Cats to Humans: Keep H1N1 to Yourselves

By Yul

Enough with this Bourdain guy. We’ve got a serious issue to discuss. A cat caught H1N1 from his owners.

The family in Iowa wishes to remain anonymous, so the cat is unnamed, but he’s a 16-pound orange tabby who’s described as “large-framed but not chubby.” He’s an only pet and never goes outside.

After three of his four humans had flu-like symptoms, the normally friendly cat stopped eating, drinking, and grooming, threw up, and assumed the meatloaf position.

Clearly, he was feeling BAD.

When the American Veterinary Medical Association reported this illness, they ended with, “To date, there is no evidence that the cat passed the virus to any people.”

WTF?

The vet who treated the cat said the only way he could have caught H1N1 was from his peeps bringing the virus to him.

Why do people always try to lay the blame on the animals?

Two pet ferrets in Oregon and Nebraska also caught H1N1, and they both died. Animal expert Steve Dale says ferrets are apparently susceptible to human flu in general.

Don’t get me wrong. Cats love humans, but we must draw a line at sharing your diseases.

• If you’re sick, don’t cough or sneeze on us.
• Wash your hands before petting us. If you leave germs on our fur, someone else pick them up, catches the flu, and we take the rap.
• Wash our bowls daily in hot, soapy water, and keep your paws off our food. Use utensils. You’ve got thumbs.
• Keep our fresh water coming, and don’t drink or wash your hands in it.

I’m happy to report that the Iowa cat didn’t become a statistic. He recovered with fluids and antibiotics and is back in his window watching squirrels.

Flu Vaccine Shortage: Real or Fake?

By Yul

Another flu season — media hyper-hype for everyone to get vaccinated — and another vaccine shortage.

I’m sitting on Karen’s bed on a heating pad with a space heater and a humidifier blowing in my face, toughing out a very nasty cold with nary a drug, and tiny cat nostrils make a stuffy nose particularly miserable. Between catnaps, I’m catching up on the CDC’s excuses. First they tried to incite a pandemic panic. But after their BFF, Big Pharma, failed to deliver enough of the antidote, they’re now saying, “Just keep washing your hands, H1N1 isn’t even as bad as regular flu!” Newspapers across the country are reporting vaccine shortages.

Why? Drug companies say the vaccine is taking longer to make, the virus isn’t multiplying in eggs as much as it needs to, and, “Well, golly gee, we have to make 2 vaccines instead of one!”

Yada, yada, yada.

Big Pharma knows flu comes as surely as death and taxes. The media has gone into overdrive, implying it’s certain death to skip the vaccine by running heart-rending stories about the one in a million who succumbs. Then the drug companies drop the ball and people can’t get vaccinated.

Since their business is making drugs, why are they so inept at vaccines? Every year, it’s like they never made one before.

I think it’s all about profit. When they first said people needed three shots this year (2 for H1N1, one for regular flu) and clinics weren’t stormed with takers, they started singing, “Oh, wait. Never mind. You only need 2 shots.”

Economics 101: If you can’t bilk suckers for triple the price, go for double.

When that also failed to start a stampede, there’s suddenly a vaccine shortage. Last-ditch effort to drive up desirability and price.

Once poo-pooed as too cheap and infrequent, drug companies now smell big bucks in vaccines and are belatedly scrambling to ramp up production — particularly since the media is nurturing a permanent mindset that immortality is yours if you get every inoculation that comes down the pike.

How much you want to bet there will never be another flu season where one shot is enough?

Insurers Now Out to Sink Healthcare Reform

By Karen

“Hatchet job” was Senator Max Baucus’ (D-Mont.) assessment of the report just released by lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). Makes you wonder why he’s killing himself trying to protect their profits at our expense.

AHIP claims Max’s plan would raise rates — by $1,700 for families and $600 for individuals — by 2013.

So what’s their point? Without reform, rates routinely increase more than $600 every year.

Obama should feel the knife sticking out of his back while AHIP’s head cheerleader, Karen Ignagni, smugly hints that TV attack ads may be coming. The sheer gall of this complete 180 would be mind-blowing if we weren’t talking about the most useless, greedy, wasteful industry ever conceived.

But perhaps insurers just did us a favor. Cornered, maybe Congress will finally consider the only means guaranteed to reduce costs — HR3200 or HR676 — single-payer plans that make insurance obsolete.

Who could possibly care about the future of an industry that just denied a policy to a 4-month-old baby for the “pre-existing condition” of being fat?

Nobody wins with insurers. When rising premiums forced me to become underinsured this year, I got my prescriptions filled by Target instead of Anthem’s mail-order pharmacy — and guess what? Anthem had been overcharging me, selling a 90-day supply of my meds for $36 that Target sells for $20.

Target initially submitted its charge to Anthem, which Anthem immediately denied, but they said I could only have a 30-day supply.

I basically told Target, “F**k Anthem. Give me 90 days and don’t tell them.”

That means my prescriptions don’t go toward my $2,250 annual deductible and Anthem wins in the end. But I’ll be damned if they’ll dictate terms while not paying a penny.

Insurers planned to sink reform all along. With a clear conscience, Obama and Congress should respond to this duplicity by establishing universal, single-payer healthcare.

Oslo to Obama: No Pressure!

By Yul

Nobody saw it coming — Norwegians putting Obama’s feet to the fire with a tongue-in-cheek Nobel Peace Prize. Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to see my fellow black cat win a prize, but that one? For what?

It’s still business as usual in Iraq, and if Obama heeds his generals, things are about to take an ugly turn in Afghanistan.

For a change, everyone seems to agree on one thing: Obama was recognized mainly for not being George W. Bush. On the other hand, the day the Nobel was announced, we hauled off and bombed the moon.

Looking for ice. Yeah, whatever.

Obama is increasingly much talk, little action. Just ask gays. Or people waiting for deliverance from the scourge of private health insurers. On that score, Obama hasn’t just taken a backseat to Congress, he’s locked himself in the trunk. It’s become blatantly obvious that health insurance “reform” is all about protecting insurers’ precious profits. Any change that would actually reduce cost and waste — the private option, expanding Medicare, single payer — is DOA.

But will Obama be able to end Bush and Cheney’s wars? Will he de-nuke Ahmadinejad and get the Middle East to accept Israel? Will he ever get Americans to stop screaming and making themselves look foolish to the rest of the world?

I’m guessing not, and Obama will someday be hiding the Prize in a closet, but you have to applaud Norway’s off-beat way of reminding our president that talk is cheap and results would be nice.

Are You Sick of Swine Flu Yet?

By Yul

Since cats don’t get swine flu I’m just an observer, but enough’s enough. The media is going overboard with this H1N1 thing. They admit swine flu is unpleasant, but runs its course in about a week, then they talk like it’s about to wipe human life off the planet. Which is it?

And who needs a shot? How many shots? In the arm or up the nose? Who will get sick? How sick will they get? Anybody got a crystal ball?

Flu happens every year. Some people get sicker than others. Unfortunately, some even die. Scaring the crap out of everybody over SWINE flu, whose porcine name makes it sound dirtier and more sinister (which the pork lobby  protests) is stooping too low.

People will be walking around with snot on their sleeves from sneezing into them. The French have even banned cheek-kissing.

Call me cynical, but I wonder if this isn’t some Big Pharma scam to score one last bonanza before Congress slams the lid on the cookie jar. It’s not hard to imagine the boardroom conversation:

“Why stop at one shot this year? There’s this icky new pig flu out there. Let’s make a separate vaccine for it so people need 2 shots this year.”

“Why stop there? Let’s say swine flu is so deadly, one shot won’t be enough. Then we can bilk ‘em for 3 shots!”

Whether people ultimately need 2 flu shots or 3, I predict that hype-induced confusion will result in fewer people than ever being vaccinated at all. Swine flu will make the rounds, most people won’t know which flu they had, and it will be remembered as the biggest non-event since the computer melt-down predicted for the millennium.

Mixed Emotions on Obama’s Healthcare Speech

By Karen

“I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. … Not this time. Not now.”

Obama said many things right, but tip-toed around the sacred cow in health reform: insurance company profits. He vowed to cut “waste” elsewhere, but the hundreds of billions we squander each year on insurance industry profit is the biggest waste of all.

By ignoring the only viable, affordable solution — single payer — and even waffling on the public option to appease Republicans, Obama would throw us to the lions, using tax penalties as a threat to make us all customers of private insurers.

It was great when Obama smacked down as “a lie, pure and simple,” Sarah Palin’s preposterous assertion that he’s proposing death panels. But I doubt we’ll ever see the day when all insurers cover preventive care, don’t exclude pre-existing conditions, don’t cap lifetime benefits, don’t cancel people on a loophole when they get sick, and don’t limit out-of-pocket expenses.

All these things would erode insurance profits. And now that Obama’s given away the rest of the farm on reform, these are the next items undoubtedly headed to the chopping block as Congress continues trying to keep insurers happy.

For Obama to claim that establishing “exchanges” will suddenly make us be treated fairly by the very companies that ritually fleece us, he’s just playing us for fools. As fast as Congress dreams up laws to curb insurer abuses, insurers will find workarounds, just like credit card issuers are doing.

Americans are being set up to get screwed like never before.

We need to forget about health insurance reform and refocus on healthcare. Health insurance is an obsolete concept, the main obstacle to care. As long as our president refuses to face this fact, which is known by every other country that provides healthcare to every citizen without a vast insurance bureaucracy, we’ll never solve this problem in the U.S. and people will continue to go bankrupt and die.

Scowling Republicans, sitting on their hands like a bunch of brats during Obama’s speech, demonstrated that they value human life as little as the terrorists they love to vilify. Such closed minds should forfeit any role in a fix, and I hope Obama follows through on this promise:

“I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it’s better politics to kill this plan than improve it. If you misrepresent what’s in the plan, we will call you out. And I will not accept the status quo as a solution.”

But I’m wondering just how little change Obama will eventually settle for and call it a solution.

To: Health Insurance Reform Opponents

By Yul

Obama has stumbled into a vortex of insanity while battling the forces of greed in healthcare. To anyone who has, or plans to, act up at town hall meetings, let’s talk about you for a minute…

Since you don’t think anybody needs affordable health insurance, I’m guessing you already have it yourself. And you got it at work. And your employer negotiated with a few insurance companies, without any help from you, to get the best deal. Then it was handed to you.

You had no say in picking your insurer. Oh, sure, you may have been given a couple of choices, but your employer made the choices.

Lots of companies choose HMOs because they’re cheaper, but only if you see doctors in the network. So you don’t really get to choose any doctor without paying through the nose out-of-network.

Since your employer probably subsidizes your premium to keep you from going into sticker shock, you mooch off someone else to avoid paying full price.

If you’re young and healthy, you may not realize this yet, but your insurance doesn’t cover everything. Just wait until you get real sick and your doctor recommends some promising, yet still experimental, treatment that could probably save your life. Your insurer will probably deny the claim — ration your care.

So what’s your beef with Obama trying to help others get decent healthcare through the government without all the games? Unlike you, they’d pay for it entirely themselves, and insurance companies wouldn’t have power over life or death.

You must be a special kind of stupid if you think anybody in Washington is cooking up “Death Panels” or planning to euthanize old people. Those ideas might have floated in the PREVIOUS administration, when life was cheap. Remember? It’s no coincidence that the people spreading these incredible lies worshipped the last administration.

Unless you have dealt directly with an insurance company to buy your own policy, and you pay for it entirely on your own, you have no clue what this debate is all about. You’re a sheep taking marching orders from liars and revealing yourself to be ignorant, selfish, and cruel.

In the end, you won’t win. Evil never does. This fix needs to happen.

Obama Signals He Gets It on Healthcare Reform

By Karen

I’ve been worried that President Obama intends to throw us all under the bus of private health insurers by mandating we buy their shoddy policies, but he sent the clearest signal yet during his press conference the other night that he really does get it.

And no one in the clueless media picked up on it, though it knocked me off the couch. They’re too preoccupied with the next hot scoop on the late Michael Jackson, I guess.

The signal came in the first words out of Obama’s mouth:

“Good evening. Please be seated. Before I take your questions, I want to talk for a few minutes about the progress we’re making on health insurance reform and where it fits into our broader economic strategy.”

In his opening remarks, he called it health insurance reform three more times. And not one hotshot reporter in the room picked up on the subtle shift in emphasis. In fact, they all kept calling it “healthcare reform.”

Here’s the difference: Reforming health care implies making medical practices, doctors, and hospitals do things differently. Yes, we need some of that, too, but they’re not really the problem. They’re victims, just like the rest of us, only trying to protect themselves.

What everyone in Washington hasn’t dared to say until now is that we need to reform health insurance. To end the extortionist, discriminatory practices that have enabled health insurers to thrive while their customers go bankrupt over medical expenses the lousy insurance they’re buying won’t cover.

Obama has talked about how his mother fought with her insurance company while she was dying of cancer. I was afraid he’d put that behind him, but now I know it’s only because he can’t speak the truth without committing political suicide.

The truth is that the insurance industry has health care in a death grip. Unless that grip is broken, doctors and hospitals will continue to squander fortunes on bureaucracy and patients will continue to face financial ruin and die while paying insurers through the nose for a product that refuses to deliver.

Let’s just hope Obama can persuade enough members of Congress to hop off the lobbyist gravy train fueled by our insurance premiums and do the right thing for once.

Washington Set on Botching Healthcare Reform

By Karen

Our legislators reject single-payer healthcare as “too drastic” a change for the country (Translation: Too simple and ethical for them to make a buck from), so growing numbers of single-payer advocates are yelling “Foul!”

One word explains why any plan continuing to be based on private health insurance won’t work:

Profit

Every penny wasted on insurance company overhead and bureaucratic requirements doesn’t go to medical care.

To preserve the status quo, insurers recently offered to forgo $2 TRILLION in future profits. That’s chump change to them. They’re admitting they’re already rolling in dough by cherry-picking, charging extortionist rates, and denying claims.

Two single-payer bills, HR 676 and S 703, languish in Congress while our representatives sit mesmerized by insurance industry snakes promising “fixes.”

The other blunder Washington’s intent on making  is to keep employers involved. That’s what they mean by, “You can keep the plan you like,” because virtually no one in the individual market has coverage that’s both adequate and affordable.

Instead, employers should contribute to a national program where workers can access affordable, portable healthcare. Corporate America instantly escapes the administrative hell of dealing with insurance companies, and employees no longer have to stay in jobs they hate just for the health benefits.

Characterizing single-payer as “free” or “socialist” is deliberately ignorant.

NOBODY says it will be free. Hundreds of billions now wasted on bureaucracy and profit will be rechanneled to actual medical care.

Republicans oppose Obama’s public option to give individuals and small businesses a break because they’re afraid private insurers will languish.

Exactly. Any industry whose success depends on providing NOTHING needs to die. The only ones entitled to profit from medical care are care providers. They earn it.

Sen. Tom Coburn, MD (R-OK) outlines the Republican proposal, which sounds fine if you think 50 new state bureaucracies in bed with private insurers are better than one federal agency that isn’t.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer lays out all the players and their plans. You need to watch this issue closely because whatever Congress does when it’s finished dithering will affect you and your family — guaranteed.

Insurance Lobbyist Karen Ignagni Stops Advocating Screwing Women

By Karen

Pro-private-insurance trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans(AHIP) has dangled a new carrot before Congress, using self-employed women like me as pawns to kill any chance we’ll ever see affordable government-sponsored or single-payer healthcare.

Last November, AHIP president and CEO Karen Ignagni began trying to derail healthcare reform by offering to stop cherry-picking customers so only the healthiest and least likely to need it could qualify for individual insurance.

In March, she offered to stop charging ill people more, but quietly replaced illness with age as a reason to jack up premiums, disingenuously slipping insurers a means to hit everyone with hefty annual rate increases, ill or not.

Now, in the individual market where insurers can get away with anything, she’s admitting they typically charge women 25-50% more than men as punishment for having uteruses.

Ignagni now agrees with Senator John Kerry (D-MA) that screwing women is wrong and is offering “not to recommend continuing it.”

Senator Kerry, with all good intentions, has naïvely introduced a bill to prohibit insurance companies from using gender to set premium rates. But he’s just playing into insurers’ hands because they’ll simply increase men’s premiums to match women’s.

Can you say “Ka-Ching!”?

Congress, instead of rewarding the AHIP’s duplicity with lame “reform” that throws all Americans into the insurance pool to be devoured by these sharks, you need to recognize these tactics for what they really are:

Bold-faced admissions of an industry’s longstanding unethical practices and unconscionable discrimination for profit at any cost.

The only civilized response to “deals” like these is to shove universal healthcare bills HR.676 and S.703 down Karen Ignagni’s throat and eliminate all such double-talking, self-serving, useless leeches from the equation.

P.S. If anyone out there thinks you can scare me with “rationing,” go get yourself some individual insurance, visit a doctor, file a claim, and see how much of it, if any, gets paid. THAT’S rationing. We have it right now, thanks to the insurers Ignagni represents.