Posts Tagged ‘health care’

Wish List

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Stei091207

With job creation at the top of the economic wish list as the nation slowly recovers from the deep recession, and with the Afghanistan decision made, Obama last week convened a jobs summit. The truth is, and everyone knows it, there’s little more that can be done to create the millions of jobs needed to offset those lost the last two years, unless the government is willing to spend billions more on additional stimulus. This puts Obama in a precarious place; does he risk adding to the already huge deficit, risking runaway inflation down the road, or does he stand pat and hope the economy creates more jobs than anticipated? Perhaps intervention from another agency will save the day. It can’t hurt to ask. “Tis the season.

Unhealthy Argument

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

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I shouldn’t be any more, but I’m still surprised when people argue vehemently against their own self-interest. The health care debate has taken this disconnect to new levels. The states that seem to have the strongest polling against health care reform are those where people would be helped most by the reforms. The arguments I hear tend to be more political than practical, involving deep suspicion of government in general and Obama in particular, fear of some sort of socialist takeover of the economy, and the truly loony equation of health care reform with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I wondered what the conversation would be  like if I removed the political philosophy from the debate and inserted in its place the practical problems our current non-system of health care presents. I ended up with this cartoon.

New Delivery

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

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My first sketch for this cartoon had the health care bill as an adult with an arm and a leg already cut off, hobbling from the House surgical unit to the Senate surgical unit. In some ways it may have been more accurate, given how butchered the plan already is, and how much more will be sacrificed before a bill acceptable to enough to our skittish lawmakers can pass both houses in congress. I finally decided that this was the better approach; after all, it is a major achievement just to get any health care reform bill passed in the House. It’s never happened before, and whatever emerges from the sausage factory that we call Congress will be far better than the broken health care system we have now, even if it needs major repairs later.

Discourse

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

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Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst during Obama’s address to Congress was a perfect illustration of just how much the public conversation has deteriorated in recent years. I suppose that it was inevitable that the deliberate rudeness of the town hall meetings held this summer would not end there. Although Wilson immediately apologized, he didn’t recant his position, which is flat-out wrong. Every version of the health care reform bills moving through both houses specifically exempts illegal aliens. What’s funny about all this, if it weren’t so despicable, is that it’s the Republicans who have have shamelessly misrepresented the contents of the reform bills, and it’s the Republicans who have so gleefully promoted the disrespectful shout-downs we witnessed this summer. Perhaps the embarrassment over Wilson’s public moment will finally bring a little civility back to the debate. For a day or two, anyway.

We’re Outa Here!

Friday, September 4th, 2009

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The medigogues demonizing health care reform have scared people most with the boogeyman of “government-run health care,” whatever that means. What’s bizarre about the effectiveness of this approach is that Americans much prefer the government-provided health care we already have to private insurance. I’m speaking, of course, about Medicare and the Veterans Administration, both of which are extremely popular with patients.

I came up with this flight of fancy after overhearing a conversation in which someone said he was so fed up with the direction Obama was taking us that he was considering leaving the country. It was a very short leap to get to this cartoon.

Memorial

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

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There could be be no more fitting way to remember the man whose lifelong passion was providing universal health care for the American people. Perhaps his death will shame those whose distortions, misrepresentations and outright lies threaten to derail reform into doing the right thing. One can hope.

Ambulance Chasers

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

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We finally know the answer to the question, what’s the dog going to do with the car if he catches it? In the case of health care reform, bury it. Republicans who want to hand Obama a major defeat are jubilant that the blue dog Democrats are doing their work for them. I know these guys think they’re helping craft a better bill, but what they’ve done so far is disastrous. The only hope is that Obama can crack the whip hard enough to get their attention (boys, you’re not going to get a lot of help from me if you ever want a bill of your own passed, and I sure won’t be there for the photo op during your tough re-election campaign, and good luck getting any money from the party), or we’re going to miss this latest best chance at getting anything meaningful passed. If so, Obama’s agenda will be wounded, perhaps fatally, and millions of Americans will continue to suffer needlessly for lack of a rational health care system. The dirty dogs.

Rerun

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

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I admit that I (along with tens of millions of other Americans) have a big stake in the issue of health care reform. When the Rocky folded, I lost not only my income, I also lost my health insurance, 80% of which had been paid for by the company. Yes, I took COBRA, which is underwritten by the federal government for nine months, after which I’m responsible for the full amount. So the first thing that happens after losing my job is that my expenses go up by about $15,000 a year. Is is just me, or is there something very wrong with this system? 

And that’s just the first part. Approximately sixteen months from now, if we don’t get major health care reform in the interim, my wife and I will have almost no chance of finding affordable private insurance, thanks to pre-existing conditions. Believe me, we are not alone in this. The statistics are frightening. Each year more than 20,000 Americans die from treatable illnesses because they don’t have health insurance and either wait too long to seek medical care or are refused service by providers. Almost two million Americans go bankrupt each year because of medical bills, and one and a half million lose their homes. According to a Reuters study, 62% of all bankruptcies in this country are as a result of medical costs. 

We remain the only wealthy country in the world without universal health care. In almost every other industrialized country, a medical bankruptcy would be a national scandal. Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany and Japan have figured it out. All of them cover all of their citizens, at a cost well below ours, and all of them have better health outcomes by every measurable standard. Their people live longer, healthier lives, have a lower infant mortality rate, and pay far less than we do for far better care.

Yet the folks who make the most money from our shockingly incompetent health care system are gearing up one more time to fight any reform that will hit them in the pocketbook, aided and abetted by political allies in Washington. How any politician representing any district in this country can support the status quo is beyond me, but there is a reflexive disdain for change among a large group of our representatives, all of whom have the best health insurance available. American health insurers make billions from a system that denies coverage to the people who need it the most, and spend a lot of that money building up the campaign war chests of their Washington allies, not to mention funding misleading advertising campaigns to talk the public out of the reform we most desperately need. I don’t know if the despicable Harry and Louise ads will run again this time. They were devastatingly effective in derailing the Clinton administration’s attempt at reform. Something like them is surely being filmed as I write this.

I know the ads I’d make if I were in charge. This cartoon would be one of them.

Pirates!

Monday, April 13th, 2009

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I can only hope that Obama is as firm and decisive with health care reform as he was with the Somali pirates. The Senate has an ambitious schedule of getting serious reform passed before the August recess, but the insurance and for-profit hospital and HMO lobbies are already hard at work trying to scuttle anything that might reduce their share of the pie. Let’s see if any real changes happen this time. I have my doubts.