Mortality is Universal but Health Care is Not—So Who Dies? When?

photo by John Dominis

Health Care is the issue that Americans keep naming as their top worry for pollsters. The latest survey found 48 percent saying so to the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. We ranked it above taxes, the environment, and immigration, the other biggest priorities named. A US News & World Report article said the reason some people gave: costs are not getting any more manageable. https://tinyurl.com/ya9hqgg9

You think?

Despite Trump’s campaign promises of making health care “much less expensive and much better,” Trump’s cabinet and staff never proposed anything but repealing ObamaCare. Their “replace” part, half-baked in secret meetings of Republicans, ultimately resulted in a failed vote. But that didn’t stop Trump and his allies. The new tax bill scraps a mandate that makes the insurance pool more affordable and less sick—which he and syncophant Republican leaders count a victory thanks to his “exquisite leadership.”

Meanwhile, the Childrens Health Insurance Program has not been renewed and the White House canceled ACA insurer subsidies, creating market mayhem and premium jumps. Our progress in reducing the numbers of uninsured is over; their numbers and expensive emergency room medicine will only increase with a mandate repealed.

Apparently Congress failed to notice what its own government reported in early December. How long can we generally expect to live?  For the first time since 1993, when AIDs was a new plague, overall US life expectancy fell, particularly among people younger than 65! The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) tracks these numbers, the latest data from 2015. In the context of other developed nations that continue to see longevity increase, US health declines are very troubling. https://tinyurl.com/y9zurzr6

Investment in prevention could reduce our costs. In early November NCHS reported on the second year of increase in gun deaths https://tinyurl.com/y8v3fztv, our gun-toting ethos now even tolerating Trump’s “fire and fury” and threats of nuclear war. Did I mention our mental health?? The American Public Health Association lists as our top five health threats, climate change, environmental health, health equity, gun violence, and health reform. More than 40 people a day die of opioid overdoses, and it is not as if any of this despair and pain has a place to go without our uniting to care for all of us, come hell or high water.  https://www.apha.org/topics-and-issues

Outside, Soft Fluffy Snowflakes...

...are falling, not in a hurry, but steadily, as if they can be counted upon to not give up, to keep on. Typically such snow makes me cozy, and inspires me to sing holly-jolly songs of the season, the cornier the better, my croaky voice the perfect foil. But today I am weepy, in touch with a fear of looming tragedy, theirs and ours.

Across the country unusual warmth is promised, while in California it bursts into flames that won’t quit. An airport loses power, holiday planes are downed by heavy fog, Houston and its neighbors are still swamp and poorer—and in Puerto Rico my fellow Americans face the season without water and electricity. In a Washington run by Wall Street and its unhinged wealthiest, Americans face yet more debt in pursuit of more growth in hopes of a trickle. Just a trickle is all we ask, and instead we get a Christmas Goose egg from a Congress of Scrooges and Stooges, who keep on selling us out.

They kick us out of the halls of power when we protest in our wheelchairs, saying Don’t Kill Us, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo and Gay is Good. God Bless Us Everyone, says Tiny Tim, the least of us—but in this year’s Christmas tale, he gets backhanded, not picked up and fed.

We can look forward to our “entitlement programs,” the insurance we’ve long paid for with our taxes, being cut or eliminated, like the environment—now deemed too expensive, given the corporate giveaway. Trump and Putin are making chummy phone calls to replace state-craft, making billionaires better off worldwide by selling weapons to Saudi Arabia and Syria in exchange for more fossil fuel money.

All is wrong with the world, it seems, although snowflakes are still falling in Vermont. Bit by bit, they float down and pile up and remind me, united we stand, divided we fall, to everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn.

Here's What Slut Put-Downs Will Get You!

Soon to-be-elected US Sen. Doug Jones (D-Alabama) with women voters who made the upset possible last night, and Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) campaigning in Alabama—where Roy Moore was soundly defeated despite Steve Bannon and Donald Trump campaigning for the accused girl-stalker. 

When Donald Trump says Senator Kirsten Gillibrand came to him “begging” for donations and “would do anything,” he knew damn well that his “anything” would be heard as “anything sexual” in the halls of male power. (See CNN story https://tinyurl.com/y9bz )

Men like Trump, who use force, or pimp their money out for favors they can’t get unless they pay first, have always used surplus money for power, closely aligned in the male imagination, with sex. Mounting someone, whether with money or slut-language-putdowns, supposedly demonstrates your masculinity, even when your hands are tiny. Sex is the male metaphor used to explain dominance—the pattern a supposedly male-only-God-intended one—with males mounting weaker females expected to “submit.”

Any evangelical woman waiting for Mike Pence or  Roy Moore to admonish the President about Jesus’ sermon on the mount (yes, a play on words), will have to turn blue before she’ll hear a respectful word for principled females like Gillibrand. To patriarchal ways of thinking (not that of real-Biblical Jesus), all females are inferior to males. And females either are begging for it, or having to be forced.  

We’re sorry, but we didn’t make up slut-mounting metaphors, or those silly and contradictory sexual rules. Women say we’re overdue for some new ones. How about getting consent before you make your power move? How about our making love together for the good of all involved? That would be democracy, wouldn’t it?

The hypocrisy Jesus meant when he called the conspicuously religious Pharisees “white-washed sepulchers” surely applies to Pence, Moore, Trump, and Bannon. So to put current matters in the sexual terms powerful men like to use, the pale male sluts of Washington are due to deliver big tax cuts to their big-money johns, effectively screwing the female majority without our consent.

We so agree with newly elected US Sen. Doug Jones from the great state of Alabama (where women’s votes made the difference) —it is time for Congress to fund CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. (See NBC story https://tinyurl.com/ybnhj9j5)

And Sen. Susan Collins of Maine? Until Republicans repent of corruption, winning your tax vote with a lie about affordable healthcare, it is time for you to become an independent! (See Washington Post story on House/Senate resolution process. https://tinyurl.com/ya6hvhpt)

#MeToo: Her Decade of Empathy

via justbeinc.org

Have you “met” Tarana Burke yet? Her story’s a lesson in the value of
persistence. She started #MeToo ten years ago. I heard her talk with Soraya Chemaly and Alicia Garza on Amy Goodman last week, and was both surprised and deeply moved by her soft-spoken empathy and her commitment to survivors. https://tinyurl.com/yd3uv43r

Tarana told Boston Globe reporter Crystela Guerra in late October that she wasn’t even aware of her tweets going viral until a friend showed her. She said about it:

“In many regards Me Too is about survivors talking to survivors. It was
never really about amplifying the number of people who are survivors of
sexual violence. It was about survivors exchanging empathy with each
other. But when I talk to young people, I use pop culture to promote the
idea of Me Too all the time. We have to have something that reaches the
masses. That’s what I’ve always known Me Too could do. This viral moment
is just confirmation that vision was real and was possible.”
https://tinyurl.com/yaejyba6

Like almost every women, I can name #MeToo encounters, though I want
to be careful to name them trespasses and shocks, not violent assaults of
the kind that threaten to undo a woman’s life. I knew such a survivor,
though, who was left for dead, and for whom attending college took such
courage “survivor” doesn’t say it. She’s a daily hero. She went on, as Tarana
did after her assault, to help and connect other victims of violence. The
trick is to ultimately outlive the bastards.

#MeToo applies widely and “reaches the masses” because every woman,
and some men too, know the special threat of sexual violence, a bodily
invasion and diminishment. But its verbal threat is everywhere, tossed off
in common parlance among men, especially powerful ones—F**k You, the
opposite of love, and the common parlance of suited street gangs in
Washington, Hollywood, and Wall Street.

Tarana says #MeToo is about survivors exchanging empathy with each
other. In the time of Screwnomics, let’s persist in sharing empathy among
us survivors aptly named the 99%. If we are to outlive Trumpish inequality,
only mutually pleasureable exchanges and partnerships will do, not
sexualized violence of any kind.

Wonders and Thanks

Wonders & Thanks

This week of Thanksgiving, let's be thankful for Gal Gadot, the Wonder Woman wonder, and "everyone" associated with the movie, for getting out from under producer Brett Ratner.  Ratner, whose company RatPack-Dune helped finance the first WW film has been accused of sexual harassment and assault. Gadot has her own story about him.

In an interview on the Today show, Gadot confirmed that Ratner would no longer be financing the Wonder Woman franchise, reported the staff writers of Women in the World (NYT)— though she ended  rumors that she had threatened to quit the film if Ratner stayed on as a player. Listen to what she said: “The truth is, there’s so many people involved in making this movie — it’s not just me — and they all echoed the same sentiments,” Gadot told staff writers of Women in the World (NYT). “So everyone knew what was the right thing to do.” 

We're thankful to "so many people" this year who spoke up, and who agreed on what was right: no more pussy-putdowns by men who just are not funny. Thanks too for WiW. 

So What Exactly Is Screwnomics* ???

Screwnomics* is the unspoken but widely applied economic theory that women should always work for less, or better, for free. 

And who thought he didn't have to talk openly about this, or stop taking us and our Mother Earth for granted?

EconoMan is my Screwnomics' name for the money guys in charge of how we live. Let's change his attitude, shall we?