US Sickies More Profitable than Brits

I’m happy to be upright and writing this because yesterday I wasn’t sure I had a future. I was on the fifth day of bedridden fever after suddenly being set upon by coughing fits. I’d met the virulent virus the flu vaccine didn’t touch.  For the first time, I believed the scare stories my doctor always told me about influenza: it kills. This year, the CDC reports 88 kids have died and flu season’s not over yet.  

So while I was sick I heard the President had tweeted about England’s protests he claimed were about the National Health Service going broke. He praised our wonderful healthcare system, apparently forgetting he’s tried to destroy it.

The NHS, begun in 1948, is as close as England has ever gotten to socialism. It turns out the NHS is not going broke, and the people marching weren’t protesting the NHS, much beloved and rated highly around the world. Its workers were demanding more pay.

Here’s how NHS works, according to Jim Edwards, a Business Insider writer with dual citizenship, who has lived in both the US and England for years, and used both systems. In England, you call the doctor, they make your appointment, you come in and the doctor sees you, right on schedule.  There’s little paperwork and you pay: zero.
http://www.businessinsider.com/an-american-uses-britain-nhs-2015-1

Well, actually you pay, he says, but through your taxes. The tax rates in England are similar to the US—but in England you get free healthcare in return, whereas in the US you pay taxes PLUS you then have to buy private health insurance, which may or may not pay for what you need. There’s maddening paperwork, impossible to understand. Uncovered medical costs remain the leading reason for US bankruptcy.

One other detail?  According to the World Health Organization, the average cost per Brit patient is $3480. Here in the US, our cost per patient is $8362.  Is that because of substandard care? No, it turns out the Brits live longer than we do—maybe because they’ve decided they’re better off united, especially when sick.

A postscript:  in 2009, when Obama was trying to pass the Affordable Care Act, Rick Scott, a multimillionaire hospital-chain CEO who’d made a fortune by defrauding Medicare and Medicaid, http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/floridas-medicaid-fraudster-governor-rick-scott-criticizes-new-yorks sponsored an ad campaign to convince Americans the Brits were dying because of their horrible socialized medicine. He then ran for governor of Florida as a “healthcare reformer,” steadfast against Medicaid expansion—the nasty public insurance that had caught him stealing red-handed.

—Rickey Gard Diamond 

Sneak Peak: Chapter 9

Here's a Sneak Peak from Chapter 9:

"So why should women care about economic issues and news that so seldom includes them? Surprisingly, given the gender of most billionaires, women around the world are largely responsible for producing the cherries and pudding.

The Economist in 2006 credited women with the lion’s share of global economic growth in an article, “The Importance of Sex,” rather like Herodotus praised women as “queen bees” when he first coined the term oikonomia: “Add the value of housework and child-rearing, and women probably account for just over half of world output. It is true that women still get paid less and few make it to the top of companies, but, as prejudice fades over coming years, women will have great scope to boost their productivity—and incomes.”

It’s a promise long awaited—and a wrong one at that. If women merely impersonate the money power now in control, jockeying for individual clout in that rigged Monopoly game, we will shortchange ourselves, our families, and leave our Mother Earth bereft.

A lot of our American lifetime’s economic growth has come at the expense of our more desperate sisters in Mexico, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. We who have benefitted at least a little from the neoliberal bullying of our leaders are entitled to demand more democratic leadership here that negotiates more fairly internationally and at home.

At stake is a very personal bottom line..."

Fat Cats of America

My cat Azula knows I could have blogged every moment of every day this past week, reacting to: Scott Pruitt’s steady dismantling of the EPA; the Trump infrastructure proposal that promises to profit the wealthiest and further indebt the public; a White House staffed by wife-beaters without security clearance; indictments of lying Russian and American men paid to corrupt our faith in elections and facts; a social media which eats up our time while creating more billionaires and smears; and a Florida legislature voting down debate on gun control because surviving kids from our latest school massacre were actually protesting, Never Again!

How did America, the land of the free, get here? It boggles the mind. But one constant does connect it: fat cat money. Who exactly has it, and who gets to make the rules that govern money and us by essentially violent means? 

How much money should the fattest pale male cats have at their paws' disposal? As I write in Screwnomics, millions and billions sound alike, but they’re worlds apart.  Calculated in time, a dollar per second, one million adds up to 12 days. A billion is 13 YEARS. Meanwhile, the median US household (which most often these days includes two earners) is $59,039, or 16 HOURS of time. Half of us earn less and are hustling.

Up until 2016, the median had yet to catch up to where we were in 2008, before the crash, created by Wall Street’s richest. By contrast, Bill Gates, our richest fat cat, had a measly $43 billion in 2008. Now he’s worth $86 billion, or 27 CENTURIES of time. This isn’t due to his overtime pay.

I’ve nothing against Gates or cats, but I do have a problem with a system that so reliably moves money up to those who already have the most. It undermines democracy for us church mice. We need money control as much as we need gun control. The founding fathers never anticipated AR-15s or billionaires, but they did know of Kings—and declared themselves disobedient to despots.

So, be heartened by those young, caring Americans, who courageously wave our nation’s authentic power. American money can be put to much better use than more guns, more billionaires, more corrupt government and lies. Even Azula knows fat cats aren't healthy cats! 

—Rickey Gard Diamond

Sneak Peak: Chapter 5

Here's a Sneak Peak from Chapter 5:

"My mom worried about the little guy—the small grocer, the independent pharmacist, the hardware guy in business for himself—swallowed up by larger national chain stores impossible to compete against. Big box retail was less than his wholesale, she’d say, so she knew the little guy was being squashed. She refused to buy anything made in China.

            And yet she never saw herself as one of the little guys. She was, in fact, among the littlest. She would hate my saying that, but she had been an employee, not an owner. She was a woman, not a man, a bargain for bosses. That put her in a majority she never claimed. She retired to live as if near poverty, with her only sizeable wealth her housing asset.

            That asset separated her from many more women even less well off who lacked that security. African American or Hispanic homeowners in her neighborhood were a tiny minority, distrusted and viewed by her as threats to her property value. Until their houses were paid in full like hers, they were more at risk.  Like my mom, they too had to pay rising property taxes and rising prices for keeping a middle class life..."

Our Populist Plutocrat at Home

I laughed when I first heard billionaire candidate Trump called a “populist.” He was a Republican! They’re the ones with money. But everything stands on its head these days. Democrats seek out the ruling class with money too. The old labels no longer fit.

But misfit-ness isn’t just along these party lines. There is something deeply different about we, the American people. Last week I read a piece by the great late writer Ursula LeGuin. She noted how in 1947, during the first televised White House address, President Truman asked Americans to give up eating meat on Tuesday and poultry on Thursdays. Why? So the US could stockpile more grain needed for people in Europe who were starving.

Who, these days, is asking us to do anything for anyone? Give up AR-15s? NO! Give up your grudge for the poor, those slackers? FORGET IT. Share health risks in a national insurance pool? NO WAY!

This past week “populist” plutocrat Trump, who just gave his richest friends a huge Christmas tax cut at the government’s expense, unveiled his budget. It cut $20 billion from our disabilities insurance program, $1.3 trillion from Medicaid, and $554 billion from Medicare, Sen. Sanders soon tweeted. https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/963101482714386432

Trump proposes cutting food stamps for our poorest families by a third, and wants to replace food stamps’ shopping autonomy in local stores with a food-delivery system—full of food he’ll decide the poor should have. Can’t wait to see what his multinational corporate friends find most profitable—for them, not for the poor. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/usda-proposes-replacing-food-stamps-delivery-service-increase/story?id=5305144

The populist plutocrats will also benefit hugely from Trump’s big military spending, and soon will be waving the flag at a military parade all along our new, expensive border wall. All these work for keeping poor people scared, and the rest of us, the majority, allied the wrong way.

Look around you, American woman. You have far more in common with the poorest than you do with any “populist” plutocrat, who pays off porn stars, protects wife-beaters, and is busy making money while in office, all on your dime and our diminishing American reputation. http://www.newsweek.com/trump-properties-special-interest-political-groups-spending-78601

—Rickey Gard Diamond

Sneak Peak: Chapter 4

//// SNEAK PEAK  from Chapter 4 of Screwnomics ////

Here's a sneak peak of a passage from Chapter 4:

“To understand better, we have to go back even further in time to the era just before the United States became a nation. I’ll be summing up two centuries of economic thought here in a few pages, so keep in mind I’m generalizing a great deal and will give it all short shrift. But in bare outline, classical economics describes the first modern economists of the eighteenth century. Yes, I know it’s confusing—usually “classical” doesn’t also mean modern.

Adam Smith, who published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, was part of a small circle of upper-class men who knew each other well. The early scholarly association of Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and a French group that called themselves physiocrats was a little like...an exclusive club. Each man had a personal interest in the money to be made by knowing men who made money….”