I am very sorry to hear about your story as well.

Another dear friend and ex-girlfriend died two years ago of breast cancer that went to bone cancer that went to leukemia. In her case there was a bureaucrat who should have known that the breast cancer was likely to become bone cancer, but insisted that it was arthritis and refused the test for six months till she paid for the test herself and then charged it back when it was proven to be bone cancer.

But a lot of damage had been done to her pelvis and spine in that six months and she was never again able to sit or stand without great pain and needed two canes to walk at all. Still she drove to work every day till three months before she died fearing that if she lost her job she would lose her coverage and be dead even sooner.

My own disability is not life threatening so I survived the two and a half years without job or insurance (and the ten years before that because I could not get a job with insurance, losing many possible jobs because of what my insurance would cost them) But SSDI pays only a quarter of my former income and will go away if I make more than another quarter, taking Medicare with it. So my life savings are dissipating also.

The answer is indeed obvious to most with any empathy for those around them. Kieth Olbermann got it almost exactly right, it is about life and death, and some day folk may look back in wonder as how folk could be so crazy, but it took them 50 years and billions of dollars to desocialize society, & it will take a lot more to socialize it again.

Until then it will take a lot of fighting for even minimal sanity. I am very happy with my Congressman Alan Grayson for cutting through the fog to hit that point, and show how it can be done.

My mother is in the midst of it right now. She was denied insurance she could afford due to a pre-existing condition. Now she has stage 4 cancer that was diagnosed way too late. She is participating in risky drug trials to keep her medical expenses down… but her life savings is dwindling quick.

It's a really shitty situation!

All the emphasis on economic frames in the national discourse makes me sick to my stomach when I think of my dying mother. Even more so when it comes from progressive organizations like HCAN.

This is my personal version of the Cassandra dilemma. I know what the problem is. I even know how to fix it. But so long as health care advocacy groups won't listen, the train wreck continues in slow motion.

We should be winning this fight hands down. Instead, we keep sliding backward because our side doesn't know how to engage in effective strategies. (Some groups do, of course, but there's not coherent movement to speak of with all key participants working together in an effective manner.)

Best,

Joe

The individual culpability was more nebulous in her case than those rescinded, or otherwise denied care by individual bureaucratic fiat, but the folk who sent her out the door refusing to help knew that their actions made her death in hours an absolute certainty. Perhaps not criminal assault, but "criminal" neglect, by somebody, if no more than the folks who allow such things to be legal.

I'd say that we are in the midst of a health care emergency because people are suffering and dying daily from the moral failings of our current health insurance system.

At the same time, it is important to be careful not to mis-characterize the problem. It is not the case that insurance company bureaucrats are going out and physically attacking would-be patients – as the homicide frame implies. A more accurate description of the situation draws attention to the extraction of wealth of for-profit insurance corporations that place earnings over the delivery of care. Those who might have sought the care they need if they felt safe that they wouldn't be strapped with outrageous debt while getting it would have been more likely to do so… and those additional deaths could have been avoided.

We don't have a situation where one agent (the insurance company) is violently killing another (the patient). Rather we have a situation where people are allowed to profit from the denial of health care in a manner that leads to the immorality of preventable human suffering and death.

Best,

Joe

How does 45,000 insurance caused homicides from denial of care fit into this conversation?

I start with the Socialized Child and look at why they are presumed to be "Socialized" and another child "unsocialized" and why Socialized is a good thing.

The answer is of course empathy (not Compassion as I will endeavor to explain) The entire golden rule "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is about as a succinct a definition of Empathy as anyone has come up with. To imagine haw you would feel in the position of another has even been shown to be a big part of how the brain works (mirroring)and thus a very good foundation.

The bridge break that the antisocialists used was to conflate empathy with sympathy arguing that the winner/victor never got sympathy and the loser/victim always did, and liberals were always out to change the outcome of a (supposedly fair) fight. This was the primary frame of the fight with Justice Sotomayor.

Compassion also fits their Sympathy frame, and liberals defend it because they do indeed have sympathy as a result of empathy, and do reach out to help those less fortunate for no other reason, but that leaves them open to attack from those without much sympathy.

However to speak about a Socialized Society based around the values of empathy, empowerment of all, and accountability for those given the power of agency by the collective acting for a uniform goal, to assign roles and benefits for each.

By that rule the commonplace violation of that role of agent to steal all the goodies is nothing less than embezzlement and should be treated as such.

From that description of a Socialized Society all the progressive/liberal agenda/policies falls naturally into place, just as most of the Conservative agenda/policies fall into place with the Libertarian arguments.

Unfortunately, many progressives don't understand how this happens. Thus they are ill-prepared to counter its faulty assertions when they come up in conversation today (which occurs all the time). The typical response is to reason within the faulty frame and distance themselves from the "enemy" role. Instead, what is needed is a different frame that places health care advocates in a morally righteous role as promoters of compassion… a much more honest and truthful depiction.

To do this there needs to be accountability, and the national government is usually the "accountant of last resort" be it through a judicial or executive branch (occasionally legislative if they invent a new crime). This is the definition of Socialism mostly spoken of as action, and they will usually conflate Government run and Soviets into the argument. Every time liberals agree, the connection is stronger.

The Soviets were of course not at all "Socialist" by that definition as there was no Democracy or accountability. The Soviets of course claimed both Democracy and Socialism as Orwellian definitions. The antisocilaist American Right was happy to keep the Orwellian version of Socialism even as they vehemently denied the equally false democracy.

I have blogged this extensively at http://freedemocrat.blogspot.com/

Representative Anthony Weiner takes an interesting approach in this interview with Bill Mayer when the "socialized medicine" concept is brought up. He clarifies (briefly, as a side point so as not to detract from the point he wants to make) that the means of production are kept in private hands – and not through the government – so we're not talking about socialism.

He then goes on to talk about insurance companies as middle men who siphon money off the top without adding anything of value to the health care exchange.

It's an interesting approach that seems to work well in the "friendly" environment of talking with someone predisposed to agree. In other situations, things get more challenging of course. Still, perhaps this will be helpful for you to think about.

Best,

Joe

I have seen many discussions that folk talked past each other in exactly those two frames, each stubbornly sticking to their side and wondering why the other side is so stupid.

In some cases there may in fact be no sensible argument that will penetrate, but without a bridge that addresses their mind set, they will still consider that either someone will get "Their" care, or that the cost will bloom out of control and "they" will be the ones paying for it.

I have tried to take the approach that profitability and waste steal care in excess of the cost of that care and that Insurance bureaucrats are literally living very well on the bodies of their victims, and that the waste would more than provide the excess cost that they are worried about.

Since such folk are predisposed to hate bureaucrats in any form, and those living off the pain of others especially, that part is an easy bridge.

What gets difficult is to frame the Insurance company as an unelected nonchosen government no different than any dictatorship where your rights are limited at best and all decisions favor the dictator.

This often gets epithets of "crazy Socialist" to which I respond by demanding the definition be based on the original "Socialized child" or "Socialized dog" frame that all power needs to be empathetic, empowering of the least powerful, and the most powerful held accountable for their promise of agency, that they have power to make decisions for all and not just to embezzle all the goodies and leave the mess for others.

I do find myself quite left out alone with such "extremism" however and wonder what your suggestions might be.

I am extremely disappointing that most of the Left seems to have accepted the Republican frame on Socialism and run away when they should be shoving it back in their faces.