Charlie Rose

NoPardonforMichaelMilken  08/08/2009 01:35 AM Report

Steve Pearlstein of The Washington Post has been on Charlie's show many times to discuss the economy.

But Charlie has NEVER had Mr. Pearlstein on his show to examine the current health care debate and, in particular, the Conservatives' attack of any and all reform proposals for the current health care system.

Mr. Pearlstein simply offers to many facts and too much logic for the tastes of Charlie and his offshore financial handlers.

Courtesy of The Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/06/AR2009080603854_pf.html

*Republicans Propagating Falsehoods in Attacks on Health-Care Reform*

By Steven Pearlstein

Friday, August 7, 2009

As a columnist who regularly dishes out sharp criticism, I try not to

question the motives of people with whom I don't agree. Today, I'm going

to step over that line.

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological

fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have

been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a

cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the

political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal

opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do

anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its

most serious domestic problems.

There are lots of valid criticisms that can be made against the health

reform plans moving through Congress -- I've made a few myself. But

there is no credible way to look at what has been proposed by the

president or any congressional committee and conclude that these will

result in a government takeover of the health-care system. That is a

flat-out lie whose only purpose is to scare the public and stop

political conversation.

Under any plan likely to emerge from Congress, the vast majority of

Americans who are not old or poor will continue to buy health insurance

from private companies, continue to get their health care from doctors

in private practice and continue to be treated at privately owned

hospitals.

The centerpiece of all the plans is a new health insurance exchange set

up by the government where individuals, small businesses and eventually

larger businesses will be able to purchase insurance from private

insurers at lower rates than are now generally available under rules

that require insurers to offer coverage to anyone regardless of health

condition. Low-income workers buying insurance through the exchange --

along with their employers -- would be eligible for government

subsidies. While the government will take a more active role in

regulating the insurance market and increase its spending for health

care, that hardly amounts to the kind of government-run system that

critics conjure up when they trot out that oh-so-clever line about the

Department of Motor Vehicles being in charge of your colonoscopy.

There is still a vigorous debate as to whether one of the insurance

options offered through those exchanges would be a government-run

insurance company of some sort. There are now less-than-even odds that

such a public option will survive in the Senate, while even House

leaders have agreed that the public plan won't be able to piggy-back on

Medicare. So the probability that a public-run insurance plan is about

to drive every private insurer out of business -- the Republican

nightmare scenario -- is approximately zero.

By now, you've probably also heard that health reform will cost

taxpayers at least a trillion dollars. Another lie.

First of all, that's not a trillion every year, as most people assume --

it's a trillion over 10 years, which is the silly way that people in

Washington talk about federal budgets. On an annual basis, that

translates to about $140 billion, when things are up and running.

Even that, however, grossly overstates the net cost to the government of

providing universal coverage. Other parts of the reform plan would

result in offsetting savings for Medicare: reductions in unnecessary

subsidies to private insurers, in annual increases in payments rates for

doctors and in payments to hospitals for providing free care to the

uninsured. The net increase in government spending for health care would

likely be about $100 billion a year, a one-time increase equal to less

than 1 percent of a national income that grows at an average rate of 2.5

percent every year.

The Republican lies about the economics of health reform are also

heavily laced with hypocrisy.

While holding themselves out as paragons of fiscal rectitude,

Republicans grandstand against just about every idea to reduce the

amount of health care people consume or the prices paid to health-care

providers -- the only two ways I can think of to credibly bring health

spending under control.

When Democrats, for example, propose to fund research to give doctors,

patients and health plans better information on what works and what

doesn't, Republicans sense a sinister plot to have the government decide

what treatments you will get. By the same wacko-logic, a proposal that

Medicare pay for counseling on end-of-life care is transformed into a

secret plan for mass euthanasia of the elderly.

Government negotiation on drug prices? The end of medical innovation as

we know it, according to the GOP's Dr. No. Reduce Medicare payments to

overpriced specialists and inefficient hospitals? The first step on the

slippery slope toward rationing.

Can there be anyone more two-faced than the Republican leaders who in

one breath rail against the evils of government-run health care and in

another propose a government-subsidized high-risk pool for people with

chronic illness, government-subsidized community health centers for the

uninsured, and opening up Medicare to people at age 55?

Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again

as a civil society -- whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big,

important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to

make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail

that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell

or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and

get this done.

If health reform is to be anyone's Waterloo, let it be theirs.

cello10  08/07/2009 02:00 PM Report

Let me also address REMant's question:

The point of my original post was to simply state the following:

We could go along way toward reducing health care costs if we corrected the problems with how we grow and process food in this country and if we modified our diets.

The intent of Norman Borlaugs "Green Revolution" and Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz's changes to farm subsidies was to increase crop production, feed more hungry people, and lower the price of food. On the surface these were admirable goals. However, sometimes the solution becomes the problem.

When you factor in the costs of health care due to the high incidence of chronic degenerative disorders, when you factor in the costs of importing oil, and when you factor in our military expenditures in the Persian Gulf to control world oil markets, when you factor in the environmental damage created by synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, this system of cheap food production is hardly a bargain. We pay for these costs elsewhere in our economy.

Thus there are enormous, hidden external costs associated with the meat, dairy, and refined food products you buy at the grocery store.

It is hard for many people to appreciate the health issues involved unless it has affected them personally. Tartufe understands first hand the connection between high fructose corn syrup and diabetes since he is a diabetic.

I myself struggled with severe mental depression and an undiagnosed case of Epstein Bar/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in my late teens and early twenties. Because the medical profession could not find anything wrong with me at the time -we are talking circa 1975 - I was literally forced down the path of alternative health, high potency vitamin supplements, and a vegetarian lifestyle. This is a personal issue for me just as it is for tartufe because of our own health problems. My own health problems forced me to make the connection between the way we grow and process food in this country and the deteriorating health problems of all Americans.

In effect, when you talk about health care reform and agricultural subsidies, you are looking at the tip of the iceberg to a much larger, systemic problem.

Back in the early 1970's, Aurelio Pecci, founder of the Club of Rome, and CEO of FIAT and Olivetti, called our current sustainability problems the "World Problematique". What he identified was a massive series of interlocking problems that no one nation, institution, or individual field could grapple with.

The focal point for solving may of these problems centers around energy and food production. Health Care finance in this country is actually a symptom of a much larger sustainability crises. Some people are now able to connect the dots and understand the larger picture. But mainstream America at large is still having trouble seeing under the tip of the health care reform and agricultural subsidy iceberg.

_Cameron L. Stewart

tartufe  08/06/2009 10:39 PM Report

My, my REMant, your posts all start out on the down-side. "White" seems to evince "Black" from you, or the flip-flop.

As a diabetic his point is spot on re misplaced agriculural subsidies. Removing corn syrup alone from the national diet would go along way in reducing obesity and diabetes.

Your contrarian bent is reaching its elastic limits. Lighten up.

REMant  08/06/2009 09:33 PM Report

It is my understanding that the Washington state co-op works very well and is very popular. Health care costs cannot actually rise past a certain point, just as gas couldn't. We haven't reached that point yet, but the way we are going it is a virtual certainty. This means simply that like gas, ppl will not be able to afford it, and providers will either have to lower prices or go into another line of work. Our problem is that as wealth distribution has shifted to the few, the many have been priced out of the mkt, just as Nigeria, once a breadbasket, can no longer afford to feed itself as a result of finding oil. Our govt has heretofore stepped in with borrowed money to make up for the shortfall, but the result of that has been to further increase prices. The reason why prices rise past the ability to pay is of course entirely due to the manufacture of credit beyond savings. I think we may have to endure a Medicare and Medicaid bankruptcy to bring the medical profession, insurance cos, and the lawyers to understand what is in their own best interest, just as it has taken the current crisis to bring Wall St to some conception of reality.

What the hell does all that crap have to do with this issue cello?

tartufe  08/06/2009 06:45 PM Report

WOW! An impressive post cello10. Well researched and thoughtful.

A small excerpt: "The industrial corn fed to cattle and other ruminants - designed to quickly fatten them up - also created diseased animals with the wrong balance of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acids. Growth hormones and various antibiotics also found their way into the human food supply via these feed animals.

"The excess corn produced that did not go to CAFO’s went instead to food processing plants where it was converted into all manner of food chemicals, including high fructose corn syrup. HFC’s exhibit a behavior in the body known as “metabolic shunting” where the high fructose corn syrup bypasses the liver and is directly stored in the body’s fat cells.

"All of the problems just mentioned have contributed greatly to the obesity epidemic in this country."

An immediate repeal and cessation of corn subsidies is sorely needed. We don't know what any vegetable tastes like on its own without the added diabetic causing corn-syrup.

Thanks!

cello10  08/06/2009 06:27 PM Report

Kent Conrad made it clear that meaningful health care finance reform will not take place in 2009 unless health insurance cooperatives rather than public insurance becomes the solution. Further, it is Republican and Democratic conservatives who are to blame. Traditionally, the legislative process is one of sausage making. Today however it is simply one of dilution and obstruction. We see this phenomenon not only in Washington but also here in our California legislature.

The immediate strategy for Democratic progressives is clear: They will need to find a way to use the defeat of health care finance reform to pave the way for the defeat of more senate and congressional Republicans in 2010. Only then can the Democrats achieve an uncontested filibuster proof majority, an essential prerequisite for America to begin solving many of its most pressing problems.

However, health care finance is just one aspect to the broader problem of health care. By accident Kent Conrad mentioned the seemingly unrelated issue of agricultural subsidies. Yet nothing could be more relevant to the health care debate than the way we grow, process, and consume our food. Agriculture is also the focal point for energy consumption, water resource management, environmental pollution, and for the transformation of our economy into one that embraces spiritual and cultural values rather than just material and monetary values.

To make sense out of this argument it is first necessary to connect the dots of history, making them relevant to our current crises.

One of the unresolved issues inherited from the founding fathers was the conflict between an emerging, industrialized, high finance, urban culture versus the Jeffersonian “Agrarian Pastoral Ideal”. This issue came to the very root of defining what America as a nation would be about. Hindering any possible resolution of this conflict was the issue of slavery and its contradictions to a democratic society, where men had certain “inalienable rights”.

Excess farm production has also been a problem since the time of Adam Smith. The early American farmers addressed this problem by converting excess grain into whiskey. The still factories that sprang up became the forerunners to the modern ethanol industry.

Henry Ford recognized the benefits of ethanol to the farmer and designed his Model T Ford as a flex-fuel vehicle. In Ford’s vision, ethanol was both a way to solve the problems of excess food production and to provide a superior fuel to a growing nation. Henry Ford lost a 20 year battle with John D Rockefeller that revolved around this one contentious point.

As the oil refining business developed there was a pressing need to deal with the huge amounts of refining waste product too volatile to be useful. Rockefeller dumped it onto the urban market - at prices far cheaper than ethanol - and called it “gasoline”. The 18th amendment - sponsored by the women’s temperance movement - was secretly funded by Rockefeller to help crush ethanol as a fuel. Ongoing advertising propaganda and the construction of gas stations in rural areas further contributed to ethanol’s demise.

FDR’s food subsidy program was also a solution to the problem of excess food production. However, the widespread use of ethanol as a fuel would have made New Deal farm subsidies unnecessary. Farm subsidies and ethanol continue to be contentious issues in the 21st century.

As the 19th century developed, people began to exploit food processing as a means to extend the shelf life of food. Besides canning, they also refined grains – such as wheat and rice – to make them less susceptible to spoilage.

The development of the canning and meat packing industry coincided with the worst excesses of capitalism. Upton Sinclair chronicled this era in his famous book “The Jungle”. As Sinclair later declared, “I tried to aim for people’s hearts but instead hit their stomachs”. President Teddy Roosevelt was said to have thrown out every canned good in his cupboards, the result of a fit of rage brought on after reading Sinclair’s classic work.

America’s response was the establishment of the FDA and the USDA as regulators instead of a political drift toward socialism.

The refining of grains by removing essential vitamins, minerals, and fiber, the adoption of refined sugar, and the widespread use of food canning and processing - also led to a decline in the health of Americans. But the problems were not immediately evident. The first signs surfaced when the US military took notice of the declining health of service entrants into WWI, forcing a lower of standards to meet recruitment goals.

As modern medicine began to gain ground in the battle to fight infectious diseases, the United States also began to see a sharp increase in deaths due to degenerative disorders. Heart disease, diabetes, diseases of the colon, and a startling increase in various cancers became prominent.

It was automatically assumed that the success of modern medicine in treating infectious disease could be translated into treating the rising increase in chronic, degenerative disorders. However, epidemiological comparative studies between industrial societies and societies based on either an agrarian or a hunting and gathering existence showed that the increase in degenerative disorders was due to the slow corruption of our food supply, created by changes in agriculture, food processing, and the consumption of a diet high in meat, dairy and refined grain and sugar products, and low in fiber.

Another problem that surfaced was created by the medical profession itself. Long before the culture wars of the late 20th century, the late 19th century medical profession waged a “paradigm war” on competing methods of health care. Herbal medicine, homeopathy, chiropractice, and a broad range of other healing techniques were systematically discredited by the AMA.

The success of conventional medicine in treating infectious diseases also became more publicized. “Doctor Worship” became a phenomenon in the first half of the 20th century, along with the scientific revolution led by physics. By WWII, scientific fundamentalism seemed to provide all the answers to the problems of modern life, giving conventional medicine an additional umbrella of respectability.

Agriculture itself slowly became transformed. Mechanized by farm machinery and commoditized in the financial markets, there was an increased emphasis on farm quantity regardless of quality. Large corporations began to take over the farm business as the small farmer found it ever more difficult to compete.

The munitions factories of WWII needed a new production imperative after the war’s ended. They were thus converted into making artificial fertilizers. The essential task of nitrogen fixation, formerly accomplished by natural, microbial processes in the soil, was now in the hands of the industrial chemist. NPK – Nitrogen-Phosphorus-Potassium – became the new scientific paradigm of soil fertility.

However, the plants grown in such soil were far less resistant to disease. Native plants – also known as “weeds” – competed with huge industrial monocultures of a single crop. The industrial solution to weeds was the herbicide while the industrial solution to insects attacking weakened plants, grown in monocultures, grown in chemically treated soil, was the pesticide.

Herbicides and pesticides, the products of petroleum derivatives, waged further assaults on the health of soil microbiology, while providing a greater market for refined oil. Pesticides are known neurotoxins to the human body. Herbicides function as endocrine disruptors, throwing the endocrine gland systems out of kilter, even when present in concentrations as small as a few parts per billion.

Currently, 25% off all oil and natural gas consumed in the United States is used for fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and the fuel to run farm machinery and food transportation. Produce in America is now trucked an average of 1500 miles. Our industrial food supply system is designed to take fossil fuel energy and convert it into food calorie energy. The petroleum consumption used to run this system worsens our current account deficits and worsens our health and the health of the environment.

Norman Borlaug launched the green revolution of the late 1960’s in an effort to increase crop production, further accelerating the need for herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizer. Earl Butz – a Nixon appointee – ended New Deal farm subsidies to increase crop production when a US Soviet grain deal temporarily forced a sharp increase in food prices at US supermarkets.

Farm animals were moved into CAFO’s, or concentrated animal feeding operations. Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” states that when farm animals were moved off the farm, agribusiness “took a solution and divided it neatly into two problems”. The animals could no longer fertilize soil with their manure nor could they stimulate grass growth and soil renewal by grazing. Huge amounts of manure waste accumulated in the CAFO’s.

The industrial corn fed to cattle and other ruminants - designed to quickly fatten them up - also created diseased animals with the wrong balance of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acids. Growth hormones and various antibiotics also found their way into the human food supply via these feed animals.

The excess corn produced that did not go to CAFO’s went instead to food processing plants where it was converted into all manner of food chemicals, including high fructose corn syrup. HFC’s exhibit a behavior in the body known as “metabolic shunting” where the high fructose corn syrup bypasses the liver and is directly stored in the body’s fat cells.

All of the problems just mentioned have contributed greatly to the obesity epidemic in this country.

America needs local, sustainable, organic agriculture – free from genetically modified crops - to replace industrial monoculture. Ruminant farm animals should be raised on grass rather than grain. CAFO’s should be brought to an end.

America will have to adopt a high fiber, natural diet that places more emphasis on vegetarian cuisine and less emphasis on meat and dairy products. Increased consumption of raw onion and garlic will be necessary to make such a transition possible.

Alternative medicine - with its emphasis on natural substances that work with cell metabolism rather than proprietary, synthetic drugs that work against it - will have to become part of the new paradigm for treating illness.

80% of the human immune system is located in the small and large intestines along with the friendly flora. The importance of maintaining a clean colon with a healthy supply of beneficial bacteria and a near absence of yeast, fungal, and parasite infection will also be part of the new health paradigm.

There is also an “Electromagnetic Resonance Revolution” occurring in the alternative health field. Every cell in the human body as well as every food we eat has an electromagnetic resonance signature. Cellular processes in living organisms involve more than just chemical reactions and electron transport. This emerging field, known as “Bioenergetics”, forms the theoretical basis for homeopathy and electromagnetic therapy. “Good Vibrations” are more than just the lyrics to a song.

Such a new emerging health paradigm – based on many diverse elements - will reduce excessive petroleum and natural gas consumption, reduce excessive water use, reduce environmental pollution, and create a diet healthier for all Americans so they are less prone to visit the hospital. It will also foster the Jeffersonian “Agrarian Pastoral Ideal” that Thomas Jefferson envisioned when this country was founded.

In the book “Dawn After Dusk”, French art critic and historian Rene Huyge once said that all the great civilizations of the world were agrarian civilizations, not industrial. In Huyge’s view, it was agrarian civilizations that produced most of the world’s great culture. Industrial civilizations in contrast, produced “Gross Domestic Product”, with the emphasis on “GROSS”.

The current health care crises debate must extend beyond issues of finance and address more fundamental problems relevant to the needs of the 21st century. This requires the construction of a new integrated paradigm for civilization. The health portion of that paradigm includes: The optimum human diet, eliminating agricultural pollution of the environment, fertility and conservation of the soil, water resource management, reducing fossil fuel consumption, alternative health therapies, and a return to local, sustainable agriculture, free from genetically modified crops. _Cameron L. Stewart