Newt Gingrich slams Sebelius, distorts reality, descends into madness

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Speaking at the right-wing Values Voters Summit (because, of course, greed and bigotry are values, too*) in Washington yesterday, Newt Gingrich said that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius should be removed from office, with a new Republican Congress "zeroing out her office," for "behaving exactly in the spirit of the Soviet tyranny" and for "represent[ing] left-wing thought police," both with respect to health-care reform.

Of course, she did and is nothing of the kind. What she wrote, in a letter to the insurance industry, is that the federal government "will not tolerate unjustified rate hikes." America's Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP, contends that "Obamacare" is forcing them to raise premiums. In response, Sebelius wrote that that is simply not true, that "any potential premium impact" would be "marginal."

Gingrich, as you might expect, takes the insurance industry at its word. Needless to say, that is a stupid thing to do. The industry wants to maximize its profits and will do and say whatever it takes to do so. But it is also stupid to suggest that Sebelius is acting like a Soviet tyrant (and speaking for some "left-wing thought police" by challenging the very industry that wants to harm consumers by charging them more and blaming Obama. Gingrich is supposed to be a historian, is he not? He is supposed to be one of the smarter conservatives out there -- at least, that is what the media would have us believe, given how much respect and airtime they give him. But he clearly lacks any genuine appreciation for history -- history to him is the just past filtered through his partisan and ideological prisms -- and, once again, we see that neither he nor anything he says should be taken seriously.

Also in his address, Gingrich said that he is "totally opposed to any effort to impose sharia on the United States." But who exactly is talking about imposing fundamentalist Islamic law on America? Where is the evidence? Where is it happening? It isn't. This is fearmongering pure and simple, projected through those partisan and ideological prisms, and just the sort of anti-Muslim bigotry we've come to expect from Gingrich. (While he's talking specifically about sharia, the message is really that Muslims are not to be trusted, that Islam is essentially anti-American, and that all Muslims, backed by liberals/progressives/Democrats, are jihadists seeking to undo the Constitution and take over the country.)

Gingrich is moving further and further away from reality -- and he was never all that close to it to begin with. In his partisan and ideological fervor, he has become a spinner of lies and smears and exaggerations, willing, as ever, to traffic in utter nonsense, running his mouth off without anything to back up what he says, simply to try to score political points by playing on popular ignorance and fear, and to keep himself in the news, where he continues to get the media's attention for saying crazier and crazier things, and to maintain himself as a key player in conservative circles, which cheer harder the crazier and crazier things get. Like the rest of the right side of the political spectrum, he's descending ever more rapidly into madness.

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* Tweeted our good friend (and Reaction editor) Carol Gee yesterday, on the VVS: "Reminder: Repubs can have no exclusive claim to be 'values voters.' Dem voters value ideas like creativity, diversity, veracity, lucidity." Exactly.

Quote of the Day: Anthony Weiner on the GOP

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Democratic Rep. from New York's 9th District, speaking on the House floor yesterday:

The Republican Party is a wholly-owned subsidiary of an insurance industry.

Yes, yes, yes. It's nice to hear someone actually speak the truth, however much Republicans may object to it, in a world of partisan truthiness. Watch it:

Ugly Coburn

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I guess right-wing Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma thinks that being denied treatment by your private health-care insurer is just the sort of choice that makes American great.

Watch. It's ugly. (And honest. For this is what the Republicans have become. For all their empty talk of "choice," it's actually them versus the American people.)

Rationing, death panels, and takeovers, oh my!

By Capt. Fogg

Is it a lack of determination that keeps me at this? There are times I just want to sail away into the sunset and forget about our idiot's Republic that seems hell bent to destroy itself in an orgy of irrational anger -- but I don't. Sometimes it takes only a word to start me off again and this time the word was "rationing."

On thing that's consistent about American politics is the practice of hiding your worst vices by preemptively accusing your opposition of it. If your practice of rationing health care to maximize profits hangs around your neck like a decomposing albatross, if you let people die because your top executives need their 20 million dollar salaries and the lobbyists and Congressmen need to be kept rich and happy, you make up a story about Obama and rationing and you stage public events where people pretend to be furious at it until eventually people do become furious enough that they stop thinking and start screaming.

Ask Wendell Potter, the former vice president of CIGNA who quit his job at Corporate Communications because of the company's decision that the life of 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan was not worth saving: the liver transplant cost too much so the CIGNA Death Panel refused, calling it "experimental." Although outcry from the public and organizations such as the California Nurses Association caused CIGNA to re-focus on how much the bad publicity was costing them and relented, it was too late and the girl died.

Now rationing is the thing with transplants. The supply is severely limited and systems are in place that attempt to make distribution equitable, but it's not based on the cost. That's not the case at CIGNA nor is it indeed in American health care. Our "system" if you can call it that, will decide how much your life is worth to them and whether or not you've paid your premiums, they will refuse treatment if it will eat into profitability. They will do so even though profitability is growing rapidly. Rationing of health care: it's nothing personal, it's just business and it's just about profits.

I know from personal experience that members of Congress and the public have good reason to question the honesty and trustworthiness of the insurance industry,

testified Potter to the Senate Commerce Committee last month. He related how unprofitable companies were purged, to maximize profits and he's now telling CNN that the buzz words and hackneyed phrases being shouted at Town Hall meetings come straight from the wordsmiths of the insurers:

People talk about the government takeover of the system ... that's a buzz term that comes straight out of the insurance industry.

Rationing of treatment is not new, nor has it anything to do with who's providing it. When resources are limited, it has to occur, whether it's because there aren't enough organs or operating rooms or surgeons or equipment. Indeed when kidney dialysis was developed in the early 1960s, a committee was set up in Seattle's Artificial Kidney Center, for instance, to ration the use of their machinery. I hesitate to call it a death panel, but if you needed time on the machines, a group consisting of a minister, a banker, a labor leader and a housewife picked by the Center would ration it based on such criteria as your record of church attendance, net worth and marital status. In other words private parties could decide what your life was worth and factor their profit into the equation. It wasn't until the "government takeover" which was Medicare that opened up access to almost everyone in need and perhaps lessened the ability of insurers to indulge in profit based rationing. They sure as hell don't want much more of that at CIGNA.

A great deal of thought goes into choosing words like "death panel" and "rationing" and "takeover." They are chosen with surgical precision so that using by them as accusations, the corporate death panels, the corporate rationing of health care and the monopolistic trusts that indulge in them are protected from the truth.

Now contemplating just how dumb are the people plugged into the corporate matrix, I'm back to wanting to give it all up and let the country sell itself deeper into slavery and dependency on those who see the American People as sheep to be fleeced.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Is CNN in bed with Big Insurance?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So you know how CNN's medical guru, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, is a Big Pharma flack? Well, it looks like, at least when it comes to health-care reform, the whole network is in the pocket of Big Insurance as well.

As Greg Sargent reports at The Plum Line, CNN has refused to air an ad from Americans United for Change criticizing "insurance companies and Republicans."

The official excuse is that the ad targets a specific insurance CEO by name, Cigna's Ed Hanway, who makes over $12 million a year (with a $70 million retirement package).

But that, as Greg notes, is the point of the ad (which will run on MSNBC): "AUC maintains that the mention of Cigna's CEO was necessary to dramatize the enormous stake the insurance industry has in the health care wars."

Makes sense -- but, of course, the official excuse may not be the real reason, which is quite possibly that CNN, formally or not, is in cahoots with, or at least sympathetic to, Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and the various other opponents of reform.

There could be political and ideological reasons, but mightn't it also have to do with the fact that Big Insurance is a major advertiser itself? (One wouldn't want to risk one's bottom line, would one, even for the health and well-being of the American people?)

Here's the ad, which deserves to be widely viewed: