To start Medicare for All, we need to go slow to not worry the system as it is. Slow might mean presenting a Medicare Card to every newborn with the special rider that it also cover pre, peri and post-natal care. This is a way for Grandpa and Grandma to support Medicare For All. What is good for the Grandma will be good enough for the grandchild, something we could do for the unborn and the adoptability of the baby.
Medicare for the newborn would get the most return for the Medicare card on the beginning of life during childhood diseases, appendectomies, strep throats and ear aches. Each year, we would have to anticipate and adjust the current insurance practices by about 1.5 %. This way, in 65 years we would look over our shoulder and find we no longer have families crushed by medical debts.
Now, if you feel that this is too incremental, consider this year giving a Medicare card to the babies and to everyone who is aged 64, then next year to those 63 years old, then the following year 62 and so forth until 33 years accrued, during which time the middle-aged people would have hope for themselves to have a Medicare card. This method would require a 3% adjustment per year. This preserves the fee for-service “system” we have as we answer the questions, “If not us, who?” and “If not now, when?”
It is said that 70% of the US population cannot afford a $600 automobile brake job. Becoming increasingly relieved of medical bankruptcies, this group would become more vested in stability. Medicare was always meant to expand. Let us start with this year’s babies and next year’s Medicare card recipients.
MICHAEL. P. McCAFFERY, Marshfield, Wis.
We are a nation, a world divided-by a faux sense of superiority and a complete denial of what human history has wrought. The multiple media resources that continue to spew their hateful divisive rhetoric defy.reason and logic. The absolute idiocy and arrogance of those who.righteously profess, “My religion, my God is better than yours,” “My gospel is the only route to salvation,” “My ideology, my politics is the better way, the right way,” “White people are superior to Black people, Red people, Brown people, Yellow people and every in-between hue not deemed Caucasian” is unequivocal, unadulterated nonsense.·If we as. a nation/world don’t immediately recognize that throughout time the aforementioned issues that have divided multiple cultures have been perpetrated by a segment of male populations to oppress and control others, along with creating wars, thereby continuing intergenerational racial and ethnic hatreds.
We the United States of America, as a leader of the free world, must set the example and take the first step to end this insanity. As long as political entities and ideological zealots continue on their paths of “divide and conquer” strategies, they do so with the inevitable destruction-of.our-very fragile global societies and civilization itself.
Until we (US) adhere to the underlying meanings within the first inclusive words of the Constitution, we (pl.) common-general ourselves,”In order to form a more perfect union,” I don’t believe the-Egalitarian Society espoused within it calls for a male dominated/governed nation anymore than it should be-the other way around. The reality is that in a society governed by both genders equally there is a greater sense of ownership, belonging and equality for the rest of the world to see and emulate. Let us stop deluding ourselves first, so the rest of the world can follow.
FRANK ROHRIG, Milford, Conn.
In an unfathomable hissy fit of electoral malfeasance, head-in-the-sand America ceded the nation’s future to the shameless, morally bankrupt majordomo of a Manhattan clan of grifters.
Now their illicit operations are funded by our tax dollars and aided and abetted by venal Trumpublican co-conspirators, cowards and grovelers.
Ill-informed, exploitable, aching to belong and preternaturally acquiescent, Trumpists swooned when a snake oil salesman with authoritarian fantasies cynically validated their bitter howls of resentment and imagined white superiority and privilege. Their abject masochism just begged for his gleeful sadism.
So, they accept the unacceptable, embrace the unthinkable and parrot the unspeakable. With Wrestlemaniacal zeal, they exalt a lowbrow, scapegoating demagogue whose pathologies and lusting for a throne are made manifest daily.
Forgotten are his unfulfilled promises, forgiven are his endless lies and self-pitying whines about hoaxes and witchhunts, gobbled up are the secondhand conspiracy theories, and, most disturbingly, ignored is the unassailable fact that Trump’s America is on a knife’s edge and decidedly less safe, stable, healthy, civilized and respected.
His cult cares not that he lacks both knowledge and wisdom, has the soil of a winter landfill, treats people like spittoons and pulls ideas out of a a fascist hat while playing domestic and geopolitical Jenga with people’s lives.
The MAGA-hatted regressive mindsets, feral impulses and selective ethics created our national nightmare … a Kafkaesque, kaleidoscopic amalgam of Nero, Mussolini, George Wallace, P.T. Barnum, Yosemite Sam, Manchurian candidate and adipose tissue.
As Trump’s laziness, incompetence, constitutional carnage, narcissistic aggression and soul-sucking darkness are increasingly exposed, he is unravelling like an arsonist trapped in a burning building.
Ever clueless and now cornered and desperate, he is ominously flailing away at demons, both real and imagined, like a blindfolded drunk flummoxed by a piñata.
KEVIN BREYETTE, Rouses Point, N.Y.
You know, after listening to Trump’s babble in South Dakota and Washington, D.C., over the 4th of July weekend, I could write volumes over what he said, between bouts of puking, but I’ll limit it to just one topic.
I’m really sick and tired of Trump talking about “his” military. Look, we have a president who chickened out when it was his turn to serve. Never spent a day in uniform, never wanted anything to do with the military when his ass was on the line, but now, all of a sudden, he loves the military and puts on these rallies and extravagant flyover sideshows, at taxpayer expense, to try and convince the American people that he is a true patriot, a “real” American and that he bleeds red, white and blue.
Why do the people with the biggest mouths always have nothing to say? Trump is a total phony!
MIKE EKLUND, Mercer, Wis.
To wear, or not to wear masks, that is the question ... not to prevent coronavirus from spreading, but for a more important reason: Quien es mas macho (who is more macho)?
Obviously, one who wears Trump’s MAGA cap but no mask, is more macho than anyone who wears a mask. It’s as simple as that.
And of course the Macho-in-Chief who occupies the White House will not wear a mask — not even if his life were to depend on it. After all, real men wear MAGA caps — never masks! Masks are for effeminate wimps with no guts.
Thus, you’ll never see a mask on the face of a John Wayne type American — one who chews nails and spits rust. In short, a genuine American who is willing to die for his flag and his MAGA cap. And sadly, to prove that he is mucho macho.
DAVID QUINTERO, Monrovia, Calif.
The 400-year history of the killing of unarmed Black people has and continues to be systemic to enforcing White Supremacy through terrorizing a whole non-white population. The more frivolous the basis for the killing, the more effective the terror. The killer has been a slave owner, a law enforcement person or white vigilantes. In the present circumstance, a very large minority of white Americans, since 2016, have lifted the lid on White Supremacy and its ethnic and racial violence. They have turned the clock back 100 years. The remaining white population hasn’t acknowledged the meaning of the killings — Its support of white privilege — and has not risen to disown it for what it is and thereby oppose it.
To expect reconciliation and healing without acknowledging the basis for the killings has been a persistent failure.
History lives in the present and the future unless it is accurately and fully accounted, understood and resolved. In that light, the human family groans under the weight of centuries of problematic, if not immoral, behavior. The consequences continue to play out. This is seen in the historical cultural memory of ethnic groups everywhere. For many people, it is like a birth trauma. This is true for Jews (the Holocaust and 1,700 years of Christian culture), for Palestinian Arabs (The Nakba: the tragedy), for Iranians (the American/British overthrow of secular democratic government in 1953 and imposition of 25 years of terror and death), for Armenians (the genocide by Turkey), and for non-white Americans the history of slavery, Jim Crow terrorism, mass incarceration and the present iteration of lynching. For some, being born into this world is being born into the fear of extinction — at the hands of fellow humans —-that clouds ones ability to accurately asses current reality. Past wrongs must be acknowledged and righted before one can safely move on to secure living without the need to always be looking back, to be able to trust the present and the future.
The author of “Just Mercy”, Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative which created the Legacy Museum — from enslavement to mass incarceration — and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice — hanging markers for 4,400 documented lynchings — both in Montgomery, Ala., seeks Truth and Reconciliation. He affirms that Truth must come first. Copies of each hanging marker are waiting for the sites of each lynching to claim the copy of the marker and thereby own the act; allowing reconciliation to move forward. To acknowledge the truth and meaning of the current killing of unarmed Black people AND the long history sustaining it, will not come easily, but if it doesn’t happen our society will come apart and move further into fascism. War as a way of life now has the militarized police and US military guns pointed at American citizens with the explicit threat to “dominate” the streets, eliminating the constitutional right to protest. If Black Americans don’t have a right to life, White Americans won’t have that right. This is a white person’s problem; on a moral and an existential basis.
VICK MACKS, St. Clair Shores, Mich.
I believe that the reason why Donald Trump focuses so much on the lifestyle, social, “identity-politics” and “culture-war” issues while focusing much less on the economic, financial, “bread-and-butter” and “kitchen-table” issues (which I happen to focus on) is because research clearly shows that when the Democrats focus on “my” issues they win almost every national election in every two years, and when they focus on “his” issues they lose almost every national election in every two years.
He knows exactly what he is doing and why.
STEWART B. EPSTEIN, Rochester, New York
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2020
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