2centsworth.info

The Boston Globe has an article (February 3, 2007 by Rick Klein) entitled Romney distances self from Mass. health plan. Just as GW slunk off to Washington leaving various disasters in Texas, Mitt is doing the same.

As pointed out in the Globe article:

The plan for statewide, near-universal health coverage was the centerpiece of Romney’s administration, and it has become a key part of his presidential resume.

As Democratic legislator Richard Moore pointed out in the article:

“That’s why he left [office] in a hurry,” said Moore, the chairman of the Senate Health Care Financing Committee. “He’s setting himself up so he can go either way. If it’s a success, he’ll take all the credit in the world. If it’s a failure, he’ll blame everybody else.”

Moore said Romney can’t hide the fact that he worked closely with Democrats to craft the law, and his administration was responsible for implementing its early stages. “If it doesn’t work, it’s going to be a shared responsibility,” he said.

One of the ironies of this state-mandated plan is that it will either lead to businesses dropping coverage of their employees… Or the coverage standards (deductibles, services included, etc.) are going to be reduced until you truly have a 2nd-Class-Citizen coverage plan.

According to previous Globe articles, under the current plan, about 200,000 people who are currently insured by their employers are going to be told that their coverage is insufficient and that they are going to be penalized. But are their employers going to pay to have their coverage improved??? All the employers have to do to bail out completely on insuring their employees is pay the state $200 per year per employee… Much less than they are currently paying for their employees current coverage.

To avoid that, the State will almost certainly reduce the coverage requirements (which is what the insurance industry desperately wants) and, yes, you will have true 2nd-Class-Citizen coverage… That isn’t worth the money and that you are required to buy by the State.

This is an apolitical public service announcement for everybody that is sick and tire of listening to these automated customer service phone systems (I suspect the irritation transcends all political, religious, ethnic, and racial bounderies!).

Most of us have been confronted by these automated phone systems asking us to press a particular number on the phone keypad depending on which category of disgruntled customer we are. And one frequently finds that your particular beef does not correspond to one of their automated bins… And you really, really want to talk to an actual human being even if he is in some third world country and barely speaks English…. But you have to wade through interminable layers of “Press 5″, “Press 2″, etc. to actually get to a live person.

Somebody has set up a website GetHuman.com which tells you the secret key combinations that allow you to get to speak to an actual person at a lot of large organizations. Actually, that is a little too optimistic… First you will probably hear “We are sorry but all of our associates are assisting other customers at this time but your call is important to us so you just sit there while we play you some elevator music…”

But at least GetHuman.com will help you skip the thicket of keypad options.

A lot of us are depressed at the current “State of the Union.”

The reason I feel some optimism is that, historically, the US has always gone through political cycles and there have been times in the past when the level of political and business corruption was easily as bad as it is today. But eventually there was a public backlash and a general housecleaning and things improved for a decade or two until the rot started setting in again. My hope is that we are approaching the bottom of one of these cycles and that at some indiscernable point in the next four years things will start to improve.

The really brilliant concept that the Founding Fathers built into the constitution was that of checks and balances. Their basic assumption, based on a good hard look at history and the contemporary world they lived in, was that you cannot trust anybody… Not politicians, not government officials, not the clergy, and not even the people. And they set up a system whereby different people and organizations with differing interests provide a check on each other. We have a Judicial System which can review and block actions by either the Executive Branch or the Congress. The President can only sign legislation that both Houses of Congress have already passed… And we have a Free Press that watches all of them. And then you have an electorate that gets to vote people in or out of office every few years. And it really does work albeit slowly, imperfectly, and with built-in delays.

The last election was a triumph of ideology and marketing over commonsense. But the levels of corruption, incompetence, and irresponsibility will bring an inevitable backlash two years and four years down the line.