According to government projections, U.S. health care spending is estimated to have reached $2.4 trillion in 2008 and is projected to experience its largest single-year increase as a share of the economy in 2009 as the effects of the recession ripple through the health care sector, federal analysts report in a study published today on the Health Affairs Web site.http://www.healthaffairs.org/press/janfeb0907.htm

The 10-year health care spending projections from economists at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) show how the economic downturn is expected to affect both public and private health care spending as more Americans lose their health insurance and as federal and state governments face projected increases in Medicaid enrollment and spending. http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.28.2.w346

By 2018, national health spending is projected to nearly double, reaching $4.4 trillion and consuming 20.3 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), the CMS analysts say.

In 2009, the United States is expected to experience a decrease in nominal GDP for the first time since 1949. Simultaneously, it is projected to see the largest one-year increase in the health share of GDP ever recorded: an increase of 1.0 percentage point from a projected 16.6 percent share in 2008 to an expected 17.6 percent share in 2009, largely as a result of the recession, according to the federal government.

From the Huffington Post, …”Remember the tax cuts signed into law by President Bush back in 2001 and 2003? A “defensible estimate” is that these cuts cost about $1.8 trillion from 2001-2008. Brian Riedl of the Heritage Institute said that number was about 25% too high, because it doesn’t account for stimulus and growth. Let’s go with his numbers. That’s $1.35 trillion over (conservatively) eight years, or about $169 billion a year. That’s about twice the cost of health care reform.

Take a look at some entitlement programs. In the good old days, you could always count on Republicans to talk about how Social Security and Medicare were going to bankrupt the government. And we should be concerned, because Medicare cost us almost $470 billion in 2008. And, with expenses rising fast, it’s likely that number will continue to rise.

When the Republicans passed Medicare Part D (which was never, ever considered deficit reducing), I don’t remember hearing many concerns from them about the cost. And now, since the Republican party has become the “protectors of Medicare” and has positioned itself never to allow any cuts to Medicare, that could bankrupt America.

We should also worry about Social Security, because last year, old-age and survivors insurance (OASI) payments for social security were over $515 billion. That’s just for 2008. Granted, more is still being brought in than is going out when it comes to social security, but that’s a lot of money.

This is a pittance, however, compared to what we spend on defense. Just in the last month, the president signed a defense appropriation bill for $680 billion. For this year. That doesn’t include the costs of the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. That’s bankrupting money.

But get this. We spent about $2.4 trillion on health care in 2008. That’s trillion with a “T.” You and I – through taxes – pay for more of this than you think. Remember Medicare? Taxes pay for Medicare. Medicaid? SCHIP? The Veterans’ Administration? Taxes. That tax break for employer provided health insurance? That also costs money. Many people also forget the health benefits of public employees. This includes not only those who work for the federal or state governments; it also included people who work for public institutions. Policemen, firemen, teachers, even me – you are all paying for our (private) health care out of public funds.

When you add up all these costs, they come to about 60% of health care expenses. This means that the public – your tax dollars – paid perhaps $1.5 trillion for health care last year. That’s what will bankrupt us….Full article on The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-e-carroll/a-little-perspective-on-t_b_343437.html

The Size of the Bush Tax Cuts vs. the Cost of Health Care Reform
Via Economix http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/assorted-links-2

Trillion Dollar Health Reform, $3 Trillion in Tax Cuts, by Howard Gleckman, Tax Policy Center:

It is interesting, and perhaps worth noting, that while political opposition seems to be hardening against the $1 trillion, ten-year cost of the early versions of health reform, barely a peep of concern has been raised about the $3 trillion price tag for President Obama’s plan to extend most of the Bush-era tax cuts.

The message seems pretty clear: The President, congressional Democrats, and nearly all Republicans are fine with busting the budget to cut taxes for nearly everyone, notwithstanding a cumulative deficit over the next decade of $9 trillion. They are, by contrast, unwilling to spend one-third as much to provide medical insurance for those who cannot afford it. I’ve always felt that health reform is as much an ethical choice as an economic one. We appear to be making ours.
Yes, priorities. Tax cuts for the wealthy come before health care for the uninsured.

From the American historian, Richard Hofstader
“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse….

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.”

Excerpt from The Paranoid Style in American Politics, By Richard Hofstadter
Harper’s Magazine, November 1964, pp. 77-86.

It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it—and its targets have ranged from “the international bankers” to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States:

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.…What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence.…The laws of probability would dictate that part of…[the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.

Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto signed in 1895 by a number of leaders of the Populist party:

As early as 1865-66 a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America.…For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the people quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose.…Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the financial and commercial independence of the country.

Next, a Texas newspaper article of 1855:

…It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism.…The Pope has recently sent his ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic church throughout the United States.…These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union of Church and State; abusing with foul calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing out the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics in the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000 annually for the propagation of their creed. Add to this the vast revenues collected here.…

These quotations give the keynote of the style. In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor.

Illuminism and Masonry
I begin with a particularly revealing episode—the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy. Illuminism had been started in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Its teachings today seem to be no more than another version of Enlightenment rationalism, spiced with the anticlerical atmosphere of eighteenth-century Bavaria. It was a somewhat naïve and utopian movement which aspired ultimately to bring the human race under the rules of reason.  Its humanitarian rationalism appears to have acquired a fairly wide influence in Masonic lodges.
Americans first learned of Illumism in 1797, from a volume published in Edinburgh (later reprinted in New York) under the title, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. Its author was a well-known Scottish scientist, John Robison, who had himself been a somewhat casual adherent of Masonry in Britain, but whose imagination had been inflamed by what he considered to be the far less innocent Masonic movement on the Continent. Robison seems to have made his work as factual as he could, but when he came to estimating the moral character and the political influence of Illuminism, he made the characteristic paranoid leap into fantasy. The association, he thought, was formed “for the express purpose of rooting out all religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of europe.” It had become “one great and wicked project fermenting and working all over Europe.” And to it he attributed a central role in bringing about the French Revolution. He saw it as a libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property rights. Its members had plans for making a tea that caused abortion—a secret substance that “blinds or kills when spurted in the face,” and a device that sounds like a stench bomb—a “method for filling a bedchamber with pestilential vapours.”

These notions were quick to make themselves felt in America. In May 1798, a minister of the Massachusetts Congregational establishment in Boston, Jedidiah Morse, delivered a timely sermon to the young country, which was then sharply divided between Jeffersonians and Federalists, Francophiles and Anglomen. Having read Robison, Morse was convinced of a Jacobinical plot touched off by Illuminism, and that the country should be rallied to defend itself. His warnings were heeded throughout New England wherever Federalists brooded about the rising tide of religious infidelity or Jeffersonian democracy. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, followed Morse’s sermon with a Fourth-of-July discourse on The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, in which he held forth against the Antichrist in his own glowing rhetoric. Soon the pulpits of New England were ringing with denunciations of the Illuminati, as though the country were swarming with them.

The anti-Masonic movement of the late 1820s and the 1830s took up and extended the obsession with conspiracy. At first, this movement may seem to be no more than an extension or repetition of the anti-Masonic theme sounded in the outcry against the Bavarian Illuminati. But whereas the panic of the 1790s was confined mainly to New England and linked to an ultraconservative point of view, the later anti-Masonic movement affected many parts of the northern United States, and was intimately linked with popular democracy and rural egalitarianism. Although anti-Masonry happened to be anti-Jacksonian (Jackson was a Mason), it manifested the same animus against the closure of opportunity for the common man and against aristocratic institutions that one finds in the Jacksonian crusade against the Bank of the United States.

The anti-Masonic movement was a product not merely of natural enthusiasm but also of the vicissitudes of party politics. It was joined and used by a great many men who did not fully share its original anti-Masonic feelings. It attracted the support of several reputable statement who had only mild sympathy with its fundamental bias, but who as politicians could not afford to ignore it. Still, it was a folk movement of considerable power, and the rural enthusiasts who provided its real impetus believed in it wholeheartedly.

As a secret society, Masonry was considered to be a standing conspiracy against republican government. It was held to be particularly liable to treason—for example, Aaron Burr’s famous conspiracy was alleged to have been conducted by Masons. Masonry was accused of constituting a separate system of loyalty, a separate imperium within the framework of federal and state governments, which was inconsistent with loyalty to them. Quite plausibly it was argued that the Masons had set up a jurisdiction of their own, with their own obligations and punishments, liable to enforcement even by the penalty of death. So basic was the conflict felt to be between secrecy and democracy that other, more innocent societies such as Phi Beta Kappa came under attack.

Since Masons were pledged to come to each other’s aid under circumstances of distress, and to extend fraternal indulgence at all times, is was held that the order nullified the enforcement of regular law. Masonic constables, sheriffs, juries, and judges must all be in league with Masonic criminals and fugitives. The press was believed to have been so “muzzled” by Masonic editors and proprietors that news of Masonic malfeasance could be suppressed. At a moment when almost every alleged citadel of privilege in America was under democratic assault, Masonry was attacked as a fraternity of the privileged, closing business opportunities and nearly monopolizing political offices.

Certain elements of truth and reality there may have been in these views of Masonry. What must be emphasized here, however, is the apocalyptic and absolutistic framework in which this hostility was commonly expressed. Anti-Masons were not content simply to say that secret societies were rather a bad idea. The author of the standard exposition of anti-Masonry declared that Freemasonry was “not only the most abominable but also the most dangerous institution that ever was imposed on man.…It may truly be said to be hell’s master piece.” Full article http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.htmlAmeri

Remember these faces when you cannot afford your health insurance premium or are denied health care or approaching bankruptcy due to your health care costs.

A conservative and closeted Republican Senator from South Carolina and an Independent Senator up to eyeballs in favors owed to the health insurance companies based in Connecticut.  Both of these reprehensible Senators promise to fillibuster or defeat the bill in the Senate. You can thank the Catholic bishops for the inclusion of the ‘no abortion’ amendment. The Senate bill also includes an opt-out option for the states!

Yes, the Health Care bill passed ‘the House’ but now it’s on the way to the Senate, where it will be stripped down and changed or stopped altogether. None of this kicks in, whenever and if a bill finally passes both chambers until 2013.

In Pelosi’s House, 64 Democrats Sell Women Out – Taylor Marsh, Huffington Post

The first female Speaker of the House makes history by passing a health care bill that not only doesn’t have a robust public option, but also sells out women’s civil rights. The Republicans acted reprehensibly, heckling women lawmakers like the chamber was a frat house. With Catholic bishops making sure they had their say. But in the end the Stupak amendment passed, 240 yeas, 194 nays, 1 present, with the names of Dems who voted for it totaling 64; the health care bill passing 220 yeas, 215 nays. Now it’s up to the Senate and the conference, because if the Stupak amendment is in the final bill it will be a setback of monumental proportions for women.

But let’s be honest. It was Pres. Obama who opened the door to sell us out when he decided to put the Hyde Amendment in the budget, something Bill Clinton never did. But Mr. Obama didn’t stop there. During the stimulus fight, at the first sign of displeasure, our President personally asked that contraceptives be taken out. Now the President seems ready to finish the job, with Democrats in the House helping him do it.

This means that any woman opting to join the exchanges would not have access to full women’s health care and abortion coverage. Ezra Klein explains:

Because of the limits placed on the exchanges, most of the participants will have some form of premium credit or affordable subsidy. That means most will be ineligible for abortion coverage. The idea that people are going to go out and purchase separate “abortion plans” is both cruel and laughable. If this amendment passes, it will mean that virtually all women with insurance through the exchange who find themselves in the unwanted and unexpected position of needing to terminate a pregnancy will not have coverage for the procedure. Abortion coverage will not be outlawed in this country. It will simply be tiered, reserved for those rich enough to afford insurance themselves or lucky enough to receive from their employers. Of course, this discussion on health care doesn’t impact wealthier women or women with access and means. Something I never forget….

There is no health care bill worth supporting that sells out women’s civil rights. Right now every woman who values her civil rights should understand how the gay community feels. Democrats just sold us out too.

Progressives in the House should have killed the bill. Civil rights begin with autonomy over our own body. If we don’t have that we have nothing. So, to hear Rep. Clyburn talk about “privacy rights” after passing the House bill was laughable.

But at least Mr. Obama and Speaker Pelosi’s Democratic House got us closer to an “historic health care win.” That they did it on the backs of women’s civil rights isn’t mentioned, though some of us will never forget.

It’s up to the Senate now and the conference to strip Stupak out, with help from Pres. Obama, of course. He will help, right? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/taylor-marsh/in-pelosis-house-64-democ_b_349769.html

And PLEASE do not credit President Obama for his role.

If you to see why nothing gets done in Congress, specifically the House, tune in to C-Span’s broadcast of the Health care bill hearings this weekend. Republicans constantly saying, I object, I object. “Mr. Speaker, parliamentary inquiry” http://www.c-span.org/Watch/C-SPAN_wm.aspx

From The Huffington Post,
Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel charged with monitoring the bank bailout, was on Morning Joe Friday morning to dig in to the newly released unemployment report. The numbers are bleak — unemployment has surpassed 10 percent for the first time since 1983 — and Warren is not surprised.

“Let’s face it,” Warren said, “This is sort of how we went about the rescue — we rescued at the top and we left the bottom to kind of fend for itself — and that’s showing up in the unemployment numbers.”

Warren went on to explain that the report is really about the guarantees the Government made to protect banks’ assets while leaving the public out to dry.

“Look, it saved the top of the system,” Warren acknowledged. “It helped stabilize it, but not so much for families who are hard hit down on the ground, the real economy.” There’s always the question, Warren explains, about how you save the top — in this case, the public pays for the banks’ guarantees and the top executives benefit. “We said, in effect, at the top, there’s really not any pain in return for taxpayer support. Not so much so when it comes to folks at the bottom. We said wait a year, we’ll get there, we’ll do what we can.”

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough suggested that it was the old “socialize the profits, privatize the gains” scenario, but Warren took it one step further.

“The way I think of it is: they say something like ‘Give me your money, investors and I’m going to Las Vegas and put it all on red 22. And if red 22 comes in — woo! we are RICH. If red 22 doesn’t come in, don’t worry because the tax payers will pay you back the money you invested.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/06/elizabeth-warren-we-rescu_n_348397.html in