Category: Politics, Religion & Money

Why Medicare?

Medicare exists because the free market doesn’t work for elderly patients. Old people are profit eaters, so private insurers don’t want to cover their medical expenses. Medicare reimbursements are typically low compared to private insurance, so some health care providers are tempted to pad their bills. On Monday the PBS News Hour had a report on alleged Medicare fraud by Prime Healthcare in California.

Watch California Hospital Chain Eyed for Possibly Bilking Medicare for Millions on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Prosecute Wall Street

If it’s true that the Occupy Wall Street protesters don’t have a single, consistent message, it’s certainly also true of the Tea Party. Both groups want to “take back the country,” and in the case of the Tea Party I don’t really know what that means, other than they don’t want a half-black President who had a free-spirited mother and who lived outside of the United States for a significant portion of his childhood. In contrast, I think it’s pretty clear what Occupy Wall Street is demanding.

Occupy Wall Street includes some Anarchist types and Socialist wannabes, but there are a lot of young people who borrowed a lot of money to get a college degree, only to find there were no jobs to pay off those loans. They’re right to blame the Wall Street traders who took the financial markets down to their figurative knees in 2008. At the very least there needs to be accountability, prosecution, and regulation of the men and markets who got us into this mess. We don’t have that, and Bernie Madoff doesn’t count.

The latest example is Jon Corzine, an Obama ally, and what he did at MF Global. Yesterday, WBUR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook had an excellent discussion about this latest example of the ego-driven crimes of greed committed by the guys at the top of the financial heap — a heap of you-know-what.

[audio:http://audio.wbur.org/storage/2011/12/onpoint_1212_the-lessons-of-mf-global.mp3|titles=On Point with Tom Ashbrook: Jon Corzine and MF Global]

So I would say that, yes, Occupy Wall Street does indeed have a valid complaint and a clear message. Jon Corzine shouldn’t just be sorry, and he shouldn’t just be subpoenaed. He should be prosecuted.

Iowa oughta know

I haven’t watched any of the Republican debates, choosing instead to read and hear about them the next day. Yesterday’s debate in Iowa reportedly showed Newt “Nut” Gingrich doing well against Mitt “Milquetoast” Romney. Prior to the debate, Liz Goodman, who writes for Yahoo!, had an outstanding feature article on how immigration, legal and not, has affected the little Iowa town Postville.

Gingrich is currently leading solely by the process of elimination — and even then, only because his multiple marital infidelities are older than Herman Cain’s. Newt isn’t presidential material, and he has no chance of ever winning the White House. So the GOP has to find a way to make Romney, who is the only Republican in the field truly qualified to be President, acceptable to its hard right base before next summer.

Honestly, nothing the Republicans have done this year has made any sense. At this point, how the heck can Donald “Comb-over” Trump still have a place at the Republican table? Romney is right to decline an appearance at Trump’s post-Christmas debate, but instead of manufacturing a scheduling conflict he should say he wants nothing to do with Donald Trump and his silly circus. We seem to be in an age where people want political contests to be like professional wrestling matches — loud, rancorous, and low class, where everything is personal.

I signed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ online petition supporting a repeal of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, granting free speech rights to corporations, as if they are distinct individuals that are separate from the people who run them. The real problem is that political campaigns need so much money for TV commercials. TV stations must love the prospect of unlimited funding for “unaffiliated” ads supporting and opposing candidates, but the best thing everybody can do is to simply not watch the TV ads. I trust neither the Republican’s nor the Democrat’s TV commercials, and I actively avoid all of them.