End of an Era-Final Post to Fare and Fowl Blog

I wanted to be in touch with all of Red Balaban's friends and contacts to let you
know there will be no more Fare and Fowl entries to follow. Dad passed away
at 9am est this morning.  His last days were peaceful.
He'd been in the hospital for a week and we  knew he was fading, but we also
expected at any moment for him to come out of it and start demanding to be
let out of the hospital immediately.

We are making arrangements.  We will be having a funeral in the on Sunday January 5th in West Haven or New Haven, followed up with a, yet to be determined, memorial celebration.  We
would like to know who among you would be interested in an invitation to
either.

Both events will be held in or near West Haven, Ct.

Please respond to this commodoreljb@gmail.com (Red's email that I will be monitoring) or my email at cosmo46@earthlink.net or call Micki(my mom, Red's wife) at 203-934-5186.

Thank you for reading and following this blog.

Steve

Friends and Frenemies

Some of you may may be wondering about the absence of my letters. The fact is I've been quite ill the past month. With what? I could answer "take your pick" or "congestive heart and kidney problems." My GP would be more apt to answer in more moralistic terms. From my point of view I'd be tickled to be able to vote in the 2016 elections.

Leonard "Red" Balaban

(note-Leonard is home from the hospital and recovering.  He finally got back on the computer and put this together for his friends and readers.  Please feel free to send him an email to see how he's doing.

commodoreljb@gmail.com )

Not Again

Yes, I’m afraid it’s more about the Affordable Care Act. After all that’s the big news these days, unless you’re fixated on George Zimmerman’s latest escapades, so here’s the latest on what I, and some of the public may have  learned since my last version.

Barack Obama was not lying when he said that people could keep their insurers and doctors if the ACA became law.Whatever policies were in place when the law was passed, even if they had sky high deductibles and extra limits to the people and conditions covered, were grandfathered from having to meet the higher standards set by the ACA. Of course premiums can change, insurers can terminate policies or simply go out of business and doctors can retire or die. But that’s always been par for the course.

The only policies subject to cancellation were written during the three years after the law was passed and before it took effect that didn’t meet or weren’t modified to meet minimum ACA standards. Obama has just extended the deadline for compliance an additional year. Surely insurers worth their salt knew that these contracts had a limited life and had an obligation to inform their prospective clients all of whom may not have read the “small print” in the law, although given the direct stake of consumers in this legislation the small print is deceptively bold.

While some of the holders of these inferior policies have been duped by unscrupulous insurers I strongly suspect many of the “victims” are plants, the more pathetic the anecdotes the better. Some of them are ringers. I saw two of these poster boys in business suits on Fox, where else, pleading personal hardship who were later identified on MSNBC, where else, as corporate executives.

Republican spin masters have been referring to this scenario as “Obama’s Katrina,” a bit of a stretch to equate a malfunctioning website and deadly storm in the Gulf of Mexico. Then too this president’s has yet to say to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius, “Katy, you’re doing one heckuva job.”

 

 

 

 

Cancelled

One of several mistakes in making the Affordable Health Care Act or “Obamacare” law was that even now too few people are informed of its details. In commenting on it we can only speak of what we know or believe we know. To my knowledge this law by itself has not and cannot order the cancellation of a single policy. Only the insurance companies and policy holders can do this. Sub-par policies in existence before the law was passed have been grandfathered while policies written in the three years since, including those now mandated by ACA, must meet minimum standards. This is the cause of many of the cancellations now making news. Has the government set unreasonably high qualifications? This is a question that might be raised by the insurance companies. Their silence on this subject should be noted.

A typical right wing response to the issue would be to invoke the free market as a guide to what consumers should get for their money. But there is another consideration here. The cheaper the policy the less the coverage, with considerably higher deductibles and more exceptions for customers and ailments. This may be all that poorer people can afford yet they are the ones most vulnerable to these limits to their coverage. Those who need comprehensive coverage the most can afford it the least.

The per capita cost of our health care is by far the world’s highest yet the results are worse than nations that provide universal health care. The discrepancy is that our national health care doesn’t begin until a person reaches the age of sixty five. A lot of people die before that age and many more develop conditions that preventive medicine would have cured or lessened had they been treated before becoming eligible for government sponsored health care. It is common sense that the cost of treating Medicare beneficiaries would be considerably less had their conditions had been tended to earlier.

Unmitigated self-interest is just that. I can think of no part of our complex society in which it is more reprehensible than caring for the sick.  

Mimimum But No Cover

I recently emailed the New Haven Register saying that while I agreed with its editorial that Obama had not been 100% square with us I had something to add. Specifically, inasmuch as Congress, the President and the Supreme Court have concluded that mandated health insurance was within federal purview, it is incumbent on the government to require that this insurance meet some reasonable minimum standard. I equated this with auto emission controls in which state government can force consumers to change cars if they decline to have theirs brought up to minimum requirements.

Obama can be faulted for not mentioning that mandated health care must be part of a plan that meets minimum standards. Sub-par policies are grandfathered. But the insurers are prohibited from issuing new policies in effect forcing them out of business. I suppose he could be guilty of a half-white lie.* I would also argue that it was done to pass legislation that was clearly in the national interest. I wonder how St. Peter would balance the two.

Opposition attempts to sabotage “Obamcare” have been disingenuous. Pricier policies are being peddled by insurance companies under the threat of even more expensive plans after the law kicks in on Jan. 1, yet available new policies, which affect about 3% of the population, are expected to be the same if not cheaper. A friend who is the widow of an IBM employee, is quite pleased with her new policy. But since she is a devout Republican I expect this to be temporary. It’s easy to understand the opposition to this law by much of the medical complex beginning with insurance companies. But one would think that corporations like IBM would be glad to be relieved of the expense of administering these policies.

There’s very little of Marquis de Queensberry influence in American politics. Still there have to be some limits. Most people have standards to which they adhere. Relatively few condone murder. These standards vary with individuals and groups and have been declining steadily, too fast as I see it. To this unabashed partisan, at any given time the ethical bar both political parties have set for themselves is much lower for Republicans.

 

*My apologies to those who consider this politically incorrect. But I just couldn’t resist it.

 

GOP Priority

Shortly after the last presidential election a friend, whom I consider reasonably intelligent but unsophisticated politically, told me that he voted for Romney because “the other guy has had four years and hasn’t fixed things.” While there may be a grain of logic here it ignores a major part of the picture. This is the same line of reasoning that elected Hitler. Yes, he was elected.

Of course it’s quite a stretch to equate a vote for Romney with a vote for Hitler. The common line of reasoning here also led to the election of FDR a year earlier, an outcome that most of us view favorably. Germans had suffered much more after the fifteen years that followed the Great War than we had after just four years of the Great Depression. For this reason it seems obvious that today’s Republican Party has a motive, if it desires, to drive this nation closer to the conditions that created the Third Reich, at least as long as there’s a Democrat in the White House.

To view the Republicans Party as a monolith is an over simplification. The establishment, which contains a majority of the current leadership, is driven by an insatiable desire for wealth. It is the home of whatever rationality exists in the party. The base, which provides an indispensable portion of votes, is driven by a combination of religious fervor, racism, xenophobia and a propensity for hatred in general. It’s hard to imagine how these people would govern together. The only thing they share is an intense dislike of Democrats; the establishment for their trying to regulate its thievery and the base for what it considers cultural depravity.

For both the first order of business is taking over the nation and soon, before they become extinct. This goal is not out of reach. They’ve held a narrow but secure control of the judiciary since 1991 when Poppa Bush engineered the replacement of Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas. They’ve developed gerrymandering to a state of the arts level which has given them the House for another seven years and, as I’ve mentioned, could set the stage to steal the presidency at the state level next year by changing Electoral College vote counting.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” “a stitch in time saves nine” “better to be safe than sorry. Choose your metaphor.

Hoist By One's Own Petard

In 2008 there was no question how incipient Tea Partiers, the future backbone of the Republican base, would react to the election of our first president of color. A quality ranging from dislike to hatred of the “other” is in their makeup. The reaction of the establishment was less predictable. We don’t know if Mitch McConnell is a racist or just a snob. But we do know now that when it came to treating Barack Obama as president he and his professional ilk behaved as both.

The various devices used by the birthers are common knowledge. Those used by the leadership haven’t been as obvious. They denied formal courtesies to a Democratic president traditionally extended to Democratic colleagues. Republicans in Congress from the start managed to find requests for social or political meetings inconvenient. He was shouted at from the floor of Congress.

Given this setting what could have been more up their alley than the Affordable Health Care Act? This subject has been a burr in the saddle of presidents since Teddy Roosevelt. Bill Clinton’s influence was shredded by it. No issue was as badly mishandled by Obama as the Clinton’s did this one. The disaster of 2010 may have been worsened by Obama’s health care legislation. But it is now law.

Naturally the immediate Republican response was to affix the president’s name to it, hence “Obamacare.” Amy Holmes, a right wing wag, mentioned it numerous times in a soliloquy on the Bill Maher show when the word “it” would have sufficed nicely, in the process saying less at greater length.

Now, like it or not and I suspect not, they have “Obamacare.” It was passed in both Houses of Congress, signed by the president and supported legally by a Supreme Court majority. In common parlance they will now have to refer to it as such, although some of the folks in three cornered hats might have found that affordable health care is too many syllables to remember.

At the beginning of the year Republicans were outraged by almost every entitlement that didn’t benefit their establishment. Now they’ve shut down the government and are threatening default unless Congressional Democrats and the president agree to repeal just the one law to which they have given his name.

If there is the life after death, as many of these people profess to believe, the perfect fate for those who fail the heavenly entrance test would be to spend eternity repeating the words “President Barack Obama.”