Time to go read the House version of the health care reform bill.

It would be irresponsible to take a position on the new House version of the health care bill without reading it, right? Despite the importance and expense of the bill, many national news websites don't even contain a link to the actual words of the bill. Therefore, go to this link and read the full text of the bill. It's almost 2,000 pages long and it's loaded with specialized terminology and ambiguities. To read it, you'll need to give up many hours of your life. I'm a lawyer, and I read difficult documents all day at work. I can guarantee that it would take me more than a week to read this bill and to obtain a thorough understanding of its main provisions. How many Americans would be willing to read this bill without being required to read it as part of a special healthcare-related job (much less understand it) prior to taking a position on it? Probably only a handful. Out of almost 300,000,000 Americas, only a few would exert the effort to read the entire thing. In fact, send in a comment if you are not being paid to read this bill, and you've nonetheless read it on your own just to be an informed citizen. This House bill will eventually need to be reconciled with a Senate bill, which will be comparable in length and complexity. Completely responsible people will read both versions and map out the differences. That could take many weeks, even for those of us who are even able to analyze text at this level. To really follow this legislation in real time would require one to give up everything he or she cares about for many weeks. It means giving up time with one's family, exercising, entertainment and probably burning vacation time at work. I doubt that it is a rare legislator has read more than 1/4 of this bill. What does it mean when it takes 2,000 words to put an idea into a law containing numerous vague provisions? I have become cynical about this process (as you can probably tell). My presumption is that this bill is representative of many modern pieces of federal legislation (there are many other similarly long and vague federal laws that have been passed over the past couple of decades). My suspicion is that when a bill is written in lengthy prose that is often vague, it means that it is intentionally written this way to discourage ordinary people from understanding it. It is written with lots of bells and whistles that will work to the benefit of private businesses. It is written for those who can afford to hire teams of lawyers who can "work" the law to their advantage in federal courts. Something for everyone who can afford to litigate, it seems, based on the many provisions. Or would it be more accurate to say that this bill is an attempt to put off for another day the dirty details of who, exactly will be covered, whether those who are being insured by the federal government get the same gold-plated coverage as those who work hard to shell out $1,000/month to insure their families, how much it will really cost to give this kind of coverage to the poor and working poor, who will pay for it in the end and what will we no longer be able to afford as a country given that we are going to be paying a presumably huge sum for health care? These are the kinds of questions that good and decent people want to know before they make a commitment. I should make it clear that the current system is terrible in many ways, both for people who are insured and those who aren't. We need a new law to keep purchasers of health insurance from getting ripped off by insurers, but this is low-hanging fruit that could be knocked out with a 10-page bill. We also need to figure out some affordable level of coverage to provide to those who we feel moral compulsions to cover. I suspect that all of this could be done in far less than 2,000 pages. Like I mentioned, I'm suspicious about this process, which has proven to be opaque in more ways than one. Seeing this bill makes me realize how daunting it is for most folks to "get involved" in the government process. No wonder so many people, driven by emotions, give up entirely and insist that living locally can take care of national or global problems. These include many of the "free market fundamentalists," as well as many others who haven't quite articulated why they are so reluctant to get involved.

Continue ReadingTime to go read the House version of the health care reform bill.

Our love-hate relationship with animals

In "Flesh of your Flesh," published in the November 9, 2009 edition of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reviews several books that investigate the kinds of creatures we eat. Well, actually, we love our creatures too:

Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of more than a hundred and seventy million fish. Collectively, these creatures cost Americans some forty billion dollars annually.
We love our animals, but we also love to eat them:
This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds. Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know—barbaric.
Isn't this a contradiction that we love our pets but that we don't care that we treat farm animals so incredibly badly? Kohler quotes Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals: “Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list.”

Continue ReadingOur love-hate relationship with animals

Representative Alan Grayson makes the truth hurt.

Some would call it a stunt, but all indications suggest that Alan Grayson was spot on. Lots of people are dying because of the lack of health insurance. Many of those people live in Congressional Districts overseen by Republicans who prefer the status quo. Grayson simply added 2 plus 2, and it made the Republicans livid. If they don't like it, then they should do something about it. That's how I see it. The solution is not to hide the facts that people in your district are dying from a problem that might have a solution but that you are not seeking any solution.

Continue ReadingRepresentative Alan Grayson makes the truth hurt.

The Monsanto monster

Monsanto has been a target for many years. They have a terrible environmental and health record, they have harassed small farmers for years, they've bribed officials in Indonesia, and they've joked about performing "rural cleansing" (a play on the words "ethnic cleansing", i.e. genocide), and told small seed cleaners that rather than buy them out, "We'd rather put you out of business, it's more fun that way." All this from the company that brought Agent Orange to Vietnam, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities, as well as 500,000 children born with birth defects. However, in the world of corporate PR, no sin is too big. Monsanto has sought to remake its image as the company that's helping to feed the world. Their website claims that "We apply innovation and technology to help farmers around the world produce more while conserving more. We help farmers grow yield sustainably so they can be successful, produce healthier foods, better animal feeds and more fiber, while also reducing agriculture's impact on our environment." High claims, to be sure. Too bad we don't know if they hold up to scrutiny. A new article by the editors of Scientific American explains the situation:

To purchase genetically modified seeds, a customer must sign an agreement that limits what can be done with them. (If you have installed software recently, you will recognize the concept of the end-user agreement.) Agreements are considered necessary to protect a company’s intellectual property, and they justifiably preclude the replication of the genetic enhancements that make the seeds unique. But agritech companies such as Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta go further. For a decade their user agreements have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails. They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects.

Continue ReadingThe Monsanto monster