A Spork in the Drawer

Socialism!

Ed Stein:

(A always, click to enlarge.)

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The United States Has The Best Health Care System In the World

Yep:

The United States has a sharply higher rate of women dying during or just after pregnancy than European countries, even some relatively poor countries such as Macedonia and Bosnia, according to the first estimates in five years on maternal deaths worldwide.

[...]

The United States has a far higher death rate than the European average, the report shows, with one in 4,800 U.S. women dying from complications of pregnancy or childbirth, the same as Belarus and just slightly better than Serbia's rate of one in 4,500.

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The death rate among U.S. black women was nearly four times the rate found among non-Hispanic white women -- 34.7 deaths per 100,000 live births for blacks versus 9.3 per 100,000 live births for whites, the report said.

It makes ya proud to be an American.

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"My job is a decision-making job. And as a result, I make a lot of decisions."

It gets worse.

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Bush To Kids: Drop Dead

If vetoing the SCHIP bill was such an important statement of principal then why did George do it in secret?

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The Invisible Hand Of The Market...

...continues to squeeze our necks:

Health insurance premiums paid by workers and their employers rose an average of 6.1 percent this year, outpacing inflation and pay increases and taking a bigger chunk out of families' budgets, according to a new survey.

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Insurance costs probably will rise again next year, according to the survey released Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health care research organization that annually tracks the cost of health insurance. Many of the more than 3,000 companies surveyed said they planned to make significant changes to their health plans and benefits, and nearly half said they were very or somewhat likely to raise premiums.

This year, premiums reached an average of $12,106 for a family of four, with workers paying, on average, $3,281 of that. Premiums to cover a single person cost $4,479, with employees paying $694. The portions both families and single people pay in premiums has nearly doubled since 2001.

But remember: Advocating anything other than staying the course, if you will, is tantamount to advocating Stalinism.

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I Can't Imagine Why

We're dying earlier:

For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles.

Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.

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A baby born in the United States in 2004 will live an average of 77.9 years. That life expectancy ranks 42nd, down from 11th two decades earlier, according to international numbers provided by the Census Bureau and domestic numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics.

It's also worth noting that of developed nations the US has the second worst infant mortality rate.

Yay us.

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Christ, It Never Ends

How long are people going to put up with shit like this?

A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration's policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health officials.

The report described the link between poverty and poor health, urged the U.S. government to help combat widespread diseases as a key aim of its foreign policy, and called on corporations to help improve health conditions in the countries where they operate. A copy of the report was obtained by The Washington Post.

Three people directly involved in its preparation said its publication was blocked by William R. Steiger, a specialist in education and a scholar of Latin American history whose family has long ties to President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Since 2001, Steiger has run the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services.

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Carmona told lawmakers that, as he fought to release the document, he was "called in and again admonished . . . via a senior official who said, 'You don't get it.' " He said a senior official told him that "this will be a political document, or it will not be released."

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Steiger, 37, is a godson of former president George H.W. Bush and the son of a moderate Republican who represented Wisconsin in the House and hired a young Dick Cheney as an intern. The elder Bush appointed Steiger's mother to the Federal Trade Commission in 1989. A biographical sketch of her on the American Bar Association's Web site states that Steiger's parents, now deceased, were "lifelong friends" of many members of the same congressional class, including the Rumsfelds and the Bushes.

I've never been an isolationist but I'm starting think that our country is so broken that it may be time for us to withdraw from the world as much as possible and concentrate on fixing ourselves.

I shudder to think how long it's going to take to repair the damage wrought by the current administration. Indeed, I'm not entirely sure it can be fixed. Not a cheery thought but there you are.

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The Logic Of Liars

It's a good thing that our health care free market prevents long wait times unlike those socialist nations that have national health care:

Adults with no health insurance face waits up to a year or longer for gallbladder or hernia surgery in Los Angeles County, a backlog that community clinic doctors say has worsened since the county downsized Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital last year.

Granted, that's just one city but I can tell you from personal experience that even the insured have trouble getting a doctors' appointment that isn't 3-6 months away.

Even that notorious Communist rag, Business Week, recognizes the problem yet bring up "national health care" and you'll be clobbered with "Long wait times! Long wait times!"

Yet another media narrative that can't be killed.

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Bush To Children:

Drop dead:

If anything looked like a sure thing in the new Congress, it was that lawmakers would renew, and probably expand, the popular, decade-old State Children's Health Insurance Program before it expires this year.

But the future of the $5 billion-a-year program, which serves 6.6 million children and has long enjoyed bipartisan support, has become mired in an ideological fight over the proper role of government in health care and in more mundane legislative arm-wrestling over how to fund the effort in a tight budget climate.

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President Bush has attacked the proposals as big-government attempts to enlarge the federal role in health care, saying they would siphon choice away from individuals and reduce private insurance coverage for some children. He has proposed about $5 billion in new funding for children's health insurance over five years, for a total of $30 billion -- an amount that the Congressional Budget Office says would be too little to keep covering even just the number of children enrolled in the program now.

"The program is going beyond the initial intent of helping poor children," Bush said at an appearance in Cleveland last week. "It's now aiming at encouraging more people to get on government health care. . . . It's a way to encourage people to transfer from the private sector to government health-care plans. . . . I think it's wrong, and I think it's a mistake."

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said yesterday that Bush's senior advisers "will certainly recommend a veto" of the Senate committee's proposal because of its size and the plan to fund it with a tax increase.

"Compassionate conservatism," indeed.

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They Have Nothing Better To Do

This is ridiculous:

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore is under investigation by the U.S. Treasury Department for taking ailing Sept. 11 rescue workers to Cuba for a segment in his upcoming health-care documentary "Sicko," The Associated Press has learned.

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The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control notified Moore in a letter dated May 2 that it was conducting a civil investigation for possible violations of the U.S. trade embargo restricting travel to Cuba. A copy of the letter was obtained Tuesday by the AP.

"This office has no record that a specific license was issued authorizing you to engage in travel-related transactions involving Cuba," Dale Thompson, OFAC chief of general investigations and field operations, wrote in the letter to Moore.

So being a Cuban terrorist is A-OK while merely visiting Cuba is a crime. I'd like to think that they're going after Moore because of his provocative Lefty documentaries but they're probably going after him 'cause he's fat.

As the wingers keep reminding us.

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Another Whitewash...

...coming right up:

President Bush has enlisted former Sen. Bob Dole and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala to lead an investigation of problems at the nation's military and veterans' hospitals.

Bush was to announce his appointments Tuesday in a speech to the American Legion.

Even if this commission doesn't produce a whitewash can anybody tell me when George has followed the recommendations of one of his commissions?

Another useless exercise in wankery.

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The Tooth Fairy...

...is as real as health care for all:

Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.

A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.

If his mother had been insured.

If his family had not lost its Medicaid.

If Medicaid dentists weren't so hard to find.

If his mother hadn't been focused on getting a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth.

By the time Deamonte's own aching tooth got any attention, the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain, doctors said. After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care, the Prince George's County boy died.

Yeah, I know this has been all over the Blogosphere since this morning but the mere idea that something like this could happen in the World's Richest Nation™ beggars the imagination.

Three-quarters of a billion dollars for war and we don't have $80 to pull a tooth.

God bless America.

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