The Washington, DC area got hit with the largest snowstorm in years last December, and then in late January a few more inches fell. Despite the fact that cross country skiing was just sublime in both cases, these events caused all kinds of problems, partly because the people responsible for clearing the roads were relying – as usual on chemicals, rather than snowplows and sand.

The pre-treating of the roads with salt has actually created ice under the beautiful, dry and powdery snow. There was no reason for spreading chemicals, particularly in view of the fact that the temperatures were much too low for salt to do any good. What it indeed caused were numerous accidents, and often the inability to slow down, stop, or climb inclines – all courtesy of the Virginia, Maryland and District of Columbia departments of transportation.

Where a plowed (or even unplowed) roadway would have been fairly easily to negotiate without salt, the authorities – that are apparently already running out of money because of their extravagant use of chemicals and hiring of often unnecessary private trucks – the salt-melted and then re-frozen snow created expensive and often very dangerous skating rinks for cars, usually in all the worst places.

Seems like still another example of our tax dollars at work.

As we write this on Friday morning, another snowstorm, which is supposed to last more than 24 hours and dump around two feet of snow in the area, is fast approaching.

The snow blowers, snow shovels and bags of salt have long been unavailable. The authorities – such as they might be – have strongly recommended that everyone stay indoors for the duration and basically get ready to watch the Super Bowl. Consequently, the grocery stores got totally overwhelmed by mobs of often glassy-eyed shoppers, filling their carts to overflowing with milk, beer, Wonder “bread”, pretzels, bottled water and the inevitable soup cans, “flavored” with among other things high fructose corn syrup.

Even late in the evening on Wednesday and Thursday it was almost impossible to find a parking spot at any of the local supermarkets. Inside, practically every person pushing a shopping cart was breaking the indoor speed limits, the shelves were often bare and the lines at the registers snaked around into almost every aisle. It appeared that it would take at least an hour just to get to a cashier, or a self-checkout gizmo.

If six, or even 24 inches of snow can cause such mayhem, we wonder how things would look, if we actually faced a real, serious emergency…

Technorati Tags: Nation’s Capital, Panic, Snow salt, Snowmageddon, stores, washington

Florida Governor Charlie Crist

It appears that despite the huge Haitian relief effort so far, the question of costs has stopped the transportation of critically ill, or injured Haitian patients to Florida hospitals.

Republican Florida Governor Charlie Crist (don’t for a moment confuse him with Christ) has asked the federal government to help pay for care. A reasonable request on the surface, but cannot the money issue get taken care of afterward? In the meantime, people are dying for Crist’s sakes!

Just to think that this “compassionate conservative” is running for the U.S. Senate this year. To quote from Crist’s campaign website: ” Charlie Crist strongly opposes the health care legislation being debated in Congress. A government run health care system is not the answer to our nation’s health care needs but instead it is the typical answer of liberals and Democrats in Congress. The American people need a health care system that provides choice and access to quality health care at affordable costs. These health care opportunities are not found in the legislation championed by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.”

Another great champion of health care for everybody and of human rights in general. Phooey!!!

Our friends at BadGalsRadio have another take on this. Take a look.

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Update, January 31, 2010: “Late Sunday, White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said the medical airlift was on track to resume by early Monday. The White House received assurances that additional medical capacity exists in the U.S. and among its international partners for the patients.”

So, we didn’t have “additional medical capacity”? Is that a joke? A few hundred patients would have strained our “medical capacity”? Don’t give us that. It was an issue of money, all along. Another argument for reforming our health care industry – the most expensive anywhere.

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Here is an Associated Press story on the original subject:
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By JENNIFER KAY, Associated Press Writer

MIAMI – The U.S. military has halted flights carrying Haitian earthquake victims to the United States because of an apparent cost dispute, though a doctor warned that some injured patients faced imminent death if the flights don’t resume.

The evacuations were temporarily suspended Wednesday, said Capt. Kevin Aandahl, spokesman for U.S. Transportation Command. The flights were halted a day after Florida Gov. Charlie Crist asked the federal government to help pay for care.

However, Dr. Barth Green, a doctor involved in the relief effort in Port-au-Prince, warned that his patients needed to get to better hospitals.

“We have 100 critically ill patients who will die in the next day or two if we don’t Medevac them,” said Green, chairman of the University of Miami’s Global Institute for Community Health and Development.

At a temporary field hospital at Haiti’s international airport, set up with donations to Green’s institute, two men had already died of tetanus. Doctors said 5-year-old Betina Joseph faced a similar fate within 24 hours unless evacuated to a U.S. hospital where she can be put on a respirator.

The girl – infected with tetanus through a two-inch cut on her thigh – weakly shooed a fly buzzing around her face as her mother caressed her corn rows, apparently unaware that getting the girl out could mean life or death.

“If we can’t save her by getting her out right away, we won’t save her,” said Dr. David Pitcher, one of 34 surgeons staffing the field hospital.

“If we can’t save her by getting her out right away, we won’t save her,” said Dr. David Pitcher, one of 34 surgeons staffing the field hospital.

There were some states that would not accept patients who needed care in the U.S., and they could not be transported without a hospital to accept them, Aandahl said.

Aandahl declined to specify which states declined to accept patients, and he referred further questions to a Pentagon press office, where an after-hours answering service could not accept incoming messages Saturday.

Florida officials said Saturday that they were not aware of any hospital in the state refusing to take in the patients. However, in a letter Tuesday to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the governor said “Florida’s health care system is quickly reaching saturation, especially in the area of high level trauma care.”

Crist asked Sebelius to activate the National Disaster Medical System, which is typically used in domestic disasters and pays for victims’ care. His letter noted the state’s health care system was already stretched by the winter tourism season and annual “snowbird” migration. South Florida hospitals also were preparing for a surge in visitors for the NFL Pro Bowl on Sunday and the Super Bowl next weekend.

While in Tampa on Saturday, Crist said Florida’s Department of Children and Families Secretary George Sheldon estimated the state’s costs had reached about $7 million.

Poor coordination and limited resources, not medical care costs, drove the governor’s request, said John Cherry, spokesman for the state Division of Emergency Management.

“We’ve made it clear that (the cost) is an issue we’ll deal with down the road,” he said.

Health officials say the medical flights landed without any advance notice, and the poor coordination may be keeping some survivors from getting the help they need, Cherry said. He cited the case of a burn victim flown earlier this week into Tampa, which is not equipped to treat those injuries.

Crist said his state remains committed to caring for injured earthquake victims and reuniting families, though he was reaching out to other states to help care for them as well.

As of Friday, the Florida Department of Health reported that 526 patients had been received at hospitals in the state: more than 400 in South Florida, 76 in the Orlando area and 37 in the Tampa area. Four burn victims were transported to North Carolina, Crist spokesman Sterling Ivey said.

“Recently we learned that federal planning is underway to move between 30-50 critically ill patients per day for an indefinite period of time,” Crist told Sebelius, saying Florida could not handle so many patients.

More than 135 patients remain hospitalized in South Florida, said Jeanne Eckes-Roper, the health and medical chairwoman of a state domestic security task force for the South Florida region.

She requested on Monday that new patients be taken elsewhere in Florida.

“We had to make sure we did not overwhelm our capacity,” she said. “We stand ready to take whatever the government wants to give us.”

Aandahl said no evacuation requests have been made by U.S. military medical facilities in Haiti, including the hospital ship the USNS Comfort, since the flights were suspended Wednesday.

There were only about a dozen medical evacuations by the U.S. military after the Jan. 12 earthquake, he said.

Associated Press writer Frank Bajak contributed to this report from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Technorati Tags: Crist, Dollar, evacuation, Florida, Haiti, Haitian, hospitals, medical, patients

A day before President Obama’s State of the Union address, we pretty much already know that the Massachusetts Senate election results seemed to have greatly influenced what the president is going to actually address.

Under mounting pressure to curb government spending, the president is to propose in his State of the Union address a three-year freeze on federal funding that is not related to national security. That being clearly a concession to public concern about government spending and which could dramatically curtail Obama’s legislative ambitions.

The freeze would take effect in October and limit the overall budget for agencies other than the military, veterans affairs, homeland security and certain international programs to $447 billion a year for the remainder of Obama’s first term.

On the surface it sounds like a step ahead, doesn’t it? But do your math. $447 billion per year, as compared to the ever-rising national debt – as of today already surpassing $13 trillion…

At the same time, when “overseas contingency operations” expenses are added to the U.S. defense budget, it comes up to $663.8 billion for 2010 alone. As a matter of fact, the real figure is even higher, reaching between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion in fiscal year 2010.

All in all the 2009 U.S. military budget is almost as much as the rest of the world’s defense spending combined and is variously calculated as being some nine times larger than the military budget of China. The United States and its close allies are responsible for about two-thirds of the world’s military spending – of which, the U.S. is responsible for the majority of the expenditures.

Understandably, this is a huge and seemingly never-ending source of income for our overbuilt defense industry. Seemingly the very appropriate warning of President Dwight Eisenhower went unheeded. Eisenhower three days before the end of his second term has warned among other things about the military/industrial complex, saying: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

If Eisenhower only knew how much the influence of the military/industrial complex has grown since his day…

At least it could seem to be a step in the right direction for President Obama to propose some saving measures in the State of the Union address. Unfortunately, the spending freeze will only address about 1/8 of our total budget and might actually cut into programs and operational budget of needed and necessary agencies, in many case to the detriment of us all.

Meanwhile, we still have well over 100,000 troops in Iraq, along with an even larger number of mercenaries, are beefing up our forces and spending for the most likely unwinnable war in Afghanistan and are maintaining the budgets of the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the FBI, recently made famous by the discovery that it has been collaborating with telecom companies to routinely violate federal wiretapping laws for four years, as agents got access to reporters’ and citizens’ phone records using fake emergency declarations or simply asking for them.

Let’s not forget the case of the Spanish lawmaker Gaspar Llamazares, who learned that the FBI used an online photograph of him to create an image showing what Osama bin Laden might look like today.

The image using Llamazares’ photo appeared on a wanted poster updating the U.S. government’s 1998 photo of the al Qaeda leader.

FBI spokesman Ken Hoffman acknowledged that the agency used a picture of Llamazares taken from Google Images.

Let’s hope that we are not rewarding incompetence, with ever-larger budgets.

Meanwhile, we don’t really know where more than $3 trillion in bailout money has disappeared to and whether it has done anybody – besides the people and the corporations, who have caused the crisis – any measurable good.

As the popular saying goes: “easy come, easy go”.

Technorati Tags: bailout, defense budget, military/industrial complex, money, President Obama, spending freeze, State of the Union address

The  Republican gubernatorial victories in New Jersey and Virginia, along with Scott Brown taking over Ted Kennedy’s seat in the U.S. Senate have sprouted all kinds of suppositions, ” I told yous” and even a bit of a reshuttle at the White House.

There is no doubt that the Democrats have screwed up on many fronts. Having a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate should have given them the opportunity to take care of many, long-overdue issues, but considering the fact that too many of them – Christopher Dodd comes to mind among others – were really taking care of somebody else’s business, things simply didn’t get done and the American electorate, including a whole slew of liberal Democrats felt downright betrayed.

There is the definite possibility that the Obama voters were really under the impression that the movement created around the candidate actually represented the man. Surprisingly, the man was and is different from what the voters imagined him to be. Just look at the bailouts of the messed up financial mills, which were ostensibly “too big to fail”. Now the biggies are paying multi-million-dollar bonuses, possible only because of the taxpayer-funded bailout.

Let’s not forget that in 2009 the U.S. has reportedly printed more money than in the entire 20th century…successfully bailing out the Wall Street shysters, called by some bonus-happy executives  “their best people”. Wouldn’t these “best people” be more appropriately employed producing our license plates for the next 20 years in some federal penitentiary?

In any case, practically exit Tim Geithner and finally re-enter Paul Volcker, who seems to have saner ideas. We also welcome the return of David Plouffe,  Obama’s campaign manager. As expected Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod says that there is no major White House shakeup in the works. Why not, we wonder?

In closing, enjoy another excellent cartoon by Washington Post’s Tom Toles. If one picture is worth 1,000 words, these two combined must be worth quite a bit more

Technorati Tags: democrats, Health Care reform, obama, politics, republicans

Many of you must have heard by now that the Senate finance committee passed its version of health care reform legislation. The bill would expand coverage without increasing the deficit, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in part by taxing the most expensive health insurance plans, the so-called “Cadillac plans.”

The problem is that many of those plans, despite requiring fairly high premiums from both employees and of employers are really not that great at all. The Senate finance committee’s thinking is not along the lines of quality coverage, but rather along the actual cost of the plan.

There is a big difference between the $40,000-a-year plan offered to Goldman Sachs CEOs, with no co-payments, no deductibles, few limits on how much you can spend, and no need for prior authorization, before you get treated and other, run-of-the-mill “Cadillac plans” offered to average government, or corporate employees.

Many not so fancy plans, which also qualify as “Cadillacs” under the finance committee’s definition are so defined because the term refers to total cost – and not a particular set of benefits – and many factors, like for example the state you live in, the size of your company, and the makeup of that company’s work force, which can affect costs.

Premiums tend to be significantly higher in some states. The employer/employee contribution also varies by state. In addition, the smaller the business, the fewer employees who participate, the less leverage the organization has to negotiate lower premiums. And if the workers have an average age of, say, 55, their premiums are going to be a lot higher than if the average is 24.

As it stands, there should be considerably more emphasis on improving the coverage of existing health insurance plans, rather than just emphasizing the total cost. There is no doubt that the cost of health care in the United States has gone through the roof a long time ago and that issue needs to be urgently addressed, rather than only worrying whether the reform is going to increase our already skyrocketing deficit. Just think about the trillions of dollars doled out to banks and other financial conglomerates. That seemed to be quite painless to those who are now worrying about increasing our deficit. Couldn’t we have used that money to improve our health insurance system and our crumbling infrastructure, rather than bailing out the fat cats, who have actually caused the financial disaster?

If we are to truly reform the U.S. health care insurance system, along with the health care itself, the main points of the so-called reform should be: how to reduce the exorbitant costs of both the care and the insurance, to improve the quality of often substandard care (unless you are willing and able to pay for the very best care available) and to broaden, rather than reduce the coverage that the health plans offer.

Providing health care insurance to the uninsured is a noble quest, to be sure, but to further penalize others, who are ‘covered”, but who do pay their premiums, their ever-rising co-pays and who’s “Cadillac” plans do not offer coverage for such common procedures such as dental care in general, specifically root canals, crowns and necessary oral surgery is the wrong way to go about it.

We have strongly supported the reform of U.S. health care system as a whole for some time now, but taxing the people, already penalized by the inadequacies of some of our health insurance plans, including some of the “Cadillac” ones, seems more like an idea of still another bean counter, rather than a true reformer.

Let’s get this done now and lets get it done right!

Technorati Tags: banks, cadillac, financial institutions, Health care, health insurance, plans, reform, taxing