Being the Change I Wish to See

This metaphor describes exactly what is going on with the GOP and health care reform:

GOP dudes want pizza but without any of the ingredients, including sauce and cheese. I wonder if they even want crust?

It’s time to forget the Republicans and for the Democrats to go it alone.

Those of you who don’t want health care reform are saying you want the insurance companies to make 35 cents out of every dollar in profits. You’re paying for it, and you are at risk of losing your insurance because the costs keep going up. It will keep going up as fewer and fewer people are insured, and our delivery system is expensive.

If you have employer health insurance, look back at your pay stubs from at least a few years ago compared to today and see how much more you’re paying now compared to then.

What’s going on with people who don’t want a public option or even a co-op? What’s wrong with making it possible for the uninsured to be able to buy insurance and afford it? What’s wrong with increasing competition to make your insurer earn your business?

What would you do if your insurance tells you the emergency surgery you just had isn’t covered or is only covered 65/35 because you were out of town when it happened? You would have to pay 35% of an average $20,000 hospital bill. Can you fork that over right now?

Think back on recent and even not so recent lay-offs at your company. How many people who were laid off had a serious illness prior to being laid off? Get rid of those who get sick and get rid of their risk from your employer’s pool.

Are the insurance company executives in your pants (or your pockets) at your demand? They’re heavy into many GOP pockets. Prostitution, figurative or literal, is the only sane thing I can think of for wanting to pay those companies a 35% profit. The rest of the excuses are myths or outright lies too many people have started to believe.

Wake up and smell the coffee! Our health care system is unsustainable, and the GOP wants a “reformed system” that is even more unsustainable and more beneficial to the insurance industry.

It’s time for the Dems to dump the GOP obstructionists.

Sources:
TRMS
Countdown

Technorati Tags: Countdown, GOP fearmongering, GOP obstructs on purpose, health care reform, Keith Olbermann, Kent Jones, MSNBC, pizza parable, Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show, TRMS, Wendell Potter

written by Sherri Joubert \\ tags: Countdown, GOP fearmongering, GOP obstructs on purpose, health care reform, Keith Olbermann, Kent Jones, MSNBC, pizza parable, Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show, TRMS, Wendell Potter

I had no idea this project existed, but The National Priorities Project celebrated their 25th anniversary in October 2008.

Here is a 12 minute video about the project and those who work on it:

America’s priorities are made very clear and very real by how our government spends the money we pay in taxes. NPP follows that money all the way to the local level. If we don’t have a handle on where the money is going and what it means in human terms, we can’t change the nation’s priorities.

To most of us, the federal budget is so huge it’s like Monopoly money. The amounts are unfathomable. If we break those numbers down into chunks we can swallow, we can understand how they effect our lives. We can only change the nation’s priorities when we get the people involved on a grass roots level, but we can’t do that if they are lost about what the numbers really mean for each of them.

We can’t reduce and eliminate the military/industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us about in his 1960 farewell speech if we don’t know what is being spent on Cold War projects. Between now and then, President Reagan brought back the military/industrial complex in a huge way at the expense of everything else in the U.S. federal budget.

This year, for the first time in a very long while, Congress finally cut something out of the Pentagon’s budget. They put an end to the production of F-22 fighter planes that the Pentagon doesn’t want, the Air Force doesn’t want and the rest of the military doesn’t want.

It’s all very far from over, but that one change to a different priority in military funding is a start in the right direction. The wars we fight now are guerrilla wars on the ground, not country-against-country where both have a full compliment of military mite. Al Qaeda and the Taliban don’t have a Navy or an Air Force. We don’t have dog fights with them. F-22’s are for dog fights. That money can be spent on other military needs, such as F-35 fighters that support guerrilla ground troops.

I am not against equipping our fighting soldiers with the best that we can get them. But we need to make sure what we are providing them is in fact what they need to improve their safety, performance and allow them to win more quickly in the type of warfare they have to fight today.

By critically reviewing what the military spends money on, it can result in some budget savings by equipping them with what they really need rather than continuing to produce weapons, ships, guns, and planes designed to fight the Soviet Union. Should a hot war arise against Russia or China someday, we have the capability of nationalizing all our production facilities to produce what that type of war would need. They did it in 1940 with the technology of the time. We can sure as hell do the same type of thing today if we have to.

In the meantime (should this type of war ever happen again), we don’t have to be completely prepared for a large scale, nation-to-nation, conventional, hot war. The money being spent on those projects can be used to rebuild infrastructure, reduce poverty, improve education, provide jobs, develop alternative energy and fund health care for every American.

What is the federal budget doing for your community and what has been cut from it since Reaganomics? Visit NPP and find out. Then start a dialogue with your family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, state legislators, governor, Senators and Representatives. Armed with the numbers and where the funding is going v where it is needed, we can have meaningful conversations, discuss much smarter policies (which dictate where money is spent), turn this country around and get it going in the right direction for a new century and a new millennium.

Lets start the discussion in the comments.

Sources:
National Priorities Project
Media Education Foundation

Technorati Tags: American priorities, federal budget, National Priorities Project, spending equals priorities

written by Sherri Joubert \\ tags: American priorities, federal budget, National Priorities Project, spending equals priorities