Author: The Show Stopper

For many of us the problem of affordable heath care is a daunting and scary process, the health care and drug industry have spent the past few years in a enterprise of misdirection with the American people over the growing cost of health care. First of all do not be fooled by the all the talk of the “trial lawyers”, to think that all of a sudden Lawyers just started chasing ambulances in the past five years , is not only naive, but slightly absurd. The cost of lawsuits is a drop in the bucket to an industry that operates on profit margins in the billions, and the ugly truth is the only thing Corporations understand is money, without the lawsuits we could not control them.
The fact is that administrative costs, as well as inflated executive salaries, and a host of “hidden fees” and just plain greed are the true culprits.
What can working people do up against a system armed with armies of lobbyists and lawyers at their command. Organizations that will sell, and profit from drugs and procedures that may or may not be what they claim they are. The answer may surprise you.

JaneCare- affordable health care for all Memphis residents.

The plan is simple, The city of Memphis would set up a legal entity called JaneCare and that incorporation would be open to membership to any resident of Memphis, Once the target number of applicants has been reached, “200, 000, the city of Memphis could then use the membership of JaneCare to collectively bargain with the health care providers, for a bulk rate that would lower the overall costs to the consumer to an affordable level. This rate would account for an expected number of drop outs and based on a formula to maintain fiscal balance.
The principal of health care is simple, in the fact that those who pay..always have and always will pay more, as they offset the loss of those who cannot, or simply do not pay. The current problems arise when the equilibrium in this economic food chain is disrupted, now because of the economic hardships we face today, the number of those who pay has decreased, and the number of those not paying has increased….therefore the logical way to lower cost for all is to restore the balance in the system, and allowing private citizens to unite and bargain in numbers for better prices will result in a net gain of Americans paying for Health care, thus reducing the burden on those who currently do, and reducing the amount of public funds needed to support the overwhelmed emergency services.
The corporations do it, when they negotiate health care packages for their employees, unions do it for their members, so why cannot normal working Americans do the same?
The fact is folks is that you are already paying for it, you pay for it with your high premiums, your high co pay, and your tax dollars to go to government programs that support those who do not have insurance. That being said if you are going to pay for a system anyway, then let’s make it a system that liberates people from poverty and government assistance, not one that traps people in poverty and jacks the cost, of “life” so high many of us cannot afford to live.
JaneCare would also have a local stimulative effect on the economy as now people would not wait until their death beds to go get medical attention, which will give the long term benefit of quality of life, but also the economic benefit of increased revenue, and jobs in the local medical sector. The American worker does not want a hand out. The American worker does not want charity. The American worker wants and deserves a health care system he can afford, and that he or she can pay on their own.
The government of this city would simply facilitate this process, by cutting out the middle men and thus avoid alot of the administrative cost that Health care providers deal with.
The benefit could also be seen as as more and more people sign up, thus the bargaining power of Janecare will grow as well. Corporations could also benefit as if Janecare benefits surpassed the insurance the corp provides, many of their employees will let their company policy drop in favor of Janecare, while at the same time allowing them to cut their own Human resources costs.One thing Corporations love doing…cutting costs.
Small businesses will be able to join in and thus provide benefits for their employees at a lower cost.Is this universal health care…no….is this a free ride…no You will still get that bill in your mail box, and you will still have to pay it or be dropped from coverage, but this could be an effective way of checking the unmatched and sometimes predatory tactics of an industry that now is spiraling out of control.
The final benefit I can see is an advancement of the city’s image and over time, affordable health care in the Memphis city limits would have a curbing effect on “White Flight ”
as well as attract new resident back to the city. In time property owners in this city would see their homes increase in value.
The working people of Memphis work very hard, and they do this for less and less as the years go by, They live in a city where crime is unchecked, where our education system is failing our young, and a leadership from downtown to Washington D.C. that turns a blind eye to their plight…is it really so much to ask that they be allowed to get medicine and medical treatment when they are sick?
Is it too much to ask that their children not suffer because of the family and neighborhood they were born into?
Do only the well to do have a right to live?

The public issues forum is a local group that has been active for the past ten years here in the Memphis area. This nonpartisan group has worked for a variety of causes, by not only spreading information, but hosting speakers on such vital local issues, such as Criminal reform, separation of church and state, the Living wage, as well as riverfront renewal.
I feel that these “old Lions” can really get us focused in the right direction, and in our struggle we will need all the friends, allies, and partners we can get.
The meeting is on Sunday, Dec. 12th, at 2:30pm, at the central library on poplar ave.
afterwards we can all go to Neil’s on madison and mclean to have lunch and discuss our future plans and goals.
I hope to see you there.
At this meeting they will discuss the issues that they will pursue in the comming year. and elect officers.There is much potential to this, we will only have impact if and when the progressive movement in this area can coordinate.The choice is one of two or three large groups allied, verses ten to twelve small groups, all going it alone.
I hope to finally meet some of you there and
If you would please post if you can or cannot make this one, on the Joe Paycheck Society of Tennessee group page.

Thank you.

Bradley

http://www.organicconsumers.org/epa-alert.htm

Dear friend,

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)is seeking input on a new proposed study in which infants in participating low income families will be monitored for health impacts as they undergo exposure to known toxic chemicals over the course of two years. For taking part in these studies, each family will receive $970, a free video camera, a T-shirt, and a framed certificate of appreciation. The study, entitled Children’s Environmental Exposure Research Study (CHEERS), will look at how chemicals are ingested, inhaled or absorbed by children ranging from babies to 3 years old.

Please take a moment to follow this link and join tens of thousands of citizens in petitioning the EPA to terminate this study prior to its proposed launch in early 2005.

More information, related newspaper headlines and petition here:

http://www.organicconsumers.org/epa-alert.htm

Please also forward this message.

Alabama Vote Opens Old Racial Wounds

Sun Nov 28, 6:48 AM ET Top Stories – washingtonpost.com

By Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post Staff Writer

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — On that long-ago day of Alabama’s great shame, Gov. George C. Wallace (D) stood in a schoolhouse door and declared that his state’s constitution forbade black students to enroll at the University of Alabama.

He was correct.

If Wallace could be brought back to life today to reprise his 1963 moment of infamy outside Foster Auditorium, he would still be correct. Alabama voters made sure of that Nov. 2, refusing to approve a constitutional amendment to erase segregation-era wording requiring separate schools for “white and colored children” and to eliminate references to the poll taxes once imposed to disenfranchise blacks.

The vote was so close — a margin of 1,850 votes out of 1.38 million — that an automatic recount will take place Monday. But, with few expecting the results to change, the amendment’s saga has dragged Alabama into a confrontation with its segregationist past that illuminates the sometimes uneasy race relations of its present.

The outcome resonates achingly here in this college town, where the silver-haired men and women who close their eyes and lift their arms when the organ wails at Bethel Baptist Church — a short drive from Wallace’s schoolhouse door — don’t have to strain to remember riding buses past the shiny all-white school on their way to the all-black school.

“There are people here who are still fighting the Civil War,” said Tommy Woods, 63, a deacon at Bethel and a retired school administrator. “They’re holding on to things that are long since past. It’s almost like a religion.”

There are competing theories about the defeat of Amendment 2, the measure that would have taken “colored children” and segregated schools out of Alabama’s constitution. One says latent, persistent racism was to blame; another says voters are suspicious of all constitutional amendments; and a third says it was not about race but about taxes.

The amendment had two main parts: the removal of the separate-schools language and the removal of a passage — inserted in the 1950s in an attempt to counter the Brown v. Board of Education ruling against segregated public schools — that said Alabama’s constitution does not guarantee a right to a public education. Leading opponents, such as Alabama Christian Coalition President John Giles, said they did not object to removing the passage about separate schools for “white and colored children.” But, employing an argument that was ridiculed by most of the state’s newspapers and by legions of legal experts, Giles and others said guaranteeing a right to a public education would have opened a door for “rogue” federal judges to order the state to raise taxes to pay for improvements in its public school system.

The argument plays to Alabama’s primal fear of federal control, a fear born of years of resentment over U.S. courts’ ordering the desegregation of schools and the creation of black-majority legislative districts.

“Activists on the bench know no bounds,” Giles said. “It’s a trial lawyer’s dream.”

Giles was aided by a virtually unparalleled Alabama celebrity in his battle against the amendment, distributing testimonials from former chief justice Roy Moore, whose fame was sealed in 2003 when he defied a federal court order to remove a two-ton granite Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court. They were joined by former Moore aide Tom Parker, who handed out miniature Confederate flags this fall during his successful campaign for a seat on the Alabama Supreme Court.

Arguing that the amendment could lead to higher taxes is a potent strategy in Alabama, which is one of the nation’s most lightly taxed states and which resoundingly rejected a record $1.2 billion tax increase proposed last year by Gov. Bob Riley (R), a conservative, to pay for school improvements and lessen the tax burden on the poor. But many blacks view the Amendment 2 opponents’ tax pitch as a smoke screen.

As the vote results sink in, the deacons and the Bible-toting ladies at the Bethel church here have spoken of dark conspiracies, of sinister agendas. They speak from experience.

Vertia Killings, 72, was riding on a bus that had to be rerouted because of the commotion at the University of Alabama on the day Wallace — who eventually renounced his segregationist past — made his stand. Her father, Benny Mack, paid a $45 poll tax and “ate a little less” because of it, she said. Others chose to eat instead of vote.

Killings does not see the amendment’s defeat as a matter of mere symbolism, even though Alabama’s constitutional ban on integrated schools was trumped — then and now — by federal law. She has watched school testing results with growing uneasiness.

Black students in Alabama have struggled on some national tests, with 73 percent of black eighth-graders rated below basic competency in math, compared with 32 percent of white eighth-graders. Killings also frets about Alabama schools — just as schools in many other parts of the country — steadfastly resegregating. This phenomenon, which is getting increased attention among national education experts, is attributed to a kaleidoscope of factors, including the suburban migration of white families, private school expansion and the rising popularity of home schooling among white conservatives.

“It seems like we’re having a reversal,” Killings said.

It matters not at all to Killings and her friends that the amendment’s opponents say they want to remove the segregated-schools portion of the constitution but cannot abide by guaranteeing a public education and fear mandates for higher education taxes. The people who are most affected by poorly funded schools are the same people who were affected in another era by poll taxes: poor blacks and poor whites.

“I don’t know but a few black folks who can afford to send their kids to private school,” said Charles Steele Jr., a former Democratic member of the Alabama legislature who lives here and is national vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

This is not the first time that Steele has tangled with Alabama’s constitution, a gigantic document that has more than 740 amendments and more than 310,000 words, making it the world’s longest, at nearly 40 times the length of the U.S. Constitution. Four years ago, voters repealed a constitutional amendment banning interracial marriage.

The state constitution, which most historians agree was written to protect large landowners and to disenfranchise blacks, is so riddled with antiquated wording that some high school students in Birmingham make an annual trip to the city library for a project known as the search for “the loony laws.”

Yet the constitution, with its racist past and its racist present, only grows. On Nov. 2, it was amended three times — numbers 743, 744 and 745.

Giles has said he would support taking out the passage about separate schools for “white and colored children” as long as the part about not guaranteeing a right to an education is kept.

Ken Guin, the Democratic House majority leader who wrote Amendment 2, is talking about trying again. Next time, he said, he might do it Giles’s way.

Call me crazy, but it sounds pretty liberal to me….
P.S……Support the LIVING WAGE…
BTW…..to all my fellow americans of faith…please pay close attention to President John Addams words…..he was there when the constitution was written after all.
P.P.S…..Damn Lincoln was right.

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“I would rather be defeated,” said James A. Garfield, “than make capital out of my religion.”

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“I see in the near future a crisis approaching. It unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. The money powers preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes… Corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed.” – – Abraham Lincoln (In a letter to William Elkins, Nov 21, 1864)

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“The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt

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“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” –Harry S. Truman, 33rd president of the U.S.

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“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” President John F. Kennedy

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“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.” President Jimmy Carter

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“No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.” President Theodore Roosevelt

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“Officeholders are the agents of the people, not their masters.” President Grover Cleveland

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“Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. ” President Woodrow Wilson

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“The buck stops here.” President Harry Truman

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“Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. (April 1953, Washington, D.C.) ” President Dwight D. Eisenhower

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“There never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the sword.” President Ulysses S. Grant

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“The government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion.” President John Adams

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“No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free no one ever will. ” President Thomas Jefferson

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“We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt

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“If we ever put any other value above (our) liberty, and above principle, we shall lose both.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower

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“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” President Abraham Lincoln

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“If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.” President Thomas Jefferson

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“There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations-President James Madison

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“From the time I was very young, I saw the ugly face of segregation and discrimination. I saw young African-American kids sent upstairs in movie theaters. I saw white only signs on restaurant doors and luncheon counters. I feel such an enormous responsibility when it comes to issues of race and equality and civil rights.

I have heard some discussions and debates about where, and in front of what audiences we should talk about race, equality, and civil rights. Well, I have an answer to that question. Everywhere.

This is not an African-American issue, not a Latino issue, not an Asian-American issue, this is an American issue. It ’s about who we are, what our values are, what kind of country we want to live in. ”

Sen John Edwards- 2004 DNC “the Two Americas

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“And let me say it plainly: in that cause, and in this campaign, we welcome people of faith. America is not us and them. I think of what Ron Reagan said of his father a few weeks ago, and I want to say this to you tonight: I don’t wear my own faith on my sleeve. But faith has given me values and hope to live by, from Vietnam to this day, from Sunday to Sunday. I don’t want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God’s side. And whatever our faith, one belief should bind us all: The measure of our character is our willingness to give of ourselves for others and for our country.

These aren’t Democratic values. These aren’t Republican values. They’re American values. We believe in them. They’re who we are. And if we honor them, if we believe in ourselves, we can build an America that’s stronger at home and respected in the world. “- Sen. John Kerry- 2004 DNC- “America can do better”

My thanks to the wonderful Politicalmonitor.us….a good website..with some admitedly left wing bias.