Reinventing the “Wheel” of Federal Government

20 November 2013

Listening to The Morning Briefing on SiriusXM POTUS Radio this morning, we heard Tim Farley interview Representative Cory Gardner about healthcare. Congressman Gardner represents Colorado’s Fourth District.

Among several points related to limitations of the Affordable Care Act, Congressman Gardner said that the states could do a better job when it comes to managing their citizens’ healthcare insurance. Congressman Gardner said, for example, that it would be beneficial if insurance policies would be sold across state lines.

Mr. Farley followed up the Congressman’s comment about inter-state insurance with the kind of incisive question for which Tim Farley and The Morning Briefing have become known. Here, Mr. Farley asked about challenges that might derive from differences between the states, where each state has its own set of insurance laws.

The Congressman’s answer caught our interest.

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According to Congressman Gardner, the states could work together to overcome such limitations. His idea is that the states could form agreements or alliances among themselves. This way, different insurance regulations at the level of the individual states would not cause problems among the allied states.

The advantage of this, per Congressman Gardner’s view, would be that, in using such cooperative arrangements, the states could work together to solve insurance challenges, without being forced to suffer from national intervention with our healthcare insurance.

That’s an interesting idea. One wonders that the Founding Fathers didn’t think of it. 

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The Idea Highlights a Key Difference between the GOP and the Democrats. Of course, where the Democrats come from, such an organization of alliances to provide for the common good among the several states already exists.

It’s the Federal Government.

Regards,
(($; -)} 
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

“Presumption of Guilt” Is Voter-Fraud Enough. Obamacare “Lies” Prove It:

19 November 2013

In a Recent Austin American-Statesman editorial, Republican consultant Matt Mackowiak says I’m lying about why he wants to restrict the rights of our fellow Americans to vote:

“Increased Turnout Trumps Democrats’ ‘Suppression’ Argument”*

Okay then: fair enough. In my defense, I call Mr. Mackowiak out. In my opinion of Republican malfeasance, I am telling the truth.

It is Matt Mackowiak who is lying.

Please bear with me on this one. The defensive case to make can seem a bit convoluted:

____________________

The Republican Party wishes to impose photo I.D. laws for the sole purpose of preventing more people of Democratic American values from voting in elections throughout the country.

Given (1) how hard it is for someone else to vote using someone else’s voter registration, and (2) how easy voter fraud is to detect, and (3) given how the preponderance of the evidence supports that such fraud does not practically exist, and (4) given that even voting registrars—even some Republican registrars—insist that voter fraud is no problem and (5) that photo-I.D. laws only serve to reduce voter turnout—

The only real reason for Republicans to promulgate costly and inconvenient Voter I.D. laws is because, to paraphrase Mr. Mackowiak, “Republicans want fewer legal votes, not more. Anyone who claims otherwise is lying.”

By the abandoned virtue of his presumptive projection, Matt Mackowiak naturally must be included in the “lying” group. 

____________________

This “presumption of guilt” on Mr. Mackowiak’s part does not just run counter to our Constitution. It also creates challenges for those who would defend against the accusations—when it is so often those first accusers who are guilty.

Take the current Obamacare controversy.

In the lead up to the bill that became the ACA, those on the Right kept saying, “Obamacare is a government takeover of healthcare! You will lose your current insurance! You will lose your doctor!”

These accusations forced the President to come out and say, “No, it’s not. No, you won’t.”

In my personal case, President Obama’s assertions have proved true. Over the course of the past year, I’ve received several notices from my insurer, describing the few, key changes that Obamacare has made to our “grandfathered” insurance plan. So what I have, as a direct result of Obamacare, is a policy that has increased about the same as, in past years or less this year than in some years, while the benefits have increased dramatically. 

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It’s harder to defend against and to describe untruths succinctly than it is to make originating accusations in the first place. Republicans accused Obamacare of things that are mostly untrue.This led President Obama to respond in kind. The result is now commonly taken for a lie. But the President’s words have borne out exactly as promised, for me and for millions of other self-employed, formerly under-insured Americans.

Republicans such as Matt Mackowiak accuse me of lying about their voter-suppression issues. It’s harder to defend against and to explain how wrong these Republican activists are about voter fraud than it is to make the preemptive accusations in the first place. And it’s harder to convey the case that the only benefit served by photo-I.D. laws is to suppress Democratic voters. But this, here, has been my short version of that case.

Mr. Mackowiak is a liar: the only true reason for the epidemic of photo I.D. laws is because Republicans want fewer [Democratic] votes. Not more.

Regards,  
(($; -)}
Gozo!
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*Matt Mackowiak, Austin American-Statesman, 7:00 p.m., 11/17/2013

@GozoTweets

THE ROLE—AND THE VALUE—OF POLITICIANS:

10 October 2013

Anyone of Us can stand firm with the dictates of our conscience. It takes a special kind of person to negotiate the differences among us. It takes a politician.
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The Naivety of Tea Party Republicans in Congress, who did not know what the “debt ceiling” was (and who still seem not to know), points to this.

Compromise is what keeps America from becoming a “dictatorship by the minority.” We fought our 1776 revolution to free ourselves from dictatorship. Then we gave ourselves a government “of and by and for the people.”

The fact that one side of our political divide thinks of our democratic government as “Them” is a burden that those on the Left are prepared to continually shoulder.

But when those on the Right decide that their own values are somehow more-valuable or more-American than counterpart values, what we end up with is something like the Tea Party Conservatives:

A group of rigid ideologues, willing to bring down our country if that’s what it takes to dictate their own values.
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Fortunately for our great American experiment, our democracy will prevail over those ideologues who remain “determined to deny liberty to others.”

Fortunately for the American people, we have those willing to do our dirty work: trash collectors, and sewer-repair people—and politicians.

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

IF GOZO TWEETED: Tweet #0097

 19 May 2013

 __________

WHITEWATER: What did Obama know and when did he know it? Republicans vow to reopen investigation. Scandalous, non-scandal list continues.
__________

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

BEATING A DEAD HORSE DEPT: What Republicans Understand About Government—or Fail To:

14 January 2013

Republican Objection to Chuck Hagel’s nomination focuses entirely on the Republicans’ disagreement with the Senator’s policies. Otherwise, his character and capabilities stand unquestioned.

In relation to the confirmation process, one might believe that Republicans expect only to vote for cabinet members who would serve their own, Republican, partisan agenda, rather than serve the elected officials whose political values won the relevant elections.

In the current case, the “elected official” is our reelected President of the United States. The political values relate to those voted on by the majority of the people of the United States.
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Something There Is, about the American political system and majority rule, that leading members of the Grand Old Party of the Republic fail to understand.

Maybe it’s not the American “government” that’s the problem. Maybe it’s just the “Republican” side  which, by failing to understand how our government work, constitutes America’s real “problem.”*

As someone younger and wiser once said, “No wonder Republicans hate government: they don’t know how it works.”

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

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*Ronald Reagan, “First Inaugural Address”

Name-Change Wanted: “Republicans Aside”?

12 January 2013

In Last Week’s Issue of Time magazine, Michael Grunwald wrote the following:

“The checks and balances in our political system were designed to encourage consensus instead of partisan warfare; if Senate Republicans had decided to work with [President] Obama in his first term instead of fighting him, they could have helped shape Obamacare and other Democratic legislation.”*

 ____________________

While No American Adult would expect that a bill as complex as Obamacare to arrive as full-born, perfect law, it is reasonable to expect that all political sides would offer constructive guidance toward improving such a bill.

Instead, Congressional Republicans, in seeming discord with their oaths of office, kept any such guidance to themselves. In oddly childish manner, they opted to reserve the right to say, “We told you so,” rather than to work to improve the law for the Nation they surely would each claim to love.
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This Blog’s Title, Ideology Aside, reflects a desire to help bridge our long-standing ideological divide. But when that divide becomes entrenched by the kind of uncompromising ideology that we’ve seen from Congressional Republicans since our current President first took office, it becomes disingenuous to pretend that the malevolence of uncompromising ideology does not hold America’s future hostage to the minority.
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Quite a While Back, the GOP took a detour into a ditch that admits no arguments of reason, and that will admit no substantive compromise. Mr. Grunwald’s example of Obamacare gives evidence to this point.

In his Time article, Mr. Grunwald provides other examples, such as the near-complete blockage of every nomination the President has made for the courts, for Cabinet positions, etc.

None of this is news, of course, to anyone who attends to America politics of the past four years. But we post the “news” (as verbalized by Mr. Grunwald’s article) here, to speak to why the blog name, Ideology Aside, has become inappropriate.

We have tried. But for now, we have failed.

____________________

Ideology Aside is looking for another name.

Regards,

(($; -)}

Gozo!

@GozoTweets

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*“Cliff Dweller,” by Michael Grunwald. Time, 01/14/2013 [Mr. Grunwald’s paragraph continues thus: “At the time, McConnell famously explained that his top priority was denying Obama a second term, but now he’ll need a new top priority.” However, we shan’t be so impertinent as to quote that portion here.]

The Republican Party of Projection Needs a New Bulb for its Projector:

12 November 2012

Republican Ideology, as currently configured, has stood up to be tested over the past thirty-two years.

It has failed miserably.

____________________

The Apparent Cause of Republican failure is projection.

Most of what the Right perceives in the Left is actually its own reflection.

___________________

Best Case in Point: the Romney campaign disbelieved Obama-leaning poll numbers because the Republicans thought that the Democrats were skewing the numbers.

Instead, it was the Romney campaign doing the skewing. And thus were their errors worsened, and their trend toward loss made stronger.

____________________

Likewise, This Conservative Ideology—that the Democrats are the party of entitlement. Those of us on the outside of the whole thing see how much it is the Right that wallows in its sense of entitlement.

Such as wondering how they could have possibly lost the election, when their policies and practices led America into the mess, and then they scared much of the American electorate away.

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Karl Rove Accuses the Democrats of winning the election by scaring voters off of the Republican Party. We on the outside see this as ridiculous, of course: the Republican policies and principles are their own  policies and principles. Though some elements are often projected on others, yet do they often state these other ideological elements themselves.

And who more than Karl Rove has thrived, politically, on the promulgation of fear?

The whole ideology of the Republican Party is based on fear—gun-bearing thuggery; misogyny; aliens; welfare abuse; voter fraud; wealth-ravaging inflation; me-first healthcare access; other languages, other faiths, and other cultures—here in “the home of the brave.”

____________________

To “Blame the Messenger”—who helps communicate the anti-immigrant, anti-choice, anti-voting, anti-poor Right Wing planks—exemplifies the Republican culture of entitlement.

And of projection.

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

IF GOZO TWEETED: Tweet #0013

22 APRIL 2012

__________

Democrats keep reaching for the rake of government. Republicans keep pushing it away. Meanwhile, who’ll tend garden & clean up the mess?

__________

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

IF GOZO TWEETED: Tweet #0009

7 APRIL 2012

 __________

Mitt Romney was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Democrats often recognize their own silver-spoon blessings. Republicans: usually not.
__________

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

IF GOZO TWEETED: Tweet #0003

25 MARCH 2012

__________

If Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich could balance America’s budget back in the 1990s, why can’t Speaker John Boehner do it today?

__________

Regards,

(($; -)}}

Gozo!

@GozoTweets

If the Other Side Is Always Dead Wrong about Debt—

—Then No One Can Ever Be Right for the Economy:

23 MARCH 2012

Everyone, Even Most Democrats, believes that we need to get government investment in line with tax revenues over time, or America will be economically ruined. The two sides, Republican and Democrat, just have two different theories behind how best to accomplish this.

The theory behind Democratic thinking is that cutting government spending in times of economic crisis invites disaster. Instead, a focus on government investing at such times revitalizes the economy, for future growth to get things ultimately in balance.

The Republican theory seems to be that cutting spending always helps, no matter the particulars of the day. This one-size-fits-all approach to economics may be correct. But we haven’t seen it much borne out in history.

We Need to Find Some Way to work on these differences with reasonable discourse. The shouting, railing and denouncing of each other gets us nowhere.

____________________

Democrats and Republicans Alike, and everybody in between, know that we need to get government spending under control. The Democrats favor a moderate approach, finding ways to increase revenue and then to modify government programs over time, as conditions improve. Meanwhile, the contrary opinion—about “job creators”—looks somewhat foolish while so many such “creators” are pouring millions of dollars into failing presidential-nominee campaigns.

(Could it be all this political spending finally be that’s finally gotten the economy growing again? How ironic if it takes political “hot air” to inflate the economy more than any particular candidate’s words or actions do—if and when she or he is elected.)

(In which case, perhaps thanks may be due the Supreme Court Justices, for the unintended consequences of their “Citizens United” decision.)

____________________

History Shows that spending cuts during hard times slow the progress of recovery.

Even today, while local governments are cutting police, firefighter, and teacher jobs almost as fast as the Obama-led government can stimulate jobs in the private sector, we see the counter-productive effects of trying to save water during a fire, by turning off the fire hoses.

____________________

Say What You Like about opposing opinions based on different theories, both are likely to hold elements of truth.

But if you can only make your argument by shouting down the corollary facts on the opposite side—as so many Americans seem to do—then you’ll likely make a lot of noise, but get very little good work done.

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

IF GOZO TWEETED: Tweet #0001

23 MARCH 2012

__________

Q: If Rick Santorum says Americans should stick with President Barack Obama, why should we believe him?

A: Because contemporary Republicans are always “Right.”
__________

Regards,
(($; -)}}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

Where Is “Honest Abe” Lincoln When America Needs Him Again?

21 MARCH 2012

President Obama Thought he could change the political climate in Washington by finding ways to incorporate Conservative and Republican ideas into his policies. Sadly, right now in America, both parties find little choice but to oppose anything the other party puts forward. Thus, for example, did Nancy Pelosi blame President George W. Bush for high oil prices, and now the Republicans blame President Obama. (Both were equally wrong.)

If Individual Americans, in large numbers, put pressure on their legislators to compromise, I wonder whether their legislators might compromise, and America might move forward.

Judging by the Divide of Opinions we see in “comments” forums for every bit of news or opinion posted on the Internet, We, the People, seem about evenly divided. So there’s probably not much hope that much help will come from there...
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“A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand.”

Or So Some Republican President Once Said.

Will the Progressives lead us forward, out of this stalemate? Will the Conservatives leave us mired in it?

Will China and the European Union and the rest of the world stand idly by, waiting to see if and when and how we work it out?

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

@GozoTweets

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The original version of this post appears at:

WHERE IS HONEST ABE (AGAIN) WHEN AMERICA NEEDS HIM?

Why Are Republicans Losing Out to Their “Straw Man” President?

11 MARCH 2012

If Barack Obama Really Is the “Straw Man” President that the Republicans pretend him to be, how can it be so hard for them to come up with a viable candidate to win the election in November?

It Looks like the Actual Facts of the Obama presidency so far are making a hard case for the Republican argument
that we need more hands-off government like we’ve had over the past thirty years:

01: Private-sector Jobs rising faster than Republican can cut jobs in the public sector

02: Unemployment numbers going down, despite Republican best efforts to make unemployed Americans wait until after the next election, before taking steps to turn the economy around

03: Millions More Americans Insured for Healthcare, and tens of millions more insured without exclusions or lifetime limits or preexisting conditions, while the Republican candidates avoid healthcare like a live wire 

04: The Auto Industry Turned Around, with GM is once again the world’s leading auto manufacturer

05: Increasing Domestic Petroleum production, even as America resumes the march toward cleaner air, greater fuel-economy, and alternative-energy manufacturing readying to take on China and Spain and the rest of the world

06: Homosexual Americans Serving Openly in the armed forces, without incident

If it Truly Took the Conservative Hand of Ronald Reagan to dig America out of the left-hand ditch
that the Democrats had gotten us into, it now looks up to Progressive hand of Barack Obama to get us back out of the right-hand ditch that the Republicans got us into during the 2000s.

If Things Are So Dim as the Republicans say they are, how come America’s future under the Republican “straw-man” President Barack Obama suddenly looks so bright?

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

America: Dictatorship or Compromise?

23 DECEMBER 2011

In Forms of Government, you can have dictatorship, gridlock, or compromise. (Gridlock equals a dictatorship by the minority. Compromise is rule by the majority, with protection of the minority.)

A pledge not to raise taxes equals a dedication to the art of “Cut and Spend” government. The efforts of the Tea Party Republican’s to impose their minority ideology on the rest of us constitutes dictatorship by gridlock.

Our representative democracy can’t afford a government dictatorship by gridlock.

America Can’t Afford a Continuation of Republican

 “Cut and Spend” Government.

In 1789, the American people, having won our freedom from dictatorship through our Revolution, voted for a government of compromise.

In 2012, we, the people, will get to vote for a government of compromise once again.

Regards,
(($; -)}
Gozo!

The Republican Mythology of “Spending Like a Democrat”

“[North Carolina Representative Patrick] McHenry may pretend to be a Republican, but he sure as hell spends like a Democrat—or even worse.”

  —Republicans Against Patrick McHenry

26 FEBRUARY 2011

This idea—that Democrats “spend” more than Republicans do—is clearly a flawed mythology. It is wrong in two different ways.
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First, if you listen to Republican language (especially over these Obama years), you hear almost-exclusively the word, “spending,” and rarely hear the word, “investing.” Given that the Republican Party prides itself so vocally on things such as “fiscal responsibility,” you would expect it to make the distinction between items limited to “Expenses” on the income statement and items to be listed as “Assets” on the balance sheet.

Republicans Avoid this Distinction.

It’s as if you were to call someone out on the carpet about where the heck all their money goes, saying something like, “All you do is spend, spend, spend. Look at this! You’ve spent $4.00 for a café latte and $400,000 for a house. That’s more than $400,000 spent in one year—for coffee and other stuff!”

Without the transcontinental railroad and the Interstate Highway system and the NASA space program,  where would American be?

Spending like a Democrat.
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Second, if you look at the lessons of history, you may be surprised at recent examples of “Spending like a Republican.”

An example notable for its relationship to one of America’s greatest examples of Republican leadership, is the spending that President Reagan motivated, in his effort either to build a Strategic Defense Initiative (AKA “Star Wars”) or to bankrupt the Soviet Union (a legitimate “Mission Accomplished”). You may be too young to remember the fears that Democrats expressed when the Reagan years produced the greatest level of non-wartime debt that America had known. Democrats then were convinced (as Republicans are now convinced) that such deficit spending could not possibly be corrected. And it was not corrected until two presidents later, when the engine of American entrepreneurship turned that “spending” debt around.

Then, of course, we have the unfortunate example of President George W. Bush taking us into an arguably unjustifiable war in Iraq and into the Medicare-D program. Both of these items demonstrate irresponsible Republican spending—which may represent legitimate, if intangible investments—in that no provision of paying for them was part of the process.

Listening to Democrats speak—notably the members of the Congressional Black Caucus—one hears them speak over and over about how they plan to pay for their “spending” programs. From Republicans, one hears only the continued promise of “trickle down,” which clearly has not occurred in our economy over the past thirty years since we first elected Ronald Reagan to accomplish this economic miracle. The vague hope, expressed with strong conviction, that lower taxes for the wealthy somehow result in good-paying jobs for those lower down in the economic “food chain” just never becomes reality.

Conservatives like to disown the latter President Bush as not one of their own. But no one who knows anything about this man could consider him to be either a Democrat or a Liberal, hiding in Conservative, Republican clothing.

At some point, any true “fiscal conservatives” remaining in the Republican Party will need to face the truth:

American Democrats “invest” in America’s infrastructure for the future, more than they just “spend.” And “pay as you go” is a Democratic expression of fiscal conservatism.

The false Republican delusions that this party opposes under the combined labels of “Democrat” and “spending” are just an easy target, painted on the backs of those Americans actually committed to making our great nation a better place. And not just a better place for eviscerating the middle class.

Regards,
(($;-)}
Gozo!

Republicans Lie with Good Intentions:

15 MAY 2011

The Politicians on the Right lie for the best of reasons—love of country—but lies are lies, nonetheless.

Over the Past Week, we’ve heard Republicans speak on the budget, the oil industry, and the economy. As their lies have been repeated, each one gets easier and easier to say.

But They’re Still Lies...

What Gets Blamed on the Current Administration and on the Democratic Party is what’s called “circumstantial evidence” in the legal system. For example, high petroleum prices result from unrest in the Arab nations—the “Arab Spring”—and are about to turn back around. But it makes a convenient and easy spear to chuck at President Obama and the Democrats.

What a Way to Treat Your Country in challenging times like these...

If You Want to Score Political Points with Stuff like This, you keep selling it. And the Tea Party folks keep chugging it down.

But It’s Still a Big Lie...

Just Think What this Country Could Do if we ever decide to work together again, instead of all this ideological dishonesty disguised as a deficiency of common sense.

Best regards,
(($;-)}
Gozo!

What the European Union Teaches America About “States’ Rights”

In the Development of the European Union, we can see the issue of “states’ rights” versus “large, central government” play out in real time, in the modern world, before our eyes. One great example of how these two approaches interact occurs between Sweden and Spain.

Swedish Citizens May Spend Their Entire Working Years contributing to the Swedish healthcare system, and then retire to Spain to draw down their late-life healthcare. What they will have paid for in Sweden will be more than they would have paid into the Spanish system, but they are free to move around the continent and retire in Spain, where things cost less. There, they can draw on health-care benefits for which they have not paid, while the Swedish system stays flush with their unclaimed payments.

And the Spanish Health-care System is going bust, at least partly as a result.

If We Had States-Run Medicare or Social Security Systems, we would experience the same issues here. Such as all those New Yorkers who retire in Florida, if they had only paid into a New York state system during all those cold winters, before heading south.

The States’ Rights Argument of the Republican Party and the Tea Party protesters can be powerful and compelling. But that does not make it viable nor realistic in our twenty-first century world.

In Today’s Edition of The Washington Post, Utah Republican candidate for the United States Senate Tim Bridgewater argues for just such a system, however. Mr. Bridgewater writes:

“In 1787, the Founding Fathers crafted a free system of government built on the principle that individuals have God-given rights. The Founders protected those rights....by a vertical separation of powers between the federal government and the states. The national government would manage external affairs and keep the states on a level playing field; state governments were to do the rest.

“Over time, that vertical separation of powers has almost disappeared. Today, the federal government feels it can manage even the details of personal health care and education. States have been relegated to administrative units of a central leviathan, in a system of plunder in which each state tries to live at the expense of the others.”

Candidate Bridgewater Offers Telecommunications as an example argument for states’ rights. But how could the individual states possibly regulate such a national, and even international, structure? How could we possibly have the Internet, with every aspect of regulation negotiated among “the several states,” if not for the coordinating power of our Federal government?

What the EU Demonstrates, even more than our 200-plus-year history shows, are the challenges of the state/Federal hybrid.

Candidate Bridgewater Also Writes:

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but Washington’s track record stinks. Congress has given us more than $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities in Social Security and Medicare. Lawmakers encouraged a housing bubble and then took hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers when it burst. There is no reason to think Congress can do a better job this time than when it tried to manage energy in the 1970s and ’80s.”

One Might Insert the Word “Republican” in front of each Bridgewater assertion about Washington, Congress and lawmakers, and get a better understanding of the failure of this thirty-year adventure with ideology. Despite that Mr. Bridgewater and the ground-swell of Conservative protesters seem oblivious to this fact, too, regardless of the inconvenience of actual reality.

What the Last 30 Years——and particularly the years 2001-2008——show is the limitations on the “states’ rights” policies, combined with an underfunded Federal government. The answer is not to excise the Federal government. The answer is to use that of it which works well, and to improve that of which works poorly.

Or Does Candidate Bridgewater Truly Believe that the state of Utah can individually put a floor under the price and costs of carbon, and let Utah take on the Chinese, the Germans, the Scandinavians, and the Spanish in developing the world’s new growth industries, the new technologies?

Naivety Such as We Saw Under President George W. Bush is a powerful force. But what America and all its 50 states need now, is to put away the “childish things” of failed ideology, and roll up our sleeves, and get to work.

Find Mr. Bridgewater’s essay at:

In Utah's Vote, a Wake-up Call for Washington

Regards,
(($;-)}
Gozo!

For Some People, the Past Only Began Yesterday

If America Already Faces a potential shortfall of 16,000 doctors within the next fifteen years, how can that possibly have been caused by last-month’s passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act? This shortage was reported this morning on Pajamas Media, on XM-Satellite Radio’s  P.O.T.U.S. station.*

I Understand That President Barack Obama reportedly can walk on water and part the loaves and the fishes. But it’s hard to believe that even the Anointed One could sign a law on 23 March 2010, and the downward spiral toward medical armageddon has already begun, just three and a half weeks later.

Something Must Have Gone Wrong a While Ago. And coming off three decades of a Republican agenda, it’s a little hard to believe that it’s not the Republicans’ fault. Unless you use the kind of Republican reasoning that the Republicans use.

How Long Will We, the People, have our reasoning faculties beclouded by the slings and arrows of outrageous, mis-informed opinion? At least with adults back in the White House, we get some facts with our opinions these days.

If Doctors Are Being Chased out of medical practice by bureaucracy, the red tape comes not so much from the Federal government, as it comes from the confusion and contusions imposed by the multiplicity of insurance companies:

• Each insurance company has its own forms. Your doctor pays special personnel to handle these.
• Each insurance company has its own ideas about what procedures a patient (you) needs, and how long a  patient (you) should be allowed to spend in the hospital for the surgery your doctor prescribes, and what medicines you should take in recovery. Your hospital has special “case managers” just to handle these rationing ideas.
• Each insurance company has its own “disallows.” You yourself will likely have to pay for these.
• Each insurance company has its own structure of fees negotiated for the payment of services you provide. You will either pay more or less than your neighbors because of these.

Now That’s a Lot of Red Tape. All in the name of illogical opinion and an ideology that has persistently failed the American people for much of recent history. Anything but “single-payer.” Anything but “socialism.” Anything but “health-care reform.” Anywhere else but here.

The Origin of Much of the Standardization of these terms of insurance coverage comes from coding by the Federal government, through Medicare. If anything in American medicine has worked to standardize the relationship between medical providers and medical insurers, it is the Medicare system

That Codification Is a Benefit of Government, not a curse. Without even just this little bit of standardization, every single transaction throughout American medicine would be subject not only to the preceding list of items, but also to different forms of terminology, and to different computer codes for different medical procedures, drugs, and routines.

“Different Strokes for Different Folks” may work for individual freedoms. But it does not work for medicine. It does not change the facts, no matter what the underlying opinions would have us believe.

The Laws of Cause and Effect are often subject to interpretation. And the connection between what comes first and what comes later is not always cause and effect.

But You Don’t Get to Just Make Up your own reality. If the United States will suffer a substantial shortage of doctors in the next decade and a half, and the new reform law was just passed three and a half weeks ago, the opposition to the bill was not only lame, but was also contraindicated by those who oppose the reform law now.

We All Heard  the Republican Leadership in Congress repeat, over and over, through the long year of debate, “Go slow.”

We All Heard the Same Leaders Say, “We need to start over.”

We All Heard the Same Leaders Say, “We need to scrap this bill.”

If the System in Place before the three-week-old reform was already steering us toward a 16,000-doctor shortfall by 2025,* it was surely broken to start with. So how could America possibly afford to scrap this bill, start over, and go slow?

Someone Is Not Being Entirely Honest about This.

But at Least While the Republicans and the angry Tea Party Movement folks keep debating it, the Obama administration and the Democratic Party will be working on getting more Americans insured, encouraging more Americans to go into medical practice, and keeping more Americans healthy.

Outrage Is Easy.™

Talk Is Cheap.

Pajamas Media Has an Agenda that defies logic.

But We Finally Have a Few Adults Back in the White House.

At Least For Now.....

Regards,
(($;-)}
Gozo!

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*Pajamas Media broadcast on P.O.T.U.S. XM Satellite Radio (04/17/2010)

Advancing America to the Rear

Only by Turning Around and marching toward the rear can we Americans sustain an illusion of ourselves as the most-advanced nation. For some people, an illusion of leading is more important than progress. As of this today, with the signing of healthcare reform, into law, those Americans are momentarily held at bay.

Let the Republican Party keep putting all of its creative energy into derailing and repealing this important change. The rest of us don’t have that luxury: we need to keep moving forward.

Back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan defined government as the problem, not the solution. That’s like complaining that air is often polluted, so we shouldn’t breathe it. We have no real choice about whether to breathe the air, or whether to have government.

And So While the Republicans prefer to keep fighting against government rather than improving it for all of the people government serves, the Democratic Party keeps working at making the government “of the people” and “by the people” do a better job of serving the necessities “of the people.”

Throughout the Course of the healthcare-reform debate, the Republicans have insisted that they believe in reform, yes, too, but: We need to take it slow. We need to start over. We need to go step-by-step. Etc.

Now, the Majority in Congress has managed to pass reform—through the ugly political process by which all difficult change is made. And the best thing for the Republican Party to do, to be true to its word throughout the process, would be to get to work with the majority in Congress, making healthcare-reform work better for all of us.

Instead, State Attorneys General—Republican attorneys general—are initiating a lawsuit to block the bill. Republicans in Congress say that they will fight to repeal the bill.

Was There Ever Any Truth behind their “we believe in healthcare reform, too” and.....whatever else they said in their festival of denial? Show us some evidence.

Government Is an Inefficient and messy process of compromise. Nobody really likes it. But some of us have to be more mature about how we deal with it. Just as in any family, the adults of the American populace cannot afford to spend their time throwing tantrums. There is much more work to be done.

The Republicans Continue to assert that compromise is not an option for them. Fortunately for us, they have some good ideas that have been included in the new law. Fortunately for us, the Democrats seem to take it all seriously, trying to make the best law they can get for the American people.

Meanwhile, the Republicans moan and shout. They initiate law suits and vow to repeal. The new law moves us forward. While the Republicans throughout government insist on turning around and marching backwards. Continuing a thirty-year effort to lead the United States as “the most advanced nation” in the world—marching loudly and proudly to the rear.

Regards,
(($;-)}
Gozo!