Political Irony

DailyKos has a must-read story about how a woman got (and was cured of) leukemia, and the lengths the insurance companies will go to in order to avoid paying for her care.

This is how it is explained to her by a social worker:

If you worked for a company that offered insurance, if you carried your family’s insurance, next year your insurer would slap a million dollar surcharge on the company policy for carrying a leukemia patient. The company would get the bill and someone in accounting would question “what is this extra million dollars we are being billed?”

The insurance company would explain to them that the million is for you, and it is yearly, but is, ahem, “fixable.” They will say “as long as she is on your insurance (wink, wink) this charge will be there. So what you have to ask yourself (more wink, wink) is whether this employee is worth a million dollar a year salary on top of what you are already paying her.”

Social worker said she had seen small business owners go almost broke trying to cover this charge, and had even heard of one who defiantly did go broke, throwing all of the employees out of work. But more usually, she said, they just fire you.

“Wait, wait!” say you, “Isn’t it illegal to fire someone for their health history? Suppose I’m all well and working?”

She looks at you with more pity, says yes, so of course they will have to find “cause” to fire you, which any employer can always do.

“But I am a very, very good employee!” you protest.

“Yes,” she says, “but they can always find some cause.” The real problem she goes on to explain, is that you will find a new job, that company’s insurer will slap them with the surcharge, they will take their turn at firing you, until you’ve been through six or seven jobs in a year, fired “for cause” from all of them, which of course looks very, very bad to a prospective employer.

“So in a year or so of this, you will not just be uninsurable, you will also be unemployable.”

This is what happens when health insurance is run as a for-profit business. Eventually, the insurance companies force you onto Medicaid, which means that the government picks up the tab for you anyway. So the taxpayers are already paying for socialized medicine (on top of paying for their expensive private health insurance, if they can get it).

From Discover Magazine, of all places, here is Arizona State Senator Sylvia Allen (R) packing a multiple wallop of irony into just a few seconds:

Yes, she really did state (twice) that the earth is 6000 years old, and not as a claim but as a simple fact that she is using to justify mining for uranium. As Discover puts it:

The irony, of course — and there’s always irony when creationism is involved — is that she’s talking about uranium mining, and it’s through the radioactive decay of uranium that we know the Earth is billions of years old. And she also praises technological achievements!

AIIIIiiiiieeee!

As if that were not enough irony, if she is claiming that we’ve been here 6000 years without being done away with, isn’t she forgetting about the Biblical flood?

Here is the transcript:

I can’t say enough how it’s time that we get beyond and, and start focusing on the technology we have and move forward into the future so that our grandchildren can have the same lifestyle we have. And, and this earth’s been here 6000 years — and I know I’m going on and on and I’ll shut up — it’s been here 6000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws and somehow it hasn’t been done away with. And, uh, we need to get the uranium here in Arizona so this state can get the money from it, and the revenue from it. And it can be done safely, and you’ll never even know the mine was there when they’re done. I am for this.

Thanks to AstroEngine.

After all the recent bad news, the Republicans must be feeling a bit defensive and embattled. Because they are trying really hard to create a scandal for Obama, which they are even helpfully calling “Carbongate“.

The story started with a report authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin that questioned the impact of carbon dioxide on global warming. The “scandal” is that the EPA did not incorporate his report into the official EPA finding, and suggested Carlin stop working on climate change.

Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla) ordered an investigation, saying “We’re going to expose it.” Not waiting for the investigation, Inhofe announced his own results: “He came out with the truth. They don’t want the truth at the EPA.” And Representative Joe Barton (R-Texas) proclaims “just as Nixon had Watergate, Obama now has Carbongate to deal with.”

However, conservatives are again showing that they don’t really understand irony (either that, or they just figure if they repeat something often enough, that the media will pick it up and people might start to believe it). The problem? Well, there are multiple problems:

• First, the report itself is bad. Seriously, citing-astrologers-to-support-their-claims bad. Never mind that Carlin is not a climate scientist (he’s an economist). And he collaborated with the leader of the “Friends of Science” — an astroturf anti-climate-science lobbying group.
• Second, the government has been trying to ignore Carlin’s reports since long before Obama took office. According to Carlin, “To the best of my knowledge, the Bush administration never followed up on my ideas.” So how could this possibly be a scandal for Obama? And how bad does your report have to be if even the Bush administration — who desperately wanted to discredit climate change — ignored you?
• Carbongate? What is it with Republicans using the “gate” suffix for political scandals? Are they purposely reminding us of Watergate? I didn’t see any Democrats talking about “Argentina-gate”. This is worse than the Republicans recently bringing up Katrina as an example of how government is incompetent.
• And what kind of chutzpah does it take for Republicans to accuse Obama of ignoring science? During the Bush administration, 60% of the EPA staff scientists who responded to a survey reported they had experienced incidents of political interference with their work. These are the same wing-nuts who don’t believe in evolution.

If the Republicans are trying to be ironic by pointing out an example of Obama ignoring science, then they picked a very bad example, since it only points out their own hypocrisy.

Allison Kilkenny has a satisfying rant about how banning lobbying might just save American democracy.

The American people are now competing with a giant cash machine that pumps over a million dollars a day into preventing a public healthcare option from ever becoming a reality. … In the United States, players only get to ante into the democracy game if they have enough cash.

The Consumerist has a wonderful article “Top 10 Ironic Ads from History“. These are old advertisements that innocently promoted something that eventually went horribly wrong:

• A Union Carbide ad about how “Science helps build a new India” — before one of their plants killed 25 thousand people there.
• An ad for asbestos “When life depends on it, you use asbestos”.
• An ad that inadvertently tells the truth: “This child’s life may depend on the safety of Distaval”. Distaval is a trade name for thalidomide, a drug that was responsible for tens of thousands of serious birth defects.
• An ad for Heroin — Bayer once owned the trademark on the name heroin!
• A public service ad filmed by James Dean to encourage safe driving, which was never used after Dean was killed in his speeding sports car.
• And of course the ad proclaiming that “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette”

I purposely didn’t include images of the ads, so you would have to go read the original.

I’ve heard of marrying someone for their money, but this is a new twist.

It turns out that back in 2004, an Securities and Exchanges lawyer warned that Bernie Madoff’s business “didn’t add up”. She even asked for further investigation. Madoff, of course, was running a massive ponzi scheme that ended up bilking investors out of $50 Billion (the largest fraud in history).

A large part of the fraud could have been prevented. But the investigation didn’t happen, and the lawyer was told by her supervisor to concentrate on other things. Why? We may never know, but her boss’s boss, Eric Swanson later married Madoff’s niece.

And you thought we didn’t have dowries in the USA.