The President We Really Need

Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party Presidential Candidate, from Massachusetts, is the only Presidential candidate who is speaking the truth about Obamneycare and is talking about a real solution to the health care crisis: a single-payer system: Romneycare and Obamacare are class warfare and failures, says Stein; calls for "real solution" of Medicare for All.


She is the President we really need.  I am, however, about 100 percent sure we will instead get the one named Obamney.

Last election, my vote, and my campaign contribution, went to Obama.  This year, my contribution has already gone to Dr. Jill Stein and my vote will follow.   This year, I cannot bring myself to vote for the Demopublican over the Republicrat.   Each principal party candidate has now proven by his actions - despite what he may have said, or may now say, to get elected - that he is steadfastly in support of unnecessary and immoral wars, that he is shamelessly in favor of lavish corporate welfare and bailouts to the rich elite who regularly and legally steal from the rest of us, and that he will obsequiously kowtow to Wall Street and big corporations and continuously pretend to serve the public interest without actually doing so.

In this year, as in all national political election years, I am especially mindful of the eternal truth in George Orwell's statement that political language is "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Obamneycare Upheld by SCOTUS Today

Obamneycare was upheld by the US Supreme Court today. While many of my fellow "liberals" applaud this result, I am mostly just sorry that this Heritage Foundation idea, first brought to fruition here in Massachusetts by Romney to protect the usual suspects, will continue to be viewed, due to Obama's unfortunate support of this, as a Democratic idea.

Thanks especially to the horrible mandate - already proven to be a disastrous failure here in Massachusetts - middle income people will be screwed by this terrible regressive law which will protect the interests of the bloated medical and pharmaceutical industries and the medical insurance racket at the expense of 99 percent of us.

Yes, some will benefit from the few good provisions such as that which prohibits denials for pre-existing conditions. But as Howard Dean has rightly said, it would have been better not to pass this law at all, as overall it is worse than the horrible system we had before it.


Meanwhile, true progressives, and conscientious physicians, await the only real solution: a single-payer system.  Yet the cynic in me thinks that more likely we will see Obamneycare morph instead into an even more regressive disaster for the vast majority of us, both poor and middle income.  I hope I am wrong.

A Couple More Massachusetts Blogs for Your Blogroll

In the nearly two years I have been absent from the blogosphere (from November of 2009 until today), I have noticed a number of good Massachusetts legal blogs that either weren't around before, or just hadn't caught my attention yet. There are in particular two I would suggest that you check out, and add to your blogroll as well:

1) Scaling the Summit: A Family Law Blog. This blog is primarily the work of Justin Kelsey and his associate Jonathan Eaton and is published by their law firm, Kelsey & Trask in Framingham. Much thought and analysis has gone into this blog, and there is very helpful information about recent, and pending, legislation in the area of alimony reform (which is about to become law at last) and proposed custody law reform.

2) Massachusetts Elder Law Blog. This is an excellent blog I have recently enjoyed reading by elder law attorney Sasha Golden of the Golden Law Center, a practice devoted to elder law and disability planning in Needham.


For information about Massachusetts divorce and family law, see the divorce and family law page of my law firm website.

Baucus Bullshit

Well, now we know: Baucus outlines health plan without GOP support - AP/Yahoo News. The Max Baucus Plan is awful.

Actually, the Max Baucus Plan Sucks. Well, I'd use even stronger words than that. Baucus Bullshit, I'd call it.

It would cost $856 billion, but some $500 billion of that cost would be paid out of cuts to Medicare. The plan, which would have no public option, would do next to nothing to cut costs, next to nothing to provide competition or otherwise to reduce stealing and killing by the health insurance mafia. In place of the old Kennedy bill, which would have cost much less, at about $600 billion, and which would have had a public option, the "Democrat" Max Baucus has been crafting this crap for the health insurance industry.

And that industry is the only entity that should be happy with it. In fact the industry is directly responsible for it. It comes as little surprise to me that it was actually a former vice president of WellPoint, now working for Baucus, who penned this Bullshit. See The Max Baucus WellPoint/Liz Fowler Plan

Under this plan, in a manner similar to that of the Massachusetts system ushered in by Mitt Romney, the middle class would be forced to buy health insurance from the health insurance mafia - if ineligible for employer-sponsored health insurance - or it would be financially penalized. Far from being "socialistic" this legislation would force individuals to pay too much for crappy coverage directly to the health insurance mafia. It would be like a tax requiring citizens to pay money not to the government, but to a private racket.

Meanwhile, we should expect this same health insurance racket to continue paying out only between 55 to 80 percent of the money it collects from us in premiums to pay claims, while in constrast, the supposedly inefficient government Medicare and Medicaid programs pay out around 95 percent of their funds for actual medical care. The health insurance racket, with the help of its lackeys in Congress, wants us to allow it to keep sucking up 20 to 45 percent of our money for administrative costs and profits, while doing nothing effective to bring overall medical costs down.

Well, I did not expect much more from our Congress. If this passes, in anything like the present form, we will have a "Democratic" bill that truly sucks, and the Republicans will later easily be able to show that it sucks, and then blame the "left" for wasting money on a program that screws the middle class yet again and does nothing to solve any problems. Not enough people will notice that it was the health insurance mafia that brought all this about. Instead they will believe the health insurance racket's propaganda, through the voice of the Republican Party, that it is the "left's" fault.

Machiavelli must be smiling.

Huffington Post on Health Care

More good stuff on the health insurance racket's attempt to prevent even the first step towards its own demise can be found in some recent articles in the Huffington Post. I have my doubts about the emasculated reform legislation that is pending, and am still quite angry that our supposed liberal, alleged representatives in Congress have refused to fight hard for a single-payer system, but if the currently pending health care reform bill, with a true public option, ever sees the light of day, there would indeed be a sliver of hope that eventually we will all have the single-payer system we need, and the health insurance racket would thus end up every bit as dead as the many patients who are now its daily victims.

It is interesting that a majority of doctors support a public option. Majority Of Doctors Back Public Option: New England Journal Of Medicine Study. Makes sense. And to that I say: Why can't we just take it one step further with a single-payer plan. We can't we just pay our doctors for care? Why do we have to pay the health insurance mafia as well?

Economist Dean Baker has predictably intelligent comments on the big government "conservatives" who serve the interests of the health insurance racket while pretending to do otherwise. Dean Baker: The Public Plan Option and the Big Government Conservatives

And finally, although not so recent (this one's from June) here's the following article, about the health insurance mafia. It's an oldie but goodie: Bob Cesca: The Health Insurance Mafia Deserves a Good Screwing

The Health Insurers Have Won Again - Of Course

Well, it seems pretty clear that the health-care "reform" bill will be a joke. Even if it were to have a public option, it would still be a joke, but without one, there will continue to be little to no hope that after several decades of struggle, paralleling the career of our late Senator Ted Kennedy, the good people of this country will ever have a humane and decent health care system.

Of course what we have needed for a long time is a single-payer system, privately delivered - by some of the best medical providers in the world - but publicly financed. It has been very interesting, and ironic, to see that some of the most vociferous supporters of the health insurance racket are in fact older individuals on medicare. All we need is to expand medicare to cover everyone - thus eliminating the waste, greed and inefficiency of the health insurance racket - and then we could join the ranks of the other rich, and not-so-rich, countries, that have long ago created humane health care systems.

But the writing was on the wall a long time ago. In early August, Business Week already reported that The Health Insurers Have Already Won ("The Health Insurers Have Already Won; How UnitedHealth and rival carriers, maneuvering behind the scenes in Washington, shaped health-care reform for their own benefit").

Our supposedly liberal Congressional "leaders" from Massachusetts, which has not a single Republican in Congress, were complete wimps and sounded like it when they wimped out on the issue of a single-payer system. "We don't have the votes," they said, in explaining why they would use their own votes, and clout, in a way to insure that we don't have the votes. Pathetic. Shame on you, Kerry, Frank et al. Your "efforts" should be chronicled in "Profiles in Cowardice."





With "liberal leaders" like these pretending to fight the cause for us, it is no wonder that we the people will once again lose to the health insurance racket, which continues to control Congress, along with all the other corporate lobbies. Whatever shitty bill is eventually passed will simply change our course in an insignificant manner, and the big problems will remain. We will continue to be plagued with an insane health insurance racket and the US will continue to be a place where barbaric social and economic inequality and injustice for the benefit of the rich will be the norm. Brave New Films tells the sad story:




For information about Massachusetts divorce and family law, see the divorce and family law page of my law firm website.

Men As Caregivers

There was an interesting blog post by Leanna Hamill at the Massachusetts Estate Planning and Elder Law Blog yesterday commenting on a recent report that more men have in recent years taken on caregiving roles for aging parents or other relatives: Massachusetts Estate Planning and Elder Law: More Men Taking Over the Caregiving Role. It's interesting to see that just as men have become more active in recent years in caring for children, they are also becoming more active in caring for aging parents as well.

EXCERPT, MASSACHUSETTS ESTATE PLANNING & ELDER LAW BLOG:

The image of a caregiver for an aging parent or relative is usually a woman in her 40's or 50's who is raising her own children, probably working outside the home, and then trying to care for her aging loved one at the same time. But according to a recent article in the New York Times, more men are serving as caregivers than ever before.

[Quoting the New York Times - link directly above:] "The Alzheimer’s Association and the National Alliance for Care- giving estimate that men make up nearly 40 percent of family care providers now, up from 19 percent in a 1996 study by the Alzheimer’s Association. About 17 million men are caring for an adult.

Often they are overshadowed by their female counterparts and faced with employers, friends, support organizations and sometimes even parents who view care-giving as an essentially female role. Male caregivers are more likely to say they feel unprepared for the role and become socially isolated, and less likely to ask for help."
....

For information about Massachusetts divorce and family law, see the divorce and family law page of my law firm website.

Massachusetts Legislature Moves Toward Equality for Gay and Lesbian Couples

Despite the fact that the Massachusetts Senate recently passed Senate Bill 800, which would repeal the 1913 law that prohibits non-resident gay and lesbian couples from marrying in Massachusetts unless their home state also would recognize their marriage, the House has yet to take up and pass the bill, and has until July 31 before its current session ends. See the New England Blade's most recent article from Thursday: House Ends Week Still Silent on 1913 Law; Bill Sent for Third Reading; Session Ends Next Week, and for more background the earlier article of Wednesday, July 23 (quoted below). Pressure from the advocates for marriage equality may overcome some political resistance in the House. Hopefully the advocates will prevail, and then the measure will go to the desk of Governor Patrick, who is expected to sign it into law.

In other, more decidedly positive news, also from the New England Blade: "The Massachusetts State Senate on Wednesday, July 23, by voice vote, passed the MassHealth Equality Bill H.B. 4107, which would grant married same-sex couples in Massachusetts the same access to Medicaid benefits as heterosexual couples. Currently, federal Defense of Marriage Act regulations prohibit same-sex couples legally married in Massachusetts from being treated as each other’s spouses for the purposes of federal benefits programs, including Medicaid, which is uniquely funded by both state and federal dollars. The bill passed in the House last week. Once the House and Senate agree on slight differences in language, the bill will go to Gov. Deval Patrick’s desk, who is expected to sign it into law...."

EXCERPT FROM NEW ENGLAND BLADE ARTICLE, JULY 23:

The House of Representatives, by the New England Blade print deadline, had not taken up Senate Bill 800, which, if passed, would repeal the 1913 law thatprohibits non-resident same-sex couples from getting married in Massachusetts unless their home state would recognize their marriage.

But despite the looming end of the current legislative session — July 31 — House Speaker Sal DiMasi remains committed to bringing the issue before the full House soon, said his spokesperson, David Guarino.

“It is something we hope to bring up in the next few days,” David Guarino, spokesperson for DiMasi, said on Tuesday. “Speaker DiMasi is a strong supporter of it and hopeful to get this done this session.”

Guarino did not return a call made to him on Wednesday.

MassEquality said on Wednesday that“it’s still very likely that it will come up before the end of the session,” and asked its membership to contact their respective legislators. The Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Caucus has also urged its membership to contact their legislators.

“The Senate acted quickly and decisively but the House may be a more difficult battle,” says the Caucus in an e-mail to its membership on Tuesday. “Our opponents have generated thousands of calls and e-mails to Representatives to stop our Repeal lobbying, and they’re having an impact. Now is the time to act. We need you to e-mail your state Representative and urge her/him to support the repeal.”

The State House News reported on Monday that some House members are concerned about taking up the repeal of the 1913 law during an election year, which has left doors open, says MassResistance, for opponents of the bill to talk with representatives.

“Last Thursday we sent people to personally visit every House office at the State House. They sat down with staff members and made them read our handouts explaining the facts about this issue,” said MassResistance in its blog(http://www.massresistance.org/). “They got both good and bad responses. Some were very supportive, some quite hostile. But we got the message across.”
....

For information about Massachusetts divorce and family law, see the divorce and family law page of my law firm website.

Traveling Without the Kids

There's more good advice today from Leanna Hamill at the Massachusetts Estate Planning and Elder Law Blog, this time on what you should be sure to do if traveling without the kids this summer.

For information about Massachusetts divorce and family law, see the divorce and family law page of my law firm website.

Massachusetts and New England Tops for Children

More evidence that Massachusetts, and its sister New England states, are great places for children has just been released by the Every Child Matters Education Fund. Susan Scully Petroni, editor of the Bay State Parent magazine, reports on the good news at the Bay State Parent Blog here. The full report itself: Geography Matters: Child Well-Being in the States.

Excerpt from the Bay State Parent Blog:

"Massachusetts is the second best state in the nation for U.S. children, based on a diverse set of 10 child well-being standards, including lack of access to prenatal care, premature deaths, malnutrition, poverty, child abuse and teen incarceration, according to a major new report released by the non-profit and non-partisan Every Child Matters Education Fund.

In revealing a nation that is starkly divided with what are often 'deadly differences' in how it treats its youths, the report shows 'geography matters' greatly when it comes to the ability of U.S. children to be healthy and survive to adulthood.

For example, children in the bottom of all the states are three times more likely to die before the age of 14; five times more likely to be uninsured; and eight times more likely to be incarcerated as teens.

The states with the best performance for children are (in order) Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Iowa, Minnesota, Washington, & Maine. In fact, all 6 New England states made the top 10, making it the best region in America for children....."

For information about Massachusetts divorce and family law, see the divorce and family law page of my law firm website.

Divorce and Estate Planning

All individuals who happen to be going through divorce should get an estate planning attorney to prepare for the future by helping them to plan and draft some basic estate planning documents, usually at or near the end of the divorce process. In fact, it is best to see an estate planning attorney before the divorce judgment becomes final.

For an excellent primer on this issue, please read the following series of articles from Leanna Hamill, a Massachusetts estate planning and elder law attorney from Hingham, and author of the Massachusetts Estate Planning and Elder Law Blog:

Estate Planning and Divorce - Part 1
Estate Planning and Divorce - Part 2: Post Divorce, and
Estate Planning and Divorce - Tips on Trusts for the Family Law Attorney.

Every individual's situation is different, but all people going through a divorce will have lots of reasons to hire an estate planning attorney to do an estate planning do-over, or to make a first-time visit if they have yet to do any estate planning. And more generally, most individuals with any kind of family law issues or disputes, whether in divorce or not, would be wise to get a good estate planning attorney, one who concentrates either primarily or exclusively in that area, to go over their particular situations, and provide the appropriate menu of options available to them. Fee arrangements for estate planning are more like those of criminal law than those of family law, in that flat-fee, rather than hourly billing, is the norm.

I am often asked by my clients if I can prepare wills, trusts, health care proxies, and other estate planning documents for them. As a licensed Massachusetts attorney, I can in fact do all of these things, and I have taken courses both in law school and outside of law school on estate planning and elder law, but I prefer not to take on even the most basic of such cases. Estate planning is a distinct area of practice, as are my primary areas of practice which are both in the litigation arena - divorce and family law, and criminal law. I choose, as do most attorneys, to concentrate in a few areas of the law so that I can do the best job possible. Concentrating or specializing in one or more areas of practice leads to more effectiveness and efficiency in service as it leads to greater expertise in those areas.

Many other areas of the law often intersect with family law, and that is one of the reasons I like family law. However, I often find it best, or even necessary, to refer cases or issues in other fields to practitioners in those separate fields. Sometimes, for example, I find a need to refer clients directly to attorneys who concentrate in matters of trusts and estates, in order to handle such matters as complicated trusts, education trusts, special needs trusts, or other matters. In many other cases, clients already have other attorneys for estate planning and I have found it a pleasure to work with them on behalf of the client's various needs when they are related in some way.

For information about Massachusetts divorce and family law, see the divorce and family law page of my law firm website.

Wal-Mart - Health Care Reformer?

From Massachusetts attorney David Harlow at the HealthBlawg comes this interesting new post about Wal-Mart, discussing Wal-Mart's purpurted innovations in the health care business: HealthBlawg: Wal-Mart: The 51st State?:

"When it comes to health care reform, I've long held the view that we should let the states act as laboratories, experimenting with new and different approaches to health care financing, delivery and quality assurance. Now it seems that Wal-Mart views itself as one more such laboratory. First it was promoting $4 generics, then it started offering more in the way of employee benefits (though it's drawn a line in the sand on employment-based health insurance), and now it's pushing a bold new PBM (pharmacy benefit manager) plan and getting directly into the retail clinic biz.

The PBM plan was predictably pooh-poohed by potential competitors.

The news came out today that Wal-Mart will be getting into the retail clinic biz directly, through alliances with local providers, rather than continuing to lease space to outside operators -- one such operator suddenly closed up shop last week. Wal-Mart is looking at 2,000 clinics over the next 5-7 years. "The Clinic at Wal-Mart" will allow for greater standardization across all of these sites. I've discussed pros and cons of retail clinics in other posts...."

I am skeptical. It is hard for me to imagine anything good coming from Wal-Mart in the health care arena, but I admit I am biased after seeing the documentary High Cost of Low Price, which explained how Wal-Mart, in Massachusetts as well as many other states throughout the nation, worked the system to bleed the taxpayer, most remarkably by not insuring its own employees and having its employees sign up for taxpayer-funded benefits, such as MassHealth (in Massachusetts). Wal-Mart has been very successful at making huge profits on the backs of the taxpayers throughout the nation, in so many ways, including by setting up a system whereby public benefits are provided to its own working-poor employees, for whom the company has failed to pay a living wage. See the Facts in the Wal-Mart documentary.

Now we are supposed to trust Wal-Mart with innovative new health care ideas the states can emulate? It may be that we should, but if so, I would find that ironic to say the least. Looking to Wal-Mart for ideas on health care reform seems a little like looking to Chevron for innovative ideas in environmental protection.

This particular irony calls to mind for me the similarly disturbing fact that Hillary Clinton - the supposed progressive champion of women, labor, and health care - was once on the Wal-Mart Board from 1986 to 1992, when Wal-Mart was busy with its union busting, sweatshop labor, and anti-women policies, as a run-up to its successful maneuvering to make taxpayers pay what should have been some of its own costs of doing business, such as health care costs of its own underpaid employees. See the recent ABC news story on Hillary and Wal-Mart here: YouTube - Hillary Clinton on Walmart.

To be fair, Hillary has recently distanced herself from Wal-Mart and its policies, and I believe it is clear that Hillary's mind and heart are in the right place on health care, even if, as her own relatively unambitious positions indicate, our national prospects for universal coverage, and certainly for the single-payer system we really need, are much diminished. Of course, I may myself be in fact too optimistic about this, as AlterNet: TRex: Hillary's Heath Care Sham Won't Cure What Ails Us points out Hillary's universal health care plan is really a mandatory universal health insurance plan, probably no better than what Romney ushered in here in Massachusetts, and that is a health care reform for which the jury is still out.

But I think my point, as we wait to see what wonderful, innovative ideas come from Wal-Mart, is this: We should all question the far-too widespread, collective faith in Corporate America to solve our problems, especially when corporations are themselves such a huge part of these very problems.

For information about Massachusetts divorce and family law, see Law Offices of Steven Ballard.