4-H Club: History, Health, Hypocrisy and Heart

 

Winston Churchill once said, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing ... after they've tried everything else."  We keep trying, but we haven't done the right thing yet on a certain subject. Let's review a little history.

In 1912 former President Theodore Roosevelt ran on a third-party party platform that endorsed it, but he lost the election. In the 1930s it was proposed numerous times, but special interest groups objected and the effort was abandoned. President Truman failed when he tried it. Kennedy didn’t have time. Johnson took two major steps but only got part way toward the goal. Richard Nixon tried and might have succeeded, but the Watergate scandal intervened. Seniors shot down President Reagan’s idea. Bill Clinton had a big plan that failed miserably, although children got some help. George W. Bush added a narrow provision. The latest attempt passed in 2010 under President Obama, but even that doesn’t go all the way.

“It” in this history, of course, is a health care plan that covers everybody. Nearly 130 years after Germany, the first country to do so, adopted a plan to cover its citizens’ medical needs, the United States remains the only developed nation on the face of the planet that does not provide for this aspect of the general welfare. And as high school students and citizens throughout the land will remember, promoting the general welfare is one of the six purposes of our national government. It’s right there in the Preamble to the United States Constitution, as written by the Founding Fathers. 

This is where hypocrisy comes in. Politicians and some commentators often say we shouldn’t mess with our healthcare system because it's the best in the world. But that’s simply not true. We have the best healthcare in the world— for those who can afford it—but we don’t by any means have the best healthcare system. It’s not a good system if tens of millions of our fellow citizens do not have insurance coverage and must go to emergency rooms when they need care. As medical technology gets more expensive and our population grows older, the costs of this so-called “system” are going to bankrupt us if something isn’t done. On this both liberals and conservatives agree.

One state recognized this a few years ago and enacted a health plan that covers all its residents. The key provision of that plan is a requirement that everyone who is not otherwise covered must buy private health insurance or pay a penalty. That’s the same as the “individual mandate” of the plan Congress passed in 2010. But the governor of the state in question is now trying to distance himself from the law he once enthusiastically defended. As a Boston Globe article points out,

“Basically, it’s the same thing,’’ said Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who advised the Romney and Obama administrations on their health insurance programs. A national health overhaul would not have happened if Mitt Romney had not made “the decision in 2005 to go for it. He is in many ways the intellectual father of national health reform.’’ [Emphasis added.]

Numerous others, including Governor Rick Perry of Texas and former Governor Howard Dean of Vermont, agree that “Romneycare” and “Obamacare” (the Accountable Care Act, ACA) are very similar. [See www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2010/dec/05/howard-dean/dean-howard-says-health-care-bill-prseident-barack/  For a detailed comparison of the two laws, see http://familiesusa2.org/assets/pdfs/Elections-2012/RomneyCare-ObamaCare.pdf ] 

But candidate Romney now wants to repeal the national plan that is based in large part on the state law he signed as governor. He says he wants to repeal the ACA but keep in place some of its commendable aspects:

People who want to keep their current insurance will be able to do so. We will help each state assure that every American has access to affordable healthcare. People with preexisting conditions will know that they will be able to be insured. [These lines were taken directly from news clips of his speeches shown on TV.]

He especially wants to repeal the individual mandate, a provision that he deems a tax—in supposed contrast to the "penalty" that supports the individual mandate in the Massachusetts law. But whether you call it a tax or you call it a penalty, the effect on your wallet is the same.

Furthermore, economists and healthcare experts agree that we all pay a hidden tax now: it’s called the “cost shift.” Uninsured people show up in hospital emergency departments and the costs are borne by government programs and through higher premiums for private insurance. No matter what, the rest of us pay for the care uninsured individuals receive. 

By the way, some conservatives would deal with rising costs by promoting a "free-market" solution: vouchers for private insurance. This is not a viable answer. Private insurance companies need to make a profit, and profit = more hidden cost. A better idea is to promote health, wellness and prevention programs, as the ACA does.

Demagogues are also obsessed with the claim that the ACA is a “federal power grab.” But apparently they haven’t actually read the law. I have, and I found that there are more than 25 sections—scores of pages—devoted to state-based demonstration programs of health, wellness and prevention. There are 39 pages devoted to state programs for the uninsured: programs like insurance networks that spread the costs fairly. There are state-based pilot projects, assistance to states for medical student loans, funding to expand state centers for the aging, grants to states to improve the health care workforce, and provisions for state alternatives to malpractice lawsuits. And now that the Supreme Court has ruled on Medicaid expansion, there is state flexibility on whether to cover the poorest among us (the cost of which will be covered by federal money).

Finally, and even more fundamentally, there are moral questions at the heart of this debate. For decades society has paid the extraordinary costs—the hidden tax—of emergency room care and chronic illness because our health care “system” does not cover everyone and provides few incentives for wellness and prevention. Rather than bloviate about emotional triggers like “states’ rights” and “federal takeover,” should we not be asking again what truths we hold to be self-evident? 

If it is self-evident that the general well-being of our citizens is important and that life is one of our “unalienable rights,” wouldn't it be the highest form of patriotism to provide all of our citizens with equal access to health care? (Switzerland and Germany do it ... for considerably less than the nearly 20% of GDP it's costing us.) Or are those concepts no longer part of our common mission? Is a basic human good such as healthcare only for those who can afford to pay for it? 

Winston Churchill was “spot on” when he said Americans always do the right thing ... eventually. It just takes us a long time to figure out what that is.

We’ve been trying for a hundred years. We haven’t quite figured it out yet, but the ACA is a step in the right direction.

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For a fascinating contrast in perspectives, see this discussion on CBS between Governors Walker and O’Malley: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7413500n&tag=api

 

Running Off at the Keyboard

• I didn’t watch the political conventions … I don’t like infomercials.
• Suppose you were a politician, and suppose you make stuff up. Oh, wait! I repeat myself.
• When did journalism and fact checking get a divorce?  Even TV news is tabloidesque these days.
• Why do we need a 24-hour news cycle? What happened to the concept of “TMI”?
• Why don’t we hear politicians debating health reform as a moral issue? [OMG! I just used politicians and moral in the same sentence. My bad.]
• It’s morally acceptable to have 40+ million Americans going around without health insurance, right? After all, they can just go to the ER if they need treatment, right? That doesn’t cost me anything, right?
• Someone in Arizona, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, etc. please remind officials like Sheriff Joe Arpaio the meaning of xenophobia? [Did Emma Lazarus even know that word?]
• Will Rogers said, “The American people will forgive almost any weakness, with the possible exception of stupidity.” If he were around today, he might amend that statement.

 

• For example, “We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.” –Rick Santorum, to the “Values Voters” summit last weekend. 

          Oh my! Need I say more? 

• To see this guy on video, go to: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n5oa55EsmI.]
• How ‘bout we do this? We finish this election season then lock the lawmakers in the capitol building. Total news blackout, just like when labor negotiations get serious. All they’re allowed to do is roll up their sleeves and get to work. No C-Span. No news conferences. No press releases. In about 18 months we’ll check on how they’ve done and decide whether to renew their contracts. 

Your homework assignment for today: After you look up Emma Lazarus—hint: “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—go to a dictionary and look up the meaning of mountebank. Use the name of any politician, and the words mountebank, gullible and voters in a sentence.

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Help This Man Find Honest Work – Part Deux

Having thoroughly dissed the Times Magazine’s Chuck Klosterman in yesterday’s posting, let me say this: it is of no great moment whether the author of “The Ethicist” is Klosterman or someone else. I don’t really care because it’s not my problem. And neither is it important whether I agree with the viewpoint expressed. Whoever the author may be, and whatever the comments s/he happens to write, “The Ethicist” does a great service by getting people to think ... assuming that they will.

What sets me off, though, is that Sunday's entry (“Foul Ball”) is typical of much public discourse today: full of blustering opinion and short on fact. Opinions are not facts, no matter how well informed they are. They are like noses: everybody has one. And they are often based on nothing but blind faith, what the Bible calls “the assurance of things hoped for; the conviction of things not seen.”^[1]

It’s because opinions are not facts that we don’t permit witnesses (other than experts) to give opinion testimony in court. It’s because opinions are not facts that my mother hated discussions of religion or politics, both being matters of belief and hope, not provable truth. It’s because opinions are not facts that I refuse to dispute with people on subjects that one or the other of us hasn’t researched carefully.^[2]

 

Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.” – T. Paine   

It’s a sad fact that intellectual discourse has suffered in the age of 24-hour news cycles, sound bites, and social media. Biases, preconceptions and anger tend to trump logic. Critical thinking skills disappear. People forward tripe over and over again on the Internet assuming it to be true. Politicians play to their so-called “base” while stating partial truths or out-right falsehoods.

To counter this type of creeping mendacity, in public affairs especially, “it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”^[3] But apparently being intellectual is not to the liking of some politicians. Former senator Rick Santorum, for example, said college is for snobs. And after the last presidential election another former candidate called an audience of intellectuals a “death panel.”^[4] I assume she was trying to be funny, but who knows? 

Click to enlarge

To be an intellectual today is to be un-American, apparently. But this is actually nothing new; ignorance and anti-intellectualism have plagued us since the first days of the Republic.  (See quote at right.) 

The best argument against democracy “is a five minute conversation with the average voter,” Winston Churchill once said, and he's right.

None of this should prevent people from voicing their opinions, of course, or from voting on the basis of their (uninformed) beliefs. They are within their rights to do so. But unless gullible, ignorant voters make every attempt to get better informed, the situation will only get worse between now and November 6 ... and beyond.

Maybe Chuck Klosterman should write about the ethical implications of that someday instead of worrying about foul balls.

_____

[1] See post of Nov. 1, 2010 concerning faith and the Casey Anthony verdict.

[2] See, e.g., posts of Oct. 19-20, 2010 regarding the Breakfast Bloviator’s opinions on health reform.

[3] Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” N.Y. Review of Books, Feb. 23, 1967.

[4] Sarah Palin, Gridiron Club Dinner, Washington, DC (Dec. 5, 2009).

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_______________________________

“There is not one human problem that could not be solved 

if people would simply do as I advise.”

- Gore Vidal 

(1925-2012)

Help This Man Find Honest Work

I’m starting a personal campaign to help Chuck Klosterman find a new job. For those who don’t know, Klosterman is the latest in a line of writers for “The Ethicist” column in the New York Times Magazine, a parade that began after Randy Cohen was let go in early 2011.

Klosterman is no ethicist. His background is sports and pop culture, having written for Spin magazine, Esquire, GQ, and ESPN’s Grantland.com web site, among other publications.^[1] He was hired by The Times Magazine’s new (2010) editor, Hugo Lindgren, who also has a background of writing extensively about sports and music. What a coincidence.

Okay, so what’s gotten my goat? It was the answer to this ethical question in Klosterman’s column Sunday, the headline of which was “Foul Ball.” As posed by Jeff McNear of Larkspur, California, the question was:

At a baseball game in San Francisco, my friend Fritz managed to catch a foul ball. A kid sitting a few rows behind my friend was also among those scrambling for the ball. Urged on by 50 surrounding fans, my friend gave the ball to the kid. The fans cheered. Not two minutes later, a rival fan showed up and offered the kid $100 for the ball. With his parents’ encouragement, the kid exchanged the ball for the cash. My friend was outraged. Should the kid have refused the cash, split the money with my friend or given all the cash to Fritz?

Klosterman replied that it was “profoundly depraved” to sell the ball. He wrote, “The boy wanted the ball for motives that had nothing to do with its resale value.” It was “an intangible gift … a memento from a live event that can’t be replicated, an expression of camaraderie between two people who (in theory) love the same game, and the physical representation of a unique memory.” 

Baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie. Blah, blah, blah.

In addition to the offense of weepy sentimentality, Klosterman is guilty of assuming facts not in evidence. Here are some things that are missing from his reply:

• We don’t know whether the scenario is described accurately. This is Klosterman’s rendition of what McNear said that his friend told him, so it’s double hearsay.
• Even if the description is accurate, there are some important things we don’t know: how old "the kid" is, for example. Is he seven? Seventeen? It could make a big difference.
• We don’t know why the kid wanted the ball. Even if, as Klosterman assumes, he wanted it for reasons other than resale, we don’t know what those reasons were. Maybe he was going to throw it back on the field because it came from someone on the visiting team.
• We don’t know the economic status of the family. Maybe the parents desperately need the money and the boy knew that.
• We don’t know the boy’s baseball background. Maybe he doesn’t much care about the game, or maybe he’s a player himself and has tons of baseballs at home and doesn’t really need this one.

Facts are essential to any discussion of ethics, and the sketchy details of this case and the insufficient factual analysis make me question Klosterman’s qualifications to be writing an ethics column. I am bothered by his shallow reasoning. I am bothered by his lack of intellectual rigor. And I am bothered that he uses The Times Magazine to express an opinion on something he doesn’t know enough about.

If the scene painted by Mr. McNear were used as a springboard to some witty and insightful social commentary, I could forgive the factual gaps. But Klosterman’s profound conclusion is merely this: “Though the family had every legal right to sell this gift, it was wrong of them to do so.”

He should go back to writing about sports and pop culture.^[2] 

—End of Part One—

(Continued tomorrow.)

____

[1] See http://pages.simonandschuster.com/chuckklosterman.

[2] Apparently, many readers agree: surveys show that only about 20% of them agree with the answers in his column. See http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/how-often-do-readers-agree-with-chuck-klosterman-as-the-ethicist/.

On Change, Oceans, and Weird Time

"California here I’ve come,

Right back where I once was from."

Yes, I’ve made a big move, and various aphorisms come to mind:

• Change is the only constant
• Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
• When you’re finished changing, you’re finished
• Change is good, but dollars are better

Whatever the apt expression, I’ve made this transition and am settling in once again to the Southern California lifestyle. The beautiful city that I left 36 years ago feels surprisingly familiar. Just a few feet above downtown airplanes still glide down to land beside a bay dotted with sailboats. Balboa Park still harbors the zoo, museums, and the Navy Hospital where I was stationed for a couple of years. And the various city neighborhoods — North Park, Hillcrest, Mission Hills — still have their individual charms.

There are some differences, of course. The downtown, once neglected and blighted, has been revived with condos, skyscrapers, the convention center, and a new ballpark where I got sunburned one recent Sunday afternoon. Gentrification has improved some of the older urban neighborhoods, adding new restaurants, shops, and multiuse facilities to the historic Spanish architecture. And the bus system, awkward at best in the 70s, has been augmented by light rail; I am able to get virtually anywhere without a car. (I sold mine in Atlanta and don't plan to buy another.) 

One constant is the vast Pacific. It continues to loom off Point Loma as big as eternity, and it pushes its marine layer ashore every morning this time of year. “June gloom,” as the locals call it, because the sun doesn’t come out until after 10 a.m.  Egad!

There’s another problem with the Pacific — it seems to be on the wrong side. My internal GPS system orients toward the nearest major body of water. In St. Louis it was the Mississippi; in Chicago it was Lake Michigan; in DC or Daytona Beach it was the Atlantic. The first time I moved here I was 180° off for about three months. 

I was talking recently to my Uncle Fred, a Miami native, and he asked how far east I had to go to get to the ocean from my apartment. I said, “Oh, about 2,200 miles. But if you’re asking how far it is to the Pacific, it’s about five minutes to the west.” I guess I’m not the only one for whom the ocean is on the wrong side. LOL

The other major adjustment I need to make has to do with the clock. Although I’ve lived in nine different states, in my whole life I’ve always been on either Eastern or Central time except for 2½ years. But of course California is on Pacific time. Sports Center comes on here at three in the afternoon! The telecast of an evening baseball game from New York or Boston, for example, ends here about 7:30 p.m. And I will be able to stay awake until the end of a Monday Night Football game for the first time in many years.

Back in the 1970s when one of my Navy friends was transferred from San Diego he wrote me from Norfolk that he was glad to be back on “real time.” Not me; I’m liking Weird Time. It’s a nice change. 

Here are a few more pictures for your viewing pleasure. 

Farmer's market on my block

My apartment complex

View from near my place

My Navy Hospital office building

View of the bay and downtown from Point Loma

Here's my contact info:  4021 Falcon St. #409, San Diego, CA 92103. Phone: (770) 757-1815. Please look me up if you’re ever in the San Diego area.

Fighting The Tyranny of Stuff

Stuff, n: Household or personal articles considered 

as a group. Unspecified material. Worthless objects.

I'm going to be moving next month, and I’m determined to simplify my life. I’m selling my car, donating most of my furniture, and getting rid of “stuff.”  

For years I have schlepped stuff around the country, to nine states and about 20 different addresses. There was always more stuff than I ever really needed, and I seldom if ever used some of it: casserole dishes, candlesticks, folding chairs, patio furniture, a beat-up old armoire, a bulky old television, etc., etc. After one of my Navy moves I found boxes that had stickers on them from three different moving companies … and they hadn’t been opened since they were packed, three addresses earlier. Who needs this much stuff? 

I used to think this stuff meant something important because it reminded me of someone or someplace that I didn’t want to forget. What about those important tchotchkes from Italy or Ireland or Hawaii? I’ll take a picture of them and remember them that way. I don’t need three dozen glasses of various shapes and sizes. And I only use one coffee mug at a time; why do I have eighteen? Is the “Car Talk” mug that I got with a contribution to NPR really all that important? 

How about the extra bed frame for the spare bedroom that I won’t have in my new one-bedroom apartment? Some formerly homeless family can put it to good use if I give it to a charity here in Atlanta.  

The pictures I’ve scanned into my computer; the memories are in my head. They’re better than possessions, and a lot easier to carry. Good-bye to stuff.

This feels good. It’s cathartic. A fresh start in a new place. Effective in mid-June (date TBD) I will be living in the Mission Hills neighborhood of San Diego, CA. (See below.)

 

 

The apartment complex is basically the entire square block from left to right and back behind in the picture. The neighborhood has a bit of a Greenwich Village feel to it. There are some small shops along Washington Street, the east/west thoroughfare in the foreground. And yes, for you eagle eyes out there: there’s a Starbuck’s in the building. (Green sign.)  

I'll post my address when the move has been completed. My phone number will stay the same: 770-757-1815.

"California here I come ...

right back where I once was from."