Eighty percent of my feed reader, and that doesn’t include my homepages on Google, contain posts about the Nobel Prize. I don’t think I’ve seen much else, so overwhelmed has my reader been by all this foolish Nobel frenzy. From the time Obama woke up, heard the news, muttered a few expletives, showered, dressed, and accepted a prize for a path he has yet to walk, I’ve read nothing else.

This is distracting us from things we need to discuss, most notably health care reform, the unnecessary health insurance industry, the much watered down, and practically unrecognizable, compromise for National Health Care called the Public Option. An option that, despite it all, the majority of Americans want.

Enough of the melodrama being played out in the inept theater of the media.

I’d settle for reading anything else this weekend really, your experience drinking beer at ten in the morning at the local Fall Festival beer garden, your quest for the great pumpkin, or your search for a women’s Halloween costume that doesn’t scream “I’m the object of your sexual desire take me”, the story of your sad lonely hours as a researcher in the uni library, or the secret crush you have on the guy who serves you your every two hour Latte.

I hope to answer previous post comments and read a ton of blog posts tomorrow. Tonight, I’m exhausted from drinking beers at ten in the morning at the local Fall Festival beer garden, my quest for the great pumpkin, searching for a women’s Halloween costume that doesn’t scream “I’m the object of your sexual desire take me”, my lonely hours as a researcher in the uni library, and thinking about the secret crush I have on the guy who serves me your every two hour nonfat Latte.

peace

Domestic Violence is endemic in the United States, enough to have caused the label “pre-existing condition” to be placed on it by the insurance industries operating in some states.

Society, more specifically American Society, has been slow to recognize domestic violence as an ubiquitous societal problem. Viewing domestic violence as a personal problem makes this ribbon an unlikely cash cow, leaving the ribbon unsought by corporate giants, the cause largely ignored by the coorporate world. We still view Domestic Violence much in the same way we used to see AIDS (often still view AIDS), as a lifestyle issue, something that can’t happen to anyone. Breast cancer we view as something that can happen to anyone, even to people who make stellar lifestyle choices.

Domestic Violence can happen to anyone.

Domestic Violence occurs across all demographic groups. Official (reported) rates of nonlethal, intimate violence are highest among women aged sixteen to twenty-four, women in households in the lowest income categories, and women residing in urban areas. However, the current information is insufficient to determine, but significant enough to suggest that’s because middle and upper class women have more access to care, an easier road to moving on and out, or are less likely to report the violence, than women who are less educated and less financially secure.

The aforementioned attitude is the reason the purple ribbon is not nearly as popular on Yogurt, mid-level to upscale department store logos, high end cosmetics, or blogs. And this despite the estimated 4 to 5 million women, in the United States alone, affected by this societal scourge every year.

Some would propose — including Oate’s main protagonist Skyler, (channeling Geertz), in her less than lauded My Sister my Love — that human nature, but for human culture, is virtually non-existent. As a society we must begrudgingly, with sadness, and with feigned disbelief if necessary, admit this to be the case. It is not the nature of the beast causing continued violence, it is not a lifestyle issue, it is the culture, the social construction, that allowed it to begin, and permits it’s to continue. We have no choice but that of changing the culture.

Take some time this month to educate yourself on the domestic violence endemic in your country.

Links:

Sources: National Domestic Violence Hotline, National Center for Victims of Crime, and WomensLaw.org.

The Domestic Violence Awareness Project

United States Department of Justice Office of Violence Against Women

National Domestic Violence Hotline

NRCDV

NCADV

WOMEN LAW.ORG

Women’s Health Dot Gov – State Resources

Recent News:
Democrats vow to ban domestic violence as ‘pre-existing condition

Books:

No Visible Wounds: Identifying Non-Physical Abuse of Women by Their Men

The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize it and How to Respond

Domestic Violence at the Margins: Readings on Race, Class, Gender, and Culture

Peace

Click to Enlarge.

Reform without a public option can still remedy a lot of these ills, as long as there’s enough regulation. But it’s not clear there will be, which is why Rockefeller is speaking out–and why he should be.

What Rockefeller Understands Johnathan Cohn.

Bad Congressmen. They are like dogs. If you feed them, and obviously the insurance industry is feeding them, they obey. The insurance industry big shots are sitting down to their — not on the healthy diet list, French chef served — dinners this evening, sighing with relief, and doing a impertinent yet malicious fist bump. “We did it again, phew that was close, a bottle of 1945 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild Jeroboam, if you please waiter”.

Addendum: I found this blog saying something which may end up true. Showing that the insurance companies are the only ones laughing this quote says it all.

I actually think we are going to get a reform that is both worse than the status quo and worse than a pure single payer system.

Kudos to our Congress!

As I understand it, insurance companies will not be able to refuse to cover some one, nor will they be able to charge high risk people a premium that reflects their risk. The price won’t be uniform, but the maximum variation will be well below what it would take to correctly price the variation in risks.

As I noted before, this will make premiums for healthy people extra high. And as the WSJ pointed out yesterday, at least on the margin, it will make healthy people want to hold off from getting any insurance until they are actually sick.

Problem solved, you say?

Ahh, but now it appears that the third leg of the trinity will be rule that it will be illegal to not have insurance!

So young healthy people will be forced to buy way overpriced (relative to their risk) insurance. Plus if said young healthy people make good money, they can look forward to paying more taxes to subsidize the purchase of said insurance by others.

Guaranteed Issue, Community Rating, Individual Mandate. They sound so reasonable and innocuous, but they are freakin’ lethal.

Other Chain Yankers:

Love that some film critic is questioning the ethics of the DA in the Polanski case, and only 1 WAPO columnist out of 3 not defending him. Thank you Eugene.

While were on ethics, I don’t care if the Polanski case is politically motivated. It doesn’t make Polanski any less guilty, nor does his age, or his films. His genius means nothing to me. I could have lived without his films. We gain nothing by them, at least not more than we lose by letting someone who raped, and drugged, a 13 year old go free, because genius, celebrity, entitlement, and the support of various film industry persona, makes some think he should.

Peace