Congressional representatives and senators, as well as all other employees of the Executive and Judicial branches of the US government, already have the kind of health insurance everyone in the USA should have. Perhaps that's why they're unable to care about, or even grasp, the fact that the rest of us are in terrible trouble. They have such good medical insurance that it’s - apparently - impossible for them to understand what the phrase “health care” might mean to ordinary citizens of almost all classes in this country.

In Don Sloan's Practicing Medicine Without A License (Caveat Books) you can learn about the insurance those people get: unlimited doctor visits of their choice; coverage for all accidents, routine exams, physical therapy, labs and x-rays; unlimited hospital visits and stays; some chronic care and rehab; full prescription coverage; unlimited specialty consultations for themselves and their families – with no deductibles, no co-pays, and all for nominal fees (eg, $35 monthly from a salary of $158K) – and of course, a full pension that includes lifelong health care coverage.

They also have, I've just learned, the Office of the Attending Physician (OAP), right there in the Capitol building, to which they can go (as children go to the school nurse) if/when they get sick or hurt while on the job. The OAP is staffed with docs, nurses, pharmacists, med-techs and other well-trained professionals — all of them government employees who are salaried, obviously, with tax money we've paid.

These people need a long series of intense injections of empathy, don't you think? (edited 12/11/10)

Amazingly enough, the social and political climate around abortion in the US may be worse right now than it was before the Roe decision in 1973. Why would I say such a thing today, when abortion is "legal"? Because the American anti-abortion movement has been successful, perhaps beyond their wildest dreams and certainly beyond the nightmares of American women and girls. Their great success has been in altering the national consciousness: introducing new language and definitions, promoting fear and shame — and skillfully exploiting the results of this introduction/promotion culture-wide, across lines of class, race, ethnicity, region, gender and sexual identity.

From a nation in which seventy percent of the citizens supported access to abortion and greeted the Roe decision with relief, the US has become a nation in which more than ninety percent of its counties have no access to abortion services and in many counties that do, those services (and access to contraception!) are compromised, difficult to find and use. The anti-abortion movement in the USA is rare in both its size (big) and impact (bigger); the past thirty-five years of its development and cultural dominance are historically unprecedented.

Those people do not have a lock on the family, on religion, on morality — as might appear to be the case. But they do seem to have a lock on public media – both imagery and language (from movies to the evening news on any screen and a good chunk of cyberspace too), as well as great big hunks of government, state and federal, at all levels. Their attack on candid and accurate teaching about sexuality, heterosexual intercourse and birth control has had far-reaching effects; in many parts of the US, access to contraception products and information has been targeted and interfered with by these same people.

From the passage of the Hyde amendment in 1976 disallowing use of federal money for abortion services so that no one employed by the federal government can use her medical coverage for abortion — this means postal workers, the military and the Peace Corps plus millions of other federal workers and everyone receiving federal funding (folks getting Social Security, any kind of welfare, Medicaid, disability support); through passage of state laws mandating stalling strategies including parental consent, spousal consent, waiting periods; and the clever, albeit misleading/dishonest crafting of the phrases “partial birth abortion” and “pro-life” — plus the federally supported widespread use of anti-abortion literature and images in schools, legislation and public media; to disastrous Supreme Court decisions about medical practice; as well as terrorist violence [eg, 32 known violent incidents perpetrated in the US and Canada in just the first few months of 2007, including a bomb planted at a clinic in Austin TX on 4/26 that year]; ongoing harassment and intimidation of patients and staff at clinics all over the country, plus the horrific assassinations of abortion doctors, most recently Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, KS (in church!) on May 31, 2009, the US anti-abortion movement is a success story.

Having Roe "on the books" as law has not been seriously effective as a safeguard — and may be operating now to create a kind of false security, ironically mocking the nation’s need for reproductive health and justice. In the ongoing struggle, our political action requires intense cultural reinforcement for education and consciousness raising. (note added, February 2010: If you think everything's really pretty much ok in the USA, check out the new law in Utah.)


.... and do consider these things ....

If someone tells you voting for the lesser of two evils is a bad idea (in any election), please say that what we want — what we need so very much in our lives — is less evil.

Juno is to teen pregnancy what Pretty Woman is to prostitution: an outright stamp of approval, even some encouragement; both films are well made and brilliantly promoted fantasies for girls.

If you've been dithering about the end of the world (as many of us do), read these prescient stories: one was written about a hundred years ago - E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," and the other not terribly long after that - Isaac Asimov's "The Feeling of Power" ... these will no doubt be findable online and in libraries. For examples of possible responses to consider later in the 21st century, take a look at the pretty dreadful movie called Johnny Mnemonic (I'm serious).