7.1 Million Sign-ups Don’t Say Nothing

Unlike most folk of my ilk (poverty stricken African Americans), I find it troubling that we have given our Federal government the ability to make us buy a flawed product, or any product regardless if we want to or not. But putting that aside, I want to briefly discuss How I view the metrics of the Affordable Care Act or what is frequently called Obamacare (actual law in picture).

It seems as if many of its supporters are hooping and a hollering that the program has proven to be a success just because it had 7 million plus sign up. I on the other hand, can’t even understand how anyone can use this as an indication of success. Personally, to use this number I would have to know how many who signed up actually had insurance before but lost it due to the law itself. Next, I would have to know how many of those that signed up actually will be receiving Medicare. For example, currently, more than half the states and the District of Columbia are proceeding with a Medicaid expansion which allows them to extend medical coverage to single and childless adults, of which has encouraged jail operators in many of those states to use this criteria to enroll and provide coverage to inmates under ACA.

Last, I won’t be able to see the law in action until all the exemptions and waivers the President unilaterally awarded to businesses and other entities go into effect. Just looking at Maryland for example, we know that only 60,000 people have signed up for Obamacare through the state’s exchange although more than 70,000 in the state lost their health insurance. Is this a marker of success (I know more than 250,000 in total but I am not including Medicare).  But I digress.

Yet still, even without such, that I can see where the Affordable Care Act is going and all I have to do is look at the only other major health delivery operation the government runs is functioning, and that is the Veterans Administration Hospitals.

Everywhere you look the VA is having problems, both with patient enrollment and service delivery. In South Carolina recently, it was noted that problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Columbia covered everything but the kitchen sink including but not limited to problems with surgical procedures, operating rooms not always being stocked with backup surgical instruments and equipment and not monitoring patient care close enough. More importantly, problems associated with infection control and rarely following up to ensure problems are solved adequately. And this is after reports of six deaths due to delayed screenings for colorectal cancer at the Hospital.

At the Buffalo Veterans Administration, New York, more than 700 patients at the Center may have been exposed to HIV, hepatitis B or hepatitis C because of accidental reuse of insulin pens, between Oct. 19, 2010 and November 2012.  Then there are the, three deaths that occurred at the Memphis VA, of which one of the deaths occurred because the patient was given a drug despite a documented allergy to that medication and another due to receiving a lethal dose of a painkiller. The last because VA staff did not give the patient the proper medication.

A drug abuse rehabilitation program at Miami’s Veterans Affairs hospital failed to monitor patients, provide sufficient staff, control access to the facility or even curb illicit drug use among patients because Staff members were frequently absent or in a back room instead of monitoring patients in the drug abuse rehabilitation unit. As expected numerous deaths have resulted as a consequence, specifically due to cocaine and heroin overdoses. The Miami VA is part of a network which also saw five cancer patients die because of long waits and delayed care. Not to mention that in 2009, the Miami VA revealed that nearly 2,500 veterans might have been exposed to HIV and other illnesses during colonoscopies performed with improperly cleaned equipment. In 2010, the St. Louis VA hospital may have exposed more than 1,800 patients to HIV and hepatitis in 2010 as a result of contaminated dental equipment. At the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center a 47-year-old Air Force veteran had the wrongtesticle removed during surgically which left him without any functioning testes.

I could go on and on but the fact remains that what we see with the government run VA is what we can expect from the government run Affordable Care Act. The delays that new veterans facebefore receiving disability compensation and other benefits often is way way longer than the private sector, with an average wait time of 273 days. Even worse are those veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan filing their first claim, wait nearly two months longer.  And don’t live in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago because that time is doubled.

Across the VA system we observe benefits claims taking longer than ever to process according to a recent report by the Center for Investigative Reporting. Before 2009, the number of veterans waiting more than a year for their benefits was 11,000. Since 2009 that figure grew to 245,000. And all the Federal Government does is asking for and gives more money as if that is the solution.  It is not. The problem with the VA, which is indicative of how the federal government manages health systems. It is one of management, administration, lack of understanding about health care delivery and oversight.  And this is the case for other VA hospitals around the nation in places like Dayton, Atlanta, Pittsburgh and Jackson,Mississippi.

All of the aforementioned is happening even after five years ago the president made a pledge to repair the VA bureaucracy. There should be no way in the world that a dysfunctional systemlike the VA top brass keep getting millions and gain capacity in only by underserving the millions veterans. Yet VA network directors get tens of thousands of bonuses every year on top of six figure salaries.
Rica Lewis-Payton, the network director of the South Central Health Care Network, which includes Jackson, got almost $36,000 in bonuses last year: Washington, D.C., Diana Rubens, the VA executive in charge of the nearly 60 offices that process disability benefits compensation claims, collected almost $60,000 in bonuses. Rima Ann Nelson, the former director of the St. Louis VA (where HIV and hepatitis exposure is believed to have occurred),  had received close to $25,000 in bonuses since 2009; At the  Atlanta VA Medical Center, three of which VA’s inspector general linked to widespread mismanagement, former director James Clark received $65,000 in bonuses over four years.

Again, the issue is management. If we do take the 7.1 or 10 million as a metric of success, we must acknowledge that less than a million of that number did not have insurance, meaning folks who had private insurance were forced to purchase government insurance, allowing the federal government to run and control 16 percent of the U.S. economy. If this isn’t a corporate takeover or monopoly, nothing is.  Second, the ACA to reduce the cost of CARE and or better management. Insurance is based on math and the actuarial sciences. 

Fact is that comparatively speaking, young men use very little health care when compared to young women use more than young men. No way in the world would folk stand for young men saying they should pay the same rates of women, when the fact is that young men driving habits dictate they should pay more than young women.

But like I said, numbers won’t tell the story, but if you look at how the government currently runs health care from filing claims to service delivery, we need only look at the VA and the disproportionately negative health outcomes occurring compared to the private sector. And if Obamacare is managed in the same inept manner, as long as hospitals and insurance companies raking in the loot, money will go to huge profits before health care is provided. And as a result, all the regular folk gonna see is higher co-pay, higher deductibles, higher premiums, folk losing their doctors, not having access to the hospitals in their community and the same old federal mismanagement practices. I mean, is it feasible to expect that people who never read the ACA prior to voting to pass it as law, actually know what it does to manage it even modestly? The real issue is not having coverage but lowering cost and improving service delivery. Unfortunately politicians have people equating health insurance to improved health care or even just health care when it is not. Having health insurance makes you no healthier than having auto insurance makes you a safer driver.

bling bling but no books

I am no better than anyone else, but I do know that the majority of our society has lost their way, are selfish, materialistic and socially irresponsible. This is not a criticism but an objective reality. I can see this through simple observations whether it is the massive drop out rates of African American young folk, the high incarceration rates of African American men in prison, or the exorbitant rates of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases in our community.

Truth is that while America spits its anger and venom over the fact that a man of African descent is President of the united States, we are aiding this attitude via our ignorance and none concern to the point that we don’t see it. This troubles me for we can make time and take the time to see that Lil Wayne is in prison or what a bevy of unmarried women who call themselves basketball wives are up too, Brandy and her brother and a washed up gold digging actress by the name of Lisa Raye, but nothing else really of substance.

We know more about the lives of women like super head and Kat stacks and their sordid bedroom activities, women who we dare raise our daughters not to be like or venerate but can’t name what is in any proposal outlined by our current President or proffered via the legislative branch of government unless we hear about it on television. We couldn’t even tell you one amendment of thee constitution which our very freedom and liberty is buttressed upon.

Unfortunately, we think we are free and seem to be more concerned with clubbing and who is the VIPs and what we wear than our intellectual development and education and worse, how we dedicate ourselves to our families. The women and men who raised us, at least many of them, after living and seeing the struggle would never support or practice such behaviors. Unlike days of past, ours is a sexual degenerate culture. In one word we despise drug dealing, gangsters and thugs and folk calling us nigger and bitch, but the reality is we buy the music of those that do such and shack our little butts off in our cars each day singing every word. Music that treats life as being worthless and regards women as merely pieces of meat.

Ours is a problematic state of being, for we lack knowledge of self which is what causes us to participate in our own self destruction. We enslaves ourselves for their was a period when the Likes of Carter G. Woodson, Fred Hampton, Shirley Chisom and Martin King and their words were more wide spread and popular than any musician and this was during the time of the last poets and Marvin Gaye. Even folks Like Marvin Gaye sang about the conditions of our folk and displayed some social responsibility, but such is lacking or no existence today for we don’t value knowledge or understand that information is power. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that “nothing in this world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Maybe that is why we sing and have the bling-bling and no books.

I have no problem speaking my mind and I know that some will take this as an affront to modern culture, but it is not . I just never have nor will concede my human dignity for popularity but I do know that they of the minstrel variety will complain and even defend vile, lewd and self destructive behavior as pronounced so vividly in our culture. It was not I but Carter G. Woodson Who said:

“If you can control a man’s thinking, you don’t have to worry about his actions. If you can determine what a man thinks you do not have worry about what he will do. If you can make a man believe that he is inferior, you don’t have to compel him to seek an inferior status, he will do so without being told and if you can make a man believe that he is justly an outcast, you don’t have to order him to the back door, he will go to the back door on his own and if there is no back door, the very nature of the man will demand that you build one.”

No wonder we are as we are, today I wouldn't be suprised if an unknown rapper was more reconizable and know about than somebody really worthy of attention, for it is a shame that folk recognize Lil Jeezy more than Neil Degrasse Tyson. Now I know how and what Harriet Tubman meant when she wrote “I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves."

ump ump umph

got this from Shae



Blog amnesty, true urban queen, Lisa C writes, anony miss, alice n wonderland, single black male, tc, afrobabe, flyest 1, mrsgrapevine, tias world, invisible blog, regina, Mika's realm, the hunnie blog, sugar & spice, television tracy, love babz, b12th planet, malibu, koffe dyme, black N married with kids, a lover's dream and brain splitter.

My book release party will be held at the M-Bar - April 24, 2008 from 7 to 10pm
257 Peters Street, Atlanta, Ga 30311- phone: 404 523 1555

far from the truth

A while back, Tocqueville and an associate of his Gustave de Beaumont obtained permission to travel to the United States to examine their newly developed prison system. In 1835, Tocqueville published his famous work Democracy in America, which a significant part spoke of the elucidation of his views on crime and punishment. From his observations, conditions have not altered much from the times of the mass storage of mostly males of color for industrial benefit and without some type of rehabilitation.

The prison system has become an industrial complex, but it still has remained the same way in which Tocqueville described what he saw in the America South when he wrote that by imprisonment Anobody thinks of rendering them better, but only taming their malice; they are put in chains like ferocious beasts; and instead of being corrected, they are rendered brutal.

This difference is evident in the caustic environment in which men at even younger ages are castigated and left without opportunity. There is nothing good about going to prison unless you are making money from cheap labor or you like becoming a more hardened criminal by learning from the masters in the game. Then there are other risk, death, rape and maybe even contracting infectious disease.

Of the over 2 million inmates in the United States, it has been estimated that about one in 10 has been raped. One study conducted in Nebraska reported that 22 percent of male inmates had sex against their will. The rates of infectious disease are well higher in prisons than the general public. It is estimated for example, that about 2.5 percent of al inmates in America have HIV nationally according to the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. In addition, the chances of contracting the virus are 5 to 6 timers higher for inmates than the general public.

Still many US prison systems do not attempt to protect inmates via condom distribution. In 1991, the World Health Organization reported that 23 of 52 prison systems surveyed around the globe allowed promoted condom distribution. Condoms have been available in Canadian federal prisons for 10 years. In the US, five jail systems, in Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, and two prison systems, in Vermont and Mississippi, make condoms available to their inmates. The excuses provided for why most don’t include condoms being used as weapons, to hide contraband and that it would suggest that sex is acceptable while incarcerated.


What makes this problem more insidious is that men can go into prison for three the five years and come out with problems ranging from mental illness to practicing homosexual acts, yet do not acknowledged the situational sex that occurs in prison as being. Some state prison systems attempt to avoid this by allowing conjugal visits. In Mississippi only legal marriages are acceptable for conjugal visit privileges. Inmates can qualify for conjugal visits are those that at minimum custody levels and display good behavior. Inmates that may transmit sexually transmitted disease are not eligible for conjugal visits. Visits are normally an hour long and come with soap, condoms, sheets, pillowcase and towels. The inmate and spouse are searched before and after each visit for security reasons. The Federal Bureau of Prisons does not permit conjugal visits.

Prison in America has not changed since the travels of Tocqueville and still have no benefit to the incarcerated, the community other than generating a criminal and uneducated segment of society that tend to be male and African American. Although many in the so-called hip-hop generation promote a culture that places incarceration on a pedestal, such is far from the truth.