What half of the public doesn't know

IS THERE ANYTHING we can say to the fellow down the street who hasn't been paying any attention to the chaotic state of his world - and ours? I don't even know his name, but I know he's out there, as well as his wife, too. And I have a 50-50 chance of being right about this. That much is clear in the latest poll by Kaiser Health about an epic issue that has a life of its own for half of America: Health care reform.

According to the Kaiser Health survey, only 52 pct. of Americans know that there is still a health-care law on the books. On the other hand 22 pct. believe the Republican House of Representatives repealed the law and 26 pct. aren't sure what's going on and are too preoccupied with the important things in their lives to find out.

Short of some sort of cosmic force control, there seems to be no solution to such indifference. Facts are often hard to come by, but I do know that there's a guy down street who doesn't give a damn.

May we call this the "banana split"?

YOU'VE DOUBTLESS heard that Rush Limbaugh, the clownish malcontent with Cadillac health care of his own, has vowed to move to Costa Rica if the health care reform bill passes. Regardless of his disconnect that Costa Rica has universal health care, there is more to his eagerness to become an expatriate, I'm told. Limbaugh wants to buy that country and convert it into a plantation with a private, male-only golf club while staging annual banana-eating contests by the natives to amuse his Wall Street guests. You think I'm kidding?

Tom Strauss lays it on the line

TOO BAD THE stone-faced Republican opposition at yesterday's "summit" with President Obama didn't have the cautionary words of Tom Strauss to consider before they demanded that the health-reform bill be wiped clean (Read: delayed forever) before any further action.

Strauss is the chief executive officer of Summa Health System in Akron whose urgent appeal for prompt governmental action appears in Newsweek and the Huffington Post. Coming from a realist who is in the trenches daily to keep the health system afloat, it effectively undercuts the GOP's manifesto that reform should take more time - for reasons that are more or less genetic with that side of the aisle on Capitol Hill.

"As health professionals," Strauss writes, "every day we see more people who need care, but cannot afford to pay. Ohio's free clinics have seen a 30 pct. jump in patients the past year. At one local clinic, it typically takes three months to fill the slots open each quarter for new appointments. Last January, it took three days. This January, it took three hours, as people who used to work as volunteers sign up to receive care themselves."

The figures reported by Strauss for the Summa System offer a somber picture of the enormous challenges that are not uncommon for non-profit hospitals today.

"The vast majority of the uninsured we see are working families. They either have employers who cannot afford rising premium costs, are self-employed and cannot afford the cost of health care themselves, or they cannot find coverage due to pre-existing conditions. The economic cost is staggering, but the human cost is beyond any dollar figure; just ask any nurse, who has looked into the eyes of a parent, ashamed that he or she cannot provide for family members until they are so sick that the emergency room is the only answer.

"We're all trying to do our part to help. At the system level, our hospital continues to treat everyone, regardless of ability to pay. At a community level, our health professionals volunteer in free clinics - more than 150,000 hours of personal time last year. At the county level, public health officials are working with local hospitals to address the root causes of chronic illness. At the state level, legislators are working to stretch depleted tax coffers to keep up with burgeoning Medicaid demand. Unsung heroes at non-profit, faith-based, and community organizations continue to fill the gap."

Strauss notes that the Summa System provided $57.6 million in net uncompensated care in 2008, including nearly $23 million in direct charity care.

And the costs continue to rise dramatically..

"What we really need is for the federal government to do its part, too - finish the job it started a year ago, and pass some form of health care reform. Is the compromise bill proposed by the Obama Administration this week perfect? No. Will everybody be able to find fault with parts of it? Yes. But we are far beyond the point at which our elected officials can allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good."

Strauss is an enlightened executive at a time when there are too many others who prefer to serve by only standing and waiting, athough equally confronted by the critical mission of health care. Unfortunately, those Republicans who showed up at the summit yesterday regard their only critical mission as the next election.

Joe lit up the health-care industry's cigars Sunday

WELL, Sen . Joe Lieberman must have gone to bed quite pleased with himself Sunday night. He succeeded, as is his wont, in making headlines all over the Internet as well as the New York Times as the potential destroyer of the health care reform bill. It reaffirmed his image as the Zelig-in-Chief in the wearying months-long congressional debate, telling Senate Majority leader Harry Reid eyeball-to eyeball that the bill hasn't made enough concessions to Republicans so he will join a filibuster to stop it in his tracks. Concessions to Republicans? And Joe considers himself a deeply religious man!

The Connecticut Independent (Huh!) has become an expert at blackmailing the Democratic leadership while retaining a committee chairmanship in the Democratic caucus. My hunch is that he will continue to play this ugly role until the November 2010 election, counting on a Republican senate majority that will swab him with political gravy. Inasmuch as he's already forfeited his honor, he's got nothing worthwhile to lose.

Meantime, we are told that poor women are being denied cancer screenings in a growing number of states whose health-care funds are shrinking. In Ohio, for example, the Cancer Society reported that a $2.5 million allocation in 2008-09 for such screening has been cut to$700,000 in 2009-10. It's a brutal thought, but as the opponents of health care reform might shrug and tell you, "You just can't keep everybody from dying."

And if you woke up Monday morning with a rotten odor in the air, that was from the cigars that the folks at the insurance companies and pharmaceuticals lit up to celebrate their guy Lieberman's careful attention to their requests.

Another way to "take back the country"

THIS MAY SHOCK some of you, but there are moments when I find myself in partial accord with the teabaggers when they wave their signs and shout that they want their country back (from you-know-who). I, too, want my country back, not from you-know-who but rather from the congressmen who run their offices 24/7 as a federal depository for health care industry cash. It is running into the millions these days, and like that robber Willie Sutton, who found banks to be his most rewarding nest eggs of choice, the Hill people in Congress take the lobbyists' money because it is there.

So those Republicans (who are being served well in the Senate by some Democratic colleagues) who are in for the long haul to defeat reform have good reason to keep stalling. Can you imagine the hit their daily cash flow would take if they were no longer useful to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry? The K Street handouts have become so scandalously common that you have to wonder why the pols can't be a little less conspicuous about their consumption. Maybe a ham for Christmas and round-trip airfare to the world's most fashionable golf courses. They aren't the worst abuses on the planet and a little R&R for our hard-working public servants might do them and the country some good.

These guys even raised hell about mammograms , which they would never equate with prostate cancer exams! When Sen. Barbara Mikulski's amendment expanding preventive health care for women went to a vote, it passed easily with only 3 Rrepublicans crossing the aisle to support the measure. Two thirds of the Republican yeas were women, Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. Do you think the lords of their manor will try to explain that one at their next women's auxiliary speech ? It was left to Mikulski to set the whole issue into the working context. She said, ever so incisively: "For many insurance companies simply being a woman is a pre-existing condition." I wish I had said that.

The only thing we have to fear is Tom Coburn

THE DEPTHS OF the Republican opposition to President Obama's health care reform plan was downgraded to the fallout shelter during the Senate floor debate on the issue. It was left to Sen. Tom Coburn, the arch conservative Republican obstetrician from Oklahoma to lay out the deadliest end of the spectrum when he rose to warn Americans' of their impending doom if the bill passes.

"I have a message for you," the doctor declared. "You're going to die sooner."

For his big dose of fear-mongering to unsuspecting Americans, Coburn easily wins the Grumpy Abe Linguistic Lunacy (Gall) award. And I was naive enough to think that things couldn't get worse in the war on health care reform. They have.

Joe's a multiple choice politician

JOE LIEBERMAN, the protean politician, a.k.a Zelig, continues to turn up in public to defend his thesis that (1) he wants health care reform because there are unfortunate souls among us who don't have insurance and desperately need it and (2) he will support a filibuster that will essentially kill any reforms in the current congress because his conscience tells him to do it. That sort of thinking is commonly called cognitive dissonance and Lieberman is in the top tier of those who manage to get by each day on their never-ending reliance on psychobabble.

For one thing, Joe knows as well as anybody that to kill the bill and start all over again would take us back to where we've been before - for decades, and may not return until long after he will be enjoying his retirement on a senator's many perks. Where his conscience fails him is his insistence in protecting the very health care industry with which his wife was closely associated for more than three decades.

But he , like some of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle who have the same conflicts of interest, don't allow that to trouble his spirit. He just soldiers on, wherever a TV camera crosses his path, repeating his credo day after day, always full of warm reassurances that he only wants to do what's right for America. But the real problem is that political hypocrites like Lieberman are what's wrong with America.

Rabbi Fish: The Lieberman 'incongruity'..

HAVING REFERRED to Sarah Palin's travel adventures in the previous post, it seems to be a natural fit to continue here with Joe Lieberman's latest setback in his ubiquitous road show to become somebody's - anybody's - vice presidential nominee in 2012. Joe has tried it a number of ways, as a theocratic conscience-driven politician, as a Republican in a Democrat's clothes, as an independent in the sneaky attire of Republicans and Democrats, and as an unsuccessful presidential (2004)and vice presidential candidate (2000). Now he may have stretched his luck a bit too far in his home state of Connecticut. More than 70 of the state' religious leaders, Christian and Jewish, want him to put his spiritual commitments where his mouth is and endorse the health care reform bill.

Lieberman, who says he is an "observant Jew," insists he not only opposes it but also is committed to supporting a filibuster to impede its passage. He considers it a well spent day's work for God.

But Rabbi Ron Fish, leader of the Concerned Clergy of Connecticut, has other ideas. Says Fish (courtesy of Think Progress): "In this case, Sen. Lieberman so regularly invokes his religion and his 'conscience' to support his positions that I felt it was important that we called him on the incongruity of his position on health care and his faith."

I think a better word, rabbi, is hypocrisy - which hasn't bothered Lieberman in the past and probably won't now. He wants to keep getting invited back to his caregivers at Fox News.

Health care reform: A learning experience

LESSONS FROM the congressional wasteland in the debate over health care reforms:

The national media's track record on reporting the issues was about c-minus, often speculating on things that didn't happen. The influential A-list people working in Washington have agendas, and for scoop-hungry pundits, it was not difficult to find "well connected insiders" on both sides who used pundits as their surrogates on the national public address system to plant a rumor. Some reported that the public option was DOA in the House, or that it was alive but would likely take us into next year to resolve (according to, eh...sources familiar with someone else who was familiar with someone tracking the inside sources. The new media moral: Get it first, even if it's wrong. LESSON: It will get worse as the Senate takes up the bill.

Fox News broke the mold on the cliche that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it it drink. It proved that you can not only lead an audience to contaminated water, you can also force it to drink it. LESSON: There are more horses' asses at Fox than there are horses.

Sen. Harry Reid is making a mockery of his title of Senate Majority Leader. So far he has acted as the Senate minority leader, which is just fine for Republicans. If the Democrats do nothing else, and they probably won't, they should put him out to pasture when they return in January. He's managed to reverse the meaning of majority and minority. LESSON: You'd have a better chance at the roulette wheels in Reid's home state of Nevada than laying down a wager that Reid will rise to the occasion of his high office. He's not a carpe diem kind of guy!

The nation is now divided into two parts: Wall Street and everybody else. And Wall Street is winning, thanks to the willingness of the Obama Administration to turn the other cheek while the investment empire gives its employes billions in bonuses. LESSON: With the Wall Streeters, including the health care industry and pharmaceuticals, you have no chance. None.

Separation of church and state is a myth. Further evidence of this was the invasion of Capitol Hill by powerful Catholic bishops to strong-arm (with success) House members to take public funding of abortion off the table, not prayerfully but with threats to call out pro-choice candidates on Election Day. Much of Europe, with the exception of Ireland, has legalized abortion. Even Italy, where voters are in the Vatican's neighborhood, legalized abortion in 1978 and in 1981 rejected by a 2-1 margin a referendum that would have again outlawed abortion. LESSON: The last remaining bastion against the separation of church and state is the exemption of taxes from churches.

A compassionate plan for those who need it the least

AND NOW, FRIENDS, do I hear a motion from the the ether to call the newly arrived and, eh...long-awaited, document from committee the Baucus-Grassley Wealth Care Plan? We might all have awaited the arrival of Godot, who never showed up. Don't be shy.

A call for Republicans to slit their wrists

THE REPUBLICAN opponents of a health care reform seem to have taken their cues from a Class D minor league pitcher in firing wild pitches: curve balls aimed at the electorate, stray sinkers in the dirt, fast balls at the chin of Barack Obama, knock-down sliders that force the umps to warn of ejections.

It is disgraceful behavior by a group that calls itself a national political party without apology.

And it has only gotten worse in the past several days as that segment of the GOP that was once the home of the the fringe has now spread to the party's "leaders" who washed out of the mainstream of political discourse. Some samples, if you are sitting down:

• The Republican National Committee circulated a fund-raising letter that claimed an Obama style medical care reform would deny Republicans access to coverage! Here is a direct quote from the letter:

"It has been suggested that the government could use voter registration to determine a person's political affiliation, prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system. Does this possibility concern you.?"

What concerns me is that the RNC employs people who can come up with that sort of crap. And by the way, who, in your words, suggested it?

OK, so after it placed such idiocy before its jury, it stepped back from it, with an RNC operative saying the letter was "inartfully worded" while denying it was intended to scare people. But it obviously was quietly pleased that the message made it to a friendly jury before it was stricken from the record.

• Michele Bachmann, the Republican c0ngresswoman from Minnesota , again rose from the ashes of her many earlier self-immolating utterances to explain the intensity of her opposition to reform. This one has taken her to new heights as the party's uncontested ding-a-ling:

"This [health care reform] cannot pass...What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn't pass" .

Covenant? Michele, be sane for once in your life. If you slit your wrists there's no way you can reach the summit of Mt. Sinai alive.

• Finally, credit Rep. Joe Barton, Republican, Texas (what is it about Texas!) with counting his chickens before they cross a heavily traveled road. Barton believes Democrats will lose the House in 2010, allowing him to return to his former role as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. And if health reform becomes law, he says, Repubicans will simply repeal it with him in the driver's seat.

Joe has yet to say whether he will join Michele up to the top of Mt. Sinai.

This is an incredible chapter in the life of a desperate political party. And a promise: I'll stop nailing it when its soldiers stop acting like infantile soldiers.

The Return of the Middle Ages

AMERICANS LOVE to be fearful. As a child, I learned that from my own dear mother. She warned me that anybody who went outdoors within a couple of hours of having a hair wash would be a candidate for pneumonia. God help me if I did. I could forgive my mother's daily myths. She had my best interests at heart with very little education, and like my father, never read a book

But a political party that today has strong medieval tendencies and devotes most of its time to spreading fear? That takes us back a thousand years when illiterate folks were largely isolated in tiny villages and lived by the fearful myths of the day because there was no way to challenge them. For some it was the weighty threat of excommunication for an imagined misdeed. For others it was the silhouettes of advancing witches on the dusky horizon.

We have our share of witches and warlocks on the horizon today. Having lost to Obama last November, the Republican Party is reaching deeply into its cesspool of fears to win back some ground. It is clubbing folks with preposterous stories of death and destruction. And why not? It worked for George Bush, when he used Saddam Hussein and fictitious weapons of mass destruction to whip up public (and, alas, media) fervor to lead us into disastrous war. As I've written earlier, it was Bush & Co. against Gog and Magog.

Now, the weapon of mass destruction is single payer health care. The right-wing (i.e., Republicans and their enablers) opponents are conjuring up mushroom clouds from coast to coast should the Obama Administration have its way. And if you listen to all of those people shouting their protests at the town hall meetings, it's obvious that once again the know-nothings are gaining a lot of ground. Time and again the government Medicare program that has worked well for millions, including me, has been reduced to fiction by people who have no idea who is behind their Medicare coverage. Where do you think they're getting the frightening disinformation? Guess.

And when Sarah Palin tells you that her parents and infant son would be a victim of a "death panel" if the Administration prevails, it quickly enjoys currency among the uninformed fearful - or are they the don't-want-to-be-inf0rmed fearful? . We are immediately back to the Middle Ages, the only socio-politico culture that seems to work for a party with no progressive ideas of its own. It might help Obama if he told Americans to wash their hair anyway.

A woeful opera in too many nasty acts

WE'RE LIVING with the myth that the "debate" over health care reform is all about what's best for ordinary citizens. But there's nothing very ordinary about the nasty narrative that's in our face today. Americans might just as well be taking sides on whether Silvio Berlusconi should be running around his luxurious Sardinian estate with tempting young girlfriends. It really doesn't matter what ordinary Americans think. (Nor does the Italian premier care about what Italians think!)

In this country the luxurious estate is the fortress set up by huge health insurance companies to protect their tidy investment in your health and mine. They are, of course, servilely aided and abetted by their beneficiaries within the ranks of both parties. Besides, we've learned rather quickly that there are few self-described "ordinary" folks at the disrupted Town Hall meetings. They are scripted in how to hack a reasoned discussion of the issue with their Democratic congressmen.

And who is the inspiration for the hackers who have been crafted with behavioral patterns that riotously break up these sessions? One is, of all people, Rick Scott, who has put up millions to fight health care reforms as head of Conservatives for Patients Rights. I love these benign sounding front groups with titles that have little to do with their line of work. They might as well be called Concerned Foxes for Chickens' Rights. This, after all, is the same Rick Scott who once headed Columbia HCA, a for-profit hospital system that chiseled so much money from the Feds that he finally had to pay a $1.7 billion fraud settlement. That's billion. Among other things, he closed unprofitable hospitals and cut back services to the patients who were unlucky enough to land in the profitable hospitals that made the cut. I'm obviously missing something here, folks. Where are the patient's rights that this conservative wants to protect?

Another who has cast a big shadow on the "debate" is former Texas congressman Dick Armey, who is one of the heavy hitters at "Lobbyists, Central" in D.C. His outfit is a warm and fuzzy number called DreamWorks. He's also the Co-Chairman of the Alliance for Retirement Prosperity, another straight-faced cover job? By now, I'm ready to accept the validity of Concerned Foxes for Chickens' Rights.

But some of the paint on these well financed civic enterprises is starting to flake. One woman who went bananas at one of Town Halls later told a network that she was "just a mom" from down the block who had arrived to express her frustration. She lied. When reporters checked her background, it turned out that she was a soldier for the Republican Party in her state. The script for these well organized assaults of public sanity also remind the shouters to spread out across the hall so that a speaker might conclude that everybody is up in arms against health care reform.

And didn't Rep. John Boehner, the House minority leader, referring to the town meetings, declare that it was going to be a long, hot summer for the Democrats? This raucous opera obviously won't be over until - unlike the fat lady - the woeful chorus of Boehner, Scott, Armey and The Mom, stop singing.

The only thing we have to fear is...Boehner

Happy Halloween! Run out and buy a fright mask to join the dark revelry of Rep. John Boehner and his like-minded moon prancers who market fear as their moronic way of challenging President Obama, health-care reform or any other obstacle to their claim of honorable public service.

They've cast their latest evil eye on what they insist is a government attempt to kill off old people. Yep. Grandpa is just a government bill away from being sent to the nearest morgue. It's somewhere , they insist, in a health care reform proposal. And like most of the dead fish that guys like Boehner or Fred Thompson (remember him?) are throwing around, it can be easily disputed, which is all anyone should have to say about such nonsense.

One might excuse the malignant chatter of talk show hosts like Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck, neither of whom impress me as having much brain gloss. They are paid to make fools of themselves. As one Fox News executive noted , the network only hires people who can improve ratings. I would have never guessed.

But when an always grim fellow like Boehner, the House Minority Leader who speaks regularly for Republicans , and Fred Thompson, who tried feebly to run for president, come at us with trash talk for the sake of terrifying an already confused mass, we ought to start worrying about the consequences, don't you think?

Republicans are no longer the loyal opposition; most of them sit around twisting their handkerchiefs while Boehner sets the pathetic cultural tone for their party. If they aren't embarrassed, I'll step into the vacuum. Watching fools pretending to be serious thinkers does embarrass those of us who hang on to the belief that political discourse should be better than that. A zillion times better!

Dark news from the health-care reform front:

DISPATCHES FROM the health-reform trenches:

• A friend reports that the medical bill for his four-hour out-patient hospital visit for the replacement of a pacemaker battery was more than $50,000.
• A middle-management fellow whose overtime has been frozen also faces a 20 pct. increase in his share of health insurance next year. That's a monthly bill of $600 instead of the current $500.

These aren't exceptional stories. So when President Obama says the situation will only get worse if we do nothing now, here's the gruesome evidence. Is Congress listening these days? I think not.