Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time

Another quick visit of an old item with relevant recent news.

Last summer, I commented on the protests following what appeared to be a rigged election in Iran. Now, the UN has chimed in.

The U.N. General Assembly's human rights committee condemned Iran on Friday for a violent crackdown on protesters after presidential elections this year that the Iranian opposition says were rigged. ...

The 192-nation assembly's Third Committee, which focuses on human rights, approved the nonbinding resolution 74-48, with 59 abstentions.

The resolution focused

"particular concern at the response of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran following the Presidential election of 12 June 2009 and the concurrent rise in human rights violations."

Among those violations were "harassment, intimidation and persecution, including by arbitrary arrest, detention or disappearance, of opposition members, journalists and other media representatives, bloggers, lawyers, clerics, human rights defenders, academics, (and) students."

The result, it said, has been "numerous deaths and injuries." It also condemned reports of "forced confessions and abuse of prisoners including ... rape and torture."

No real consequences are expected to arise from the report, which the Reuters article says has become "an annual ritual in recent years" (along with similar condemnations of North Korea and Myanmar - or, if you're an opponent of the military regime, Burma), because among the "no" votes were Iran defenders Russia and China, both of which have veto power in the Security Council. Still, for the little it's worth, the moral force of such a condemnation, even as it's unlikely to move the reactionary mullahs who retain the real political power in Iran, might bring some encouragement to those Iranians who still hope for cultural freedom and a real, honest, vote.

Footnote: The Iranian delegate condemned resolution co-sponsors Canada and Israel, accusing the former of "systematic violations of human rights including discriminatory policies ... against Aborigines, migrants and minorities" and the latter of "the worst forms of human rights violations, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, mass murder, crimes against humanity and terrorism."

Which just goes to show yet again that even if it is the pot that is calling the kettle black, that doesn't mean the kettle isn't black.

Labels: human rights, international, Iran, Middle East

Quickly revisiting an old item that has relevant recent news.

In October 2004 and June 2005 I commented on the case before the Supreme Court regarding a move by the city of New London, Connecticut to seize private homes under the rubric of eminent domain, not for some public purpose but to turn the property over to a developer. The city claimed that the "public benefit" of the supposedly greater property taxes the new upscale development would bring in justified the forcible sale.

At the time, I described such a claim as

a perversion of the Constitution. The "takings" clause of the Fifth Amendment, as it is known, was designed to protect people from arbitrary government authority, not to enable that government to take land away from one private party only to give it to another.

It was, I said, part of a disturbing pattern of

cities ripping up established, stable neighborhoods in order to mortgage their economic futures to greed-driven corporations, selling their birthright, as it were, for a mess of pottage ... in pursuit of what too often turns out to be a mirage rather than a miracle.

Unhappily, the Court ruled 5-4 in support of the city, meaning that in essence there was no constitutional limit on the power of cities to impose eminent domain so long as they could claim some "benefit," however indirect.

The development in question in the case was supposed to involve hotels, condos, and a Pfizer research center and after the ruling the city spent $80 million preparing the land - but the project never got off the ground. And earlier this month,

Pfizer dealt a final blow to the project and the struggling seaport city by announcing that 1,400 jobs would leave the area as the pharmaceutical giant scales back amid tepid sales and a lack of new drugs in its pipeline. The move will vacate a 750,000 square foot complex built in 2001 and nothing is planned in its place.

The jobs will be gone in two years as Pfizer leaves behind

the city’s biggest office complex and an adjacent swath of barren land that was cleared of dozens of homes to make room for a hotel, stores and condominiums that were never built.

The project proved to be, that is, "a mirage rather than a miracle."

The upside of the story is that as a result of the outcry over the Supreme Court decision, 43 states have adopted laws putting some restraints on this sort of overbroad use of eminent domain.

But Robert M. Pero, a New London city councilman who is about to become mayor, still defends the original city action.

“I’m sure that there are people that are waiting out there to say, ‘I told you so,’ ” Mr. Pero said. “I don’t know that even today you can say, ‘I told you so.’ ”

Actually, the homeowners whose property was, in the words of one, "stolen" for economic development can say that. And they do.

So, for that matter, can I. And so do I.

Labels: Constitutional rights, corporations, economics, housing, land use, law, social justice, Supreme Court

Another reason, in case you needed one, to think that the health care bills in Congress may very well not be worth passing. The article is from the Washington Independent a week ago, I but didn't see it until now and didn't know this about the legislation.

The Democrats’ proposal to terminate the Children’s Health Insurance Program would hike health care costs for some of the country’s low-income families, likely increasing the number of uninsured kids in the name of expanding coverage, several health policy experts and state health officials warned Friday.

That's right: The health "reform" bill passed by the House would put an end to CHIP, (formerly S-CHIP). The program that was designed to provide health care to children whose parents couldn't afford it, the program first proposed by Bill Clinton in January 1997 but which for years suffered from inadequate funding, the one we worked so hard to expand in the face of reactionary obstructionism and Shrub vetos, the one we celebrated when that expansion was signed into law just last February after years of effort - that program

would cease to exist at the end of 2013, instead shuffling those kids into Medicaid or private insurance plans on a proposed insurance marketplace, called the exchange.

Now, in fairness, the idea is that the changes will enable entire families to join the same insurance plan, thus expanding coverage from the children to the whole family. And, some note, there are some advantages, such as that neither Medicaid nor the exchanges would require Congressional reauthorization, as CHIP does. Still, the fact is that

critics, including some children’s welfare advocates and policy experts, maintain that the proposal would shift an additional cost burden on millions of low-income families, thereby discouraging them from buying coverage at all.

Stan Dorn, senior health policy researcher at the Urban Institute, told a children’s health care forum on Capitol Hill a week ago Friday that due to CHIP's affordability,

“it’s clear” that kids “are much better off” under CHIP than they would be under private exchange plans.

“It’s not even a close question,” Dorn said....

Indeed. According to a study mentioned in the article, parents who now pay no more than 2% of their children's health care costs under CHIP could see that soar to as much as 35% under the House plan.

The Senate version of the bill originally called for CHIP to be eliminated but now reauthorizes it through 2019.

Labels: Democrats, health care, human rights, social justice

Updated Updated again In this case, it's the nanny-nanny naysayers on climate change looking to turn up the heat on climate scientists, continuing the campaign of innuendo-fed paranoia they've intensified as their arguments against the science become desperate and feeble.

The Guardian (UK) reports that someone apparently hacked into computer files at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK and sucked up hundreds of private emails and documents exchanged by climate scientists over the past 13 years. The files were uploaded to a server in Russia, then mirrored across the internet.

According to Raw Story,

only a few diehard skeptics doubt that the warming of the last few decades is real. Now, however, those skeptics can barely contain their glee at the release of a cache of stolen emails that they believe prove global warming is nothing but a colossal hoax.

"If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW," one of these skeptics blogged on Friday. "The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed...."

Those gloating over the emails have seized in particular on expressions of hostility towards climate change skeptics and dismissals of their papers as not representing legitimate science to elaborate theories of a conspiracy to suppress debate. They are also pointing to certain brief quotations that might be taken as boasts of manipulating data or as private acknowledgments of a lack of data to support the conclusion of global warming.

In short, they are combining cherry-picked quotes with expressions of the completely accurate sentiment that the work of the nanny-nanny naysayers is not legitimate science to claim "smoking gun" evidence of "the greatest scandal in modern science," one marked by deliberate falsification of data and cabal-like collusion among a large number of climatologists.

In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

This sentence, in particular, has been leapt upon by sceptics as evidence of manipulating data, but the credibility of the email has not been verified.

More to the point, as Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, pointed out, even if accurate it tells you nothing.

"You can't tell what they are talking about[," he said]. Scientists say 'trick' not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something - a short cut can be a trick."

But of course that won't move the nanny-nanny naysayers any more than the lack of context will. For them, like the Holocaust deniers they increasingly resemble, no proof of global warming will ever be strong enough to be accepted and no counter-"proof" will ever be weak enough to be dismissed - and they positively revel in lurid tales of massive conspiracies, one that in this case would have to include at least, as Greenpeace pointed out, "the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, NASA, and the world's leading atmospheric scientists."

I mean, just think about it: The wackos stole and have published 1,079 emails and 72 documents - and it appears that all they have to show for it, so far anyway, is one sentence in one email which can only be construed as proof of some conspiracy by assuming it is proof of some conspiracy. That's pathetic.

What a sad crew. And how sad for the rest of us that their voices are amplified first by right-wing media well-versed in conspira-philia and then by corporate media who find conflict more profitable than consensus.

The nanny-nanny naysayers insist "the truth is out there." Which it is - right out there in the open. The problem is, when you show them the truth, they refuse to believe it.

Updated with some later news: The email with the line about the "trick" to "hide the decline" was verified; it was written by Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit.

On reading the whole email (available in this post at Media Matters for America), it appears that what he's talking about is the so-called "divergence problem," something of which climatologists are well aware. From the time temperature records begin in 1856 until about 1960, the records and temperatures derived from examination of tree ring data tracked pretty closely. But after 1960, they began to diverge, with recorded temperatures showing increasing warmth while the tree rings showed some cooling. No one knows why.

Given the choice between indirectly derived figures and actual observed data, scientists will of course go for the latter. The big issue with the divergence problem is how it affects the reliability of tree ring data for the years prior to when records begin.

So it appears that Jones used a short cut - a "trick" - of taking actual observed data and appending it to, or overlaying it on, tree ring data after 1960 in order to illustrate long-term temperature change since the observed data was, obviously, more reliable.

Unless he claimed that the recorded data was tree ring data (or that the tree ring data was recorded data), he clearly did nothing wrong. (Note, for example, that in the "Reconstructed Temperature" graph in this post that recorded temperatures, marked by the black line, are clearly differentiated from the results of various proxy studies.) No conspiracy to "hide" anything.

Updated again with a correction: The original version of the post, in line with early reporting, said the files hacked were from the Hadley Centre, the UK's foremost climate change research center. The hack, as the text now indicates, was actually of computers at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia; the Hadley Centre and the CRU are separate organizations.

Labels: energy, environment, global warming, media, right-wing foolishness

I've been a bit surprised that in the coverage of the protests at University of California campuses over the 32% increase in student fees I haven't seen any condescending tongue-clucking about it being, in Tom Paxton's line, "vaguely reminiscent of the '60s." Which is, I rush to add, a good thing.

But damn, in some ways it does remind me of the '60s:

Police arrested 52 students protesting a tuition hike Thursday at the University of California-Davis and held them in jail overnight without food. One was reportedly beaten by police, a source close to the incident tells Raw Story. ...

The protesters held a sit-in in Mrak Hall, an administration building on the UC-Davis campus near Sacramento that the authorities told protesters to vacate by 5 p.m. Thursday evening. Officers from the Yolo County sheriff's office moved in and arrested those who didn't comply with the order.

“They were put in the paddy-wagon between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. last night, and they were taken to jail and held all night long without food,” Kristin Koster, who participated in the protests, told Raw Story. ... The students were reportedly only given food at 6 a.m. Friday. ...

Koster tried calling the administrators at UC-Davis Friday morning and said “they had no idea where the students were and took no action to find them."

“If anything, UC-Davis called the cops on their students, and then sent them off to jail in Woodland – in another town – without any legal observers, without any legal help, without notifying parents,” she said.

Ah, memories! Meanwhile, to the west, students occupying a classroom building at UC-Berkeley also got a dose of déjà vu:

Reports from the Berkeley campus describe students trying to arrange negotiations, and police moving in to break down barricades and make arrests. ...

Rachel Brahinsky, a former Guardian reporter who is now a Berkeley grad student, called in with this report:

    Tensions are escalating. Rows of riot cops are marching toward lines of students at the barricades. They come up to the students and barrel through. A student has been injured with either a rubber bullet or a taser, we’re not sure which.

    I have personally witnessed two incidents of students getting beaten badly.

    None of this is provoked. The students have linked arms, but nobody has taken any hostile action toward the cops.

According to a spokesperson for the students, Callie Maidhof, the action started early this morning. “Around 5 a.m. a group of students put barricades up and sometime before 6 a.m. police arrived and arrested three people who were unable to get up to the second floor.”

She added that bail was set at $10,000 for two of the students and $16,000 for the third (he refused to provide a DNA sample), who gave the statement “I think it’s ironic that we’ve been charged for burglary when it’s them that are stealing our futures.”

The two initial demands of the estimated sixty locked-in students were to rehire the 38 custodial workers that were recently laid off by American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and to grant amnesty for all protesters involved in the events.

It's not certain but I suspect that last sentence is garbled and that the workers were not laid off by AFSCME but were members of AFSCME. In any event, two more demands, both related to student services, were added later.

There have been several incidents of recorded police violence, including at least two protesters with hands broken. Zhivka Valiavicharska, a graduate student in the department of rhetoric, had her hand resting on a barricade and was hit by a police baton. She was taken to a hospital and will need reconstructive surgery.

This was the second occupation of a building on campus this week. On Wednesday, students locked themselves in to the administration building where capital projects are based, but the confrontation was resolved in a few hours.

I want to emphasize that the previous post was not meant to denigrate student/youth activism. It was directed at that self-important subset of blogging budding politicians who think that activism consists of being a talking head and engaging in conference calls with White House officials and dismiss non-electoral forms of protest and action as anything from "self-indulgent" to "pointless" to "counter-productive."

It admittedly was a while ago but I specifically praised student activism and I was quite taken with the creativity of the "filibuster a building" protest that took place at Princeton a couple of years ago.

Labels: activism, education, police, resistance, social justice

Updated I just read one of those posts you see from time to time where some young activist and/or blogger bemoans the "attention" being given to '60s activists. (No, I won't tell you where because it's not important or even relevant.) Now, I have to say that I don't see all this supposed attention to the '60s, but eye of the beholder and all that.

Still, if younger activists are fed up with we old fogies sucking up all the air, there is one good way to shut us up: Outdo us! Put us to shame!

You could start by asking what I (as a self-described "child of the '60s") and my cohorts can say for ourselves. A start of an answer could be a short list I threw together a while back, a short list of things - attitudes, really - that I could identify with the '60s. None of them originated with the '60s and of course the movement of the '60s grew out of and was nourished by previous generations of dissidents. But it was the '60s generation that brought these notions to critical mass and thus moved them from fringe to mainstream. So, just as examples:

When you see people not blinking at an interracial couple - that was us.
When you see men wearing colors - that was us.
When you see women comfortably wearing jeans - that was us.
When you see two adults unselfconsciously holding hands in public - that was us.
When you see two men unselfconsciously holding hands in public - that was definitely us.
When you think about being environmentally-conscious - that was us.
When you see companies finding it necessary to try to convince everyone how environmentally-conscious they are - that was us.
When you see companies actually being environmentally-conscious - that was definitely us.
When you see people admitting that there is a glass ceiling - that was us.
When you see women challenging the glass ceiling - that was us.
When you see women actually breaking the glass ceiling - that was definitely us.
When you hear anyone defining patriotism in terms of willingness to challenge authority when it's wrong - yeah, that was us.

Another answer that might serve is something I wrote to a friend a number of years ago which I have quoted in this space before: The movement of the '60s was one that

over a several-year span was powerful enough to end the draft, limit and finally stop a war, force one (and maybe two) Presidents from office, shake the foundations of a society's judgments about half its population, force the nuclear power industry to a virtual halt, and change - perhaps not by much but quite possibly permanently - that society's sense of its relationship to the environment.

So take that as the place where the bar is set. You want to show us up? Top that! Do it! Turn it into "BFD" material!

Please! Really. I mean it. Do it. Nothing would make me happier.

But do take one bit of advice from the old guy: Please oh please stop imagining that your marginal access to the halls of power - access gained by that "old style" activism at which you now sneer - is the path to a better society. Let me amend that in an important way: Stop imagining it is the path, one that does and can stand alone. That is a fantasy that will leave you feeling - quite accurately - used and dismissed, as I know an increasing number of you are feeling now, almost a year into the "we are the change we've been waiting for" administration on which you staked your hopes.

"Inside the Beltway" thinking - and I note that is not a matter of geography but of a way of thinking, one that focuses on political campaigns, elections, and lobbying to the exclusion of other means - will fail you. Elections surely have their place, a necessary place, in the process of change. But not only are they not the only part, they're not even the first part of that process and they are far from the only means to press ideas. What's more and I would say particularly, your apparent distaste for street actions does genuine damage to your - our - cause.

One more very important piece of advice: Do not repeat the mistakes of the past. Slicing away your friends and supporters in a foolish attempt to avoid criticism or look "more mainstream" will not help you. It never has and it never will. It merely narrows the field of fire for the forces of reaction.

I say you should embrace all nonviolent means to change. You have the skills. You have the knowledge. You have valuable experience in organizing people. You have access to tools we never had. So get on with it! I promise you that you will find the old fogies right there with you.

Put us, put our record, to shame! Please!

Updated with a Footnote: Now you're getting the idea!

Labels: activism, elections, personal, resistance

So what's that a picture of, you say?

Well, the circled area in the enlarged area shows a plume of ejecta thrown up as the result of an impact. The picture was taken about 20 seconds after impact.

Why is it of any interest, you ask?

The plume has got water in it.

Yeah, and...?

It's on the Moon.

There is water on the moon. Quite possibly, a fair amount of it. Okay, water vapor and ice, but still water. H₂O. The wet stuff. That had been suspected for a time, particularly in the cases of some craters with permanently shadowed areas, but now there is no room for reasonable doubt.

Last month, NASA sent a Centaur rocket stage weighing (on Earth) nearly 5,000 pounds (a mass of 2,200 kg) smashing into the Moon's Cabeus Crater. It threw up a cloud of debris about a mile (1.6 km) into the air - not as big as had been hoped, but more than big enough to do the job of enabling other instruments to analyze the cloud.

And what they found was

copious quantities of water-ice and water vapour.

One researcher described this as the equivalent of "a dozen two-gallon buckets" of water.

"We didn't just find a little bit; we found a significant amount," said Anthony Colaprete, chief scientist for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission.

Two different instruments - a near-infrared spectrometer and an ultraviolet-visible spectrometer - analyzed the ejecta and both found clear evidence of water.

Colaprete, who described researchers as "ecstatic," said that the data gathered was so rich that it will be some time before the results are fully understood.

"Along with the water in Cabeus, there are hints of other intriguing substances[, he said]. The permanently shadowed regions of the Moon are truly cold traps, collecting and preserving material over billions of years."

And you know, that's the thing I like about science: There is always, always, something more to learn, something more to discover. It doesn't get any better than that.

Labels: astronomy/space, geek

This wasn't about Veterans Day originally, it was about Memorial Day, but I think it fits here equally well.

In May 2002, someone on a mailing list I was on posted a message asking people to take a moment of silence on Memorial Day, saying "Let us ensure that those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom are not forgotten."

In response, I wrote:

And in that silent moment remember, too, the many nonviolent warriors who struggled, searched, sacrificed, for justice and freedom, who remain without songs or memorials to celebrate their lives or their passing, but who at some moment stood weaponless against the machinery of oppression and showed in their simple “No more” a force that can move history.

It is indicative of how we as a culture regard things that on the whole, we celebrate our soldiers while they are alive and our nonviolent warriors only when they are safely dead. Then again, I'm not so sure we're so different from others in that way.

Footnote: Then there is still my post "Heroics" from June 2008, reposted last Veterans Day with a little additional material, which has been my one big contribution to Web discussion.

Labels: activism, militarism, nonviolence, pacifism, personal, resistance

Updated Seriously. Are you? Are you satisfied with the health care bill that passed the House? After all the compromises, after all the "asses of Blue Dogs are to be kissed, those of progressives are to be stomped" concessions, after stripping out authorities for state-level single-payer plans and adding in abortion bans, after changing "Medicare plus 5%" to "negotiate one provider at a time," after creating a flimsy, weak, unattractive "public option" consciously designed to be no better than private insurance and which will cost more than private insurance, after creating an individual mandate but omitting any rate caps and removing the prospect of serious competition, after creating a system of what amounts to multibillion dollar taxpayer handouts to the insurance industry, after getting zero concessions from the right or the insurance companies that they weren't prepared to give even before the debate began, are you really satisfied?

Well, no, of course you're not "satisfied" and I know you're not. But here's what I was really asking: Do you think this bill was good enough to pass? Do you think the health care system it creates, the one of the actual facts on the ground, not the lofty rhetoric, is worthy of active support? Would you have voted for it?

I say it was not, it is not, and I would not have.

There was a period of time a few weeks ago when I could have been swayed by the "better than nothing" argument, not so much by the argument itself as by the political impact of a defeat and how it could (would) be spun as a declaration that "the people do not want reform" rather than as "this is not reform enough." That was before the House leadership caved and allowed a floor vote on Rep. Stupid's amendment knowing it would pass and before Tailgunner Joe Lyingman announced his intention to block the Senate version and got no reaction from the party leadership.

It became obvious beyond obviousness at that point that the concern was no longer, if it ever had been, enacting actual health care reform. It was passing a bill. Whatever concessions to politics and platitudes, to conservative endruns and Connecticut egomania, had to be made to get a bill passed were going to be made so long as at the end of the day the Democrats could say "we did health care reform" - even if they hadn't.

To those who say "It's a first step, one that can be built on," I say you can't build a solid house on a foundation of "stubble and straw." Medicare was supposed to be a first step. Medicaid was supposed to be a first step. Yet here we are, nearly 45 years later, still talking about "building" on "first steps." Why are we to imagine this time is different?

Have Medicare and Medicaid been improved over the years? Yes, they have - but the point is, they are still Medicare and Medicaid. They have not been built into anything more, anything different. And neither will this, no matter the final form upon passage. Oh, it will be tinkered with, adjusted, over time but it will never become something more if only because - again, just like Medicare and Medicaid - the energy will go to defending the system against being dismantled in the face of unending complaints about deficits and unremitting claims of impending bankruptcy.

At the end of the day, I can see only one progressive in the list of those who voted no, one name of someone who stuck to their guns and to the earlier pledge made by House progressives to reject the bill if it did not contain a strong public option. That one representative was Dennis Kucinich. I am not a constituent but I called his office anyway to say that there are those of us out here who understood why he did it, who recognized that the bill was just not good enough to deserve passage and that in the long run it may well do more to harm the hopes of real reform than to advance them.

We will never have universal health care. Damn it to hell, we are a disgrace before the world.

Footnote: The New York Times had an interesting chart about the 39 Democrats (including Kucinich) who voted "no." The accompanying text makes all the usual noises about how "vulnerable" many of them are, but the chart demonstrates that to be bullshit. For example, it mentions that

[a]n overwhelming majority of the Democratic lawmakers who opposed the bill — 31 of the 39 — represent districts that were won by Senator John McCain

in 2008. But of those 31, 23 won by double digits in 2008 and three more were unopposed - despite being in a district McCain carried. And they're supposed to be running scared in an off-year election? Of the 39 "nay"s, 30 won by double digits or were unopposed. They're supposed to be scared? For 17 of those who had an opponent, the margin was more than 20 points; for nine, the margin was over 30 points; for five of them it was over 40 points.

Of all 39, I could see only eight who could claim serious electoral concerns: They are first-termers, each of who won by no more than 5 points.

Other than that, I just don't buy the "running scared" or "vulnerable" crap. These people aren't "vulnerable." Other than Kucinich (If there's another name in there I should credit with similar gumption, let me know.), they are either prisoners of the insurance industry, reactionary jackasses, or both.

Footnote to the Footnote: The Times also had a good overview of the differences among the various bills; the link is right here.

Updated to note that among the vulnerable was Eric Massa, a single-payer supporter who voted against the bill, he said, because "at the highest level, this bill will enshrine in law the monopolistic powers of the private health insurance industry, period. ... I believe the private health insurance industry is part of the problem."

Labels: abortion rights, health care, human rights, social justice

I was just reading Susie Madrak (of Suburban Guerrilla) on how the New York State Insurance Department is looking into charges that Cigna Corp. mislabeled $5 billion in health care premiums in reports to state regulators, thus making its "medical-loss ratio," the percentage of premiums actually paid out in claims, look bigger than it actually is.

And that phrase hit me for, I have to admit, the first time: "medical-loss ratio." Not "medical-expense ratio" or "medical-cost ratio" or "medical-claim ratio," but "medical-loss ratio." The insurance companies regard the money they pay out as a result of you giving them your hard-earned money in premiums as a "loss." Not a cost, a loss. By definition, every time they pay a claim, their attitude is "We're losing money on you!"

No wonder they try so hard to deny claims: They think that every premium dollar that comes in should be theirs to keep by right.

Labels: corporations, health care, human rights