Suddenly San Franciscan

Warning - this is a highly simplified and probably simplistic view - which sadly is part of the point.  It’s also meant to be for the enlightenment of those non-US people still listening to my witterings more than the US folks, who clearly know more about this stuff than I do or ever will.  It’s also a little disjointed - I’ve been ading to it in my spare time over a few days.

Freely and openly I will admit that I come from a country which has had what Americans are wont to call “socialized health care” for a number of years (though this phrase is often used to describe a number of quite different systems).  What that means, essentially, is that if we need medical attention, we don’t pay for it.  That is to say, we don’t automatically get a bill at the end of a doctor’s appointment or a hospital visit.  We pay for prescriptions if we can afford to, and of course we pay for healthcare via our taxes - it’s clearly by no means ‘free’.  But it is, to use the famous phrase “free at the point of need”.

A few years ago when I got an infection that could have left me blind in (at least) one eye, I called my doctor’s surgery the morning I woke up with my face so swollen I couldn’t really open my right eye, got in to see my GP as an emergency an hour later, was referred by him to the hospital where I was admitted a couple of hours later and spent the next five days being pumped full of intravenous antibiotics.  Along the way I had a couple of scans, saw high-powered consultants in two separate disciplines, and received a considerable value of drugs.  Total bill at the end of all this; well, there wasn’t one.

I tell that story to my colleagues here in the US, and even though we all have what we suppose to be a ‘good’ health insurance package care of the company, to a man and woman they’re filled with horror at the thought of something similar happening to them, because they all assume, or possibly think they know, that in a similar situation they could end up paying thousands and thousands of dollars either because the plan wouldn’t cover all that care, or the insurance companies would find a way to wriggle out of paying.

The British health system isn’t perfect - if it’s not an emergency you could easily wait a week or more to get an appointment at a GP for example.  But at least it doesn’t create a situation where people will avoid even acknowledging they’re ill because they can’t afford treatment.  I know someone in the US who was knocked off his bike by a car and got up and walked away even as people were calling 911 because he couldn’t risk being given treatment that he couldn’t afford.

And so, coming eventually to the point, I watch the current ‘debate’ on what people tend to call healthcare reform, but which I think is probably more accurately called health insurance reform, with significant interest.  This is all predicated on President Obama’s stated reformist agenda and particularly his drive for a ‘public option’ which is to say an alternative to all those nasty commercial insurance companies run by the state, for all those individuals and businesses that can’t afford big brand coverage for themselves or their employees.  It’s not, in any sense a Briton would understand it, “healthcare like ours” - you’d still need to take out coverage, and payment would still be involved, but the public option is important - more than 40 million Americans are currently uninsured, and some unknowable number of others are struggling under the weight of premiums which go up while coverage doesn’t.

Given that in the UK we can opt to supplement our NHS care with private coverage, it’s almost the reverse of our model.  And note, critically, that private health insurance does exist in the UK, with its providers apparently able to make solid profits, so that seems to counter any concern that a not-for-profit competitor would damage the business of the corporations.

But there’s a vocal groundswell of opinion against a reform plan that includes a public option.  It’s a groundswell that at least superficially actually starts at the ground - in the form of grassroots activism organising against the proposals mostly at what are called ‘town hall’ meetings where elected officials meet with their constituents.

The arguments which have been thrown up (I use the term advisedly) have tended to centre around some consistent scare tactics; that the plan will mean taxpayers paying for abortions, that old people will be euthanised (no, seriously), that taxpayers will be forced to subsidise gender reassignment surgery, the list goes on.  I’m going to come back to some of these in a bit.

The other argument against is a slightly odd one.  Years and years ago, I think on Metafilter, in a discussion on healthcare I asked “if it means people who need treatments but can’t afford them get treated, why wouldn’t you want ’socialized healthcare’.  In seconds I was bombarded with responses from people who said that they didn’t want the government ‘interfering’ in their private lives, which I honestly thought was a bizarre way of looking at it.  But it’s cropping up in the current rows too.  The looks-like-a-joke-but-is-said-seriously comment I see doing the rounds is “I don’t want the government running my Medicaid!” (for Brits, Medicaid actually already is a government-run healthcare programme).  And this isn’t just from people-in-the-street, pundits are coming up with lines like:

If you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they’re run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government.

This is simply not the comment of a rational, informed individual.  Except it is, apparently - that was said by a former member of Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board. Now, I don’t use Medicaid or Medicare, and I hear both good and bad things about them, so I’m not going to judge.  But whether the government is currently doing a good or a bad job in running them, it’s futile to argue against the idea of government getting involved in healthcare when it’s been involved in it in this country for over 40 years.

The astute among you will have noted my use of the word ’superficially’ to describe the source of the opposition.  Of course, it’s not really (or at least not just) a grassroots movement at all.  A highly organised coalition of professional Republican activists and lobbyists are doing a lot of work on this front, working on a three stage approach:

1) spread the lies about what ‘Obamacare’ is going to do by all channels, including elected officials (yes, actual members of Congress are openly promoting the ‘Obama wants to kill your granny’ lie, among the others.  And Sarah Palin (oh yes, she’s still around) supported the nonsense with this gem last week, in which, oh look, she once again used her child as a political prop:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

It’s interesting to wonder, given the gaping chasm that apparently lies between Palin and an even room-temperature IQ, whether she’s actually part of the plot to undermine the reform or if someone just told her some lies, she believed them without checking, and went off in her usual mavericky way.  This ‘death panel’ nonsense, by the way, stems from the provision in ‘Obamacare’ that coverage would be provided for end-of-life counselling sessions to help people formulate living wills IF THEY WANT TO.

2) make sure you get the lies in front of as many people as possible - use the mainstream media and any partisan commentators you can, and spread the message via websites set up by supposedly concerned citizens who are actually well-paid political operatives.  Use those sites to promote the town hall meetings of only those representatives who might support reform.

3) give the people you’re hoodwinking and lying to in order to rile them up, not only talking points to raise at the meetings, but guidelines on how to be as disruptive as possible to shut down via volume or physical means not only any attempt by the rep to state their case, but any debate with their fellow voters who may actually support a programme designed to help those 40+million uninsured people.

There’s a fourth stage that’s rapidly coming to the fore too, by the way, which equates Obama specifically with past dictators like Hitler and uses language that actually seems premeditatedly to suggest that violence against him might be in the country’s interests.  Might actually in fact be praiseworthy.

Now, I haven’t read every single paragraph and page of the proposed legislation, though I’m fairly sure I’ve read rather more of it than a lot of those screaming at Senators and Congresspeeps, and I can’t claim the intimate familiarity with the issues of people who’ve lived here all their lives.  What do I know, after all? I’m from one of those countries with ’socialized healthcare’ - it’s not my debate.  (Though as Rachel Maddow points out in one of the clips I’ve linked below, this isn’t actually a debate about healthcare.  The people who don’t want there to be a debate are making sure of that.)

But lest anyone not currently in the US (and indeed anyone here who isn’t following this avidly) should misunderstand: all this stuff; the lies, the organised intimidation, the priming of potentially unstable people to commit violence in the interests of billion dollar corporations (and their bought and paid-for politicians) is actually happening in the USA.  Today.

Some suggested viewing:

Clip of a Maine protester “tired of having my country taken away from me”

Clip of one of North Carolina’s protesters equating Obama with Hitler

Keith Olberman on ‘Legislators for sale’

Rachel Maddow, a journalist I want to clone and use to populate the world’s media, on:

The real organisers of the ‘grassroots’ activity

The “organized use of initimidation as a political tool in the USA”

The obfuscation of the politics by the vested interests

The increasing tendency of the protests towards violence

This is really quite scary stuff, and it’s getting worse.

August 13th, 2009 | Tags: news | Comments (2)

Pretty much since Proposition 8 passed here in California back in November, there’s been a drive to get a repeal motion in front of California’s voters.  The various voices of the LGBT community is the state (and beyond) have, over the last nine months, been tying themselves in knots setting up discussions/meetings/polls to try and formulate a coherent platform on which to base a campaign, and potentially as important, when the ballot measure that campaign would drive to should be tabled.

Assuming you don’t want to push it too far out, the two contenders are 2010 and 2012.

The former would put it on the ballot at the same time as the next Gubernatorial election.  The latter would line it up with the next Presidential vote.

The voices in favour of each option have been loud and determined, and, you can’t help but feel, passionately convinced of the rightness of their own argument.

Arguments for 2010 tend to be a little more emotional; why should we wait a single minute longer than we have to for equality? Don’t those people who were married in the state before Proposition 8 came along deserve to have their currently odd status clarified sooner rather than later? etc

2012 advocates, while no less emotionally committed, seem to me to be a little more pragmatic.  People spent a *lot* of money on supporting the No On 8 campaign and going back to that well so soon may be unreasonable; three years from now there will have been more chance to work at the grassroots level to show the people who bought into the scare stuff last time round to see that same-sex marriage isn’t really going to destroy society; there’ll be a greater demographic change in that period, with more young people becoming voters; those new voters are more likely to turn out for a Presidential election than one for the Governor.

Over the last few months various of the organisations involved in these discussions have declared for ‘10 or ‘12, and potentially the most influential, Equality California, has today made its decision public.  For all sorts of reasons, detailed here on their blog, EQCA is going for 2012.

I confess that even though it’s long after I’m due to be back in the UK, and I’d love to be around for the scrap, I think 2012 seems sensible.

Though as I do every time I talk about this stuff, or read about the upcoming ballot on same-sex marriage in Maine (attempting to overturn the law already passed there), or the despicable campaign to undermine Washington State’s domestic partnership protections by pretending they’re something to do with same-sex marriage, I cannot, wrack my brains though I will, understand what possible damage to the institution widening the pool of people with access to it can possibly do.

August 12th, 2009 | Tags: LGBT rights, news, proposition 8 | Leave a comment

There’s a lot of stuff going on here at the moment, not all of it good, and some of it categorically bad, so occasionally doing that “getting the most out of being in SF” thing I blogged about last week feels increasingly important.  Of course, finding the time in amongst all this stuff is the trick.

Fortunately, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is about two blocks from the office, and offers a convenient lunchtime respite.  Obviously a lunchtime isn’t enough to do any museum justice, and certainly not this one, but it is time to take in the key points of a current exhibition; Richard Avedon, Photographs 1946 - 2004.

Obviously nearly 60 years of material provides an incredibly diverse range of subjects, and Avedon’s style over the duration shifts appreciably, while maintaining a clear sense of his particular approach.  The exhibition material states he “revolutionized the genre of portraiture. He rejected conventional stiff-and-staid poses and instead captured both motion and emotion in the faces of his subjects…” and there’s little to argue with that here.  Even a particularly striking portrait of Marilyn Monroe, which comes close to looking traditional at first glance, provides an intriguing twist.  Marilyn looks off-camera, a slightly downcast expression on her face, her eyes and downturned mouth somehow sad, her whole body slightly sagging.  It’s a far cry from the kind of photos of the icon you’re used to, all flamboyance and sparkle.

SFMOMA is the only US venue displaying this exhibition, so seeing it definitely fits the ‘only in SF’ model, but regardless of that I’m glad I did.

The museum has a Georgia O’Keefe/Ansel Adams exhibition running through the autumn too, so a return visit is definitely on the cards.

August 4th, 2009 | Tags: a san francisco thing | Leave a comment

Been a while since I ranted about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal.  Not that things have been quiet - on the contrary, loads of stuff has been happening, but it’s been covered well elsewhere by people far closer to the issues and the detail than I.

But in the wake of the White House actively working against someone who had a plan to stop discharges under DADT by means of the frankly genius means of saying the DoD should save money by not pursuing any further discharges, I thought at the very least I should provide a link to this impressive summary of the situation relating to President Obama’s campaign promise that work on repeal would start the day he took office.  It’s by Keori at Pam’s House Blend and clearly contrasts the promise of last year with the reality of today.

At every turn, the “fierce advocate” has gone out of his way to screw LGBT servicemembers and their families. He’s changed his rhetoric and his website, passed the buck to Congress, passed the buck to the Pentagon (who have admitted no real conversations on repeal or integration have taken place), admitted his refusal to utilize his authority as CINC to bring about change, and has pressured both the Supreme Court and Congress to leave the ban in place. He is actively fighting the change he promised.

A quick reminder - every single independent view says that support for repealing the policy is significant among every relevant sector; Democrats and Republicans (both politicians and the public), senior service leaders both current and past, everyone except it seems the actual boss of all those discharged LGBT servicemembers.  So making the big assumption that the President isn’t actually a raging homophobe, what exactly is this man so afraid of?

EDIT to add this link to a Rachel Maddow interview with the proposer of that amendment, Congressman Alcee L. Hastings, who uses the word ‘thwarted’ regarding what happened to his effort.

I *heart* Maddow, and I’m now very fond of Congressman Hastings :)

July 30th, 2009 | Tags: LGBT rights, news | Leave a comment

I’ve been reading with some bemusement the coverage of a new book by Alan Chambers, the president of an organisation called Exodus International.  This is one of those ‘ex-gay’ groups which helps people ‘leave homosexuality’.  Bemusement not, strictly, at the coverage, but at some of the content cited.  Chambers apparently doesn’t think that he’s ex-gay in the sense that he’s no longer prone to homosexual temptation, just that God/Jesus/etc is helping him resist those temptations to which he may yet be prey.  The much-quoted line from the book is “The opposite of homosexuality isn’t heterosexuality.  It’s holiness.”

Among many reasoned and insightful critiques of Chambers’ beliefs in the cause to which he’s dedicated the last twenty years of his life, there are also the inevitable piss-takes, which I’ve read with glee.  None more so than Dan Savage’s comments today:

Chambers’ definition of “ex-gay” is more elastic than a power bottom’s bottom. An ex-gay, according to Chambers, still wants to sleep with men. He just refrains from having sex with men. So technically I’ve been ex-gay all morning. Not straight, of course, because nothing can make me straight—not even Almighty Gawd—but so long as I don’t have a dick in my mouth I am, according to Chambers, totally not gay.

Worth clicking the link by the way, for the photo of Chambers and the related comment (number 7 under the article).

July 28th, 2009 | Tags: just plain weird | Leave a comment

Strictly speaking, though I tend to count our time in SF from the point when The Mrs joined me in late September, I’ll have officially have been a permanent resident of San Francisco for a year next week.  But I have to confess that I don’t really feel as though I’m ‘of’ San Francisco.

Fair enough, a lot of travel away from the city over the last year hasn’t helped, but I also have to admit that I don’t feel as though I’ve taken enough advantage of everything the city has to offer.  I guess it’s always like that when you live in a place - the drive to get out and explore is curtailed by the sense that there’ll always be more time to do so.  If you’re just visiting then you need to pack everything in.

But we’re in an odd sort of limbo: the original deal to come over here was based on staying until the end of 2010, so mentally we know it’s not permanent.  Our house is still sitting in London waiting for us to go back to it, and our friends and family are all presumably awaiting our return.  So there won’t always be more time to do things, but the end of the stay is far enough away that it robs us of any urgency to get out and do.

But I want to get better about this.  We have been trying a bit harder recently, but could do better.  So I’m setting myself the challenge of doing or going somewhere new at least once a week.  It could be a big thing or a little one, but it has to be something I can only do because I’m currently living where I am.

Watch this space.

July 22nd, 2009 | Tags: culture shock, real life | Comments (1)

Further to yesterday, the Senate just voted to remove the fighter plane funding from the Defense Bill, removing the excuse for a Presidential veto.

The roundabout continues on to other amendments.  You never know, the Matthew Shepherd Amendment may yet make it into law.

July 21st, 2009 | Tags: news | Leave a comment

Sorry - quiet week last week; much going on in various directions, including work and a rather unpleasant “falling out among friends” which got The Mrs (and me to a slightly lesser extent) quite upset.  I may revisit the latter at some point soon.

Anyway, picking up briefly on some recent topics:

The Hate Crimes bill passed the first hurdle last week, but some dark clouds hit the horizon as President “Fierce Advocate” Obama has threatened to veto the Defense Bill to which it’s attached because it contains approval for spending on fighter planes that the US doesn’t need.  Cynical minds began to suspect that attaching the amendment to this bill was a ploy to make it look like people (Obama specifically) were trying to make progress on hate crimes, but were forced to reject the legislation because they couldn’t sanction the wasteful expenditure.

Then today, Senator Jeff Sessions, all over the new last week because he heads the committee that oversaw the confirmation hearings for potential Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor (the same committee that once turned him down for a federal judgeship because he’s a racist), attached a series of further amendments designed to make the hate crimes parts of the bill harder to pass.

Just once, wouldn’t it be nice if a politician just said “I disagree with this measure, and will argue it on its merits, without trying it weaken it, filibuster it, or just plain old politic it out of existence.  If my arguments are sound then I am confident I will sway others without need for deceit, distraction or dishonourable behaviour”?

On the Queer solidiers (etc) front, Congressman Patrick Murphy (D-PA) is now the driving force behind the repeal of DADT.  He did an online chat on Americablog last week that’s good reading, and an interview with Rachel Maddow that is also worth watching.

On the AIDS Walk:  Did it - raised $500, which was my target.  I could have done better if I’d worked more at it, but thank you to anyone who donated - the walk raised over $3.5million.  Huge numbers of people, and I felt good that I’d actually gone out and done something - I used to volunteer, and get involved in things that help make a difference.  These days I mostly sit back and give money to a few charities, and I’ve been feeling for a while that it’s not enough.  The Walk was a move in the right direction.

July 20th, 2009 | Tags: LGBT rights, news, real life | Comments (1)

After a long and convoluted journey, which has actually seen it passed by the Senate three times, The Matthew Shephard Hate Crimes Prevention Act will be offered as an amendment to an upcoming National Defense Bill (don’t ask), in the far more confident hope that it will pass (again) and actually be signed if it does, since the former President had made it clear he would veto it.

Hate crime legislation is a strange beast, with some opponents who I suspect genuinely worry about the idea that it seems to be legislating what people are allowed to think.  But a point that is missed is that motivation and intent are always taken into account when crimes are tried.  It’s the difference between murder and manslaughter after all.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy is moving the amendment, and addressed this point in his announcement:

This amendment was carefully crafted to respect constitutional limits and differences of opinion. It will combat acts of violence motivated by hatred and bigotry, but it does not target speech, however offensive or disagreeable, and it certainly does not target religious expression.

Indeed, the Constitution does not permit us in Congress to prohibit the expression of an idea simply because we disagree with it. To paraphrase Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Constitution protects not only freedom for the thought and expression we agree with, but also the freedom for the thought that we abhor. I am devoted to that principle, and I am confident that this amendment does not contradict it.

That additional line “and it certainly does not target religious expression” is also crucial, as one of the claims made against the legislation is that it will criminalise religious leaders who preach hatred disagree with homosexuality for instance.  It won’t.  It never would, and it’s scandalous that politicians would try to use the suggestion that it does as a means of derailing it.  Though ironically that wouldn’t even work as a tactic if it wasn’t for the people who hate those of us who are LGBT.

The senator’s whole statement is covered in The Advocate.

July 13th, 2009 | Tags: news | Leave a comment