Category: politics

Opinion | How Much Will Americans Sacrifice for Good Health Care? – The New York Times

Sadly, this New York Times Editorial op-ed is factually wrong in a material way that I had to write a letter. I also ripped into Dan Gorenstein on twitter(1) for linking to the article and “guessing” he didn’t think Americans would tolerate #MedicareForAll.

Here is the text I sent to the Times, who knows if they will publish it. My track record of getting corrections to editorial op-eds published is close to zero. It’s like they don’t want to be wrong.

The editorial board seems both confused, and factually inaccurate when it comes to how insurance works in government funded, single payer healthcare systems. It is common place in such systems to have an option of top-up insurance. I was lucky to have had such insurance when I needed serious surgery in the UK, in 1992. It was employer provided insurance.

One of the constraints in the many government single payer systems is the supply of buildings and doctors to treat a patient “on demand”. Urgent cases are as always seen as soon as they can be. Non-urgent cases, not so much. But then, medically, they are non-urgent. Top-up insurance allows patients to schedule both dates and locations, specialists for non-urgent treatment. The single payer system, pays an agreed amount for the treatment or surgery, much like Americas current insurance based system.

The difference is, that in America today there is massive over supply of both facilities and staff, specialists etc. That over supply is costing every one, both the insured and the uninsured, money for nothing. Yes, it’s great if you can walk into your local Dr’s today and get a referral to a specialist this afternoon for that annoying toe bunion that has bothered you for the past 6-months. Should our healthcare system be based on the costs of carrying that burden? Absolutely not.

While single payer systems are not perfect, nor is the current US Insurance based model. Almost everyone of the people that are involved in charging, finance, billing, negotiating, handling disputes, etc. is overhead. That overhead has to get paid for. So called “death panels” are more common in the US based insurance system than they are in single payer systems. In a single payer system there is no out of network, drug prices are controlled, and there is much more transparency. For everything else there is top-up insurance.

The editorial board overlooking this important fact, does a major dis-service to it’s readers and to Americans who continue to pay too much for healthcare.

Source: Opinion | How Much Will Americans Sacrifice for Good Health Care? – The New York Times

British Concentration Camps: A Response to Jacob Rees-Mogg | The Gladstone Diaries

On a BBC politics, current affairs program, Question time last week had another of it’s heavily #brexit based episodes. This one featured UK Government and Conservative prig, William Rees-Mogg. Mogg is infamous for his lowkey, I’m holier than thou, silver spoon accent. He makes statements with such supposed authority you’d be hard pressed to doubt there were 12 commandments.

This time in a pseudo-educated way, he prognosticated over William Churchill and took other members of the panel to task, “from the comfort of 2019”. “You’ve got to understand the history”. Turns out, as often, Moggs dictats were, as they frequently are, a mix of details and claims pulled literally out of thin air.

Actual historian, Robert Saunders, took Moggs claims to task.

First, some figures. From 1899 to 1902, roughly 48,000 people died in British concentration camps in South Africa. Of the 28,000 white deaths, 22,000 were children under the age of 16. More than 4,000 were women. The 20,000 Black deaths were less clearly recorded – a mark of official indifference – but most estimates suggest that about 80% were children.

Source: British Concentration Camps: A Response to Jacob Rees-Mogg | The Gladstone Diaries

The Boer War makes a useful addition to my 2016, Making Britain Great Again post.

State of the Union: Whither Afghanistan?

Tonight the President will address the nation in his second state of the nation. It’s unclear if he’ll say anything about Afghanistan, he’d be wise not to. Equally, given the President is prone to tackling sacred cows, maybe he should.

President Trump sent more troops and in his words America would stay until the “war is won”.  While not as notorious as Vietnam, Afghanistan is Americas longest war, all Presidents from Roosevelt are complicit. America had been involved  in/with Afghanistan from 1946 until the late 1970’s, as the Americans left, the Soviets arrived.

We are now negotiating with the Taliban, essentially the same deal to end the American involvement in Afghanistan, that Donald Rumsfeld turned down in 2001. Since then there has been 17-years of bloody war, costing America more than a trillion dollars, and taken the lives of more than 4,000 Americans.

Afghanistan is a country that is at the center of the world, almost exactly 10,000 miles from either coast of America. Long before the War on Terror, long before the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the Americans were there. Buoyed by their success in WWII and in an effort to counter the Soviet Union threats of expansion, in 1946 American Engineers, their wives and families started to arrive in Helmand province in unprecedented numbers, they lived in a campus that became known as “Little America“.

M-K Completes Dam Projects in AfghanistanThey worked for the worlds biggest construction company at the time, Morrison Knutson. The King of Afghanistan had bought them in to replicate what had been done in Nevada, roads, dams, canals and even a new model city. The Kings plan had been to harness the power of the giant Helmand River and turn Afghanistan into a modern society like the west. Thats when everything started to go wrong.

In an era that is long forgotten and projects that were ultimately doomed to fail, it was the first, and possibly the best example of “too big to fail”. It did, we are still paying that price today, even before the Russians invaded, America had sunk $80-million into Afghanistan.

It’s the forever war, will President Trump actually succeed, no.

REFERENCE MATERIAL

The New York Times “The Daily” covered Afghanistan yesterday(Feb 4th), disappointingly they never included anything about the whole “Little America” project. It is still one of the best summaries of what happened since the Russians invaded.

BBC NEWS has a great infographic style documentary on Helmands Golden Age from 2014 by Monica Whitlock. It is a good read and contains many pictures from Morrison Knutson engineer Glenn Fosters films. It also includes many clips of his color films, sadly they are geo-locked and not available in the US. You can though find much of the same material on Youtube. As an accompanying piece, Monica Whitlock also recorded an episode of the BBC World Service “The Documentary Podcast“, also from 2014. In an episode called “Damming Afghanistan: Lost Stories from Helmand” you can download and hear it here.

NPR has a 2012 interview with author Rajiv Chandrasekaran about his then new book, Little America – The War Within the War for Afghanistan. Entitled “A Cautionary Tale About Transforming Afghanistan”, by Greg Myre, it is online here and can be downloaded here. It includes an amazing slideshow.

The US Agency for International Development, bureaus for Program and Policy Coordination, Bureau for the Near East, have a great detail report on Afghanistan, it can be read here, in its original 1983 form.

America and Syria – the backstory

President Trump has decided, unilaterally apparently, to pull all America troops out of Syria, both surprising his Chiefs of Staff and allies.

The American story with Syria is intertwined with almost everything the west has done in the Middle East since the end of the 2nd World War.  American was the prime enabler of the Assad family rise to to power, and as everything post war seemed to be, all about fighting the rise of Communism and installing “democracy”.

Syria gained its independence in 1946 and in 1948 engaged in the Arab-Israeli war. Later in 1949, the Americans were party, or if you believe many, responsible via the emergent CIA, for the coup d’état that replaced the Syrian democracy with Husni al-Za’im, who was executed later the same year.

The Syrian story since the 2nd World War is complicated, wars, Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah. Assad senior played key roles in much of the 1980’s terrorism, before the US and especially the UK decided that their actual target in the Middle East was Gaddafi, and that they needed Assad’s Syria as an ally their upcoming war.

So, you can be surprised by President Trump’s actions, you can blame it on his trying to appease Russian leader Putin, or you can just believe that this is yet another of President Trump’s rollbacks of President Obama’s actions. Whatever you do though, don’t think American involvement in Syria is just about the defeat of ISIS.

serveimageA great read is Wilfords 2013 America’s Great Game. You can purchase the book from Amazon, you can read a book review on the Boston Globe, or this review, “Playing Both Sides” on the New York Times. better still, you can watch/listen to Wilford, here on C-Span.

Protect Colorado – Give me a break! (Yes on 112)

When we ride our bikes north and east of Boulder you can see the gas and oil pipelines an extraction points at regular intervals. But it’s nothing like Texas. Very, Very few oil derricks, certainly in and around Erie, CO there are a number of fracking pad sites, you can see them clearly from Colorado State Highway 52, in places.

But there is nothing like the density I expected given the prominence of the Oil and Gas industry in the state politics. Even when you drive out through north east Colorado, wells yes, but still surrounded by massive areas of open farmland.

So when you see TV ads and claims like this, you have to wonder.

from the Protect Colorado PAC web site.

“extreme out-of-state groups” > “thousands of jobs” > “devastate Colorado’s economy for years to come” – All pretty extreme. I wondered.

But I wonder no more. As always the great folks over at CPR News covered this is much detail, there are lots of in-depth articles on their website. I found the Colorado Wonders segment on the radio by Energy and Environment reporter Grace Hood and presented with Journalist and Presenter Ryan Warner.

You can hear them discuss it in full here. It’s the first 12-minutes or so. To save time, and as a form of notepad, here are my notes.

  • The two main political action committees involved are Protect Colorado(Oil and Gas PAC) and Colorado Rising(Environmental PAC) 
  • Protect Colorado is outspending Colorado Rising by 32-1.
  • Depending on how you look at the land affected it could put 85% off limits if Prop.112 passes, or it could put only 54% off limits due to increased setbacks.
  • The 85% number comes from looking at surface land available for well pads. Except, as anyone who has watched the fracking industry for the last 10-years knows. Drillers can now drill underground and then go horizontal for upto 3-miles. Yep, so your fracking site can be setback 2500 feet from schools, hospitals etc. but they can still drill upto 3-miles underground. Stunning.

So thats who is involved and some numbers to get you started More interesting though are the claims for the impact on the Colorado economy. Here again Grace and Ryan have you covered.

Oil and Gas Industry Impact in Colorado Overall

  • 2014, the peak of the oil and gas boom, Oil and Gas accounted for only 7% of Colorado’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
  • 2016, a low for oil and gas, Oil and Gas contributed just 3% of GDP.
  • 2018 looks to be about 5% of GDP, and is the average over 10-years.

This sort of contribution doesn’t even put the Oil and Gas Industries in the top-10 list in Colorado. So much for the devastating impact.

But I hear you say. Oil and Gas contributes so much more. What about taxes?

  • Severance taxes(what Oil and Gas pays) from 2012-2017 were between $4-million and $265-million. Sounds a lot, but is less than 1% of the State budget.
  • Compared to other States, like Alaska, where the severance taxes make up more than 50% of the State budget.

Why the variation and swing in both GDP and Taxes from Oil and Gas? Because it’s all dependant on the price of crude oil and gas. While the oil price has been slowly rising, it’s nowhere near the 2013 peak.

Grace Hood makes the point in her answers that the numbers don’t include oil and gas service workers and service industries. One of which would be the truck drivers who truck water out to fracking sites. Then there are the people directly employed by the Oil and Gas Industry, that must be big?

  • Employment State-wide is circa 29,000 or just 1% of the workforce in Colorado.

Who Wins?

The last note I took while listening to the CPR News item was the biggest impact would be felt in Weld County. You can take the link to find out a bit more about Weld County, but here are some notes I looked up from Wikipedia.

  • Weld County has an estimated population as of 2017 of 305,000.
  • Weld County is the richest agricultural county in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, and the fourth richest overall nationally.
  • For a relatively rich county, the median family income is just $49,569. So the money is going where?
  • There are just 76 people per square mile in Weld County, compared to some 450 people per square mile in Boulder County and even more dense in urban areas and cities.

So while it’s easy to see that Weld County, if as populace as Boulder County, would suffer real financial hardship, given the population density and size of Weld County, it’s hard to image that the setbacks will be a real inhibitor there. Unless of course they are all out of sites and places to drill already. 

It’s easy to come to the conclusion that you should VOTE YES on Prop.112. I can’t vote as a non-citizen. The TV Commercials by “Protect Colorado” are pure unadulterated fear mongering. Sure, families and workers will be impacted if 112 pases, but hey, they’ll be impacted if the oil prices head south again. The boom and bust of the Oil Industry has been going on for decades, the setbacks won’t change that.

Protect Colorado doesn’t have a leg to stand-on with their extreme claims. I know most people who live near me would be horrified to find that a well pad 2-3 miles away was drilling underneath them. The setbacks are well deserved for safety in urban and more populous areas than Weld County and the like.

Amazon’s $15 Minimum Wage Won’t Change How Americans See Work – Bloomberg

n 2017, the real median household income in the U.S. was $61,372, which is roughly what two earners with full-time jobs making $15 an hour would make.

I remain totally confused about class as a term to classify people in America. This article is a prime example. While overall this is good news, if $15-per hour helps the middle class, how little do you have to earn to be working class? And why is that term never used?

As far as I’m aware the amazon deal doesn’t include health insurance, which effectively means before taxes, you’ll have to work for nearly 1-week in 4 just to pay for an individual plan, for a family plan, you’ll be working for just over two weeks every month just to pay your health insurance premiums. Then there’s food, rent, transportation etc. and so who knows where you are going to find the average $4,533 deductibles if you do get sick. Rather than working class, you are the working poor.

If two people have to work for a couple to survive they are working class. Telling them they are “Middle class” if they earn more than $22 is just a great example of gaslighting. To be middle class,  surely it means when one of you can chose not to work.

Source: Amazon’s $15 Minimum Wage Will Won’t Change How Americans See Work – Bloomberg

Maternity medical crisis

As we approach this year’s open enrollment period for health insurance, I continue to be shocked and disappointed about almost everything I learn about the US Healthcare system. Before I return to notes about my own experiences and my own health, maternity care is another healthcare topic that doesn’t often get discussed, as the average American prepares to pay more than $10,348, per person, per year on healthcare.

While many argue about the definition of single payer, and if it would lead to socialism (and what that is?), the inefficiency, mistakes, cost and just outright expense of what should be routine treatment, continues to make me despair.

America has healthcare snobs, millions of them, they just don’t realize that while they might have great access to medical facilities and Doctors, that doesn’t mean it’s always good, or that the system acts in their best interest. However, any suggested change is met with claims of death panels, socialism and more. Oft heard is also they ‘don’t want the Government in the healthcare.’

Even I was left speechless as I watched a recent CBS Sunday Morning segment on maternal healthcare. Among the points made were:

  • U.S. “most dangerous” place to give birth in developed world
  • The United States is ranked 46th when it comes to maternal mortality. That’s behind countries like Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan.
  • “Sixty percent of the deaths in the United States are preventable,”
  • At least two women are dying every day

And it’s not about access to healthcare; it’s not about the poor without insurance; yes, there is a racial element, but it’s not what you’d think. Here is the entire segment, well worth watching before you enroll this year.

| Edit: The embedded video doesn’t apparently load in some browsers, so here is a direct link to the CBS This Morning web page. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/maternal-mortality-an-american-crisis/

Can it be true that women giving birth in America are more at risk than women in dozens of other countries?

Legislating hacking/data exposure responses

I don’t know enough about the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) but at least on basic reading it seems inadequate in meaningful individual action requirements and legislation that benefits the actual user/person whose information has been exposed.

I’ve been signed up for haveibeenpwned an excellent website by Troy Hunt. You enter your email, and it tells you what breaches your personal information has been found in.

I was going to say “if any”. But of course your data will be there, especially after breaches like the River City Media (RCM) “spammer gate” where 1.4 billion peoples’ email accounts, full names, IP addresses, and often physical address, were exposed. Suffice to say, my two primary email addresses have been exposed in more than 20-breaches.

haveibeenpwned was a great start. CapitalOne, at least among my financial providers, has stepped up the game significantly. Their creditwise arm has incorporated Credit & Identity Alerts in to the app and website. Numerous times recently I’ve received alerts, and while initially the alerts didn’t contain enough information to take action, the most recent alerts have had all the detail I needed.

Creditwise Email
Email alert from Creditwise

Creditwise Alert
via website or app

Among the websites my data has been exposed this year include:

  • linkedin.com
  • kickstarter.com
  • ticketfly.com
  • bitly.com
  • myspace.com
  • last.fm
  • zomato.com

Some of these websites did individually send emails disclosing the breach. Of these, only ticketfly had any form of financial data that might have been breached. I have all my emails from them going back to 2012. Not a single word about a data breach or other exposure of my personal data.

The same is true for more sites than not. No notification. When you login to the site to at the very least, change your password to a new unique one, they more often than not also give you no indication. For many of them it’s also nearly impossible to find out how to delete your account. In the case of ticketfly, I submitted a trouble ticket asking how to delete my account but retain tickets for future events, so far nothing but a generic ‘we’ll get back to you’ response.

It’s time for legislation about what websites/businesses are required to do when they find a data breach. They must be held accountable, and not just through financial penalties that mostly just go into government coffers.

I’d like to see at a minimum:

  1. Mandatory requirement to notify by email, and if the business has a real mail address, by mail.
  2. A default opt-out and deletion period. At discovery, if data breached includes significant personal and/or financial data, the account must be deactivated. After notification, if the business has not heard from the user whose data is breached within 14-days, and the account is not already deactivated, it should be deactivated.
  3. Recovery of a deactivated account should NOT depend on any data exposed in the breach.
  4. When the user whose data is breached logs-in to their account following notification or during account recovery, they must be presented with clear information on what data was exposed. Two, they must be given a simple option at this point to permanently delete their account.
  5. If the user opts to delete their account, any consequences of the deletion must be made obvious at that time. For example, in the case of ticketfly, where I’ve already paid for tickets to future events, those tickets must still be available to me, even after my account is deleted.

In the era of “big data” and “everything online” the only way these businesses/websites will really put privacy and security first is not fines. It’s the actual loss of the customer/user and their data. These companies are often over valued, and paying government fines is just moving magic money from one bucket to another. It has a short term impact on their profitability, their quarterly results, not much else.

Why do some States have more Representatives?

As a quick follow-on from yesterdays post, thanks for the emails and messages on linked-in. I was listening to the USCIS MP3 for the 100 Interview questions last night and found this answer, among others pretty imprecise. This is a single question extract from the actual USCIS MP3.

The question this raises is, which States have more representatives but a smaller population, and why? Obviouly this also hightlights the importance of the U.S. Census which measures the population.

Also, google searching for the questions is a great way to find the confusing litany of websites out there to help immigrants learn and practice for exams, most being for profit. ESLbasics being a good example. Here is the same question.

The delivery isn’t quite as monotone, and the answers are EXACTLY the same, the speaker, Andrea Giordano, even looks down to ensure she is reading it correctly.

Andrea sells a complete pack to prepare for the test for $59.99. She also has most of the questions on youtube for free.

The US Citizenship conundrum

It’s become a constant, “why aren’t they citizens?”

Questions over immigration eventually always end up with a debate, almost always unproductive, sometimes angry about why people who live in the US have not become US Citizens.

It’s my view, that people who pose these questions, do so mostly because they’ve never had to apply themselves. They have no idea how expensive the process is, how long it takes, and for many how difficult it is.

I get a weekly email, it contains a 1-byte GIF, which is used for tracking. When the mail reader loads the .gif file via http, I presume the USCIS keep a record rather than depend on email “read/open receipts”. Other than this the email always says:

USCIS

In my “case” (pun intended), it’s not an application for citizenship, it’s a road block to that application. Turns out sometime late last year while sorting out all my medical billing related issues, I physically lost my green card.

The application for a replacement, cost circa $725. Not a new one, not one that is extended, not a renewal of an expired one, just a replacement/duplicate card. When I applied in the Denver office, and had my bio-metrics done again, I was told to expect a 9 to 11 month delay before I received the card.

I’m waiting for the replacement, so I can legally surrender it during my citizenship process. I wasn’t able to apply until at least May 12th, 2017 as per this very helpful and positive info-graphic. Since I married Kate in October, strictly that would normally mean a 3-year wait, but my 5-year wait was already up.

What does it take to become a US Citizen?

As is often the way, the US Government provides a very helpful and mostly simple set of web pages. The forms can be confusing and intimidating, purely due to the cost of  failed application.

The process is initiated through the completion and submission of form N-400. The filing fee is currently $725 including the bio-metrics fee. After that you have to wait for an appointment, depending on state, this can take up-to a year. You also have to respond as fast as possible to any  requests for information about your application.

Next up you’ll get you interview. At the Interview apparently the process includes

  • you will answer questions about your application
  • take the civics and English tests as required. In a quick vox-pop survey, most of the natural born citizens I’ve asked fail some of the less obvious ones.
  • You also have to prove a level of proficiency with spoken and written English.

You can study up for the questions in many ways. Including this helpful MP3. According to this article in the Boulder Weekly of the 100 questions

Out of the 100 questions the group studies each week, only six are asked at the naturalization interview, at the most 10, as each person is allowed to miss four.

 After which, USCIS issues a written notice of decision. Your application is
  1. Granted—eligible for naturalization.
  2. Continued—you need to provide additional evidence/documentation; or retake the test(s).
  3. Denied—Ineligible for naturalization.

Assuming you are eligible, all you have left is the Oath of Allegiance ceremony.

Why am I waiting?

us gov chatIf you read the webpage details, you can in principle apply, and use the receipt given when I applied for my replacement green card, form I-90. However, when I asked at the office I was told you must have your green card. I asked again today (see left, yes the USCIS uses Salesforce for chat) and was told the same thing.

If I was still working, I could refer the whole thing through to an immigration attorney, but as a stay-at-home Dad, right now I’d like to avoid paying an immigration attorney. Equally, I don’t want to complete and submit my form N-400 and have it rejected, at $725 that’s another expense I don’t want to risk.

I’ve completed the application, minus the final section which lists time outside the country in the last 5-years, only because I have to set aside time to be factually accurate. Until I have my green card that can wait.

So, aside from the expense, it takes a year for most people, which assumes they’ve already been in the country for a minimum of 5-years as a legal green card holder. For most people, that means you’ve been in the country on a visa program before that, add another 2-5 years. Unless of course you’ve can apply for fast-path to green card.

I was an O-1 visa recipient, that didn’t qualify me to be fast-pathed.

Next time you meet someone who isn’t a US Citizen, instead of assuming they are lazy, or don’t want to, have some empathy, it’s an intimidating and fraught process.