Got some news for you -- while the debate in Congress drags on, and incredible organizations like Health Care for America Now, Sick for Profit, Rock the Vote, Physicians for a National Health Program as well as millions of committed individuals fight for sane, effective, humane, and efficient American health care, my job's taking me out of the country for the next few months, and I won't be able to post here or respond to comments.
I was never really supposed to be doing this: my regular bit basically involves reading, language, and travel. I started this blog out of a kind of sense of compulsion, and have been trying to run it in my spare time (which should be obvious to anyone who reads every day -- some pretty thin entries, back there in the archives...).
If all goes well, I won't be back before our Congress votes on, and Barack Obama signs, a strong public option. One that gives the government the power to negotiate for lower health care costs, and one in which any American can choose to participate.
Until then, this blog will slow down a great deal -- I'm going to put the comments on moderation to avoid dozens of ads for Cialis cluttering up the place, and hopefully Mattlo In His Infinite Wisdom will have plenty to say (although he's got a full time job too, so you know), but there may be a good bit more silence in the next few weeks.
As long as I'm doing a meta-what-about-the-blog post, here are blog-related facts: since I started monitoring traffic on September 12, a little under a month ago, the blog has had 712 page views and 403 unique visitors. The most linked-to post was "Specifically, Women", which got picked up by feminist blog Feministing. The most commonly viewed individual page was GradMed Insurance Review, thanks to our OCD, underutilized friends at GradMed aka American Insurance Administrators aka all sorts of things. The blog has been accessed from Britain, Singapore, Turkey, Japan, and Spain. Someone from Vilnus, Lithuania arrived here last week by doing a Google blogsearch for "bill +method" (I don't think they were looking for info on the Baucus bill, but that's what they got).
My favorite picture on the blog is this one, a real circular from the early 60s outlining the treasonous Communist sympathies of John F. Kennedy. The cutest person on the blog is this person. My favorite reader comment is this one, which outlines what an AIDS patient had to do in order to get his life-saving medication covered by Pacificare. His success -- and his willingness to fight -- gives me hope that the rest of us can win our fight against the insurance industry, too.
Also, Dying for a Public Option is the only Internet site in the entire world which contains the phrase "internet fancyparties". This phrase, wholly invented by me personally, is not a registered trademark and may be freely used for any and all purposes.
I have one more post ready for tomorrow, but after that, I'm out. I sort of had fun doing this. If we end up with affordable health insurance for all Americans, I will have really had fun doing this. Thank you all for the outgoing links to HCAN and the calls to Congress. Please keep up the good work.
Showing posts with label internet fancyparties. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet fancyparties. Show all posts
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Attention Deficit Disorder in the NYTimes
I woke up this morning, and to my significant disappointment, found this article at the top of the New York Times: Aim of Obama Health Speech: Reigniting a Presidency. NONONONONONO. Or to use a visual from last night,
(Translation: hey, now. Hey there, buddy. That's not good for anyone.)
The article should rightly be titled: "Aim of Obama Health Speech: Health."
My attitude towards a great deal of the media isn't so much that they're skewed liberal or conservative -- different media outlets have different kinds of customers -- but that they're all necessarily in the business of selling papers/ad time/magazine subscriptions, and that each of them fights in their own way between the urge to say a thing that is true and the need to make sales. Glenn Beck wakes up in the morning and thinks, ok. Gotta attract some eyeballs today. The New York Times, same thing -- this is the kind of impetus that ends in a news analysis article (they're not, in their defense, claiming that this is 'news') at the top of the paper the day after an important policy speech, and one that eschews the issue at hand (what kind of health insurance? What kind of bill? When? How much?) for personalities, narratives, and conflict.
My point is that this is essentially a dressed up version of "JENNIFER ANISTON TELLS BRAD: I'M OVER YOU!" or "BRONCOS ROUT CHARGERS" -- the kind of story that they assume we will find inherently compelling. It's got people we know in it, and they're fighting with each other, and we want to know who's winning. Meanwhile, though, these same papers are running articles like "Democrats do poor job of explaining health insurance reform" -- can you see the disconnection? Whether a person is for reform or against it, whether they want a public option or not, the responsibility lies in part with the media to help outline exactly what's in the bills, and what's at stake. Journalists are never going to be entirely objective, but there's a difference between a journalist of any party whose goal is to understand an issue or event and one who just wants to tell a compelling horse-race story. This is the difference between the Olbermann/Limbaugh/Becks of the world and the Cronkite/Woodward/Bernstein/Moyers types.
The proliferation of the former is a problem. While the discussions among voters that I've seen have been largely centered on whether or not we should pass a public option or some other form of health insurance reform, Yahoo and Drudge and the Huffington Post want to talk about Joe Wilson yelling, and the Wall Street Journal has a speech grader. The real exception this morning seems to be the Washington Post: the article's registration-only, but the top headline right now is "Obama Endorses Limited Malpractice Reform." Maybe I should sign up: it feels like it's been forever since I felt the informative and seductive caress of news.
(Translation: hey, now. Hey there, buddy. That's not good for anyone.)The article should rightly be titled: "Aim of Obama Health Speech: Health."
My attitude towards a great deal of the media isn't so much that they're skewed liberal or conservative -- different media outlets have different kinds of customers -- but that they're all necessarily in the business of selling papers/ad time/magazine subscriptions, and that each of them fights in their own way between the urge to say a thing that is true and the need to make sales. Glenn Beck wakes up in the morning and thinks, ok. Gotta attract some eyeballs today. The New York Times, same thing -- this is the kind of impetus that ends in a news analysis article (they're not, in their defense, claiming that this is 'news') at the top of the paper the day after an important policy speech, and one that eschews the issue at hand (what kind of health insurance? What kind of bill? When? How much?) for personalities, narratives, and conflict.
My point is that this is essentially a dressed up version of "JENNIFER ANISTON TELLS BRAD: I'M OVER YOU!" or "BRONCOS ROUT CHARGERS" -- the kind of story that they assume we will find inherently compelling. It's got people we know in it, and they're fighting with each other, and we want to know who's winning. Meanwhile, though, these same papers are running articles like "Democrats do poor job of explaining health insurance reform" -- can you see the disconnection? Whether a person is for reform or against it, whether they want a public option or not, the responsibility lies in part with the media to help outline exactly what's in the bills, and what's at stake. Journalists are never going to be entirely objective, but there's a difference between a journalist of any party whose goal is to understand an issue or event and one who just wants to tell a compelling horse-race story. This is the difference between the Olbermann/Limbaugh/Becks of the world and the Cronkite/Woodward/Bernstein/Moyers types.
The proliferation of the former is a problem. While the discussions among voters that I've seen have been largely centered on whether or not we should pass a public option or some other form of health insurance reform, Yahoo and Drudge and the Huffington Post want to talk about Joe Wilson yelling, and the Wall Street Journal has a speech grader. The real exception this morning seems to be the Washington Post: the article's registration-only, but the top headline right now is "Obama Endorses Limited Malpractice Reform." Maybe I should sign up: it feels like it's been forever since I felt the informative and seductive caress of news.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
The 9/9/9 Speech
First off: people watched it. 2500 comments on Fark, the top two slots at Reddit (this and this -- Reddit is pretty liberal, though, in addition to its Ron Paul contingent), headlines in every respectable newspaper, and twenty-three THOUSAND comments at the Huffington Post, plus another five thousand in the sub-stories about Joe Wilson, etc. Now, Internet fancyparties aren't really an indication of what the rest of America is doing or thinking, but interest online is pretty intense. I didn't hear too many televisions through my thin thin Los Angeles walls -- but the speech played pretty early here, and most people likely weren't home from work yet.
From the perspective of someone who believes very much that a public option for health insurance is the best way to limit costs and provide insurance for those who don't have it, the speech was a punt. Congress will decide -- the President pointed out only that legislation needs to pass, that it's Congress's job, and that too much time has been wasted bickering. He remains, it seems, a personal supporter of the public option (much has been made of the text of his recommendation at the whitehouse website) but seems to have no compunctions about triggers, co-ops, or any other way Congress thinks might work to cost-effectively insure Americans. His "door is open" -- his priority is clearly to get effective legislation in place, and to do it quickly. This is hard to hear for me, a little -- because there's a lot of doubt as to whether a public option has enough votes to pass in the Senate, and other policies might have a better chance -- but I, for one, was never expecting him to release some sort of magic fungus that would digest and then replace senators who've been bought off by the insurance industry, mimicking their shapes long enough to pass a strong public option. I wasn't expecting that at all. It might have occurred to me as a nonzero possibility, but I wasn't expecting it. This is okay. I have always suspected that the best policies are those that the people dictate to the government, rather than the other way around: I'll continue dictating, and I invite you to do the same.
As an American, though, and someone who's sat through interminable debates (I got called a fascist AGAIN today -- wassup, guys? Wass! Up!) that use divisive language, code, and 20th-century cliches in the place of substantive discussion of policy, I was really relieved that the President did his best to insist on change without the assumption that he or his party was the sole determinant of that change. He seemed to understand that there is a significant part of the nation that has their own ideas about how to best bring about reform, and that Congressional Republicans and Blue Dogs represent a lot of those people. At heart, he really is a negotiator, and regardless of the right's fears about him, he seems to be pulling for a majority solution. I'm sorry if we lose the public option -- and I fully intend to keep advocating for it as a fiscally responsible, morally preferable, centrist policy -- but it's a small price to pay for a real reform that we feel like the whole nation weighed in on. I poked around the conservative rageblogs a little bit this evening, and their response was muted: a lot of talk about tax-and-spend, a lot of talk about number-fudging with regards to uninsurance rates and cost overruns. Not a lot of "treason" or "Communism". That seems like an improvement, to me, and well worth some negotiations with regards to reform.
I know that a GOP representative from Louisiana heckled the President during his speech -- he's since apologized, probably realizing that it wasn't that sort of speech and that we're no longer having that kind of argument.
If, I say if, the reform Congress produces ends up representing a real and positive change. The most valuable plan plank for the insurance companies -- an insurance mandate, with fines for Americans who don't get insured -- seems to have gained wide acceptance in Congress, but cost limiting measures and social assurances for the unemployed and underemployed have not. Luckily, someone's been jamming up the phone lines at the Congressional switchboards (1-877-264-HCAN), and maybe they should just stay jammed until Congress gets the idea.
From the perspective of someone who believes very much that a public option for health insurance is the best way to limit costs and provide insurance for those who don't have it, the speech was a punt. Congress will decide -- the President pointed out only that legislation needs to pass, that it's Congress's job, and that too much time has been wasted bickering. He remains, it seems, a personal supporter of the public option (much has been made of the text of his recommendation at the whitehouse website) but seems to have no compunctions about triggers, co-ops, or any other way Congress thinks might work to cost-effectively insure Americans. His "door is open" -- his priority is clearly to get effective legislation in place, and to do it quickly. This is hard to hear for me, a little -- because there's a lot of doubt as to whether a public option has enough votes to pass in the Senate, and other policies might have a better chance -- but I, for one, was never expecting him to release some sort of magic fungus that would digest and then replace senators who've been bought off by the insurance industry, mimicking their shapes long enough to pass a strong public option. I wasn't expecting that at all. It might have occurred to me as a nonzero possibility, but I wasn't expecting it. This is okay. I have always suspected that the best policies are those that the people dictate to the government, rather than the other way around: I'll continue dictating, and I invite you to do the same.
As an American, though, and someone who's sat through interminable debates (I got called a fascist AGAIN today -- wassup, guys? Wass! Up!) that use divisive language, code, and 20th-century cliches in the place of substantive discussion of policy, I was really relieved that the President did his best to insist on change without the assumption that he or his party was the sole determinant of that change. He seemed to understand that there is a significant part of the nation that has their own ideas about how to best bring about reform, and that Congressional Republicans and Blue Dogs represent a lot of those people. At heart, he really is a negotiator, and regardless of the right's fears about him, he seems to be pulling for a majority solution. I'm sorry if we lose the public option -- and I fully intend to keep advocating for it as a fiscally responsible, morally preferable, centrist policy -- but it's a small price to pay for a real reform that we feel like the whole nation weighed in on. I poked around the conservative rageblogs a little bit this evening, and their response was muted: a lot of talk about tax-and-spend, a lot of talk about number-fudging with regards to uninsurance rates and cost overruns. Not a lot of "treason" or "Communism". That seems like an improvement, to me, and well worth some negotiations with regards to reform.
I know that a GOP representative from Louisiana heckled the President during his speech -- he's since apologized, probably realizing that it wasn't that sort of speech and that we're no longer having that kind of argument.
If, I say if, the reform Congress produces ends up representing a real and positive change. The most valuable plan plank for the insurance companies -- an insurance mandate, with fines for Americans who don't get insured -- seems to have gained wide acceptance in Congress, but cost limiting measures and social assurances for the unemployed and underemployed have not. Luckily, someone's been jamming up the phone lines at the Congressional switchboards (1-877-264-HCAN), and maybe they should just stay jammed until Congress gets the idea.
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