Although he’s regarded as a sell-out by Harpers, Obama seems to be taking the sensible tack that Hillary Rodham Clinton won’t survive the Democratic primaries based on her pro-Iraq war vote and her incrementalist health care strategy. Today he called for universal care by the end of the next Presidential term.

The AP report seems to think that makes him the same as Hillary and Dennis Kucinich. That’s just ignorance of the press. Clinton has been explicit about doing this incrementally and Kucinich has been explicit about wanting single payer. Obama is, my guess, too smart to lay out any specifics. But an incremental reduction over 10 years in the uninsured rate (as AHIP favors, for example) is not the same as universal insurance by 2010.

Say what you like about Arnold, but you got to give him credit for being a proper flip-flopper with real moxie. While Bush drowns in his stay-the-course quagmire, Arnold has repudiated basically everything he claimed to care about when he first came into office, and is now running like the unaligned centrist everyone thought they were voting for back in 2003.

Today he called for universal coverage based on a comprehensive pay or play, surrounded by an individual mandate. He even brought back the notion of provider taxes, a beast last seen in the wild in the pre-HillaryCare years, but thought to be extinct having been shot by the AMA and AHA back then.

But my favorite of all is the fact that the pay-or-play employer mandate he’s calling for includes all employers with more than 10 employees. In November 2004, just 26 months ago, he told people to veto Prop 72, which had a pay-or-play system for employers with more than 20 employees. Boy, times and people change, don’t they!

It’s all quite amusing. You wouldn’t know it, but there are no problems with health care in California, and what Arnie did yesterday was a display of showing his true feelings—a combination of handouts to illegal aliens and an introduction of European socialism.

At least that’s what you’d think if your only source was reading the Los Angeles Times reader comments about the proposal. Methinks that the FreeRepublic or Michelle Malkin crowd was sent over there….

(BTW I’ll be writing more about the Arnie plan at Spot-on tomorrow, but I wrote most of what I think the result will be there last week)

In a op-ed in the LA Times, called The battle of Iraq’s wounded Linda Bilmes points out that the number of wounded servicemen and women from the Iraq war/occupation is incredibly high relative to the 3,000 deaths. Something like 50,000. And once the current generation is discharged from the army, the VA —which is already stretched— is going to be overwhelmed.

I’ve just read Imperial Life in the Emerald City which is a mind-blowing account of exactly how screwed up the initial occupation of Iraq was. Not only was there no plan of any form before the invasion for what the occupation ought to be like, but the only people who were thinking rationally in advance about what it should have been like (in State and other departments) were forcibly prevented from getting involved. I thoroughly recommend the book (by WaPo reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran).

But, as if you needed to know after their “preparations” for occupied Iraq and Katrina, it’s for sure that this Administration has done no planning for the wave of disabled veterans that’s about to hit the VA. Now that they finally control the purse strings, let’s hope the Democrats can do better.

Arnie is yakking about health care. Over at Spot-on where I’ll be penning a weekly column this year (honest!) I explain why it’s mostly much ado about nuttin’.

Well you can’t trust these people, can you? No sooner than I’d spent all last year explaining why the time wasn’t quite right for health care reform by 2008
,
then just because they eke out a small electoral win, the Democrats—and
every non-loony conservative Republican—comes out with their own health
care reform plans.The new Congress hasn’t even found out where to molest the pages and already Senator Ron Wyden has introduced a comprehensive plan to eliminate employer-based health insurance,
and transform it to a highly regulated individual market.  Not to be
beaten to the punch, AHIP, the insurance industry lobbying group, has
announced a universal insurance plan
that doesn’t get us close to universal insurance, but miraculously
involves lots of government subsidies for insurance companies. Even
more bizarrely, Kaiser Permanente, which signed on to the AHIP plan
despite the distaste with which they must view some of the other
members of the AHIP board, introduced their own separate plan for California. Continue …

Dan Bednarz from Energy & Healthcare Consultants in Pittsburgh, PA is pretty concerned that you health care types don’t seem to be concerned about Peak Oil. What you say, you’ve never heard of Peak Oil? Better read this then!

America’s healthcare predicament will be resolved in the context of the worldwide energy emergency idiomatically known as “peak oil.” In short, the era of cheap, abundant fossil fuels is entering its twilight and medicine — virtually cut-off from this awareness—is exposed to the consequences. Like any other system healthcare requires energy and resources to function; fossil fuels, especially petroleum, provide both.

Continue reading…

Just worth reading this report to figure out how politics gets done, and how the Federal treasury gets looted drip by drip….especially right before the budget bill is sent to the President by a lame duck Congress (and it’s not just the Republicans at it!)