Commercial Manipulation Campaigns

Is there a major election happening? I thought smear campaigns and negative commercials on TV only showed up during major election season. Apparently, that is no longer true.

It's instructive, I think, to analyze the tactics of these lobbyist commercials. Now, I'm going to take on an anti-public option ad, but to be fair, I have to admit that there exists the possibility that some pro-public option ads might be doing the same thing. I haven't looked as deeply into them, because they are stating what purport to be facts I find important, like the salaries paid to CEOs of insurance companies, the rates at which premiums advanced in comparison to average household income, etc.

The ad I have in mind is by the group "Conservatives for Patients' Rights". It's the NO GUARANTEE ad. You know, lists things that are not explicitly guaranteed by any of the pending legislation in congress that include the so-called public option, implying that the intentions of the president and those democrats who favor a public option are trying to deceive us, with respect to this subject.

Ok, let's examine the 'public option' pending legislation vs. the status quo.

1. We are not guaranteed that we will be able to keep the doctors we have now, in any pending legislation. It might be noted that under the status quo, none of us is currently guaranteed that we can keep our current doctor. Any number of things could change that would require us to change our current doctors, like the death or retirement of said doctors, or relocation. The implication is that it will be due to no. 4, because somehow it would be worse to have to change for that reason, as opposed to any other reason.
2. Pending legislation does not guarantee that we won't wait longer for medical care. That's right. In fact, nothing could make such a guarantee. We've all heard stories of the insurance companies that make up the status quo denying coverage or delaying pre-approval to the point that the medical care becomes passe, given the progression of disease in the mean-time.
3. Pending legislation doesn't guarantee that there won't be rationing of healthcare. It's called triage. It only comes into play in extreme situations, anyway, and nothing can guarantee that such a rationing will not be needed someday. My understanding is that pending legislation also does not include provision for rationing healthcare, so we have, surprise, surprise, a red-herring here.
4. PL doesn't guarantee that you won't lose your current insurance. Neither does my benefits package at work. In any given year, my HR department might contract with another insurance company because they give a more affordable deal. That could mean lots of things, including an overall decrease in benefits or, sometimes far worse, a decline in the quality of service. So, the status quo doesn't guarantee it any better.

Overall, what we see here is that pending legislation does not guarantee 4 things that are also not guaranteed by the current status of our nation's healthcare situation. However, we are to believe, according to the commercial that a PUBLIC OPTION could lead to GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTHCARE. They want us to hear 'equals' instead of 'could lead to,' which words are, by the way, spoken about quite as quickly as the words in all caps. This way we don't examine the tenuousness of their claim. Yes, a public option could lead to government-run healthcare, but it doesn't have to. My purchasing a mainly orange plaid shirt could also lead to government-run healthcare, but it isn't very likely. This is not to say the two possibilities are equally as likely, but you have to remember, the people who support big insurance paid for the 'no guarantees' ad., so they're not really concerned for your guarantees. They're concerned about their profits, which is not, in itself, a bad thing. When you try to manipulate public opinion to favor your own profitability, however, that is a bad thing.

I am not unaware that an equal mischaracterization could be at play in the 'how to get rich in the healthcare insurance business' commercial could be at play, engineered this time by those who favor a public option. My question is, how would these people gain from there being a public, non-profit option, except through the provision of healthcare coverage at more affordable prices, and increased competitive pressure upon medical insurance companies to trim their costs, so as to be able to offer more affordable rates and continue to make a profit for the owners of the companies. It doesn't make sense that these folks would gain much else.

Ultimately, I bet that the 'public option' debate is a bit of political misdirection engineered by the insurance industry (the largest single industry lobby in America, by the way) to avoid the other aspects of pending legislation, namely those provisions that will force them to pay the benefits they supposedly offer to those who pay premiums. That's going to put a dent in some CEO's multi-million dollar salaries, not to mention other corporate executives.

Will a public option ruin medical insurance? I doubt it.

Do I really know? No.

Does anyone?

Healthcare in the US

I've held back for a long time from putting anything up regarding the healthcare debate now raging in our nation. I had to deal with my own inner raging debate first. In that, I realized what the main issues are.

Sobering Up: No Drunk Healthcare Policy Makers
First of all, before we can even begin to come to a real solution to the healthcare issue, we have to rid ourselves of passions, or at least (more realistically) the control we often let our passions have over our mouths and hands. This is a serious issue that requires sober consideration and sober judgment. In the grip of passions, raging hither and yon about whichever aspects of this issue seems most important, we act like drunk people. I don't want drunk people making decisions about public policy at all, let alone something as important as our nation's healthcare system. So, we have to let go of the passions. Everybody take a deep breath, and understand that the passions come from an internal delusion that we, as individuals, can actually control anything. From my personal perspective, I have to accept whatever reality faces me as 'the way it is,' and I don't get to choose the details of that which is beyond my control.

Universal Access to Health Care: What Is It, Really?
Ok, that having been said, there are some fundamental values at stake in this debate, and we have to order them. I put the common good of all people at the top. It is in everyone's interest that everyone gets good basic healthcare, whether or not they can personally afford it. The dignity of the human person, created in the image and likeness of God, demands this. Just like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is a right of every human person to receive reasonable healthcare, and it is a duty of every human person do contribute to the provision of healthcare for all. Reasonable healthcare, by the way, does not include many things that some would like to see included. For instance, abortion, the willful intervention for termination of pregnancy, is in no sense 'health care.' It obliterates the health of one human being, the developing baby. In those extremely rare instances when pregnancy is threatening the life of the mother, it is an emergency intervention, much the same as shooting a lion rushing to attack. It's much more serious than shooting the lion, because it's a human being, but the commonality is that you have a non-culpable life being terminated to save the life of another. In most cases, you do not have a viable baby to save, or else an emergency c-section would be the solution.

For a more instructive example, we could justly ask whether organ transplantation should be universally provided. It is not necessarily the case that an organ transplant would qualify under the 'reasonable' provision of healthcare, because this is an extraordinary procedure aimed at restoring health or preventing death, which may or may not succeed. Every human being is going to die. Sometimes the best response we can make is compassionate palliative care to reduce the suffering involved in dying. On the other hand, if we can afford, together, to make sure every person has access to the level of healthcare that involves organ transplants, why not do it?

Reforming Benefit Provision
Another huge aspect of this issue is the reform of our current systems of health insurance and medicare. I would be willing to bet, by the way, that if we can agree to address this issue with good solutions, the provision of healthcare for all would become much easier. Nobody questions today whether health insurance companies have been guilty of frivolously denying claims for medical care, nor that this has resulted in serious harm to individuals who had every right, once you dispense with the truly malicious fine print provisions some companies put in their contracts, to receive benefits to cover the needed medical care. No one would deny that medicare, though it does, overall, do a good job of covering the medical expenses of our senior citizens, would benefit greatly from major reform, reducing significantly the cost of providing that medical care. It isn't much of a leap to be concerned that any government-run 'public option' might involve increased waste of time and money in the provision of medical care. The solutions to this significant issue are not simple, either, because of the repercussions any of them will have in our economy. Anyone who denies the issue or oversimplifies it is either not thinking clearly, or is being willfully deceptive and manipulative. This issue gets even more clouded, because it is thoroughly polluted with the manipulations of lobbyists, representing the insurance industry or whatever groups are advocating for socialized medicine.

Socialized Medicine?!?
Then there is the philosophical issue of whether we ought to have socialized medicine at all. Some would have us believe that socialized anything cannot coexist with capitalism or democracy. This is clearly not true. First of all, in America, we have both public and private educational systems. While the private schools generally produce more highly educated people, the public schools keep the vast majority of the rest from being illiterate, and give every person in our country the opportunity to become as educated as he or she wants to become. Many people have graduated from public schools with a fine preparation for undergraduate studies, and have become highly successful citizens. A large number of people would like for public education money to be dispensed in education vouchers so that parents would have more choice with regard to participation in the private or public schools, but this would still be a buy-in to the public system. So, in some ways, our own American experience demonstrates that socialized provision of services can coexist with private provision of services, and have a very positive impact on society.

In like manner, many other countries (more democratic than ours) have socialized provision of medical services which work very well. They don't work perfectly, but if we're honest, neither does our mostly private system. I am reminded of a commercial shown on the evening of President Obama's address to the nation, through an address to a joint session of congress. It was a Canadian woman who was sharing one of the so-called horror stories of the Canadian healthcare system. She would have had to wait for a serious procedure much longer than she was willing to wait, had she not been able to afford to come to the US and have the procedure done here. She was, however, able to get the service she wanted (as a non-doctor, I can't say whether she needed the procedure in the timeframe she desired), because she was able to afford it in the US. If she had been unemployed, homeless, etc., however, she would have had the exact same experience of Canadian healthcare, which is to say that she would have been able to get regular medical care that picked up on her need for a procedure, and would have been able to get that procedure in a particular timeframe. Here in the US, the preventive care would not have been available to her in this situation. The only thing that might have happened here, is that she would have been taken to an emergency room, perhaps to be revived long enough to discover it was too late for anything to be done at all, and then to die just the same. I think that the Canadian woman should have been able to procure the medical procedure she needed privately in Canada. Perhaps the coextistence of socialized and private provision of healthcare is the answer.

The Christian Perspective
There are many different solutions reasonable people can generate to solve this issue, but first, we have to agree that we want to solve the issue. The value of the human person, and the inherent right to healthcare is preeminent. This right trumps all other considerations. What has been most disturbing to me personally is the number of people who claim to be Christians, whose first response is, "Why should I have to pay for it?" Not only does this contradict the thrust of the both the Old and New Testaments, everything in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the teachings of Jesus himself, as portrayed in the gospels and then as handed on in the apostolic letters of the New Testament, it isn't even good citizenship. Such an attitude is, given the scope of our history, un-American. We've always believed in coming to the aid and defense of our fellow man (or woman). Sure, it may mean that I can only afford one TV in my house because I'm paying higher taxes, but when did that become a value higher than serving my fellow Americans?

Government Provision vs. Faith Based Initiatives
More reasonable are the people who say that, while we would like for all people to have access to healthcare, whether through affordability or charity, we don't want the government getting its hands on healthcare, because they will ruin it. As I've hopefully demonstrated above, while this is a reasonable concern, it need not keep us from doing something. We just need to find an American way to do it, one that doesn't dismantle capitalism, one that doesn't increase the cost of healthcare through the imposition of layers of inefficient government bureaucracy. However, when this becomes an excuse to put off action on reforming our national healthcare system, I begin to doubt the sincerity of those who posit this claim. I have had people argue that if the government can prove it is able to find the money by reducing waste and fraud, then let them do that before taking on the provision of healthcare. This is the wrong attitude. We can't wait. Some of these people also advocate for the use of faith-based initiatives as the answer. I agree, in principle, that this is a good answer, but put back to them the same response. Let the faith-based initiatives take care of the situation. Once they have succeeded in providing healthcare for all, then the government provision will cease being used, because the faith-based system will be much better, and the government system can be dismantled. It's a reasonable position, and one that this son of the "Show Me State" believes is the wisest. Perhaps having socialized medicine will be the spur that finally gets so-called people of faith to put their money where their mouths are. I don't bear them (since I'm one of them) any ill-will, and would like to see us succeed, but many more of us are going to have to embrace a less affluent life-style and contribute more to the cause if we want our message to have any validity. We're going to have to show the nation that we can provide for those who need before the nation relinquishes its responsibility to 'promote the general welfare' in whatever manner seems most likely to succeed.

Final word: we have a responsibility to see to it that all and each of us can get the healthcare we truly need, when we need it, no matter what our current economic status. How we do that is up for grabs, but we have to do it, or else we must stop claiming that the American people care anything about the well-being of anybody.

Bumpaholism?!? Really???

As I was getting ready to head out the door this morning, I caught a story on the Today Show asking whether being pregnant could be addictive. The stated questions in the story involved wonderment at why so many women were getting pregnant up to '3 and even 4 times.' The telejournalistas and their guests were exploring the possibilties of feminine self-medication with pregnancy, warning about the 'wrong reasons' to become pregnant. I almost choked on my coffee.

The jarring bit of the story was not the surface content, discussion of the opinion that one should not go about getting pregnant in order to solve problems, that many aspects of pregnancy, including biochemical and social benefits can be very pleasant, and perhaps addictive, etc. It's true, just about any good thing in life can be overdone, or done for the wrong reasons. People can become addicted to the sensation of eating quite apart from the nutritional requirements of our bodies. Using anything, including pregnancy, as a 'fix' for problems in our lives we ought to address more directly, such as relational problems (unhappy marriage, troubled relationship, lonliness), depression, etc., creates new problems. Besides, it seems like a total 'nuclear option' to become pregnant in order to stitch together a broken marriage or a failing relationship. I think we have examples of how our national narcissistic search for 'self-realization' can lead to the bizzare situation wherein a woman gets pregnant quite apart from any relationship with a man, in order to attain to a certain sense of self-fulfillment, which is just as bad as using pregnancy as a drug or relational splint. The Today Show producers, or at least their guests had a good point: if one is going to choose to become pregnant, it should be for the right reason--intentionally to bring a new life into the world.

The problem with this morning's discussion is that the entire question of becoming pregnant has been thoroughly divorced from the familial context created when a man and woman unite for life in the sacred bonds of matrimony. The assumption underlying the conversation is not merely that it's ok for people to engage in sexual activity without being well-disposed toward becoming pregnant; we left that frontier behind decades ago as a nation. The assumption is that becoming pregnant is no longer seen as just the natural consequence of sexual activity (which we could optimistically refer to as love-making, were it not the case that much of what happens sexually between two (sometimes more) human beings today is more about mutual libidinal self-gratification than the self-donation genuine love-making expresses). The assumption is that a reasonable, well-balanced woman only becomes pregnant because she has decided (chosen), for whatever reason, to bring a new life into the world at this particular point in life. Implicit in this 'choice' script, by the way, is the legitimacy of a 'choice' at some point not to remain pregnant until the pregnancy reaches a natural conclusion.

For a very long time, pregnancy was seen as the natural development of successful love-making. I'm not denying that pregnancy can also be the result of some rather tragic things, but that fact does not negate the reality that love-making naturally begets new life (which is the most important aspect of pregnancy, I'm sorry to have to make clear). It's one of the most beautiful aspects of human living, not just a clinical medical condition characterized by differing hormones, or a social reality characterized by extra attention and tenderness. It should set us back and set us thinking that merely 100 years ago, pregnancy was routinely accepted as the result of sexual activity. In fact, most people considered it a blessing, a cause of great joy, something to be looked forward to as a normal aspect of marital relations. Pregnancy was seen and accepted, quite correctly, as part of the natural reality of human sexuality.

While one could get into questions of sexual morality, and such a discussion is certainly legitimate, no matter how much our society pushes for a laissez-faire attitude toward sexual behavior, I don't think we have to go there in order to make this point. Almost everyone these days, excepting the 'Bigs' (Big Oil, Big Pharmeceuticals, etc.), acknowledges that behaving in ways that correspond to the natural design (whether accidental or intelligent) of our bodies and the rest of the natural world is preferable to excessive artifical interference. We desperately need to begin having that attitude toward human sexuality. Taking such a truly natural, and perhaps even contemplative, approach toward human sexuality would go a long way to healing troubled relationships. It would tend toward minimizing the emotional tragedy so often experienced today when people engage in sexual activity with uncommited partners, with whom they have no intention of raising children. It would tend toward reducing the phenomenon of 'unwanted' children, and thus the heinous action of procured abortion. Even better, this approach would tend toward the development of a greater concentration of happy, emotionally balanced human beings, more likely to happen given a higher concentration of people who see pregnancy and parenthood as something to be joyfully anticipated within the experience of lovemaking, and without which sexual activity would not be worthwhile.

With regard to the stimulus for this blog entry, the telejournalistic media 'article' about pregnancy sought without the procreation and rearing of children as the main intention, I agree that no one should seek to become pregnant for the wrong reasons. In fact, I would say that no one should seek to become pregnant at all, as it's own primary end. Married couples, by which I mean a man and a woman, should seek to express their self-donative love toward each other in the way they naturally have since the dawn of the human family, joyfully anticipating the possibility that they may be blessed with the gift of new life

Finally, the point to be made by launching this blog is that we should all listen carefully and critically for the assumptions that underlie the presentation of media stories and other cultural and political phenomena, because those unspoken assumptions can shape the way we think, often going against our own convictions.