Iraq War Vet Accused of Baby Rape

By Cernig

WTF? Yes, I know this is an isolated instance - but even one isolated instance of such a crime, coupled with persistent reports of other problems, suggests there's a huge job of work to be done on returning vet's PTSD and mental health issues.

A former Army paratrooper who served two tours of duty in Iraq has been ordered tried on charges of raping and critically injuring a 3-month-old girl.

Kirk Coleman is charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct and first-degree child abuse, charges that carry up to life in prison.

Authorities say the then-27-year-old Coleman attacked the baby Sept. 14 in Jackson County's Blackman Township, about 65 miles west of Detroit.

The girl sustained brain damage and 17 broken bones and is undergoing therapy. District Judge R. Darryl Mazur ruled Tuesday there's enough evidence to warrant a trial.

Coleman remains free on a $100,000 bond.

For too long, America as a whole and the pro-war Right in particular has had it's colective head in the sand over these pressing issues of veteran care. You can't "support the troops" by dropping them like broken puppets when their usefulness is over.

And another thing - does anyone doubt that if this allegation concerned a Muslim or an illegal immigrant the Malkinites would already be all over it like flies on s**t? And accusing Lefties of being friends of barbaric criminals if they didn't follow suit.

Which Democrat has the better health insurance plan?

By Libby

This is an important debate where I could certainly use some help. I find myself buffeted between the spin of the two camps to the point of vertigo. Mike Lux at Open Left scared me with this post about Obama's health care advisor.

Cooper, a leader of conservative Dems on the health care issue, instead of working with us, came out early and said universality was unimportant, and came out with a bill that did almost nothing in terms of covering the uninsured. He quickly became the leading spokesman on the Dem side for the insurance industry position, and undercut us at every possible opportunity, basically ending any hopes we had for a unified Democratic Party position. I was never so delighted to see a Democrat lose as when he went down in the 1994 GOP tide.

Obama truly doesn't care about comprehensive health care reform or universal coverage, and that the health care package you would propose if President would be a conservative, pro-insurance industry bill.

Ron Chusid counters with a long post that should also be read in full but he quelled my anxiety somewhat with these grafs.

To be precise on this, Obama’s plan might not be called universal as people have the option not to participate. However if Obama’s plan is not considered universal, then Clinton’s plan could not be called universal either as not everybody obeys government mandates. Robert Reich has argued that Obama’s plan would actually cover more people:

She says his would insure fewer people than hers. I’ve compared the two plans in detail. Both of them are big advances over what we have now. But in my view Obama’s would insure more people, not fewer, than HRC’s. That’s because Obama’s puts more money up front and contains sufficient subsidies to insure everyone who’s likely to need help – including all children and young adults up to 25 years old. Hers requires that everyone insure themselves. Yet we know from experience with mandated auto insurance – and we’re learning from what’s happening in Massachusetts where health insurance is now being mandated – that mandates still leave out a lot of people at the lower end who can’t afford to insure themselves even when they’re required to do so. HRC doesn’t indicate how she’d enforce her mandate, and I can’t find enough money in HRC’s plan to help all those who won’t be able to afford to buy it. I’m also impressed by the up-front investments in information technology in O’s plan, and the reinsurance mechanism for coping with the costs of catastrophic illness. HRC is far less specific on both counts. In short: They’re both advances, but O’s is the better of the two. HRC has no grounds for alleging that O’s would leave out 15 million people.

Health insurance is a major issue for me. Since I left the law firm to help out my family, I'm now a single payer, self-insured. The insurance company raised my rate to $750 a month this year, a $160 jump. I need more affordable health insurance, as do the millions who are already priced out. Frankly, I don't have much hope that either candidate will buck the insurance industry enough to really help us but this is one place where the difference in policy really matters to me.

So maybe the policy wonks who read us can help me out here. Is Reich right? Is Obama's plan better or is Bob's opinion colored by the bad blood between himself and the Clintons?

Dutch Woman Faces Murder-By-Abortion Charge

By Cernig

Is this insane or what?

A Dutch woman is being prosecuted for murdering her unborn child in an unprecedented case after she travelled to Spain for an abortion when she was already 27 weeks pregnant.

Today a judge rejected the 24-year-old woman's request for an injunction ordering an end to the Dutch murder probe, her lawyer Gerard Spong said.

Spong believes his client has done nothing wrong because Spain has a provision in its abortion legislation that allows late-term abortions, "if there is a psychological need for it," he said in a telephone interview.

"My view was and is that as long as Spanish judicial authorities do not make any decision that this woman has committed an offense ... the Dutch judicial authorities should abstain (from investigating)," he added.

Abortion is legal in the Netherlands up to the 24th week of pregnancy and it is extremely rare for Dutch authorities to file murder charges linked to such a procedure. The fact that the woman is being prosecuted for an abortion carried out overseas makes the case unprecedented.

I mean, wtf? I know the E-Christian crowd will be happy about this, but is this really the way the rest of us want to go?

California's ambitious health care reform dead

by shamanic

Swampland calls this the Underplayed Story of the Day, and I have to agree: California's legislature has killed the ambitious $14.9B health care reform plan that would have created a pretty universal system in the state.

If memory serves, Tennessee's far narrower CHIP program fell victim to the last recession, so it isn't as though this kind of thing is unexpected when the economy tanks. I won't even pretend to understand California's current budget crises, but I can guess that the broader economic woes in the country offer legislators little hope of money problems magically fixing themselves.

I remember welcoming this plan when it was introduced largely because it appeared to be backed by a broad coalition of groups representing health care, businesses, and people. That approach, even though this plan failed, will be required for any substantive change at the state or national level, and I do have to wonder whether this program would have survived were the economy not in tailspin mode.

Pentagon Forced To Reveal Human Cost Of War

By Cernig

The Pentagon has been forced to reveal the cost in wrecked lives of the War on Terror, after a FOI request by Veterans for Common Sense.

The US has suffered more than 72,000 battlefield casualties since the start of the war on terror in 2001, a Freedom of Information request has revealed.

The query by the campaigning Veterans for Common Sense organisation shows that 4372 American soldiers have died and another 67,671 have been wounded in action, injured in accidents or succumbed to illness in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The veterans' group had to force the US Defence Department to release the figures by persuading judges to uphold their FoI rights.

A second request to the Veterans' Administration, the government-funded body responsible for taking care of ex-servicemen and women, showed 263,909 soldiers with experience of the two 21st-century wars have so far received treatment for everything from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to the aftermath of amputated limbs.

It also showed 52,375 veterans had been diagnosed with PTSD and 34,138 have received approval for disability claims for the psychological disorder. As of October 31 last year, 1.6 million Americans have been deployed overseas since 2001.

Harvard University estimates the cost of caring for Iraq and Afghan veterans over the next 40 years will amount to between £125bn and £350bn, depending on the long-term effects of trauma.

Those are really big numbers. Over quarter of a million servicemen, women and their families negatively impacted by medical issues alone. Somewhere between $250 and $700 billion in long term medical costs. [Ed note - Libby pointed out that in my original text here I hadn't converted pounds to dollars. The exchange rate is roughly $2 to the pound.] More than 72,000 dead and physically imjured. McCain and others are saying 10 years more of this, 100 years more of this...

And as is often the case, it's the foreign media rather than US outlets who are taking notice. This report is from Scotland's Herald newspaper.

(Hat Tip - Ken)

Racing to the bottom

One of the core components of the failed strategy to sell Social Security privatization was an explicit intergenerational argument that the short term costs of Social Security would be borne by younger workers who would have no expectation of ever seeing any money from Social Security. This explict strategy failed, although we still see significant sneering among people my generation about Social Security. However Social Security is not the only place where there is an anti-gray power strategy in place; healthcare and health insurance is another area where explicit inter-generational warfare and the expectation that the social contract is either currently invalid or will soon be invalid.

USA Today reports on the trend of companies ending their group insurance plans and paying a small flat fee to their employees and hoping that they can find insurance in the individual market. It is not that bad of a deal for people in very good health and short time horizons, but a horrendous deal for anyone with any pre-existing conditions, intermediate term medium to high cost underwriting profiles, or long time horizons:

As health insurance costs continue to rise, some employers are adopting a controversial new approach: ending group coverage and giving employees $50 to $200 or so a month to help them buy their own.

The shift is touted as a lower-cost way for employers to offer workers some kind of health coverage, while making smaller and more predictable financial contributions toward that coverage. Like other companies considering the switch, Ilios will pay a portion of employees' medical costs into tax-free accounts that workers can tap. It also will provide a link to an independent website where workers can compare price quotes from a variety of insurers.....

Critics say the change would end the long-standing, implicit social pact to provide coverage to sick and healthy workers alike in favor of a more Wild West, go-it-alone approach that could benefit young and healthy workers but leave those older and sicker unable to get medical insurance.

That's because ending group coverage removes a key protection in group insurance plans. Insurers cannot reject members of group plans for health reasons, and everyone in the group pays the same premium.

In most states, insurers can reject individual applicants for health reasons and can charge widely varying premiums based on the applicant's age, health history and other factors. Only in a handful of states, such as New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey, must insurers sell coverage to everyone, regardless of their health....

Like some other employers contacted, Trikolas says he doesn't expect his employees, who are mainly in their 20s and 30s, will have a problem qualifying for individual insurance. If any do, he says the company will help them find coverage.....

Canopy's Kashyap says most people can get insurance. Those who cannot, he says, should be looked upon like bad drivers, who have to pay more for auto insurance. He expects health insurers, possibly with the help of government or employers, ultimately will develop coverage for higher-risk people.

This strategy is great for someone like me. I'm male (so I can't get pregnant), no pre-existing conditions, young enough that I have a good probability of staying healthy for a while, old enough that I am not inclined to be particulary stupid anymore and wouldn't mind getting a couple extra bucks in my paycheck. But there is a chance that I'll get hit with a cancer diagnosis tomorrow, however small that may be, and I could be hit by another car again. At the same time, I expect to get old and start to run down a bit.

Insurance in this case is a long term bet that things will even out instead of attempting to cash out today and look for assistance as soon as there is a problem in the future. I'll pay in a little more than my expected annual expense this year, and get a bit more out when I'm 55.

However the short term gain of wedging a young workforce against an older workforce will lead to an intensified incentive for older workers and voters to exert their gray power as the median voter is significantly older than the median American. As the social time horizons shrink, the incentive for all interested parties is "I've got mine (today), so screw you." And in that case, younger people will get screwed politically.

SWAT outrage of the week

By Libby

As I often say, when we allowed the civil rights of drug consumers to be abridged because who cares about druggies anyway, it would come back to haunt us. The government won't stop there; they'll just keep pushing the envelope and here's a case on point. This one wasn't over drugs, it was about the refusal of medical care.

Nearly a dozen members of a police SWAT team in western Colorado punched a hole in the front door and invaded a family's home with guns drawn, demanding that an 11-year-old boy who had had an accidental fall accompany them to the hospital, on the order of Garfield County Magistrate Lain Leoniak.

The boy's parents and siblings were thrown to the floor at gunpoint and the parents were handcuffed in the weekend assault, and the boy's father told WND it was all because a paramedic was upset the family preferred to care for their son themselves.

The basic story here is the kid fell down and hit his head. He comes from a poor family living in a trailer park in Glenwood Springs, Colorado and is one of six of ten siblings still living at home with his parents. One suspects they can't afford health insurance.His father was a medic in Vietnam and opted to take the kid home instead of to the hospital.

Apparently a witness to the fall called an ambulance anyway, and the paramedics showed up at the house uninvited and were allowed to check the boy out. They found no evidence of traumatic damage but wanted to take the boy in to the hospital for testing. The father refused.

The next day social services showed up and examined the child. They took no action at the time. Now two days later...

[F]ollowing an afternoon shopping trip to town, the family settled in for the evening, only to be shocked with the SWAT team attack.

The sheriff said the decision to use SWAT team force was justified because the father was a "self-proclaimed constitutionalist" and had made threats and "comments" over the years.

However, the sheriff declined to provide a single instance of the father's illegal behavior. "I can't tell you specifically," he said.

"He was refusing to provide medical care," the sheriff said.

Now to begin with, the estimated population of Glenwood Springs in July 2006 was 8765. Why the hell does a town of that size even need a SWAT team? They don't and if not for the forfeiture laws, they wouldn't have been able to afford one.

In the second place, the father made a decision that all too many uninsured families are forced to make. He had to balance the medical need against the financial debt he would incur by playing it safe. He was within his rights to make that decision on the side of being able to feed his family instead of paying huge hospital bills. Finally, Radley has an update and "as it turns out, the kid was fine. After the raid, a doctor examined him, and told him to drink some fluids and take a Tylenol." So the father made the right call.

Which leaves us to ponder justifying the raid because the the father is a "self-proclaimed constitutionalist." I take that to mean that the dad values his privacy and doesn't want the government sticking its nose into his business. One guesses he doesn't like cops and the cops don't like him. But whatever the particulars are in this case, it should be a matter of great concern to all of us when our government can forcibly enter our homes and enforce their own judgements on what should be entirely private decisions. Isn't that the definition of a police state?

[h/t Peter]

Healthcare, volatility and outliers

Tyler Cowen, a liberterian economist offers a grudging quasi-endorsement and an interesting analysis of single payer healthcare that I think is wrong and limited on program design, political economy and pragmatic grounds.

Government-dominated health systems, insofar as they work well (a number of them do), succeed simply by lowering costs. Health care has a murky relationship to human health, pharmaceuticals and broken limbs aside. A version of the single-payer system, as might be adopted in the United States, would not lower costs. We would be raising taxes and lowering medical innovation to give poor people a good deal more financial security and a slight bit more health; that is the relevant trade-off. [emphasis mine]

Please note the highlighted sections. He concedes that single payer systems have and can work, and he notes the basic mechanism of them working; they reduce baseline costs and there is evidence that they reduce trend cost increases as well. However he is saying that the US single payer model could/would not do this. That is a question of program design and a decent program implementation model. The Republican Party has no interest in designing such a system, but the Democratic Party has an interest in designing a system that delivers decent or better results at reasonable costs. The most recent example is the debate on whether or not Medicare-D should be subsidizing private insurers to such an extent that it costs Medicare more to send someone to a private plan than to keep them in Medicare. Also look at the program design in Medicare D where the government can not exercise its cost containment power by saying that it will buy drugs from companies at the lowest offered price to US interests, or OECD interests. This is basic program design here, and it is pure technocratic wonkiness to figure this out; it is not complicated.


The average, median, first and third quartile, first and fourth quntile American worker and family has noticed the following economic trends. We have experienced stagnant real wages per individual, greater labor intensity by sending the second member of a relationship into the workforce, more uncertainty concerning retirement income and health insurance, and greater income volatility. Pretty shitty deal overall, especially if you throw in lower savings, and a much weaker social safety net as reserves when exogenous shit happens such as job loss during a corporation wide restructuring. The rewards have concentrated at the top despite the economy and individuals as a whole being significantly more productive today than thirty years ago.

From a political economy/policy perspective the 'best' types of policies are Pareto improvement policies where no one is made worse off under a new policy regime than they would have been under the old regime and at least some people are better off. Most policies on first glance do not provide a Pareto improvement, but once second round impacts and side deals are included, it is theoretically reasonable to compensate the losers within a policy change from some of the winners' gains. For instance, Brad DeLong notes that the universal health care initiative in the Clinton administration was an attempt to compensate lower wage individuals for the increased competition that they would see from a successfully passed and implemented NAFTA. However that political trade-off was quashed. There is a significant amount of compensation owed for previous policy deals, and more accessible, more predictable, and cheaper healthcare for all people is a reasonable pay-off for the reaming the bottom 90% of the population has taken.

And now onto the pragmatic side, and I can wear my professional hat here, as I'm an analyst/evaluator. If I presented the following two graphs to my boss (1st via Barry Ritzholtz , 2nd via Kevin Drum) and said that there were no systemic issues or alternatives that could explain the oddity in inputs and outcomes compared to near peers, my boss would not be too happy with the quality of my work:

Let's just take a quick look at the input variable --- the average expenditure for the United States is massively larger compared to anyone else, while almost everyone else, excluding the outlier of Cuba, is clustered, spending roughly $2,000/capita +/- $1,000. Let's ignore the outcome for a moment until we get to the next chart:



Here the US spends the most but still gets crappy outcomes, while best in category are about 45% in this metric of avoiding deaths through the application of available medical care. And this is very common; in most areas the US spends significantly more than almost any other healthcare system and gets mediocre or worse results. The few areas of above peer performance are either in elective/convienence areas, or in areas of inputs and intermediate processes that have minimal real outcome differences such as the superior US detection and treatment rate for prostrate cancer when the long term death rates per capita from this disease between the US and the UK are virtually identical.

If I go into a meeting with my boss and say that this is how it is, and there are no potential explanations as to why the US spends so much for comparatively mediocre results, I'll get laughed at as it is implausible on its face that the US healthcare system is perfectly optimized to provide good and accessible healthcare to all and that there are few/no areas of currently improvable methods that need to be improved.

If I wanted to argue that the combination of US population profile, implicit race/classism in health care access/effectiveness, screwed up medical school system capping the number of doctors, lifestyle choices and information asymetries have a significant explanatory power, that is a cluster of reasonably related and coherent arguments and understanding of the variance.

However my boss would ask me a very uncomfortable question at this point about non-US group similiarities and how they differ from the US. The first answer I would have to give is that the US is the only nation in this group that overwhelmingly relies on private insurance to pay for healthcare, and that this could skew incentives, and fragment the market and standards as well as produce significantly higher administrative costs that produce no real health outcomes.

So I don't think that shifting to single payer or a bastardized intermediate step towards single payer would just result in a wealth and volatility suppressing transfer to the bottom 90% of the country; although I am fine if that is the actual outcome. I think there are significant baseline and trend costs savings available as well as better outcomes.

National Veterinary Care

by shamanic

(Apropos of nothing at all...) You know, one key segment of the voting public that has not been addressed by any of the candidates is the pet parents of America. All the Dem candidates (and none of the GOP candidates) have comprehensive solutions for human healthcare, but not a one has proposed a single-payer system for veterinary care.

It's a shame that in the Greatest Country In The World (tm), millions of pets lack health insurance. Maybe in 2012, candidates will finally get brave enough to address this crisis.

America's Public-Private Partnership

by shamanic

In case the eggnog induced some amnesia, I'll explain how the "public-private" partnership of the American marketplace works:

Where corporations stand to make great profit, the public (i.e., the government) should never, ever impose any regulation that might cut into that profit. Doing so is, to put it mildly, abhorrent to the wisdom of the American consumer and the very many important shareholders of corporations.

Where corporations are uncertain about profit in the near term, taxpayers (i.e., the government) should extend incentives in the form of cash, land, expertise, security, buildings, tax breaks, etc., to help corporations expand their endeavors, create jobs, and of course, take care of the very many important shareholders of corporations.

Where corporations long ago signed up for a money-losing proposition, say, health care for retirees, the American public (i.e., the government) should just take it over -- and pay for it -- entirely.

(The smart companies never got themselves into such money-losing propositions in the first place, so taxpayers foot their bill and get to buy their crap!)

Teenage sex, lies and statistics

By Libby

After six years of policy based on religious beliefs, the fruits of 'faith-based' sex ed are ripening. The latest statistics show teenage births rose 3% last year. The obvious conclusion is that abstinence-only sex ed is the culprit yet the abstinence-only nannies are claiming this is proof that teaching about safe sex is to blame, apparently because they haven't managed to completely wipe out the fact-based programs yet.

Oddly, "a biannual government survey of high school students found that the percentage of those who said they used a condom the last time they had sex rose to 63 percent in 2005, up from 46 percent in 1991." There's that self-reporting thing again. Considering "sexually transmitted disease rates have been rising, including syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia." one might think those kids are, shall we say, stretching the truth?

This isn't rocket science. Teenagers are going to have sex. They always have and they always will. Why we allow our federal government to spend $176 million annually on abstinence-only education is the only mystery here.

Well this is rather interesting

by shamanic

McClatchy says that today's universal health care plans look an awful lot like Richard Nixon's 1974 universal health care plan.

So if Hillary wins and we implement her plan, will the GOP take credit?

Interesting factoid from the article:

Medical costs continue to outpace inflation, albeit not nearly as fast as they did in Nixon's day.

Hindsight is 20/20 factoid from the article:

But then, according to a 1974 political almanac published by Congressional Quarterly, the AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers lobbied successfully to kill the plan. Unions hoped to get a better deal after the next elections.

And the GOP has been busting unions ever since! All in the name of universal health care! Elephants never forget, of course.

A Massive GOP Sigh Of Stem Cell Relief

By Cernig

Back in 2005, a rightwing blogging friend of mine wrote that the controversy over stem cell research had the potential to disrupt Republican hopes for 2008 by splitting the party.

The titanic clash between Evangelist republicans and non-Evangelist republicans is nigh- (and as rightwing and Christian as I am I'm still a non-Evengelist republican) this will bring it to a head. The titanic clash between spiritualist-luddite conservatives and laissez-faire conservatives is also here, and this is not a throw-away issue. This has life and death and very close to immediate impact. There's no squirming away from this.

If you were listening closely yesterday, the sound was a collective Republican sigh of relief. Steve Benen explains:

Yesterday’s announced breakthrough on stem-cell research is obviously good news for medicine, public health, and scientific advancements. Scientists from the United States and Japan have successfully been able to reprogram skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells. If the promise of these results is true, experts can move forward on embryonic stem-cell research without embryos, thus ending the political and philosophical debate.

...Taking the political argument to the next step, meanwhile, shows that the single happiest people in the country yesterday were Republican presidential candidates, none of whom wanted to explain their opposition to life-saving research that the overwhelming majority of Americans support. Now, it looks like the issue has been taken off the table for the 2008 presidential race, leading to a massive GOP exhale.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that scientists sill want some short-term research on actual embryonic stem-cells, because the research on the new method needs to be tested against the existing model. In this sense, there may still be some fighting left to do.

Steve's correct to say that Bush's claiming credit for pushing this breakthrough by his recalcitrance is ridiculous - especially since, as the WaPo reports,

scientists first had to study embryonic cells to find out how to accomplish the same thing without embryos.

“My feeling is that the political controversy set the field back four or five years,” said James Thomson, who led a team at the University of Wisconsin and who discovered human embryonic stem cells in 1998.

Of course the cheerleaders, like AJ Strata, ignore the inconvenient fact that this advance came from embryonic stem cell research in the first place:

Those who claimed you had to kill young humans to gain access to stem cells are all over themselves trying to claim they were vindicated now that we learn adult stem cells, created from skin cells, will do the job. What a bunch of BS from a group that never grasped the topic in the first place. These fools who tried to leverage their 3rd grade understanding of biology to claim we had to kill people te to get spare parts.

Then again, AJ might have trouble with that 3rd grade biology test himself. He writes that, in his scientific awesomeness, he understands that the single definer of "life" is that it have DNA - "the determinate factor is the DNA in the cells". I assume he will now write a post coming out against all autopsies and cadaver research, since dead bodies have DNA too.

Suffer The Little Children?

By Cernig

From ABC News:

The rate at which infants die in the United States has dropped substantially over the past half-century, but broad disparities remain among racial groups, and the country stacks up poorly next to other industrialized nations.

In 2004, the most recent year for which statistics are available, roughly seven babies died for every 1,000 live births before reaching their first birthday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. That was down from about 26 in 1960.

Babies born to black mothers died at two and a half times the rate of those born to white mothers, according to the CDC figures.

The United States ranks near the bottom for infant survival rates among modernized nations. A Save the Children report last year placed the United States ahead of only Latvia, and tied with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia.

The same report noted the United States had more neonatologists and newborn intensive care beds per person than Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom but still had a higher rate of infant mortality than any of those nations.

Doctors and analysts blame broad disparities in access to health care among racial and income groups in the United States.

National health services are very, very good at neo-natal care. It's mostly well-tried medical technology and the important thing, in respect to mortality rates, is that is be available to everyone. So here's the question for all those free-market conservatives who quite obviously think that there should be limits on the free market in heathcare areas like - oh, abortion - when it comes down to markets or lives:

Are you willing to suffer a few extra weeks before getting your hip replacement under a national health service so that more babies can survive to their first birthdays?

FEMA Wont Go Near Toxic Trailers Themselves

By Cernig

Is it a requirement for being a FEMA senior manager that you have an empathy bypass as well as a commonsensectomy?

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is barring employees from entering thousands of stored travel trailers over concerns about hazardous fumes, while more than 48,000 other trailers continue to be used by hurricane victims in Louisiana and Mississippi.

FEMA is advising employees not to enter any of the roughly 70,000 trailers in storage areas across the country, but the directive does not apply to other trailers still in use, agency spokeswoman Mary Margaret Walker said Thursday.

"It's common knowledge that formaldehyde emission levels rise when they are closed in the heat and humidity without any ventilation," Walker said.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., accused FEMA of using a double standard, and said it "defies logic" that occupied trailers are safer than those in storage.

"I don't really buy that argument," she said in an interview. "It makes no sense, in that most of these (occupied) trailers are closed up and locked during the day."

Many trailer occupants have asked to be moved because of concerns about formaldehyde contamination, and hundreds are suing trailer manufacturers, accusing the companies of jeopardizing their health by providing FEMA with poorly constructed campers.

Last week, FEMA indefinitely postponed plans to test for formaldehyde levels in the air inside occupied trailers, saying it needed more time to prepare.

Incredible. It's OK for poor folks but heaven forfend the employees of FEMA should have to breath carcenogenic poison too!

All this, of course, utterly unneccesary since there were plenty of vacant actual houses and apartments for rent in the South at the time of Katrina which could have housed refugees safely. Instead, though, the Republicans arranged another corporate price-gouging welfare scheme to enrich an industry that gives 90% of its campaign donations to their party. As it was, $85 million bucks worth of trailers sat unused in a field as they became more toxic every day. But the Republicans hate "big gub'mint", oh yeah.

(Hat Tip - Kat)

America's health care adventures

by shamanic

Early in the week, I wrote a piece on this Daily Mail article from England about the apparent catastrophe of 70,000 Britons going abroad for health care. Right blogtopia also ran with the story, as yet another indicator of the hell that universal health care is.

I direct my Righty friends to this 2006 ABC News article about American medical tourism, which notes that some "100,000 Americans a year travel beyond the border for cosmetic procedures alone." (Emphasis mine) 50,000 Americans visited a single Thai hospital.

What fascinates me about this information, and the universal health care debate in America generally, is that we already ration health care in the states. Taking a different approach than those socialist hells like Canada, Germany, and England, we ration ours by income by generally tying insurance to employment. (The old American, "If you don't work, you don't eat" philosophy.)

I just priced round trip airfare from Atlanta to Bangkok, Thailand, for the end of January and the lowest rate was $1100. In other words, what's hinky about this is that it isn't poor people taking these trips, it's people with enough money to choose expensive American procedures or cheaper Asian ones. Many of these people are likely insured.

So someone should explain the difference between an American with (at least some) money going abroad for lower prices or a Briton with (at least some) money going abroad to have something done more cheaply or more quickly. I guess I don't really see the difference, but at least in the English system, everyone can get basic and emergency medical treatment without going bankrupt.

British health system hardly on the rocks

by shamanic

I'm going to ask Cernig to jump in with any insider commentary he may have on the leanings of the Daily Mail, because today they're running a scare article that seems to suggest that Britons are fleeing England for quality Malaysian health care, except that the numbers cited represent some tiny fraction of 1% of NHS users.

What the reporting does show is that people of means will always have more options than those of lesser means. Which isn't exactly news, in England or anywhere else.

Update By Cernig First, let me note that the Daily mail is the most rightwing of all the Brit tabloid press and that the company behind the article's study is one which exists to promote private medicine both in the UK and abroad. Unbiased, they aren't.

Sha has it exactly right that the main thrust of this story is that people who can afford private healthcare in the UK are the ones doing the shopping around. Which means this story is far more an indictment of Britain's overpriced and profit-gouging private sector than it is of the NHS.

The key graff in the Daily Mail's story is being deliberately overlooked by US conservatives today:

Low prices in India, where flights, hotels and a heart bypass cost less than half the price charged by British private hospitals, explain its top ranking in the survey by Treatment Abroad, a British website providing information on hospitals overseas.

These travellers wouldn't have used the NHS in any case. They're rich queue-jumpers.

None of the conservative pundits talking about this story will mention, either, this article on the Treatment Abroad website that says "many Americans are choosing to have their treatment abroad. The primary reason is due to the astonishing financial rewards....Given the cost of medical treatment in America, it is little surprise that people are outsourcing complex medical operations to other countries."

As to the part about MRSA superbugs driving this exodus - again it's rubbish by the article's own admission, sheer purple journalism. However, conservative fans of the American private system shouldn't get too jubilant about British superbug woes. A recent US government study detailed how MRSA killed more than 18,000 Americans in 2005, a quarter of whom became infected while in the hospital. But let's not let facts get in the way of a good chance to bash "socialized" healthcare, or by extension the Democrats, shall we?

Can we say "point made"?

by shamanic

I'm all in favor of expanding S-CHIP to cover more people, but the fact remains that there are a lot of people who desperately need this program continued. Can we agree that the point has been made that George Bush and too much of the GOP is opposed to S-CHIP and go ahead and pass a continuance of the program as it exists?

I know how politics works, but I'm deeply concerned that Democrats will decide that this is just an awesome issue for 2008 and impede a continuance of something that Bush will sign, leaving millions of American kids out in the cold for more than a year while the votes are tallied and new politicians sworn in in 2009.

It is an awesome issue, but let's pick our battles. Bush has agreed to some form of the program. Pass that, and win on issues like a health care safety net for everybody in 2008.

An open challenge to the National Review

By Libby

AND to the all the major bloggers and the "citizen journalist" swarm that have been working so diligently to discredit the Frost and Wilkerson family. I am truly impressed by your ability to google up dirt to attack the messengers who support the additional funding for SCHIP. Your investigative skills are just awesome and far superior to mine. So here's the challenge.

I assume from your arguments, you're not against the program itself, just its coverage of undeserving families. So, if you could please just take a moment from judging the moral fitness of the recipients whom you feel don't deserve the help for "bad choices," perhaps you could find a family whom you think does deserve the assistance. And if that is beyond even your incredible investigative abilities, I'll make it even easier. Invent one. Just describe the sort of family you would consider to be deserving of help with health insurance coverage.

I feel confident in saying, I'm not the only one who would like to know.

Suffer the children

By Libby

I'm not sure how I got on this list but I just got an email from Jane Hamsher and Matt Stoller and it seems to me they have the most practical response to the recent attempts by the smear machine to kill SCHIP by attacking the Frosts. They're ignoring the hatemongers and going straight for the lowly Bush Dogs that voted against the bill. Through ActBlue, they've developed an ad campaign targeting Bush Dog Jim Marshall of Georgia for supporting Bush's veto.

Frankly, I've only recently warmed up to the Blue America PAC. In the beginning I was a bit suspicious that it was going to turn out to be just another special interest group designed to prop up the status quo but this sort of targeted action against turncoat Democrats seems to be exactly what's needed if we're ever going to rescue the party from those who betray the principles it used to stand for.

If you have the cash, throw some their way to get the ad published. If you don't have the bucks, then please at least spread the word. The only way to fix the big problems in our political system is to take it one step at a time and this is clearly a step in the right direction for the left.