Let's Hear It For Some Anti-Party Unity

"Well-played, Bernie," simpers Michelle Cottle of the New York Times today as she ever so "gently and gratefully" shoves Sanders into the memory hole that she and her cohort were so feverishly digging for him and for America for the better part of the last year.

Joe Biden is so great and such a savior that even the coronavirus couldn't keep legions of his fans away from the latest batch of Democratic primaries. 

Yes - Michelle Cottle really does come right out and gush that tens or hundreds of thousands of voters unnecessarily exposing themselves to infection is so well worth it so long as it achieves "party unity" and the removal of Donald Trump from office this November.

Cottle further insinuates that the pandemic will only get worse the longer that Sanders "reassesses" his campaign. His supporters must socially distance themselves, pronto, before he kills her. And then Joe Biden will give all of us an avuncular hug... or grope... or if we're really lucky, a long lingering hair-sniff.

 This primary began with a sprawling, at times overwhelming, field of candidates. Campaigns rose and fell and rose again as Democrats agonized over which contender had the best shot at defeating President Trump — their absolute top priority. Once actual voting began, the race quickly boiled down to two clear and competing visions: one of electrifying revolution and one of reassuring restoration.As is often the case in presidential politics, things could have broken a different way based on a thousand different factors. (Just ask Hillary Clinton about that.) But whatever hope Mr. Sanders had of wooing more people into his camp effectively died with the arrival of an apolitical black swan in the form of a pandemic.

When Biden won South Carolina and Barack Obama put his discreet thumb on the magical scales to effect a veritable party convention of centrists to nominate Uncle Joe, the pandemic was still only a blip on the media radar. Those were still the days when Russia was the only existential threat, newly encapsulated by Democratic propagandists in the person of Bernie Sanders. 

That the pandemic has had little to nothing to do with Bernie's defeat is beside the point when it becomes a talking point.

But in order to cover their own asses, all that Michelle Cottle and all the folks at the Times, the Post, and MSDNC have to do is pivot from red-baiting to disease-baiting Bernie Sanders. At the same time, they pretend that Biden's wins actually mean something.

Cottle cynically and cloyingly absolves the media of all blame for Bernie's losses , ridiculously claiming that he can't go on TV as much to make his case because the pandemic is interfering with all the positive coverage he allegedly would have gotten after their coverage of Amy Klobuchar's fifth place victory over Bernie's first place showing in Nevada. Or was it New Hampshire?

The thundering hooves of the mainstream media's horserace coverage are like the pitter-patter of tiny raindrops compared to the pandemic. The election has faded in importance in the space of a nanosecond, but still they persist in obsessively fact-checking Donald Trump, as though his lies were more deadly than the lethal virus.

Who cares about Biden or any of them when the lack of toilet paper is second only to the daily overriding fear of the premature deaths of ourselves and our loved ones?

The corporate media, even as they boast of reporting from the quarantined confines of their luxury basement bunkers, certainly seem to care. They have been too well-programmed with the official petty narratives to abandon them just because of a pesky old plague.

"On Tuesday night, the cable news shows kept interrupting their analyses of the primary results for virus updates," Michelle Cottle disingenuously marvels in her own alleged analysis of the death of Bernie's "brand."

My published response to her clueless condescension:

And well-played, New York Times, for the relentless campaign of red-baiting and fear-mongering and marketing of the sexist "Bernie Bro" trope that helped to give us Joe Biden.

Bernie or no Bernie, the revolution from neoliberal predatory capitalism to social democracy is already underway, courtesy of the coronavirus pandemic. Shrill cries from centrists of "but how you gonna pay for that?" are already turning into distant memories.

  The cry for "party unity" is also sounding more grotesque by the minute, given that what we really need is human unity on a scale not seen since who knows when. Biden's latest victories are pyrrhic ones, especially in light of the Democrats refusing to cancel Tuesday's primaries and willfully herding vulnerable older people in large crowds into polling places. Since Biden's victory was all but guaranteed anyway by superdelegates regardless of the once-feared Sanders plurality, the continuing marketing of illusory participatory democracy is both stupid and cruel 

History, if we do have a history, will remember Bernie as a kind man who stuck to his principles and simultaneously and tragically lacked the necessary cutthroat political skills to call out Biden's right-wing career until it was far too late. That is my main beef with Bernie. He put comity over taking the gloves off on behalf of his millions of supporters.

  Lesson learned. Revolution never comes from within a presidential campaign or from elected officials.

On that note, the enforced isolation of the pandemic has not had the desired or expected effect of people crying on their couches as they hope against hope for Biden Party Unity as the panacea against both disease and against Trump.

New York's Upstate-Downstate Housing Alliance, to which I have belonged for the past year, just succeeded in enforcing a statewide moratorium on evictions. That's not good enough, though, so we are now clamoring for a moratorium on all mortgage, rent and utility payments for the duration of the catastrophe. Looming rent strikes and other boycotts of capitalism are what's scaring both sorry sides of our political duopoly into issuing stimulus checks for every American. It's not because they love us. They're perfectly OK if we die, but they're also desperate to win elections and hold on to power.

They will soon get the message that their one or two thousand bucks aren't going to cut it.

I see us going the way of Britain, for hundreds of years one of the most class-based and imperialistic countries on the planet, answering  its physical, emotional and economic post-World War II trauma with the National Health Service.

The unicorns and puppies once so derided by neoliberal naysayers and corporate shills are already dancing in the detritus of this horrific viral pandemic. Medicare For All is coming for those of us lucky enough to survive the last gasp of neoliberlal capitalism.

Bernie-Bashing Backlash Bonanza

To say that Elizabeth Warren's accusation of sexism against Bernie Sanders doesn't pass the smell test is the understatement of the year. Even total nostril blockage would not quench the stench of her allegation that he told her at a private dinner that a woman could never win the presidency. What he likely said was that Donald Trump would act like the sexist pig that he is toward any woman candidate.

Likely, given that Bernie has always stood up for women and Elizabeth does have this disturbing history of, ahem, exaggerating stuff, bending the truth, or even making things up.

What really reeks is the desperation in Warren's faltering campaign. It joins in lockstep stinkiness with the desperation of the oligarch-controlled media borg. Right on the eve of the last "debate" prior to the Iowa caucuses, CNN chose to run an anonymously-sourced story about the private dinner setting of his alleged remark, a conversation which Warren initially vowed would remain private, thus only adding to the intrigue. After several hours, she issued a statement confirming the unconfirmed CNN hit job, which was broadcast with glee by the New York Times and the whole crew of usual media suspects.

The themes of sexism and the threat to "party unity" will no doubt be the dramatic manufactured focal points of the "debate." The game show emcees ("moderators") will keep both their nostrils and their ears carefully stuffed with cotton balls as they corral the candidates into the desired tag team whose goal is to stamp Bernie into the ground. Never having had to develop the ability to actually think on the job, their careerist journalistic brains were themselves replaced by wads of cotton stuffing quite a while ago. Their minds have the handy dual function of absorbing the ooze of the plutocratic agenda while at the same time acting as protective barriers against any outside democratic contamination.

Poor Joe Biden will probably not join in the bashing with any great gusto, given his own history of sexism combined with that nasty hair-sniffing habit that the media has long since forgotten in its zeal to protect him from the Ukrainegate-based Trumpian slime machine.

Hopefully Sanders is primed and ready for the buckets of slime that are only beginning to be hurled his way. Hopefully he won't preface his defense with "Elizabeth is a good friend of mine, and she can absolutely win this thing!" 

Because judging from the backlash against Warren, the ears, noses, throats and brains of his base of supporters are absolutely clear and cottonball-free. #RefundWarren, a Twitter campaign demanding that she return donations from her small-dollar supporters, is taking off like a blast of turbo-charged nasal spray. (Notwithstanding the concern-trolling mainstream media package warnings to progressives about about the dangerous pro-Trump "rebound effects" of their righteous indignation)

Stay tuned. The ratings for the contrived slug-fest gleefully marketed by the New York Times as "Mom and Dad Are Fighting!" promise to be better than initially expected.

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New York Times columnist and MSNBC personality Michelle Goldberg cloyingly advises liberals to move past the contrived Bernie/Liz battle, which originally started with Warren's accusation that he was "attacking her" via campaign workers pointing to the fact that she has well-heeled support. Goldberg sniffs that this stuff is too silly to even talk about -  before she then proceeds to spend her whole column talking about it. Her essay is essentially a thinly disguised call for Bernie to quit the race because, apparently, Warren is the only candidate who can provide that all-important "party unity"  that the Democratic establishment is so concerned about.

Midway through her piece, she casually mentions that since her husband advises the Warren campaign, she was really, really hesitant about even writing her column endorsing Warren. But needs must, when "party unity" trumps relief for the sick, the jobless, the underpaid, the desperate.

It's still all about the upper middle class pathological grief over Hillary Clinton's defeat:

Attacking another candidates’ supporters rather than her record is kind of obnoxious, but as far as political combat goes, it was pretty mild. The reason it caused a small uproar is that in much of the Democratic Party, there’s tremendous resentment of Sanders left over from 2016. Many believe he weakened Hillary Clinton by dragging out the primary — at one point even threatening acontested convention — and then only halfheartedly rallying his fans behind her when it was over. Warren alluded to this anger in a fund-raising email keyed to the Politico article that said, “We can’t afford to repeat the factionalism of the 2016 primary.”

"Many believe" is the same kind of unsourced weasel-wording smear tactic as the all-purpose "some say."

My published response to Goldberg:

How does the Sanders campaign pointing out Warren's poll-verified voting demographic amount to "attacking" her?

If this little kerfuffle is such a little kerfuffle, by amplifying it Michelle Goldberg only adds to the manufactured hysteria, and just in time for the latest episode of the Gong Show, I mean the "debate." If Warren thinks Bernie is "trashing her" simply by pointing out differences in their bases then I hate to think of a President Warren's epic meltdowns when the Republicans start trashing her for real every two minutes.

  By playing the faux-feminist victim card here, she actually disempowers other female politicians. Worse still, she is playing the crumpled Hillary card. Remember how well that pitiful ploy worked out to achieve "party unity" once upon a time? Bernie campaigned for her as soon as she was nominated. Then he was blamed for not having the magical Svengali touch to entice his supporters to actually vote for her.

The long-awaited smear campaign against Bernie has begun in earnest. The only surprising thing is that Warren has chosen to be an integral part of it.

==============================

 Goldberg's colleague Paul Krugman seemingly wrote his own anti-Bernie column before the manufactured kerfuffle over trashing and sexism broke out. Because all his does is drag out the same old narrative about Medicare For All being the terrible thing that's destroying party unity. If you want to overcome "Trump's Plot Against Health Care," then you'd better shut up and vote for somebody who will fight to the death for the restrictive, junky, predatory insurance policy that you might be lucky enough to still actually possess. In the meanwhile, don't get upset about not having guaranteed coverage. Be upset because Trump lied about protecting your pre-existing conditions!

Krugman sounds the dire warning:

Make no mistake: Health care will be on the ballot this November. But not in the way ardent progressives imagine.Democrats running for president have spent a lot of time debating so-called Medicare for all, with some supporters of Bernie Sanders claiming that any politician who doesn’t demand immediate implementation of single-payer health care is a corporate tool, or something. But the reality is that whatever its merits, universal, government-provided health insurance isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

My published retort:

 The only pre-existing condition Trump saved is that of the top 0.1% owning as much wealth as the bottom 90%.

That grotesque reality is precisely why Medicare For All is such a "tough sell." The oligarchs own our political duopoly as well as corporate media conglomerate. They spread the fear and the misinformation that make people feel nervous about losing their precarious, expensive coverage to a more equitable program covering everybody from cradle to grave with no premiums, deductibles, networks, co-pays or surprise bills from private equity vultures.

  One of the leading questions in polls is "do you know that Medicare For All would make your private coverage disappear?" -- the implication being that there looms a coverage gap of epic proportions.

 Paul Krugman does his own "there is no alternative" part by labeling those of us who demand what exists in every other advanced nation "ardent progressives" who just cannot understand that single payer is impossible even with a Democratic majority. That statement says more about the pundits and politicians in thrall to the oligarchs than it does about the "ardent progressives."

In other words, if we don't adhere to the status quo of 84.2 million of our fellow citizens staying uninsured or underinsured, Trump will up the killing ante even more.

 It's like telling the people of Flint they're better off with the toxic water they already have, what with the uncertainty and the fear that new lead-free pipes might cause.

Harking back to the sexism theme now in vogue, I got a chuckle from a simile-averse mansplaining retort from "Michael" of The Bronx. Here's what the "woke" gender-conscious New York Times, which claims that it moderates every single reader comment, saw fit to publish right below my own comment:

@Karen Garcia: A couple of your statements in your letter reveals a tendency to hysteria, with a zeal that makes you prone to believe false narratives and propaganda. First you say that Krugman's incremental (and realistic) approach "says more about the pundits...", and then you mention the Flint toxic water situation. I suggest that you investigate more thoroughly the lead levels in Flint to the lead levels in other communities and nationally, and the history of the problem. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones would be a good resource.

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Epilogue:

Dreadicare For All Elites Who Don't Want It

Second only to the astroturfed impeachment marches threatening to spread like chemical wildfire in the well-off parts of Blue America is the overwhelming anxiety over ascendant candidate Elizabeth Warren.

Members of the neoliberal pundit class are gnashing their collective teeth about Warren's imminent unveiling of her detailed Medicare For All/Some/Who Knows Plan. Will she or won't she advocate for a true single payer program like the one introduced by Bernie Sanders?

The conventional wisdom among the corporate wing of the Democratic Party is that if she does, she's toast. And if she's toast, then Trump wins another term. So be afraid. Be very afraid, all you One Percenters who know full well that your scare tactics are bullshit, given that most Democratic and independent voters,  and even a sizable percentage of Republicans from Trump's own base, favor Medicare For All. It's only when the pollsters and the gaslighting pundits put the fear of losing their employer-based coverage and the prospect of the Great Unknown into their heads that many respondents will then say "well... maybe on second thought I'm not as gung-ho as I thought I was."

This instillation of fear and doubt is, of course, the gist of the grand plan to kill M4A before it ever gets a fact-based hearing. Tax-averse multimillionaire moderators of the so-called Democratic debates always preface their questions with the specter of middle class tax increases, giving left-leaning candidates thirty seconds to respond before the buzzer goes off and the moderators invite a low-ranking corporate centrist to chime in with the industry-approved rebuttal.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a big fan of Warren's based upon their mutual exalted wonkishness, is very worried that she won't be able to keep up her evasive bullshit on M4A very much longer.

Like many policy wonks, I’ll be waiting with bated breath; this could be a make or break moment for her campaign, and possibly for the 2020 election.

Phony talking point #1: all this reckless M4A rhetoric will hand the election right to Trump. 

Single payer has a lot to recommend it.... but we're not starting from scratch... More than half of Americans are covered by private health insurance, mainly through employers.

Industry-approved talking point #2: In theory and on paper, we love, love, love Single Payer. But the people we really need to care about right now are the vulnerable well-paid professionals in our base, whom for propaganda purposes only, we shall now squeamishly dump in with the teeming masses of low-paid workers forced to fork over a chunk of their paychecks for the company insurance plan, which is usually inefficient and limited at best, and pure exploitative junk at worst.

 Most people probably would end up better off under single-payer, but convincing them of that would be a hard sell; polls show much less support for Medicare for all than for a “public option” plan in which people could retain private insurance if they chose to.

Misleading Talking Point #3: It's not that we wonks are against single payer in principal. It's that the Deplorables are so gosh-darn stupid. And we wonks simply don't have either the time or the inclination to try to educate these rubes on all the money they'd save under M4A. Besides, our target audience is restricted to our fellow wonks and to the already well-insured upper middle class readership who can afford a subscription to the New York Times. 

Which brings me to the third point: In reality, single-payer won’t happen any time soon. Even if Democrats win in a landslide in 2020, taking control of the Senate as well as the White House, it’s very unlikely that they will have the votes to eliminate private insurance.Warren, who has made policy seriousness a key part of her political persona — “Warren has a plan for that” — surely knows all of this. And early this year she seemed to recognize the problems with a purist single-payer approach, saying that she was open to different paths toward universal coverage.
Since then, however, she seems to have gone all in for the elimination of private insurance.

Annoying Talking Point #4: People who want to have a healthy life and not die or go bankrupt if they get sick are "purists" who belong to some weird kind of Bernie Bro Cult. They're making impossible, annoying demands on the Elite Class... which has no such worries, thank you veddy much. Now get lost, you bunch of sickos! Because "our side" winning back power is more important than you are.

The plan in the works will presumably try to dispel that fog, but doing so will be tricky. An independent estimate from the Urban Institute (which is, for what it’s worth, left-leaning) suggests that a highly comprehensive Medicare-for-all plan, similar to what Sanders is proposing, would substantially increase overall health spending, although a more modest plan wouldn’t.

Krugman creates some fog of his own by failing to mention that the Urban Institute is funded by such M4A-averse corporations as private health insurer CIGNA and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. So you should probably take their scary cost estimates with a huge hunk of LSD-laced salt.

Chairing the Urban Institute's Board of plutocrats is Jamie Gorelick, who is also kept busy acting as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's personal lawyer. She defended them, among other grifty things, against nepotism accusations when they first joined the Trump administration. Jared's brother also has a vested interest in killing M4A because he happens to own his own multibillion-dollar health insurance company founded right after the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

 Other directors of the Urban Institute are N. Gregory Mankiw, who led George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers and who infamously advocated privatizing Social Security and cutting benefits; former Obama "Catfood" Commissioner and billionaire austerian Erskine Bowles; Diana Farrell, CEO of the JP Morgan Chase Institute; and Facebook executive Marne L. Levine.

So if Krugman is actually calling the Urban Institute "left-leaning" with a crew like that calling the shots, then the Democratic Party has moved even farther right than I thought.

No wonder he's rhetorically wringing his hands over "capitalist to my bones" Elizabeth Warren's mild threat to the ruling class. If she doesn't watch out and mind her wonkish Ps and Qs and "escape the Medicare trap," she might very well turn into Susan Sarandon or heaven forbid, even a dreaded "unwitting Russian asset."

My published New York Times response:

The real question is whether the estimated 87 million people who are uninsured or underinsured can escape premature death, life-long disability through negligence of their medical conditions, or bankruptcy - with the subsequent inability to get a job, rent an apartment or take out a car loan.

 Elizabeth Warren will do what she has to do. So will the congress critters in thrall to the insurance and hospital and pharmaceutical lobbies. So along with taking to the streets to demand the impeachment of Donald Trump, we're also going to need to take to the streets to demand what in every other advanced country on earth is a basic human right. Sure, M4A would cost a bundle and it has to be paid for. But it would cost a heckuva lot less than what we're currently paying to predatory insurance companies, for criminally overpriced drugs, and for obscenely padded hospital bills.

 If people are anxious about losing their employment-based coverage, it's largely because both politicians and pundits don't hammer home the essential fact that any increases in taxes will be at most half of what they now pay for premiums, co-pays and deductibles. Furthermore, employment based coverage is getting more precarious, with employers reducing or discontinuing coverage due to higher costs. Think of the bargaining power that workers will get if their bosses no longer can claim that their health benefits are a huge chunk of their salaries. Sounds like a plan to me. It also sounds extremely humane.

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Thanks to all the readers who donated so generously to my fall fund drive. If you didn't get a chance to contribute yet, my PayPal door (upper right corner) is always open. Or, you can contact me at kmgarcia2000@yahoo.com. If you like reading my stuff but can't afford to donate, please don't worry about it and please keep reading! Times are tough for most people.

Health Care Head Fakes

As I guessed that it would a week ago, President Trump's threat to kill Obamacare via some reactionary judges went nowhere fast. It was a diversionary tactic designed to make us forget about the still-secret Mueller report, of which he no doubt has gotten an exclusive sneak peak. Though exonerating Trump of plotting an electoral conspiracy with Russia, it is reportedly none too flattering to him.

Trump's bluster was bound to be short-lived, because the Republican senate majority doesn't want to risk trashing the Affordable Care Act so close to the 2020 election. In their heart of hearts, they love this plan, massive giveaway to the private insurance industry that it is. Moreover, Trump's own in-laws have their own huge stake in the grift, with the crown jewel of the Kushner brothers' financial empire being a multi-billion dollar online insurance company which depends on the ACA to survive.

Of course, the biggest beneficiary of Trump's short-lived health care head fake was the Democratic Party, which pounced on his threat as a means to raise campaign money while defending Obamacare in lieu of introducing Medicare For All legislation in the lower House. As a matter of fact, Speaker Nancy Pelosi's health care henchman, Wendell Primus had personally reassured insurance industry executives right after the November midterms that their capitalistic system would be living long and prospering under Pelosi's watch.

The secret meeting, originally reported by The Intercept in February, got renewed attention this week with some new reporting in Politico. Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Pramila Jayapal, chief author one of the single payer bills (HR 1384) confronted Primus directly over his undemocratic subterfuge.

This confrontation came only one day after Trump abruptly reversed course on his Obamacare offensive. His latest head fake has left Pelosi and her minions suddenly deprived of the fear-based rationale for keeping the neoliberal "there is no alternative" ACA alive. They find themselves forced to feebly deny the reports that they are actively trying to kill the universal care legislation supported by at least 70% of the electorate, including Republican voters. However, neither she nor Primus apologized for meeting secretly with insurance industry lobbyists in the first place.

Right before Trump inconveniently nixed his threat and left the Democratic leadership scrambling, the New York Times' Paul Krugman penned an exquisitely timed column about the latest nasty Republican plan to yank health care away from tens of millions of people. Being a victim of Trump's chronic head fakes is a terrible thing. This is despite the fact that Krugman dutifully inserts the latest tally of Trump's lies right at the beginning of his piece. As of Monday, at about the same time Trump was changing his mind via Twitter, he had lied a grand total of 4,682 times! He also happened to conduct his head fake reversal on April Fools Day.

Krugman writes:

Republicans just keep telling the same lies, over and over. Again and again they have promised to maintain coverage and protect pre-existing conditions — then offered plans that would cause tens of millions to lose health insurance, with the worst impact on those already suffering from health problems.....
ut Republicans cannot admit that the only way to protect pre-existing conditions is to emulate Democratic policies. The party of Eisenhower, or even the party of Nixon, might have been able to do such a thing, but the party of Fox News cannot.
Nor, however, do Republicans dare admit that they have no interest in providing protection that a vast majority of voters demands. So they just keep lying.

In other words, Krugman hews steadfastly to the corporate Democrat plan, sold to a scared public during the latest Trump Threat Week,  to merely protect coverage for pre-existing conditions as well as increasing federal subsidies for private insurers --  including, but by no means limited to, the very same Kushner family that liberal corporatists only pretend to hate.

My published response to Krugman:

How often do Republicans lie? How much do they despise everyone except rich people, preferably male and white? Let us tally up the totals and feel alternately angry and smug. Because hey, at least the Dems will fight for our inalienable right to pay hefty premiums to insurance companies and force them to cover the pre-existing conditions of some of us! After all, they're protecting a GOP plan, which leaves the GOP nowhere else to go but off the Social Darwinist cliff.

If we keep shooting stinking GOP fish in a barrel, maybe we can take the uninsured and underinsureds' minds off the fact that the US is the only civilized country lacking universal health coverage, and that the life expectancy of US citizens has dropped for a third straight year.

Anything to avoid informing people that contrary to centrist propaganda, any extra taxes they'd have to pay for Medicare For All would be far, far less than the premiums, co-pays, deductibles and other out of pocket medical expenses they now pay to our cutthroat market-based system.

 And that includes the cost of an ever-increasing number of premature burials.

Put another way, although 23 million people would lose coverage if the ACA is killed, another 29 million desperate people currently lack any coverage at all. But somehow, these have-nots aren't mentioned when pundits warn us not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Instead, we're told to feel guilty about the great national tragedy of jobless insurance adjusters.

*****

Here's more excellent input from Dr. Adam Gaffney of Physicians for a National Health Plan:

Neoliberal Bioethics: Just Die Already

 Ezekiel Emanuel, health policy adviser in the Obama administration, lists his current credentials as oncologist, bioethicist, and vice provost of the University of Pennsylvania.

His idea of ethics is writing a propaganda piece in The Atlantic which insinuates that Bernie Sanders's Medicare For All ("messy care") proposal is politically impossible, because Americans are like battered women trapped in a toxic relationship. Citing the results of recent push-style polling which conclude that the 70 percent of respondents who initially claim to be in favor of single payer health care suddenly change their minds when (falsely) told they'll lose benefits under a government-run system, Emanuel says the real enemies of single payer health care are not Republican think tanks and politicians, but the US citizenry. 

As much as Americans hate insurance companies in general, they want the right to have a love-hate relationship with their own insurer. During the battle over the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama promised, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” When a handful of Americans lost their plans, the backlash was tremendous—even when the cancellations had nothing to do with the new law. The polling data today are clear: When Americans are told they might have to give up their current insurer, fewer than 40 percent support Medicare for all. That’s nowhere near enough to override the entrenched interests in health care.

Emanuel is so ethical that he doesn't stop at simply debunking the vicious Republican propaganda about socialized totalitarian medicine and death panels. He sets up a brand new straw man with which to gaslight his audience and attack Medicare For All. If we get sick and die because we are uninsured, he explains, it'll be our own damn fault for getting obliquely lied to by push-pollsters. We cannot blame our poor beleaguered congress critters for failing to pass a true universal guaranteed health care payment system. We can only blame ourselves and our neighbors who listen to nasty right-wing talking points and watch insurance industry-sponsored Harry and Louise-type TV commercials.

Needless to say, Emanuel's bioethics do not include informing people that true single payer is not only simple, but that coverage would be guaranteed and that private insurance would not only be rendered superfluous but people would end up with more money in their pockets by not paying premiums, co-pays and deductibles and their employers would save money and hopefully pass the savings on to their workers in the form of better pension plans as well as higher wages. He doesn't explain that the taxes to be collected would be much lower than the premiums charged by the insurance industry.

But to give him credit where it's due, Emanuel does nonchalantly and ethically inform readers toward the end of his piece that

Between Bernie Sanders and a buy-in are two more practical and politically appealing plans. One is Medicare for America, a proposal drafted by the Center for American Progress. (Full disclosure: I helped design it. I’ve also received speaking fees from groups representing insurers, hospitals, doctors, and employers.)

That little snippet is so inconsequential that he puts it in parentheses so you get the message that his grifting activities have nothing at all to do with his true concern for his gaslit audience.

Just as, if not more, important as guaranteed universal coverage from cradle to grave, Emanuel thus concludes, are the guaranteed and continuous windfall profits for the predatory and admittedly abusive-at-times private insurance industry. One way to improve and expand upon Obamacare would be to implement Medicare Advantage For All, and allow private companies to impose their narrow restrictive networks and suck up even more exorbitant profits from the myriad services which would be deliberately excluded from coverage under any new government plan. Medicare drug coverage plans already are privately run, and the prices of many drugs therefore would still be kept artificially high under the plan Emanuel helped design.

Although named Medicare Extra For All, not everyone will pay the same premiums, which will be based on income. Subscribers would still have to fork over co-pays and deductibles, again based on income, with discounts offered if services are rendered at a "center of excellence."

And all this would be available gradually, over a period of eight (!) years. 

It's a lot more convoluted than true single payer. There's a lot more space for watering down and tinkering by lobbyists.

The whole point is to keep cut-throat competition as the health care marketplace's driving force, and to keep treating health care as a privilege or lottery and not as a basic human right. Capitalism is so slick and smooth and well-groomed compared to "messy care for all" as envisioned by messy old Bernie. Giving people immediate relief and peace of mind simply does not meet the requirement of "efficiency" -- code for keep it unnecessarily complicated, and maybe it'll all just go away.

Emanuel's plan, with no apparent sense of irony, also adds reams of paperwork and whole new layers of bureaucracy to the already messed-up system, and thus is almost guaranteed to garner complaints, with much justification. He explains to the bewildered:  

There are also good policy rationales to preserve a role for private insurers. While progressives often claim these companies do nothing for the health-care system but add paperwork and extract profits, this view is anything but universal. Medicare Advantage plans offered by private insurers currently enroll about a third of seniors and are the fastest-growing part of Medicare. The evidence—only 2 percent switch back to regular Medicare— suggests that seniors like these plans and, by implication, the private insurers that offer them. In addition, having multiple payers adds competition, which can improve performance and prevent the government’s health plan from ossifying.

The fact that even old people stay in abusive relationships does not mean that victims love their abusers. It means that they're afraid of their abusers. It's human nature to be afraid of change. They're afraid that if they stop giving in to blackmail and extortion and protection rackets, they'll be left with nothing at all. They might even die.

Emanuel does not explain this, or attempt to set the record straight or soothe any manufactured fears. He does not ethically explain what he even means by the dreaded "ossification" of a government-run single payer health system. I suppose he wants to impart the notion that Medicare For All isn't sexy enough. Our lives are not precarious enough. We need constant intrigue and excitement. Why be bored and complacent knowing that the good old stodgy reliable government will always be there to promptly pay for our medical care, when we can enjoy seductive and dangerously titillating trysts with Cigna or Aetna or Blue Cross-Blue Shield?

Never knowing when or even if they'll show up is half the fun. What's your phone for, after all, but to spend countless hours trying to locate an insurance company adjuster and beg them to reverse a claim denial? It's as emotionally appealing as trying to track down a cheating or inattentive or missing spouse or partner.

And what an aphrodisiac it is when they finally do deign to talk to you or show up and make up for your bruises with a bouquet of flowers (or a surprise partial reimbursement check.) Abusive relationships are to die for.

Ezekiel Emanuel hasn't been this persuasive about the joy of pain since 2014, when he wrote in The Atlantic that since he doesn't want to live past the age of 75, neither should selfish old you -- Medicare Advantage plan or not. 

I wrote a critique of that slimy bit of neoliberal propaganda, cross-published in Truthout, which up to then had been regularly running my pieces. "Medicare, Dr. Mengele and You" apparently was not, I heard from a reliable source, well-received from on high, because the liberal site suddenly dropped me like a hot potato. An ossified, unpaid hot potato. 

Granted, my critique of Zeke was fairly brutal. An excerpt:

If Ezekiel Emanuel, M.D. can’t live forever in a young body, then neither should you. If Ezekiel Emanuel’s attack of male menopause freaked him out, then you should freak out too. If Ezekiel Emanuel fears a decline, then the rest of the aging population should just quietly disappear, even before they get sick or senile.
Ezekiel Emanuel has decided that if he can’t function like a rich jerk forever, he would just as soon die before he reaches 75. Therefore, nobody else should live past 75 either. Once you stop being entertaining or remunerative, you should just check the hell out.

Sad to say that judging from his most recent "Messy Care" narrative, Emanuel is as ossified in his tomb of a capitalistic belief system as ever. The continuing neoliberal message is that if you can't learn to survive within an abusive, cutthroat market-based health care system and cannot appreciate all the Advantages accruing thereto because you have no money and no clout, then you might as well just die already. 

Emanuel is really, really bad at bioethical gaslighting. If there was such a thing as journalistic malpractice, he'd be sued. His shameless propaganda should make us more determined than ever to keep agitating for single payer health coverage for everybody.

The War Against Single Payer Intensifies

A recent poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation reveals that guaranteed single payer health coverage for every American is as popular than ever.

But much to its discredit, this respected foundation also used some pretty slimy "Harry and Louise"-style push-poll tactics in its survey in a seeming effort to tamp down the enthusiasm and give ammunition to opponents of Medicare For All.

 What if, the respondents were passive-aggressively asked, "they heard" that universal guaranteed insurance would lead to delays in diagnosis and treatment, and even to rationed care? Would they still want Medicare For All then?

 And what do you know: the enthusiasm for single payer suddenly dropped by a whopping 44 percentage points!

So, the inherent message is clear. People desirous of a nonprofit health care system enjoyed by every other civilized country in the world are not only befuddled, they are stubbornly set in their ways. It is not in the Kaiser pollsters' job description to inform their targets that alleged delays in treatment are simply right-wing talking points beneficial only to health care market privateers, and have little to no basis in fact.

The oft-repeated claims by Republicans of deadly, life-threatening waiting times in Canada, for example, are completely false. It's true that Canadians do have to wait longer than Americans for such elective surgeries as knee replacements and cataract removals. Even so, they have the option of paying out of pocket to a private provider if they so desire. Canadians in need of immediate care get immediate care. And on average, they live three years longer than Americans.

  The malign objective of the single payer naysayers in the Oligarchic States of America is to send the message, either directly or indirectly, that Medicare For All "might be" dangerous to your health. Better to stick with the reliable economy-busting, budget-crushing predatory arrangement that we already have. It sucks for sure, but at least it's better than a world full of known unknowns and unknown knowns. 

Anti-single payer pundits and politicians, meanwhile, are pouncing on Kaiser's manipulated poll results with barely contained glee. David Leonhardt of the New York Times even goes so far as to declare in his headline that Medicare For All is a "trap" for Democratic presidential contenders. They'd better be careful, or Trump might win.

It does not occur to Leonhardt to actually critique the negative push-polling inserted by Kaiser in its survey, using false information and scare tactics that are identical to those employed by such conservative, profit-driven think tanks and media outlets as the Heritage Foundation, CNBC, and the Wall Street Journal. He simply repeats the propaganda, essentially warning candidates like Kamala Harris to be careful what they promise to fickle, stupid people who simply don't understand complicated stuff: 

Some 56 percent of respondents said they favored “a national plan called Medicare for All in which all Americans would get their insurance through a single government plan.” A large majority of Democrats backed the idea. Almost a quarter of Republicans did, too.
The poll’s details, however, were a lot of less positive about Medicare for All. In fact, they showed why single-payer health care may turn out to be one of the few problematic issues for Democrats heading into 2020 — if the party isn’t careful. Harris has highlighted the tensions this week, saying on Monday night that she supported the most aggressive version of Medicare for All before moderating her position, via aides, late yesterday.

It also does not seem to occur to Leonhardt that candidates who pander to voters on Medicare For All, only to cravenly walk back their support within hours via campaign flacks, as Kamala Harris did, are more apt to lose votes based upon their own shallowness and hypocrisy rather than on sincere, consistent advocacy for programs for the greater good.

Who knew that people finally getting peace of mind, no longer having to worry about going bankrupt or losing their home or dying prematurely because they can't afford treatment when they get sick or hurt, would be so "tense" and even worse, "problematic?"

To paraphrase Cindy Adams: Only in America, kiddo. Only in America.

Medicare For All Meets Kafka

*Updated below.

Although 70 percent of Americans now favor Medicare For All, the Knowledge Class is warning us to hold our horses for at least another couple of decades, by which time many of the uninsured and underinsured will be prematurely and conveniently dead. If climate change doesn't get us, untreated disease and despair should do the job in the efficient manner so beloved of the neoliberal thought collective.

That's because Medicare For All doesn't really mean Medicare For All. None of the various and sundry Democratic (read: Gentry Party) proposals has the aim of providing immediate relief to the tens of millions of people who lack coverage. On the contrary. There is no sense of crisis in any of them. With perhaps one exception, the proposals are incremental at best and purely profit-driven at worst. Even Bernie Sanders is only proposing an initial Medicare buy-in beginning at age 55. This is negotiating from a position of apologetic weakness, with the ultimate victory possibly being a compromise of getting Medicare by aged 60 rather than from birth.

Rather than honestly admitting this to the 70 percent, or 200 million (and counting) people who want government sponsored single payer health insurance, not a few of the politicians and corporate-funded think tanks claiming to favor Medicare For All are actually adamantly opposed to it. They just can't come right out and say it, lest their popularity suffer and their greedy inhumanity be exposed. They cannot acknowledge that their real constituents are corporations and wealthy people, who equate universal health coverage with an actual plague, and who are used to getting what they want from their servants in government and the media.

 So instead, Democrats are falling back on the tried and true Kafka-esque method. They'll talk and they'll talk and they'll talk, and they'll gaslight us and guilt-trip us over Single Payer's "winners and losers," and they'll warn us about the costs and the dangers of achieving health care as a basic human right. And the Republicans will get to do their part by accusing these neoliberal corporatists of being Marxists-Leninists-Socialists. 

And the technocrats will draw up their dozens and dozens of colorful pie charts to aid in the glazing-over of the eye and the melting of the mind. Everybody will become so exhausted and confused, the hope is, that Medicare For All will eventually die of its own wonkitude. (For the merest hint of the assaults yet to come, refer if you dare to the latest Vox explainer.)

This was the theme that Franz Kafka explored in most of his writing, in the economically depressed years between World War I and the rise of fascism. Even the most mundane tasks are fraught with such unnecessarily complex difficulties that they never are completed. Since there is no such thing as a simple problem, there can never be a solution. True to his own philosophy, Kafka didn't even complete several of his own stories, and even ordered that most of his work be burned upon his premature death. Thankfully his friend and executor, Max Brod, did not honor this request.

The only reason that (unlike the neoliberal wonk class) Kafka is not a complete downer, and remains popular nearly a century after his death, is that he had a wicked and humorous sense of the absurd, a sense that (making the neoliberal wonk class quake in fear and loathing) we ordinary slobs are all in this together and that our condition is pretty much universal.

This solidarity and unity are the exact opposite of what the political duopoly mean when they long for the good old bipartisan days, when Democrats and Republicans supposedly got along so well. To them, everybody must be divided between conservative and liberal, or more recently, between rural- deplorable and urban-enlightened. It's the main reason why they are so flummoxed by the Gilets Jaunes ("Yellow Vests") movement in France. Here are ordinary people acting, not out of ideology or identity, but in recognition that this is a class war, and it's global. They're emerging from their ordained isolation, and their unified anger is absolutely terrifying the ruling class.  

Well, sort of terrifying them. French President Emanuel Macron hasn't gone so far as to repeal his infamous repeal of the wealth tax. He is doing an imitation of his friend and early booster Barack Obama by calling in the "fat cats" (les chats grosses) for a friendly gross chat in the Elysee Palace and mildly "browbeating" them into a voluntary relinquishment of a smidgen of their obscene profits to their employees. Whether, like the duplicitous Obama, Macron also claimed he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks, is not known. 

But back to Kafka. The pretend-architects of a "Medicare For All" simulacrum are like the doorkeeper in his fable Before the Law. The supplicant (let's say it's for health care coverage) is told that he can't gain admittance just quite yet, but that if he's reasonable and patient, it's possible that he'll be allowed in later. As a gesture of good faith,  he's even allowed a glimpse inside. And as he peers into the hope and brightness, 

The doorkeeper laughs and says: "If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him."

The supplicant wheedles, bribes and begs, and the doorkeeper teases and promises. Only at the very end, when the seeker is near death, does the doorkeeper inform him that nobody could ever be admitted because "the gate was made only for you. And now I am going to shut it."

The moral of this story, as I see it, is that the various wonky policy proposals for Medicare For All are about as artificial as the neoliberal architects who are fashioning them. 

So enough of waiting for politicians to do the right thing. If we want entree to social and economic justice, we have to storm the gates and above all, reject the neoliberal dictum that we're lone economic consumers who must be in constant competition both with ourselves and with others in order to "succeed" in this best of all possible worlds.

But we are already being skillfully and subtly discouraged by the Explainers. If it took the Vox policy wonks (with the help of funding from investors NBC Universal and private equity giant General Atlantic) one whole month to read through all the "Medicare For All" proposals, the subliminal message is, it will take you ordinary people at least twice as long to try and make sense of it all. Meanwhile, they'll allow you to peer in to the turgid brightness for the time it takes to read their "explainer" piece and wade through the complexity of its myriad charts and graphs - if you can even make it through to the end. I could not.

But the basic gist is that if you like your plan you can keep your plan (sound familiar?), especially if you have employer-based insurance. It would be terrible, for example, if your boss were to lose his tax breaks on your premiums because you were selfish enough to enroll in government-sponsored health insurance.

Dash away, dash away, dash away all.

And the fraught, impossible choices? There's Medicare Buy-In For All, and Medicare Extra For All, and Medicare X, and the Choice Act, and Healthy America, and Medicaid Buy-In on the convoluted imaginary menu. Of course, Vox warns, buying into Medicaid doesn't translate into receiving actual care, since it would reimburse doctors at much lower rates than private insurance "typically" pays. 

Other "universal" plans charted and explained by Vox appear to be nothing more than Obamacare with new labels attached to them.

Bait-and-switch is exactly how this eternal Kafkaesque game is played. All of these plans totally sidestep the reality that wealth inequality is the fundamental public health crisis of our time. Forty million Americans live below the official poverty line, and at least half the population are just a paycheck away from outright destitution.

As Dr. Michael Fine lays out in his book Health Care Revolt, Americans spent about 30 percent of total household income on health care and health insurance in 2017 - or about as much as we are expected to pay for housing. That is about $11,000 for every man, woman and child. Of that money, between $1 and $2 trillion is being skimmed off the top by the "market" as pure profit. Fine writes:

It's estimated that by 2025 we'll be spending 50 percent of household income on health insurance and medical services. By 2032, we will spend an estimated 100 percent of the average family income on health care. I hope you understand how that will work, because I don't. Neither does any economist. Think climate change is a threat to our planet? It is but many believe that climate change will take fifty to a hundred years to destroy the planet.  Health care is on track to destroy our economy and our nation within fifteen years.

Donald Trump is not the only denialist in this Kafka-esque mix. 

Franz Kafka also had a prescient thing or two to say about Trump's precious Wall, which I've written about in a previous post. The whole idea of the Wall, just like the Democrats' unnecessarily convoluted health care proposals, is that it will always be "a work in progress" and not something we should ever expect our leaders to actually complete. Gaps and holes are always essential if they are to keep us hoping, dreaming... and compliantly fearful.

They hate it when ordinary people poke holes in their manufactured holes.

*Update, 12/15. Well, isn't this convenient. On the very eve of this year's Obamacare enrollment period deadline, a federal judge from Texas has struck down the entire "Affordable" Care Act, declaring it unconstitutional. Judge Reed O'Connor also happens to an appointee of the newly-sanctified George W. Bush and is a member of the reactionary Federalist Society. Will Michelle Obama still love Junior "to death" and continue accepting candy from him at celebrity funerals after what his appointees and pals continue to do to her husband's precious legacy?

Anyway, here's my comment on the New York Times op-ed on the matter:

While we await the ultimate decision of the Supreme Court, what better time than now for Democrats to take the Medicare For All campaign up a notch or ten?

Look at this ruling as a blessing in disguise. The lucky 20 million or so Americans who have coverage under the ACA are not going to lose it right away, if ever, and meanwhile, the 30 million who have virtually no coverage at all will gain the additional clout to convince their reps that government-sponsored single payer insurance, from cradle to grave, is the only thing that will prevent these cruel and frivolous rulings in the future.

Just let the Supreme Court uphold this insane decision. Just watch the GOP sink when/if their voters are kicked to the curb.

Democratic leaders should finally be learning that negotiating with Republicans to the extent of adopting an actual GOP scheme (from the conservative Heritage Foundation) is not only a crazy strategy, it keeps giving ammunition to the experts who believe -- correctly, in my view -- that requiring citizens to purchase "product" from an essentially predatory cartel of private insurers is the wrong way to go about covering people. These companies skim trillions off the top of US medical care expenditures, making this country's market-based system the most costly and least effective in the civilized world. Better to require everybody to pay taxes, according to their means, to truly cover everybody. The reactionary judges won't have a leg to stand on.

Fifty Is Not So Nifty In Unequal America

People within a decade of retirement are at increased risk of not living their "golden years" in the same state of good health that their own parents enjoyed and in many cases continue to enjoy.

Sixty might be the new 40 for the rich and famous. But for too many people, it's become the new 80. The Great Recession has not only wiped out savings and jobs, it's been a main cause of premature aging and the development of chronic diseases which only get worse the longer that they go untreated. 

Depression-Era Photo Courtesy of the Social Security Administration

A study by University of Michigan researchers reveals that American workers in late middle age are at a higher risk of developing disease than the previous generation. People are forced to retire later, and they have fewer resources to pay for medical treatment and the high insurance premiums, co-pays and deductibles of the Affordable Care Act. Those who are within 10 years of qualifying for Social Security and Medicare are at especially high risk.

From UM's Health Care Institute for Policy and Innovation:

• Those born after 1967, who have to wait longer to receive their full Social Security benefits, tended to have higher rates of poor cognition, such as memory and thinking ability, in their 50s than the earlier cohort groups had at a similar age.
• When people in the latest-born birth cohort was asked at around age 50 to rate their own health, more of them said it was fair or poor—compared with lower percentages in the middle three birth cohorts when they were around 50.
• The later-born groups had higher percentages of people who had at least one limitation on their ability to perform a basic daily living task by themselves, such as shopping for groceries, taking medications or getting out of bed.
• There weren’t strong differences between the groups in physical function, such as being able to climb a flight of stairs without resting, lifting 10 pounds or walking several blocks.
• Stark differences in health between people with different levels of education were seen—echoing what other studies have shown. For instance, about 25 percent of people who had to wait until age 66 to claim full benefits and had less than 12 years of education reported at least one health-related life limitation when they were in their mid-50s. But among those who had more than 12 years of education and were in the same claiming group (age 66), only about 7 percent had at least one such limitation. Those whose education had stopped at high school graduation were in the middle.

Economic inequality has been growing steadily worse since the Reagan years. According to another survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the wealth gap among American senior citizens is the widest of any other developed country, with only Mexico and Chile doing worse.

 And if Donald Trump's regressive tax plan goes through, the divide will become even more extreme. Wealthy, healthy retirees will get to keep more of what their investments earn, and they'll be able to pass most of their money down to succeeding generations with the planned repeal of the estate tax.

No wonder that the predatory casino known as the Stock Market (heads they win, tails you lose) is posting record gains. These are gains for the rich at the expense of the rest of us. Meanwhile, Trump has even axed the Obama administration's milquetoast and rather cynical MyRa private retirement plan - for the quite logical reason that not enough workers have had the spare change to put into it.

Yet, the richest of the rich are still not satisfied with having it all. They want to extract every last penny from the poor, the old, and the sick.

"Centrist" Obama administration advisor and financier Steve Rattner, who had no qualms orchestrating the bailout of the auto industry after the 2008 crash, has now penned a New York Times op-ed warning of the dangers of Medicare for All. His elite class cringes at the very thought of hordes of vulnerable people escaping from poverty and illness. This unprecedented glut of healthy people threatens to suck the life right out of the billionaires - or at least prevent them from using their hoarded money to buy a larger mega-yacht or a fifth vacation home.

Of course, Rattner didn't put it quite like that. Rather, too much health care for too many people would have the awful affect of sinking the whole Democratic Party! What is more important than life itself, if not an exclusive political party?

Rattner begins with the stale argument that since Medicare for All proponent Bernie Sanders isn't even a Democrat, his proposals are absolute heresy, if not inherently un-American. This is definitely a question of Party Over People, especially when the partiers are billionaires and CEOs. And not only that - Sanders also viscerally offends the Upper Crust by dint of being a "crusty Vermont independent."

"A freight train is coming at us from the Left!" the Wall Street multimillionaire shrills in the proper spirit of Halloween and Krusty the Clown. 

That ghost train would run right over and crush the lucky few who now enjoy gold-plated health care. They would be inconvenienced if they were automatically enrolled in a Medicare-type health plan with little to no effort on their own parts. Single Payer insurance would take away all the pleasure of shopping and choosing among gold, silver, bronze, copper, plug nickel and paper plans. It wouldn't even require Internet access.

Even worse, public insurance would knock the joy right out of the booming stock market. Therefore, Rattner clownishly concludes, if Democrats would only get out their knives and join in the ghoulish fun and heartlessly deny single payer health care to the poor, the old and sick, they are bound to beat Trump in 2020!

Needless to say, the Times did not open Rattner's unhinged horror story to reader comments.

On a related note, though,  the Times is urging what it calls "consumers" (who apparently are human beings only secondarily) in that high-risk 50+ age bracket to blithely fork over $280 for a brand-new Shingles vaccine:

According to the C.D.C., almost 1 of every 3 people in the United States will contract shingles, a viral infection that can result in a painful rash and lasting nerve damage.

The disease, also known as herpes zoster, can range in severity from barely noticeable to debilitating. It is caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which also triggers chickenpox.

The newspaper made no mention of the cruel policies which have triggered the shameful morbidity and mortality rates in the richest country on the face of the earth.