Bad Deeds for 8-4-2009 – Healthcare Hooligans for Hire

Health Care Town Halls Being Sabotaged by Well-Funded and Instructed Corporate Hooligans – Corporate lobbyists are organizing far right hooligan tactics to disrupt civic meetings about health care reform. This is the organized use of intimidation. This is orchestrated outrage. There is a script for this stuff that was written before these events happened and that appears to be instructions to people to shut down these efforts at civic discourse. The web site Think Progress obtained a leaked memo from a group that calls itself Right Principles. The three page memo details how protesters should behave at town hall events.

Under the heading “Inside the Hall” it says:

You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early. If he blames Bush for something or offers other excuses — call him on it, yell back and have someone else tallow-up with a shout-out. The goal is to rattle him.

When the formal Q&A session begins get all your hands up and keep them up…. The balance of the group should applaud when the question is asked, further putting the Rep on the defensive.

Who’s giving these rent-a-mob instructions like this? Well that memo was written by a man named Bob MacGuffie. Bob McGuffie is associated with an organization called Freedom Works. Freedom Works is a Washington DC lobbying firm, run by former Republican Majority leader Dick Armey. This is well paid lobbyists doing this as a strategy to keep their corporate CEOs rich by depriving Americans of the health care they need.

Please take action now by calling on your members of Congress to reject these tactics.

 

More Organized Hooligans – Freedomworks isn’t some “organic grassroots” outfit. It’s run by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey — corporate lobbyist, global warming denier and ladies’ man. As Paul Krugman noted, their money comes from the Koch, Scaife, Bradley, Olin nexus, as well as other reliable funders of right wing infrastructure including Exxon Mobil.

 

Republican States Have the Worst Health Care – A 2007 Commonwealth Fund report, “Aiming Higher: Results from a State Scorecard on Health System Performance,” examined states’ performance across 32 indicators of health care access, quality, outcomes and hospital use. Topping the list in the chart above were Hawaii, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. Bringing up the rear were the Bush bastions of Kentucky, Louisiana, Nevada, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma. The 10 worst performing states were all solidly Republican in 2004. (8 voted for McCain in 2008.)

For example, 30% of adults and 20% of children in Texas lacked health insurance, compared to 11% in Minnesota and 5% in Vermont, respectively. Premature death rates from preventable conditions were almost double (141.7 per 100,000 people) in Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi compared to the top performing states (74.1 per 100,000). Adults over 50 receiving preventative care topped 50% in Minnesota compared to only 33% in Idaho. Childhood immunizations reached 94% in Massachusetts, compared to just 75% in the bottom five states. As the report details, federal and state policies such as insurance requirements and Medicaid incentives clearly impact health care outcomes.

 

Death, Dishonesty and the GOP – In an effort to defeat universal health care, conservatives are engaging in a campaign of lies that will ultimately cause more families to suffer needlessly at a most painful time. It’s easy to play on people’s fear of death. It’s even easier when you’re willing to lie outright, as conservatives are doing in the health care debate. Republicans want to ensure that “Granny” suffers needlessly in death, and that her family — in the midst of their pain — deal with the confusion of not knowing what kind of care “Granny” does or doesn’t want, and what kind of measures she does and doesn’t want taken.

Only a party that believes the Terri Schiavo spectacle was a boon to their cause could engage in a campaign to virtually ensure that many, many more such cases will happen
That’s because the measure they’re exploiting to defeat health care reform is really intended to facilitate more people getting advance directives. An advance directive is simply a document that serves to state what medical treatments you want or don’t want, and what measure you do or do not want taken if you are unable to make medical decisions for yourself. In other words it speaks for you when you cannot speak for yourself.

Health care reform advocates don’t want to “Kill Granny.” Neither do conservatives. I’ll even give them the benefit of the doubt that they don’t want your family battling it out over Granny’s hospital bed, or in court for years and years, as Granny lies there, no longer able to say what she wants. But that’s the ultimate outcome of their dishonest campaign.

 

Will Obamacare Make the U.S. More Like Europe? – The right knows that they are supposed to hate Obamacare; the only problem is that they keep forgetting why. According to a study that they have been widely touting it promises to both increase coverage and reduce costs. Presumably these are not the reasons they oppose President Obama’s plan.
One of the other reasons that the right has pushed is that President Obama’s plan will be a serious impediment to the growth of small business and make the U.S. more like Europe. Let’s look at that. 7.2 percent of the workers in this country own their own business. France has a self-employment rate of 9.0 percent, Germany 12.0 percent, and Italy 26.4 percent.

Okay, maybe self-employment doesn’t tell us much about the role of small business. How about the share of small firms (fewer than 20 employees) in manufacturing employment? Well, our 11.1 percent share again beats out Luxembourg, and also Ireland, but it trails all the other countries for which the OECD has data.

Maybe 20 employees is not the right cutoff for a definition of small businesses in manufacturing. How about 500? By that measure, the U.S. comes in dead last.

Will President Obama’s health care plan promote small business and make us more like Europe? It very well might. And maybe that will be good for small business.

The idea that Europe’s welfare state has strangled small businesses is not true. The politicians and pundits should be corrected when they spew such nonsense.

Regards,

Jim