Patrick Dodd: The Soap Box

Writing is work.  Moreover, the better you write the harder the work.  I worry as an artist when people try to convince young artist that writing is easy.  If it was the people who say things like that would be making their living selling songs, and almost universally when you examine the person who is saying that writing is easy, you will note that they do not make their living doing it.  Almost all art forms look easy when someone who has spent their life in the honest pursuit of something performs them.  All it takes to find out how truly difficult any art form truly is, is to attempt it.  There is one other way, though I am probably going to piss off people who don’t take it seriously but for the sake of the young lets take off the gloves and step into the ring.   (I was just told by someone who understands public debate much better than I shall ever understand it that I will put my friends on the spot if I write what I am about to write, [...]

   The fascist corporate intervention of Big Pharma, Hospitals, A.M.A., and insurance industry in the health care reform effort has made it emphatically clear that recovering our Democracy must precede any other efforts at progressive reform.  The American public has made it clear that they want affordable, accessible, quality health care.  The politicians are giving us unaffordable, inaccessible, poor quality health care.  We the people will be paying more, be able to afford less, and can expect no improvement in quality of health care given the current health care reform proposal.  With current reforms, politicians receiving big bucks from medical industry corporations will force Americans to give big dollars to insurance companies for inferior coverage.   Current reform will not guarantee these insurance companies will keep premiums, deductibles, or co-pay rates at affordable levels.  Our health insurance premiums may well exceed our mortgage [...]

 
We have a deep and abiding belief that the powers that be have gotten us used to listening to "them" talking about "us", to keep "us" from getting together and talking about "them." Powerful cultural and political influences have driven wedges between us that would not stand through a single cup of coffee; if we just sat down and had that cup of coffee. We are first and foremost neighbors, all across America and the world. We can work our way through damn near any difference if we realize one simple fact, we are in this together. We need each other if we are to transcend destruction. While it may sound odd on it's face, we are convinced the powers that be do not want us to be nice to one another, because nice people really listen to one another. They do not want us helping each other mend fences, because we may come to see that some fences do not need to stand and some should have never been built at all. They do not want us to comfort each other’s children, because [...]

Arrogance, Abuse, Fraud, Medical Malpractice:
How Some Physicians Beg for Law Suites
   Physicians and mass media often depict patients and their lawyers who file lawsuits against Doctors as greedy, money-grubbing opportunist. 1 It turns out this is more projection than reality. A 1990 study by Harvard researchers of 31,000 medical records subjected to evaluation by practicing doctors and nurses, “found that doctors were injuring one out of every 25 patients (latter studies put that figure closer to one out of every seven patients), and that only 4 percent of these injured patients sued.” 2 Another Harvard study of 1,452 malpractice lawsuits found that more than 90 percent of the claims evidence supported medical injury and 25 percent of the time the patient died, 60% of these injuries resulted from physician wrongdoing. The study also found when “baseless” malpractice suits were brought they were “efficiently thrown out.” Only 145 of 515 patients [...]

V.A. Fails to Diagnose and Treat Vets to Save Money: Implications for Health Care Reform?

By MC Kean

V.A. Fails to Diagnose and Treat Vets to Save Money: Implications for Health Care ReformNo matter what side of health care reform you are on, none of us would like our physician to NOT tell us about a treatable condition, just to save the government money. V.A. physicians have been ordered not to diagnose or treat “low priority” veterans for many conditions. I am all for single payer health care, but we should be honest. The V.A., like private health care is a socially stratified system. All Veterans do not all get the same care. Veterans who have managed to get a service connected designation (many who should get this classification do not), retired officers and others who have been anointed with the classification of deserving get the medical they need. Some veterans get no care at all. Other veterans, who qualify for care, but are considered, “low priority”, are not getting [...]