alexandraerin | Entries tagged with to your health

Here is a two-year-old article about a study that found how people feel about their weight is a better predictor of health and mortality than how much they weigh.
Here is an abstract of a study demonstrating that overweight and obese patients have a lower rate of cardiac death than "normal" weight patients.
Here is an abstract of a study demonstrating one of the many ways "failed weight loss attempts" damage a patient's health.
Here is a list of weight loss strategies that will not fail over the long term for the vast majority of the population:
So why do doctors focus so much on their patients' weights?

Note I'm not questioning doctors who focus on any of the following:
- Blood pressure.
- Blood sugar.
- Cholesterol.
- Nutrition.
- Exercise.
- Risk of diabetes or other diseases.
But all of those things have two things in common:

1. They are not the same thing as being fat. They are things that a given person, thin or fat, may or may not have a problem with.
2. Fatness is used as a shorthand for all of them, in popular culture as well in the world of medicine. And why not? Doctors are people, too. They hear the same stuff growing up that we do. They heard it from their doctors, who were after all people, too.

If you're a doctor and you're worried that your patient will be killed by blood pressure or cholesterol, why talk about their weight? Even if there weren't negative health implications to pressuring your patients to lose weight (and there's plenty of evidence that there is!), wouldn't that be like going for the overly complicated bank shot? Why would you get all fancy with your attempt to save a patient's life instead of addressing the actual issue?

Here are some guesses:
- Because we have a culture that pathologizes and polices bodies as a means of control.
- Because we love any narrative in which other people's misfortunes are 1) preventable and 2) their fault.
- Because "thin == healthy, fat == unhealthy" is appealingly easy.
- Because it's what we're taught.
If you have any doubt that the focus on patients' fatness is taking attention away from their health, you might find this interesting. I believe it's by the same Paul Ernsberger who wrote in 1987:

"The idea that fat strains the heart has no scientific basis. As far as I can tell, the idea comes from diet books, not scientific books. Unfortunately, some doctors read diet books." (Source.)

I've turned off comments on this journal because I'm not interested in having a debate. No, it's not that I'm not willing to listen to opposing viewpoints... on this subject, as so many others, I can't help hearing opposing viewpoints. The viewpoint that fat is unhealthy and losing weight is beneficial to your health is ubiquitous. We are swimming in the opposing viewpoint.

Keeping comments open is only going to bring in more people who are parroting unproven (or disproven) assertions about what fat does to the body, keep insisting that doctors should shame their fat patients even while there is no real solution at hand even if fat were a problem, and generally encourage the status quo to rear its ugly head.

If you disagree with me, disagree with me, but you don't need to say it and I don't need to hear it. If you're so sure I'm wrong, go do some reading with an open mind. Somebody accused me of cherry-picking studies. I sort of did: I had masses and masses to choose from and I picked the first few ones I could think of off the top of my head. The research is out there. It's just ignored or parsed to fit the conventional wisdom.

Two of my favorite words are republic and weal.

"Republic" is from the Latin res publica, "the public matter" or "the public thing"... it could mean anything that belonged to the public or was of general rather than private concern.

Civic matters. Public property. Public good.

"Weal" means well-being and prosperity. It's the root of two modern words that have very different meanings: wealth (someone with great weal has wealth, in the same way that someone who's high up has great height) and commonwealth. The "wealth" in "commonwealth" is closer to the full meaning of the root word than it is in "wealth" by itself... again, it's rooted in the idea of public welfare, of a people's interest as an aggregate rather than a person's interest as an individual.

These are important concepts. They're strongly rooted in the foundations of the United States of America. As popular as it is to appeal to our idealized history as rugged individualists, we are a Republic. Our Founding Fathers talked about unity as much as they did liberty.

E pluribus unum - from many, one.

That's not to say that they didn't write and speak of individual liberty. Our Founders believed that the greatest threat to the individual was the overwhelming influence of majority factions... what would later be called "the tyranny of the majority". Accordingly, we have our systems of checks and balances. We have our Constitutional guarantees of specific rights. We have our weighted representation in the lower house and uniform representation in the upper house, to make sure that the less populous states cannot be completely subservient to the interests of the larger ones.

A lynch mob is a direct democracy in action: a noisy majority decides that some other person doesn't have any rights. This is why we don't do direct democracy. It's antithetical to the very concept of "individual liberty".

Today's Republican party... or at least the noise-making division of its national presence... has turned the idea of res publica on its head. Any time the majority is not allowed to work its will on a minority, they decry this as the death of individual liberty. Any time the government prevents a private business from holding the position of standing on someone's neck and crushing their trachea under a booted foot, the right-wing calls this "fascism".

Why corporate boots on our throats should be more tolerable than government ones has always been a mystery to me.

They ignore the supreme importance of collective action for common good in the founding, defense, and growth of our country... they make "collective" a dirty word... and pretend that our nation was built solely through the efforts of rugged pioneers, every one of them a Randian Man-God who personally built or earned every thing they ever had, including the bootstraps they used to pull themselves across the great rolling prairies, which were empty at the time because of course brown-skinned people who talk different didn't start showing up until a hundred years later when we accidentally invented food stamps and our once great civilization teetered on the brink of collapse.

...

But I digress.

When we talk about something like healthcare reform... affordable access for all, however it's accomplished... our rugged individualists say, "The government can't turn a profit with Amtrak or the USPS. Why should we trust them to manage this?" That presupposes that profit in the capitalist sense should be the goal of everything the government does.

But look at our Declaration of Independence. Look at the preamble of our Constitution. Look at the Federalist papers.

Where in the words of our country's founders does it mention profit as a goal or function of government? "In order to form a more Profitable Union?" No. "In order to provide for the common bank account?" Not in there. The purpose of our government is to serve the public good... to create weal, not wealth.

We don't need a post office or a passenger rail system that turns a profit for the American people... if they did I wouldn't be complaining, but that's secondary to the purpose of such things, which is serving we the people... all of us, including those who live in places where no commercial company could hope to turn a profit serving. Both the former Department of the Post Office (now USPS) and the National Rail Passenger Corporation (the entity behind Amtrak) have been the victims of pushes to "privatize" and "commercialize" them. The budget-slashing consequences of these actions could fill a number of blog posts all by themselves, but the reason I'm bringing them up here is because they're examples of just how badly the point of a government service can be missed.

Amtrak was created because passenger rail travel--while necessary in many parts of the country--was not profitable. What does the "free market" do in situations like this? Well, when I say "necessary"... the world wouldn't end without government subsidized rail travel... but a lot of economic activity that is itself profitable but is dependent on commuter rail corridors would cease.

That's jobs lost, businesses closed, the common weal suffering. The government is Constitutionally directed "to provide for the general welfare" (oh, there's another dirty word!), not to make a buck.

The people who like to position themselves as self-made captains of industry (or as people who would be self-made captains of industry, if the darn government didn't keep getting in the way!) would no doubt say that if there are business that depend on the benefits of passenger rail, then they should pool their resources and come together to provide it for themselves instead of relying on the government.

But this is exactly what the government is: a pool of resources to do what none of us alone can do. Res publica in action. The fact that we're all having our resources dumped into the same pool means that, on some level, I'm maybe paying for your stuff that I'll never need and you're maybe paying for my stuff that you'll never need, but it all comes out in the wash anyway. Larger pools mean we're more protected from things like unexpected shocks.

And of course, this all comes to bear on the health care debate. Before we go any further, I'm going to say one thing: I just checked, and France is still a country. Their government has not collapsed into anarchy from a total lack of funds, and their population has not succumbed to plagues that would be easily treatable by modern medicine if only they hadn't driven their doctors into bankruptcy and rationed care away to nothing. Cutting-edge medicine is practiced in France and the life expectancy at birth is 81 years. There is nary a commission de la mort in sight. So...

As long as France (along with every other modern nation that manages to care for its population) is still a country, "how adopting a similar health care system will destroy America" is a conversation that won't be had here. Okay? Okay.

I've written on this before, but it still amuses me that people who claim loudly and often that what the rest of the world has managed to do is beyond the limits of America's ingenuity and can-do spirit call themselves "patriots"...

Anyway, health care. If ever there was an "industry" where the clear focus should be on weal rather than wealth, it's health care. The insurance industry and the health management industry are excellent examples of what happens when Republican (in the res publica sense) impulses--collectivization of interests for the public good... shared risk, shared responsibility--collide with the profit motive. Through insurance and HMOs, we pool our resources, but we do so in the hands of businessmen, private citizens like ourselves who under the "Every Man Is An Island" version of the American Dream being peddled across the country owe nothing more to the world but to look out for themselves.

By pooling our resources through the government, we're keeping them in our hands. We The People. I'm not saying there aren't corrupt and greedy politicians, but there's a reason we call them "public servants". Unlike big business, they have to at least pretend to look out for our interests. Whatever the motives of the individuals who work in and oversee it, an entity like the USPS or Amtrak or a notional national health care institution doesn't care about profit. They care about controlling expenses to the extent that if they don't then somebody will score political points off them by talking about "trimming the fat", but they ideally don't have to worry about being in the black, much less having huge profits for executive salaries and dividends for shareholders.

Now, the bill that's going before Congress today isn't perfect. It's pretty far from perfect, in fact. Its flaws and the blame for those flaws would be a whole 'nother blog post. But my opinion on it is that it's a start that can be built on. If it passes, the situation will start to improve and its flaws can (and will) be corrected by future reformers. If it fails, that's likely to be all she wrote for another decade or more... the right's base will be pleased and energized that their representatives delivered what they wanted, whereas the progressive base will be completely disillusioned. Trying to reform the health care system will be seen as a total non-starter, political poison.

But whether it passes or fails, for things to go much further we need a change in national consciousness. We need people to realize they aren't islands, they aren't self-made men, they didn't earn everything they ever got.... not individually, anyway. Not on their own. The power lines and phone lines and plumbing (and increasingly, high speed data cables) that they depend on were very likely government-subsidized. Depending on where they live, it might only be through government "make-work" programs that they got power and plumbing in the first place, because otherwise it never would have been profitable enough for a utility company to come in. Roads are maintained through public money. Airlines... the airlines got more federal money in their post-9/11-slump bailout than "publicly funded" Amtrak has received in the past ten years.

And more, we need people to realize that this isn't a bad thing. It doesn't reflect poorly on them or on their country. It's why we have a country instead of just a bunch of little independent feudal holdings.

Of course, if we did have a bunch of little independent feudal holdings, the smarter landholders would quickly realize the benefits of working together, and would pool their strength, and absorb or annex or otherwise acquire their neighbors, and then if we were very lucky the result would be more like a republic than a dictatorship.

First, MU reader/supporter

lunakitten has requested a signal boost for a friend who's in a bad place due to a life-changing accident and life-threatening insurance dickery. The story's here. There is a Paypal button, but I think at this point his best hope of a resolution may be attention. They're trying to get some support from the media. Passing the YouTube videos around will probably help.

Unless you're really absolutely truly obscenely wealthy, you could be Kevin. No matter how good a job you may have or how much money you have saved up, you could contract an illness or suffer an injury that costs you your job and depletes your money. Therefore, you owe it to yourself to help make sure that society takes care of those who find themselves in that sort of situation. Be selfish this holiday season. When you hear a story like Kevin's... pass it along, loud and often.

Second, a great big and heartfelt thank you. Thanksgiving was last week, of course, but this week I'm feeling particularly grateful. It was last December that I came close to quitting because I didn't think I had another choice. I told my readership how bad shape I was in and they came through with an internet miracle. The year since then has had its ups---including a magical trip to New Orleans, my first very small con appearance, some incredible new friends, and a wonderful guy---and its down, mostly health-related. Through the ups and downs, I've learned a lot about myself in the past year. I've figured out a lot about what it means to dwell inside my head, to live in my own skin. I'm more comfortable with myself now than I've ever been.

Third, an apology. "Learning about myself" is good in the long run, but it's not the same thing as "writing a whole lot", which is what you people pay me for. I've figured out a lot of ways of managing my life, but I haven't always managed to apply them. After watching me drift early this week and seeing the disappointment in comments, Jack had a conversation with me about my lack of focus and he's going to be helping me stay on the ball even when I'm tired and distracted.

My replacement computer is showing an ETA of tomorrow, but FedEx tracking also currently shows the "has received information from the shipper" message that they show before they've actually picked it up, so who knows what's going to happen with it. Those of you who've asked about 3 Seas, it should be back up this weekend if I get the computer.

Here's the question we should be asking all public figures who are against a public option or other form of national health insurance:

"[Senator/Congressman/Pundit], how long have you believed that France is better than America?"

It's fairly easy to point to the failings in the Canadian health care system... a system, incidentally, that neither President Obama nor the Democrats in the legislature are looking to as an example... but France, which has a system closely resembling the much-denigrated "public option", has the top-rated healthcare system in the world.

France can manage to provide quality health care to their entire population and we can't? And it would be too expensive for us to match the feat, when they do it while spending less money per person than we do?

I'm sorry, I don't buy it.

I'm sure the reason that the supporters of the public option have been pointing to France is... well... as I've said before, liberals have a real problem with sitting back and allowing their opponents to frame debates. "Speak softly and carry a big stick" worked fine for Teddy Roosevelt, but it wouldn't have worked so well for his cousin Frank, who had to speak loudly and often just to make himself heard. If we pointed to France and said "We want our country to be more like that.", the right would jump on it in an instant... I mean, we're talking about people whose response to half of the things our president does is to say "arugula" like they've made some great and telling point about policy.

But with France using the public option and not just making it work but making it work so well that they have the best medical care in the world, consider the implication being made any time somebody says that the public option wouldn't work in America or that it would result in worse care for most people:

America is less capable than France.

In my previous post on the subject, I framed things in terms of goodness vs. greatness. Well, let's talk about greatness. As I said, we put a man on the moon. Is there any reason we couldn't take the number one spot away from France if we wanted to?

A lot of our political representatives and media figures seem to think so. Let's put them on the spot and ask them why that is.

Whenever liberal judges or politicians bring up the state of justice overseas in discussing the laws here, a certain segment of the far right tends to go into a tizzy.

"New World Order!" they say.

"One World Government!" they say.

Pish, I say.

We're just taking stock of the world and our place in it. If we happen to notice that we're engaging in a practice that only countries Bush 43 identified as members of an "Axis of Evil", we wonder about the company we're keeping, you know?

We're not interested in giving up our sovereignty. We're interested in using it... using it to better ourselves as a nation, to form a "more perfect Union"... more perfect today than it was yesterday, we hope, and possibly even better still tomorrow.

And at its heart, that's what this health care debate is about: how we define ourselves as a people, how we define ourselves as a nation.

Is it enough to be a free people and a powerful nation? Does it not matter what we do with our power and freedom?

Is it enough that America is great?

My thought is that greatness is okay, so far as it goes, but it's better to be great and good than the alternative.

Those who are against reform say that there's an effort underway to change America, to redefine what America is and take it away from our roots and traditional values.

Folks, that's going to happen anyway. It's happening anyway.

A shining beacon on the hill? Not when we lag behind every other developed nation in how we treat our citizens.

A Christian nation? Not with how we do unto the least of us... and I don't know exactly who shall know us by our works, but probably not anyone we'd want to be seen with.

The land of opportunity? Face it, we've had a mixed record on that one. Unavoidable, really... if success doesn't bring rewards then "opportunity" is worthless, but if the rewards are meaningful then the rich hold advantages over the poor that carry across generations, resulting in unequal opportunities.

But even if we've never been perfect in an area, we can still do better or worse and right now we're doing much worse than we should be. The rising cost of health care shackles people to jobs by making a lot of traditional opportunities... entrepreneurship and education, for instance... too risky for the rewards.

The land of the free and the home of the brave? It's hard to be brave when you have to choose between food, rent, and medicine. It's impossible to be free when your choice is death from untreated but preventable conditions or a lifetime of onerous debt.

America is redefining itself by degrees. Like a satellite in a decaying orbit, the great and soaring dream of the world's first Democratic Republic will come crashing down if we're too afraid to make some necessary course corrections. We will become a third world country with scattered pockets here and there of breathtaking privilege. Within one hundred years, we may not be one nation indivisible, but two nations divided: a permanent underclass of workers who find that both the simple necessities of life and the opportunities for advancement are rigidly controlled and rationed in order to keep them in bondage, and an upper class that pats itself on the back and congratulates itself on having "made it" while exhorting the teeming masses to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

(Hopefully somebody among the underclass will be educated enough to appreciate the irony when the ruling class identify themselves as John Galt and claim the millions whose labor supports them are parasites and looters.)

And you know what? Eventually I think the underclass will pull themselves up... and it will be ugly. When our descendants some centuries hence read about "The American Revolution", they won't be reading about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. They will be reading about something that would make the Bolsheviks blush and Robespierre go "Oh, my."

Because that's what it would take to upend a social order that entrenched in a nation so large, so great, and so powerful.

And with that, the redefining of America will be complete.

Call this speculation. Call this hyperbole. Call it a bit of fiction dreamed up by a purveyor of the same.

But don't be afraid to look at the path we're on and see where it's leading... not where you want it to lead, not where you think it should lead, but where it actually is leading: the gap between the rich and poor... the increasing barriers to opportunity... the almost pathological gutting and cutting of any tool we give ourselves to use our collective might and wealth and freedom to help our fellow citizens.

Making access to our leading edge health care system a public concern, a national concern isn't so much about "redefining America" as it is about examining our existing definitions and seeing how we measure up.

I think we can do better. I write this without irony: we can put a man on the moon. We can split the atom. We wrapped a continent in bands of iron and a world in bands of information.

Anybody who says we can't provide health care is underestimating us. Anybody who says we shouldn't... well, with as much respect as I can muster, I disagree with their definition of America.

I was going to use an entirely different recording of this song, but after getting back to my room and reading that Garrison Keillor has suffered a "minor stroke", this just jumped into my head:

It's from Robert Altman's lovely swan song, A Prairie Home Companion, a fictionalized film account of the end of Garrison Keillor's signature radio show with his whole cast of personae brought to life as separate members of a radio repertory company. A lot of people felt the movie was a big talkie mess, with plot threads brought up and dropped seemingly at random, with none of the expected morals or messages, and a lot of unnecessary ambiguity, especially at the end.

So of course, I loved it.

But then, I also loved Altman's other underrated musical treasure, Popeye.

Anyway, my thoughts go out to Mr. Keillor.

Alright, I think that if anyone has been reading my work for any time at all, then they are sure to definitely know that pedantry is among a couple things I just won't put up with. But, I'm going to take a moment to address a somewhat pedantic point that I think is worth emphasizing:

The plural of "person" is "persons", not "people".

"People", you see, is a collective noun.

In day-to-day conversation, the distinction's hardly worth noting. But when the foundational legal document of our nation begins "We the People", I think it's important to reflect on what that means. Legal documents are one of the few places you will see "persons" being used on a regular basis, because it has a distinct meaning separate from "people".

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Not "We, a bunch of persons". "We the People".

They built an entire episode of Star Trek around this, folks. That's how important it is.

I believe in individual liberties. I believe in privacy and freedom from interference. I believe in the power of the market and the right of persons to individually and collectively utilize it. I believe that when this happens, there will be a general trend towards the betterment of all. The poorest segment of the population of the United States today are generally better off than the poorest segments of the population a century ago.

But I also believe that there are times when our individual strengths aren't enough, there are times when masses of persons following immediate and obvious self-interest conflicts with the common good, and that in those times, We the People must come together.

Imagine if we tried to run a country where each person was responsible for the safety of themselves, their families, their homes, and their possessions. I don't just mean a reasonable level of personal responsibility. I mean that there are no police, no fire departments, no armed forces... if your house is attacked, by robbers or murderers or religious zealots or people who want the land it occupies, you are on your own.

Could you live the life you now live if you were solely responsible for your own protection? Even if you think the answer is yes, do you think the society you live in and the benefits you enjoy from that society could exist under those conditions?

Sure, your answer might be that if the government just disappeared we could all just band together with our neighbors and establish patrols and watch groups and fire brigades and militias... you know, come together for the common defense and promote the general welfare and... hey, this is starting to sound familiar, isn't it?

We the People.

It's easy to get people to agree with the benefits of collectively facing some threats. When your neighbor's home is on fire, yours is in danger. When your neighbor's home is burgled, your home could be next. When your neighbor is threatened by tyranny, what's to stop that tyrant from doing the same to you?

So how about when your neighbor is sick with an infectious disease?

What about when your neighbor is bankrupted by paying for a surgery?

What about when your neighbor can't afford the surgery in the first place?

Sure, you might be thinking, "I can't catch a broken leg.", but if the economy falls, it's taking you with it, and each person taken out of work or rendered destitute is a blow to the economy.

This looks like a job for... We the People.

Using large corporations to insure us against the cost of health care services is a poor substitute for using our collective power as "We the People" to ensure that each of us the persons has access to health care.

I don't know how we can have domestic Tranquility, common defense, or general Welfare when we won't to come together as a People to ensure the health of our population.

This has been making the rounds for a while now, but I feel that liberal/progressive/decent human being/healthcare reform blogs should be blanketing the interwebs with this recording... this is the "private option", folks. Healthcare is rationed right now. The free market is a rationing tool, but right now it's being rationed artificially by the need to support the profits of layers of management and middle men. Right now, our collective ability to afford health care is being impacted by our ability to pay for panels of non-medical people who make life or death decisions for us*.

If the government operates a public insurance plan as a tax-supported non-profit entity, those same decisions will be made, and while money will come into it, it will not be with an eye towards maximizing profit, pleasing shareholders, filling corporate coffers, etc., which is how it's made now.

This isn't Underpants Gnome territory. HMOs and private insurers maximize their profits in two ways: by increasing the money they take in and by decreasing the amount of money they pay out. The free market will thus tend towards higher cost for less service. What are we going to do? Negotiate with them? Boycott? We have no real options which is why there is no real competition.

Thanks to Richard Nixon's odd combination of crippling paranoia and overweening arrogance, we have the tape where he listens to John Ehrlichman laying out the model of our current health care system: charge people money and deny them service. That's what we have now and as they say dans la belle tech industry, it's not a bug, it's a FEATURE. This was planned.

This was done to us, and we're all suffering for it.

Even if you've got health coverage now, even if you feel you can afford to pay for your own medical care, a healthy population directly benefits you.If your neighbors are healthier, you're healthier. If everybody's healthier, the nation is stronger. Right now we're dealing with diseases when they become outbreaks and dealing with chronic health problems when they become life-threatening.

This puts all of us in danger and it costs all of us money. Think about everybody who doesn't go to the doctor when they get flu symptoms because they can't afford to go if it's just the sniffles, think about everybody who has a preventable heart attack or stroke or seizure while operating a motor vehicle. Prevention is cheaper than cure, and safer for society.

Some Republicans like to inject the image of Ronald Reagan into this conversation and say that government is the problem, not the solution. Well, I'm willing to concede a point when they have one, and they do have one... because the government's fingerprints are all over this one. It's time to hold them accountable and make our government undo this heinous crime that was perpetrated against us. The late Senator Edward Kennedy fought this, he fought for public health care in the 70s, and he lost... on the rightwing blogs right now, there are people who are saying--in response to the push to pass healthcare reform in his name--that we can lay the creation of the HMO system and the current flaws at his feet.

Folks, there are an awful lot of sentences one can start with the words "Ted Kennedy was not a good ____________.", but this is not his doing... and even if it were, that shouldn't matter. We know the system doesn't work as it is. Seriously ill people who can't afford pain pills are being told in breathlessly horrified tones that if we went so far as even adding a public health plan then they'd be given pain pills and be told to go home and tough it out.

And a lot of people are buying it.

Way too many.

Canada's ongoing management problems do not flow inevitably and naturally from their decision to make sure that all the citizens of a modern, first world economy with a first class economy have access to doctors for preventive care. People point to the fact that the UK lags behind the US in cancer treatment like this is some damning blot on their system.

People, we are the United States of America.

It shouldn't be remarkable that Britain lags behind us in cancer treatment. It shouldn't be worth mentioning because they should be lagging behind us in everything. We should be leading the world instead of lagging behind it. The fact that this statistic exists and gets bandied about so much is itself a symptom of how sick our system is.

Do people think we're going to lose all our cutting-edge cancer research and experimental treatments and highly trained specialists if we change the layer of finance-arranging entities that stand between us and our doctors? No. All the stuff that makes us better on cancer is still going to be there.

Anyway, listen to the audio... and please post, link, share. This should be everywhere. This should be the answer to talk of rationing and talk about the power of the marketplace... I believe in the power of the marketplace, but once of its biggest powers is generating money, and that's what's being done now.

If food or shelter or clothing or water or any other basic human necessity were being controlled the way health care is right now, we'd be rioting in the streets...but because our need for health care is seen as sporadic and something we can avoid the need for if we're lucky or make the right decisions, we put up with the intolerable.

Share this audio. If you're active on any major progressive blogs, push it. If you engage with conservatives, push it... don't let it die until Richard Nixon is the voice and face of the "private option".

Let's do it to it, folks.

*Note to self: think of a snappy name for those panels of people who make life or death decisions for us... I bet if I could come up with an ominous-enough sounding sound byte for them, I can whip up all kinds of furor.

Edit to add, now that I'm more awake - before bed last night I went looking for any clip of the audio recording and posted what seemed like the best one. This is apparently actually footage from the Michael Moore film Sicko, which could form a natural "rebuttal" to it: "Oh my God you're quoting a Moore movie."... but the truth is the truth, it's not tarnished by association.