Texas has spent years trying to steer money...

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Texas has spent years trying to steer money meant to repair hurricane damage housing of low income and disadvantaged owners. They've done the typical republican('t) dance of changing the rules, so people have to apply again and again, changining the disbursement formula, in an attempt to steer the funds to people who hadn't suffered damage. Now, relief is in the hands of a different agency. Another set of delays is sure to follow. Extending the Miseries From Hurricane Ike Three years after the damage from Hurricane Ike, affected Texas homeowners are angry at a state bureaucracy that has paid out less than 10 percent of the $3.1 billion in federal aid it has received. View or comment on Alfred Ingram's post »

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The Mendacity of Nope

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(And the Horse He Rode In On, Part 2)

The majority of Americans oppose the Senate Healthcare Reform bill! Really!

But, When asked where they stand on what's in the bill, they support it, don't think it goes far enough.

So, how did we get here? Does it have anything to do with persistent, unending lies?

I think so.

Death Panels that never were, tax increases that will never be, fines that cannot be assesed, cuts invisble under a tunneling electron microscope are coming. The Republicans stir the dregs at the base of the tea cup, Tea Partiers become even more bitter. A new lie is added ever time things seem to be calming down and the main stream media covers the falsehoods as if they were indistinguishable from the facts.

Afte all, the opposition wouldn't tell bald=faced lies for partisan gain? Would they? Financial gain? Of course not, surrounded by parentheses, prefaced by another not!

It's proof positve that even pygmy elephants, moving as a herd can trample the most needed reform,just for the hell of it,

And the Horse Brown Rode in On. Part 1

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I am sick and tired. I've been uninsured and uninsurable for twenty-five years. The faintest hope of healthcare reform has, at times, been all that stood between pain and insanity. It is the slim piton from which I've clung to life, like a climber clings to a rockface when all other anchors have failed.

I deeply resent the glee the mainstream media seems to feel. Apparantly, they think this is entertainment, so they're covering it like a season of some contact sport, some kind of hybrid of football, debate, WWE and ultimate fighting.

I lost my savings. I don't even have the mrmory of what a`pain free life is like   But, I have a condition , which most people from, if treated in the first few years. Unfortunately, it took over ten years to get a diagnosis. Waking, it burns. Sleeping, my jaw muscles clench so tight that I often wake up wit broken teeth. What about a mouth guard? Remember no insurance. Did you know, in many places even the Medicaid eligible aren't covered for dentistry? Where you are covered, you have to jump through hoops. Ever tried jumping through hoops when you're in so much pain tou ca;t see straight?

People who are trying to kill reform, whatever their reasons, are in fact trying to kill me. Every day without reform shortens my life and diminishes the quality of the life I have remaining. Bad teeth become inflammatipn become heart disease. Causalgia, burning pain, sustained  long enough can chane low blood pressure to high as if you flipped a switch. Inadequetely treated, these will kill. Without reform, tratment is a matter of luck.

But when people dig pits in the trail and camoflage them after lining the sides with punji sticks. They're trying to guarantee bad luck. That/s assault at best. At worst it's murder.

Maybe, I should have title this "And the Elephant Brown Rode in On."

Five Senators Vote Against Public Need

Five Senators Vote Against Public Need:

"Besides Mr. Baucus, two Democrats, Senators Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, voted against both public option proposals. Two other Democrats, Senators Thomas R. Carper of Delaware and Bill Nelson of Florida, voted against the first amendment, but supported the second.
Mr. Carper said he liked Mr. Schumer’s proposal because it “would establish a level playing field” for competition between private insurers and the government plan.
The votes on Tuesday set the stage for a compromise under which the public plan could be offered in states where people could not find affordable private coverage, Mr. Carper said. He and Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, have proposed such a compromise."

Is fear what determines their votes? Right now the bill that came out of the Finance Committee could be titled the Insurance Industry Windfall Mandate because everyone is reqired to get insured, but insurance doesn't have to be affordable and the taxpayer will pay the difference in any case.
Where are the cost controls? Where is any pressure on the Insurance industry to lower their costs or even cut their overhead. Co-ops aren't going to do it because they are too small, by political intent. They're designed to look like an alternative without actually being one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/health/policy/30health.html?th&emc=th

Joe Lies! (Obama Heckled by GOP During Speech to Congress)

This isn't politics.

This isn't policy.

This is the spouse that lost custody accusing the winner of child molestaation, while planning to kidnap the child and go into hiding.

The Health Care Challenge: Sailing Into a Perfect Storm - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com

The Health Care Challenge: Sailing Into a Perfect Storm - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com

Either Americans in the higher income strata must step up to the cashier's window to help subsidize, with higher income taxes, the health care of the most hard-working members of the lower income classes, or the United States will have to evolve toward a noticeable two-tiered or multi-tiered health care system, with bare-bones, low-tech health care for families in the bottom half of the income distribution and increasingly superior, high-tech health care for families in the upper-income strata.

Consider a family headed by two income earners each with a gross wage base of $30,000. One might be a taxi driver, and the other a sales clerk in a department store or at, say, Home Depot.

By "gross wage base" is meant here the sum of all of the debits that an employer makes to the account "Payroll Expense" for an employee. It includes the employee's cash take-home pay, all the income taxes and Social Security taxes and other deductions – for example, the employee's contributions toward health insurance and pensions — withheld from the employee's paycheck, as well as the employer's share of Social Security taxes and the employer's contributions toward the employee's health insurance, pension, vacation pay, sick days and so on. It is a sum that supports all taxes paid by or on behalf of the employee and all fringe benefits earned by the employee, whether formally paid by the employer or taken out of the employee's paycheck.

It follows from this definition of gross wage base that it must support all of the health expenditures made by or on behalf of the family in a given year — that is, the employer's contribution to premiums for the employee's health insurance, the employee's own contribution and the employee's out-of-pocket health spending.

According to the Milliman Medical Index, this total health spending figure for a typical non-elderly American family of four had reached an average of $15,600 by 2008. It had grown at an average compound growth rate of about 8.6 percent from $11,192 in 2004.

To return to our family with an assumed gross wage base of $60,000: If that gross wage base grew by, say, 3 percent per year over the next decade, to $80,600 by 2017, while total family health spending grew by, say, 8 percent per year over the same time frame, to $33,700 by 2017, then about 41 percent of the family's gross wage base would be taken up by health care alone, before any deductions for taxes or fringe benefits. If the wage base grew by 4 percent, health spending still would absorb about a third of the family gross wage base.

These numbers, which are realistic, suggest that before long the gross wage base earned by American households will become too small a donkey to carry the load of the family's spending on health care. It will put before Americans an uncomfortable choice.

It is one of the several unpleasant trade-offs facing President-elect Barack Obama.

Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economist at Princeton.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/the-health-care-challenge-sailing-into-a-perfect-storm/