Christian Leftist

Want to know the difference between socialized health care in France and privatized health care in the U.S.? France screws you after you turn 65; the U.S. screws you until you turn 65.

My family received an email a couple of days ago which said that my grandmother is now completely dependent on my uncle and therefore cannot live in her apartment any longer. His family has to do what is sadly the only option left to middle- and lower-class citizens with an elderly parent: send them to a nursing home. The French government isn’t going to grant her their equivalent of Medicare until all of her children AND grandchildren submit their financial histories to them. Read: me and my brother, who is barely old enough to vote, are supposed to tell a foreign company how much we make off of Ebay because they expect us to pay until we bleed before it will consider giving her financial assistance.

Apparently, France expects its young to provide for both themselves, their own families and their parents simultaneously. I suppose it might be easier to do so if we had the luxury of job security and free health care for everyone under 65 like they do. You see, one of the many reasons why unemployment is so high in France is that employers are legally prohibited from firing most of their employees unless rare and critical requirements occur (at least , this is the impression I formed after the riots last spring over proposed changes to the rules left thousands of burnt-out cars in their wake). We here in the U.S.A. lose our jobs for reasons as obtuse as disclosing a keyword we use at a marketing firm or as petty as forgetting to tuck in one’s shirt at Blockbuster. Decent health care here is rapidly becoming as elusive to most of the country as a college education. So excuse me, Monsieur, if I sniff at the notion of paying for a service that should be entirely government-subsidized, no questions asked. Not that we’re any better off here until we receive our Social Security checks, mind you, and that won’t be a sure thing after the baby boomers wreak havoc on our economy, but for now it’s a decent system.

I was a little tetchy after hearing the news, especially since my other grandmother died less than three months ago, and the average patient at an American nursing home or hospice lives less than a year after their admittance. (My advice to those of you with folks in the ‘retirement centers’ — make sure they’re kept well-hydrated. Everything functions better with a healthy amount to fluids in the system, and it’s so ridiculously easy for nurses to overlook it until a patient’s organs start to fail.) So when I saw an article by Gary Rotstein on a study’s recommendations that home health care be funded the same way nursing home care is, I was all ears.

The Pittsburgh-Post Gazette reports, in summary, that efforts to fund home care have been insufficicient. Other states have made home care an entitlement if the senior has qualified for Medicaid and paid down his/her assets. It’s an extremely brief article, musch like any other candid conversation about why health care in America needs to be accessible to every citizen.

At the top of my blog is this curious crapdumb of mysql code that I can’t fix. Here it is in all its glory:

Warning: array_merge() [function.array-merge]: Argument #2 is not an array in /home/.margo/ps34_14/christianleftist.org/wp-includes/widgets.php on line 53

…So what do I do to make it go away? It appeared after I updated to Wordpress 2.2 on my Dreamhos account, which does 1-click updates, and I don’t want to delete my blog (although I have it backed up). How do I fix this? Any help would be appreciated.

Yes, you heard me correctly: those crazy Kansans are going to make a comeback – unless you want to do something about it. I don’t mean on their state school board, where voters ousted them from power in 2006 after they redefined the meaning of the word ’science.’ I mean on the National Association of State Boards of Education, where Kenneth R. Willard, a Republican who voted with the Kansas school board’s conservative (read maximalist zealous anti-evolution) majority in 2005 to teach intelligent design in the classroom, is poised to take the helm. The New York Times article politely describes intelligent design as “an ideological cousin of creationism.” Yessir.
This is one of those stories that will fly under the radar of most Americans because it’s a nonprofit group and not a nomination that involves heads of state like Bush or Gonzales. But this is exactly the plan of the extreme right wing maximalists: to slowly win local and state elections that have lasting influence on the education of future voters and to slowly worm their way into the very fabric of rational society that they seek to destroy.
Mr. Willard is an insurance executive from Hutchinson, KS. (Great, I dislike him even more now.) He retained his seat even when voters kicked out many of his peers for subscribing to the same ‘beliefs’ as he did. As president-elect of the NASBE, he will take office in January of 2009.
As stated on the national nonprofit group’s website at www.nasbe.org, the organization’s purpose is to work to “strengthen state leadership in educational policymaking.” Read: instead of being able to control a state’s direction in teaching science, one of the creationists will now be able to influence all school boards on a national level.
Mr Willard’s sole opponent withdrew from the race for personal reasons after the nominating period had ended, which made it impossible for another state board member to win a nomination and compete against Willard. Each state has one vote in the election. Scientists who oppose Willard’s views are urging state school boards to write-in a different candidate in the hope that one or other names will actually receive more votes than the intelligent design advocate. Last November, a retired businessman named Sam Schloemer won a seat on the Ohio school board when scientists organized to defeat creationist candidates there. He is the first nominee mentioned as a possible write-in candidate.
When asked, Willard said he believes that the teaching of evolution and/or opposing theories is best left up to individual states, but he admitted to his opinion that alternatives to evolution like intelligent design should have a place in science classrooms. Of course, the conclusion that one can draw from this is that while evolutionary debates have so far stayed within the confines of state school boards, with Mr. Willard’s appointment to a national school board leadership position, that will change dramatically.
In other words, there is still time to influence the votes of the individual states on this, and I bet plenty state boards are none too happy about the Kansan’s stance on evolution. But they will need to reach a consensus on one alternative to Willard in order to be able to defeat him, and that means we need to act by contacting them NOW.
I’ll quote the New York Times article on the subject in closing, because it says in two sentences what a frightening number of American citizens have yet to accept:
“There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on Earth. Courts have repeatedly ruled that creationism and intelligent design are religious doctrines, not scientific theories.”
Period.