Tag Archives: health care

Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) blog, Asian Americans, blog, diversity, news, politics

Emil Guillermo: Trump praises Australia’s single-payer plan after taking victory lap for passing sub-standard Trump-No-Care.

“You have better health care than we do!”

So said Donald Trump to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

One problem. Australia’s great system is essentially a universal care, national system that takes care of its people.

TrumpNoCare does the exact opposite. He lets healthy young people and rich people off the hook. No more mandatory insurance, but that’s precisely why premiums will go up. Insurance is based on large pools so that risks are spread. When you don’t require young healthy people or rich people to buy insurance and broaden the pool, then those who will suffer are the sick, the poor, the middle class and the elderly. That is to say, most of America.

Unless we get a system like Australia.

Listen to my podcast, Emil Amok’s Takeout:

Click the link, or go to the player below:

blog, news, politics

That odd SCOTUS health care debate: Do we really want what’s worst for all Americans?

My mom is an idealist when it comes to affordable health care. And she’s unassailable. She died years ago.

But she knew the secret about making sure people got the coverage they needed. It’s called Medicare, though it should be called what it really is: single-payer health care.

It works. It’s not unconstitutional. And it can withstand the Tea Party’s illogical attacks.

http://aaldef.org/blog/saving-justice-kennedys-blind-man-and-the-affordable-care-act.html

While driving the other day,  I saw I sign a Tea Party type put up on the side of the road. It said, “Obama–Hands off my health care!”

Who really likes it the way it is, besides the big corporations? Health care is a large bureacracy that’s too expensive and leaves out way too many Americans. The only way to make it cheaper is if everyone gets in  and all the bad costs are  spread over a wide pool of folks.

The Affordable Care Act took care of that. It may not be perfect, but it expanded the pool and made coverage more fair.

We should be heralding the coming expansion of the ACA in 2014.

But after listening to the Justices the other day, I worry if this court will do the right thing.

This is after all, the court that believes corporations are people.

http://aaldef.org/blog/saving-justice-kennedys-blind-man-and-the-affordable-care-act.html

blog, diversity, news, politics

Jimmy Carter’s race statements are right, but at odds with Obama’s Plutonian race strategy

When Jimmy Carter says it’s about race, I believe him to be as true as his boiled peanut recipe.

But Carter’s bluntness in his comments to NBC that the animosity toward Obama is race-based, is much too direct for Obama’s current style, and could upset the president’s momentum.

Obama is too cool for direct. Apparently, his race politics are way too subtle for the country.

The way Barack Obama has become a winner in politics is by diffusing the race issue and making it seem irrelevant.

In the Obama universe, issues don’t revolve around race. In this political solar system, race isn’t at the center like the Sun.

It’s more like Pluto.

It really is the formula to Obama’s success, and his new politics of bringing the country together. That’s not to mean he’s a Clarence Thomas , or that he forgets the importance of ethnicity and race in public policy.

It’s just that he knows race bogs down everything . It’s polarizing. And it prevents him reaching the kinds of compromise that helps one effectively lead an entire country.

So he sidesteps it.

Obama’s compromise on race is to show up, make it obvious he’s a black president, but not to dwell on it. For Obama, race is more the subtle subtext and not the raging headline. It was his secret to his campaign and his success.

And it throws the GOP off-track. They don’t know how to deal with a 21st Century Race politician.

When the GOP can’t argue the facts, as in health care, or when it can’t stem the support for the president on real issues, then it goes ad hominem and race is the old standby. The whole birth certificate issue and the Islamic middle name issue are nothing more than racist attacks on Obama.

Of course, all the stumbling around on race is based on how most people don’t want to admit racism is happening or even in existence. It plays to the moral conscience of both the white perps and the white liberals, who think they are perfect. Aren’t we all better than that? We’ve gone beyond race, right?

Well, not exactly.

So when Maureen Dowd writes her NY Times column about essentially saying, “Damn, we got racism here;” And when Jimmy Carter, our Southern gentleman, starts talking from the heart about racism at play in the policy debate, well then, by gum, we have racism.
What are we going to do about it?

I’m starting to see the wisdom of the Obama strategy. He’s just figured out a way to deal with race so he can get things done. The answer. Don’t deal with it.

It’s a tad zen-like.

By comparison, those who know the old politics on race are like cold warriors. Maybe we should try to do as Obama and ignore all this and try to press on, hoping that policies and people can change, and that by focusing on the bigger picture we can all be led to a new place together. Does that sound too grandiose or Lincolnesque? So be it. To do otherwise, is to bog down in the past, polarize, and get no where. Didn’t Obama show us that?

Maybe this is another one of those times that race bubbles up in Obama’s path, like the Rev.Wright affair. That means one sure-fire prescription could work now: A little speech therapy to put everything back into order in the Obama political universe, where race is minor.

As I said, race is not the Sun, it’s more like Pluto, making the strategy absolutely Plutonian.

blog, diversity, journalism, news

Dowd on Wilson’s outburst: I guess it takes a white person or two to recognize an act of racism

Any other claim from a person of color gets automatically dismissed as more of that old, tired reverse-racist grievance politics.  It’s usually accompanied with a scornful response like “Grow up, you old race dinosaur. Get a life. Get real. We have a black man as president. Join the 21st century.”

Insisting that the racist tendencies of America are still operating on all cylinders gets you that kind of reaction.

And then, because the racism is so obvious, and no one hears your cry, one tends to accept it as the reality of the new America.  Save the wails for the extreme cases. Crying racism about the norm just doesn’t make it today.

That is, unless a white liberal columnist like Maureen Dowd  finally gets it enough to wake up her white readers in the New York Times about a certain Southern congressman’s outcry during President Barack Obama’s health care address last week.

Said Rep. Joe Wilson (R-South Carolina) to the President: “You lie!”

The president didn’t of course. Not like George W. Bush ever did.

But Wilson’s charge has since made him a hero and darling to those who share his same segregationist values. Wilson is a Son of Confederate Veterans, who fights for the rights to wave the Dixie flag and decries the truth of segregationist Strom Thurmond’s bi-racial child as a smear.

Wilson has a difficult time with the truth.  But his outburst made Dowd realize a truth:

In today’s column, “Boy, oh, boy” Dowd wrote: “I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.”

Welcome to the ethnic truth, Maureen. Those of us who write primarily for the ethnic media have heard the drumbeats loudly before Wilson’s shout.  Hopefully your readers will snap to, as you have.

With race as a subtext, Wilson shows that  health care reform led by America’s first black president is made to order for those who yearn for the second coming of the civil war.