Thank God there are some of our Congressman who are actually level headed and have balls.....namely Anthony Weiner, a representative from NY's 9th district. He proposed an amendment to axe Medicare to force the Repubs into a position to say that they still think it works, and making them realize that if they did axe it they would be dead at the polls in 2010! That was so priceless...saw it on Rachel tonight. At my hubby's suggestion, I was on the computer to write to Mr. Weiner, despite the fact that we are not his constituants, about how we appreciate and support his efforts. He is actually a single payer advocate, as we are, and we wanted him to know that we felt the Congress needed to quit the pandering and go for what the people need!!!!
I have felt so helpless lately, and one of the things that has helped me is to be in contact with my organizations, and my elected officials, including the White House!!!! They know me well at this point...I feel this is important, so I ask that you all take my lead, if you haven't already, and hound your Congress people on this issue!!!!
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Rave......Whistle blowing!!!!
I don't know if anyone has been watching Rachel Maddow lately, and her wonderful reporting on "C" street, the residence of a number of right wing, religious law makers. She has been showcasing a young author, Jeff Sharlet, as a guest and expert on this group. He lived with them, and wrote a book about his experience as well as the information he gathered about their 'secret' organization. His book is entitled THE FAMILY, and it is on my reading list, if I can stomach it.......
This is the scariest damn stuff I have ever heard....reminds me of Hitler! I have been wracking my brain as to why there are so many 'crazies' in our legislative branches, and now I feel like it has been a slow, decisive, planned attempt to make headway with their agenda and to have control. Not only here, but on the international scene as well.
Jeff is an engaging guest, and very versed in this group's antics. If you get a chance to view an episode, tonights Rachel, was the most telling on this subject, and made me shiver! Hope you get a chance to check it out.....I didn't make it easy for you, but it will be worth checking it out. We can't let these people get away with this.......thank you Jeff, for blowing your whistle......and hope you make more than a few bucks off of it as well!!!!!!
ps...if you use my Rachel link on my list, it will say error on the first page....go to shows, then Rachel's show, then facebook...she has a number of segments highlighted, so you can watch them live....good luck...AirAmerica isn't an easy site to use...sorry!
This is the scariest damn stuff I have ever heard....reminds me of Hitler! I have been wracking my brain as to why there are so many 'crazies' in our legislative branches, and now I feel like it has been a slow, decisive, planned attempt to make headway with their agenda and to have control. Not only here, but on the international scene as well.
Jeff is an engaging guest, and very versed in this group's antics. If you get a chance to view an episode, tonights Rachel, was the most telling on this subject, and made me shiver! Hope you get a chance to check it out.....I didn't make it easy for you, but it will be worth checking it out. We can't let these people get away with this.......thank you Jeff, for blowing your whistle......and hope you make more than a few bucks off of it as well!!!!!!
ps...if you use my Rachel link on my list, it will say error on the first page....go to shows, then Rachel's show, then facebook...she has a number of segments highlighted, so you can watch them live....good luck...AirAmerica isn't an easy site to use...sorry!
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Rave...one step at a time, but let's have perspective!
Oysters for Health Care
Saturday 18 July 2009
by: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
This is a story of health care and two Americans; a tale of two citizens, if you will.
This week, Regina Benjamin was nominated by President Obama as our next surgeon general, charged with educating Americans on medical issues and overseeing the United States Public Health Service. She was the first African-American woman to head a state medical society, a member of the board of trustees of the American Medical Association and last year was named the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius award."
But more important, she's a country doctor, a family physician along the Gulf Coast of Alabama, serving the poor and uninsured - white, black and Asian. After Hurricane Katrina destroyed her clinic - the second time a hurricane had done so - she mortgaged her own home to rebuild it. The day it was to reopen, a fire burned the clinic to the ground. Moving to a trailer, Dr. Benjamin and her staff never missed a day of work.
Stan Wright, the tobacco-chewing mayor of Bayou La Batre, the small shrimp-fishing community in which Dr. Benjamin practices, told National Public Radio, "She'll do whatever she's gotta do to make sure everyone's taken care of."
Benjamin will no doubt bring that same ethic to the fight for health care reform. When President Obama announced her nomination in a Rose Garden ceremony Monday, Dr. Benjamin said, "These are trying times in the health care field, and as a nation, we have reached a sobering realization. Our health care system simply cannot continue on the path that we're on. Millions of Americans can't afford health insurance or they don't have the basic health services available where they live." Although the clinic has not been able to give Dr. Benjamin a salary for years - Mayor Wright says she's owed over $300,000 - she buys medicine for her patients out of her own pocket.
In fact, many of the folks in Regina Benjamin's bayou town are so poor that sometimes she's paid with a pint of oysters or a couple of fish. She's fine with that. And she makes house calls.
Now meet H. Edward Hanway, chairman and CEO of CIGNA, the country's fourth-largest insurance company. At the beginning of the year, CIGNA blamed hard economic times when it announced the layoff of 1,100 employees, but it reported first-quarter profits of $208 million on revenues of nearly $5 billion. Mr. Hanway has announced his retirement at the end of the year, and the living will be easy for him, financially at least. He made $11.4 million in 2008, according to The Associated Press, and some years more than that.
That's a lot of oysters, although he lags behind Ron Williams, CEO of Aetna Insurance, who made $17.4 million last year, or John Hammergren, the head of McKesson, the biggest health care company in the world. His compensation was $29.7 million.
Here's the difference. To Dr. Regina Benjamin, health care is a public service, helping people in need with grace and compassion. To Ed Hanway and his highly paid friends, it's big business, a commodity to be sold to those who can afford it. And woe to anyone who gets between them and the profits they reap from sick people.
That's what Wendell Potter, the former CIGNA executive turned health care reform advocate, told us on last week's edition of "Bill Moyers Journal."
"Just about every time there has been significant legislation before Congress, the industry has been able to kill it," he said. "Yeah, the status quo works for them. They don't like to have any regulation forced on them or laws forced on them. They don't want to have any competition from the federal government, or any additional regulation from the federal government. They say they will accept it. But the behavior is that they will not."
As we reported last week, that behavior includes spending nearly a million and a half a day to make sure health care reform comes out their way. Over the years, they've lavished millions on the politicians who are writing and voting on health care reform. Now it's payback time.
Proposed legislation finally is coming out of House and Senate committees, and Thursday's Los Angeles Times reported "signs that the debate was moving into a more bruising phase in which insurance companies, hospitals and others fight to shape the details of legislative provisions that affect them."
It's going to get ugly, especially now that some Democrats, according to ABC News, are contemplating new taxes on health insurance and pharmaceutical companies to help pay for reform, perhaps as much as $100 billion worth.
In other words, no more Mister Nice Guy. Those TV commercials you've been seeing from the health care companies about their generosity and miracles of modern medicine are about to change, as the opposition shifts gears from charm to alarm. It's the war against the Clinton health care plan all over again.
This time, don't let them scare you. "It should not be this hard for doctors and other health care providers to care for their patients," Dr. Regina Benjamin said when she was nominated this week. "It shouldn't be this expensive for Americans to get health care in this country."
--------
Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program "Bill Moyers Journal," which airs Friday nights on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers. Research provided by producer Gail Ablow and associate producer Julia Conley.
Saturday 18 July 2009
by: Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
This is a story of health care and two Americans; a tale of two citizens, if you will.
This week, Regina Benjamin was nominated by President Obama as our next surgeon general, charged with educating Americans on medical issues and overseeing the United States Public Health Service. She was the first African-American woman to head a state medical society, a member of the board of trustees of the American Medical Association and last year was named the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius award."
But more important, she's a country doctor, a family physician along the Gulf Coast of Alabama, serving the poor and uninsured - white, black and Asian. After Hurricane Katrina destroyed her clinic - the second time a hurricane had done so - she mortgaged her own home to rebuild it. The day it was to reopen, a fire burned the clinic to the ground. Moving to a trailer, Dr. Benjamin and her staff never missed a day of work.
Stan Wright, the tobacco-chewing mayor of Bayou La Batre, the small shrimp-fishing community in which Dr. Benjamin practices, told National Public Radio, "She'll do whatever she's gotta do to make sure everyone's taken care of."
Benjamin will no doubt bring that same ethic to the fight for health care reform. When President Obama announced her nomination in a Rose Garden ceremony Monday, Dr. Benjamin said, "These are trying times in the health care field, and as a nation, we have reached a sobering realization. Our health care system simply cannot continue on the path that we're on. Millions of Americans can't afford health insurance or they don't have the basic health services available where they live." Although the clinic has not been able to give Dr. Benjamin a salary for years - Mayor Wright says she's owed over $300,000 - she buys medicine for her patients out of her own pocket.
In fact, many of the folks in Regina Benjamin's bayou town are so poor that sometimes she's paid with a pint of oysters or a couple of fish. She's fine with that. And she makes house calls.
Now meet H. Edward Hanway, chairman and CEO of CIGNA, the country's fourth-largest insurance company. At the beginning of the year, CIGNA blamed hard economic times when it announced the layoff of 1,100 employees, but it reported first-quarter profits of $208 million on revenues of nearly $5 billion. Mr. Hanway has announced his retirement at the end of the year, and the living will be easy for him, financially at least. He made $11.4 million in 2008, according to The Associated Press, and some years more than that.
That's a lot of oysters, although he lags behind Ron Williams, CEO of Aetna Insurance, who made $17.4 million last year, or John Hammergren, the head of McKesson, the biggest health care company in the world. His compensation was $29.7 million.
Here's the difference. To Dr. Regina Benjamin, health care is a public service, helping people in need with grace and compassion. To Ed Hanway and his highly paid friends, it's big business, a commodity to be sold to those who can afford it. And woe to anyone who gets between them and the profits they reap from sick people.
That's what Wendell Potter, the former CIGNA executive turned health care reform advocate, told us on last week's edition of "Bill Moyers Journal."
"Just about every time there has been significant legislation before Congress, the industry has been able to kill it," he said. "Yeah, the status quo works for them. They don't like to have any regulation forced on them or laws forced on them. They don't want to have any competition from the federal government, or any additional regulation from the federal government. They say they will accept it. But the behavior is that they will not."
As we reported last week, that behavior includes spending nearly a million and a half a day to make sure health care reform comes out their way. Over the years, they've lavished millions on the politicians who are writing and voting on health care reform. Now it's payback time.
Proposed legislation finally is coming out of House and Senate committees, and Thursday's Los Angeles Times reported "signs that the debate was moving into a more bruising phase in which insurance companies, hospitals and others fight to shape the details of legislative provisions that affect them."
It's going to get ugly, especially now that some Democrats, according to ABC News, are contemplating new taxes on health insurance and pharmaceutical companies to help pay for reform, perhaps as much as $100 billion worth.
In other words, no more Mister Nice Guy. Those TV commercials you've been seeing from the health care companies about their generosity and miracles of modern medicine are about to change, as the opposition shifts gears from charm to alarm. It's the war against the Clinton health care plan all over again.
This time, don't let them scare you. "It should not be this hard for doctors and other health care providers to care for their patients," Dr. Regina Benjamin said when she was nominated this week. "It shouldn't be this expensive for Americans to get health care in this country."
--------
Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program "Bill Moyers Journal," which airs Friday nights on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers. Research provided by producer Gail Ablow and associate producer Julia Conley.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Rave...getaways!
I'm packing the motorhome, cooking tomorrow so I don't have to cook later, and hitting the road to Paso Robles........relaxing, eating, drinking, swimming, walking, watching movies, wine tasting and just enjoying each other....Gary, and our friend Robert share a BD on Thurs. We are adding the grandgirls to the mix, so should be eventful.........more later!
Monday, July 6, 2009
Rave....Courage, do we have it in us??
"One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.".......Maya Angelou
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