Health Care is Broken and No One Will Fix It

The White House will proudly announce a modest reduction of the federal deficit for this fiscal year, but it probably won't mention our current budgetary policy is "totally unsustainable." According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budge Office, health care costs are inflating so rapidly that Medicare and Medicaid expenses will consume the ENTIRE Federal budget by 2050. The last three CBO directors have all highlighted the impending health care train wreck, but Washington remains deafeningly silent. Not one of the major Democratic Presidential candidates is willing to go after the root cause of the problem: the free market. You don't have to watch Michael Moore's latest documentary, Sicko, to know that the for-profit health care system is an absolute disaster.

Insurance companies are the biggest problem. They maximize their profit when they minimize the claims they pay out, which means they have a strong incentive to weasel out of paying those chemotherapy bills and an even stronger disincentive to cover sick people. That means lots of people just can't get coverage to begin with.

Of course, people with no health insurance still get sick, but when they do instead of going to a family physician they have to tough it out and hope they get better. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they end up in the emergency room and up to their eyeballs in medical bills they can't possibly pay. And how for-profit hospitals make up their losses from treating sick poor? By jacking up prices on people who can pay--people with insurance. The result is more costly insurance, which leads to more companies dropping coverage, and the spiral of doom continues.

Drug companies just add to the absurdity. While millions around the world die from infectious disease, our best and brightest drug researchers are focused on erectile dysfunction and restless leg syndrome because those drugs are more profitable. But the free market doesn't just distract drug companies from curing disease; it actually DISCOURAGES them. Why would you want to make a $200 vaccine for an illness when you could make a $200 pill that people will have to take for the rest of their lives?

Yet, despite these obvious and well-established arguments, not one major candidate for President wants to fix the problem. John Edwards wants one America, but he doesn't want single payer health care. Instead he wants to stick with the same broken, employer-based system. Barack Obama offers a similar plan with more focus on subsidizing insurance costs, fueling the problem by propping up the crumbling system. Hillary Clinton hasn't released a detailed plan yet, but she's been talking about putting restrictions on insurance companies so it's clear she's not even considering a wholesale change.

The ONLY candidate in the race with a rational health care plan that will actually CHANGE things is Dennis Kucinich. I don't support Mr. Kucinich because I disagree with him on half a dozen other issues, but it absolutely kills me that he's the only one with the guts to stand up on this critical issue.

Abstinence Only: The Dumbest Idea in Education

It's hard to believe but there really are some teens who have never been told the importance of using protection and birth control during sex. The reason is that their sex-ed programs have been replaced with "Abstinence-Only Sex Ed." The "Only" part means that teachers are not allowed to teach any methods of reducing pregnancy or other risks from sexual contact except abstinence until marriage. They aren't even allowed to mention the existence of contraceptives except to mention their failure rates. This is a ridiculously dumb policy. Here are the three biggest reasons why:

First, Abs-Only contributes to teenage pregnancy and prevalence of sexually transmitted infections (STI's) in teenagers. This might seem counter-intuitive, but teenagers who go through Abs-Only programs don't learn miraculous self-discipline in the face of 4 billion years of evolutionary bio-history. Abs-Only programs fail to control human instinct while simultaneously failing to inform teens on how to protect themselves. This is one reason the US currently has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrialized world.

A short bonus-point here: kids who sign abstinence pledges are highly likely to break their pledges and highly unlikely to use birth control or protection. It seems that these kids really believe they're going to wait until marriage, so they don't bother to take birth control or procure condoms.

Second, Abstinence-Only programs have a track record of lying to kids. The Waxman Report shows that the curricula being used by schools receiving federal Abs-Only grant money contain blatant errors and distortions. A few examples:

1. Several of them sight a much maligned 1993 study that suggests condoms are only 69% effective against HIV. One curriculum says, "In heterosexual sex, condoms fail to prevent HIV 31% of the time" (note the wording--HIV just springs to life sometimes?). These studies rely on the completely debunked idea that microbes can somehow penetrate latex. In fact, the CDC says "latex condoms provide an essentially impermeable barrier to particles the size of STD's."
   
2. Some claim that having an abortion reduces sterilizes up to 10% of women. In fact, obstetric textbooks say abortion has no impact on female fertility.
3. This one's hilarious: one curriculum claims that infection with Chlamydia can lead to heart attack or stroke. In fact, they're confusing the respiratory infection Chlamydia pnuemoniea (which can cause hardening of the arteries) with the STI Chlamydia Trachomatis.

So what's wrong with lying to kids if it's for a good cause? Aside from being morally repugnant, it also destroys trust. When teachers or the government present children with ridiculous lies they undermine their own credibility. If they tell you that Chlamydia will give you a stroke, maybe their also lying when they tell you that coke will make your heart explode.

Third, Abs-Only education (through both the specific curricula presently used and the general underlying philosophy) promotes sexism and negative attitudes towards sexuality. One of the curricula in the Waxman report actually says this:

"Just as a woman needs to feel a man's devotion to her, a man has a primary need to feel a woman's admiration. To admire a man is to him with wonder, delight and approval. A man feels admired when his unique characteristics happily amaze her."

The Waxman Report is loaded with other, equally absurd examples of Abs-Only curricula promoting conservative interpretations of gender roles. Even more troubling to me, though, is the Abs-Only program's attitude towards sex. The very idea of "wait till marriage" suggests that sexuality is a monster inside us that must be conquered controlled. That ideology only increases the stigma of premarital sex. But the stigma can never overcome evolution, at least for most of us. The result: horny teenagers who believe they are evil for wanting to have sex and don't know the first thing about how to protect themselves.

If you're interested in learning more about this topic, please check out the Waxman Report. I promise you will be shocked.

The Next War

Neoconservatism is not dead. The ideology of American imperialism and global conquest should have been decimated by failure upon devastating failure in Iraq, but the thready pulse is getting stronger. In the halls of power neocon elites, unshaken by the unmitigated disasters of their foreign policy, are setting their sights on a new target: Iran.

Last month Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Norman Podhoretz published a novella presenting massive airstrikes as the only option for dealing with Iran. US military and White House officials menacingly assert Iran's engagement in a proxy war against US forces, and President Bush continues threaten Iran, leaving "all options on the table." Meanwhile, Republican Presidential candidates fuel the fire. John McCain turned the theatrical performance of "Imminent Danger II" into a song and dance act; Fred Thompson, the unannounced front-runner, has called for a blockade.

Unilateral military action against Iran would be phenomenally stupid, and those who advocate it are willfully ignorant of the facts. The logic of the neocons own argument, that Ahmadinejad is a madman hellbent on the destruction of the US and Israel, guarantees an escalating military response from Iran. The results would be devastating.

First, Iran sits between Iraq, Afghanistan, and well over a hundred thousand US troops. If, as the US Generals assert, Iran is successfully killing our soldiers IED's in a covert proxy war, imagine the damage they could do in an all-out conflict. The Iranian Army is not a band of starving, poorly trained conscripts brandishing dilapidated weaponry. It is the strongest military force in the region (US and Israel notwithstanding) posing a "significant military threat" to the Persian Gulf and boasting "significant capabilities for asymmetric warfare." If we bomb Iran, US troops will die.

Second, Iran's small navy possesses incredible power due to its strategic location. The Straight of Hormuz connects the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman and channels 40% of the world's oil supply. Inconveniently, it also borders Iran. The Iranian Navy can't fight American warships, but it can scuttle warships and lay mines in the Straight. If Iran successfully closed Hormuz to oil traffic, the impact on global energy supplies could be catastrophic.

Third, Iran's paramilitary arm extends across the Middle East in the form of increasingly powerful militant groups like Hezbollah. These groups present a serious threat to US soldiers and local pro-American officials and advocates, but their threat to Israel is even greater. Last summer Hezbollah alone forced the exponentially more powerful Israeli forces into a stalemate and the moral victory generated massive public support. An American assault on a third Islamic would catapult public support for these groups.
Even if limited American airstrikes didn't provoke full scale retaliation from Iran it would still be disastrous. US aggression would almost certainly trigger popular uprisings across the Middle East. Pro-Western governments in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are already vulnerable, and massive destabilization in these countries would be the best case scenario. That danger is particularly severe in Pakistan, a nuclear power where popular support for Taliban forces is growing. Even the debate over whether to hit Iran with military force is percipitating conflict. Concerns over US actions are reverberating through the Middle East and Islamic Asia. An article published today in a Pakistani periodical frets that "it is hard to visualize the Americans [ending] their program of regime change in Iran."

It's tempting to blow off concerns over a potential attack on Iran as mere paranoia from an American left wing still shocked by the hubris of the invasion of Iraq, but that would be a grave mistake. The war with Iran may have already begun.

Prisoners of the Census

Most people reading this will be familiar with the term "felon disenfranchisement." In most states, if you get convicted of a felony you lose your right to vote, at least for a while. Since minorities are disproportionately convicted of felonies, the result is that those same minority groups are underrepresented at the polls. About 5.3 million Americans can't vote because of these policies, and included in that figure are 13% of all black men.

That's old news, but you may not know that the Census Bureau actually supercharges minority underrepresentation with fuzzy math. The census determines who lives where for the purposes of apportioning representation, so big cities are supposed to get more state and national representatives than rural areas. But the census counts people as living where they sleep, which means they count prisoners as living in prisons rather than in their homes.

The problem is that the vast majority of prisons are built in rural areas, while the vast majority of prisoners are from urban areas. In Illinois, for example, 60% of prisoners come from Chicago while 99% of the prison cells are outside of Chicago. In New York, NYC residents make up two thirds of prisoners, but 91% of them are held in upstate prisons. Dozens of other states exhibit similar numbers.

This practice creates major distortions, or "phantom populations," which skew democratic representation. Urban minorities are underrepresented while rural whites are overrepresented. In New York, phantom population have created at least seven severely underpopulated senate districts overpopulated. When state senators these districts vote on legislation like sentencing guidelines they have a tremendous incentive to keep prison populations high--if they don't, they could lose their jobs. The people who are supposed to represent prisoners actually work to keep them in prison. Worse still, since money for Federal programs is frequently distributed on the basis of population, urban districts get less money than they should.

Counting prisoners this way blatantly disenfranchises minorities who are already underrepresented by felon voting laws. The insidious catch-22 is that the people affected by this travesty can't do anything about it because they have no voice in the system. They've been stripped of their right to vote. To find out more, and to see what you can do to help, visit Prisoners of the Census.