Guerilla Theatre as Effective Peaceable Assembly

Today in Gay History

Happy 138th Birthday
MARCEL PROUST (1871-1922)
Premier French Novelist

Proust, who was himself homosexual, or as he termed it "inverted," was one of the first European novelists to treat homosexuality openly and at length. His major work, the epic novel À la recherche du temps perdu (later translated as A Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), was published in seven volumes. The work contains over 2000 literary characters, many of whom are homosexual or lesbian. It spans some 3200 pages.

Born to wealthy and educated parents in Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, he was well educated and studied law and philosophy at the Sorbonne, receiving degrees in both fields. He lived with his parents until the age of 34, and never held any job outside of his writing. His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. His father died in November 1903 and his beloved mother died in September 1905. She left him a considerable inheritance. (In US dollars circa 2006, the principal amount was worth about $6 million, with a monthly income of about $15,000.) His health throughout this period continued to deteriorate.

He wrote the seven volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu commencing in 1910, and was still working on them when he died in 1922. The final 3 were pubished after his death.

Proust spent the last three years of his life mostly confined to his bedroom, sleeping during the day and working at night to complete his novel. He died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922.

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The New Head of the Tea Party

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Happy Anniversary
To My Norman

~~~~ My Partner, Sweetheart, Confidante, Comforter
~~~ my Husband, and my truest and dearest Friend. You are my best Inspiration.

You are my biggest Grin, heartiest Laugh,
Deepest Sigh and sole Contentment.

The Highest Highs
would not be worth remembering
without You.

The Lowest Lows
would have long ago become unbearable
were You not here to lighten their burden.

You are my best Refuge, and
I could hide myself away from the world
with You alone
and never miss any other part of it.

I renew my promise to always
Love you Big As the Moon,
Twice as High, and
Forever!
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TODAY in Gay History

h/t to Joe.My.God

Today: DC Recognizes Marriage Euality

At 12:01am this morning, Washington DC began recognizing the validity of same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions. Here's what that gets you if you are married elsewhere and move to the District:

Gay couples residing in DC but legally married elsewhere are now entitled to more than 200 legal rights extended to all married couples. The rights include: inheritance, benefits for spouses of employees at private companies and in the District's government and spousal immunity from testifying against each other.

The DC City Council is expected to move to allow local same-sex marriages in the fall.

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Will Congress Throw Out the Baby Thinking Public Options are all Bath Water?

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Stand Out Story of the Week

Innocence Lost

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HAPPY JULY 4th, May God Forgive America

Compare and Contrast: A Woman With Pneumonia Goes to The Local Clinic

By Susie Madrak posted in Crooks & Liars blog Jul 01, 2009

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From Coalition of the Obvious, via Avedon, this useful "compare and contrast" on national health care systems. It especially means something to me because a few years back, after my unemployment ran out and I was working an hourly job, I developed pneumonia and couldn't afford to pay for a chest x-ray. I'm glad I'm still alive to tell the tale:

During my time in Venezuela, I developed a cough that went on for three weeks and progressively worsened. Finally, after I had become incredibly congested and developed a fever, I decided to attend a Barrio Adentro clinic. The closest one available was a Barrio Adentro II Centro de Diagonostico Integral (CDI) and I headed in without my medical records or calling to make an appointment. Immediately, I was ushered into a small room where Carmen, a friendly Cuban doctor, began questioning me about my symptoms. She listened to my lungs and walked me over to another examination room where, again without waiting, I had x-rays taken.

Afterwards, the technician walked me to a chair and apologized profusely that I had to wait for the x-rays to be developed, promising that it would take no more than five minutes. Sure enough, five minutes later he returned with both x-rays developed. Carmen studied the x-rays and informed me that I had pneumonia, showing me the telltale shadows. She sent me away with my x-rays, three medications to treat my pneumonia, congestion, and fever, and made me promise to come back if my conditioned failed to improve or worsened within three days.

I walked out of the clinic with a diagnosis and treatment within twenty-five minutes of entering, without paying a dime. There was no wait, no paperwork, and no questions about my ability to pay, my nationality, or whether, as a foreigner, I was entitled to free comprehensive health care. There was no monetary value connected with my physical well-being; the care I received was not contingent upon my ability to pay. I was treated with dignity, respect, and compassion, my illness was cured and I was able to continue with my journey in Venezuela.

This past year, a family friend was not so lucky. At the age of 56, she was going back to school and was uninsured. She came down with what she thought was a severe case of the flu, and as her condition worsened she decided not to see a doctor because of the cost. She died at home in bed, losing her life to a system that did not respect her basic human right to survive.

Her death is not an isolated incident. Over 18,000 United States residents die every year because of their lack of prohibitively expensive health insurance. The United States has the distinct honor of being the “only wealthy industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have coverage”.(8)

Instead, we have commodified the public health and well being of those live in the US, leaving them on their own to obtain insurance. Those whose jobs do not provide insurance, can’t get enough hours to qualify for health care coverage through their workplace, are unemployed, or have “previously existing conditions” that exclude them from coverage are forced to choose between the potentially fatal decision of refusing medical care and accumulating medical bills that trap them in an inescapable cycle of debt. And sometimes, that decision is made for them. Doctors often ask that dreaded question; “do you have insurance?” before scheduling critical tests, procedures, or treatments. When the answer is no, treatments that were deemed necessary before are suddenly canceled as the ability to pay becomes more important than the patient’s health.(9)

It is estimated that there are over fifty million United States residents currently living without health insurance, a number that will skyrocket as unemployment rates increase and people lose their work-based health care coverage in this time of international financial crisis.(10)

Already this year, 7.5 million people have lost work-related coverage. Budget cuts for the state of Washington this year will remove over forty thousand people from Washington Basic Health, a subsidized program which already has a waiting list of seventeen thousand people.(11)

As I returned to the US from Venezuela, I was faced with the realization that as a society, the United States places a monetary value on life. That we make life and death judgments based on an individual’s ability to pay. And that someone with the same condition I had recently recovered from had died because, according to our system, her life wasn’t insured.

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What the U S A as the World's Oldest and Most Successful Democracy Can Learn From Others~~ HOW TO FIX HEALTHCARE~~

What do the world's "laboratories of democracy" tell us about health care?


AnonymousLiberal blogger eloquently reasons:

Republicans, at least rhetorically, claim to value federalism and to believe that the states can function as "laboratories of democracy"-- places where policy experimentation can take place. Through this process, flawed policies are exposed and voted down and newer, better policies are given a chance to prove themselves. Over time, the policies that prove to be the best are adopted by other states.

For some reason, though, the only laboratories of democracy that matter to Republicans are those located within the United States.

This is especially true when it comes to health care. The United States is not the only industrialized democracy in the world. We are, however, the only one that does not guarantee basic health care to all of its citizens. When Democrats propose relatively mild reforms to our current dysfunctional system, such as creating a public insurance option, Republicans flip out and suggest that doing so will result in some sort of socialized health care dystopia.

But we don't need to travel into some hypothetical world to understand what universal health care looks like. There are literally dozens of countries in the real world that have functioning universal health care systems. Indeed, the verdict of the world's laboratories of democracy is pretty clear. Virtually all of them produce better health outcomes at less cost while covering everyone. We're the outliers. We're the laboratory that's stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that its experiment has failed.

To adopt the Republican position on health care requires believing that every other country in the world is wrong, that their policy experts are misguided and their citizens confused. Indeed it requires believing that the American people themselves are wrong, that despite endless opinion polls to the contrary, people in this country really love the system we have.

You would think that, at some point, these lovers of federalism would ask themselves why it is that no country in the world currently has (or has any plans to adopt) the kind of health care system they're clamoring for. After all, if the ideal health care system is one in which the government plays the least active role and lets the free market work its magic, you would think that some country would have already tried that by now. Such a policy is, after all, much easier to execute and to fund. It's infinitely less complex and requires much less government spending, so you would think that at least some group of lawmakers somewhere would have given the "do nothing" approach a shot. And if the results were as great as the Republicans claim, by now most countries would be following such a system.

Of course, the reason no one follows such a system is because it doesn't work. As economists have understood for many decades, markets don't work very well in the area of health care, at least if the goal is producing a world in which most people can afford care. Indeed, the reason we have a patchwork system of health care in this country is precisely because the market doesn't work and the government has been forced to step in and remedy its most glaring failures. Under a free market system, most elderly people are priced out of the market (hence the need for Medicare). Under a free market system, the poor can't afford health care (hence the need for Medicaid). Under a free market system, children of those without insurance have no access to health care (hence the need for S-CHIP). Every health insurance regulation or government program currently on the books was passed in order to address a significant failure of the market.

Other countries have confronted the exact same issues, but instead of trying to solve these problems piecemeal, they have opted for a comprehensive approach. In an effort to discredit the far better approaches taken by other countries, Republicans like to cherry-pick stories of people who were denied treatment or had to wait for treatment under a universal system (while ignoring the very same kinds of stories in our country). But here are some numbers they ignore:

The number of people in other industrialized democracies who go bankrupt as a result of medical bills = 0

The number of people in other industrialized democracies who lack access to routine medical care = 0

The number of people in other industrialized democracies who feel trapped at their jobs for fear of losing their (or their family's) health insurance = 0.

That last number is particularly galling given conservative reverence for entrepreneurism. Though it's difficult to quantify, I would bet that our dysfunctional health care system, more than any other factor, discourages entrepreneurial risk-taking in this country. Which makes all this talk about free markets all the more absurd.

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