Aequanimitas

robertreich:

A third political party is emerging in America. Call it the I’m-Mad-As-Hell party.

It’s a mistake to see the Mad-As-Hell party as just a right-wing phenomenon – the so-called Tea Partiers now storming the gates of the Republican Party. There are plenty of mad-as-hellers on the left as well – furious at Wall Street, health insurers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and establishment Democrats.

Mad-as-hellers don’t trust big government. But they don’t trust big business and Wall Street, either. They especially hate it when big government gets together with big business and Wall Street – while at the same time Main Street is in shambles and millions of people are losing their jobs and homes. 

First it was TARP, the giant bank bailout that seems to have made Wall Street flush again — so flush the Street is now distributing giant bonuses as if the crash it brought on never happened.

Then came the stimulus package, replete with earmarked goodies for every corporation big enough to hire a team of Washington lobbyists.

And then it was health care, which to some people looked like a sweetheart deal between government and Big Pharma and big health insurers.

To the Mad-As-Hell party, the biggest event last week wasn’t Scott Brown’s upset victory in Massachusetts. It was the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizen’s United vs. the Federal Election Commission, allowing corporations to spend however much they want on political campaigns. True mad-as-hellers see this as inviting even more collusion between big business, Wall Street, and big government – and against the rest of us.

With the mid-term elections months away, both Republicans and Democrats are scrambling to embrace the Mad-As-Hell Party as their own. Republicans are hoping the mad-as-hellers forget the gushing corporate welfare of the Bush administration and the last Republican congress. And Democrats have become born-again economic populists, blaming the nation’s problems on the same “fat cat” bankers and corporate lobbyists they’ve been cozying up to for years.

If the Mad-as-hell Party helps get money out of politics it will do a world of good. I might even join up. But if it just fulminates against the establishment, forget it. Wrecking balls are easy to wield. Rescuing our democracy is hard work.

America’s Public Healthcare should be administered by the Institute of Medicine [ http://www.iom.edu ] and The National Institutes of Health [ http://www.nih.gov ] with delivery coordinated via existing collaborating academic medical centers of excellence and affiliated clinics: 1) Johns Hopkins Medicine http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org 2) Washington University School of Medicine http://hap.wustl.edu/pages/?page=overview 3) Mayo Clinic http://www.mayoclinic.com/ 4) Geisinger http://www.geisinger.org/about/healthier/index.html 5) Stanford University Medical Center http://stanfordhospital.org/ 6) Emory University Hospital http://www.emoryhealthcare.org 7) Oregon Health and Science http://www.ohsu.edu/xd/ 8) University of Alabama Medicine http://www.uabmedicine.org/ 9) University of Pennsylvania Medicine http://www.pennmedicine.org/ 10) Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center http://www.dhmc.org/ 11) NYU Langone Medical Center http://www.med.nyu.edu/ 12) Intermountain Medical Center http://intermountainhealthcare.org/Pages/home.aspx

13)UVA Health System  http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/toplevel/home/home.cfm

14) Duke Medicine http://www.dukehealth.org/ + many others

This system will not be “government run”. Call it The NIH-IOM option. It will be headed by a Chief of Medicine or Chief Medical Officer of the United States, someone like Geisinger’s Glenn Steele Jr., MD,PHD or Brent C.James, from Intermountain Medical