Category Archives: health care

Religio: taking careful account

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Well, a trip to the emergency room over the holidays interrupted my train of thought. I’m most grateful to a young cardiologist who treated me at Mercy Hospital in Iowa City. As we agreed that I should have a heart catheterization, he remarked gruffly, “You’ll be OK. You’re a healthy guy.” As it turned out, he was more than right. The catheterization turned up no blockages or other problems with my heart—not that hypertension isn’t a problem

—thanks Dr. Ammar! You’re a mensch.

Meanwhile, the Catholic bishops are seeking again to build sympathy for their continued effort to suppress women’s reproductive choices and impose catholic teaching on all employees of catholic institutions, whether they are catholics or not. Rich Lowry, writing in this week’s Time harangues us all in a piece that features a cartoon effigy of the president as Henry VIII, to view the good bishops as an oppressed religious minority and the president as their oppressor.

But the president may have outfoxed the proud prelates this time by removing the birth control mandate from their shoulders and placing it on the shoulders of insurance companies. The bishops are crying foul, as should be expected from a group of privileged citizens who have long been able to claim benefit of clergy in ways that defy rational analysis. Witness their attempt to blame the sexual abuse of thousands of catholic children on American culture—I wonder how that fits in Ireland and Holland—and their casuistic claim that catholic universities are not religious organizations when the issue is grant money.

I’ve taken it down

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I’ve removed the “I stand with Obama” about health care link I had posted here. Apparently both the end of life provisions and the public option have been abandoned by the administration.

Mike Allen at Politico suggests that the public option was always a mere bargaining chip and quotes Marc Armbinder of The Atlantic about angry liberals, of whom I guess I am one.

If you equate health care reform with a public option, then, well, health care reform is dead to you. There are a lot of angry liberals tonight. They are within their rights to feel aggrieved.

Whatever may be the future of the health care debate, so called. the move to reform our health care system has now been so demagogued by the wingnuts (who can now include Charles Grassley among their numbers) and so mired in payoffs to the medical-industrial complex, that the entire mix has become toxic.

And the President, instead of leading, instead of providing clarity, caves.

It’s a great disappointment, but no less I suppose than my disappointment with the President’s validation of Bush policies on detention and the rule of law, with his willingness to force major auto manufacturers and their subsidiaries with their hundreds of thousands of workers and retirees into bankruptcy whilst propping up major banks with billions in undeserved federal dollars and rewarding venal bank executives with huge bonuses as recompense for their venality, with his adoption of the factory model of education, emphasizing test scores and rote learning at the expense of independent thinking.

I have a deal of thoughts about all this, but tonight I’m just angry. So I’ve removed the link.