As we all know, a dump of less-than-favorable information always happens on a Friday, and something of this magnitude — 71-year-old cancer survivor and war torture survivor John McCain’s health records — happened on the Friday of a holiday weekend — and the terms of review of them were curiously restricted. (Newsweek):
During his first presidential run, eight years ago, McCain disclosed hundreds of pages of records to reporters as he sought then to counter what aides called a “whisper campaign” questioning his mental fitness. In those records, medical personnel concluded that his years in prison, including solitary confinement, left him with no psychological wounds. Aides said McCain has had no mental evaluations in the past eight years.By the way, we never learned in February that McCain had yet another cancerous growth removed from his face:This time, a small group of reporters reviewed 1,173 pages of medical documents that span 2000 to 2008 over several hours in a conference room at a resort just outside Phoenix and a few miles from the posh Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, where McCain receives most of his medical care under a pseudonym — which reporters were asked not to disclose.
McCain’s most recent exams show a range of health issues common in aging: He frequently has precancerous skin lesions removed, and in February had an early stage squamous cell carcinoma, an easily cured skin cancer, removed. He had benign colon growths called polyps taken out during a routine colonoscopy in March.The cancer issue, while a relevant health issue to consider when electing someone to the highest office in the land, is not nearly as critical as the fact Sen. John McCain hasn’t had a mental evaluation in eight years. More below the fold.
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A reminder to Americans with short fucking memories.
The number of anti-vaccination cranks out there on the interwebs seems to be multiplying. It seems you can’t make reference to any kind of vaccination lately without people, sometimes pretending to be liberals (sometimes actually misguided liberals) wailing and moaning about how terrible vaccinations are. It’s the new fluoridation. I’m somewhat surprised that no one wailed and moaned that I mentioned on Pandagon a tetanus vaccination I got the other day, but rest assured, while my arm has been kind of sore, I haven’t yet developed autism.
I have very little patience for cranks as a general rule (which is why working for this site is so fun, because it’s about pushing back against anti-choice cranks), but I reserve a special contempt and loathing for anti-vaccination cranks. They remind me of nothing so much as women who make their living as professional anti-feminists in terms of denial and idiocy levels. Anti-feminist professional women create a special kind of loathing, because they don’t acknowledge that their very ability to be out there earning a paycheck lambasting feminism would not be possible without feminism giving them the right to be women in the public sphere. Anti-vaccination cranks have a similar parasitic relationship to the existence of vaccines. If it weren’t for vaccination, our country would have far more immediate infectious disease health concerns to worry about that the largely imaginary health drawbacks of the vaccination wouldn’t have a chance to ruffle any feathers.
PZ reports that researchers have discovered a link between HPV and oral cancers in men, justifying another look at vaccinating young men for HPV (which also improves herd immunity). So now, as PZ notes, the religious right is facing a major dilemma. It’s one thing to tolerate thousands of deaths from cervical cancer, which only affects women, in order to show that the wages of sin are death. But the sin of fornication is a much different thing for men and women—which is why the nuts say that a woman who has sex is impure and contaminated, but a man who does has just let his integrity slip a little, which is something you can get back by giving your bus seat up to a few old ladies. Certainly, we don’t need straight men getting physically contaminated for real to show that sex is contaminating, when the only spiritually contaminated party is the woman. That’s why, after all, it’s not a sign of integrity for a man to have sex with a woman before marriage, because you’re fouling up someone else’s virgin.
Anyway, PZ has a question.
You know, I had a weary response semi-scripted in my head to those people making a fuss over Obama’s old minister’s belief in conspiracy theories about where HIV came from, a response that would both be understanding of why people fall for conspiracy theories while still maintaining that the truth is the most important thing, and conspiracy theories need to be pushed back against. With a soupcon of explaining why the underlying themes of conspiracy theories about the medical profession that proliferate in the black community are understandable, considering the circumstances. But luckily, wiser heads than me have tackled this problem, so I recommend reading them instead on this issue.
But what is interesting to me is how disingenuous some of the attacks against Rev. Wright are when it comes to actual concern for stopping the spread of HIV.* While not downplaying the role that HIV crankery plays in the spread of the disease (as Kevin notes, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has dismantled the infrastructure to respond to the disease in the wake of believing said crankery, but for racists eager to embrace this, it’s worth noting that Mbeki did so over backed by white advisors and over the objections of black officials), I’m going to say the larger problem here and everywhere around the world is lack of access to protection and lack of education about how to protect yourself from contracting or passing HIV.
As a demonstration of what utter, irresponsible bullshit is going on, I present you the figure of Michael Gerson. Gerson is very concerned about HIV conspiracy theories.
This accusation does not make Wright, as Obama would have it, an “occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy.” It makes Wright a dangerous man. He has casually accused America of one of the most monstrous crimes in history, perpetrated by a conspiracy of medical Mengeles. If Wright believes what he said, he should urge the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he views as guilty of unspeakable evil. If I believed Wright were correct, I would join him in that cause.
But Wright’s accusation is batty, reflecting a sputtering, incoherent hatred for America. And his pastoral teaching may put lives at risk because the virus that causes AIDS spreads more readily in an atmosphere of denial, quack science and conspiracy theories.
And Gerson should know about crankery and battiness on the issue of sexual health, because he’s one of the nation’s leading cranks who is eagerly spreading wack-a-doodle theories that are getting people killed unnecessarily. Gerson has been a huge player in trying to make sure that AIDS relief money sent to Africa is not used to do anything crazy like prevent the transmission of HIV. He pushes abstinence-only here and abroad. After Democrats managed to push through a much weaker PEPFAR bill than they should have, he ran to the WaPo to whine some more about how all the world needs is to start yelling louder at people to keep it in their pants, as if millenia of pushing that message has worked (or as if it were fair to deprive people of sexual expression when there’s a way to do so that’s relatively safe).
An aside - why does it seem like when I go out of town that come back with a cold of some kind? It feels like my head is about to explode today, and I’m hacking up a lung. Speaking of health care, check this out.
Nothing to see here, move along — Hospitals Reuse Medical Devices To Lower Costs.
In a bid to save costs and stem a rising tide of medical waste, hospitals are recycling a growing number of medical devices labeled as single-use, from scissors and scrubs to the sharp blades surgeons use to saw through bones.OK. Saving the planet is a laudable goal, but I wonder what controls are in place to ensure appropriate oversight of the reprocessing. It seems like a situation ripe for corruption at the expense of good (safe) health care.Recycling medical devices labeled for single use is legal as long as certain Food and Drug Administration guidelines are followed. But the practice, which involves shipping devices to reprocessing facilities to be cleaned, sterilized and tested for reuse, has raised concerns about safety. Medical device makers say their single-use products are just that, and pose a higher risk of failure and harm when recycled.
…At Catholic Healthcare West, the nation’s eighth-largest hospital system, a wide range of medical devices labeled as “single use” are reprocessed each year. Last year, the San Francisco-based concern figures it reduced waste volume by 41 tons and saved $1.8 million.
“The safe use of these reprocessed devices helps us conserve resources so we can be more cost-effective in delivering care” says Sister Susan Vickers, vice president of community health. “And we are diverting significant amounts of medical waste, which definitely benefits our planet.”
When I posted this at the Blend, one reader made this unsettling comment:
Disclaimer: I work for a medical device company, but have held these views since the time when I was working in hospitals as an employee.Mad Cow and CJD are caused by prions, snippets of protein that can invade cells and damage them. no sterilization technique can guarantee to eradicate prions.
I encourage everyone to advocate for their own health care and ask your health care providers whether they reuse single-use medical devices and to ask for new product if you (or your SO or family) need some kind of invasive care.
I feel bad that I usually mention Kevin Drum only when I’m quarreling with him for supporting Amy Sullivan’s scolding of the meanie “secularists”. So credit here for this quote that Ezra snagged. (The entire post is good, too.)
As progressives, our goal shouldn’t be to provide gold-plated care to every person in the country, nor should it be to restrict the ability of the rich to get better service if they want to pay for it. Our goal should be to provide decent care to everyone, with the market free to operate on top of that.
It’s a useful insight into some of the resistance to universal health care. I’m continually amazed at how much politics is driven by the notion that a lot of rich and powerful people seem to have that wealth is kind of pointless unless you can lord it over everyone else. And how middle class people slavishly follow that line of thinking. That your foie gras somehow tastes less exquisite if the family down the hill has enough sandwiches for everyone. Wealth is all relative, and if gaping inequalities are moderated, apparently it stings the hides of many a Republican voter, even if they actually are as comfortable and secure as ever before.
I’m running a fever, making this two years in a row where I may very well not see any live music during SXSW because of the common cold. Right now, my ability to write is running kind of low. But I have to share this story with you:
“During my recent annual visit with a new gynecologist, I was shocked by the doctor’s response to my request that she screen me for STIs along with my annual Pap test. Although my gynecologist didn’t exactly dissuade me from getting screened, she warned against having it done during my annual visit. In her experience, insurance companies often refuse to pay for STI screening done during an annual exam; insanely enough, she finds that insurance companies are more likely to cover STI screening when the patient returns for a second pelvic exam.”
Yes, they’d rather pay twice for some reason. Why, I couldn’t tell you.
Congress will be voting next week on passing a new version of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). This is a big deal, because while the old aid package has been pretty successful,* it doesn’t go far enough. There’s a whole bunch of kow-towing to crazy right wing anti-sex demands in the bill, which is no joke, because the more right wing nonsense gets stuck to the package, the more people die from AIDS that didn’t need to. Especially problematic is the refusal to put emphasis on prevention. The Democrats have a great opportunity to renew this, but with all these problems ironed out, saving a lot more lives. But it looks like they’re going to roll over on some key issues just to avoid a fight with the right wingers.
The main issues are that the bill, as rewritten by the Democrats, while it does finally get past the abstinence-only nonsense, still has loopholes that allow organizations that discuss abortion options with patients who are dealing with unplanned pregnancy to be denied funds on that basis. Which is that the global gag rule will be attached to PEPFAR. The sad irony is that the addition of the global gag rule is a new thing to PEPFAR, so the Democrats are overreaching in their attempts to kiss some right wing ass. Contraception for HIV positive women has not been included in the package, even though, as this interview with the Guttmacher’s Susan Cohen that I did this week explains, providing contraception to women who seek it is a low-cost, highly effective way to reduce the amount of perinatal HIV transmission. (The issue is complex and multi-tiered—I recommend listening to the interview to get the full scope of the issue. Understand that this is about helping women prevent pregnancies they don’t want, and is in no way meant to replace getting drugs to women carrying children to term who are trying to prevent perinatal transmission.) And there’s the issue of a pointless requirement that organizations who receive funds to help stop HIV transmission in the sex work community be required to sign an anti-prostitution pledge. All that accomplishes is that we pat ourselves on the back, and that actual prostitutes become wary of the organizations that are supposedly set out to help them, because they’ve openly stated that they’re against these women’s right to be free of legal harassment.
What can you do? Contact Speaker Pelosi’s office and demand that the Democrats pass a bill that puts saving lives and stopping HIV ahead of ideological feel-good crap that doesn’t help and only hurts.
*Maybe you saw “The Daily Show” segment they did on it where they had fun with the fact that the lives saved with PEPFAR might actually end up being the only good thing accomplished by the Bush administration? I know. I can’t believe that something positive has happened, myself.
As you know, the Clinton campaign has charged that Barack Obama lifted whole chunks of another person’s speech, specifically specifically Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, who delivered a speech in 2006 when running for office that is similar in nature to one Obama gave. (WaPo):
“Sen. Obama is running on the strength of his rhetoric, and the strength of his promises. So I think it’s relevant when someone who’s running on his rhetoric lifts words from the speeches of another politician,” Clinton campaign communications director Howard Wolfson said Monday during a conference call with reporters. When asked why the campaign is highlighting the similarities, Wolfson stated that “Sen. Clinton is not running on the strength of her rhetoric. She’s not running to be the Orator in Chief. She’s running to be the president.”Unfortunately for Clinton, the WaPo notes that she has lifted key phrases from her rival.
“We are fired up and we are ready to go because we know America is ready for change and the process starts right here in Iowa,” Clinton said in Iowa in early JanuaryWell, he did, though a charge of plagiarism is pretty weak.
Joe Biden famously withdrew from the presidential campaign in 1987 after it was discovered that he lifted quite a bit of a speech from British politician, Neil Kinnock. I presume the Clinton campaign, in its desperation is throwing everything but the kitchen sink to attack Hillary’s rival for the Dem nomination.
Yeah, Obama should have cited Patrick within the speech, but all of this seems really weak and panicked, particularly since Patrick quickly responded to the charge. It’s after the jump, along with a video from a man alleging he gave a BJ to Obama in a limo. Oh, it’s too much.
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I’m of two minds on stuff like this. On one hand, I agree with bean that the way the media touts every single half-assed scrap of evidence that babies might benefit from restricting and depriving pregnant women of their indulgences is motivated by an unsavory love of having any excuse to pick on women as much as possible. On the other hand, I do think that women should have as much information as possible to help them bring healthy babies to term. I think that the difficult nature of pregnancy reinforces why it’s so critical that make sure that it’s a choice and not mandatory or used as punishment for having sexual experiences that Mike Huckabee disapproves of. But I also think that all the hyper-focus on women’s behavior during pregnancy misleads people into thinking that’s the number one factor when something goes wrong (like a miscarriage, which is somewhat correlated to caffeine use according to this article, though bean brings up some methodology problems), which could lead women to beat themselves up for no good reason. If you had a morning cup of coffee and you miscarried, the odds are mostly that it was a pregnancy going wrong for reasons outside of your control, such as genetic anomalies. As much as it pains us in an era of sperm magical thinking, the female body rejects most opportunities to bring a pregnancy to term for good reasons that we should be grateful for.
Regardless of how good the study is, though, or how right it is, the media outlets who tout every pregnancy deprivation possible as absolutely mandatory reinforce the idea that they think women are nothing more than ambulatory wombs. This quote made me spit out my coffee that I drink to wake up the brain I apparently don’t have.
Today I just got my statement from the insurance company about the gall bladder surgery and overnight stay. The bill was for $9014.35. Because I work for a university and have decent coverage, I only have to shell out $383.11 (there may be other statements to come, but this appears to be the bulk of the charges). On this particular form there is no identifiable line item listed for, say, a dose of the pain medication they gave me while I was in there, but I’m sure it was probably something outrageous, like $20/dose.
I’m thankful the bill is tolerable, but what if I had crappy insurance or none at all?
Our country is so in need of a single payer system (never going to see that in my lifetime), or at the very least a serious overhaul, and even minor attempts to rectify the myriad problems means having to deal with Big Pharma and insurance companies, who have nothing to gain with reform.
Even for those of us who are so fortunate to have health insurance, the fact that it is tied to your employer (significant particularly if you have pre-existing conditions, or kids) becomes a veritable ball-and-chain, limiting opportunities in order to preserve stability — a choice people shouldn’t have to make, but often do.
How many millions of people are in the same boat? What is the impact on the economy as employers pass on more and more of the cost onto employees, or offer reduced benefits in every open enrollment cycle?
Q of the day — do you have adequate coverage, sub-par coverage, or none at all?
If you do have health insurance and are gay, does your employer allow a same-sex partner benefit? In my case I work for a private university that extends the benefit to a same-sex spousal equivalent, my wife Kate works for the state (NC) and has insurance through her job, but there is no benefit extended to partners. So if I lost/left my job, I’d be SOL; if she lost her job, she could go on my policy.
Can you choose your own doctor, are you covered outside of your state (that’s one option offered, limiting in-network coverage to state boundaries to keep premium cost down for the employee)? Have you ever been declined a medical procedure that you would have expected to be covered?
It’s clear that even employers that provide decent coverage are struggling with costs, and which benefits to extend or reduce, but it often seems arbitrary to the layman.
So I’m reading this article about home film distribution on Salon, and the reviewer, Andrew O’Hehir, mentions “The Business of Being Born” as a primary example of a film that’s seen most of its business through Netflix, and then proffers the most defensive review of a movie I think I’ve ever seen. Most of the language is a (probably futile) attempt to plead with people to simply read the damn review as a review instead of spin off into defensive posturing about how they are Not Bad People because they went with hospital births instead of midwives. I’d quote part of the review to show you how defensive it, but every sentence in it is about driving home the thesis, “Just because you personally gave birth in a hospital doesn’t mean you have to flip out and shut down every discussion of alternatives for fear that you’ll conclude that you made the wrong choice, thereby destroying your last attachment to any hope of self-esteem.”
It’s quickly becoming an iconic moment of adolescent female sexuality. First you’re penetrated, then it hurts terribly. You may cry. You may even faint. For a day or two afterward, you might feel kind of weird.
Losing your virginity? No, getting the HPV vaccine.
75% of me wants to write off this story about how incredibly painful the shot is (with hints of maybe you shouldn’t let your daughter get the raging slut shot) as mostly laziness. The reporter clearly went to a CDC-based conference in Georgia and saw this presentation and thought, “Both easy to write about and has a great hook, because it’s about teenage girls and Teh Sex.” But the hyperbolic language of the piece, especially the stuff about the vaccine being the most painful shot ever (more painful than having your cervix removed?) is irresponsible in an atmosphere where sexphobic, religion-addled parents are resisting getting this life-saving prevention for their daughters in the first place, and are probably looking for any excuse possible to avoid it.
Because the shot doesn’t sound significantly different than other vaccines.
A few of you wrote me about the results of this study funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on the disparity in the pain management in the ER based on ethnicity. It's appalling.
The study, which analyzed treatments for more than 150,000 pain-related visits to U.S. hospitals between 1993 and 2005, found 23 percent of blacks and 24 percent of Hispanics received opioids compared with 31 percent of whites. Twenty-eight percent of Asians and other groups received opioids.– Differences in prescribing between whites and non-whites were greater among people with the worst pain. Among patients in severe pain, opioids were prescribed to 52 percent of whites, 42 percent of Hispanics and 39 percent of blacks.
– Blacks were prescribed opioids at lower rates than other groups for almost every type of pain-related emergency department visit, including back pain (33 percent for blacks versus 48 percent for whites), headache (22 percent versus 35 percent) and abdominal pain (20 percent versus 32 percent).
– Opioids were prescribed less often for blacks than whites for kidney stones (56 percent to 72 percent) and long bone fractures (45 percent to 52 percent).
– Non-opioid pain relievers, such as acetaminophen (sold as Tylenol), were prescribed more for non-whites (36 percent) than whites (26 percent).
This study is particularly timely since I've 1) been to the ER recently and 2) had gall bladder surgery last week. Both resulted in my receiving morphine while inpatient and pain-relieving opioid drugs for use at home. While I can't say that I experienced biased care and withholding of these medications because of my race, I have no doubt that implicit bias plays a role in denial of adequate medical pain management in many cases. I was simply fortunate.
I highly recommend Blender JulieWaters' diary on this, Medical care and racism: this is your war on drugs, which I noticed while working on this post. It gets to the heart of the third rail discussions that you all simply love to comment about — not.
This is about having a discussion about the spectrum of racism and bias, not accusing people of running around in a Klan Night Rider hood. People often head straight for the defensive zone there to make sure everyone knows they aren't "racist," when in fact this study proves that implicit bias has direct impact on minority health and well being. It's there, and it's dangerous.
And it's not a matter of whites shouldering all the blame for holding those biases. See after the jump.When talking about racism, it's easy to reduce it to the simplistic: to assume that everyone's racist to some degree and that while whites can act racist towards blacks, sometimes blacks are racist against whites as well. So let's get that out of the way first, by distinguishing between "small r" racism, which is personal racism: "I don't think I'd ever want to date a black man." "I lock my doors in that neighborhood." While problematic, occasional personal individual racism is not nearly as damaging as large-scale ("big R") institutional Racism, which is just intensely dangerous and is implemented nearly universally to the detriment of non-whites.
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I haven’t been online much since my gall bladder surgery (Cholecystectomy) last Thursday. I’m doing as well as can be expected — very sore, sometimes nauseous, very sleepy because of pain meds, etc. — but looking forward to feeling better in a little while. For once, I’m actually staying in bed like I’m supposed to, and getting up and walking as required, rather than doing something insane like getting in the car and driving because I’m stir crazy.
I am slowly but surely healing, I wanted to thank all of you who sent me emails of support and advice, tips in the tip jar and well-wishes in Facebook before and after the surgery. I was really shocked on Saturday when a package arrived from Mike Rogers of BlogActive and PageOneQ. He apparently put out a call to folks on a couple of listservs I’m on, and they signed onto a sweet get well card and gift. My wife Kate can testify that I was genuinely touched and shocked that folks out there cared enough to do that — after all, I just bloviate across your screens each day, I’m not saving the world or anything.
OK. Do you want to see the gall bladder? For the squeamish, I took the liberty of placing the pic (and the description of surgery) over at my pad so I could avoid placing the blather and gore here.
Today’s the big day — I go in to have my crappy gall bladder removed (cholecystectomy). If there are no complications that result in switching from laproscopic to open surgery, I’ll only be in the hospital overnight — my lovely wife Kate will stay over with me. At this ambulatory hospital they wheel you out to the curb by 9AM the next day if you’re an overnighter. Everyone who’s had the op, says after a couple of weeks I’ll feel a lot better than I do now. Here’s hoping.
Anyway, we have to get there today by 9:15 AM, with the slicing and dicing to begin at 10:45. They estimate it will take an hour, more or less, for the operation itself. After that, who knows how long I’ll be too out of it to blog, but you know I’ll have something up if at all possible, since, well, I’m nuts. I have to remember to ask the surgeon to save the stone(s) for me.
On a relevant political point before I sign off, thank goodness I have health insurance that covers this. It’s a sad state of affairs that one is dependent on one’s employer to have decent coverage, particularly if you have pre-existing conditions. Feel free to use the thread to gripe on the state of health care in this country.
If you’re one of my Facebook friends, you’ll probably hear from me there first, since it requires less energy to post a status update over the cell phone. 
I have a regular post in the queue ready to go up in a bit after this one.
Related:
* Blogmistress slice and dice day
* Upcoming holiday slicing and dicing of the blogmistress
* My AM in the ER
* My 2001 ridiculously detailed kidney stone diary (I still receive random emails about this one).
The implications of this article by Michael Pollan are chilling. In sum, superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics are increasingly common, and since at least 70% of American antibiotics are actually used on farm animals to prevent them from getting sick in the inhumane, crowded conditions of factory farms, the chances are pretty high that factory farming is largely responsible for the evolution of these superbugs. And these superbugs are scary—in 2005, more Americans died of staph infections than of AIDS. There’s no condom you can use against staph infections, and even though you run the most risk of catching one by being hospitalized, there’s a new version that you can get elsewhere.
The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain — called “community-acquired MRSA” — is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO.
The logic of capitalism has this amazing power to run over any other kind of logic, which is definitely the case with factory pig farming, which is the likely culprit in the case of the antibiotic-resistant staph cases. Normal human logic resists the factory pig farm. It’s cruel, for one thing, and disgusting. The sheer amounts of pig shit produced are clearly an unmanageable environmental hazard. But the eventual consumers are shielded from the horror of factory pig farms, and the owners and workers rely on the money from the farms, and as such are ill-motivated to make the necessary changes. And since lagoons of pig shit weren’t enough to convince corporate pig farmers to reconsider their methods, I doubt the increasing toll in human life from their efforts will move them, especially since it’s two steps removed from their direct control.
Pollan argues that the word “sustainability” is losing its meaning, and it’s clear why—it’s incompatible with capitalism, and openly arguing for economic systems to replace capitalism is simply verboten in our society. Taboo, unacceptable, off the table. And it will be until it’s too late to reverse the damage done by the need for unchecked growth for profit.
Ezra’s right; there’s something farcical about the knee jerk use of the word “nanny state” when you’re talking about children. The rhetorical device “nanny state” was developed to exploit a very specific set of non-subtly gendered anxieties—to make men especially picture a finger-wagging Mary Poppins that they could rebel against. “Don’t you tell ME what to do! I’m a grown man! I’ll eat all the toxic chemicals that I’m unaware are in my food that I want!”
But whining about the “nanny state” when you’re talking about the bona fide child care duties of the state—i.e. the right of the state to restrict the foods brought into the school to be sold or served the children—is puzzling. It really shows that “nanny state” is a code word that means, “In a conflict between public health and corporate profits, the latter should always prevail.” I’m guessing if it somehow started to conflict with corporate profits to teach children to read, libertarians would start howling “nanny state” about that. “How dare the nannies feed the children healthy food and teach them to read?!” It’s truly bizarre.
I do think there’s a limit on in loco parentis rights of a school, and luckily the U.S. Constitution enumerates the rights that I think should be respected on school grounds—cruel and unusual punishment, freedom of speech and religion, etc., though there’s a certain reasonable amount of age-based restriction that should loosen up as they age on some of these. There’s no real reason to stock age-inappropriate books at an elementary school, for instance. But the rights that a student doesn’t relinquish on school grounds roughly correlates to those very things where citizens have strong disagreements that would necessarily mean that any school interference would be a genuine infringement on basic rights. Religious instruction in the schools, for instance, is a clear violation of the 1st Amendment right, no matter how much wingnuts try to get around it. But healthy food and the eating of it? There’s no constitutional right to junk food, nor is there any sane disagreement in our society about the fact that it’s better to eat your broccoli than a Twinkie. And as Ezra notes, if your child absolutely must eat nasty junk food at school, no one is stopping her from bringing it with her lunch.
What’s more insidious about this whining about federal school food guidelines is how the lack of these guidelines will disproportionately affect the poor. The lack of resources, both financial and geographic, for the poor to get good, healthy food has been discussed thoroughly here. Children living in that situation could really benefit from one or two nutritious meals a day at the school. So as usual with the pro-corporate “libertarian” nonsense, it’s not just about prioritizing corporate profits over public health, it’s specifically about prioritizing corporate profits over the health of people with a lower income. In other words, outright class warfare.
But I think we can all agree this is a problem that everyone, middle class or poor, shares. Everyone wants their kids to eat better, and they’re already bombarded with advertisements for junk food everywhere. When they’re out of your sight and at school, you can’t make them eat right. The school should be able to step in on behalf of parents on this one. It’s not just for kid health and parent peace of mind, either. It’s really unfair to teachers to load kids up on a bunch of sugary stuff at lunch so that they’re beginning their sugar crash phase when they return to their desks. It’s not just a nutrition issue, in other words, it’s a discipline issue.
I’ve been sort of tapped for time today, so not much on the blogging front. But I will give you this post by Jill about how male gynecologists are being targeted for murder by religious extremists in Iraq. Fascinating, isn’t it, that two entirely separate patriarchal religious nuts—some Christian, some Muslim—have independently come to the same conclusion to target for death or at least punishment doctors who exist under the concept that women deserve health care and rights? Granted, their reasoning is a bit different. The Muslim nuts argue that it’s slutty to have women have their bodies and especially genitals seen by male doctors, and the Christian nuts are much more anxious about the slutty behavior preceding the abortion. But in both cases, doctors are treated like traitors to the patriarchy, because they’re viewed as lightening the load of shame and sex-phobia on women.
It’s almost like the excuses about female modesty and saving “babies” are self-serving justifications for otherwise unvarnished misogyny or something.
From the Midwest Teen Sex Show:
It occurred to me while reading this thread that there’s another way that handing contraception out in middle schools might be a good opportunity to intervene before kids get into serious trouble. A lot of young teenage girls are probably not quite aware that they can get pregnant so young. If they have, as I assume many must, much-older boyfriends, the chance that they’re being told this by someone they trust is sliding upwards, too. By making the contraception available, the school indicates to girls that are unsure about what’s going on and are hearing this line about how they’re too young to get pregnant that this is likely untrue. More information is always better, people.
Of course, as wayward noted in comments, the well-being of middle schoolers is far from the priority of the wingnuts screaming about this:
“It’s all fun and games. Experiment, it’s ok. You aren’t hurting anyone…despicable.”
“Action.Meet.Consequence.”
If you think I’m kidding about how they want 12-year-olds pregnant, at least as punishment for supposed wrongdoing, well action meet consequence.
Few things are more indicative of our mainstream media’s idiocy than the fact that right wingers have been allowed to wave the “family values” banner for so long despite this rather unseemly hostility to minor children.
More thought, and more snark on the issue from Womenstake. Salient point: The contraception is being handed out to middle schoolers in direct reaction to the alarming pregnancies in the middle schools. Dress it up however you want, but the screaming over this policy is straightforward opposition to direct measures to keep girls from giving birth when they’re in middle school.
Less sweet if shared?
One of the things about this S-CHIP debacle is that it’s exposing how the difference between the left and the right on reproductive justice issues really is our views on class and freedom, not “life”. Like this wonderful piece decrying the idea that the working class have any rights at all from Mark Hemingway.
While the debate around the Frost family at least initially centered around their relative wealth, the issue really at hand is one of bad behavior. While USAction and a labyrinthine maze of leftist activist groups prepare to rally around images of Tampa Bay’s Most Photogenic Baby holding up a crayon sign that says “Don’t Veto Me,” Dara and Brian Wilkerson are real poster children — for irresponsible decisions.
On the conference call, Dara admitted to me that she and Brian had been talking about having children since before they were married. She further admitted that after they were married she voluntarily left a job at a country club that had good health insurance, because the situation was “unmanageable.” From there she took a job at a restaurant with no health insurance, and the couple went on to have a baby anyway, presuming that others would pay for it and certainly long before they knew their daughter would have a heart defect that probably cost the gross national product of Burkina Faso to fix. But not knowing about future health problems is the reason we have insurance in the first place.
Translated: Having redefined “good faith” arguments as harassing anyone who offers a different political opinion than me and “bad faith” arguments as substantive policy discussions I will lose because I couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel,* I decline to debate you. You’ll want to talk about terrible things you should be ashamed of to bring up in public, like the effectiveness of a certain policy at reaching certain goals, instead of important issues for polite company, like what the Frosts did with their kitchen decor and who do they think they are?!
More flailing for Dan Riehl:
Meanwhile, Ezra Klein has been going after Michelle Malkin. Frankly, if the Liberals actually felt their positions were sound, they wouldn’t use such pathetic tactics, or scream so loud when you start poking holes in their spin.
Offering a sober-minded debate on health care policy=pathetic tactic. Few things are lower in a democracy than having a substantive discussion of the issues in order to persuade voters to your side. Better get back to more honorable tactics, like spreading unsubstantiated gossip.
This commenter at Riehl’s is trotting out some awe-inspiring misogyny:
The labial mind in action. Place ever higher taxes on smoking to pay for programs for the poor and then forbid smoking in ever more locations until finally in and around the home.
That’s the plan—we use our seductive socialist folds to draw you in and then bite off your tax-penis. And your totally-not-compensating-for-something cancer stick.
*Thanks to a reader for introducing me to that lovely metaphor.
The face of creeping communism, apparently.
Ezra is offering to debate Michelle Malkin about S-CHIP, now that Malkin has whined that it’s liberals who make bad faith arguments. Apparently, in her topsy-turvy world, a good faith policy debate is conducted by harassing people who offer up standard issue examples of how good policy works. Sending out your minions to send the message that participation in the democratic process will be punished through harassment by a bunch of right wing thugs is a “good faith” argument.
I don’t imagine Michelle will take him up on the offer. She will either have him mop the floor with her anti-intellectual ass or she’ll just scream him into oblivion.
This entire debacle has managed to freak me out for some reason, which puzzled me for a bit, since as a blogger and political writer I spend a lot of time contemplating horrible right wing nuttery. Then I realized that it was giving me flashbacks to my and Melissa’s stint as a target of this Wingnut Flying Monkeys brigade. Except this is like 100 times worse, since she and I at least were probably aware of how sick and evil the assholosphere was going in. I’m sure for the Frosts, this is coming out of left field.
The entire situation is highlighting the profound differences in vision that the left and right have for what government and economy is for. I think that it really gets to the heart of it, actually. The left generally seeks a society with widespread middle class prosperity, where all people have access to the good life, defined as having roughly these things:
What is it with right wingers and the need to punish people? Democracy, where everyone gets a chance to offer arguments freely and the best ideas win, is an anathema. Abortion and contraception are legal, so stalk women who avail themselves of their rights in an attempt to terrorize them out of using them. Someone speaks up on issues that are important to them and says things that are ideologically incorrect by right wing standards? Try to get them fired.
If that option isn’t available, start calling their house and harassing them. Which is what they’re doing to the Frosts, especially now that it’s coming out that all the smears on this lower middle class family are proving to be so much horseshit. It’s pathetic to see a bunch of people whose main political function in life is to be apologists for the uber-wealthy, to scream bloody murder about capital gains taxes and estate taxes as if making millionaires live on fewer millions (or inherit fewer millions) was the same as stealing bread from orphans try to pretend that a family of 6 that lives on the East Coast and makes $45,000 a year is living high on the hog.
The take-home lesson is the difference between the poor and the middle class is mostly smoke and mirrors. The rich and their wingnut enablers don’t make huge distinctions—any amount of money that you plebians who have to work for it make is considered too much in their eyes.
JTrain, blogging at Majikthise, has an interesting post up about a post-Katrina situation he blogged about almost two years ago. Two years ago, the stories about doctors issuing morphine doses that may have hastened the deaths of some patients in an overwhelmed New Orleans hospital were only rumors, and at the time, J (who’s a doctor that does a lot of E.R. work) explained the concept of a triage:
“Triage”, as the word root implies, originally meant separating patients into three groups–those who would likely be OK without medical care, those who are beyond any help, and those who can benefit from medical care. The idea is to concentrate resources where they can do the most good; it’s no use spending valuable time working on someone with hours left to live no matter what when you can save decades of meaningful life for three or four other people in the same time. In that case, the right thing to do is to provide comfort for the dying, and in a serious and urgent situation, that might include active euthanasia.
If you have sufficient resources, choosing between comforting the dying and attending the salvageable isn’t necessary, but obviously in a hellhole battlefield-style situation like New Orleans after Katrina, there’s a direct conflict. The dying become a direct resource-suck that could end up killing the salvageable. In this case, J broke down the likely options for the dying:
–Evacuate the patients. It may not even be an option. If it is, they’ll probably die en route. If they do make it, it’s just so that they can wait to die in a different building, probably still separated from family, and (just to be frank about it) using resources and manpower that are already scarce to delay the inevitable for a little bit. The patients’ last hours will be spent in a flurry of activity, and on the other end comfort will almost certainly take a back seat to raw necessity.
–Leave the patients. They won’t make it, but the lack of nursing care or meds will mean their last hours will be spent alone and miserable. This is not an option, IMO.
–Push the morphine.
From a strictly utilitarian standpoint, there is only one good option, and a disaster like Katrina brings out the utilitarian in all of us. That doesn’t make it easy to do, or easy to accept.
It’d be easier to accept the libertarian paradise if it wasn’t for the stupid clothes.
Scott highlights the sort of way your brain fries and you quit thinking in Earth logic once you commit yourself to the libertarian ideology. Jane Galt shows why anti-health care folks are just going to lose the argument over time, because they have no real points. How can you, when you’re arguing that it’s better to be sick than well?
As a class, the old and sick are already luckier than the young and healthy. Again, for individuals within that class–those with desperate congenital conditions, for example–this is not the case. But I’m not sure it’s terribly compelling to argue that we should massively disadvantage a large group of people in order to massively advantage another, equally large group of people, all to help out the few who are needy, or deserving, or unlucky.
Of course, she does try to modify her point, but it’s out there that she honestly thinks people are getting away with something by aging or getting sick. As Scott points out, though, the real fault in her argument is that it sort of presupposes there’s a way to escape age or sickness. But Jane appears to think there is.
Moreover, as a class, the old and sick have some culpability in their ill health. They didn’t eat right or excercise; they smoked; they didn’t go to the doctor as often as they ought; they drank to much, or took drugs, or sped, or engaged in dangerous sports. Again, in individual cases this will not be true; but as a class, the old and sick bear some of the responsibility for their own ill health, while younger, healthier people have almost no causal role in the ill-health of others.
She casually leaves off what the old did to cause their own problems: They refused to commit suicide at the age of 40. I mean, the option is there, they don’t take it, and there you go. I suppose we can get Megan to sign onto a Logan’s Run-style plan of a shot to the head for everyone whose body has aged past a point of optimal performance.
I have to say, the desperation of opponents to universal health care is heart-warming. Of course, that’s no excuse to slack on the demands—just because our side has clearly won the argument doesn’t mean we’ve won the battle. (Look at abortion rights, for example.) But once you’ve hit the Logan’s Run argument, you’ve basically conceded all chance of being right.
By the way, dudes of the internet: If you mock them for their arguments instead of their clothes or their sex lives, you avoid giving them reasons to act all victimized.
I’m stealing Zuzu’s picture from an Indian ad campaign for McDonalds. Because it gets right to the point.
Zuzu has a post up about a study that made me all the sadder for how much it didn’t shock me.
Preschoolers preferred the taste of burgers and fries when they came in McDonald’s wrappers over the same food in plain wrapping, U.S. researchers said, suggesting fast-food marketing reaches the very young.
“Overwhelmingly, kids chose the one that they perceived was from McDonald’s,” said obesity prevention expert Dr. Thomas Robinson of the Stanford University School of Medicine, whose work appears in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
They gave the kids the same exact food in different wrappers, mind you, and the kids liked it better if the food came with the McDonald’s brand on it. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s had a preschooler, been around preschoolers, or remembers being a preschooler. I remember when my sister and I went through the phase of wanting to eat at McDonald’s all the time. My father, who likes good food to say the least, pretty much preferred driving needles into his arms rather than eating lunch at McDonald’s, so he went on a parenting rampage to break us of picky eating and junk food yearnings. I’ve told the story before of how he blindfolded us and made us eat different kinds of pizza to show that we liked mushrooms better than we though, which was part of a larger program of breaking us of picky eating. I recall that some people were quick to liken that to child abuse, which I find a little overdramatic, though not at the Dan “Women Who Won’t Worship My Cock Must Have Dark Secrets They Don’t Want Their Master To Discover” level. I found his methods to be an enjoyable challenge—he’s told me that his main issue was that he hates it when people who make their kids clean their plate before they’re excused from the table, which encourages overeating. Anyway, I digress. I just remember being a little kid and like bouncing around begging to be taken to McDonald’s and having my dad rock my worldview by describing the coveted junk food as disgusting. At the time, I took his opinions very seriously, which is good in this case, since McDonald’s is disgusting.
Not actually free.
Jeff’s right; something about this quote just goes beyond the usual semi-murderous musings of our Asshole-In-Chief.
Bush spent a fair amount of time talking about health care yesterday, as well.
“The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America,? he said. “After all, you just go to an emergency room.?
Translation: Ideally, insurance companies would be able to take the public for all they’ve got, and for those who can’t afford to be taken by insurance companies right now, they should be licking my ass that we don’t shoot them in the head for insubordination.
Well, it’s what I heard. I remember hearing this line about E.R. on Rush Limbaugh’s show a million years ago and he was both arguing that a) health care isn’t that bad since you can go to E.R. to be bankrupted and b) that people who can’t pay for E.R. really shouldn’t be able to get health care anyway. The latter was in the margins, but you got the message loud and clear: That we as Americans are generous enough to send you into bankruptcy for the privilege of not dying makes us overly generous. Somehow.
Not that it should matter, weirdly enough. My argument for single-payer health care has always been not that we should undertake it out of basic decency—as Sheezlebub has demonstrated today, basic decency is not something American voters seem to have in enough numbers, especially when there’s a slim possibility that said decency will be extended to black people. And you can tell me that I “hate America” by saying that, but if America is decent enough to care for the poor and the sick, where’s the evidence of this decency? Lurking somewhere in an E.R. where someone is watching their hopes of ever having any kind of savings disappear into a doctor’s bill? Lurking between the corridors of the post-Katrina trailer parks?
No, my argument for universal health care is pure selfishness: We citizens who pay for insurance deserve to get some return on our investment. In Bush’s ideal world, we’d all have to write checks to insurance companies once a month and, if we get sick, we’ll be generously granted a shot of morphine before being shoved out in the snow to die, while the insurance companies are free to liquidate what’s left of our assets to pay themselves back for the cost of the morphine and the labor costs of closing the door as it hits you on your way out. We’re not there yet, but it’s basically the end goal of an industry that exists to make money by denying care.
I want a return on my health care dollar. I want the money I pay in to come out in benefits to me, not in checks made out to stockholders. Pure. Selfishness. And Bushie here is against it, thinks I should be paying his fucking rich buddies more money, when they have more than they know what to do with, money that I actually need. It’s actually pretty simple. But still, his comment bugged me, mostly because he has an endless expansiveness of heart when it comes to the pleadings of his rich buddies for more access to the money from my wallet. And yours, of course.
