Kamala Harris – The Health Care Blog

No, Health Care Is NOT Brat

Jul 31, 2024

By KIM BELLARD

Until last week, I thought “brat” referred to an obnoxious child. I was vaguely aware of Charli XCX, but I wasn’t aware that earlier this summer she’d dropped a new album with that name, or that the cultural zeitgeist subsequently declared this to be Brat Summer. Then last weekend in the space of a day, Joe Biden dropped out of the Presidential race, Vice President Harris became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and Charli XCX tweeted “kamala IS brat.”

V.P. Harris’s campaign exploded. Most of us had kind of been dreading the campaign between two eighty-year-old white guys, and then suddenly we had a mixed heritage woman as a candidate, who even at 59 seemed positively youthful by comparison. And brat to boot!

It’s been hilarious to watch people like Stephen Colbert or Jake Tapper try to explain brat to their viewers. Charli XCX herself described it on TikTok as:

That girl who is a little messy and likes to party, and maybe says dumb things sometimes, who feels herself but then also maybe has a breakdown but parties through it. It’s very honest; it’s very blunt—a little bit volatile, does dumb things, but, like, it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.

It’s been taken much further than that, of course. An article in The Guardian described it: “Because, as we all know by now, brat – inspired by Charli’s most recent album – is more than a name, it’s a lifestyle. It is noughties excess, rave culture. It’s “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, a strappy white top with no bra”. It’s quintessentially cool.” Shirly Li, in The Atlantic, opined: “The essence of “brat”is not defining people as such; it’s being simultaneously provocative and vulnerable.”

But, more to the point, Xochitl Gonzalez, also writing in The Atlantic, made clear how we should think about brat: “If you don’t know what that means, it doesn’t matter.” After all, if you’re not in on the joke, you are the joke.

The Harris campaign is all in on the joke. It fully embraced the appellation, even changing its campaign logo on social media to the easily identifiable lime green of the Brat album cover. The KHive is busy creating memes, posting TikTok clips, and filling the world with coconut emojis (long story). Some have claimed that brat summer is already over, but maybe not so fast.

Whether it is the brat effect or simply a honeymoon period for Ms. Harris, her favorability and enthusiasm ratings have soared, and the Presidential race polls again show a dead heat, after President Biden’s polls had tanked following his disastrous debate performance earlier this month. The simple fact that the Dems have a candidate who can become a cultural meme, in a good way, feels refreshing, especially in a campaign that heretofore had evoked more dread and resignation than enthusiasm.

I wish healthcare was brat.

California’s Proposition 46: Trial Attorneys Behaving Badly

Nov 3, 2014• 131

By CALIFORNIA DOCTOR

After more than a year of conspiratorial planning that would make Francis Underwood proud, California’s trial attorneys got a number assigned to an opaquely worded ballot initiative on Drug and Alcohol Testing of Doctors. Medical Negligence Lawsuits Initiative Statute. As a result, “Proposition 46” could give California voters an unwitting hand in doing what this attorney group has been unable to accomplish after 40 years of inept legislative lobbying and dubious court challenges: undermine the state’s Medical Injury and Compensation Reform Act, or MICRA.

MICRA was passed in 1978 by a Democratic-dominated legislature and signed into law by then-governor Jerry Brown in response to the collapse of the state’s medical professional liability insurance market. MICRA didn’t change the right of injured patients to obtain unlimited economic damages for all medical costs, lost wages and lifetime earnings. What it did was limit was non-economic “pain and suffering” damages to $250,000. Up until 1978, California’s trial attorneys had used this highly speculative class of damages to rake in a third of the multi-million jackpot jury awards. That made California physicians’ malpractice insurance unavailable at any price, leading many doctors to close their practices and leave the state.

That ended with the passage of MICRA. The market stabilized and in the decades that followed, billions in health care savings from lower professional liability costs were passed through to California’s patients.

Early last year, California’s physicians had heard rumors that a ballot initiative to undo MICRA’s non-economic cap was being planned. Little did they know that California’s trial attorneys would take their cue from political consultant-bully Chris Lehane by opening their campaign with a mass mailing of anti-MICRA cadaver toe tags. That was quickly followed by the neighbors of pediatrician and then California Medical Association President Paul Phinney receiving deceptive postcards implying he was a drug dealer.

Months later, the ballot initiative – that was 100% underwritten by the trial attorneys and their allies at a cost of $2.85 per signature – landed on California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ desk. The initiative’s authors cleverly disguised its quadrupling of the MICRA cap to more than $1 million (“to account for inflation”) and cynically camouflaged it between two conversation-changers: 1) mandatory physician drug screening and 2) mandatory uploading of the narcotic prescription history of every California patient to an online database. Naturally, Ms. Harris rewarded her trial attorney donors by making a mockery of the state’s single-subject rule and okayed it.