AnotherVoice

Waxahachie, Texas, March 29, 2005 -- Believing what I was raised to hold sacred, that every voice counts, I've bombarded my local paper for years with letters and op-eds (and been active in politics). Yet here in the heart of everyone's favorite "red state," where it's especially important that another voice be heard, no one seemed to be listening. This is my megaphone.

Monday, October 22, 2007

Beat the Drum Slowly

True to his promise, President Bush vetoed the bipartisan State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) legislation sent to his desk last week, and even though I guess I expected it, I was still shocked, SHOCKED that it had come to this. And furious, too, because I just didn’t understand how the cadre of Republicans who voted against extending the program could do that, if it was true, as widely reported, that over 70% of the American people supported the bill.

Locally speaking, I’ve had a hard time squaring Congressman Joe Barton’s opposition to expanding the program since, according to an April report in the Houston Chronicle, “Texas has the highest rate of uninsured children in the nation."

It seemed to me that, if so many citizens wanted SCHIP expanded, then the offices of the 6th Congressional District, which includes Ellis County, should have been flooded with calls and emails and faxes and regular old letters; and you’d think that knowing that his constituents cared about the issue would have persuaded the congressman to respond to the people’s wishes.

Of course, it’s possible that most folks in the 6th District did NOT want the program expanded, in which case Joe did the right thing. That must be the case, because I just can’t believe his loyalty would be to President Bush rather than to his constituents!

Then another possibility occurred to me: Could it be that the public didn’t know the facts?

Look, I admit to being a news junkie, one of those people who live and breathe current events, and I’m lucky that my work from home makes it easy for me to keep informed. So let me pass on just a few items that you may not know:

Item: Our own Joe Barton was the Republican Floor Leader for the opposition to the SCHIP bill; it was his job to lead the fight against the bill, to keep fellow congressmen from defecting to the support side, and presumably to make life difficult for those who chose to support it.

Item: The President vetoed the bill, claiming, among other things, that expanding the Bill to bring the number of children covered to 10 million from the present 6 million, would (a) cost too much, (b) lead inevitably to “socialized medicine,” and (c) make it possible for “adults making $83,000 a year” to be covered. Item (a) is a judgment call (think Iraq); (b) and (c) are simply not true, and I challenge any reader to offer irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

The funding the President said he would agree to not only did not provide for expansion but would actually cause children to be dropped off the program. Again, I’m not going to bother you with details here, as I have written about them before, but I challenge any reader to prove me wrong.

Item: The legislation expanding SCHIP passed the Senate by more than enough votes to override the presidential veto; the House vote, 273 to 156, was just 13 votes shy of where it needed to be. Thanks, Joe.

Item: The supporters of the legislation were aided by a family whose 12-year-old son was a beneficiary of SCHIP. Standing before the microphones, the child spoke in public to urge Congress to expand the program so that other children would benefit as he had.

Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old, had been critically injured, as was his younger sister, in an automobile accident, and SCHIP stepped in when the family resources ran out. He was in intensive care, in a coma, and in rehab for months. He still has partial paralysis.

The attacks began almost immediately, and thanks to emails from the office of Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Minority Leader, news outlets were contacted and told that the Frosts were very wealthy, that their home was in a neighborhood of half-million-dollar homes, that the two children were in an expensive private school, that they were well able to buy their own insurance, and so on and on. One blogger went so far as to publish the Frosts’ home address.

The truth is that the Frosts’ combined income was less than $45,000 a year; they had paid $55,000 for their home back when the neighborhood was run down; the only insurance available to them before the accident was $1200 a month, not an amount a family with four children could have paid, and none was available after; the children were in private school on scholarships. After the facts came out, Sen. McConnell confirmed their truth, but the damage was done.

Item: After the Frost incident, one of Joe Barton’s websites published a page using The Simpsons characters for graphic effect, entitled “Children’s Health Fact of the Day.” The page, officially a Press Release for the “House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans, Joe Barton, Ranking Member,” ridicules the idea of a child speaking out for SCHIP.

“Quimby here says he knows a bunch of low-income nobodies who are ripe for the picking.” After which “a restive crowd of backdrop-toddlers who’d been rented by MoveOn for the photo-op” were run out of town by hounds: “The 37 rental children fled and were not seen again, but the arf-arf-arfing of their pursuers could be heard well past sunset.”

Thanks, Joe.

Well, I’m sorry to keep on beating this drum, but I just wanted to make sure that people who might not have the time or opportunity to be news junkies got the whole, sordid story.

The good news is, the program has been extended until mid-November so there is time to make this right. Joe Barton’s number in Washington is 202-225-2002.

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Monday, October 08, 2007

The War

Today I want to talk about the war. Now, first let me say I am referring to The War. The Second World War. Folks of a certain age know what I’m talking about, and it’s not about Iraq. Not exactly.

For those of us who remember it, The War will always be World War II. But now there are too many who, through no fault of their own, missed out on a really important chunk of American history.

All these thoughts came to mind thanks to Ken Burns’s incredible documentary just recently shown on PBS.

I was riveted. And felt oddly proud of the way ordinary people mustered every ounce of support for the war effort, many of the familiar details recalling my own childhood experiences.

There were the songs, of course: “Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor” and the song of the Army Air Corps; I remember a song about “Collecting Tin to Win the War,” though I’ve never met anyone else who does, and I still remember the tunes if not the words to “This is the Army, Mr. Jones,” “Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer,” and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.”

The boys at school made drawings of fighter planes all during class, the favorite being Flying Tigers, and there were school yard arguments, naturally: “Who’s the best, the Army, Navy or Marines?”

We had a victory garden and raised chickens, sat in front of the radio to listen intently to news I didn’t completely understand, and Mom and group of her friends met at our house to roll bandages.

We lived just outside Washington, D.C. which may be why there were frequent air raid drills in school (I honestly thought that “they” covered our school in plain brown paper to hide it, though I couldn’t figure out how) and blackouts at night; neighbors in Civilian Defense helmets patrolled the darkened streets and scared a little girl just about to death with a flashlight beam in the face as she peeked out the window.

Oh, yes, the war was very much with us.

There were ration stamps to preserve supplies of sugar, grains, coffee, meat and butter, so as to be able to feed our troops, not to mention gasoline, tires, and shoes (the family Packard went up on blocks in the garage pretty much for the duration as the rubber went to war).

Each Saturday morning meant a trip to the post office to pick up the mail and buy a war stamp for 10 cents; if you filled up a book with $18 or so worth of stamps you could trade it in for a $25 war bond, but just buying that stamp felt important. War Bonds, or Victory Bonds, were everywhere because everyone promoted them, from the local newspapers and movie theaters to politicians and movie stars.

Everyone bought into the war effort, everyone had a stake in it, everyone’s life was affected by the war, and most of all the homes with service flags in the window.

There was a draft, too, and the irony was that a young man who was not in the service often became somewhat of a social outcast, even if he had volunteered and was turned down. Almost every able-bodied young man was called up. Uniformed young men were everywhere, including in our home when uncles came to visit.

I knew what the draft meant and remember each Saturday examining the family mail in dread, lest one envelope might contain a draft notice. (It turned out that the letters from the State Department were not to worry about, since my father worked for them, and anyway he was too old to be called up.)

My childish understanding of what was going on was limited, but I knew there were bad guys and bombs and dogfights in the air, and people dying in places I’d never heard of. Every show at the movie theater was preceded by a newsreel and it was pretty much all about the war.

There was a POW camp somewhere nearby, apparently, because from time to time a contingent of POWs would be seen in our small town, working on some kind of construction project. We pointed and stared, but didn’t really understand what we were seeing.

It was all war, all the time, everywhere; it limited us and it defined us, individually and as a community.

These memories came back as I watched The War last week. Well, they didn’t really come back because they are always present or just about so; these experiences were formative, I guess you could say, at least for me. I’d be interested to hear from others on that.

But some parts of the documentary were new to me, even after years of learning more about it; they were stories that hadn’t been told before, that have been learned only recently, as aging veterans have finally, according to Ken Burns, begun to talk about what they’d been through.

And there are many, many lessons for today.

I am really sorry that inevitably some folks didn’t see the series, especially from the beginning. The good news is that some installments are still scheduled to be repeated, beginning this Wednesday evening on KERA, and that there’s a web site that provides a decent glimpse.

One way or the other, sooner rather than later, The War should be seen by every American who worries and waits as our amazing and dedicated troops struggle to sort out the mess in Afghanistan and Iraq, for there are lessons in it.

It should be mandatory viewing for those Americans still out at the shopping mall.

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Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Can Anyone Give Me An Answer?

OK, it’s time for me to come right out and ask a useful question here:

As you know, I’ve spent some ink in this space in support of the States Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) presently apparently headed for Presidential veto. And a host of Washington politicians have suggested that expanding that program would be the absolute end of everything we hold dear, or words to that effect.

Senator John Cornyn (R – TX) last week stood up in front of Congress and made such outrageous statements that a couple of his fellow Republicans saw fit to chastise and correct him, right there in front of everyone.

Congressman Joe Barton (R – Arlington TX) has made it clear over and over again that he’s opposed to SCHIP. I won’t go into his interesting claims, having done so in the past. (I hear ‘n tell he wasn’t too happy with that, but I also note he didn’t write to correct me.)

They both insist that expanding SCHIP would send us down the slippery slope to “government-run” health care or, worse, “socialized medicine.”

Well, given that at least they both seem to agree that there are lots of totally innocent children who are without health insurance (this is true, even though President Bush famously suggested a few weeks back that everyone has access to medical care because they can go to the emergency room), let’s just dissect that frog and see if we can understand what, exactly, is wrong with universal health care.

I defy any opponent of universal health care to answer honestly WITHOUT resting their argument on certain phrases, such as “government-run” or “socialized medicine”; if they feel they just can’t live without them, I demand that we agree on definitions. Global warming is only made worse by the red-button rhetoric of the Washington folks.

Remember, my goal here is to get an answer to the question.

Let’s just take a look at a couple of examples of government-run medical services.
Start with Medicare. Anyone out there want to give it up?

Here’s who I think might be willing to do that: A retired corporate executive whose benefits include lifetime medical coverage, for whom Medicare is only a nuisance that he doesn’t really need; with both Medicare and private coverage, he’s in the catbird seat.

You could say that about airline pilots and union members, except that you can’t because their former employers are forever going bankrupt or cutting their benefit packages in order to cut costs. So it’s not likely these folks will give up Medicare benefits because they might need them!

The Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. Senator Cornyn and Congressman Barton would likely be quite willing to give up Medicare, because they will retire with the excellent health insurance available to federal employees, said to be even better than Medicare. Like Medicare, it’s a government run program.

Both FEHBP and Medicare provide universal health care to their populations: Medicare to seniors, the federal employees’ insurance plan to former and present federal employees, in each case with the government picking up about 75% of the premium and the insured picking up the rest.

Now, how about the Veterans Health Administration? Here’s what Phillip Longman, author of Best Care Anywhere, wrote:
And who do you suppose is the highest ranking health care system? Johns Hopkins? Mayo Clinic? Massachusetts General? Nope. In every single category, the veterans health care system outperforms the highest-rated non-VHA hospitals.

And here’s what Ezra Klein, writing for American Prospect, said:
What makes this such an explosive story is that the VHA is a truly socialized medical system. The unquestioned leader in American health care is a government agency that employs 198,000 federal workers from five different unions, and nonetheless maintains short wait times and high consumer satisfaction.

Anyone got a problem with the Veteran’s Health Administration?

So, you can see that the term “socialized medicine,” which simply means “the providers are government employees,” is SUCH a bugaboo!

So, if we do away with the terms “socialized medicine” and “government-run health care,” as I’ve shown they don’t describe something to be afraid of, what are we left with?

Oh, SCHIP opponents are also worried about the cost, they say. This is a red herring. Leaving children uninsured drives them to emergency rooms, as acknowledged by our President, where their care drives up the costs for the rest of us or, worse, leaves them without care, so their strep infection can go untreated and infect the whole class and from there their families, and from there their parents’ co-workers, all with lots of folks missing work because they are sick. NOW you can start counting the costs.

But you know what? You don’t make decisions about children’s health based on the cost. Do you?

And what about the assertion that some States would allow coverage to children of families with incomes up to three or four times the poverty level, causing some “rich” families to sign up instead of keeping their existing insurance. The poverty level is $20,650 for a family of four; you can do the math and see if the answer you get is “rich.”

Our own Senator Cornyn told a fib when he said incomes as high as $82,000 a year could qualify (he was talking about New York’s application to the Bush administration for a waiver to allow that increase, and it was denied) thus allowing some people who don’t need it to drop their private insurance and join up.

But consider the cost of living in New York, and then the cost of private health insurance, and do the numbers again.

You know what? I think a few “rich” kids (define “rich” — have you looked at the cost of living in New York?) getting coverage, so that over 4 million uninsured children can, it’s not a bad tradeoff!

So, it’s not the cost, “socialized medicine” is not always bad, and “government-run health care” can work pretty well. So, what?

Would someone please offer a convincing, fact-filled argument against SCHIP – or, for that matter, universal health care for all Americans?

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