Healthcare Bill More Likely to Pass Now Thanks to Error by Republicans!

jim kawakami: Blog on NY Times Article http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/health/policy/10health.html?pagewanted=all

It might be a coincidence, but after Senator Coburn (R-OK) taunted the Democrats that the current bill is much worse than the Congressional Federal Employees Healthcare Plan. The most conservative Republican Senator gave the Dems the excuse to Act!

By essentially killing the Public Option and giving Medicare to those uninsured at a higher price than current Medicare patients, it solved two problems, for reasons rarely mentioned in the corporate press/media.

Firstly older workers almost certainly have pre-existing conditions and long-term unemployed, and is a liability for the insurance companies so they would prefer not to have these people on the books.

Secondly many are likely to be unemployed in spite of the easily bypassed age discrimination law. These workers include influential voters who might make a difference in states such as Ohio which has a huge number of White middleclass workers out of jobs and many are now on the breadline. MSNBC showed a very long line of only White middleclass workers picking up food from a Food Bank.

The cost for Medicare is more imagined than factual among these younger than 60 unemployed workers. In fact they may lower the individual costs because they are younger and not as sick.

About two-thirds of the cost of Medicare is among those over 75 years and the highest cost by far of this number is for those terminal patients kept in the hospital an extra few months. Surveys show that most would have preferred to die at home and only their sons and daughters force their parents and grandparents to suffer by not giving them a higher amount of pain killer and sending them home to be loved and cared for at much lower cost. Home Care is much cheaper than hospitals. The Hospital lobby much have argued against home care and has been removed as an option.

An example of the difference in cost in my own case. I had a severe case of an autoimmune skin disease with boils all over my body. Just Ten Days in the hospital cost my insurance company $150,000 excluding all the "extra" costs for me !

When I got a similar case, I made the decision to have home care because of MRSA infection in hospitals with the nurse coming in every other day which my primary care physician changed to daily care. Medicare paid for all of it at an incredibly lower cost! In some patients MRSA seems to never go away entirely.

In a similar manner, abortion during the era of the 1787 formation of our Constitution was very common and done by Mid-Wives, but physicians in the Nineteenth Century wanted the income from this procedure so made it illegal for Mid-Wives to conduct this service. Banning abortion was not done by the Church in Rome, but by Emperor Constantine in the mid-4th century AD at the time abortion was common.

If you read scholarly religious history, power and profit more than God or Christ led to rules over-ruling Christ regarding images and homosexuality. There is no record of Christ banning homosexuality. Now the radical Evangelicals and Catholics quote the Old Testament which has contradictions galore because at least three different authors have been proved by scholars. The Radical Evangelicals in the Nineteenth Century developed a new religion contradicting Christ by ignoring the teachings and inconvenient truths of what Jesus said about Greed and Wealth!

Why are we so religious and fearful? A partial answer might be that many who populated this country survived by being paranoid and violent in much larger numbers than many other countries. Europeans with the same genes are largely not that religious, even Catholics attend church sparsely now because they were not as oppressed as the ones who fled because of religious suppression.

This is a simplistic answer, but I think I am largely right. That is why we spend so much money trying to keep our parents and grandparents alive because they are even paranoid about God's will while some countries in Europe by law or in practice don't abhor euthanasia of terminal loved ones.

WE FEAR DEATH even though religion should have the opposite effect if we truly believe Jesus or other religious scribes and prophets.

Jim Kawakami, Dec 9, 2009, New Blog http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Our Stone-Age Brains Do Not Help Us Survive Future Death Threats Such as Healthcare Disfunction, Global Warming, and Over Population

I grew up at a time after World War II where Americans had been subjected to the constant hate monger racist and fascistic Father Coughlin with the considerable help of government propaganda against over 100,000 Japanese-Americans who developed the feeling the hatred where we could see it almost without words, but just a look.

Black Americans who grew up under de-facto segregation in both the South and North also experienced severe racial discrimination and they can feel it instantaneously too in a way Europeans do not understand.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink shows how the art experts' knowledge gained through experience allows them to see a fake instantaneously before they think about it. Apparently President Obama does not feel racism, or else he is hiding it quite well. Jimmy Carter has felt it and I felt it when I traveled through the South, especially in South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.

NY Times Nicholas Kristof attributes our problem of not being able to react to future events such as the worsening effects of Global Warming such as floods and famines because they will happen in the future because of our Stone-Age Brains. But even in our more modern world as we have seen drastic changes in the population of short beak and long beak birds on the Galapagos, the environment survival requirements changes these populations quite quickly because the type of bird who cannot feed dies off and those who can survive. I suspect similar situations exists for we humans in times of brutal wars and sparse food and shelter.

Native Americans survived very harsh times due to a lack of food so those who survived could live on sparse food and fight well. But the Europeans with modern weapons and deliberate or not spread of small pox easily subdued these fierce warriors.

A similar situation of survival occurred in the lowlands of Scotland and Northern Ireland many of whose immigrants migrated to the Appalachia Mountains and Southern USA and then spread out to other parts of the country and now make up a substantial part of the Confederate and Republican Party. A combination of ferocity and paranoid behaviors combined with religious fervor makes them a difficult opponent to overcome with logic.

(Only about 50 percent of college students can think abstractly. So why do we spend so much time and effort explaining concepts instead of a more concrete manner. I found that even graduate students have this problem. We are the most religious country in the World and far more religious than other industrial states including Italy. Even forty percent of our Academy of Sciences members go to church regularly. It seems obvious that we need to train pastors and priests to communicate to their flocks. We are the most fearful peoples in the world! Jim)

Of course we also have the hurdle that the wealth and power are quite skilled at taking advantage of them to increase their wealth. Money Equals Power as we have seen in the August disruption of Democrats trying to explain the healthcare bill by interested heathcare insurance companies

The many billionaire funded Republican Think Tanks make up the sound-bites Republican politicians use to appeal to the emotions of their supporters. The Democrats must stop trying to be so logical and appeal to the emotional factors that drive Democrats and Independents and ignore what the Republican politicians can contribute. They don't care about what happens to other Americans.

I talk often with working Americans who are intelligent, but enormously ignorant due to a concerted effort by those with Wealth & Power. If given factual information in an easily understandable manner with all of the truth which politicians such as President Obama who is more honest than most, still cannot tell the whole truth. Telling some of the truth is not the whole truth. Sure insuring another 50 million people is going to cost more, but Obama has done a very poor job in explaining how he plans to cut costs without compromising treatment and outcomes. He needs to spend a whole talk explaining this to Americans in simple language.

Jim Kawakami, Sept 16, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com

Our Stone-Age Brains Do Not Help Us Survive Future Death Threats Such as Healthcare Disfunction, Global Warming, and Over Population: NY Times Nicholas Kristof July 02, 2009

Evidence is accumulating that the human brain systematically misjudges certain kinds of risks. In effect, evolution has programmed us to be alert for snakes and enemies with clubs, but we aren’t well prepared to respond to dangers that require forethought.

If you come across a garter snake, nearly all of your brain will light up with activity as you process the “threat.” Yet if somebody tells you that carbon emissions will eventually destroy Earth as we know it, only the small part of the brain that focuses on the future — a portion of the prefrontal cortex — will glimmer.

“We humans do strange things, perhaps because vestiges of our ancient brain still guide us in the modern world,” notes Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon and author of a book on how our minds assess risks.

Consider America’s political response to these two recent challenges:

1. President Obama proposes moving some inmates from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to supermax prisons from which no one has ever escaped. This is the “enemy with club” threat that we have evolved to be alert to, so Democrats and Republicans alike erupt in outrage and kill the plan.

2. The climate warms, ice sheets melt and seas rise. The House scrounges a narrow majority to pass a feeble cap-and-trade system, but Senate passage is uncertain. The issue is complex, full of trade-offs and more cerebral than visceral — and so it doesn’t activate our warning systems. (The Atlantic coast has already seen a measurable increase in average water levels. I recall it is about an inch plus. As we have seen the land ice in Greenland seems to be going into the ocean at a faster and faster rate, well beyond predictions. If all the Greenland Ice melts our coastal cities will be underwater. A German ship is planning to go to Asia via the Arctic Ocean very soon. A first. Jim)

“What’s important is the threats that were dominant in our evolutionary history,” notes Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University. In contrast, he says, the kinds of dangers that are most serious today — such as climate change — sneak in under the brain’s radar.

Professor Gilbert argues that the threats that get our attention tend to have four features. First, they are personalized and intentional. The human brain is highly evolved for social behavior (“that’s why we see faces in clouds, not clouds in faces,” says Mr. Gilbert), and, like gazelles, we are instinctively and obsessively on the lookout for predators and enemies.

Second, we respond to threats that we deem disgusting or immoral — characteristics more associated with sex, betrayal or spoiled food than with atmospheric chemistry.

“That’s why people are incensed about flag burning, or about what kind of sex people have in private, even though that doesn’t really affect the rest of us,” Professor Gilbert said. “Yet where we have a real threat to our well-being, like global warming, it doesn’t ring alarm bells.”

Third, threats get our attention when they are imminent, while our brain circuitry is often cavalier about the future. That’s why we are so bad at saving for retirement. Economists tear their hair out at a puzzlingly irrational behavior called hyperbolic discounting: people’s preference for money now rather than much larger payments later.

For example, in studies, most Americans prefer $50 now to $100 in six months, even though that represents a 100 percent return.

Fourth, we’re far more sensitive to changes that are instantaneous than those that are gradual. We yawn at a slow melting of the glaciers, while if they shrank overnight we might take to the streets.

In short, we’re brilliantly programmed to act on the risks that confronted us in the Pleistocene Age. We’re less adept with 21st-century challenges. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/opinion/02kristof.html?ref=opinion