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Freedom from Health Care!

Thank god that Americans are free to experience the freedom of free market, profit-above-all, health care:

He says he can't afford insurance for his wife and himself. He spent $40,000 on medical care in the last year, wiping out his savings.

He still owes $20,000 in medical bills. The interest each month on his credit card, he said, is $400.

"That's a lot of haircuts," he says.

From September to May, he spent 30 days in Underwood-Memorial Hospital in Woodbury and missed 60 days of work.

"My credit card is pushed to the max," he says. "My savings are depleted. I'm at the breaking point."

He's been feeling better lately, but adds: "I'm basically living week to week. If I get sick again, I don't know what will happen."

His children, at least, are covered through New Jersey FamilyCare, a program for working families.

"It's a godsend," he says of that program, although his income is too high for him and his wife, Debrah, to qualify. "Without it, I'd probably be living with my mother."

His kids are suffering with the nightmare of socialized medicine???   That's a tragedy.   Well, it's up to Marty and his wife to explain to them the freeing feeling of freedom they get from fighting all day to keep their home while staving off disease and bankruptcy. 

After the surgery in late April, doctors wanted him to stay home, rest and recover.

But Grassia couldn't afford it.

"I come to work and I'm dying," he recalls. "I'm popping Vicodin after Vicodin just to stand here, just to make money for the day, so I can pay these bills."

And when patients like Marty develop chemical dependencies from self-medicating, I'm sure the free market, bootstrap club will be right there screaming at them to fix their own damn addiction problems and stop crying for us to fix their moral failings.  Freedom!

Health Care for America Now is busy building the energy we will need in the field to overwhelm the next administration and Congress with our demands for health care reform.  We won't care about the deficit.   We won't listen to how other priorities (mostly likely killing people in Afghanistan) will have to be paid for first.  The wave we are generating now will simply crash down on the head of anyone who stands in the way of getting Americans the guaranteed, quality health care that we all deserve. 

That scenario will happen if you help build the wave.  You can sign up and take action here.

Good news for Bucks County residents: Rep. Patrick Murphy just signed on in support of the HCAN principles.  He joins Rep. Allyson Schwartz and Rep. Chaka Fattah in the region.

One More Debate Postmortem

Jane picks up some stuff I missed:

Forget the tight stripper skirt, forget the metallic eyeshadow inappropriate for anyone over the age of 40, forget the cloying sitcom delivery, the lies, the cruel and calculated needling of Biden by calling his college professor wife a "school teacher" and saying "she'll get her reward in Heaven" (to a man whose first wife died in a car accident) -- she's an idiot.

Jane goes on to say that Palin doesn't know what "Achilles' Heel" means.  Judging from Palin's answer, I think she's right - or else Palin was just bein' a maverick and speakin' directly to the American people and not answerin' those questions the way the pundits wanted her to. 

I listened to the debate but didn't watch it so I wasn't going to catch any of her winking and wardrobe goofiness but I didn't catch the stuff about Biden's wife.  And the "reward in Heaven" struck me as condescening, natch, but now I see how cruel it was.

The Dems won't haul out the Wahmbulance because they don't get the same traction with it that the GOP does so I'm glad Jane is making note of this stuff.

Thanks, Digby

By the end of the debate I was passing out and still had two hours of work to so when I heard Palin channeling St. Ronnie yet again, I didn't have the energy to look up the speech she was stealing from.  Now I remember thanks to Digby and Jonathon Chait:

Palin's final quote was from Ronald Reagan, warning that without vigilance, "you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free."

In fact, Reagan was not warning about a general lack of vigilance about freedom, he was warning what would happen if Medicare was enacted.

McCain/Palin: Saving us from access to health care.

Can I Call You Joe?

So much for lowered expectations.  I'm squarely in the bubble and hyper-informed, so my opinion doesn't mattter.  I'm sure though that Palin was the big winner tonight among voters.  She was Zombie Reagan by way of Petticoat Junction.  That's a winning combination these days.  My notes are below the fold. 

UPDATE:  Looks like I could be wrong.  Whew.

UPDATE the second: Wow - I was way wrong.  Double whew.  Can it be that Reagan is really dead?   At least BushCo's soaring incompetence was good for something.  According to what I'm reading and hearing, people did not respond to Palin's tightly scripted yet mavericky and folksy routine about how Obama hates our soldiers only slightly more than he hates clean energy and that taxes kill the economy.   This morning my son said that expectations had been lowered too much for her.  He saw any competency she displayed last night was a flook and the result of good memorizing skills.  It seems as if the people responding to the polls agree: the thought of a Palin presidency is lunacy. 

Speaking of lowered expectations, I forgot to link to Turkana on the subject before the debate:

Some say the Republicans successfully have lowered the bar for Sarah Palin, but that presumes that the bar is adjustable. It is not. The vice-president has to be able to assume the presidency at a moment's notice, and for that, the bar tonight could not be higher. This debate is not to be graded on a curve. The two candidates are on equal footing, and they are to be compared as equals. This is not about choosing a king or queen for a prom. It's not an entrance exam for a prep school. It's not about being able to get through a canned media event without drooling.

I hate to jinx the afterglow but judging from the polls, it looks like most people understood that going in.

Finally, f**kwit, a commenter at Avedon's captured the night well:

All together, it looked about what you would expect in a debate between a professional who didn't want to seem overbearing and an amateur who wanted to make that attribute equal to authenticity.

Sarah Palin's Briarpatch

The VP debate will not be canceled.  Team Palin is not worried about how she'll perform.  Athenae is right - all the rumors are about lowering expectations for her.  Right now all she has to do is get through the 90 minutes without falling over in a faint and she'll have won the night.   Yes, she's a moron when it comes to knowing the stuff you need to know to be Vice President or, god forbid, President.   But she's also a beauty queen, the Governor of Alaska and a former journalist.  Most importantly, she is an expert and inveterate liar.  And, even if that last part weren't the case, the media aren't a bunch of brainiacs on nerd patrol.  They don't care if she makes stuff up all night as long as she looks pretty and sounds mavericky while she does it. 

Putting Sarah Palin on stage and expecting her to fail is like putting a fish in water and expecting it to drown. 

Well, Typepad Knows Best

I was liveblogging the debate but Typepad just ate the very long post.  I think it was for the best.  I have learned my lesson: stay short.

Financial crisis: 
McCain: Tax cuts!!!  Cut spending!  Stop waste!

Obama: Values matter.  Must spend on energy, health care and education.  Cut waste.  Close loopholes!

Iraq:

McCain: Obama is an idiot who doesn't understand anything about the military.  I will treat him with nothing but contempt.

Obama: I was right about Iraq in the beginning.  I am right about Iraq now.  Afghanistan!  Pakistan!

McCain: If you're going to kill Pakistanis, you don't tell them first and you do with the the cooperation of the Pakistani government.  Obama doesn't understand the STRATEGY that we'll need - the same STRATEGY we used in Iraq - to get Pakistan to love us.   Now I will confuse you with some words and phrases that make me seem informed but are really all drawn from Wikipedia.

Obama: I don't want to invade Pakistan.  I just want to invade Pakistan.  Plus you were a jerk about North Korea AND bombing Iran so shut the fuck up. 

McCain: Obama doesn't understand Pakistan.  Musharif took over a failed state; he had to be our guy.  Marines in Lebanon were a bad idea.  Gulf War: good.  Bosnia: good.  Kosovo: good.  Somalia: bad.  I have a record of voting right in the Senate so you shut the fuck up.  I have a bracelet with the name of dead person on it to remind me that more people must die in Iraq so that the already dead feel better about dying.  Vietnam!!!

Obama: I've got a bracelet too!  From a mom who doesn't want any more U.S. soldiers to die in Iraq.   So game over.

McCain, turning really nasty and sneering:  Gee, you'd think that will all that concern, he would have been able to get to Iraq or take up the issues in his subcommittee.  Obama just doesn't understand.

Lehrerer: My five minute things have run over.

Victory or Death

If you remember the Shock Doctrine, which is the parent of the Bush Doctrine and which that deceitful moron, Sarah Palin, could also not explain to you, it is impossible to observe what's happening around you - from the Endless War to this financial crisis to the surreal quality of the election - without understanding that it is all happening according to plan.  I'm still in shock and, frankly, not smart enough to be able to figure out what that plan is in detail (don't all conspiracy nuts say the same thing?)  but I know that at its core it is about giving the enemies of Roosevelt and his reforms a do-over.   Now they've got their own Greatest Financial Crisis of All Time to play with and this time they will make the great strides when it comes to setting up (or demolishing) institutions and legislation to deal with it.   They've been waiting for it and when it didn't happen thanks to the safeguards that Roosevelt put in place, they created it.   And here we are. 

Maybe Obama is the One who can turn this around and be the leader we need but I'm not betting what's left of the farm on that.  I think he's the leader we have a chance to pressure to do the right thing but if we don't get there firstest with the mostest starting on the dawn of Novemeber 5, we will have lost our only chance for probably decades to start to turn all this around. 

And the Universe Collapsed

This is funny.  By pure chance, the Bush Legacy Tour bus met up with McCain's Straight Talk Express at a maintenance stop in Nashville.  From the press release:

The ‘Straight Talk Express’ Comes Face-to-Face with the Bush Legacy it Enabled 

Check out who we bumped into today in Nashville, TN, the latest stop on the national Bush Legacy Tour.  During a routine maintenance stop at the local Prevost bus shop, Americans United for Change’s Bush Legacy Bus had a random encounter with Senator John McCain’s ‘Straight Talk Express.’   

“There’s some symbolism to be found in this random, face-to-face meeting of the McCain and Bush Legacy tour buses,” said Jeremy Funk, of Americans United for Change. 

“There is no where for Senator McCain to run or hide from his record of rubberstamping Bush’s failed policies 90 percent of the time, from endless war in Iraq to tax breaks for corporations that outsource American jobs.  The ‘Straight Talk Express’ got an up-close glimpse of how four more years of the same failed Bush policies it promises would further ruin the economy, weaken our national security, threaten our Social Security, and sacrifice so many priorities here at home.”

This is What 527's Are For

But by the second minute even I, who agrees that McCain's medical records should be released without restrictions, was feeling really bad for McCain.  Damn my compassionate soul. 

I do think that this sort of video would be effective in the health care reform debate.  I'd like to know what sort of insurance hurdles he was forced to go through to get that great care that has kept him alive all these years.