Pre-Existing Condition

As we age, the thickness of everyone's medical file, whether healthy or not, increases, and inevitably most of us evolve into a "pre-existing condition," a chronic or episodic illness that makes moving from one to job to another nearly impossible without major lapses in health care coverage.

The reason: portability of health care. The new insurance, if the prospective employer offers it, or more likely, the insurance privately purchased after the 18 months of COBRA extensions end, will exclude coverage for any pre-existing condition.

That's what bankrupts most people. According to recent studies, two-thirds of all people who file for bankruptcy had health insurance at the time of the onset of the disease, but lost it either from attrition, inability to continue working through the crisis, or being fired.

So when I see this kind of crap from the GOP, I want to scream. Check out the new confusing way the GOP is describing the Democrats incremental attempt at health care reform.

Millions of dollars are being poured into the debate on health care reform. Voice your opinion, voice it more than once. Write to your legislators and insist upon real health care reform. NOW!

100 Crises, 100 Cars

The affect that President Obama projects is that none of the things CNN is shouting about are really crises--foreclosures, bank failures, type A H1N1 influenza, Chrysler's bankruptcy, GM's impending one, Iran, Iraq, the revival of the right wing in Israel, North Korea, and now he is faced with appointing a new member of the US Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice David Souter.

That's why I do take the time to watch him when he goes on television, as I did Wednesday night, during his press conference.

We are in a crises, however, no matter how cool the president manages to appear. America, as Bill Clinton once said, manufactures houses and cars. Right now, America is doing neither. And to just ramp up production of these commodities by making credit more available will do nothing to end the serious threat of global warming.

So this confluence of crises might be one of those opportunities the Chinese speak about, but only if President Obama strongly steers us there: to restructure our economy to sustainability.

In 1974 we were suffering from inflation and a recession brought on by the oil embargo. I left New York and moved to San Francisco to start my career as a young lawyer. San Francisco's economy was robust because it was based on small businesses--restaurants that were adopting the Alice Waters' outlook of eating locally grown wholesome food, small law firms that had specialty niches (My firm only did plaintiffs' antitrust class action work. We were terrible at most everything else.) The Napa and Sonoma Valleys were being planted with vineyards and boutique wineries were blossoming. The first video rental stores soon sprouted up; there was no Blockbuster then. And of course, in garages all through the Silicon Valley, computer hardware, the Macintosh, and software were being developed by geeky guys.

Saving Chrysler and GM, and reviving the McMansions market, isn't the future for America. Will we be able to accept that? Our individual status has been linked to how much we consume for almost our entire history. It began before the Europeans arrived here. Where I live on Long Island, the Mattinicock tribes wore so many strands of wampum, early European explorers might have misstaken them for mollusks. Ostentation seems to be in the rich top soil that once supported the local farming that fed New York City.

Now mega-farms with cruel pens holding hundreds of thousands of animals, supply the dead carcasses that get quick frozen and shipped around the world. In those pens of hundreds of thousands of animals, weird viruses mutate, hence type A H1N1 influenza. Our acts have consequences.

We have to change, and what I so admire about our new president is that he is thoughtful, that he surrounds himself by very smart people, and as we learned from the debate about the release of the torture memos, he likes to listen to debate, but unlike Bill Clinton, he makes a timely decision after digesting the information.

My head aches just thinking about how much information he has to digest and how many decisions he has to make. But it isn't just him. As the myth of Obama fades a bit, as we see through our own illusions, it's time for us to engage so that our democracy is fueled by an informed and articulate electorate. We can do it.

Bailouts Through American History

Bailing out failing sectors of the American economy isn't unique, and there is a handy chart now available at propublica.org. The chart has converted the financial exposure into 2008 dollar terms, so that it is comparing apples with apples.

The first bailout was of the Penn Central Railroad, which eventually brought us Amtrak, and in cost terms totaled $3.2 billion. That was during the Nixon administration. OK, socialization of the railroads occurred during a Republican administration.

Actually looking down the list, all of the bailouts, have occurred during Republican administrations! Lockheed, Franklin National Trust, Chrysler, New York City, the Savings & Loan debacle, the airlines after 911, and now this financial mess.

Should that be telling us something about how Republicans govern or more accurately, fail to govern, with their free market deregulation and the resulting greed factor when left to self-regulation?

Last night on Bill Maher, Andrew Sullivan , the conservative writer who hates Bush claimed that this current financial crisis was brought on by the stupidity of American people who bought homes they couldn't afford with mortgages that they couldn't afford. He laid everything on individual irresponsibility. Naomi Klein, the author of "The Shock Doctrine" countered that the crisis is the result of the "ownership society" tauted by the Bush administration that resulted in massive profits for the same companies that are now verging on bankruptcy. The bailout might mean the loss of social programs, perhaps even the privitization of Social Security, if the wrong people get elected in November.

Without counting in the cost of any upcoming legislation that might shore up the banking industry, so far in the last few months, the Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie, and AIG bailouts have cost $315 billion.

In 2005, Congress, at the behest of the credit card industry, passed a new bankruptcy law, that makes it harder for consumers to file for bankruptcy, and to insist on credit counseling before one might file. See this comprehensive and accessible article on the new law.

Under the new restrictions, consumers have to pass a means pre-filing test to determine whether they can discharge all of their debt, including credit card debt, or be forced into an onerous pay-back schedule. In addition, a consumer's net worth has a higher valuation formula, there is more paperwork and consequently, higher attorney's fees to file.

So, let's get this right: deregulation allowed mortgage companies to engage in knowing fraud when they sold consumers mortgages based on unverified income and facially unaffordable rates, often in neighborhoods that had previously been red-lined. The mortgage brokers were paid commissions based on percentages over risk assessment. Money, money, money. These mortgages were bundled and resold as highly rated secure investments, rather than dangerously unsecured ones, to financial institutions around the world. Money, money, money. Once the housing bubble burst, the government is bailing out the same financial institutions that profited from their greed and complicit fraud. But now the consumers, the ones who can't afford to live in their homes anymore, have a rough trail to hike in order to file for bankruptcy.

This is why Congress has to make sure that any upcoming legislation includes consumer relief. Otherwise, ordinary people will have no recourse and no hope of ever getting out of debt. Unfortunately, too many people borrowed money from their credit cards to pay monthly mortgage bills, and those trailing balances, as we know, are charged usurious interest rates. I've heard of trailing balances getting hit with 30% interest charges!

This is probably why there has been an increase in support once again for Obama.