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| Tacoma woman, 2011: recording the strength of character and depth of feeling so magnificently evident in her face was its own reward as, at the time, I had no other reason to make her portrait. Pentax MX, 135mm f/2.5 Takumar, Fujucolor 800 (desaturated). Though these bayonet-mount Takumars are frequently damned for having low-end, inferior glass, I have to differ: this was wide open at 1/125th of a second. (I bought the Takumar after the retirement of the last Leica-trained repair person in the United States forced me to sell my beloved M cameras and make Pentax my sole 35mm system.) Photograph by Loren Bliss, copyright 2013. |
*
ANOTHER EXPOSÉ
DETAILING how sequestration threatens lower-income people with death
by abandonment and neglect – the One Percent's favorite 21st
Century modality of genocide – surfaced last Friday via Medicare
Watch, the on-line weekly of the watchdog Medicare Rights Center.
The MW report summarizes
detailed analyses from two unimpeachable sources, the National
Council on Aging and the federal Office of Management and Budget. It
itemizes
$292 million the sequester is gouging
from Medicare funding, and describes how “(t)hese
devastating cuts will no doubt have a major impact on the economic
security of middle- and low-income Medicare beneficiaries, who will
have to spend more out–of-pocket on basic necessities, thus making
it more difficult to afford health care.”
“Half of all people with Medicare,”
the report continues, “live on annual incomes of $22,000 or less
and spend one-third of their household incomes on health care costs.
Due to sequestration, already overburdened seniors will need to make
difficult choices, such as whether to pay their heating bills or fill
their prescriptions.”
MW
also provides convenient links to the original documents.
The underlying premise,
based on MRC's 24 years as a primary advocacy group for
Medicare beneficiaries, is that all cuts in government payments to
hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, doctors and
other Medicare providers will be passed onto patients as increased
costs or reduced services. Even if such trickle-down measures are
presumably illegal, the lawyers who serve the insurers and other such
health-care profiteers invariably find loopholes by which to maintain
their margins.
Supported as it is by the historical
record, this conclusion adds yet another credible rebuttal
to the Obama Administration's increasingly unbelievable claim the
much larger cuts to Medicare provider payments already imposed by the
Affordable Care Act will somehow not increase the already burdensome
medical bills paid by elderly and disabled people.
Hence there's a growing fear – and
not just amongst seniors – an ugly post-electoral surprise is
lurking in Obamacare. Skeptics are already damning it as another
example of “change we can believe in”: the absolute certainty
that life in the United States – at least for the 99 Percent –
will get much, much worse.
*****
EDITORIAL NOTE: here's my explanatory
response to a couple of colleagues who thought I buried my lead in
“How Sequester's Sword Slashes Vital Programs for Lower Income
People,” one of two stories that ran last week under the “Economics
Below the Salt” headline.
If this were a local-news blog – if
the majority of its readership were local instead of national and
international – the two critics would be right. But readers who
are unfamiliar with the intricacies of U.S. governance need
background information if they are to understand the sequester's
magnitude – why it could prove to be the most maliciously deadly
atrocity in the nation's political history.
It is also the most diabolically
clever political ploy I have yet encountered, an unabashedly vicious
bit of legislative sleight-of-hand by which both parties give the One
Percent the budget cuts they demand while simultaneously worming out
from under responsibility for the ruin so inflicted.
(Yes, I believe sequestration is
permanent – why the present Republican/Democrat infighting is
merely another Big Lie to conceal the grim reality we are governed by
One Party of Two Names, a political machine that serves only the One
Percent, the rest of us be damned.)
In any case, rather than begin the
sequester story with quotes from Tacoma Housing Authority Executive
Director Michael Mirra, as I would have done had I been writing only
for locals, I prefaced his remarks with many details that were
presumably familiar to readers in the U.S. but possibly unknown to
those elsewhere.
I took this route not just to
facilitate maximum comprehension, but to contribute my own tiny part
in what – if there is any justice left in this world – will
surely become a global journalistic campaign to inflict maximum
embarrassment on the treacherous and cowardly politicians who
perpetrated the potentially murderous fraud of sequestration.
Which, of course, assumes such
conscienceless politicians can still be mortified – that they have
not given themselves completely over to the moral imbecility
advocated by Ayn Rand in her capitalist sequels to Nazism's Mein
Kampf. Obviously we shall see.
LB/12 March 2013
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