FUCK THE PUBLIC OPTION: LET'S EXPLODE

Capitalist Health Insurance Companies Murder 45,000 People a Year

2009-09-18T07:24:00.000-07:00

"The concept of nonviolence is a false ideal. It presupposes the existence of compassion and a sense of justice on the part of one's adversary. When this adversary has everything to lose and nothing to gain by exercising justice and compassion, his reaction can only be negative." - George Jackson, Black Panther Party

"I believe it's a crime for anyone being brutalized to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to defend himself." - Malcom X, Black Panther Party

Tearing down the health insurance companies is community defense.

Study links 45,000 U.S. deaths to lack of insurance

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.

"We're losing more Americans every day because of inaction ... than drunk driving and homicide combined," Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.

Overall, researchers said American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage.

The findings come amid a fierce debate over Democrats' efforts to reform the nation's $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry by expanding coverage and reducing healthcare costs.

President Barack Obama has made the overhaul a top domestic policy priority, but his plan has been besieged by critics and slowed by intense political battles in Congress, with the insurance and healthcare industries fighting some parts of the plan.

The Harvard study, funded by a federal research grant, was published in the online edition of the American Journal of Public Health. It was released by Physicians for a National Health Program, which favors government-backed or "single-payer" health insurance.

A similar study in 1993 found those without insurance had a 25 percent greater risk of death, according to the Harvard group. The Institute of Medicine later used that data in its 2002 estimate showing about 18,000 people a year died because they lacked coverage.

Part of the increased risk now is due to the growing ranks of the uninsured, Himmelstein said. Roughly 46.3 million people in the United States lacked coverage in 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau reported last week, up from 45.7 million in 2007.

Another factor is that there are fewer places for the uninsured to get good care. Public hospitals and clinics are shuttering or scaling back across the country in cities like New Orleans, Detroit and others, he said.

Study co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler said the findings show that without proper care, uninsured people are more likely to die from complications associated with preventable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.

Some critics called the study flawed.

The National Center for Policy Analysis, a Washington think tank that backs a free-market approach to health care, said researchers overstated the death risk and did not track how long subjects were uninsured.

Woolhandler said that while Physicians for a National Health Program supports government-backed coverage, the Harvard study's six researchers closely followed the methodology used in the 1993 study conducted by researchers in the federal government as well as the University of Rochester in New York.

The Harvard researchers analyzed data on about 9,000 patients tracked by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics through the year 2000. They excluded older Americans because those aged 65 or older are covered by the U.S. Medicare insurance program.

"For any doctor ... it's completely a no-brainer that people who can't get health care are going to die more from the kinds of things that health care is supposed to prevent," said Woolhandler, a professor of medicine at Harvard and a primary care physician in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

(Editing by Xavier Briand)

Fragments of an Anarchist Public Health: Developing Visions of a Healthy Society

2009-08-20T02:23:00.000-07:00

A highly academic, yet much more useful and anarchist text than others about fragments of anarchist health care that are all around us including an accounting of the Zapatistas, Ithaca NY, and Patch Adams:

"Fragments of an Anarchist Public Health: Developing Visions of a Healthy Society"
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21916

Taking note of intensifying anarchist social movements worldwide, the goal of this paper is to provide some vision through relating the objectives of these movements to discourse going on within the area of public health—specifically, taking into account these movements' social, political, and economic goals, impact, and implications toward considering what functionally makes for a healthy society.

Community Free Clinics

2009-08-20T02:11:00.000-07:00

One alternative to capitalist and state-run health care is the model of community free clinics. Unite for Sight is a non-profit that compiles information about free clinics around the country. This is also a site struggling folks can look towards to find clinics in their communities.

Here is one example from the article "Fragments of an Anarchist Public Health: Developing Visions of a Healthy Society"

Paul Glover's Health Democracy movement—the Ithaca Health Alliance (IHA) based in Ithaca, New York—is a cooperative health care model built on mutual aid and was developed with the idea to create a sustainable model of community-oriented, community-driven solutions to the ongoing national health care crisis. According to the organization's main website, the Ithaca Health Alliance was created as a cooperative model that has been continuously shaped and sustained by members in the alliance. The idea is that through the power of community-building, IHA members help each other with health expenses—financially through the organization and through the services they make possible, and directly through member-to-member benefits, like discounts on health care which Provider Members offer to other members.[xxvi] The IHA functions on three main levels: the Ithaca Health Fund, the Ithaca Free Clinic, and general education.

The Ithaca Health Fund was established to provide financial assistance for the costs of health care. Through the fund, IHA provides grants to IHA members to help with specific categories of preventive and emergency healthcare expenses. The Fund also offers members interest-free loans for dental procedures, eye care, or for improvement of professional health services (health care provider members only). Through the IHA Community Grants program, small grants are offered to other groups doing health-related work...The Health Alliance opened a free health Clinic in downtown Ithaca on January 23, 2006. The Ithaca Free Clinic (IFC) provides 100% free healthcare services to the un- and under-insured residents of Tompkins County and the surrounding region. IFC is a medically integrated facility where volunteer health professionals provide both conventional and holistic medicine services to clinic visitors, as well as health insurance counseling and other services... The Alliance offers educational programming to our members and the general public. Informal classes, lectures, and guest speakers are offered throughout the year; other events are scheduled as they arise. We offer resources in the waiting area of our offices and Free Clinic, which everyone is welcome to browse through. We network with experts in all fields of health in order to help our neighbors learn about the wealth of health options available. Our quarterly newsletter provides information about different health subjects, and other educational resources, in addition to news of the organization. [xxvii]

An Anarchist Approach to Health Care

2009-08-20T01:43:00.000-07:00

Here is an "anarchist" academic's piece from Infoshop. It's too oppressively long for me to read it and it includes as the "anarchist initial response" to do something with import duties and supports "Tuckerite socialism" without defining WTF that means...um...sounds like ruling class reformism to me. Remind me not to buy his upcoming book, Conscience of an Anarchist.

"An Anarchist Approach to Health Care"
by a white dude with ruling class credentials blah blah blah
http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20090819141745671

Anyway, it's always good to pass on anarchist lit to keep our community in the loop with each other.

Of Tea-Parties and Patriots

2009-08-20T00:58:00.001-07:00

This is an interesting blog from the Institute for Anarchist Studies. I don't feel it accounts for the desperate condition we face and the political implications of campaigning for Obama and his corporate-negotiated, expensive "public option" that would leave millions of folks uninsured, priced out, without access to care. I like his piece on it reinforcing class divides, however, we will never see an end to "property-based society" until we pose a real, immediate threat: insurrection and subversion...

The following article was written and directed towards members of the "Liberty Movement," participants in the Tea Parties and Town Hall meeting protests. It was originally intended to be handed out at Colorado gun shows, where anarchists have done counter-recruitment against the Minutemen:

He's much less fearsome and foaming than I am when I talk about health care. Here is an excerpt:

"Of socialism and healthcare

Let’s be plain. Obama is not a socialist. His reforms and the reforms of other politicians are not socialist. They’re not even radical. They’re truly reformist. And they’re truly state-capitalist.

Obama’s policies have not threatened the power structures of this country in anyway. The rich will stay rich. The poor will stay poor. Property will still be just as protected as it is now. Wars will still be waged on multiple continents. The systemic inequities that have created a mess for all working people will still exist.

But while these reforms, like public option healthcare, are not radical and do not fundamentally change any power relationships in this country, they still remain important bread and butter survival policies for poor and working people.

Just like people of all races and backgrounds, most white working and poor people have no healthcare. We’ve seen it disappear. We don’t have access to medical care when we need it. While national healthcare is not the answer to all of our problems, and shouldn’t be our ultimate end goal, it is a short term fix that we, as working class people, could probably use.

However, the red flag of socialism has been waved in front of our faces. We can’t see anything but the closet communist Obama taunting us and attacking our very way of life with these reforms.

And it’s this mentality that divides us from nonwhite working people even more. The vast majority of nonwhite working people are in support of this healthcare reform. They are in support of social service spending. They are in support of legislation that affects their survival as working class people.

We’re divided in a way that is fairly predictable. White working class people, people who have been bought off by the rich, would rather protect property rights that are used against us and our interests than work for healthcare and social services that we don’t like to admit that we utilize and need.

In our class based, capitalist society, white working class people protect property, while nonwhite working people struggle for social services necessary for survival. And thus, we as white working people play for the wrong team. And in the end, everyone besides the rich and the politicians ends up losing.

Let’s be honest. I don’t want the government to control healthcare. But I also don’t want to live in a property based society where I’m denied healthcare because I don’t make enough money. Until we get rid of that property based economic relationship, then I’ll gladly take social services from the state, just to level the playing field a bit between me and the rich boss that steals money from my paycheck, or the rich politician who guts money from our schools to fund occupations of other countries that benefit corporations he owns stock in."

Forming an Affinity Group

2009-08-19T02:13:00.000-07:00

It's important to organize in affinity groups ("AGs") to escalate your actions beyond soloing. AGs can ally with each other for larger actions. Here is a great tutorial on AG basics by the famed Starhawk:

http://www.starhawk.org/activism/affinitygroups.html

Paint Grenades in 6 Steps

2009-08-19T01:43:00.000-07:00

Needed:
Incandescent Light Bulb
Spoon/butter knife/hard thing
Pen/Pencil/Nail
Paint/Ketchup/Mustard/Etc...
Tampon/Tissue/Tape
Fascist/Capitalist Property

How:
1. tap out the black glass bottom of your light bulb with the spoon/knife/hard thing.
2. stick your pen/pencil/nail into the hole to break the filament and insides.
3. pull out the insides to hollow out the bulb.
4. fill with paint/ketchup/mustard.
5. stuff tampon/tissue/tape over the hole.
6. throw at fascist/capitalist property.
7. repeat.

Optional: angry communique/letter to the fascist/capitalist whose tools of domination you just decorated.

*Wipe your prints! Don't snitch! Don't Brag! Enjoy!*

A Beginners Guide To Graffiti

2009-08-19T01:24:00.000-07:00

Tagging is and always will be a great form of radical messaging. Here is a website that helped me learn:

http://www.leedshiphop.co.uk/2007/11/10/a-beginners-guide-to-graffiti/

Health insurance companies have unguarded property all over...fucking it up with a clear message is a liberating way to shake off your chains and cost them mad cash.

Fuck the Public Option: Let's Explode

2009-08-18T21:39:00.000-07:00

A Dream Deferred (by Langston Hughes)

Let me premise this. I'm backed by a lot of revolutionary leaders from the past and I'm by no means alone in this criticism. I'm just calling it as I see it, I operate in solidarity, "an injury to one, is an injury to all" and that means no one is denied health care in the society I'm struggling for. In my society, people coordinate with one another to meet each other's needs, no politicians, no corporate thugs. Just us, brothers and sisters in solidarity.

In the 90s, when Amerika's "economy was good," my family had a financial crisis. It could have been any number of crises that happen to working class families because of credit, disability, discrimination, and other systemic violations of our rights to live, failures of the state and capitalism to provide the needs for people. This isn't just my story, it's the story of millions of people who faced the same shit and still face it.

Anyway. Shit was fucked for a lot of people as usual. Welfare reform was goin on, the Democrats in charge were bowing down to CEOs, because they are capitalists and will always be apologizing for capitalists.

The Democrats are greedy fucks. Greed for power, greed for money, greed for the middle class, greed for organizers, greed for their party machine. They're takers. They are slobs that sit at a bargaining table in an east coast city (Washington), insulated in Georgetown from any sight (or memory) of poverty. If they aren't in DC, they're scrambling up to get there, up the pyramid of power they built on our heads, a granite pathway that's crushing us. From their bargaining table at the top, they throw the working class people in the poorest rural and urban communities rotten SCRAPS of "reforms" that we never asked for.

Back to my family, in the midst of this, someone in my family got diabetes again, after fighting it off earlier in life. To put food on the table and afford (mortgaged) shelter and rehab for an alcoholic, my family decided to pass up expensive health insurance options because they cost dollars we didn't have.

Apparently 50 million people in this country are doing the same thing.

As a result, our diabetic didn't receive the treatment they needed, developed very serious side effects, and now will loose 10 to 15 years off their life because some greedy fucks in an office put a price on their condition and said "go curl up and die." As long as it cost dollars for health insurance, we wouldn't have had it.

That's the system as it is now. Giant health insurance companies pricing poor people out of insurance. 50 million people, to be more precise.

Now, the "public option" is a scheme, scam, "false solution" as liberals put it when they pat themselves on the back for opposing "clean coal". It's schemed up by the same cult of power elites that make wars, prisons, and police states. The public option is not free for families. It will "compete" in the "marketplace" against health insurance companies that will be left intact and battle-ready. It will cost dollars to buy the public option insurance which means IT WON'T COVER EVERYONE.

Most of all, you're a fool if you trust anything shat out of Obama's mouth saying he's going to save lives: he's destroying Afghanistan, prisoners, immigrants, gave $1.1 trillion to the IMF, and is calling for the 2016 Olympics to be in South Side Chicago that would put every struggling family there out of their homes. Y'all know what else he's got up his sleeve and that's not the purpose of this piece.

How long will his public option scheme last? Well, let's look at Medicare, VA benefits, Medicaid, SCHIP and all the band aids Democrats schemed up in the past to pacify the uninsured out of riots, insurrection, and revolution. Well, those programs been around for DECADES.

If the public option is passed, it might take DECADES before we have the organizing capacity to confront its failures: it's not free, it's trading corporate bureaucracy for state bureaucracy, it's going to leave millions of people uninsured and left for horrible deaths.

Now I'm not about to pat myself on the back and thank God for THAT. I'm not an Obama apostle. I'm not fighting this battle they chose at a time they chose it. I've been fighting it since my childhood FOR REAL. Not in town hall meetings, but while I've been grieving at night and hating, wanting to put bullets through CEOs' heads. I stopped subscribing to their ideology of "everything must be civil and diplomatic."

That mentality is for the privileged few who communicate on the college level, across tables, in town hall meetings. The middle class. For me, I have to look towards the change makers from the past: the riots and militancy that put labor, womyn's, queer, black, latina, and antiwar movements over the top. I'm tired of watching my people melt away in fear. It's time to take up the flame, the gun, and organize insurrections. We got little left to lose.

Health care is a right and rights have never been protected by governments, especially not in the arbitrary borders of the United States. Rights are defended by communities and communities are where health care decisions should be made. Take a look at what we got: We got doctors who claim they're in it for the sick, not for money. We got free clinics. We got street medics at our demonstrations. We got models of free health care and theory from our past to back us up.

Health "insurance" only exists when we let economists define the limits of our society to their benefit. They make health care "scarce" and justify people dying as a "negative externality of efficiency" or "a market operating at equilibrium." They have algebra and calculus to back that shit up like a spell they can conjure, but there ARE enough doctors, they're just doing facelifts on the next paralyzing pop star instead of free check ups for families like mine.

We got to change the story. I laid out the basics and that's enough because I'm not arguing over specifics of Obama's plans for us. Here's a story:

The most violent, face-lifted, institution in the world, the US government and it's CEO penis pleasers, is proposing to us a tourniquet to stop maybe half of the bloodshed they cause because we got no health care. Or how about a state that is committing a genocide of an overrepresented working class of rural whites, blacks, chicanas, latinas, arabs, africans, persians, and east asians, is telling us they're only going to murder half of us if we support their plan.

Does that sound like justice to you? Is that something you're going to rally behind?

That's the fucking prisoners dilemma. That's an interrogation technique. That's them begging us not to organize harder, for the justice we deserve. That's what the public option is.

Then why the fuck are you organizing for the public option?

When Native Americans got genocided by Europeans, they said HELL NO.
When workers got offered a less-than-living-wage from their bosses, they said HELL NO.
When Southern black slaves got offered Jim Crow, they said HELL NO.
When womyn got offered housekeeping and dishwashing, they said HELL NO.
When queer folk got offered marginalizing hate crime laws, they said HELL NO.
...
You know all the examples if you know your peoples' history.

I'm not settling for no public option, most of all, because I know free health care will never come from above, from corporates or government. It's time we start organizing from below for free health care and beat back Obama's attack on our movements. We need to be militant. We need to let loose our anger. Storm their buildings or trash them at night. They've silenced our voices, but not our weapons.

I'm in solidarity with my brothers and sisters that been slaughtered in their beds by health care companies. I'm down with Emma Goldman. I'm down with Malcom X and Fred Hampton. I'm down with the Zapatistas. I'm down with the anarchists. I'm down with the students occupying their schools.

We've been attacked for too long.

There's no space left for conversation. My message to the rulers: Back off, step down, and shut the fuck up. These are our communities, our families, our streets, you been playing Monopoly with. I got the movement's cannon pointed at you and we could be rolling 50 million strong.

Let's explode.