In the two weeks following a so-called landmark agreement that healthcare industry leaders would trim their own growth by 1.5 percent per year, industry lobby groups behind the scenes were mounting million-dollar advertising campaigns against key planks in the Obama plan, reports the Washington Post.
Hospitals and insurers came out just a few days after the White House photo op last week to say Obama had the story wrong. He overstated their agreement. They had not pledged steady cuts -- $2 trillion over 10 years, according to the New York Times.
Health care leaders who attended the meeting have a different interpretation. They say they agreed to slow health spending in a more gradual way and did not pledge specific year-by-year cuts.
“There’s been a lot of misunderstanding that has caused a lot of consternation among our members,” said Richard J. Umbdenstock, the president of the American Hospital Association. “I’ve spent the better part of the last three days trying to deal with it.” Read more >>
A week after the White House photo op, the Washington Post reported that Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina was planning ads in direct opposition to a public health plan option.
As part of what it calls an "informational website," the company has hired an outside PR company to make a series of videos sounding the alarm about a government-sponsored health insurance option, known as the public plan. Obama has consistently maintained that a government-run plan, absent high-paid executives and the need for profits, could be a more affordable option for Americans who have trouble purchasing private insurance. The industry argues that creating a public insurance program will undermine the marketplace and eventually lead to a single-payer style system.
In three 30-second videos, the insurer paints a picture of a future system in which patients wait months for appointments and can't choose their own doctors, according to storyboards of the videos obtained by the Washington Post. Read more >>
The ads resemble “Harry and Louise” type ads that helped defeat Hillary Clinton’s plan in the mid-90s. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recalled what Obama said about such attacks during the campaign:
Back during the Democratic primary campaign, Mr. Obama argued that the Clintons had failed in their 1993 attempt to reform health care because they had been insufficiently inclusive. He promised instead to gather all the stakeholders, including the insurance companies, around a “big table.” And that May 11 event was, of course, intended precisely to show this big-table strategy in action.
But what if interest groups showed up at the big table, then blocked reform? Back then, Mr. Obama assured voters that he would get tough: “If those insurance companies and drug companies start trying to run ads with Harry and Louise, I’ll run my own ads as president. I’ll get on television and say ‘Harry and Louise are lying.’ ”
The question now is whether he really meant it. Read more >>
The healthcare industry must really be getting desperate now, digging down into the bottom of the barrell for concessions when millions are spent in opposition.
This weekend, industry leaders announced plans to cut the rate of cost growth by 1.5 percent per year, amounting to $2 trillion in savings over 10 years. Some compromise when insurance rates go up 15 percent per year.
It's all theoretical. Once again, the industry offers as a concession to stop screwing us over, just a little. "We'll stop overcharging you by 1 percent," they say. "Aren't you happy?"
Make no mistake about it. This is a desperate attempt to thwart any true reform. Here's a good piece of skeptical journalism from Robert Pear at the NY Times that appeared yesterday:
If history is a guide, their commitments may not produce the promised savings. Their proposals are vague — promising, for example, to reduce both “overuse and underuse of health care.” None of the proposals are enforceable, and none of the savings are guaranteed. Without such a guarantee, budget rules would normally prevent Congress from using the savings to pay for new initiatives to cover the uninsured. At this point, cost control is little more than a shared aspiration.
The piece goes on to describe past promises during the Carter and Clinton administrations of similar cost saving measures only to have past practices resume.
Henry J. Aaron, a health economist at the Brookings Institution, said that when he heard the industry’s promises on Monday, “I had a Rip van Winkle moment, as if I had fallen asleep in 1977 and woke up again this morning.”
Mr. Aaron served in the administration of President Jimmy Carter, whose proposal for hospital cost controls prompted the industry to undertake a short-lived “voluntary effort.”
After President Bill Clinton proposed an overhaul of the health care system in 1993 and 1994, the growth of health spending slowed, only to surge a few years later.
Today, while the healthcare industry says they can cut costs, they are also arguing not to reduce wasteful, over payments to Medicare Advantage plans. And they're spending millions of dollars to defeat healthcare reform. Doesn't that strike you as contradictory?
Wealthy healthcare industry leaders have enlisted swift-boaters CRC Public Relations to oppose Obama's health reform plan. CRC hired Rick Scott, a former hospital CEO with a history of fraud to head the newly formed Conservatives for Patients' Rights. Scott is spending $5 million of his own money and $15 million in donations, according to the Washington Post. The ads commonly bring up long lines and waiting lists in Britain and Canada, which really is nothing compared to the horrors we have going on in our country right now.
Conservatives for Patients' Rights spent about $600,000 a month on ads in March and April but is ratcheting up its buy for May to more than $1 million, CRC representatives said. Scott has also spent recent weeks meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and addressing conservative groups in Washington, including the influential weekly breakfast organized by anti-tax activist Grover Norquist.
Meanwhile, Health Care for America Now! has about $600,000 all total to spend on media ads, some of which it spent this week calling out key Democrats such as Oregon Senator Ron Wyden.
I know there's been plenty of coverage about the use of unmanned drones and lots of stories about the pilots who leave a suburban American home in the morning to fight in a war 7,000 miles away by remote control during the day. (I hear a good account comes in PW Singer's book Wired for War but I'm waiting for it in paperback.)
Regardless, 60 Minutes this week featured the always-stunning story of these unmanned drone pilots with their bird's eye view of the battlefield from an air conditioned trailer outside Las Vegas. It just figures these guys would be in Vegas.
It shows how drone pilots pull guard duty on troops in Afghanistan while they sleep and how soldiers rely on their aerial surveillance when out on patrol.
The military released footage of what the drone pilots see, but for those who have watched the war play out on Youtube over the years, you may be familiar with drone strikes. When you hear the pilots talking over the radio, it shows how dicey things can be. Check out this clip of a hit on an apparent terrorist camp where the pilots are trying to sort out which building is the mosque and later see people streaming out of the mosque.
Here's a clip of the bombing strike on Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq for a few years when we had so much trouble there in 2006. Though it's an F-16 hit, the view is similar to what pilots see flying drones. I reference it so you can see how devestating collateral damage can be in a crowded distrist.
Here's Singer's take on Youtube on the Youtube phenonemon while referencing drones. What a segue.
"We have the ability to see more, but feel less," Singer said.
It's plain creepy that these guys, by a flick of a joystick, can turn war into a video game. The logical next step is unmanned humvees and tanks with robotic ground troops. And that should scare the living shit out of everybody.
While I'm at it, if you want to see a harrowing ambush that really demonstrates the "fog of war," here it is. Here's the extreme on the lighter side of the Youtube effect as troops eavesdrop on a farmer with night-vision video.
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai might wear a blanket over his shoulders like a geriatric, but he's no pathetic old sickly man.
He disputed Obama Administration claims that he doesn't do enough to fight corruption with this zinger reported by the NY Times:
He said instead that any gulf between the countries had more to do with the civilian toll of American airstrikes in Afghanistan.
Karzai warned in another article that "civilian casualties were fast turning ordinary Afghans against the United States." He then called for an end to air strikes, something US officials said would be like fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.
Karzai, meanwhile, is turning around in his own country's opinion polls nearing reelection.
Apparently, Obama and Karzai are off to a bumpy start. Karzai reminisced in one article about his friendly relationship with G.W. and how corruption charges and civilian death tolls have created friction between the two leaders.
Airstrikes last week -- likely from unmanned drones -- in western Farah Afghanistan reportedly killed more than 100 civilians. Human rights groups report burns on civilians consistent with white phosphorous, a chemical used to illuminate battlefields and banned for direct use against combatants. US officials say Taliban insurgents are to blame, while the US acknowledges using the chemical only for its intended purpose.
All this white phophorous talk is reminiscent of human rights abuses by Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza earlier this year. Are we heading down the same path of endless occupation and warfare?
Apparently the Washington Post shares my reasoning: Even if Smithfield Farms' La Gloria factory hog farm isn't to blame for the swine flu, it's as good a time as ever to point out how it and other factory farms are a disaster for human and environmental health.
For years, farmers in the communities that dot this arid valley complained about the effects of the industrial pig farms that had multiplied near their fields.
The overpowering stench gave them headaches and drove them from their homes. Packs of wild dogs feasted on discarded pig carcasses and occasionally turned on their children and pets. There were fears that vast lagoons of excrement from more than 1 million hogs might seep into their groundwater.
Later on.
Smithfield moved into Mexico in anticipation of the expanding market after the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. Granjas Carroll is a 50-50 joint venture between Smithfield and Agroindustrias Unidas de Mexico. Its pigs are raised under a "vertical integration" method that packs thousands of animals into identical barns covered with metal roofs. The pigs do little except eat and grow before being slaughtered. When they defecate, the waste falls through slatted wooden floors and is then flushed through pipes into open-air pits the size of two football fields, which the company calls lagoons and says are built with an impervious liner to avoid leakage.
Large-scale industrialized farming poses a number of health risks, according to a recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They include possible contamination of groundwater and increased risk of transmission of "new or novel viruses" such as swine or avian flu.
I'm starting to enjoy the reaction we're getting from the health insurance industry these days.
On Wednesday, its industry trade group -- American Health Insurance Plans -- said it would agree not to charge women higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs.
This obviously begs the question: Why were they charging women more to begin with? Oh I see, the health insurance industry's idea of compromise is offering to do what they should have been doing all along anyway.
It's well documented from other recent stories including this one from NPR that women have historically paid higher premiums, let alone co-pays and out-of-pocket costs.
Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, told Ms. Ignagni, “The disparity between women and men in the individual insurance market is just plain wrong, and it has to change.”
Mr. Kerry introduced a bill on Tuesday to prohibit insurers from considering sex as a factor in setting premiums for policies in the individual insurance market.
Women are often charged 25 percent to 50 percent more than men for insurance providing identical coverage.
This latest so-called concession comes after the industry said in November that it would agree to cover everyone if -- and only if -- everyone was forced to buy insurance and there would be no government-run health plan option.
If I were someone going into the negotiating room with these people, the public health plan option is completely off the table. We can find ways to bridge the difference between covering everyone and an individual mandate.
Virginia-based Smithfield Farms and every factory farm out there should take notice. A whole town of Mexicans happen to get sick downwind from one of your factory hog farms and the whole world thinks you're the cause of a pandemic. Smithfield CEO Larry Pope would have you believe it's completely unjustified.
Yesterday the New York Times puts out this massive expose with everything you'll ever want to know about Smithfield's operations in Poland and Romania where they basically mimicked their Mexican strategy, which is to lay waste and break the law. This from NY Times.
It moved with such speed that sometimes it failed to secure environmental permits or inform the authorities about pig deaths — lapses that emerged after swine fever swept through three Romanian hog compounds in 2007, two of which were operating without permits. Some 67,000 hogs died or were destroyed, with infected and healthy pigs shot to stanch the spread.
Later on.
The impact on the environment is even more marked. With almost 40 farms in western Romania, Smithfield has built enormous metal manure containers to inject waste into the soil. “We go crazy with the daily smell,” said Aura Danielescu, the principal of a school in Masloc, who closes her windows tight.
Familiarize yourself with the Smithfield label so you can participate in the boycott. It doesn't take much, just remember when you're shopping to pass it by.
Here's something interesting from the Smithfield Web site's FAQ section.
Mold appears only on uncooked ham or bacon products. Simply wash off in hot water and scrub mold off with a stiff brush before cooking. Like fine aged cheese, dry cured hams and bacon tend to mold under certain conditions.
With Smithfield bacon, you're getting a lot worse than mold for your money.
I thought it was really poor that Sen. Max Baucus, Democrat in charge of the Finance Committee, laughs at these demonstrators at first, suggesting what he needs is more police in response to the protester saying single-payer needs a seat at the table. He redeems himself a bit with his statements at the end. But nonetheless, these Senators won't put single-payer on the table. What gives?
May 5, 2009 -- The score: Banks 1, Homeowners 0. That is because the U.S. Senate has caved in to the banking lobby and refused to allow bankruptcy judges to modify primary residential mortgages for homeowners facing foreclosure. This would have been the best way to prevent hundreds of thousands of foreclosures, because the threat of court-mandated modifications would have prodded more banks and loan servicers into negotiating in good faith with struggling homeowners. President Barack Obama, who claimed to support the idea, didn't fight hard enough for it and the banks won.
The Senate defeated an amendment last week to give bankruptcy judges the power to alter the terms of home mortgages. The opponents who sided with the mortgage industry over homeowners included 12 Democrats and 39 Republicans — including Florida Republican Mel Martinez. You would think a senator from the state with the second highest mortgage foreclosure rate in the country last year would have seen the wisdom of giving bankruptcy judges more discretion. Florida Democrat Bill Nelson showed commendable backbone, standing up to the banking lobby and voting for the amendment.
The banks fought hard to send this modest initiative down in flames and prevent federal judges from lowering interest rates, extending payment periods or reducing principal — known in banking parlance as "cramdown." Primary residential mortgages are the only type of loan that cannot be restructured in bankruptcy court.
Majority Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois, who was the measure's chief champion, declared that banks "are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." Many of these banks, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, are recipients of taxpayer-funded bailout money. Essentially, they are using taxpayers' money to fight against a public policy that would have helped many taxpayers — including many in Florida. And the Senate let them win.
I can't believe I'm about to say this, but it appears that a local television station -- WTKR in Norfolk, Virgina -- actually did some damn good investigative reporting on the swine flu. Looks like Smithfield Farms took notice of reporter Mike Mather as well. Mather lands the first interview with Smithfield CEO Larry Pope for his unequivocal denial.
And he went to La Gloria and didn't wear a mask.
"Had it not been called the swine flu, Smithfield wouldn't even be involved in this discussion at all," Pope said. "You find a boy in southern Mexico who gets sick. There happens to be a Smithfield facility near it and Boom, you have the linkage right there by some people's standards."
Smithfield volunteered to genetically test its hogs outside La Gloria and had its own consultants deliver samples to a University of Mexico laboratory. Results are due out next week, but Smithfield hasn't decided yet whether to make those results public.
Say what? I guess it depends on the outcome, of course. Initial tests by Mexican officials reportedly failed to find swine flu on Smithfield hogs, instead linking it possibly to Asian pigs.
Pope was already hedging. "Even if that farm is determined to have that (H1N1 flu), there's still no indication it went from that farm to that little boy."
Pope had been in the news lately lamenting how the company's poor press coverage was hurting pork sales. But wait, Oh Gee Willakers, the stock rose again just today thanks in part to positive press such as this piece in Business Week, which linked the strain to Canadian pigs.
I would say even if Smithfield isn't to blame for the flu outbreak, it's as good a time as ever to expose its despicable practices thanks to NAFTA which let it poison poor Mexican towns. Here's a great Rolling Stones piece many people are referencing on the net.
We should rewrite our trade agreements immediately and boycott factory farmed meat products. Meat labeled "organic" is your best bet. Remember Michael Pollan's advice: Eat food, Not too much, Mostly plants.
According to the World Health Organization, 1,490 confirmed swine flu cases have now been reported in 21 countries, resulting in a total of 30 deaths. It said Mexico has reported 822 confirmed cases, including 29 deaths. No deaths from the virus have occurred in countries other than Mexico and the United States, WHO said.
With all the nonstop around the clock threat level alerts by every media outlet in America, surprisingly little if any coverage has been given to the cause or the origin of the swine (ahem) H1N1 flu virus.
After Mexican media reported for a month about the virus origin, on Friday news finally made the US mainstream media that the epicenter of the swine flu was La Gloria, a town of 3,000 people located downwind from the Carroll Ranches hog farm owned and operated by Virginia-based Smithfield Farms. Residents had reported falling ill since February. Mexican officials said on Saturday, they didn't believe Smithfield could be to blame and that the virus came from Asia. But questions remain.
Here's a video from the AP about Ground Zero in La Gloria outside Mexico City and the first known boy to contract the virus.
Even with a decent amount of coverage about the origin, virtually none of the mainstream outlets would dare question the root cause of the pandemic, which is the North American Free Trade Agreement. Of course, Democracy Now! was one of the first to connect the dots.
The following comes from a piece by Al Giordano, special to the Narco News, one of the best rundowns of events and links to NAFTA that I found on-line.
April 29, 2009 --US and Mexico authorities claim that neither knew about the “swine flu” outbreak until April 24. But after hundreds of residents of a town in Veracruz, Mexico, came down with its symptoms, the story had already hit the Mexican national press by April 5. The daily La Jornada reported:
Clouds of flies emanate from the rusty lagoons where the Carroll Ranches business tosses the fecal wastes of its pig farms, and the open-air contamination is already generating an epidemic of respiratory infections in the town of La Gloria, in the Perote Valley, according to Town Administrator Bertha Crisóstomo López.
The town has 3,000 inhabitants, hundreds of whom reported severe flu symptoms in March.
CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, reporting from Mexico, has identified a La Gloria child who contracted the first case of identified “swine flu” in February as “patient zero,” five-year-old Edgar Hernández, now a survivor of the disease.
By April 15 – nine days before Mexican federal authorities of the regime of President Felipe Calderon acknowledged any problem at all – the local daily newspaper, Marcha, reported that a company called Carroll Ranches was “the cause of the epidemic.”
La Jornada columnist Julio Hernández López connects the corporate dots to explain how the Virginia-based Smithfield Farms came to Mexico: In 1985, Smithfield Farms received what was, at the time, the most expensive fine in history – $12.6 million – for violating the US Clean Water Act at its pig facilities near the Pagan River in Smithfield, Virginia, a tributary that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The company, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dumped hog waste into the river.
It was a case in which US environmental law succeeded in forcing a polluter, Smithfield Farms, to construct a sewage treatment plant at that facility after decades of using the river as a mega-toilet. But “free trade” opened a path for Smithfield Farms to simply move its harmful practices next door into Mexico so that it could evade the tougher US regulators.
Unlike what law enforcers forced upon Smithfield Farms in the US, the new Mexican facility – processing 800,000 pigs into bacon and other products per year – does not have a sewage treatment plant.
According to Rolling Stone magazine, Smithfield slaughters an estimated 27 million hogs a year to produce more than six billion pounds of packaged pork products. (The Veracruz facility thus constitutes about three percent of its total production.)
Reporter Jeff Teitz reported in 2006 on the conditions in Smithfield’s US facilities (remember: what you are about to read describes conditions that are more sanitary and regulated than those in Mexico):
Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs—anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.
The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.
Consider what happens when such forms of massive pork production move to unregulated territory where Mexican authorities allow wealthy interests to do business without adequate oversight, abusing workers and the environment both. And there it is: The violence wrought by NAFTA in clear and understandable human terms.
The so-called “swine flu” exploded because an environmental disaster simply moved (and with it, took jobs from US workers) to Mexico where environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced against powerful multinational corporations.
False mental constructs of borders – the kind that cause US and Mexican citizens alike to imagine a flu strain like this one invading their nations from other lands – are taking a long overdue hit by the current “swine flu” media frenzy. In this case, US-Mexico trade policy created a time bomb in Veracruz that has already murdered more than 150 Mexican citizens, and at least one child in the US, by creating a gigantic Petri dish in the form pig farms to generate bacon and ham for international sale.
None of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but, rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the optimal conditions for the flu to gestate and become, at minimum, epidemic in La Gloria and, now, Mexico City, and threatens to become international pandemic.
Welcome to the aftermath of “free trade.” Authorities now want you to grab a hospital facemask and avoid human contact until the outbreak hopefully blows over. And if you start to feel dizzy, or a flush with fever, or other symptoms begin to molest you or your children, remember this: The real name of this infirmity is “The NAFTA Flu,” the first of what may well emerge as many new illnesses to emerge internationally as the direct result of “free trade” agreements that allow companies like Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and environmental laws.
Media Methadone advances top notch stories in alternative media, provides original reporting and serves to connect the dots in mainstream stories in ways that others have not. We embrace personal commentary to call it what it is.
I am an independent freelance journalist with more than 10 years of experience writing for newspapers. I write primarily about healthcare, conservation and social justice. Recent freelance clips are available through the Wordpress link below.
In the two weeks following a so-called landmark agreement that healthcare industry leaders would trim their own growth by 1.5 percent per year, industry lobby groups behind the scenes were mounting million-dollar advertising campaigns against key planks in the Obama plan, reports the Washington Post. 
Posts
