15 August 2018 — 1434 mdt
Pearl Jam’s poster, a nasty oped, Save the Brain, single-payer truth
Pearl Jam’s poster. The band’s bass player, a friend of Sen. Jon Tester, and no friend of President Trump, commissioned a controversial poster for the band’s concert in Missoula earlier this week. State Auditor Mass Rosendale, Tester’s Republican opponent, took umbrage, denouncing the poster. The story made the Washington Post. Tester’s spokesman, Chris Meagher, sort of apologized.
It’s a tempest in a teapot that won’t have an effect one way or the other when the votes are tallied in November. Meanwhile, a lot of Democrats will be quietly obtaining a copy of the poster.
A nasty oped in the Daily InterLake
Kalispell resident Tim Adams writes hyper-religious opeds and letters that are published in the InterLake every few months. His latest oped attacks teenage homosexuality. His oped’s not libelous, but it’s certainly in poor taste. Editors are under no obligation to publish such screeds. Whether the InterLake should have published this oped can be debated. That Adams’ oped is an affront to civil society cannot. His oped is a textbook example of how certainties born of extreme religious conviction can lead to terrible cruelty.
Heatstroke and Save the Brain
In May, a football player at the University of Maryland died after overheating in practice. According to the player’s family, medical treatment that probably would have saved his life was delayed. Both the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post have excellent coverage, as does ESPN, which reported that the university’s football program is brutal. The university’s president apologized to the dead player’s family, but the player is still dead. The apology will not restore life, but it might restore funding from donors upset by the death.
Save the Brain is the name of a program at Kalispell Regional Medical Center that educates the public and educators, especially coaches and trainers, on brain injuries; on concussions. There are online listing of symptoms and treatment protocols. After watching an online video, the website’s visitors can take an online test and, if they pass it, receive a certificate they can print out.
There’s another way to save brains: ban football, soccer, and boxing.
Setting the record straight on single-payer health care
At Dorf on Law, attorney and economist Neal Buchanan debunks the Washington Post’s hand-wringing over the cost of single-payer health care:
…what about Medicare for All scares people who are nominally non-conservative? Surprisingly, many of them, to use a favorite term of academic-speak, fetishize the public/private distinction. That is, they treat exactly the same activity as somehow different if it is being directly carried out by a government entity as opposed to a private entity.
For example, the national statistical accounts once treated the construction of a new runway at a major airport as “private investment” if the money for the runway was paid by a private company but “public consumption” if the money was paid by any level of government. Because consumption is often deemed wasteful while investment is presumptively thought to be virtuous, this distinction mattered quite a bit politically. Yet the bottom line was that, either way, there was a new airport runway. Who should care if we call it government spending or private spending?
In the single-payer debate, fetishizing the public/private distinction is particularly pernicious, because people like The Post’s editors focus on the arbitrary fact that the money that people pay into a public health insurance system like Medicare is called “taxes” (and the system’s spending counts as “government spending”), whereas dollars spent to buy health insurance from companies like UnitedHealthcare are called premiums — that is, not-taxes — and the company’s benefit payments are similarly deemed not-spending.
There’s more. I hope his analysis will stiffen the spines of Democratic candidates who in private claim they like single-payer but in public recoil from the phrase; but I have my doubts.