Saturday, June 20, 2009

Politics: Health USA: Obscure notions of "co-ops" stirred, Green split spits at Dems & Reps said to favor the Big Interests, not us

I certainly hope for the mobilization of reformational Christians in the USA to support a big step forward in national healthcare. But, it's fine to require pay-in requirements for those who can pay, as far as I'm concerned. I don't mind that Obama has backed down from a "Canadian" plan -- a plan still booted about South of the Border, a plan which isn't Canadian at all. In Canada, healthcare is financed by both provinces and by federal govt contributions to the provincial health ministries. Other ways to pump selectively further Federal money into, say, the Ontario Healthcare system coud include receiving otherwise unmarked funds from a Federal scientific and research grant by the Pure Science desk or whatever it's called and of which existing ministry of govt, I don't know. Apparently, Obama has givenup on that plan -- and, for now, has artfully dodged a "progress" (Shakespeare) that could have generated quite dubious results for Americans.

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a critique by interspersion of refWrite's responding intertexuality,

in deconstructive stancing toward the written, reconstructive interpretation too;

semiotically-enriched / -clarifying

while sometimes -ambiguating, what often becomes indeed a semiotically-semantically interactive intertextament of meanings scattered against a great skyscape of meaning-levels

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Obama has shifted and will continue to shift on what he's exactly talking about, as in part he searches his way along, listening to the instant and 24hr, 48hr, 72hr feedback he gets from his staff, media, and emails from the public (which he can't possibly take time to read). It's certainly fine for the government to require medical doctors to give a day every week of free healthcare working among the poor, providing this care in the maximally debureaucratized environments suitable to local healthcare delivery to the poor. There are many strategies possible for bringing every American into the Big Tent of civil society's healthcare and of personal responsibility to the general health of society. Including of course one's own healthcare to one's own body (nearly 69, I'm somewhat neglectful) and one's own responsiblity to those around you to keep the common areas clean and healthy (in addition to which I bitch at them when they leave work for me, 7 males all; but she at whom I don't yell, no need whatsoever; further we have one instance of psychosis). This is the sociology -- societal experience! reflected upon with sociological referencing -- out of which my own thinking emerges guided by my Christian worldview. This doesn't mean a plan is good simply because it taxes everybody or charges "user fees" in the Emergency Room.

It's futile to be arguing whether the Canadian system is better or worse than the USA's. First, the Canadian system is good (it involves two levels of govt support by taxation, with much further supplemental support to the pensioners, and to the poor). Second, at the same time, the system has it's sometimes serious disaster of a failure, a flawed delivery system that results in a human personal tragedy. But to hear the fatuous Glenn Beck potvaliantly sneer at the system and smear using innuendo wide and reckless, to dishonestly disparage the daily accomplishments of the Canadian healthcare system because one person went unattended for 36-hours and died in the Emergency Room somewhere, doesn't mean the inferiority of the Canadian system. Beck's approach is not a one of a Christian concerned for healthcare for all; what's more, we need something other than what the capitalist medical system in the USA has to offer Americans, especially poor Americans.

In the USA, the kind of case that Beck selected to represent Canada's healthcare, in a USA context where so many of our poor have no medical insurance, some people in great need never even get to a hospital or clinic to die on a bench there. And Beck is being treacherous in regard to this needless misrepresentation based on a huge generalization. Beck is the latest starlet to do offthewall flackery on FoxNews.com. I don't like, either, much of the other "news"-casting on TV; but generally I can stand the other channels far less than Fox, which like most everything has its br+t spots too. But on Fox News, Beck is not one of those br+t spots. On the plus side, generally, the women, br+t and mentally sharp, are far more interesting on Fox News than on the other news channels, .

My search on the web for good critical sources regarding federal debate on healthcare, took me to what is one of the two Green Parties in the USA:
WASHINGTON, DC -- Green Party leaders said today that measures to end the recession must focus on the financial needs of middle- and lower-income Americans, and accused Democrats and Republicans in Congress and President Obama of favoring big banks, financial institutions, and insurance firms.

"The very banks, Wall Street firms, and insurance companies that are responsible for the economic crisis are calling the shots for economic recovery. They're using their power over Congress and the White House to make sure that taxpayers' money and workers' retirement benefits rescue CEOs and major shareholders
[false insofar as it is incomplete: the labor unions have been and are presently being h+ly benefitted by the White House. Now, I'm thinking of the UAW and the leverage that the union now has over GM thru its rescued and privileged Pension Funds, while the union CEOs are not treated equally with the GM brass, as far as clipping usurious incomes are concerned]. They're blocking badly needed regulation and the deeper reforms in our economic system that are necessary to dig us out of the hole. [Again, this Green outfit is so tendentious that its statements end up being false overall, whatever GPUSA's intentions.] Unfortunately, President Obama and Democrats and Republicans in Congress are cooperating with them [the corporate greedmeisters, to use my own metaphor for the potvaliant way GPUSA broadbrushes all corporate leaders] so that the power these corporations hold over America remains undiminished," said Laura Wells, former candidate for California State Controller (TV interview: http://www.gp.org/flash/LauraWells/lw.html). [The foregoing is also false in portraying any "cooperation" with corporations as (necessarily) a cooperation with the sole villain in the recent economic crisis. Maybe Obama has outsmarted the very same bosses with whom the h+ hallucinating Wells woud conceive her own special Obama, the two, he on top and the coporate leadership only seeming to be beneath him (in the dirty-mindeds' way of reading), in a single identity for her purposes here.

In actuality, we simply don't and can't know many things, yet; speculations about the logical necessity of a certain scenario (given the fragmentary facts we do know sort of, thru dubious mass communications, including books); and maybe we will never know (double negative and all). Ms. Wells is just making tooth-and-claw politically-negative statements; because, apparently, the Greens (either split A or split B) have little to nothing to say on precisely how to structure healthcare to cover everybody in our medically-divided society's health institutions; we must accept pluralization of groups, besides any allegedly "religiously-neutral" public governmental institutions; the Green Meanies coud instead discriminate among corporations -- at least insofar as some of these business leaders may get behind Obama's or a similar initiative when a decent plan comes up; and that re-orientation of corporations already is at least beginning to happen, according to my reading between the lines of Jonathan Cohn's "The Operator," a piece on Karen Ignagni an entrepreneur of a certain kind of entrepreneurial structure, a kind of trade association of small-business insurers ("small" relatively speaking). "Why is the most powerful health care lobbyist playing nice?" But returning to our analysis of the text of the Greens:]

The Green outfit says "Ms. Wells intends to run for the position again 'until we -- the people of this state -- win.' [Please, suddenly she and her party are "we"-- the people of California -- " , whereas in actuality the people of California includes everyone in Calfornia, where many of those very people that Ms Wells verbaly tries to lasso for inclusion in her herd of slippery definitions, many of those momentarily entertained precisely don't believe in the constant straining of Greens to sound better and more connected and just laden with real solutions than the non-people out there who don't yet see the error of their ways -- suddenly, in the logic behind this rhetoric, readers can surmise how Green party "ecologism" turns out to be class-warfare rhetoric (in which I presently note distinct echoes of Trotskyism) after all -- whereas the field of contemplation here just doesn't allow anyone that level of surety. And the last remark also applies to r+twingers, like Beck.] We need to follow the money, understand it, and correct it."[Cant buttered in cliché. And what about your money, Ms Wells, and what about your own mirage-generating ideology?]

"The measure of the health of the economy is the stability of the nation's households. The current economic 'remedies' offered by Republicans, Democrats, and the Obama Administration are designed to ensure the well-being of corporations at the expense of our households," [false: this is just self-serving political claptrap] said Jill Bussiere, co-chair of the Green Party of the United States.

Congress and the White House have refused to take real action against skyrocketing interest rates, especially on credit cards, by restoring laws against usury and imposing interest rate caps. Greens called the Democrats' "Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights" a small step in the right direction
[better said perhaps: a little ray of honest acknowledgement of the credit crunch, as it affects those other than rich] but severely inadequate, [ Agreed!] with no limits on future credit card interest rates.

"The economic meltdown is the result of deregulated lending
[again, not true enuff, as the demand by the banks to set up, instead, their own outside-of-kind financial firms [philosophers read: anti-normative banks, anti-normative non-bank financial houses] -- financiers and brokerages of the more predatory kind -- and then exalt these half-assed banks with the cancerous h+risk core internally, exalt them as the true centers of said "banks," where internally the banking function comes to serve the brokering function -- this whole anti-regulatory slide all constituting a severely anti-sphere-sovereignty/universality distortion of the internal structural principle of both kinds of business companies in each of its variant positivizations, involving also a complex of concepts which is resoundingly combinatory into a key ins+t into the structural part of the problem of the faux lending] -- predatory mortgage lending, outrageous credit card interest and fees, and other practices that have put working Americans into endless debt and bankrupted small businesses," [false: the Greens' conceptualization unfairly again targets only the corporations -- they're the devils, the demons, and the dark murky sea -- but what of the simultaneous govt and Congressional committee chairmen and ranking minority members's unconscionable pressure put on lendors to grant mortgages to those never able to pay for them, again, as a result of actions and policies of key congressional Democrats, of Fannie Mae leadership and structures, and likewise Freddie Mae, etc] said Jody Grage, treasurer of the Green Party of the United States (split A or B, I just don't know). "But Democrats and Republicans alike have refused to consider modest steps like an 18% interest rate cap, out of loyalty to major corporate campaign contributors and lobbies." [Go for it, gals. You're ascription of motives is a bit severe, but otherwise I'm backing you on this one -- except your overload of blame-placing put on corporations -- whereas, it seems to me that the ladies are themselves totally dependent on the corporations, regulated sufficiently or not, dependent upon corporations for their daily lives, a large part of their own ways of life.]

"The most important step in ending the economic crisis must be reversal of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton revolution, which deregulated the financial industry. [This is such an unnuanced and monothematic historiographic analysis, a unexceptionally traditional marxist scholarly-framework implied,so unnuanced yet with such bold political horizons, and with a political time-frame that ends up being that of the statement's author in her reckless abandonment of any effort to carefully persuade a wide variety of readers; instead, the rhetoric proferred is all about targetting, demonizing, while lacking positive proposals on the actual point at hand.] All that rhetoric about 'shrinking big government' really meant repealing protections for working people, especially laws against usury. Since 1980, bipartisan legislation favoring giant corporate lenders have paved the way for the current disaster. It's time to restore and expand the Glass-Steagal Act, overturn recent bankruptcy bills that put millions of Americans in hock to credit card companies and other financial corporations, and place restrictive caps on corporate lenders and creditors," said Ms. Grage. [At last, some good ideas buried in here in all the mindless leftwing rhetoric. But, sorry, I don't have time to pause and analyse the this particular set of accusations and proposals; a task which in itself woud be wellworth doing. Later sometime, maybe. So, please read the Greens' recommended back-up:]

More information: "The Trouble With Democrats" by William Greider, The Nation, June 22, 2009 (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090622/greider).>


While the recent massive taxpayer-funded bailouts [stop! most of the tax-base people now paying for the mass bailouts, payment which has been and yet will be extracted from corporate elites and their staffs and, far more broadly of course, extracted from anyone who pays graduated income tax more than do the poor [my usage here of "the poor" includes those who pay nothing in income taxes and who live marginally, perhaps utterly homeless, but not necessarily so -- so much for romantically conceived "working people," as many of these working people at the top of corporate hierarchies actually work longer hours and much harder than do the ladies making featured statements for the Greens' press release] for Wall Street firms and major banks have imposed minimal conditions, the Obama Administration forced General Motors into bankruptcy and now demands that the retirement health benefits of workers be used to pay off GM's debt.

"By demanding that GM workers' retirement money be sent to creditor banks, Steven Rattner, President Obama's 'Car Czar,' is breaking the law. That money belongs to the workers, not to GM or the banks. This is outright theft,
[tedious!] for the benefit of powerful banks," said Jody Grage. [This last one I'll have to look into, and I can't judge at this point the alleged action by the Car Czar, who looked a bit shabby to me from the outset.]

The 1974 Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) protects benefits that workers have already paid for, prohibiting their use to pay off an employer's debt. More information: "Grand Theft Auto: How Stevie the Rat bankrupted GM" by Greg Palast, June 1, 2009 (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vlatibertaciana/message/3894).
[That source looks interesting, but does it support the argument of the self-quoting ladies above?]

A Harvard Medical School and Ohio University study reported in the American Journal of Medicine (http://www.pnhp.org/new_bankruptcy_study) reveals that medical bills are behind 60% of bankruptcies in the US.

"Insurance companies are chiefly responsible for the breakdown of US health care and skyrocketing medical costs, and for contributing to the greater economic crisis by sending Americans into bankruptcy.
[Far too much single-cause thinking, not nearly enuff multi-factorality (therefore requiring a h+er level of proof by far, if possible)]The only solution [This concept of an "only solution" is part of the problem.] is to remove for-profit insurance from the health care system [That political move doesn't sound too br+t, removing institutions that create not just wealth, but technical equipment and medical services, shoudn't be "removed" by the ladies before they even know what the unintended consequences may be, by way of a considerate multi-factoral analysis] and converting to a Single-Payer/Medicare For All national health care plan, which would protect everyone from financial ruin because of illness or injury," [The male PhD here upon whom the ladies' press s release depends, is quite off his rocker: first, in the American context, a person who has no income and no medical insurance, is hardly one of those who go into bankruptcy for any reason; people who go into bankruptcy often restructure their lives and bounce back into conditions of a decent or again superior income; altho some don't.

In any case, bankruptcy is not the issue or the test here; the report is obviously talking about people at one or another of the levels of corporate existence; whereas in Canada, Her Majesty's govt have had to open some room for entrepreneurial contributions to medicine and technical equipment, despite having a healthcare system close to what the Greens pretend they want; that doesn't make Canada's complex system or something similar, transferable to the USA.] said Ron Forthofer, PhD, Green candidate for Congress in 2000 and for governor of Colorado in 2002 and retired professor of biostatistics, the University of Texas School of Public Health (see http://www.healthcareforallcolorado.org).
The other Green Party (The Greens -- Green Party USA) doesn't have much to offer concerning the topic at hand, but it does have another go at the the class-warfare ideology the American Greens like to spout, jettisoning the rhetoric of ecologism.]
Today in America the best paid one-fifth of the population receives about one half of all national income, while the bottom one-fifth receives less than 4 per cent. The distribution of wealth in America is even more unfair. Here, the top one-half per cent of all property owners control over 25% of all wealth; while the top 5% sit on nearly 70% of wealth and property. [So?] What chance does the average person [who's "the average person"?] have for exercising his or her democratic rights under these conditions! [Lots! However, winning an election is another matter. The Greens don't have a chance of being elected, except in the next round in Pennsylvania for the Senate, I say with wry irony, where the GOP is picking up the bill for the run of the state's Greens, apparently, as well as it's own GOP campaign expenses. The triangulating strategy is only too obvioius.]
It may be fine to point out certain factual differences, but the question is import: why? Why shoud this quoted set of statistical observations [stripped of quotation's far-reaching web of innuendo] be particularly salient for a political party -- except of course to further fire the engines of employment, self-employment, industry, and within that entire orbit, certainly also small business. Healthcare should not be tied to wealth, nor wealth taken from some to finance the healthcare of those who can pay for it themselves. Some can't so pay, and they should be financed with equitable financing from specified long-term revenues (altho the necessary conditions to make this possible, may not now exist). The healthcare system shoud not be used to "redistribute wealth."

Ralph Nader ran for prez as nominee of the Association of State Green Parties (Split A), because it's less radical than are The Greens--The Green Party USA (GPUSA) which latter carries a plank in its platform to "[a]bolish the disproportional, aristocratic U.S. Senate," which a few people have cited as solid-gold evidence that the Greens (hence Nader) are insane. "I'm not for the abolition of the Senate," Nader told The Washington Post last summer. "There's so many bad things going through Congress I want two opportunities to stop them." Nader's Association of State Green Parties, whose statement we have been chiefly quoting, has a platform that makes no mention of abolishing the Senate. It intends to keep the Senate right where it is."

Following upon all this, I must add that reformational philosophy professor, Dr Evan Runner used to intrigue us with his elevated slogan, "Neither r+t nor left." Owlbirdbet Nu Spel untraditional English spelling based on the English sound system, NuSpel orthography that you've been encountering interspersed in my critical remarks [sometimes longish-parenthetical interspersions into the text under examination and at hand]. If there were ever a situation where Runner's advice comes urgently, this is one of them.

Where to turn on the subject of Healthcare Plans?

Try Jonathan Cohn, "The Operator" (The New Republic (July1,2k9)--about Why the most powerful lobbyist is playing nice. He investigates the connection between the insurance companies, the economic crisis, and healthcare plans. You can learn things here, as you can in an earlier dispatch of his, "The Single Biggest Issue That Could Undermine Reform," ( TNR , Jan4,2k9). Cohn is leftwing, nevertheless he makes a real effort to be explanatory.

Finally, there's Jacob S. Hacker, "" TNR's "The Treatment" (Jun14,2k9). In this article, I finally found a text on the topic of healthcare USA which took a h+ly critical approach to the principle of required participation in the federal overall health program which is emerging. He does not advocate compulsion or coercion. Apparently,in his view, you do not have to pay-in. Good.

Here comes the juicy part:
The idea of public plan choice was part of all the leading Democratic candidates’ health plans, Senator Max Baucus’ November 2008 White Paper, and the vision of reform articulated earlier this year by key congressional Democrats. All with little attention outside health policy circles--until conservatives, health insurers, and some provider groups decided the public plan was public enemy number one. And so, the misinformation campaign began: A public plan available alongside private plans only for Americans without workplace insurance was suddenly described as a “government takeover” of medicine, the “,” and (that old standby) “socialized medicine.” Republicans drew their lines in the sand, and Democrats started their favorite parlor game: compromising among themselves even before the real debate begins.
I want nothing to do with such greedy conservatives. But, in Canada, conservatives have nothing to do with obstructing healthcare for all -- tho for them and all other parties, it's quite a struggle of govts to keep up with the longterm hemorraging costs to the system of public financial support. Canada's remedy has been in part to allow some independent health centers, particularly specialized healthcare clinics, and independent physicians. A doctor can opt out of the current system and charge a load if he thinks he/she personally commands a market due to proven expertise, "a proven track record," even implying h+ professionalism (altho shadiness in billing is not unheard of).

Most of Dr Hacker's umbrage is reserved for Sen Kent Conrad, Chair of the Senate Budget Committee.
Allow consumers, states, and anybody else so inclined to create cooperatives that would purchase health care for their members. Conrad has not offered much in the way of specifics on what the cooperatives would look like or how they would be chartered. Most important, he has offered no reason to think that the cooperatives he envisions could do any of the crucial things that a competing public plan must do.
The foregoing statement is dubious; I apply the hermeneutics of suspicion somewhat because of the statement's presumptions and assumptions.

At the same time, I think this whole line of thawt is nevertheless something of a breakthru-opening for any organization or leader who has reformational concerns at heart, and wants to lead us and cobelligerents into proposing a sphere-sovereignty alternative that adds pluralization to Conrad's recipe of factors that shoud be embraced in structuring healthcare insurance coops, one that would cover coops (what kind? there are many kinds ... this concern also matters), stockholder-run health corporations whose shares are offered on the stock markets, entrepreneurs who own a healthcare business or service and want to swim in the industry's open waters.

That means, the coop alternative for healthcare consumers is at least under discussion. More than that, reformationals have communal history, experience, in self-organization with a goal for Christian expression in every sphere of life. Of course, there woud probably have to be two coops in order to cover all coop-Christians who want to join and be represented at official bodies relevant to this sphere of life, work, and health -- a representation for Christians who cannot in good conscience join fellow Christians and fellow-travelers of any faith (or none) who want the Christian-principled insurance-group (Welcome!, I say) in a pro-abortion medical-insurance group, so pluralization will mean an healthcare insurance consumer-group for Christians who approve abortions, and a distinct one for those who don't. I'm with the latter, and I don't want any of my money going to the abortion industry or it's doctors or it's clients. I shoud have that choice, as shoud you. As should any medical doctor or nurse. But that doesn't mean any, including those who want abortion practices included in their coop's negotiations, shoud be denied healthcare except in abortion-related matters.

Hacker aims at "a competing public plan." He says:
An easy way to think of the public plan’s functions is the three “B”s: We need a national public plan that is available on similar terms in all parts of the nation as a backup. This plan has to have the ability to improve the quality and efficiency of care to act as a benchmark for private insurance. And it has to be able to challenge provider consolidation that has driven up prices to serve as a cost-control backstop.
The principle of sphere sovereignty and pluralism of healthcare consumers' coops (non-profit, generally), stock-owned healthcare enterprises (for-profit, generally), and enterpreneur-initiated and owned healthcare companies (for-profit, generally). Regulations should exist for all three--and these regulations shoud not be onerous for the coops or single-owner entrepreneurs. The govt shoud not try to wreck the healthcare coops that would emerge; it should not try to force their pluralism of medical philosophies and contribution schemes into narrowly conceived secularist-only bureaucratically-prepackaged alternatives.

Hacker insists:
Cooperatives might be able to provide some backup in some parts of the nation, but they are not going to have the ability to be a cost-control backstop, ['not' a benchmark for private plans, because they are not going to have the reach or authority to implement innovative delivery and payment reforms. And so Conrad’s idea appears to be yet another compromised compromise that cuts the heart out the idea of public plan choice on the alter [sic: the correct spelling is "altar"] of political expediency.
Suddenly, a shift of tone:
That’s not to say that encouraging cooperatives would be bad policy. In fact, Conrad has resurrected an old health care idea that taps into Americans’ strong belief in direct community control (what the political scientist James Morone has called “the democratic wish”). Cooperatives of various sorts have been discussed and sometimes created to provide health care in the past. ...

After the Great Depression, the Farm Security Administration encouraged the development of health cooperatives--which at one point had about 600,000 members, mostly in rural areas. But the cooperatives crumbled in the face of physician resistance (including boycotts), the lack of financial wherewithal of the cooperatives themselves, and the eventual withdrawal of government support. [If the govt was supporting the faith-based-&-community initiatives of those olden times, then why did the coops "lack financial wherewithal?" The historical narrative being reconstructed by Hacker seems very selective in regard to the plethora of facts available and presumably yet discoverable.
The term Hacker wants is "purchasing coops."
And that’s the story of purchasing cooperatives writ large. They have been hard to establish or extend, and when they have been established, they’ve been under constant siege from doctors and insurers and eventually largely operated as private insurance plans or weak purchasing arrangements. It is hard to see how any sort of decentralized cooperative model could do what a public plan can do.
But Hacker's "hard to see" statement may be only his own blindspot, or the failure of an imagination stuck on an ideology, or a misjudgment about presentday American social ferment, which is quite unlike all the others when no Christians in this country seemed to understood with any depth the principle of sphere-sovereignty and pluralization of representation in all public and many communal spheres of life.


Then he adds:
But what if the cooperatives were national?

To this I woud immediately add: the idea of a Christian national healthcare coop shoud appeal to Christians who no longer want the American Medical Association and its ilk, to represent them in health matters, as the AMA is a creature of some doctor's greed, unfortunately and overcomplicatedly intertwined in AMA's culture and ethos of excellence, along with health insurers' manipulations.
Conrad has suggested that
a national cooperative could be created on behalf of consumers. This would be a distinct improvement over the decentralized approach [binomial bullshit!, I say to Mr Conrad -- it's not a question of centralization or decentralization], especially if Congress established the cooperative [again, this is just socialist centralism, it's extra baggage that the medical system (coops, investor-owned, and singly-owned small enterprises] can't afford to overlook in their ruminations, instead of falling back upon unitary social thawt, the plan has to distinguish -- rather than trying to avoid at all costs -- the difference between other functions in the medical system, and free associations of coop healthcare seekers (among whom woud be those preferring, say, a Catholic hospital and doctors affiliated to it (perhaps whether they be Catholics or not, otherwise), who together, in their formal grouping in a free association, coud thereby acquire the power to participate as a Christian medical-consumer representation in the ongoing discussions and thereby be represented in the govt and healthcare businesses' deliberations and consultative processes. Of course, there woud be a reporting process required of all representational healthcare coops] and provided federal startup funds [there could be a distinct federal Medical Bank that woud consult with and finance all the legal free-association healthcare coops and thus their members, perhaps in part on a per member basis, all the coops that met basic regulations, all such coops to be represented in group representations and in the medical-coop sub-industry's consultations with the Medical Bank].

Health law expert Timothy Jost has argued that the only viable cooperative strategy would involve “a federal charter to license and regulate a national non-profit coop, with coop governance prescribed by Congress.” Ugh! Please keep Congress out of the health business! They are incompetent for the purpose of healthcare cooperation, of providing healthcare or deciding who and how people may freely group to participate and get the freedom of association in medical representation that obtains elsewhere, in accord with their own medical philosophy and religious values. There shoud be no dominance of secularist, abortionist, or purely bureaucratic arrangements, as the AMA and the Congress seem to have arranged so far.

The Christian Medical Society shoud be free and independent of the AMA, and shoud be ready to take responsiblity for all its patients' care, also by supporting healthcare coops, according to new legislative guidelines when they are provided by govt after enactment of the new legislation; but not at an unjustifiable expense to medical-care consumers, as prevails at present.

To spice up the discussion, I woud suggest that the Christian Medical Society shoud not be free and independent of the Christian Labor Association-USA, in existence in America since 1934. Doctors, dentists, nurses, receptionists, all professional healthcare workers of Christian faith should be members thru a future CM&DS affiliation with the Christian Labor Association.

Hacker goes on to make dogmatic policy comments, that woud be shredded by a further close reading.

-- Politicarp

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