Health care is basically socialist

It is time for me to figure out what I’m going to do about Medicare. I’ve been at it for a while each day for ten days now. The easy part is yes, I’m going to enroll in parts A and B. If I don’t I won’t have health insurance in a few months because the company I retired from will automatically yank it. Instead, that company will put a chunk of money in an account and I have to send in receipts to claim it. More paperwork. But simply choosing A and B is the easy part. Medigap? Advantage? A plan with part D separate or within? One website said I had 61 options for one version of Medigap. Another said I had 50 options for Advantage. Yes, I feel overwhelmed. So last night I wrote a note saying that Medicare shouldn’t be this hard. The health insurance industry likes to say that I have a choice! I remember the comment from an American who lived in Britain. How’s this for choice: You get treated. It’s covered. I sent that note to my Congressional Rep. Rashida Tlaib, to Senators Stabenow and Peters, and even to the White House. Today I checked my former employer’s retiree handbook again. There’s a short section about a website (with real people to talk to!) that is a resource for navigating the Medicare complexities. This time I was able to say who my primary care doctor is and the 50 options are now three. That I might be able to manage. It shouldn’t be this hard. Stuart Stevens, who had worked on five GOP presidential campaigns and wrote a book “It Was All a Lie” tweeted:

While standing in line to get vaccinated, I was thinking about the 8 million ads I’d made about how government involvement in medicine was socialized hell. Maybe, just maybe, it was all a lie.

Dave Winer responded:

BTW imho health care is basically socialist. So maybe the mistake was thinking that somehow that’s a bad thing.

Winer linked to an article in Scripting that he wrote that described how health care is socialist. In America we try to fit everything into the Market. Some things don’t fit. And, I add, some things like heath care are incompatible with profit. Dartagnan of the Daily Kos community discussed a report by the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health titled Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era. The short answer, according to Dartagnan:

The consequences were horrific, but they were also entirely predictable.

The report discussed the nasty guy’s COVID response, of course, and also discussed such things as: Income inequality and related regressive tax policies. Large racial disparities in incarceration, education, and housing. The privatization of employee health care. The decline in union membership. Cuts to food and housing subsidies. Gutting environmental regulations. Then there was the nasty guy’s actual response to the pandemic. Dartagnan said one way to show how harmful the nasty guy’s pandemic response was is to look at the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus website. In the national map the US is bright red, even more solidly red than India or Brazil. Yes, there are 29.5 million cases in the US while there are 11.4 million in India and India has four times as many people. But the redness of the map is misleading because in the US there is a dot per county and in Canada there is a dot per province. In some European countries there is a dot per country. So, of course, the US is going to look more fully red. But that’s my only complaint of Dartagnan’s article. The latest Johns Hopkins stats: 120.6 million cases around the world. Close to 2.7 million deaths worldwide. 29.5 million cases in the US. 536.8 thousand deaths in the US. 56.6 thousand new cases today in the US. Back to Dartagnan and the Lancet. Another factor was the winnowing of federal agencies to make them incapable of adequately responding to the virus. Dartagnan wrote:

Trump can fairly be deemed responsible for the COVID-19 related deaths of approximately 200,000 Americans—people who would not have died had this administration followed the practice of other similarly situated developed countries ... our economic “peers,” so to speak.

Laura Clawson of Kos reported:

Rep. Deb Haaland finally made it past Senate Republicans’ special woman-of-color blockade on Biden nominees and was confirmed Monday as secretary of the interior by a vote of 51-40. Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo, is the first Native American Cabinet member.

Another reason why this is a big deal is the Department of the Interior is the one that includes the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Having one of their own heading the department is a great step forward. It is also great to not have a friend of the oil companies in that job. The GOP and many news companies are in a snit because Biden hasn’t given any press conferences in his almost two months in office. David Frum of The Atlantic thinks that’s a good idea. By keeping a low profile he is de-polarizing politics. By letting various secretaries and agency heads speak Biden is showing how government should work and letting people see those who also make decisions. Reporters get more useful info out of the agency heads and are less tempted to try for the viral video. Frum thinks Biden is over-talkative and might not have the self-control for the job. By not talking Biden answers that question. From a week ago – Kerry Eleveld of Kos discussed an important part of the rescue plan recently signed into law, the help it gives to black farmers.

Oppression of America's Black farmers runs long and deep, with them losing more than 12 million acres of land over the past century, much of it since the 1950s. The U.S. government has been responsible for fueling most of that land loss through policies that boosted the buying power of white farmers while denying farmers of color access to credit and loans that are essential to helping people grow their business. Today, just 45,000 of the nation's 3.4 million farmers are Black. A century ago, the country was home to nearly a million Black farmers. The latest farm census also found that the average farm run by an African American is roughly a quarter of the size of the national average for farms—about 100 acres versus some 440 acres.

The rescue package will go a long way to reverse many of those policies.