be “the most powerful man on earth”, but he is only one man and cannot do everything alone.  He [or that future "she"] is not Constitutionally vested with the authority to do everything.

“The most powerful man on earth” has very little sole authority or power to change things on his [or her] own.  It takes a lot of people rowing the boat to get where the majority want it to go.  And who can argue that we find ourselves in very turbulent waters?

President Obama could do more in the way of leadership — and could do less golfing while he’s at it.

Snip from Boston Herald’s Obama Watch

The presidency is a tough job, what with two wars, a health-care crisis, a swine flu pandemic, and a recession. What better way to work out the stress of being president than with a littlegolf ? Well, the Big O set a dubious mark last week when he passed Dubya on the links. According to CBS’s Mark Knoller, the unofficial chronicler of all things Obama, the president has played 24 rounds ofgolf – it took vacation-happy George W. Bush 2 years and 9 months to reach 24 rounds.

It’s a shame really, you would think that the person who chose to run the office of President of the United States would have realized that being a leader, what the President is supposed to be, takes actual leadership.  He may need others to row the boat, but he is supposed to be the Captain standing in bow giving direction — and let’s not forget that all important inspiration to keep us rowing.

Remember to cast your vote today if there is an election in your voting district.  Our vote is our “voice” and election day is the day we get to use it most effectively.  Unless, that is, you happen to be a celebrity or large financial donor.