70 Years Ago Today, UK citizens got something that US citizens are told is impossible, a National Health Service

How is it possible that a modern National Health Service was achievable 70 years ago in a Great Britain still clearing rubble from World War II and still experiencing food rationing, but is considered impossibly expensive in the world's wealthiest economy, one that hasn't experienced war on its soil since 1865?

The National Health Service began on July 5, 1948.

I'm simply retyping the historic text of the page above in order to make it searchable and readable on all devices:

THE NEW

NATIONAL

HEALTH 

SERVICE

*

Your new National Health Service begins on 5th July. What is it? How do you get it?

    It will provide you with all medical, dental, and nursing care. Everyone--rich or poor, man, woman or child--can use it or any part of it. There are no charges, except for a few special items. There are no insurance qualifications. But it is not a " charity ". You are all paying for it, mainly as taxpayers, and it will relieve your money worries in time of illness.

Another TBL Poll: How Will #MAGA Kill You?

If you die during the #MAGA years of @realDonaldTrump, which of the following is most likely to be the cause?

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) October 13, 2017

Or will it be a climate-change-induced weather catastrophe? Or black lung from all those new coal-fired power plants? Or getting hit by a Nazi-driven car because you had the temerity to engage in a peaceful protest? Or...?

[Almost] Back to Business As Usual in the GOP/Fox Universe

After yesterday's Twitter misstep by the current resident of the White House, he was attacked from both sides of the aisle for reverting to his true bullying misogynistic personality (with a healthy dollop of his professionally-unexamined female blood obsession). Among the Republicans who attacked the anti-Mika Brzezinski tweets was Ben Sasse of Nebraska who responded, "Please just stop. This isn't normal and it's beneath the dignity of your office."

This morning Senator Sasse was on Donald Trump's favorite show Fox and Friends and called for a change in strategy to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act:

A few minutes later, the president (whose own understanding of the mechanics of drafting and passing laws is less than rudimentary) tweeted this:

Looking at the time stamps on those tweets, it looks as though the official presidential statement in tweet form might have come before the Fox broadcast, but a CNN reporter retweeted by Sasse confirms the original sequence:

The sequence, however, is actually immaterial. The real point is that the GOP White House, the GOP Senate, and the GOP television network are all getting back on the same page and are rededicating themselves to working hard to achieve job one, removing health insurance from the poor and middle class in order to give large tax cuts to the very rich. Hooray! The world is back to normal!



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HOLD THE PRESSES! While I was writing this, it seems that a certain television addict in the White House switched the channel from Fox News to MSNBC, and got his tweeting back on track.

Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2017

Trump Tweet Translator:
"#PresidentBannon needs to give me more things to do. It's not good for me to have too much time to watch TV. Sad." https://t.co/np3XL8Wlt0

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) June 30, 2017

How the GOP TrumpCare Bill Would Affect Me

There's nothing dramatic to my story, but since the Republican attempt to "repeal & replace" the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will affect every American if it passes, we should probably all share our stories.

I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm not quite as lucky as those the GOP health care bills are written for, those who earn over $250,000 a year who will get tax cuts if the Senate version of "WealthCare" passes. But still, I'm one of the lucky ones. I've never been seriously sick as an adult and I have consistently had health insurance from an employer since 1978. I'm less than four years away from becoming eligible for Medicare, but I may not make it that far in an industry and a corporation that are both undergoing regular job reductions. I've also thought about retiring voluntarily before my 65th birthday, but the only thing that keeps me from doing so is health insurance. Even though I have been a very light user of my health insurance (I've made it through the past forty years with one broken arm, a few stitches, and two 'annual' physicals), I don't feel I could let myself go uninsured. I wouldn't like paying for a private health plan under the ACA to close the gap before Medicare, but I could afford to do so. If I lose my job and the Senate version of TrumpCare (the Orwellian-sounding "Better Care Reconciliation Act") passes, my annual premium would rise from $6,800/year under the ACA to over $20,000/year to give tax breaks to millionaires. At that price, I probably would go without insurance until Medicare kicks in and hope for my health luck to hold out (even though I know that I'd have the first serious illness of my life as soon as I became uninsured). That, in a nutshell, is my undramatic story.

But this isn't a collection of individual stories; it's a national tragedy. Unfortunately, for many Americans it's a devastating story of life and death. For many others its a harrowing matter of personal bankruptcy caused by a single unforeseen accident or illness (an exceptionally American problem). For others, it's a common American story of feeling chained for life to a boring corporate job one hates when one would rather be taking a chance being a writer or artist or freelance plumber or food-truck entrepreneur, all because of our health insurance trap. Why can't the party that claims to love FREEDOM! more than any other value see that a modern (c.1948) government-run single-payer health plan would free companies large and small from acting as insurance agents and free the rest of us from our greatest financial uncertainty and from our dead-end bullshit jobs, freeing us to be more fully ourselves and worrying less about piling up money for that inevitable rainy day? I would have gladly gotten out of the way and given my desk to a young go-getter by now if we had a National Health Service, but US corporations are full of burnt-out pieces of dead wood hanging on for our Aetna or Cigna cards, hoping we never have to use them.

Even though Mitch McConnell had a setback today, keep contacting your Senators and Representatives and tell YOUR story, which is probably more compelling than mine. Let them know that Obamacare isn't perfect but it has insured millions more and greatly reduced medical bankruptcies; TrumpCare in both its House and Senate versions would increase the number of uninsured, increase the number of medical bankruptcies, reinstate lifetime coverage caps, etc. We should always be moving toward universal coverage, not further away.

This could be the most effective healthcare speech in the current Trumpcare 2.0 debate

Normally I'm not a fan of the American television and celebrity culture that has given us our current resident of the White House, but maybe that culture is also the best weapon to help bring him down too, or at least help neutralize his power to take away health insurance from those who finally gained it under President Obama.



Although if I ever watched late night television, it might be hard to decide between Kimmel and Colbert.

Today's True Blue Liberal Poll on Trumpcare

The House Republicans have finally announced their specifics for replacing The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) with The American Health Care Act (Trumpcare). Supporters of Obamacare are appalled at the number of people who will lose coverage and at the way it targets women and older Americans for special mistreatment. The Tea Party wing of the GOP is appalled that Trumpcare is leaving even a few tattered remnants of Obamacare's patient protections; they are calling for a straight repeal of the ACA and a return to the status quo ante a black man in the White House.

Which leads to today's Twitter poll:

Here's a simple poll to determine whether you are a liberal or a conservative.

I believe that replacing the #ACA with #TrumpCare will...

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) March 8, 2017

The USA is exceptional (and almost 69 years behind the UK) in at least one area.

The National Health Service began on July 5, 1948.

I'm simply retyping the historic text of the page above in order to make it searchable and readable on all devices:

THE NEW

NATIONAL

HEALTH 

SERVICE

*

Your new National Health Service begins on 5th July. What is it? How do you get it?

    It will provide you with all medical, dental, and nursing care. Everyone--rich or poor, man, woman or child--can use it or any part of it. There are no charges, except for a few special items. There are no insurance qualifications. But it is not a " charity ". You are all paying for it, mainly as taxpayers, and it will relieve your money worries in time of illness.

TBL Tweet of the Day for 12/6/2016

The trueblueliberal.org tweet of the day is from @DaveWeigel. It's another quick reminder of how different the cost of health care can be in places where it's not completely driven by the profit needs of private insurers, hospitals, and others in the U.S. medical and pharmaceutical industries.

Just had an eye injury diagnosed, treated, and prescribed for in Vietnam and I think I'm a socialist now pic.twitter.com/vdAkdbfeRn

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) December 6, 2016

Close Down the GOP! (their website is buggy)

On a whim, or out of an excess of masochism, I made my way over to GOP.com this afternoon and started clicking on random annoying pages and links.  When I "decided to contribute" and pressed the appropriate virtual button, I got stuck on the following blank screen with its frozen progress bar:

GOP.com on Internet Explorer, 25 October 2013

Based on the logic that they've applied to the growing pains of Healthcare.gov in its first month of operation, their political party needs to be shut down until they can get this fixed. At the very least, based on their party chairman's logic about Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the GOP needs to fire Reince Priebus.

~~~

In the interest of fairness, I should point out that the frozen screen up above that appeared in two tries with Internet Explorer was solved with a quick switch to Google Chrome where I was able to "donate" to the party of the rich and their dupes. But these complex interactions between browsers, operating systems, etc., are indicative of some of the growing pains the Obamacare site  is experiencing too. They will be fixed.

A Reason to Celebrate on #GOPShutdown Day

Here's the page you'll be greeted with if you visit HealthCare.gov this morning:

Despite the efforts of the Tea Party and their stooge John Boehner to extort concessions they couldn't win through legislation, the courts, or the ballot box, the Affordable Care Act will start helping to insure unisured Americans today. They have shut down large portions of the Federal Government causing inconvenience to millions and pain to hundreds of thousands of workers, but HealthCare.gov is up and running.

  

Happy Birthday Obamacare!

A User-Friendly Obamacare Guide from WNYC

It seemed appropriate to share this on a day when the GOP House will be shutting down the US Government to save us from the Affordable Care Act:

Dewey Beats Truman Redux

Here are CNN and Fox News reporting this morning's Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act with all the care of overactive retweeters on Twitter:

I'm not clear from these edits though. Was CNN getting its updates by watching Fox? Or was Fox getting its breaking information from CNN? I'm confused.

Language Matters

Frank Luntz met with the Republican Governors Association this week to give them advice on how to use language to frame arguments, especially now that the Occupy movement has widened the frame of political discourse in this country. Yahoo News was there and they gathered a list of ten key talking points presented by Luntz. You can click on the previous sentence for more details, but know that if you hear a GOP governor saying "I get it" to the Occupiers, or using the words "Job Creators", "Hardworking Taxpayers" or "Taking from the Rich" (while avoiding the words "Capitalism," "Compromise," "Sacrifice," and "Taxing the Rich"), you'll know that they've been schooled by Luntz.
We need to have a few rules of our own.  Being in no way comprehensive, here are a tiny fraction of my pet politico-linguistic peeves:

1)  "War" on anything other than another nation upon which we have issued a formal declaration of war. The TrueBlueLiberal.org Style Guide requires that the "War on Terror" and "War on Drugs" must be placed in quotation marks and preceded by the words "so-called".
2) "Obamacare".  Show me the piece of legislation with this name and I'll start using this word.  Until then, if I hear this perjorative moniker for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 being used, I'll know that the person using it is a Republican partisan or one of their linguistically-lazy stooges in the press.
3) "Democrat" as an adjective. If you hear anyone say "the Democrat Senate" or "that Democrat bill" or "the Democrat liberal rat from Taxachusetts," then you are listening to a student of Luntz speaking (or someone who has only a rudimentary understanding of  English grammar).  The adjective form is "Democratic," whether you are talking about the Party or the form of government.
4) "Job Creators". The correct term is "The Rich" or "The 1%", i.e., those to whom all the benefits of GOP tax policies have flowed since the Reagan era. In the Republican Style Guide any person who makes up part of the scum that floats to the top of the cup is given this title, even if their coupon clipping and hedge-fund managing has never created a single job.  In the TBL.org Style Guide, "Job Creators" (as with so-called "wars" on things or tactics) must be placed in quotes and preceded by "so-called" modifier.
5) Don't even get me started on the so-called "Death Tax." Maybe the Democrats should follow the Holy Founding Fathers' lead and double or triple the Estate Tax with a new name, The Patriotic Aristocracy Eradication Act.

Do you have a "favorite" Republican twist of speech?
Maybe this "Language Matters" heading needs to become a recurring feature here at TBL.org, because I know I have some of these linguistic manipulations annoying me every day (watching a single GOP debate generally brings dozens of them to the surface).

Today's Only Message: VOTE

... unless, of course, you're tempted to vote for the party whose platform is built on the twin pillars of tax breaks for billionaires and the repeal of a bill that extends healthcare benefits to children with pre-existing illnesses.

The "R" on my car does not stand for "Republican"

Police in my town famously stopped Bob Dylan on the street a month ago because Bob was wandering around like the suspicious old man he is (we didn't know about his detention at the time, but we saw his outdoor concert in the rain later that night in Lakewood and he and the band did a great job), but today I heard that the police allowed Republicans -- right here in Long Branch, openly, allowed to walk, chant, and hold ridiculous signs -- to freely assemble on the street in front of Congressman Frank Pallone's office, demonstrating to maintain the wonderful status quo in American health care. And really, it is a wonderful system. What other healthcare system in the world employs millions in unnecessary jobs filling out insurance paperwork, or collecting big bonuses for denying lifesaving treatments? What other healthcare system in the world forces the rest of us to hold like grim death onto jobs that we hate in order to keep private health insurance that may or may not cover us when we really need it? Things are perfect just as they are. Or at least that's what the Repulicans who invaded Long Branch today from their strongholds in Middletown and Rumson think.
I wouldn't even have mentioned them except for the fact that I went to the library today, just a few blocks down Broadway from their demonstration, and when I came out I noticed that the OBAMA'08 bumper sticker that had been on my car since late 2007 was missing. I can't swear that it was one of them, but the sticker was definitely there just a couple of days ago. When I get my liberal self appointed to one of Obama's Death Panels, I'll be looking for the sticker thief so I can personally pull his or her plug or administer the lethal injection (the final preferred Obama Death Panel Execution Method [or ODPEM] has yet to be determined by soulless atheistic socialist government bureaucrats).

Jonas Salk, M.D., and a fiftieth anniversary well worth celebrating

Here's a golden anniversary worth celebrating. I was born in 1955, so I don't remember a fear of swimming pools and urban crowds. I don't remember polio as anything but as the disease that crippled FDR, all because of the discovery that was announced by Jonas Salk on April 12, 1955:

"He further endeared himself to the public by refusing to patent the vaccine. He had no desire to profit personally from the discovery, but merely wished to see the vaccine disseminated as widely as possible."

Exactly like all those selfless capitalist drug companies today.

-TBL