The Republic of T.

This has already been covered in numerous other places, so you probably haven’t seen it here first. Nonetheless it reminded me of something a wise lesbian activist said to me when I was newly arrived in D.C.

The gist of it was that it’s incredibly important ­that when policy decisions are being made people from those groups affected at at the table and engaged in making those decisions. It was a statement, at the time, about the importance of getting gays & lesbians elected to public office. It’s not that someone who doesn’t belong to a particular group can’t advocate effectively for that group. But advocacy (and policy) based in the direct experiences of the people who are impacted by can often address more specific needs.

In other words, if you want a voice when it comes to making policy, you gotta get people elected. Because if you got something that looks like this:

You’re a lot more likely to end up with something like this:

In a spectacular act of complicity with the religious right, the Department of Health and Human Services Monday released a proposal that allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman’s access to contraception. In order to do this, the Department is attempting to redefine many forms of contraception, the birth control 40 percent of Americans use, as abortion. Doing so protects extremists under the Weldon and Church amendments. Those laws prohibit federal grant recipients from requiring employees to help provide or refer for abortion services. The “Definitions” section of the HHS proposal states,

Abortion: An abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. There are two commonly held views on the question of when a pregnancy begins. Some consider a pregnancy to begin at conception (that is, the fertilization of the egg by the sperm), while others consider it to begin with implantation (when the embryo implants in the lining of the uterus). A 2001 Zogby International American Values poll revealed that 49 percent of Americans believe that human life begins at conception. Presumably many who hold this belief think that any action that destroys human life after conception is the termination of a pregnancy, and so would be included in their definition of the term “abortion.” Those who believe pregnancy begins at implantation believe the term “abortion” only includes the destruction of a human being after it has implanted in the lining of the uterus.

And you’re liable to have policy made by people who say stuff like this.

Back in 1990, the Republican candidate for Governor of Texas, Clayton Williams, likened rape to bad weather, saying, “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

When that joke came to light in June, John McCain was forced to “postpone” a fundraiser in Midland hosted by Williams. McCain spokesman Brian Rogers called the joke “incredibly offensive.”

But what Williams said in 1990 is not all that different than a joke McCain made about rape in 1986. According to the Tucson Citizen, here’s what McCain, then a two-term Congressman from Mesa, said during his run for the Senate:

Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, ‘Where is that marvelous ape?’

And people who know who don’t even know stuff like this.

The bus had been rolling for a half-hour and McCain was holding court on everything from Iraq to college basketball. (”Who woulda thought? VCU,” he exclaimed upon boarding.) And then someone asked about public funding for contraception in Africa to prevent the spread of AIDS.
“I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it in the past,” he stammered as he looked to his communications director. “I’m sure I’m opposed to government funding.”

Sensing a vulnerable moment, reporters kept the questions coming. What about sex education in the schools? Should it mention contraceptives? Or only abstinence, like President Bush wants?

“I think I support the president’s present policy,” he said, tentatively.

More questions: Do condoms stop sexually transmitted disease?

A long pause.

A stern look.

“I’ve never gotten into these issues or thought much about them,” he said, almost crying uncle.

And who can’t answer questions like this.

So, yeah. Getting the right (or not right, in this case) people elected matters.

Five-year-olds, for those who don’t know, ask a lot of questions. No. Really. I mean a lot of questions. Questions about questions, even. My policy, as a parent, has been to answer the ones I can (age-appropriate answers, of course), and to say “I don’t know” when I really don’t know the answer.

Some questions are easy. Parker had noticed that Daddy is a vegetarian, and the stuff that Daddy eats doesn’t taste like the stuff that Papa eats. So, I just explain to him that Daddy doesn’t eat meat and Papa does. But after reading this Washington Post article, I realized that there’s another question coming my way sooner or later, and I haven’t really thought about how I’m going to answer.

“Daddy drinks wine. Why don’t you?” asked my son Nico at dinner not long ago. Taken aback, I considered my response: “Because I’d just guzzle down the whole bottle plus the two more in the fridge before passing out in the mashed potatoes” would have been true but probably not the appropriate response for a 3-year-old.

Instead, I lied. “I just don’t like the taste, sweetie. You know how you don’t like, um, corn?”

Nico wrinkled his nose with distaste, and we moved on to other subjects, such as why cats have mouths but still can’t talk and whether Hugo from school is in fact mean or whether he was just having a bad day.

Comparing wine to corn seemed to work in the short run, but I knew it was only a temporary solution. What do you tell your kid when you’re an alcoholic and a heroin addict in recovery? Or if you have other skeletons in your closet?

I had been sober for five years when my son was born, so he never knew me in the days when I used to walk around with smeared lipstick and a tendency to vomit.

I now have a life story to hide or reveal.

It’s been almost 16 years since I had my last drink. Do I have a story to hide?

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This got a laugh out of me when I spotted the title, and then a nod of recognition once I started reading the article. Apparently, ADHD can make you miss 20 days of work per year. Well, kinda.

When “Fidgety Philip” grows up, the problems of attention deficit disorder can multiply into loss of nearly a month’s work per year.

Long seen as a problem for children, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder was first described in 1845 by Dr. Heinrich Hoffman, who wrote “The Story of Fidgety Philip.”

More recently, it has been recognized as continuing into adulthood for some people, and new research seeks to estimate the effect of ADHD on workers.

This lack of ability to concentrate costs the average adult sufferer 22.1 days of “role performance,” per year, including 8.7 extra days absent, according to researchers led by Dr. Ron de Graaf of the Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction.

It’s almost funny that, for folks with ADHD, those “missed days” occurred when they were actually at work. Almost.

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If my dad were alive, I know he’d be hanging the flag in front of our house, where it would stay for the remainder of the weekend. A veteran of two wars, Korea and Vietnam, my father was fiercely patriotic. Yet, displaying the flag on Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day was as much a show of loyalty and respect for those he served with, and — I think — an acknowledgment of that they each carried home a part of those wars inside of them. I learned early on that my father carried his experiences in Vietnam and Korea with home him.

One of the earliest rules I remember learning as a child was how to wake dad up from a nap. Don’t touch him or shake him, I was told. He might be dreaming about being back in Vietnam, or the defensive reflex required to survive there might kick in and the reaction might be violent. So, when it was time to wake him up, we would stand at the door and call to him until he responded, even well into my high school years. Looking back, in think it was a way of not releasing the war inside — the war he carried with him — into our home.

I never knew what my father experienced in Vietnam, or what he re-experienced sometimes when he closed his eyes to sleep. We never talked about it. Even when I wrote a one act play about Vietnam for a high school literary competition. Two of my classmates and I interviewed Vietnam veterans we knew, and placed classified ads to reach more veterans willing to share their experiences. I was surprised by how many were willing, even eager, to talk to three high school boys about what they’d experienced.

But I never interviewed my dad. I was in charge of distilling the interviews into an initial script of monologues that my classmates and I would perform, after they offered their input and edits. But I don’t remember my dad ever reading the script. We performed the play at our county literary competition, and won the chance to perform it at the state competition. But I don’t remember my dad ever seeing the play, or even talking to him about it.

Years later, when my parents came to visit me in Washington, D.C., I took my dad to the Korean and Vietnam war memorials. I watched him walk the length of the Vietnam memorial, stopping at the names of the men he’d known. I witness his silent tears at each stop. Yet, we never talked about his experience. To this day I don’t know what he saw, or what he brought home from those wars.

I think that’s because, though he’d brought home his experiences from the war, he wanted to keep the war — the war inside — out of his home.

Though he passed away just over two years ago, I thought of my dad, and all he kept inside of him when I read about two of the most recent Iraqi veterans to commit suicide. Recruiter Nils Aaron Andersson, who suffered PTSD, shot himself at two o’clock in the morning, on the top floor of a Houston parking garage. Staff Sgt. Travis Twiggs, who wrote about his PTSD experience, fatally shot his brother and then himself after a cross-state car chase.

News stories about their suicides were published the same week news broke that of a Veterans Administration employee’s email suggesting that veterans with PTSD be diagnosed with disorders that carry a lower disability payment.

An internal e-mail message written by a Veterans Affairs Department employee suggested that the agency avoid giving a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder for veterans and instead consider a diagnosis that might result in a lower disability payment.

The message, dated March 20 and titled “Suggestion,” said: “Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that we refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out. Consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder, R/O PTSD.” R/O stands for “rule out.”

“Additionally,” it said, “we really don’t or have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD.”

News of their suicides — Andersson was one of 16 recruiters to take their own lives since 2000 — came one week before documents released by the VA gave further evidence of the agency’s failure to address veterans’ mental health needs.

New VA documents obtained exclusively by VCS using the Freedom of Information Act indicate the VA is only paying disability benefits for PTSD to 33,247 Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans, although 67,717 have been diagnosed with PTSD. According to Sullivan, VCS is calling for an investigation into this apparent discrepancy.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report in September 2007 stated that the VA’s "lack of early identification techniques" led to "inconsistent diagnosis and treatment" of PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury. According to the GAO, early diagnosis is essential in preventing PTSD’s consequences - which could be deadly.

It’s bad enough that we sent men and women overseas to fight a war founded disinformation, in insufficient numbers, and with inadequate equipment. But, when they come home with deep psychological wounds from that war, and we give them less than the treatment they need, Memorial Day celebrations and speeches ring hollow.

Let’s all pay lip service to Support Our Troops. But if we want to be honest, we should edit those yellow-ribbon bumper stickers to say Support Our Troops — As Long As It Doesn’t Cost Anything.

Let’s acknowledge that this new generation of soldiers and Marines is amazingly motivated and talented. They’re expected to be good killers, good diplomats and ambassadors of American goodwill who operate under impossibly complex rules of engagement in impossibly dangerous and deadly environments.

But if they come home wounded, their brains rattled by the huge IEDs of the new way of war, and if they suffer the horrors of PTSD nightmares and flashbacks, let’s dump them on the streets with the least amount of help and benefits possible, as cheaply as possible.

For sure we don’t want to improve their chances, better their future prospects, by offering them the same college benefits we gave their grandfathers six decades ago. God help us if they all get college degrees and figure out what we’ve done to them.

If my father were alive this Memorial Day, he would still display the flag. But not without anger, if he knew how today’s veterans are abandoned to fight the war inside — the same one he fought when he came home — on their own.

Forget green cards. A growing number of Americans are getting hitched to get health insurance.

Some people marry for love, some for companionship, and others for status or money. Now comes another reason to get hitched: health insurance.

In a poll released today, 7% of Americans said they or someone in their household decided to marry in the last year so they could get healthcare benefits via their spouse.

“It’s a small number but a powerful result, because it shows how paying for healthcare is reflected not only in family budgets but in life decisions,” said Drew E. Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which commissioned the survey as part of its regular polling on healthcare.

…What surprised researchers was that such costs had become a factor in marriage decisions. “We should have asked about divorce,” said Altman, joking.

Those who cited health insurance as a factor in deciding to marry tended to have modest incomes. About 6 in 10 were in households making less than $50,000 a year, said Mollyann Brodie, who directs Kaiser’s opinion research. They also were younger, with 4 in 10 between 18 and 34.

Maybe they should have asked about divorce. They’d have found that at least some people stay married for the sake of health insurance.

Whether people get married or stay married for the sake of health insurance, who can blame them?

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Thanks to an anonymous manager at CNN, I have a new favorite word: “neurotypical.” Or maybe it’s “neuro-atypical.” I’m not sure, but I know which one I am. So, I knew I’d find something to identify with when I (finally) sat down to read her account of how diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome in adulthood left her feeling like an “earthbound alien.”

Recently, at 48 years of age, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. For most of my life, I knew that I was “other,” not quite like everyone else. I searched for years for answers and found none, until an assignment at work required me to research autism. During that research, I found in the lives of other people with Asperger’s threads of similarity that led to the diagnosis. Although having the diagnosis has been cathartic, it does not change the “otherness.” It only confirms it.

When I talk to people about this aspect of myself, they always want to know what it means to be an “Aspie,” as opposed to a “Neurotypical” (NT). Oh, dear, where to start . …

Neurotypical? Now there’s a new one. I suppose though, it’s better than “normal,” which has obvious implications.

Where to start, indeed.

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Ed. Note: I’m attending the Take Back America Conference this week — as part of my day job duties — and since I’m blogging the conference there, I thought I’d blog it here too. Since I’ve been blogging about health care lately, I thought I’d cover the health care panel session.

Starting with Monday’s panel, “Health Care For All: The Plan to Get There,” during Take Back America we’re talking about health care. Every day. It’s obvious why. Health care is a concern for every family in America — those with insurance and the 47 million Americans without it.

• It’s a top concern for young voters, who don’t have health insurance and aren’t sure they will be able to afford insurance in the future.
• It’s a concern for working Americans who must give up an ever-growing chunk of their paychecks to gain health insurance through their employers.
• It’ a concern for people with insurance, who face enormous bills for out-of-network medical services.
• It’s a concern for anyone who’s ill and discovers their insurer is more effective at setting up barriers to treatment than helping them get needed care.
• It’s a concern for the insured who are coping with chronic illness — their own or a family member’s — and are hitting the lifetime cost limit on their coverage.
• It’s a concern for anyone who’s had their coverage revoked in the middle of a major illness, by an insurer that rewards employees with bonuses for canceling policies.
• It’s a concern for anyone who decides against DNA testing that might reveal a genetic predisposition to disease (and lead to an early opportunity for early intervention), because the results may cause them to be denied health insurance.
• It’s a concern for every child without health insurance, and every school that spends more time finding medical care for students than educating them.
• It’s a concern for anyone bankrupted by a major illness, who — before the subprime mortgage crisis — accounted for almost half of bankruptcy filings.

Those are the stories behind some of the numbers presented by Prof. Jacob Hacker, author of “Health Care for America,” which has been adopted in one form or another by the remaining Democratic presidential candidates. Prof. Hacker shared that:

• three in ten of the non-elderly are underinsured
• four in ten put off home and car maintenance to pay for needed care
• six in ten postpone needed care due to difficulty paying
• one third dip into savings to pay for needed care
• more than 1 in five made job decisions based on health care

Dr. Maya Rockeymoore addressed healthcare as a civil rights issue, and noted the disparities of the current system, particularly where African Americans are concerned. Even the U.N. has noted and expressed concern about “wide racial disparities” in women’s health care in the U.S. (No surprise, since the U.S. comes in last — beaten out by first-place France — in providing effective and timely health care to citizens.)

Finally, Ezra Klein emphasized the importance of winning elections, and the imperative of winning enough seats in the Senate, if we’re going to achieve health care for all. Ezra also offered what was perhaps the most succinct and memorable advice for progressives moving forward on health care: Make health care for Republicans what they tried to made Iraq for Democrats.

Check out the video of the this panel for more details.

I don’t remember where I heard it, but it’s something a core belief of mine: Freedom and liberty are meaningless concepts without two things—knowledge of them and the ability to act on them. To my mind, the former is basically education, and the latter means health care. I’ve come to believe that a country that can’t provide those two basic things to its citizens can’t have more than a tenuous grasp on the two concepts above.

I’ve wanted to write about health care for some time, but until recently hadn’t taken the opportunity. I ventured down that road with an earlier post. Now I have a post up on the blog at the day-job, about a health care plan the organization is promoting, that would—if everything adds up as it’s supposed to—guarantee coverage to almost every American.

Given what I said about that core belief of mine, the idea of universal or near-universal health care is something I’m passionate about for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that believe it’s criminal that—in a country as wealthy as ours—there are millions of children without health insurance. But lately I’ve become passionate about for another reason, and one raises a question for me.

Is health care a gay issue? I don’t know that it’s a priority for any of our political organizations, but I’m starting to believe that it should be.

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Unfortunately, PZ, this kind of thing—from this administration—is all to believable.

Every year, overdoses of heroin and opiates, such as Oxycontin, kill more drug users than AIDS, hepatitis or homicide.

And the number of overdoses has gone up dramatically over the past decade.

But now, public health workers from New York to Los Angeles, North Carolina to New Mexico, are preventing thousands of deaths by giving $9.50 rescue kits to drug users. The kits turn drug users into first responders by giving them the tools to save a life.

Sounds good so far, right? After all, before you can get someone into recovery or treatment, you’ve got to keep them alive. I’ve never yet heard of a dead junkie graduating from rehab. So fewer overdoses is a good thing, even if it’s only the first step towards maybe getting some people the help they need.

You’d think so. Right? Well, if you do, you’re likely not a part of the Bush administration. Keep reading.
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Does anyone else grind their teeth at night? How about during the day?

It started sometime last year, around the end of the summer, but I didn’t notice it until September. I’d started waking up with inexplicable headaches that didn’t dissipate during the day. I’d take pain medications, sinus medications, thinking one or the other would fix it.

Then I realized that not only did I have a headache, but my face hurt too, especially my cheeks and my jaw muscles. I realized I was probably clenching or grinding my teeth at night, something called bruxism.

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There are natural disasters and man-made disasters. There are those who look upon the aftermath of disaster and see things as they should be. We call them conservatives.

As I write this, the seeds of disaster and an aftermath of Katrina-like proportions have been and are being sown in the shadow of the nation’s capitol, by a conservative philosophy that—as a matter of principle and policy—neither prepares for or prevents disaster, nor provides relief in its aftermath And when disaster befalls those most vulnerable to its ravages, conservative philosophy declares disaster the fault of and its consequences deserved by those least able to defend themselves against either.

When disaster strikes Washington, D.C.—whether in the form of a disease outbreak, a dirty bomb, or another terrorist attack—it will be the fault of those who cannot get themselves out of harm’s way, and not the fault of conservative philosophy that makes disaster all but inevitable. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone has heard at least one “health care nightmare” story, like the death of 17-year-old Nataline Sarkysian hours after her insurance company approved coverage a liver transplant, following repeated denials. Before that, it was the death of Diamonte Driver, for want of an $80 dental procedure. These stories naturally provoke outrage. What happened to an anonymous 68-year-old man, however, is categorized as weird news, even though it’s as much about our failed health care system as the familiar “nightmare” stories.

The abstract of the article published in Journal of Emergency Medicine, in December 2007, is about as dry as you might expect a medical journal to be.
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I’ve been meaning to post some kind of follow-up after my last three posts on mental illness and mental health care (or the lack thereof). After going off about the lack of mental health services, or lack of access to treatment, can lead to problems for the mentally ill, their families, and the rest of society, it was encouraging to read about states increasing funding for mental health services. But it raises some interesting questions about how to achieve a balance that also protects the rights of the mentally ill.

I thought about it a couple of weeks ago, when I read about Kaine’s plan to boost mental health funding, in the wake of the VA Tech shootings. But that funding comes with a reform that—though apparently intended to address situations in which people, like VA Tech shooter Seung Hui Cho, don’t get court ordered treatment—raises questions about the effectiveness of basically coercing the mentally ill into getting treatment.
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