Thursday, December 28, 2006

Various Congratulatories

During light blogging, and to show how everybody loves either Kung Fu or Monkeys, therefore Kung Fu Monkey has friends on both sides of the spectrum.

Congratulations to Ezra Klein for the big-ass Op-Ed in the LA Times about Universal Health Care. Study after study has shown that Universal Health Care is fiscally more efficient and it's better for corporations and small business. If you're one of our friends locked in 1968, scream "socialism" all you want, but the numbers say you're lying. Come, join us in the 21st Century. There's HDTV. It's cool.

Oh, and for me, small point -- it's the right thing to do. I think it's wrong for you to lose your house when your kid gets cancer. Call me nuts.

Back to Ezra -- seeing as I remember him from a frighteningly short amount of time ago as "that wonky kid up the street at University", his big-stick swinging in the public policy world is impressive. Congrats, you little bastard.

On the other hand, our friend Warren Bell has been recess-appointed a board member for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I worked with Warren back in the day in Hollywood way. Warren writes for the various conservative spots; in fact, his essay defending the term "chickenhawk" fired me up to write "Lions Led By Donkeys", which catapulted me intothe stratosphere of C-list blog fame and is still not only the most read and linked piece here, but is sadly more relevant today than when it was written. (Warren sent me a lovely e-mail thanking me for the immense amount of hate mail he received. Classy guy.)

All this to say: although he does have this odd hobby of hanging out with the wingnuts, I've worked with him, and his priority is making good TV. He is, in point of fact, a fine television writer. Partisan witch-hunting is a Bush Administration trademark, and shouldn't become ours. When somebody pushes an agenda in their media job, like, say, the cretins at ABC, well then they deserve both barrels. Warren is a committed guy and fair guy, and he'll do a fine job in the post.

Virgil Goode, on the other hand, is a primitive scumfuck. Happy Holidays.

26 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amen on the health care front. I wish you the best of luck in getting it done, and hopefully we can learn a few things about sprucing our own system up a bit without accidentally turning back the clock to pre-Tommy Douglas. Heaven knows, we've got more than a few still salivating to make that nightmare happen and call its re-creation righteous.

Anonymous said...

I live in canada, and we have Universal Health care.

When our kids get cancer, we dont lose our house. We lose our kid.

This is because we dont have enough Doctors, Nurses or Hospitals
to provide the kind of health care that society needs.

There has to be a better way than both these extremes advocate.


(ps enjoying BB)

Anonymous said...

Nobody is proposing that the US adopt Canada's system. Canada's system sucks (but is better than Republicans want you to believe, and is better than the US's current system (scary thought)). We'd be much better off with a variant of France's system.

Anonymous said...

If john was telling the truth, you wouldn't be reading this comment.

That's because I would be dead right now.

Peritonitis does that to a person, see. At least, that's what it does to one who isn't put in an hospital bed and sent to an operating room for an emergency appendectomy.

My father wouldn't be around, either, considering his unexpected heart attack. (He sure wouldn't be enjoying an ongoing relationship with a bunch of skilled medical professionals who occasionally fly him out for specialized tests as part of a study.) My cousin, whose forehead got smashed in by a hammer when he interrupted a home robbery... well, he's around too, even if he's found that the pressure in his skull gets a bit high if he doesn't keep talking.

In fact, I really can't think of anyone in my family, or anyone in the families of any of my friends, or anyone in the families of even my merest acquaintances who'd agree with john that they "lost the kid" because they had to rely on Canadian health care. Not to cancer, not to heart disease, not to the saucy kiss of the Stanley Works' finest cast iron being introduced to your dura with swift and certain force, not even to a bad flu.

For a system that "sucks", it's sure cheated funeral home directors in areas of the country ranging from downtown Toronto to rural Newfoundland out of quite a few dollars.

Unknown said...

I've noticed that trend -- Candians bitch about their system until a life-threatening illness occurs, and then can't shut up about how much they love it. Americans brag about having the best health-care in the world until a life-threatening illness occurs, and then they can't shut up about how badly they're getting fucked.

Losing your house in the States is often the upside (fifty percent of all personal bankruptcies in the US are caused by health care costs). If you're one of the 40 million uninsured or forty million under-insured, you're out of luck, aneven if you carry insurance, there's no guarantee your insurance company ust won't up and fuck you. Good luck appealing that.

That said, John has a point in that the single-payer system in Canada is fraying about the edges, and only a similar political/social inflexibility is keeping them from transitioning to a svvier, more efficient French-style system. Hopefully this will evolve.

I recommend the excellent health-care series over at Angry Bear's blog for a good primer. I believe Ezra Klein also did an excellent comparative analysis at one point on his site.

Anonymous said...

The thing is, we don't need a French-style system. The Canadian system isn't collapsing from an excess of demand for health care. (For one thing, it's not collapsing. And even if it was, this wouldn't be the cause.)

The problems are because we've a shortage of supply (of doctors and nurses). And it's not even a lack of manpower. It's just bureaucracy, egged on by health care professionals who fear wage depression and conservative governments who fear widespread satisfaction without privatization.

X percent of the problems with Canadian health care are illusory (I'd set X=90, but reasonable people can disagree). But the rest is because we just aren't licensing enough doctors. And we don't actually have to train more doctors, because they're already here! God, yes, I know it's a tiresome talking point but it turns out to be true: the nation is littered with foreign-trained doctors whose certification to practice medicine in Canada isn't happening quickly enough.

Now, I could do a half-assed job of explaining how all of this fits together, and don't think I haven't tried in the past. But now I know the right thing to do: point you at Ian Welsh, who's damn well betraying his nation by being a reasonably good American-foreign-policy blogger instead of the best health-care blogger in Canada. Take a look through Tilting at Windmills' health care category to find out what he's had to say over the years.

opit said...

This is actually only the latest iteration of Ezra's healthcare wonkery. His site even had its own dedicated health insurance troll because of all the stats he was posting on compartitive health care systems and the need for single payer universal insurability. He's been at it for months.
I often neglect his posts at L.A. Times and TAPPED but had been regular on his personal blog for over a year.
It's actually difficult to find a continuing reliable source of healthcare commentary just as a side issue to one's main surfing.
I find more problems with incompetent medical staff than with insurance issues ( Canada ) and read articles about overworked nurses, etc. Relatives working in healthcare have encouraged me to become active as they think I would have a talent for it, but I find the bullshit factor excessive ( as in must put up with ).

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