Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Doggie diary: The story of Rosie and Sophie Spoiled rotten and loving it

There are few things as enjoyable as watching kids and dogs play together. Last night, Annie and I took the pups to Cold Stone Creamery on Route 27 to meet my brother and two of his kids. We bought Rosie and Sophie kid-size sweet cream ice cream and let Dan and Joss feed it to the dogs, which was fun to watch. They — meaning both kids and both dogs — get so excited.

This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!

To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.

Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime� 6.5 or higher is required.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Exploding a healthcare myth 1

Opponents of healthcare reform like to pretend that the system we have right now is full of choice, that we can get in to see doctors whenever we want, that we have access to every and any treatment under the sun.

Patients, however, know better.

David Leonhardt, in The New York Times, pretty much explodes the open-access myth in this important analysis story. Rationing, he says, exists in a big way — in “three main ways”:

The first is the most counterintuitive, because it doesn’t involve denying medical care. It involves denying just about everything else.

The rapid rise in medical costs has put many employers in a tough spot. They have had to pay much higher insurance premiums, which have increased their labor costs. To make up for these increases, many have given meager pay raises.

This tradeoff is often explicit during contract negotiations between a company and a labor union. For nonunionized workers, the tradeoff tends to be invisible. It happens behind closed doors in the human resources department. But it still happens.

He continues:

The second kind of rationing involves the uninsured. The high cost of care means that some employers can’t afford to offer health insurance and still pay a competitive wage. Those high costs mean that individuals can’t buy insurance on their own.

The uninsured still receive some health care, obviously. But they get less care, and worse care, than they need. The Institute of Medicine has estimated that 18,000 people died in 2000 because they lacked insurance. By 2006, the number had risen to 22,000, according to the Urban Institute.

The final form of rationing is the one I described near the beginning of this column: the failure to provide certain types of care, even to people with health insurance. Doctors are generally not paid to do the blocking and tackling of medicine: collaboration, probing conversations with patients, small steps that avoid medical errors. Many doctors still do such things, out of professional pride. But the full medical system doesn’t do nearly enough.

That’s rationing — and it has real consequences.

So, please, enough about the long lines and rationed care elsewhere. That is the reality we face right here in America right now.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Tilting at windmills?

This paragraph from this morning’s New York Times story on proposed financial-sector regulations is becoming all too common in the early days of the Obama administration:

Although it would strikingly reorganize the regulatory architecture, the president’s plan results from many compromises with industry executives and lawmakers, and is not as bold as some had hoped.

It is as if the folks surrounding the president — and the president himself — forgot Rahm Emanuel’s pre-inauguration comment, essentially the raison d’etre for the Obama administration:

“Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” Mr. Emanuel said in an interview on Sunday. “They are opportunities to do big things.”

I said early on — more than a year ago, back in the early days of the primary campaign — that Barack Obama was a politician at war with himself: It was obvious that his instincts were liberal/progressive, coming from his background as a community organizer; that he was cautious to a fault and too wed to the notion of bipartisanship (the basic thesis of his book, The Audacity of Hope).

For voters, however, he represented their hopes and aspirations — often competing hopes — his persona being a political Rohrschach test. Many on the left viewed him as a potential progressive ally, someone likely to revive the tradition of an aggressively activist government in the mode of FDR and LBJ (on domestic issues), ignoring his ties to the coal and financial industries, his vote on bankruptcy reform and forgiving his backpedaling during the campaign on telecom immunity and other progressive issues.

The reality is that Obama is, in many ways, a better version of Bill Clinton, less divisive and nominally more progressive, but just as pragmatic and just as committed to that vague third way that too often seeks to split the difference to keep dissent at a minimum. So far, the president has spent far more time trying to appease the more conservative elements of his own party and attract the few remaining moderates left in the GOP than using his strength among his party’s progressive base to push his agenda through.

The stimulus, Guantanamo, gay rights, climate change, health care, financial regulation — on nearly every policy goal — he has been willing to jettisone the more progressive elements of his policies to keep moderates on the reservation.

Obama doesn’t deny this kind of calculus. A quotation of his from the Times story:

“Did, you know, any considerations of sort of politics play into it? We want to get this thing passed, and, you know, we think that speed is important. We want to do it right. We want to do it carefully. But we don’t want to tilt at windmills.”

Progressives are not asking him to “tilt at windmills”; they’re asking him to craft tough policy. If they — we — want him to be more aggressive, then progressives need to become more aggressive and make sure that the president knows that he can’t keep selling the left out.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.