by Downtowner, posted on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Well, CNN is reporting that Ben Nelson is feeling a bit more in control of my body, so a happy camper overall.
He says:
“Anyone who is in the exchange who also gets a federal subsidy because they’re poor, if they choose a private insurance policy and want any kind of abortion coverage, they have to write that part of the premium from their own personal funds.”
Offhand I’d say that means most poor women getting subsidies will elect not to write that additional check for the coverage – can’t afford to, really, if you are poor.
No word on whether Nelson’s other demands, such as cutting the aforementioned subsidies, have also been met.
by Downtowner, posted on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 8:43 am
Harry Reid has indicated that he anticipates a vote on the Senate’s Festive Giant Insurance Co. Giveaway on Christmas Eve, making that a really big day for celebration by Insurance Inc.
But today is a big day too; Harry Reid says he has his 60 votes and today will unveil the final version of the Festive Giant Giveaway.
Of course, neither we nor Harry can really know that it’s final until Lieberman and Nelson have issued their public responses to the “final” version Harry thinks they’ve agreed to. We will then learn what additional perks we will have to provide to Big Insurance in order to get our money on it’s way to them.
I plan on monitoring events throughout the course of the day and hope to be back with updates, comments, despair, panic, as the situation warrants.
by Downtowner, posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
I need health care. Which the Senate bill will neither provide, nor provide access to for uninsurable people like me.
Sorry to put the “Breaking” into the title, but this appears to be news to so many diarists and commenters that I thought it was justified.
Also, sorry to be repetitive, as I posted much of the same appeal here recently, but there seem to be so many people deluded by the belief that at least the Senate bill offers access to care for the uninsured that I can’t help thinking someone, possibly lots of people need to repeat this, in real terms, until we are debating reality.
This is a piece of junk legislation, that will lead to junk “coverage” and continued lack of care for people who are currently most damaged and most at risk because they have been uninsurable – in some cases for quite a long while. In short, for people like me, uninsurable people, it is worse than the status quo.
by Downtowner, posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
My youngest daughter, Kate, is 31. She’s married with three children. She has Type I Diabetes and was medically bankrupt at the age of 20 when she fell into a coma and spent two weeks in intensive care while uninsured. She is the principal breadwinner for her family, and despite her health challenges and past financial hardships they are doing okay now. In fact, Kate is doing so well right now that the most pressing personal family problem on her mind is that her brother will be deployed to Afghanistan this spring. And that is weighing heavily on her mind, though I won’t here go into what Kate thinks of the Afghanistan escalation.
Up until the 2008 election there was no force on earth – including me – that could move Kate to so much as vote. Her take on it: there is no point, big business owns government, and nothing will change. But in 2007 Kate changed, radically, sharply, suddenly, changed her mind.
by Downtowner, posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 1:46 am
I was a bit fascinated by Illinois Media Progressives posting of this item on their blog, now cross-posted here on Progressive Fox. I can’t say I disagree with anything in the post, but I can say this: It doesn’t go far enough.
I know the author of the post, in fact in the interest of my own full disclosure I’ll point out that I first met the author when we were both working on John Laesch’s 2008 primary campaign, which is when he also first met John Laesch. My acquaintance with Laesch goes a bit farther back – to the 2006 campaign. Which is part of the reason I think the post does not go far enough: the author of it was not in the room when Rich Miller’s favorite Republican 18 second John Laesch YouTube sound-bite was taped. I was.
by n0madic, posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 9:21 pm
A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to be in the audience when Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff was screened in public for the very first time. The film was an animated version of a short, fast, and riveting talk that Annie had developed about consumption — and all the “externalities” that conventional economists commonly leave out of the story. The Story of Stuff is due out in book form next March.
Now, on the eve of Copenhagen, Annie has a new story to tell: The Story of Cap & Trade. Check it out.
by John Laesch, posted on Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Illinois unemployment rate hit 10.5% in September of 2009 and a Kewanee-based company, Jensen Construction, chose to use out-of-state workers to build a $3M building in Sycamore, IL. According to Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES), the unemployment rate in DeKalb County is 9.2%.
Last week,
union members from a number of trades picketed the construction site using banners. When one picketer left the site to answer an emergency phone call, he returned to find that the banners had been stolen. Unions responded by putting a rat out in front of the construction site.
by n0madic, posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
Cherry, Illinois was a company town. Named after James Cherry, the superintendent of the St. Paul Coal Company, mining operations had begun at Cherry, in the Illinois River Valley of north central Illinois, in 1904 in order to produce coal for the steam engines of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad.
The Cherry operation was considered a safe, modern mine by the day’s standards, but on November 13, 1909, a fire started in the mine when torches used to light the mine after it’s state-of-the-art electrical lighting system had broken down set fire to a coal car full of hay that was being taken to feed the mules living down in the mine. There were 481 miners in the Cherry mine that day; 259 died. At the time it was the most deadly mining disaster the country had ever seen.
What follows is a description of what happened in the mine that day, based on first-hand testimony, excerpted from The Report on the Cherry Mine Disaster, published by the State of Illinois’ Board of Commissioners of Labor in 1910.
by Downtowner, posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
So it’s been a long few days. My company lost it’s biggest contract – the one I was assigned to for the balance of this year – last Wednesday. They are a governmental entity who shall remain nameless and their budget was cut by their state legislature. Bad news at casa Downtowner. Happened just as I was about to get on a plane to visit my daughter, son-in-law and 9 month old grand-daughter in Phoenix. So I went.
By the time I got there, one of my grand-daughters back here in Illinois was sick with the flu, and two days into the trip, my Mom (who lives in Florida, but was here in Illinois visiting my brother) was hospitalized with a wide array of symptoms, ranging from a blood infection to problems with her heart. So I’ll admit I was stressed already, but then I got the phone call…
by John Laesch, posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
On Saturday, Sept. 26, 2009, Carpenters Local 195 joined other members of the Illinois Valley Building Trades to picket a new Hampton Inn that is being built in Peru, IL. The Hampton Inn is being constructed in an enterprise zone and will not be paying property taxes for 10 years. They are using materials and workers from Indiana instead of supporting the local Peru economy.
is due out 
