Unsilent Generation

Long Live Margaret and Helen

July 14, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I must be a little slow on the uptake. It’s been eight months since I started this blog, which is supposed to be for and about “pissed-off progressive old folks,” yet somehow it’s taken me this long to learn about two fellow bloggers who are supremely qualified for that title. I mean Helen and Margaret, longtime best friends in their eighties who live in Texas and Maine, respectively, and blog at  http://margaretandhelen.wordpress.com.

The banner photo alone is worth the price of admission, and the posts by Helen and Margaret (mostly Helen) are worth reading just for their titles, though you shouldn’t stop there. Recently these titles have included ”Pat Buchanan Is a Cracker,” “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Dick Cheney?” and “My God, Bush Was an Idiot!”, along with equal-opportunity evicerations like ”Bye Bye Evan Bayh” (on the Democrats’ sellout on health care reform). 

I know you must be sick of reading about Sarah Palin and her over-hyped resignation. (As my teachers used to say when some other kid was getting a lot of attention by acting like an asshole, “Just ignore him and he’ll stop.”) But try to find the wherewithal to read Helen’s post on the subject. To give you just a taste:

Things are getting tough and once again she is trying to hide behind that dysfunctional family of hers. She actually stood there and talked about how the Palins had a family meeting and everyone agreed it was time for her to step down as Governor.   Well, I call that bullshit.  The only family meetings the Palins have usually involve someone peeing on an early pregnancy test stick.

 

→ Leave a CommentCategories: radical geezers · right wing · women elders
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On the Death of Robert McNamara and the Continuing Survivial of Dick Cheney

July 11, 2009 · 1 Comment

POETRY AND POLITICS SERIES

Robert McNamara , the former secretary of defense who was–despite his half-baked, late-in-life regrets–one of the primary architects and apologists for the Vietnam War, died last week.

Dick Cheney has played a similar role in the Iraq War, and seems unlikely to have any attacks of hindsight or conscience in his golden years. At the end of June, Cheney offered a damning benediction on the beginning of troop withdrawals from Iraq:  

“I hope the Iraqis can deal with it,” Mr. Cheney said. “At some point they have to stand on their own, but I would not want to see the U.S. waste all the tremendous sacrifice that has gotten us to this point.”

Here’s a poem written by British poet G.K. Chesterton in 1922, after the senseless slaughter of World War I had decimated an entire generation. With the substitution of “America” for “England” (and “men and women” for “men”), it can be fittingly rededicated to McNamara, and especially to Cheney, whose dicky heart is still beating.  

Elegy in a Country Church-Yard

The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home:
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.

But they that fought for England,
Following a falling star,
Alas, alas for England
They have their graves afar.

And they that ruled in England,
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England
They have no graves as yet.

 

Posted by: Jean Casella

→ 1 CommentCategories: Bush Administration · Poetry and Politics · right wing · veterans
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Vive la Geezer

July 11, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Unsilent Generation has taken a break while principal James Ridgeway visits a friend in France. He’s still over there, but is now back at the computer and will be posting again soon.

10450In the meantime, here’s something from the grand old man of French music, Charles Aznavour. For members of the Silent Generation, Aznavour became an international epitome of cool for his chanson and his appearances in films like Truffaut’s 1960 classic Shoot the Piano Player. He began performing while he was still a child, was “discovered” by Edith Piaf, and has recorded more than a thousand songs over almost 70 years. In 1998 he was chosen as “Entertainer of the Century” in a CNN/Time contest, edging out Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan.

At age 85, Aznavour is still recording and touring. Interviewed by the New York Times in 2006, while performing at Radio City Music Hall, he said:  “There are some people who grow old and others who just add years. I have added years, but I am not yet old.” Here’s more from that Times piece:

Even now, while best known around the world as a singer (he has also appeared in more than 50 French movies), Mr. Aznavour considers himself first and foremost a songwriter: he starts with the words, and only later does he or another composer add the melody and rhythm. For him the chanson française is quite simply the art of telling stories to music.

For material he has always counted on love and its pitfalls, but recent songs confirm that he is also ever-alert to what is topical.

“I don’t write stories like novels,” he said. “I don’t invent anything. I bring language to existing facts and events. I read all the newspapers. I watch all the news programs on television. I was the first to write about social issues like homosexuality and the deaf. In my new record I write about unrest in the suburbs, about ecology. I find real subjects and translate them into song.”

One recent record, “Le Voyage,” includes two songs about journalists: in “La Critique,” he snipes at critics and concludes that, “in the end, only the public is right”; and in “Un Mort Vivant,” or “A Living Death,” which he dedicated to Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal correspondent assassinated by Islamic extremists in Pakistan in 2002, Mr. Aznavour pays tribute to reporters who risk their lives while seeking the truth.

And here is Aznavour performing “The Old-Fashioned Way” at Carnegie Hall in 1995, at age 71.

 

Posted by: Jean Casella 

→ Leave a CommentCategories: arts and literature · elder books / arts · international
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More on Congress’s Addiction to the Drug Lobby

July 6, 2009 · Leave a Comment

The Washington Post this morning prints an lengthy article and elaborate chart showing the numbers of drug lobbyists at work on the health reform legislation. This list includes a little congress in itself of former aides and members that only lots and lots of money could buy.

The nation’s largest insurers, hospitals and medical groups have hired more than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress in hopes of influencing their old bosses and colleagues, according to an analysis of lobbying disclosures and other records.

The tactic is so widespread that three of every four major health-care firms have at least one former insider on their lobbying payrolls, according to The Washington Post’s analysis. Nearly half of the insiders previously worked for the key committees and lawmakers….

The hirings are part of a record-breaking influence campaign by the health-care industry, which is spending more than $1.4 million a day on lobbying in the current fight, according to disclosure records. And even in a city where lobbying is a part of life, the scale of the effort has drawn attention. For example, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) doubled its spending to nearly $7 million in the first quarter of 2009, followed by Pfizer, with more than $6 million.

Valuable as this information is, you have to wonder whether the paper would have published any of this without Politico’s expose of publisher Katherine Weymouth’s audacious plan to hold a salon where, in exchange for fees running as high as $250,000, from the lobbyists, she would bring the paper’s reporters, key administration sources, and other notables to her home for a private confab on health care—like a little closed committee session, if you will, where the Post could facilitate Obama’s reform on industry’s terms. Once the plan was made public Weymouth cancelled the salon and apologized.

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American Dreams

July 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

POETRY AND POLITICS SERIES

Jean Casella, my longtime editor, who has published, edited, and written about books for twenty years, has agreed to bring some culture to Unsilent Generation by posting a literary excerpt every now and then, along with reviews of books, movies, and music.

For July the 4th, she sent me these two poems, one from the 1930s (and especially relevant to our current economic conditions), and one from the 1950s (which reminds me what things were like in this country when I was young). In both, the poets confront their nation about its failure to live up to its own promise, and its own mythmaking. Both, I think, are examples of what Howard Zinn meant when he said that dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

I can’t post these in their entirety for copyright reasons, but urge you to follow the links and read them through.

 

Let American Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)…

Read the complete poem here.

 

America
by Allen Ginsberg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument….

Read the complete poem here.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Great Depression · Poetry and Politics · Silent Generation · radical geezers
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Air France 447 Report: French Duck for Cover

July 3, 2009 · 1 Comment

I am posting this morning a lengthy comment I received from Manuel Garcia, Jr.,a retired engineering physicist, who wrote a most informative critique in Counterpunch.

His original article there—”The New Crisis in Aviation”—provides a detailed analysis of Flight 447, and is well worth reading. Garcia can be reached at: mango@idiom.com. Garcia writes:

I notice two things about the AF447 BEA investigation (http://www.bea-fr.org/anglaise/actualite/actu.htm) news stories today: 1) the plane held together till the bitter end, including the tail, and 2) Airbus planes are completely safe, keep flying folks:

[Quoting the Washington Post]
Despite the lingering mystery about what led to the plane’s sudden plunge, [Alain Bouillard, who is heading a probe by the French Investigation and Analysis Bureau] said he saw no reason at this point to ground the twin-engine Airbus A330 or for passengers not to board such aircraft with confidence. “As far as I am concerned, there is no problem flying these aircraft,” he told reporters.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/02/AR2009070201409.html?hpid=sec-world

So, the plane hits in one piece at one spot, and the tail is found six days later about 50 km south of most the rest of the debris field, which stretches about 150 km north, with the bodies pretty much along a line, and bits of wreckage flung out 50 km each way laterally from that track. China Airline 611, a 747, broke up at 35,000 in 2002 — a badly repaired rear pressure bulkhead gave way, explosive decompression — a breakup first into four pieces (estimated from radar) and ultimate scatter over 130 km; and AF447 pinpoints in one spot and has equivalent scatter? Maybe the ocean currents did spread out the AF447 debris that far; but some data on the currents and perhaps some computer models of the dispersal would sure make that argument more convincing to those of use not experts at marine drifts.

Regardless of any technical analysis (and the BEA people are closer to the data and specimens than I can ever be, and they have access to specialists, which I am not) it seems pretty obvious that if more Airbus planes had fallen out of the sky because their composite tails fell and/or broke off, then the world would be screaming to ground the entire fleet immediately. And Boeing’s increasing delayed Dreamliner would start looking like a Plumbob Zeppelin. So, AF447 has to hold together because it is holding ‘everything’ together. There was already a crisis in civil aviation before AF447 died, because of high fuel prices and the economic crash — ticket sales were down, airplane orders (at the Paris Air Show) were absent, and the buyer’s market has people demanding and getting bargain tickets. What government agency is going to sink it’s civil air transport sector over one or two little crashes?

There is big fear out there about the management of the public mind, and the fearful withdrawal of its pocketbook. Back in 1958 Queen Elizabeth II even went abroad on the new de Havilland Comet to instill confidence back into the British aero industry. But, that was after the Comets had been grounded for over three years while the problem was solved. The prospect of over twelve quarters of no cash flow is not a viable option today. Who says there is no human sacrifice in our society? Instead of war captives spread out on stone altars to have their hearts ripped out on state holidays, we send bundles of people off on low-odds sudden termination lotteries in jumbo plastic airplanes, or death-wad and toxin-laced junk food mass feedings and drug trials. Our capitalist society is a like casino where you’re forced to play a slot machine, and if the long odds come up against you then it blows up in your face. The concept is deemed OK (by those raking in the chips) because the odds of bad stuff are “low.” Russian Roulette with 8 million empty chambers in the barrel is OK, so just pay up and keep pulling the trigger.

I hope they find the recorders, because I have a belief they will clear the pilots (the presumption of good piloting is a purely emotional attitude on my part), and because I think it would be enormously helpful to aeronautical engineers to finally decipher the instrument failures and sequence of forces that occurred on AF447. The price for this lesson was unwillingly paid by 228 people. I fear that not finding the recorders will become politically convenient, and suspect that the blame game has now completely taken over: anyone with a perceived liability regarding AF447 is in Red Alert CYA mode, and many with a loss or perceived potential for gain are weaving court filings (some no doubt quite justified). The French and the Brazilians already had a finger-pointing tiff early in the search, about what was or wasn’t real AF447 wreckage, and what might or might not have happened as regards in-flight breakup. The BEA report of 2 July points to air traffic sluggishness in Brazil and more so in Senegal as delaying the start of search-and-rescue. In seems unlikely that starting the search planes six hours earlier would have made any difference; the wreckage of AF447 would have sunk in minutes, and since there seems to have been no fire, there would be no ocean-surface fuel-burning to see. Despite the news reports (officially leaks) of autopsy findings in Brazil, and the participation of French medical forensic observers, the BEA complains it has not received the official autopsy results from Brazil. Probably true, but why?, is it all PR jockeying for world news media, CYA, and finger-pointing?

The BEA’s conclusion about an intact impact may be correct, but I will find it more convincing when they present step-by-step reasoning that ties all known facts (or proves individual facts spurious) into a sequence that produces their conclusion. That, and making their data public so independent analysts can replicate their findings, would be a first payment of honorable compensation to the dead. The principal of the rest of that debt would be to re-engineer the air transport fleet to prevent the technical failures that occurred on AF447. To do that we have to know what they were.

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Airbus Goes Down in Indian Ocean in “Strong Wind”

June 30, 2009 · 3 Comments

It is far too early to tell whether structural problems had anything to do with the Yemeni Airbus crash earlier today in the Indian Ocean, as it headed for landing in Moroni, capital of the former French colony of the Comoros Islands. One hundred fifty three people are presumed to have died. One child was initially reported to have survived the crash.

The BBC reports on problems in the past with the Yemenia plane that crashed today:

The Yemenia Airbus 310 flight IY626 was flying from the Yemeni capital Sanaa, but many passengers on the plane began their journey in France. The EU voiced concern about Yemenia’s safety and proposed a world blacklist of those carriers deemed unsafe. The EU already has its own list, and its Transport Commissioner, Antonio Tajani, said such a list would be a “safety guarantee for all”.

Another EU official told Reuters news agency there were concerns about the airline’s “incomplete reporting procedure and incomplete follow-up” following 2007 tests on the aircraft which crashed, but that its record was improving.

But relatives gathered at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport and at Marseille Marignane airport to wait for news expressed anger about the state of the aircraft used by Yemenia, which is is 51% owned by the Yemeni government and 49% by the Saudi government. ”They put us aboard wrecks, they put us aboard coffins. That’s where they put us. It’s slaughter. It’s slaughter,” one relative in Paris told French TV. The AP reports:

Stephane Salord, the Comoros’ honorary consul in Marseille, called Yemenia’s aircraft “flying cattle trucks.” “This A310 is a plane that has posed problems for a long time, it is absolutely inadmissible that this airline Yemenia played with the lives of its passengers this way,” he said.

“Some people stand the whole way to Moroni,” said Mohamed Ali, a Comoran who went to Yemenia’s headquarters in Paris to try to get more information.

Thoue Djoumbe, a 28-year-old woman who lives in the French town of Fontainebleau, said she and others had complained about the airline for years. “It’s a lottery when you travel to Comoros,” said Djoumbe. “We’ve organized boycotts, we’ve told the Comoran community not to fly on Yemenia airways because they make a lot of money off of us and meanwhile the conditions on the planes are disastrous.”

By mid morning, Yemeni officials were blaming the weather. It has been said the first attempted landing was aborted, and the crash appears to have happened during a second attempt. The wind speed recorded on land at the airport was under 40 miles an hour, but Agence France Presse quoted a Yemeni official saying that winds were gusting up to 70 mph over rough seas. This is turbulent weather, but still ought to be something a widebody commercial jet can handle.

Turbulence has also been cited as a contributing factor in earlier Airbus crashes. Air France 447 crashed amidst thunder storms. Another Airbus crashed after take off in New York in 2001. Safety officials said that was due to co-pilot misusing the rudder as the plane was being buffetted about in the wake of another aircraft.

As I’ve written about in the recent past, questions have been raised about the structural design of the Airbus 300-series planes–in particular, points where the tail is attached to the main plane. Under pressure, some say, the tail can snap off possibly because the bolts that hold it to the plane are made of composite materials, as are other parts of the plane. But at this point, with no detailed analysis yet made public, by either the company or French investigators who have been dispatched to the scene, such suspicions remain unsubstantiated.

Bloomberg News reports that French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau cited past “faults” found in inspections of the crashed A310, which led Yemenia to be placed “under strict surveillance.” But he was quick to rule out connections to other accidents on Airbus planes, which are produced in France.

The French minister ruled out any link between the crashes of Yemenia’s A310 and Air France’s A330. “It would be as if there were two accidents with Clios and we withdrew all Clios from the road,” Bussereau said in remarks televised from Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris, referring to the model from carmaker Renault SA.

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Congress’s $1.2 Million a Day Drug Habit

June 30, 2009 · Leave a Comment

When it comes to securing their interests against even the flimsiest of threats, the drug-makers’ pockets appear bottomless. A look at last week’s Center for Responsive Politics report on the industry offers an awe-inspiring view of the druggies in action: To begin with, we’re not talking about a handful of lobbyists twisting the arms of members of Congress. Pharma had 1,814 flacks at work last year and 1,309 in the first 3 months of this year. That’s 12 percent of all the lobbyists in Washington. Last year alone the drug industry spent $234 million on lobbying. In the first three months of this year, it spent more than $66.5 million–$1.2 million a day. And that doesn’t include polling, advertising, and research. Among the top recipients of Pharma funds are several members of the Senate Finance Committee, including Chair Max Baucus, who have positioned themselves as a “coalition of the willing” dedicated to promoting a bipartisan middle ground on health care reform–in other words, minor changes that won’t seriously affect private sector profits.

And that’s just what we’re getting from Big Pharma, in the form of a phony “discount” program for Medicare recipients. As I wrote last week, the drug-makers are offering a 50 percent discount–on brand name drugs only–to old and disabled people when they fall into the Part D coverage gap known as the “donut hole.” Pharma’s purported “gift” to seniors, and to the health care reform effort, is actually a smart long-term business strategy, since it is likely to keep Medicare recipients hooked on brand name drugs, rather than switching to less costly generics when they reach the gap.

A study released last year by Wolters Kluwer Health showed “clear evidence of a growing affinity for generics and a continual slide away from brands” since the institution of the Medicare prescription drug program. In 2007, the study found, generics accounted for 67 percent of the Part D market, up from 50 percent just three years earlier. “What’s most striking,” said a VP of the information services company, “is the fact that of those who discontinue their branded drug therapy in the coverage gap, only 6% return to them after leaving the gap.”

In other words, seniors keep taking the cheaper generics, even once the government starts picking up the bill again in the new calendar year. Since most Medicare recipients spend more time outside of the donut hole than in it, the drug-makers could actually see a big payoff from their discount program if it keeps a fair number of elders taking the brand name drugs, and keeps the government—and the taxpayers—funding them.

All this points to the fact that despite their protestations, the drug companies (and insurance companies) have no real objection to health care “reform,” as long as it happens on their terms. The Republican-penned Medicare prescription drug bill, for example, was a huge boon to both industries, opening up a mammoth new market for their products, with the government footing the bill. 

What the drug-makers want to avoid, then and now, is an end to what Dean Baker calls “their government-granted monopolies,” which allow them “to charge whatever they want. As a result, we pay nearly twice as much for our prescription drugs as people in countries like Canada and Germany.

By making voluntary “concessions,” the industry positions itself to combat any real change that might affect its profit margins. And with drug spending estimated to total $3.3 trillion over the next decade, $80 billion in discounts is a small price for Big Pharma to pay to preserve its stranglehold on the American health care system. And so is $1.2 million a day to preserve its friends in high places in the United States Congress.

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My AARP True Confession

June 28, 2009 · 4 Comments

By now readers will have noticed that I hardly ever have anything nice to say about AARP. I do sometimes cite their studies, which provide some valuable information. But I’ve also bashed them several times, both here on Unsilent Generation and in Mother Jones, for making money by selling insurance–an inherent conflict of interest for a group that is supposed to represent older Americans’ interests in health care debates. I’ve even dissed their magazine, which to me always comes off as a Cosmo wannabe for old farts. 

AARP's Temple of the Geezers. Photo by Kimbar from Flickr.

AARP's Temple of the Geezers. Photo by Kimbar from Flickr.

I can tell from the comments I’ve gotten (not to mention the hundreds of oldsters who burned their AARP membership cards when the group supported Bush’s Medicare drug bill) that I’m not the only one who feels this way. In response to my latest post about AARP, reader George Fulmore remarks that “AARP doesn’t have one of the largest, most impressive buildings in downtown Washington, D.C., primarily by being a supporter for the elderly. From the start, AARP has been in the insurance business and has been profitable.” (It’s true–AARP’s HQ looks like some kind of castle, complete with courtyards and turrets, and takes up a full city block. You don’t build a place like that just off of $16 membership fees.)

In view of all this, I think I need to come clean with George and the rest of my readers: Hello, my name is Jim, and I am an AARP member.

That’s right, like millions of other American elders, I have developed a dependency on AARP. In fact, I’m not only a member, but also a willing participant in their insurance scams. I have not one, but two types of  AARP Medicare insurance: Medigap supplemental insurance, and a Part D prescription plan. 

Why do I do this, knowing what I know? I really don’t have much of an answer. Part of it is fear and loathing of the insurance industry, which over time I have experienced as a bunch of con artists and double crossers in the health, auto, life, and home areas. I realize, of course, that AARP is merely a middleman, which works in partnership with United Healtcare. But even though I know better, I feel more comfortable dealing with AARP than dealing directly with the insurance companies. 

Most important, I think, is the fact that when you call up AARP you actually talk to a live human being. And most of the time the people answering the phone sound like real people, not programmed sales staff. If they can’t answer your questions, they politely pass you along to another real person. This is unheard of in this day and age–speaking to two live people in one phone call. I suspect this is a major selling point for a lot of people, especially older people who grew up in an age before impersonal automated phone systems. I know it’s a pretty flimsy standard on which to base my choice of an insurance provider. But then again, in the United States, the bar is set so low that it doesn’t take much.

I’d sincerely like to overcome my AARP habit, but I don’t think I’m ready yet to make the break. All I can say is that I look forward to the day when all parts of Medicare take their place in a true and complete single-payer system, with the insurance companies left out in the cold–and AARP with them. Then I’ll be first in line to sign up for AARP Anonymous.

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AARP Lines Up Behind Pharma–Again

June 25, 2009 · 2 Comments

AARP was among the very first to register support of the drug industry’s announcement of $30 billion in price cuts to Medicare beneficiaries, which are supposed to help us out when we fall into the donut hole in Medicare Part D’s prescription drug coverage. AARP head man Barry Rand, standing behind the President in announcing the deal, said just what Big Pharma must have wanted to hear: “This is an early win for reform and a major step forward. It is a signal the process is working and will work.”

AARP is positioned as a nonprofit advocacy group for the interests of older people–and sometimes it actually acts like one. But when it comes to anything involving the health insurance business, it has private interests of its own. AARP offers Medicare supplemental policies as well as Part D policies–in fact, these insurance plans, offered in conjunction with the private insurance company UnitedHealthcare, are a major source of the group’s income.

AARP already gave one big boost to Big Pharma’s profits when it decided to support George W. Bush’s privatized Medicare Part D program, which was a boon to both the insurance and drug companies. Now its cheerleading for the pharma proposal. While it might look benevolent on the surface, the discount program will likely channel more oldsters onto brand name drugs (see yesterday’s post), or keep them there when they might otherwise switch to generics. It will also enhance the position of the Part D insurance plans, which under the law get to run the federal funded prescription program. The largest provider of this insurance is, of course, AARP/UnitedHealthcare.

Reformers have argued that drug prices can be cut if the government steps in and runs the Part D program itself, just as it runs traditional Medicare, thereby eliminating the insurance industry as a go-between. This totally freaks out the pharma guys, who not only see themselves losing business, but fear any federal extension into their protected “freemarket” will be the beginning of a domino cascade that will end up with socialists making them walk the plank. (If only!)  So Big Pharma’s discouint deal is a twofer—a sales ploy for the drug industry, and protection for the insurance companies running the Medicare program.

All of this underscores the basic politics of health care “reform.” Journalists who are wrestling to make sense out of different polls, and running back and forth from one politician to another—from Baucus to Grassley to Dodd to whoever, while listening to Obama’s earnest pleas—don’t seem to get it. Health care politics is run by a troika of the insurance industry, Big Pharma, and the doctors. And when Obama says he doesn’t care what’s in the plan, he means it. The industry guys cut the deal—not him, not the politicians on Capitol Hill.  And for God sake, least of all the public.

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