Cause Less Pain

Life, Liberty, and the Persuit of Happiness for ALL life!

Affirm Affirmative Action

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There seems to be a movement growing to rescue poor white miles from “white discrimination.”  The premise of the argument is that they are being discriminated against if they are equal to a woman or a minority who might be chosen over them due to Affirmative Action.    Who says the “equal” whites didn’t get a TON of advantages every step of the way making them substantially inferior even though they appear equal, or even better, on paper? If a white man, a minority man, and a white woman arrive at the same point, the subconscious assessment of most people will be that the woman and the minority man had an unusually good outcome but the poor little white guy must be having a bad day and they will pick the white man.  There is an implicit built-in bias that says the white man is better.  Over all, over the long term, the white man is better. When black slaves were forced to drink polluted water and had little food while white men ate well and drank clean clear well water, white men adjudged themselves to be “physically superior.”
If you feel that you have no biases, check your own tendency to discriminate here Project Implicit. If you think that outcome doesn’t affect every single move you make in life where there is a white man involved along with either a minority or a woman, you’re not being honest with yourself.  As a woman, I know I have to be many times better to end up even. Every woman, minority, and history, in general, convey experiences where less capable men received better grades, awards, accolades, promotions, etc. over more capable women or minorities. I know what I, as a white woman have gone through, and I can’t even imagine what black women would have to go through. In the United States today, there is no way that either minorities or women have had the same greasing of their paths that white males have.
 
There is no one – no individual white man or men to blame but there have always been leaders who give men permission to degrade and abuse others for fun and for profit – for sex, to pick cotton, or sometimes, both. If today’s white men can not acknowledge that and actively work to right that wrong – to all the minorities from Native Americans to the latest groups of immigrants to our country, they are the problem because today lies firmly within the “Information Age” where everyone knows. Every single white man knows. You either work to protect your supremacy or you work for an equal society. There is no land between.

How Much Profits Should There Be In Entitlements?

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I had CNBC on a little while ago and caught the CEO of CIGNA, one of the few remaining Health Insurance companies, explaining that the “breakup fee” for a failed merger attempt – in the $Billions – don’t recall how many – doesn’t really matter because the company is sitting on so many more billions of dollars in cash that, well, that breakup fee just doesn’t matter. His paycheck – his obscenely giant paycheck making thousands of dollars a minute – is another but we won’t tackle that today.
 
It instantly made me feel ill. Those billions of dollars sitting around – and being used to pay things like “breakup fees” are a huge part of the cost of the SickCare insurance we’ve been watching Congress struggle with. The CEO went on to name the lucrative – HIGHLY LUCRATIVE parts of his business – Employer Health Insurance – much much much cheaper for larger companies than you and I, as small business owners, have to pay, Medigap – all those sick old people we keep hearing about – highly lucrative, and Medicaid – again – highly profitable. So, they are highly profitable in every sector except for those of us who have to buy our own.
 
Do you remember back before the ACA – before you had insurance – how much more you had to pay if you paid cash than your friends got billed for the same exact procedure if their insurance paid for it? That’s the “Rip-Off” premium insurance companies charge the little guys who can’t defend themselves against the giant insurance companies.
 
So, that brings me to my conundrum. It does all boil down to deciding who gets to profit. We like to say that everyone is entitled to food, clothing, and shelter. Those are “entitlements” – things that every citizen of the United States has a right to have.  We’re talking about adding SickCare to the list of things that formally, governmentally, we are entitled to.
 
There have been several ways of dealing with entitlements. Take food for example. Our whole food program was an outgrowth of the BIG CRASH. Farmers were going broke – which was just fine in the beginning, the banks were making a killing on taking people’s farms. Then the market for the farms dried up. The banks took them but nobody would buy them so the banks were stuck with this property. They went crying to their politicians, large checks in hand. In response, their politicians began our current Crony Capitalistic Corporate Welfare System.  Systems have always wavered between giving people the goods and services or giving them the money to buy those goods and services on the open market.  The former limits profit in the private sector, the second does not.
 
A lot of people were starving after The Great Depression and farmers had a lot of extra produce they couldn’t sell. The Government bought it and distributed it to the hungry. This was known as the “Surplus Commodities” program. People who were deemed needy would collect their share of these Surplus Commodities at a distribution center. Then the economy straightened out and they developed Food Stamps in 1939. People bought the stamps and the stamps entitled them to buy food – specific items or categories of food – at a discount. Prosperity ended the program in 1943. Food stamps didn’t start up again until Kennedy started it up in a very limited way. LBJ made it permanent and national BECAUSE THERE WAS AN AGRICULTURAL SURPLUS. Once again, this program was never started up – either time – to help the poor. Helping the poor was merely a way of helping a certain segment of the population with disproportionate political influence.
 
So now we have SickCare. Nothing has changed. The whole single-payer vs. providing corporations with $Billions to keep in their bank accounts – supporting a whole giant industry that costs us collectively $trillions in OVERHEAD COSTS is the real crux of the fight. When people talk about “health care,” a term I refuse to use generally because I view it as a marketing lie, it’s generally in terms of how costs are rising.  What they are talking about to a great extent is that the OVERHEAD costs of SickCare are rising. They insisted that the ACA would add “trillions” in “overhead” costs. This is a time of massive movement to technology and machines. “Overhead costs” are paper shuffling costs and wages at the bottom aren’t going up. That means the bulk of these billions or trillions, depending upon the scope of your view, is upper administrative – in other words – enriching the UBER rich.
 
It’s long past time to re-evaluate who we are as a country, agree, or compromise, on who is “entitled” and what they are entitled to. Then the biggest question of all is how much profits should play into the provision of entitlements. There have to be serious incentives for the insurance industry to reduce the “overhead” as it seems to apply mostly to executive benefits if they are going to be a part.  Keep in mind that the entire “insurance” industry has evolved into a primary function of maintaining the gate between people and medical services.  The entire cost added by the insurance industry really has no purpose at all once you decide that SickCare is something everyone is entitled to.

The Cancers That Kill Nations

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Nothing built on lies lasts. Part of why our nation is breaking apart now is the lie that was not so much “slavery” but the idea that they were ever truly “freed” and were certainly never treated like “equals.” It is no different with Native Americans.
 
Societies fall when their untreated cancers grow too big to allow normal life to go on. There are three giant cancers that are growing within the US. The first cancer is our treatment of Native Americans. Our second is slavery and racial discrimination of which tRUMP is the current fruit. The third is the pseudo-slavery of the millions of undocumented immigrants brought across the border, worked “under-the-table” often in illegal forms of indentured servitude – often flat-out trafficked – upon whose backs the recent spurt of wealth in our country was built.
 
Until we confront and “treat” all three of these cancers, our country stands to die.
 
There is a fourth cancer that is beginning to attack now that the body is in a weakened state. That is the cancer of Islamaphobia. Finally, there is the very slow-growing cancer that should be easily treatable, and that is sexism. While slow-growing, it contributes substantially to the weakened state that allows the others cancers to take hold because it implants a basic acceptance of the concept that all people are not equal – that men are better – and that is the main disease that gave rise to the concept that WHITE men are “best” of all.

SickCare . . . Or the Lack Thereof

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There’s been an infinite amount of talk about SickCare – and no, it’s not “health” care because it includes absolutely nothing to foster good health.  Every news channel, every newspaper, pages on Facebook, endless Tweets. Nobody is making the point that WE ALL PAY the sick care costs of the more affluent and people with good jobs through increased prices for everything we buy. It is the poor AND SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS who don’t get paid sick care at work. Those not in favor of single-payer SickCare act like it’s manna from heaven for most USicans. In fact it’s built into the cost of our food, gasoline, banking fees, phone bills – all of the cost of all of the sick care for all of the employees of companies who cover their employees build it into the cost of everything we buy – and it’s part of why they say income is stagnant.
 
Decouple SickCare from wages. If the GOP wants to put everything into the private sector, get rid of every single employer and union paid sick care plan in the country – level the field.
 
I’m self-employed and I’m sick to death of paying for everyone else’s sick care insurance built into the costs of everything I buy. If I buy SickCare insurance for myself and my employees, I have to raise the prices to my clients. This is the root of people saying that SickCare mandates to employers cost jobs. The solution is not to get rid of sick care, it’s to get rid of employer-paid sick care. Now we have a problem we can deal with that’s clean, clear, well defined, and out in the open.
 
Pass the Bill with the modification that we completely get rid of ALL – ALL – ALL employer paid sick care – that includes Congress and all other government employees on every level. Now we have a “marketplace” big enough to generate competition. Right now we have three or four major SickCare insurance corporations that have divisions in multiple states. There is no competition – and that’s why competition won’t work as it is now – or just go to Single Payer – but not this one-foot-in, one-foot-out policy that is just another way of favoring those who already have money as the result of having great jobs at the expense of those who don’t.
 

The government says they want people to start small businesses. I’ve worked with startups and Micros for 20+ years and I can tell you that lack of good quality affordable sick care is a HUGE barrier to people wanting to start businesses. Someone has to keep a job with SickCare just to keep the family covered. If we’re going to go “Capitalist” and “free market” let’s do it – not pick and choose the parts that benefit the wealthiest the most and constantly enacting legislation that intentionally creates ever more people who need help. First, we enact legislation that strips wealth from the lower end – and many / most of them do work VERY hard – to benefit those who sit behind desks in cushy chairs pushing symbols of money around computer screens all day. Then The people who push symbols of money around computer screens all day whine about how “needy” and underserving the people they’ve just stripped everything from are.

The one thing that makes everyone happy is a sense that they live in a “fair” world.  Above all, to Cause Less Pain, you have to strive to build our world to be FAIR to all.