Curious

~ susie ~ 7 Comments

Does anyone else see the Obamacare website as the massive end-of-the-world catastrophe the media paints it? Honestly, I see it as a minor inconvenience (operating on the assumption the law can’t require me to meet a deadline they themselves can’t meet.) My brothers were programmers and developers, there were always problems with big rollouts. (That’s where the term “vaporware” applies.)

Sure, Obama fucked up. No question. If you read that “Locked in the cabinet” post from yesterday, you read the part where the White House political team delayed important implementation decisions until after the election.

But it will all eventually get fixed, we will eventually get insurance coverage and hopefully it will all work out. Then we will vote out as many of the assholes as we can and start pushing for single payer.

Am I crazy?

CHOP bars supplements

~ susie

They have a point. We have no easy way of verifying the ingredients, and thus no way of predicting the effect on a child or interactions with other medications:

One of the nation’s largest and oldest children’s hospitals is cracking down on parents who bring their kids herbs, extracts or other dietary supplements.

In what it describes as a break from other hospitals, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, or CHOP, last month removed most dietary supplements from its list of approved medicines, and established new policies for administering them.

Dr. Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at CHOP, tells The Salt the move comes after a “growing level of frustration” over the years. Offit, who chairs the board which approved the new policy, says supplements often aren’t what they claim to be. The Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, treats them as food, not pharmaceuticals.

“The problem has been that we can’t even get from most companies that certificate of analysis, that shows the product was independently tested and what’s on the label is in the bottle,” Offit says, pointing to a recent problems like in Hawaii, where a fat-burning supplement was linked to liver failure.

Under CHOP’s old policy, dietary supplements were treated as home medications. If a family brought them in, an attending doctor or nurse was obliged to evaluate them as best they could and administer them along with hospital-sanctioned meds during the patient’s admission. If the supplements ran out, the provider would order more through the hospital pharmacy. Now, families are entirely responsible – they have to obtain and administer the unapproved supplements themselves, notify a doctor when that happens, and sign a waiver form. The hospital is also distributing additional explainers to families.

Ungovernable

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

Charles Pierce:

Which brings me to a question to which I do not have a complete answer — is the country ungovernable right now because the Republicans have made it so, or are the Republicans merely taking advantage of the fact that, through its creaky institutional structures and through an unforgiveable lassitude towards the obligations of self-government on the part of the American people, the country has become ungovernable in and of itself.

The apparent lack of oversight and preparation in the implementation of the ACA is unforgivable, and the president and the Democratic party will (and should) pay something of a political price for it. But the fact is that the country wanted its massively fractured health-care system fixed, and it had wanted that system fixed since before Bill Clinton tried it back in the early 1990’s.

A completely ludicrous percentage of the country also wants criminal background checks on gun purchases. Right now, if you believe the polls, it is massively in favor of raising the minimum wage. And, actually, if you go below the surface of the polling on the ACA and health-care reform, you find a substantial portion of the country that doesn’t like the embattled law because it doesn’t go far enough toward health-care’s being a right, not a privilege and, in any case, the country repeatedly stated throughout the last 20 years that the status quo ante was an unacceptable combination of corporate avarice and personal tragedy. And yet, that is where the debate is right now, no matter how much Fred Upton says otherwise from deep in the pockets of the people who make money off human misery.

It has become remarkable how the people of this country, an ostensibly self-governing republic, fail to get what an overwhelming percentage of them say they want from their government, over and over again. You can argue, and I have, about the power of money, increased by an order of magnitude through the egregious Citizens United decision. You can argue, and I have, about the unforgivable vandalism practiced by the Republican party and the modern conservative movement that has been the prion disease in the party’s higher functions that has driven it mad.

But the fact remains that, dammit, there has to be a political price to pay for actively opposing something 66 percent — or, in the case of the background checks, 91 percent — of the people say they want. And the electorate is the only body of citizens empowered to exact these penalties, and it has been shamefully lax in doing so. Parts of the country have contented themselves with electing morons and crazy people. (How in the name of god does a buffoon like Louie Gohmert ever run unopposed?) Great portions of the country can be duped, or frightened, into voting against their own economic interests. And the great undifferentiated apathy that attends most of our elections is a deadweight on the democratic process that grows heavier by the year.

If our politicians are not responsive to our needs, then it’s time for new politicians, and we’re the only ones who can bring that about. And yet, it’s easier to complain about an inconvenient website, or a scary letter from an insurance company, or bullshit anecdotes that fall apart under the barest scrutiny. The country is ungovernable because we, The People, have decided not to govern it any more. That, to borrow a phrase from the president, is on us.

McClatchy: Chained CPI on the table in budget talks

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Fortunately for us, I guess, the president’s low popularity ratings may make politicians more reluctant to take on senior citizens and vets over the chained CPI — but they’re sure as hell going to try:

WASHINGTON — With congressional budget negotiations moving behind closed doors, one item apparently on the table is changing the way cost-of-living adjustments are calculated for seniors, veterans and other recipients of government benefits.

The consumer price index, or CPI, is the government’s main gauge of inflation and is used to determine cost-of-living adjustments, often shorthanded as COLAs. It’s a formula used for more than four decades.

But President Barack Obama earlier this year proposed a less generous formula called a “chained” consumer price index, in hopes of saving the government $230 billion over 10 years.

In April, Obama’s proposal was viewed as an olive branch to Republicans that was largely rejected. With budget bills passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate now in a conference committee to narrow differences and a mid-January deadline approaching, the issue is back on the table.

The chairman of the congressional talks, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., identified the issue as an area ripe for compromise.

“Compromise” being politician-speak for “selling out,” of course.
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