Where is this guy's family? Why do they let him humiliate himself like this? It's obvious he suffers from dementia. Why won't they put him in a nursing home already?
1 BEM-AVENTURADO o homem que não anda segundo o conselho dos ímpios, nem se detém no caminho dos pecadores, nem se assenta na roda dos escarnecedores.
2 Antes tem o seu prazer na lei do SENHOR, e na sua lei medita de dia e de noite.
3 Pois será como a árvore plantada junto a ribeiros de águas, a qual dá o seu fruto no seu tempo; as suas folhas não cairão, e tudo quanto fizer prosperará.
The only reason McCain would have the power to drop a bomb on Iran is because idiots like you dont want to take responciblity for there own governance. Too fat, lazy and scared to be as brave as those who enacted the Consitution. We have the power this election to enact the NI4D that will empower the American people to become lawmakers to repeal all these bullshit laws and make sure the Presidancy is never abused again.
Democrats win the popular vote, their are massive reports of voter fraud, Democrats hand over the Presidency to Bush with thier tail between there legs offering no contest. BS if you think Gravel would go out like that, Gravel has a solid record standing up for Americans rights, Obama will denounce you in a heartbeat just like he did his pastor.
xMannyfestox you talk about splitting the vote, isn't that what Hillary and Obama are doing right now to ensure a McCain victory. Seriously how stupid to you have to be to realise that the democrats have been handing over the election for 8 years without contest. Instead of sticking with the one party, one choice, Republicrat communist party; Make that vote count don't just vote for false change or someones experience entails sleeping with the president. Vote Gravel!
I agree, this stupid spoil sport didn't get the democratic nomination so now he wants to help McCain by running as a third party candidate. That's what i call a traitor.
I am not a democrat but I do know that it's very important that John McCain not become president. Anyone that is a proponent of splitting the vote to help mcCain become president will be PERSONALLY responsible for the hell that comes of it. That means you cream puff.
I am not going to be vote for one lesser evil just so someone else doesn't get in office. I am going to vote for someone because I believe that they will be the best president, period. Mike will be a better President than any of the other runners. Just because you aren't courageous enough to cast a meaningful vote doesn't mean that everyone else should follow that pattern.
When McCain drops the bomb on Iran it is because the American people could not see past the 2 party system. That's not my fault because I am fighting EVERY DAY for people to learn to cast courageous and meaningful votes. If McCain drops the bomb on Iran, it is the American publics fault because they didn't stop him. We have the right to overturn our government if they are making decisions we don't like, we just dont exercise that power because we are manipulated by corporations and
Right on sgandms, when people realise that the Democrats and Republicans are apart of the same damn communist party then people will start to understand why its important to vote Gravel this election, otherwise we just are electing who the republicrats want us to elect.
and manufactured goods. We are blinded by starbucks and hollywood into thinking we don't need to DO anything in the world and our government is handling it. That is obviously not true. When McCain drops a bomb on Iran, it is your fault for not standing up for your rights as a citizen. It has nothing to do with me, because I will be fighting every step of the way.
This comment has received too many negative votesshow
Fuck you! "peaceczar", with a stupid handle like that you are the last one to critisize someone's intelligence. Let me spell it out so that even a fuckwit like you can understand. A vote for anyone besides Barak Obama will help grandpa McCain become president. As someone that claims to be a proponent of peace that should scare the hell out of you, are YOU just to dumb to realise it?
And in case you weren't aware, Obama has voted to continue funding the Iraq war. Obama has said that NO OPTIONS are off the table when it comes to Iran - that is code for NUKES. The republicans and the democrats are the SAME PARTY with different rhetoric. A vote for either party is a vote for more war, more taxes, more government corruption and their little greedy fingers in all aspects of your life.
This sounds like a joke, but unfortunately some people actually think this way so it's hard to tell. Either way, you're being an asshole which clearly seems to be the intention, so... keep up the good work! Sometimes I think this is exactly how MSM teaches people how to think in their PC codes, so maybe it's a sardonic critique. Kudos then or whatever...hehe
That is the most ignorant, un-researched, untrue pile of shit I've ever seen on here; and that's saying something. Just because Rush Limbaugh or David Duke says some shit that doesn't make it true.
It is difficult to appreciate the damage we do to other nations and their people when we focus our foreign aid on military and police equipment to permit autocratic regimes to better maintain themselves in power. We would be well advised to revisit some of our agricultural tariff policies as an effective way to wean foreign farmers from a dependency on narcotic cultivation.
We need to throw a lifeline to those of us addicted to drugs. We are all addicts to some degree—such is the advance of pharmacology. However, advanced drug addiction is a public health, not a criminal problem. There is a tremendous amount of human and technological talent tied up in the DEA and other agencies involved in the drug war. Imagine taking these powerful assets—complete with a global intelligence network—and focusing it on tracking terrorists.
But for all the failures, we have had one outstanding success in the War on Drugs, a stunning victory that calls for our attention because it clearly shows a way out. Over the last 15 years, adult use of tobacco in the U.S. has dropped by 50%. The secret weapon? Education.
As in 1933, once we've got the money and the guns off the table, we can concentrate on our addiction problem. It won't be easy, but at least we won't have to pour money down a rat hole by arresting a million otherwise innocent people every year.
Drug usage is a public health problem, not a criminal problem. It's the War on Drugs—the war against the criminal element—that ravages our inner cities and compounds the social damage of an errant social policy.
It will be tough to turn this juggernaut around. There are tens of thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, police officers, prison guards and attorneys who receive most or all of their paycheck from this failed campaign. Even though they know the ship is dead in the water, they're not about to jump overboard.
As astounding as it sounds to us, most of these addicts lived otherwise productive lives. The drugs simply allowed them to function and as long as the dose was correct, the side effects were minimal. The vast majority of narcotics addicts at the time were paying their taxes and holding down jobs. Like diabetics, they had a medical problem that they worked out with their doctors.
As for the hard drugs, that's a much harder problem; but it should be clear by now that police, no matter how dedicated, are not going to be able to fix it. Law enforcement is much too blunt an instrument. If you're trying to turn a screw, you only make things worse with a hammer. Before 1914, there were no drug criminals or drug crimes in the United States. If you were addicted to heroin in those days you went to the doctor, who wrote a prescription, and you took it to the drug store.
Though this conclusion was the product of two years of research by some of the best minds available, it did not fit with the president's political agenda; and the report was deep-sixed. We should resurrect it.
In 1972, Richard Nixon called for exactly that kind of study. He established the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, and the so-called "Shafer Report" is regarded as the most thorough examination of the cannabis plant in history. It was endorsed by the AMA, the ABA, the American Association for Public Health, the NEA, and the National Council of Churches. Their recommendation? Legalize marijuana.
Marijuana has been a political football since the 1960s, and it's time we stopped playing this silly and destructive game. We should assemble the leading medical and scientific experts and have them conduct an exhaustive study of every aspect of the marijuana problem and then we... Wait a minute. We already did that.
Washington may be asleep at the switch, but the American people have already made up their minds on this issue. In the latest national poll, 80% of the voters support access to marijuana with a doctor's recommendation. Twelve states have already adopted legislation to make this happen.
The value of marijuana as medicine is now solidly established in the medical literature here and abroad. The latest research indicates that the THC in marijuana shrinks cancer tumors. Let me say that again: The latest research indicates that the THC in marijuana shrinks cancer tumors.
The first thing we have to do is change the official classification of marijuana so sick people, at least, can have immediate access to it. Right now, the federal government still claims that marijuana has no medical value. That position is absurd, and it flies in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence.
There are experiments like this going on all around the world as more and more countries turn away from the draconian drug prohibition the U.S. has championed for the last century. When the Dutch decriminalized the sale of marijuana in 1978 there were cries of outrage and alarm from Washington. Today, teenage marijuana use in Holland is half that of the U.S. As one Dutch official put it, "We have succeeded in making pot boring."
And there was another amazing footnote to this experiment. Eighty-three of these hard-core users decided, on their own, to give up drugs. It seems that when uncertainty, fear and desperation are replaced by dependable government drug suppliers, people are able to think more clearly and can sometimes decide to straighten out their lives. This voluntary abstinence ratio—8.3%--is a better cure rate than we get from most of our forced treatment programs.
They found 1,000 "incorrigibles"—people who had been through rehab more than once—and just gave them the drugs. The results were astonishing. Once the subjects were stabilized on a dependable dose of heroin, they didn't nod out—they went out—and got jobs. Half the unemployed found work, crime dropped by 60%, the homeless found housing, and general health improved all around.
Maybe we ought to consider another approach. This Swiss, for example, stepped outside the prohibition box and came up with a completely original plan for dealing with chronic heroin addicts.
They need the daily hard core addicts, the one or two people out of a hundred who have to have the stuff right now. If we could take this small segment of the population out of the market, there would be no market. For 90 years, we have tried to get these folks to give up their drug habits by using threats and intimidation. We have had a notorious lack of success.
And that's the key to the whole drug problem: get the money out of the equation. The best way to keep hard drugs like heroin and cocaine away from kids is to make the market financially unrewarding to criminals. Organized crime can't make a living on teenagers, amateurs and tourists.
Alcohol distribution today—tightly regulated and heavily taxed—clearly does a better job of keeping booze away from the kids than when the Mob was running the show. You never hear about whiskey pushers hanging around the schoolyard. There's no money in it.
Immediately after Prohibition was repealed, the U.S. murder rate began to drop precipitously; and over the next decade it was down by half—a stunning success. Of course, we still had an alcohol problem but now we could try to get the victims into AA instead of having shootouts with their supplies.
In 1933, we did not end alcohol Prohibition because we suddenly decided alcohol wasn't dangerous. It's plenty dangerous. We ended Prohibition because the crime and violence was out of control and we were getting nowhere. That sounds like a pretty fair description of where we are in the drug war.
Prohibition didn't work with alcohol and it's not working with drugs. Today both heroin and cocaine are cheaper, purer, and more available than ever before. Even worse, we've created a whole new generation of Al Capones with enough cash, influence, and firepower to threaten the country's foundations.
And this is not only here in the U.S. Our War on Drugs has been a war on the countries that grow poppies and marijuana which have become the havens for crime and corruption. The whole point of prohibition is to make some prohibitive substances "prohibitively" expensive. Unfortunately, it becomes extremely attractive to organized crime.
If you include all costs—interdiction, including use of the military, police, courts, and prisons—we're spending around $70 billion a year on this insane enterprise; and as Lt. Cole says, we're making the problem worse day by day.
Instead of giving them treatment—proven to be many times cheaper and many times more effective than incarceration—we'd rather send them off to prison where they can often get all the drugs they want.
Today, after spending a trillion dollars and filling our vast and growing prison complex to the max, we have driven the rate of addiction up—not down—to nearly 2%. That's a 500% increase, but we're still talking about a very small slice of the population. But for some reason we have focused our most threatening legal artillery on this group.
The problem was—and is—not much of a constituency for treating drug addicts as human beings. The numbers clearly show that there never were—and are not now—enough narcotics users in this country to raise concern. When the first drug laws were passed in 1914 we had maybe 300,000 addicts in the whole U.S.—less than half of 1% of the population.
Lt. Cole came to understand what a lot of us already suspected: the drug way was fatally flawed from the get-go. In fact, when we ended alcohol prohibition in 1933 we should have ended drug prohibition for all the same reasons: to stop the skyrocketing murder rates, the corruption at all levels, and a criminal underworld growing by leaps and bounds—all the while the booze and drugs continued to flow unabated.
For a young officer on the way up it was a great game and he was good at it. "If somebody simply passed a marijuana cigarette to me, they became a drug dealer. That one marijuana cigarette would send that person to jail for seven years." Today when he talks about that success his voice is almost a whisper. "Over a thousand young people went to jail as a direct result of what I did as one undercover agent...something I'm certainly not proud of today."
So now they had to justify this additional funding, and that called for a dramatic increase in drug busts. "They took undercover people like myself," says Cole, "and they targeted us against small friendship groups—groups of young people in college. And as soon as we got in there and became their friends, come Friday night, somebody'd say, 'Hey, school's out, we're off work, anyone want to get high?' And of course, if nobody said that, it was our job to say it."
All of a sudden federal money began raining down on police departments all over the country, and Jack Cole was there when it happened. "We had a seven-man narcotics unit," he says. "It always seemed perfectly adequate for the job we had to do. Then overnight we went from a seven-man unit to a 76-man narcotics bureau."
Drug prohibition, like alcohol prohibition, actually got started back in the 1920s, but most of us think of President Nixon as the man who started the War on Drugs. Nixon took the Bureau of Narcotics, a tiny federal agency with a few hundred employees, and turned it into the DEA, a vast international police force with more power than the FBI and CIA combined. And it was Nixon who got Congress to open the public coffers to local law enforcement.
Here was an honest cop who had lost faith in his mission. So he changed missions. Now Lt. Cole is trying to end the drug war. Three years ago, he and several of his fellow officers founded LEAP—Law Enforcement Against Prohibition—and already some 500 other law enforcement officers, judges, and prosecutors have joined them.
But nearing retirement in 2003 he looked back over the thousands of hours of danger and deception and decided maybe he had not really accomplished anything. In fact he might have made things worse.
FOR 12 GRUELING YEARS, New Jersey State Police Lt. Jack Cole was an undercover agent on the front lines of the drug war. He's exactly the kind of cop you'd hope to find in a job like that—rock steady, fearless, and dependable as the sunshine. And he was successful—one of the best in the department.
"The income of the drug barons is greater than the American defense budget. With this financial power they can suborn the institutions of the state, and if the state resists they can purchase the firepower to outgun it."
In sum, I believe the time is ripe for a broad healthcare compact. But achieving this compact will require every American to think outside his or her current healthcare box and examine the HSS plan I propose.
Our current system stinks. There's no other way to put it. And suddenly, everybody but everybody seems to realize it. To me the parameters for change are clear. To reiterate, we need a single, efficient, transparent system that includes everyone, that treats everyone fairly, that covers all the basics, including prescription drugs, home healthcare, and nursing home care, and that costs no more than the economy can afford.
And millions of elderly go to bed at night worrying whether Medicare is running short of money, whether they'll be able to afford Medicare's soaring premiums, whether their doctors will drop them because of Medicare's low reimbursement rates, and heaven forbid, whether they will end up like so many others—living in a nursing home, flat broke, and at the mercy of Medicaid.
Forty-seven million uninsured Americans are living day to day, scared to death that they'll get sick and have to hand over their life savings to pay their medical bills. Millions of insured workers live with the gnawing fear that they could be next—next to lose their employer's insurance coverage because the business can no longer carry the cost.
Fourteen years have passed since our nation last seriously debated healthcare reform. Why is the issue once again front and center? The reason is clear. Our healthcare system has become so bad that it's made everyone sick—sick with fear.
What I'm proposing is that we redirect our current healthcare's explicit and implicit expenditures to a new system that is efficient and equitable and that won't break the bank. The retail sales tax that will pay for the system can be a portion of the Fair Tax I propose in Chapter 4.
Finally, HSS will preserve and, indeed, will greatly strengthen our competitive healthcare industry. Individuals will have free choice of doctors, hospitals and caregivers. Certificate holders will be free to purchase additional insurance coverage if they so desire.
In addition to resolving three terrible problems, HSS is highly progressive. It eliminates huge tax breaks to the rich and provides certificates based on medical condition; and the poor are advantaged on average, since they are in much worse physical shape than the rich.
The best part of HSS is that it requires very little new financing, except for the upfront cost of computerizing every certificate recipient's health history. Total everything federal and state governments now shell out directly and indirectly via tax breaks on healthcare and throw in some significant administrative savings, and you arrive at roughly the same cost of our present broken system.
The HSS boards will fix the total annual healthcare certificate budget for the nation as a percentage of GDP so that the nation can't go broke due to healthcare expenditures. This budgetary process is not unlike what a family or a business would reasonably impose upon itself. Obviously the HSS boards would be making triage decisions with respect to the services provided relative to age and lifestyle.
The boards will develop health improvement programs and individual incentives to certificate holders to minimize overuse or waste of services. The plans will compete for participants by offering incentives to improve healthier lifestyles—exercise, weight reduction, cessation of smoking, gym memberships, and other incentives to improve the nation's health.
The HSS boards will define the medical standards and the care that all plans will be required to offer, including catastrophic care. The basic plans will cover drugs, dental, eye glasses, home healthcare by family or other person, mental healthcare and nursing home and hospice care.
A National HSS Board and Regional HSS Boards (not unlike the Federal Reserve System) will first secure the computerization of each American's medical history when they sign up for their certificate. The HSS boards will be composed of healthcare stakeholders: citizens, doctors, nurses, holistic health care providers, nutritionists, educational and research institutions and representatives from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries and private care facilities.
The plans are exactly the same so the companies will compete not on the services provided but based on who can provide the administrative cost more effectively. Participants can change their plan annually but cannot be dropped by the plan provider for any reason.
The plan provides each American, annually, with a health insurance certificate based upon his or her recent healthcare history; an unforeseen catastrophic event will be totally covered. Those with higher expected healthcare costs (the poor) receive bigger certificates. Participants use their certificate, each year, to purchase a basic health insurance policy from one of five private insurance plans or a government Medicare type plan.
THE HEALTHCARE SECURITY SYSTEM (HSS), the plan I propose, provides a singe solution for all three of our crises and provides quality healthcare for all Americans. It is designed to replace all state healthcare plans, employer-based healthcare systems, and eventually Medicare and Medicaid, which would be allowed to expire.
As for forcing the uninsured poor to pay for their own coverage, good luck. There is no way to force someone who is poor to buy health insurance, meaning we'll still end up with huge numbers of uninsured showing up at emergency rooms.
And, rather than help employers exit the health insurance business, the schemes permanently trap all employers in it. Worse yet, they may suggest to employers that they dump their plans and simply pay the losers' insurance tax for all their workers, lest the government pass a law that compels them indefinitely maintain their very expensive current plans.
It's time for a reality check. Worsening Medicaid's finances and letting Medicare hemorrhage further will leave no money for anything else, let alone massive government subsidies for losers' insurance.
To finance this higher price, these plans propose direct government subsidization, as well as forcing all employers who don't provide health insurance coverage to pay a special fee per worker. Those uninsured who don't work, including many very poor people, will be required to buy a health insurance policy.
Since this population has much higher-than-average expected healthcare costs, the insurance companies will provide coverage only if they are compensated at a higher price than they would charge the general population.
In the Massachusetts plan, attractive to a number of candidates, citizens not covered by employers must purchase health insurance, a thinly disguised open-ended subsidy to the insurance industry. The uninsured get stuck in what is best described as a loser's insurance pool in which participants receive third-rate insurance coverage, thanks to significant co-payments, high deductibles, exclusions and ceilings on coverage.
Those political candidates who suggest a Medicare single-payer system for all seem not to have noticed that the government's present managing of Medicare and Medicaid is exploding the government debt, contributing substantially to the fiscal gap. As pointed out earlier, there is only one single payer—it's not the government—it's the citizen, the taxpayer or the consumer; we can all identify with one of those roles.
Thirty years ago, I argued with labor leaders that their primary focus should be on capital ownership for their members rather than the pursuit of wages and benefits. Dues and pension fund management were too strong an elixir for my arguments that also included predictions of union decline. As a strong supporter of the labor movement, which has done so much for the well-being of average Americans, I am distressed by my own analysis.
VEBA is viewed as a model for American industry. In my opinion, if this model is acted upon it will spell the death knell of what modest resurgence the American labor movement is enjoying in this election cycle.
The UAW is gambling that the cost of healthcare will not exceed the earning and the corpus of the trust. A poor gamble in view of the Caterpillar and Detroit Diesel trusts' bankruptcies.
One would have thought the General Motors' experience would have been instructive to these presidential wannabes. The GM solution, creating a voluntary employees' beneficiary association (VEBA), a trust with a corpus funded by GM but controlled and operated by the UAW, merely puts off the day of reckoning for union members. Without VEBA, GM would likely be forced into Chapter 11, where more than likely the retirees would lose a considerable portion of their healthcare benefits.
Most healthcare plans suggested by presidential candidates address only one of our three healthcare problems—the 47 million uninsured. Tragically these "solutions" compound the problem by mandating that business either cover their employees or pay an employer tax to cover them. This is forcing a failed solution that already cripples America's competitive ability abroad.
As the uninsured run of funds to cover their healthcare bill, more and more end up at the emergency room on Medicaid. Since 2000, Medicaid enrollments have soared by 35%! And, to close the circle, the fee-for-service reimbursement system used by Medicare and, to a lesser extent by Medicaid, has contributed significantly to the overall rise in the price of healthcare and, consequently, to the healthcare costs employers now face.
Employers that continue to offer health insurance are asking their employees to pay for ever larger shares of the premiums. Millions of U.S. workers are saying, "No, thank you" and declining coverage in their employers' plans.
The three crises are interconnected and therefore cannot be solved individually. Employers are reacting to the high cost of healthcare by eliminating their health plans. This is swelling the ranks of he uninsured. In 2000, 66% of non-elderly Americans were covered by employer-based health insurance. Today's figure is 59%.
The third healthcare crisis involves enormous healthcare obligations facing employers, many of whom are drowning in healthcare bills. General Motors, for instance, is sitting on more than a $50 billion healthcare liability for 73,000 employees and nearly 27,000 retirees that may ultimately spell its bankruptcy. How could GM have predicted that healthcare costs would have grown three times faster than inflation in 40 years?
Fifty trillion dollars is enormous, even in an economy as large as ours. It goes well beyond anything the nation can pay, particularly if it squanders its treasure on excessive defense spending and unnecessary wars.
These huge pending annual healthcare costs are largely responsible for the roughly $50 trillion fiscal gap separating projected future federal expenditures and receipts, where all of these amounts are valued in the present (measured in present value). This fiscal gap provides the true measure of nation's indebtedness because it puts all future obligations, implicit and explicit, on an equal footing.
Second, Medicare and Medicaid costs threaten to bankrupt the country. Today's elderly are now receiving, on average, over $15,000 per year from these programs. When all 77 million baby boomers are fully retired, the average benefit will exceed $25,000 measured in today's dollars. If benefit growth is not restrained, then the two programs' inflation-adjusted annual costs will run close to $1.5 trillion.
Our country faces three terrible and worsening healthcare crises. First, 47 million Americans, including 8 million children, have no health insurance coverage. In 1987, the uninsured totaled 32 million. Thus, in two decades we've seen almost a 50% rise in those without health insurance.
I've never been able to forget that man's face. It made me sad and angry—angry because it was such a senseless, mindless penalty to pay on top of his grief. And I am angrier still at how commonplace this sort of outrage is in our society and how we tolerate it. We are allowing sickness to literally wreck the lives of millions of people—the average citizen and the poor alike—by putting the cost of proper care out of reach.
When he opened the door, I was shocked. From a robust Alaskan in his mid-sixties he had turned into a despondent old man. And then he told me how his wife had contracted cancer and how he had used up all his financial resources to ease her suffering. The bank account was empty. He had mortgaged the trailer and sold the pickup truck and camper. One illness had wiped him out.
While we talked he raised the subject of medicine and how he was against providing free care to anyone and proved his point by announcing that he was a Republican voter. He said everybody should pay for his own health needs, observing "socialized medicine is bad stuff."
A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO IN ANCHORAGE, during a political campaign, I knocked on the door of a retired plumber, a man who had worked hard all his life and who now lived in an expensive trailer with his wife. He had an automobile and a pickup truck with a camper and was obviously proud of his independence. He was enjoying the fruits of his lifelong labor.
- Treat drug addiction as the public health problem that it is.
- Create alternatives to restrictive post-release correctional control for non-serious, non-violent offenders.
- Offer release incentives to inmates for good behavior and education.
- Treat the whole prisoner (economic, social, spiritual and physical).
- Develop meaningful ways to strengthen families with incarcerated parents through regular, less restrictive visits in prison and much less costly telephone calls.
- Creates opportunities for direct citizen involvement through volunteer programs in prison and jails, mentoring of released offenders, family outreach, and provision for citizen oversight boards for all levels of the criminal justice system.
- Decriminalize the regulation of drugs.
- Legalize marijuana, tax it, and make it available through regulated stores.
- Eliminate mandatory minimum and three-strikes sentencing laws.
What must we do? We need leadership that does not flinch from the realities of the problem. We need a strategy for transformational change that can eliminate the threats to the country that have arisen due to misguided thinking in our criminal justice system. The recommendations in this chapter address the transformation that needs to take place in our criminal justice system for the survival of America as a nation of opportunity for people, regardless of their race or national origin.
The only beneficiary of a tough-on-crime political posture is the prison-industrial complex. Its prime directive is more profit for its shareholders, who benefit by putting more and more people into the system. The rising costs of doing so are an unrecognized drain on our national competitiveness, especially the hidden costs of all the negative human capital created by the criminal justice system.
"Politics as usual" fosters irrational, counterproductive responses rather than effective solutions. Many political races are characterized by accusations that the other party is soft on crime. Talking tough on crime may win elections. But being tough on crime has worsened the problem by packing our prisons with non-violent offenders.
- Create opportunities for "boomer generation" retirees to get involved and apply their skills and experience through volunteering and mentorship to help people, their neighborhoods, and their communities to find their place in the "New America."
- Enact a federal law to give voting rights to felons who have paid their debt to society.
A strategy to implement this philosophy could reduce the American rate of incarceration to that comparable to Canada and other democracies within a decade. This would be a domestic Marshall Plan to:
- Revitalize poor, crime-ridden communities by presenting opportunities for economic, social, and political advancement.
- Change the paradigm of the corrections system as a whole from punishment to problem solving and rehabilitation.
The guiding philosophy for change must be that the purpose of the criminal justice system is to assure public safety through changing the behavior of people who commit criminal acts and by giving offenders the opportunity to become more capable of leading productive lives in the open community through education and treatment of addictive behavior.
It is possible to reduce our jail and prison population, now at 747 per 100,000 to levels comparable to Canada (129 per 100,000). Canada has a similarly diverse population with comparable levels of affluence and poverty. Since there are countries, such as Finland, that employ "gentle justice" and incarcerate far fewer people than Canada, we must look beyond our shores to those examples and elevate our long-term goals.
Incarceration, with some exceptions, should present educational opportunities to every inmate to the maximum of their aspirations. If that aspiration includes a college education, then we should create that opportunity, since we have already committed to pay this price by incarcerating that individual.
The solution is indicated by the results. People who, while in prison, complete their higher education or participate in any number of programs designed to teach a work ethic and other values that can be applied in the real world when the prisoner is released, have a 3% recidivism rate. Clearly, making people more capable produces the desired results.
Our correction system must be transformed to produce people more able to become productive citizens than when they entered the system. Nationally, over two-thirds of people who get entangled in the criminal justice system re-offend and return to the system.
We have concentrated a vast army of troubled people together with hardened criminals and potential terrorists. We are beginning to see the emerging threat of terrorist gangs, taught in our prisons, paid for by taxpayers at a cost per annum equal to a Harvard education. The greatest threat to our nation may lie within our own prisons.
Forty years ago, Karl Menninger, M.D., in his book, The Crime of Punishment, pointed to the deep flaws in our "corrections" systems. Instead of taking measures to correct the flaws identified by Menninger, state and national leaders responded to demagogic populist calls, fueled by manufactured political claims, to get tough on crime. They have created a monster that threatens not only the nation's competitiveness but our personal security.
Locking up people for $30,000 or more per year for lengthy sentences is extremely wasteful. Moreover, it is a human, social, and moral waste that can no longer be afforded nor tolerated. Other countries that do not spend such vast resources on creating negative human capital will knock our socks off competitively unless we make the decision to end this waste.
If this approach were taken across the country, within a decade, significant progress could be made in changing the culture of the American justice system.
It is absolutely critical that basic needs such as housing, medical care, and work are available. A person who is denied basic needs is forced by society to operate in an extralegal environment to survive.
When they are released, where there are functional families, support should be made available so that the families can better receive them and be educated in ways of keeping them on the track of productivity. To support the family's efforts, probation and parole must offer positive intervention. Often, however, there are no function families; in those cases, mentoring needs to be encouraged by faith-based and other volunteer organizations.
Oh my. Now that is very uncalled for..very rude. No political party wants you to be affiliated with you.
Medication102 2 years ago
Look, he's senile and swearing lol.
MOV13M4ST3R 2 years ago
Where is this guy's family? Why do they let him humiliate himself like this? It's obvious he suffers from dementia. Why won't they put him in a nursing home already?
MOV13M4ST3R 2 years ago
unnecessary censorship is what it is....unnecessary. I agree with that statement Mike!
kardentyrell 2 years ago
this guy is so chill
kickAbooJoyjuice 3 years ago 2
i would like you to dance
HerschelKrustofski 3 years ago 2
Mike is awesome!
MedienPcpaul 3 years ago 4
This comment has received too many negative votes show
Happy Birthday Mike..even if it is a an actual day that not one single human being can ever remember :)
VVendettaz 3 years ago
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What an awesome weirdo.
Reubnick 3 years ago
SALMO I
1 BEM-AVENTURADO o homem que não anda segundo o conselho dos ímpios, nem se detém no caminho dos pecadores, nem se assenta na roda dos escarnecedores.
2 Antes tem o seu prazer na lei do SENHOR, e na sua lei medita de dia e de noite.
3 Pois será como a árvore plantada junto a ribeiros de águas, a qual dá o seu fruto no seu tempo; as suas folhas não cairão, e tudo quanto fizer prosperará.
videoscristaos 3 years ago
DEUS É FIEL
videoscristaos 3 years ago
happy birthday Mr. Gravel, I hope you're our next prez
bbproductionsLA 3 years ago 20
Super job on this video, Jon & Skyler!
MIKE GRAVEL 4 PRESIDENT!!!
uterfan 3 years ago 13
Happy Birthday Senator!
LittleRachael 3 years ago 10
omg his guy is great!
yankees12054 3 years ago 11
The only reason McCain would have the power to drop a bomb on Iran is because idiots like you dont want to take responciblity for there own governance. Too fat, lazy and scared to be as brave as those who enacted the Consitution. We have the power this election to enact the NI4D that will empower the American people to become lawmakers to repeal all these bullshit laws and make sure the Presidancy is never abused again.
kyeot 3 years ago 3
Democrats win the popular vote, their are massive reports of voter fraud, Democrats hand over the Presidency to Bush with thier tail between there legs offering no contest. BS if you think Gravel would go out like that, Gravel has a solid record standing up for Americans rights, Obama will denounce you in a heartbeat just like he did his pastor.
kyeot 3 years ago 6
xMannyfestox you talk about splitting the vote, isn't that what Hillary and Obama are doing right now to ensure a McCain victory. Seriously how stupid to you have to be to realise that the democrats have been handing over the election for 8 years without contest. Instead of sticking with the one party, one choice, Republicrat communist party; Make that vote count don't just vote for false change or someones experience entails sleeping with the president. Vote Gravel!
kyeot 3 years ago 4
Happy birthday Mike! You're the coolest!
butterflyhands 3 years ago
Yay! I wish Mr. Gravel could be our president, hes such a cool guy.
Frost4U 3 years ago 3
This is supposed to be a happy video for MIKE'S BIRTHDAY, not for bickering. Why does everything turn into a hate-fest?
Even though I already said happy birthday, I can't wait to see you again in Denver, Mr. Senator! Just a week away!!!
sgandms 3 years ago
happy birthday!
merrimac291 3 years ago
Go Beatles!.... Mike Gravel too!
colonelcorn4u 3 years ago
does this make him a taurus, yaaay mike. cause i am one. i think it does.
photofu 3 years ago
who donated for gravel's birthday, or bought a book?
PhillyForGravel 3 years ago
you can buy gravel's book at citizen-power . us
PhillyForGravel 3 years ago
a few more comments to get it on the most commented page
PhillyForGravel 3 years ago
Happy birthday
SalamiSlim 3 years ago
who makes these videos for mike? they're absolutely ridiculous! I can't wait for the next one!
zorrell 3 years ago 2
Thanks?
gravel2008 3 years ago
Happy B-day
55NarutoYagami55 3 years ago
gravel2008 . us / donate _ now
PhillyForGravel 3 years ago
Traitor
xMannyfestox 3 years ago
happy birthday
MunchieMunchie 3 years ago
Happy birthday big Mike!
hugozoom 3 years ago
If Gravel, Paul, Kucinich, and Nader were the Beatles,
Obama and McCain would be Milli Vanilli.
RonPaulGeorgeRingo 3 years ago 2
"If Gravel, Paul, Kucinich, and Nader were the Beatles"
the only person in that list that's worth a shit is Kucinich.
xMannyfestox 3 years ago
um...
PhillyForGravel 3 years ago
Temper temper.
Let's figure who's who.
Gravel is definitely John.
Nader is George (
Ron Paul is Ringo.
And Kucinich is Paul (fellow vegetarian).
But you gotta watch that temper, boy!
PeaceCzar 3 years ago 2
PeaceCzar: "But you gotta watch that temper, boy!"
I don't HAVE to do anything comrad.
xMannyfestox 3 years ago
calm down, please!
PhillyForGravel 3 years ago
I don't even think my comment was directed towards you, can't remember.
Whether it was or not, I think your response makes my case perfectly clear!
Back behind your keyboard, tough guy.
PeaceCzar 3 years ago
Your comment was a reply to mine and you can kiss my ass.
xMannyfestox 3 years ago
please, mannyfesto, this is just stupid
PhillyForGravel 3 years ago
I agree, this stupid spoil sport didn't get the democratic nomination so now he wants to help McCain by running as a third party candidate. That's what i call a traitor.
xMannyfestox 3 years ago
You value party over people. You are a traitor to the human race.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
I am not a democrat but I do know that it's very important that John McCain not become president. Anyone that is a proponent of splitting the vote to help mcCain become president will be PERSONALLY responsible for the hell that comes of it. That means you cream puff.
xMannyfestox 3 years ago
I am not going to be vote for one lesser evil just so someone else doesn't get in office. I am going to vote for someone because I believe that they will be the best president, period. Mike will be a better President than any of the other runners. Just because you aren't courageous enough to cast a meaningful vote doesn't mean that everyone else should follow that pattern.
sgandms 3 years ago
When McCain drops the bomb on Iran it will be on you.
xMannyfestox 3 years ago
When McCain drops the bomb on Iran it is because the American people could not see past the 2 party system. That's not my fault because I am fighting EVERY DAY for people to learn to cast courageous and meaningful votes. If McCain drops the bomb on Iran, it is the American publics fault because they didn't stop him. We have the right to overturn our government if they are making decisions we don't like, we just dont exercise that power because we are manipulated by corporations and
sgandms 3 years ago 4
Right on sgandms, when people realise that the Democrats and Republicans are apart of the same damn communist party then people will start to understand why its important to vote Gravel this election, otherwise we just are electing who the republicrats want us to elect.
kyeot 3 years ago 4
and manufactured goods. We are blinded by starbucks and hollywood into thinking we don't need to DO anything in the world and our government is handling it. That is obviously not true. When McCain drops a bomb on Iran, it is your fault for not standing up for your rights as a citizen. It has nothing to do with me, because I will be fighting every step of the way.
sgandms 3 years ago 3
would you shut up, troll?
PhillyForGravel 3 years ago 2
Damn you are dumb. But hey, that's your individual right to be an ignorant twit. The wonders of a free society!
We'll leave you be, sugar.
PeaceCzar 3 years ago 3
This comment has received too many negative votes show
Fuck you! "peaceczar", with a stupid handle like that you are the last one to critisize someone's intelligence. Let me spell it out so that even a fuckwit like you can understand. A vote for anyone besides Barak Obama will help grandpa McCain become president. As someone that claims to be a proponent of peace that should scare the hell out of you, are YOU just to dumb to realise it?
xMannyfestox 3 years ago
And in case you weren't aware, Obama has voted to continue funding the Iraq war. Obama has said that NO OPTIONS are off the table when it comes to Iran - that is code for NUKES. The republicans and the democrats are the SAME PARTY with different rhetoric. A vote for either party is a vote for more war, more taxes, more government corruption and their little greedy fingers in all aspects of your life.
sgandms 3 years ago 5
Oh snap that's right--I AM ridiculously dumb, thank heavens you reminded me!
Usually I need to vote once every four years for a candidate that follows through on their promise to not accomplish anything or stand by their word.
But this time around, you're doing that for me. So I can be really "reckless" and vote Gravel. Thanks for lookin' out for me, buddy!
You have got to vent out that anger in constructive manner. I suggest you watch a lot of porn; something tells me you need it.
PEACE!
PeaceCzar 3 years ago 4
can you use up anymore space to write nonsense?
cletusbojangles187 3 years ago
That is good to know! Hopefully you will be a supporter ;)
sgandms 3 years ago
he is like an ADD Grandfather :D
zhinch 3 years ago
- Produces a prison system that incarcerates more people than any other country.
- Fails to accept the presidential Shafer Commission recommendations to decriminalize drugs and treat addiction as a public health problem.
- Is a de facto race and economic war.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
we incarcerate more people because other countries either
1) have no niggers running amok
2) other countries summarily execute criminals.
I guess your solution to crime is to let criminals out of jail (after outlawing guns of course so no one can defend themselves)
YuToobHasAIDS 3 years ago
This sounds like a joke, but unfortunately some people actually think this way so it's hard to tell. Either way, you're being an asshole which clearly seems to be the intention, so... keep up the good work! Sometimes I think this is exactly how MSM teaches people how to think in their PC codes, so maybe it's a sardonic critique. Kudos then or whatever...hehe
Gosh, I am tired...
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago 2
That is the most ignorant, un-researched, untrue pile of shit I've ever seen on here; and that's saying something. Just because Rush Limbaugh or David Duke says some shit that doesn't make it true.
xMannyfestox 3 years ago
The Drug War
- Treats drug addition as a criminal problem rather than a public health problem.
- Ravages our inner cities and destroys family cohesion.
- Militarizes our foreign policy, destabilizes democratic regimes and strengthens autocratic regimes.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
It is difficult to appreciate the damage we do to other nations and their people when we focus our foreign aid on military and police equipment to permit autocratic regimes to better maintain themselves in power. We would be well advised to revisit some of our agricultural tariff policies as an effective way to wean foreign farmers from a dependency on narcotic cultivation.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
We need to throw a lifeline to those of us addicted to drugs. We are all addicts to some degree—such is the advance of pharmacology. However, advanced drug addiction is a public health, not a criminal problem. There is a tremendous amount of human and technological talent tied up in the DEA and other agencies involved in the drug war. Imagine taking these powerful assets—complete with a global intelligence network—and focusing it on tracking terrorists.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
We never fired a shot.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
But for all the failures, we have had one outstanding success in the War on Drugs, a stunning victory that calls for our attention because it clearly shows a way out. Over the last 15 years, adult use of tobacco in the U.S. has dropped by 50%. The secret weapon? Education.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
As in 1933, once we've got the money and the guns off the table, we can concentrate on our addiction problem. It won't be easy, but at least we won't have to pour money down a rat hole by arresting a million otherwise innocent people every year.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Drug usage is a public health problem, not a criminal problem. It's the War on Drugs—the war against the criminal element—that ravages our inner cities and compounds the social damage of an errant social policy.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
It will be tough to turn this juggernaut around. There are tens of thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, police officers, prison guards and attorneys who receive most or all of their paycheck from this failed campaign. Even though they know the ship is dead in the water, they're not about to jump overboard.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
As astounding as it sounds to us, most of these addicts lived otherwise productive lives. The drugs simply allowed them to function and as long as the dose was correct, the side effects were minimal. The vast majority of narcotics addicts at the time were paying their taxes and holding down jobs. Like diabetics, they had a medical problem that they worked out with their doctors.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
As for the hard drugs, that's a much harder problem; but it should be clear by now that police, no matter how dedicated, are not going to be able to fix it. Law enforcement is much too blunt an instrument. If you're trying to turn a screw, you only make things worse with a hammer. Before 1914, there were no drug criminals or drug crimes in the United States. If you were addicted to heroin in those days you went to the doctor, who wrote a prescription, and you took it to the drug store.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Though this conclusion was the product of two years of research by some of the best minds available, it did not fit with the president's political agenda; and the report was deep-sixed. We should resurrect it.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
In 1972, Richard Nixon called for exactly that kind of study. He established the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, and the so-called "Shafer Report" is regarded as the most thorough examination of the cannabis plant in history. It was endorsed by the AMA, the ABA, the American Association for Public Health, the NEA, and the National Council of Churches. Their recommendation? Legalize marijuana.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Marijuana has been a political football since the 1960s, and it's time we stopped playing this silly and destructive game. We should assemble the leading medical and scientific experts and have them conduct an exhaustive study of every aspect of the marijuana problem and then we... Wait a minute. We already did that.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Washington may be asleep at the switch, but the American people have already made up their minds on this issue. In the latest national poll, 80% of the voters support access to marijuana with a doctor's recommendation. Twelve states have already adopted legislation to make this happen.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The value of marijuana as medicine is now solidly established in the medical literature here and abroad. The latest research indicates that the THC in marijuana shrinks cancer tumors. Let me say that again: The latest research indicates that the THC in marijuana shrinks cancer tumors.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Where do we go from here?
The first thing we have to do is change the official classification of marijuana so sick people, at least, can have immediate access to it. Right now, the federal government still claims that marijuana has no medical value. That position is absurd, and it flies in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
There are experiments like this going on all around the world as more and more countries turn away from the draconian drug prohibition the U.S. has championed for the last century. When the Dutch decriminalized the sale of marijuana in 1978 there were cries of outrage and alarm from Washington. Today, teenage marijuana use in Holland is half that of the U.S. As one Dutch official put it, "We have succeeded in making pot boring."
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
And there was another amazing footnote to this experiment. Eighty-three of these hard-core users decided, on their own, to give up drugs. It seems that when uncertainty, fear and desperation are replaced by dependable government drug suppliers, people are able to think more clearly and can sometimes decide to straighten out their lives. This voluntary abstinence ratio—8.3%--is a better cure rate than we get from most of our forced treatment programs.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
They found 1,000 "incorrigibles"—people who had been through rehab more than once—and just gave them the drugs. The results were astonishing. Once the subjects were stabilized on a dependable dose of heroin, they didn't nod out—they went out—and got jobs. Half the unemployed found work, crime dropped by 60%, the homeless found housing, and general health improved all around.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Maybe we ought to consider another approach. This Swiss, for example, stepped outside the prohibition box and came up with a completely original plan for dealing with chronic heroin addicts.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
They need the daily hard core addicts, the one or two people out of a hundred who have to have the stuff right now. If we could take this small segment of the population out of the market, there would be no market. For 90 years, we have tried to get these folks to give up their drug habits by using threats and intimidation. We have had a notorious lack of success.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
And that's the key to the whole drug problem: get the money out of the equation. The best way to keep hard drugs like heroin and cocaine away from kids is to make the market financially unrewarding to criminals. Organized crime can't make a living on teenagers, amateurs and tourists.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Alcohol distribution today—tightly regulated and heavily taxed—clearly does a better job of keeping booze away from the kids than when the Mob was running the show. You never hear about whiskey pushers hanging around the schoolyard. There's no money in it.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Immediately after Prohibition was repealed, the U.S. murder rate began to drop precipitously; and over the next decade it was down by half—a stunning success. Of course, we still had an alcohol problem but now we could try to get the victims into AA instead of having shootouts with their supplies.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
So what do we do?
We get the profit out of the illegal drug market.
In 1933, we did not end alcohol Prohibition because we suddenly decided alcohol wasn't dangerous. It's plenty dangerous. We ended Prohibition because the crime and violence was out of control and we were getting nowhere. That sounds like a pretty fair description of where we are in the drug war.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Prohibition didn't work with alcohol and it's not working with drugs. Today both heroin and cocaine are cheaper, purer, and more available than ever before. Even worse, we've created a whole new generation of Al Capones with enough cash, influence, and firepower to threaten the country's foundations.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
And this is not only here in the U.S. Our War on Drugs has been a war on the countries that grow poppies and marijuana which have become the havens for crime and corruption. The whole point of prohibition is to make some prohibitive substances "prohibitively" expensive. Unfortunately, it becomes extremely attractive to organized crime.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
If you include all costs—interdiction, including use of the military, police, courts, and prisons—we're spending around $70 billion a year on this insane enterprise; and as Lt. Cole says, we're making the problem worse day by day.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Instead of giving them treatment—proven to be many times cheaper and many times more effective than incarceration—we'd rather send them off to prison where they can often get all the drugs they want.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Today, after spending a trillion dollars and filling our vast and growing prison complex to the max, we have driven the rate of addiction up—not down—to nearly 2%. That's a 500% increase, but we're still talking about a very small slice of the population. But for some reason we have focused our most threatening legal artillery on this group.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The problem was—and is—not much of a constituency for treating drug addicts as human beings. The numbers clearly show that there never were—and are not now—enough narcotics users in this country to raise concern. When the first drug laws were passed in 1914 we had maybe 300,000 addicts in the whole U.S.—less than half of 1% of the population.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Lt. Cole came to understand what a lot of us already suspected: the drug way was fatally flawed from the get-go. In fact, when we ended alcohol prohibition in 1933 we should have ended drug prohibition for all the same reasons: to stop the skyrocketing murder rates, the corruption at all levels, and a criminal underworld growing by leaps and bounds—all the while the booze and drugs continued to flow unabated.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
For a young officer on the way up it was a great game and he was good at it. "If somebody simply passed a marijuana cigarette to me, they became a drug dealer. That one marijuana cigarette would send that person to jail for seven years." Today when he talks about that success his voice is almost a whisper. "Over a thousand young people went to jail as a direct result of what I did as one undercover agent...something I'm certainly not proud of today."
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
So now they had to justify this additional funding, and that called for a dramatic increase in drug busts. "They took undercover people like myself," says Cole, "and they targeted us against small friendship groups—groups of young people in college. And as soon as we got in there and became their friends, come Friday night, somebody'd say, 'Hey, school's out, we're off work, anyone want to get high?' And of course, if nobody said that, it was our job to say it."
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
All of a sudden federal money began raining down on police departments all over the country, and Jack Cole was there when it happened. "We had a seven-man narcotics unit," he says. "It always seemed perfectly adequate for the job we had to do. Then overnight we went from a seven-man unit to a 76-man narcotics bureau."
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Drug prohibition, like alcohol prohibition, actually got started back in the 1920s, but most of us think of President Nixon as the man who started the War on Drugs. Nixon took the Bureau of Narcotics, a tiny federal agency with a few hundred employees, and turned it into the DEA, a vast international police force with more power than the FBI and CIA combined. And it was Nixon who got Congress to open the public coffers to local law enforcement.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Here was an honest cop who had lost faith in his mission. So he changed missions. Now Lt. Cole is trying to end the drug war. Three years ago, he and several of his fellow officers founded LEAP—Law Enforcement Against Prohibition—and already some 500 other law enforcement officers, judges, and prosecutors have joined them.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
But nearing retirement in 2003 he looked back over the thousands of hours of danger and deception and decided maybe he had not really accomplished anything. In fact he might have made things worse.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
FOR 12 GRUELING YEARS, New Jersey State Police Lt. Jack Cole was an undercover agent on the front lines of the drug war. He's exactly the kind of cop you'd hope to find in a job like that—rock steady, fearless, and dependable as the sunshine. And he was successful—one of the best in the department.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Chapter 7
The War on Drugs
"The income of the drug barons is greater than the American defense budget. With this financial power they can suborn the institutions of the state, and if the state resists they can purchase the firepower to outgun it."
--Judge Gomez Hurtado
Colombian High Court
1993
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
---End of Chapter 5---
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
- Covers such services as drugs, dental, eye glasses, home healthcare, nursing home care, etc.
- Fosters competition between plans for participants based on preventive care and efficient administrative costs.
- Fixes annual certificate budget as a share of GDP.
- Permits Medicare and Medicaid to expire, and eliminates employer-based health insurance plan tax breaks.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Chapter 5
Healthcare Security System
- Gives quality healthcare coverage to all Americans.
- Provides each American, annually, with a health plan certificate.
- Offers certificates of larger value for those with higher expected healthcare costs.
- Offers participants free choice of doctors, hospitals, and caregivers.
- Offers participants choice of insurance or government plans.
- Defines standards and services for the plans through the National and Regional HSS Boards.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
In sum, I believe the time is ripe for a broad healthcare compact. But achieving this compact will require every American to think outside his or her current healthcare box and examine the HSS plan I propose.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Our current system stinks. There's no other way to put it. And suddenly, everybody but everybody seems to realize it. To me the parameters for change are clear. To reiterate, we need a single, efficient, transparent system that includes everyone, that treats everyone fairly, that covers all the basics, including prescription drugs, home healthcare, and nursing home care, and that costs no more than the economy can afford.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
And millions of elderly go to bed at night worrying whether Medicare is running short of money, whether they'll be able to afford Medicare's soaring premiums, whether their doctors will drop them because of Medicare's low reimbursement rates, and heaven forbid, whether they will end up like so many others—living in a nursing home, flat broke, and at the mercy of Medicaid.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Forty-seven million uninsured Americans are living day to day, scared to death that they'll get sick and have to hand over their life savings to pay their medical bills. Millions of insured workers live with the gnawing fear that they could be next—next to lose their employer's insurance coverage because the business can no longer carry the cost.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Fourteen years have passed since our nation last seriously debated healthcare reform. Why is the issue once again front and center? The reason is clear. Our healthcare system has become so bad that it's made everyone sick—sick with fear.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
What I'm proposing is that we redirect our current healthcare's explicit and implicit expenditures to a new system that is efficient and equitable and that won't break the bank. The retail sales tax that will pay for the system can be a portion of the Fair Tax I propose in Chapter 4.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Finally, HSS will preserve and, indeed, will greatly strengthen our competitive healthcare industry. Individuals will have free choice of doctors, hospitals and caregivers. Certificate holders will be free to purchase additional insurance coverage if they so desire.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
In addition to resolving three terrible problems, HSS is highly progressive. It eliminates huge tax breaks to the rich and provides certificates based on medical condition; and the poor are advantaged on average, since they are in much worse physical shape than the rich.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The best part of HSS is that it requires very little new financing, except for the upfront cost of computerizing every certificate recipient's health history. Total everything federal and state governments now shell out directly and indirectly via tax breaks on healthcare and throw in some significant administrative savings, and you arrive at roughly the same cost of our present broken system.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The HSS boards will fix the total annual healthcare certificate budget for the nation as a percentage of GDP so that the nation can't go broke due to healthcare expenditures. This budgetary process is not unlike what a family or a business would reasonably impose upon itself. Obviously the HSS boards would be making triage decisions with respect to the services provided relative to age and lifestyle.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The cost of HSS will be paid for by a percentage of the retail sales tax on all new products and services—the Fair Tax.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The boards will develop health improvement programs and individual incentives to certificate holders to minimize overuse or waste of services. The plans will compete for participants by offering incentives to improve healthier lifestyles—exercise, weight reduction, cessation of smoking, gym memberships, and other incentives to improve the nation's health.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The HSS boards will define the medical standards and the care that all plans will be required to offer, including catastrophic care. The basic plans will cover drugs, dental, eye glasses, home healthcare by family or other person, mental healthcare and nursing home and hospice care.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
A National HSS Board and Regional HSS Boards (not unlike the Federal Reserve System) will first secure the computerization of each American's medical history when they sign up for their certificate. The HSS boards will be composed of healthcare stakeholders: citizens, doctors, nurses, holistic health care providers, nutritionists, educational and research institutions and representatives from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries and private care facilities.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The plans are exactly the same so the companies will compete not on the services provided but based on who can provide the administrative cost more effectively. Participants can change their plan annually but cannot be dropped by the plan provider for any reason.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The plan provides each American, annually, with a health insurance certificate based upon his or her recent healthcare history; an unforeseen catastrophic event will be totally covered. Those with higher expected healthcare costs (the poor) receive bigger certificates. Participants use their certificate, each year, to purchase a basic health insurance policy from one of five private insurance plans or a government Medicare type plan.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
THE HEALTHCARE SECURITY SYSTEM (HSS), the plan I propose, provides a singe solution for all three of our crises and provides quality healthcare for all Americans. It is designed to replace all state healthcare plans, employer-based healthcare systems, and eventually Medicare and Medicaid, which would be allowed to expire.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
As for forcing the uninsured poor to pay for their own coverage, good luck. There is no way to force someone who is poor to buy health insurance, meaning we'll still end up with huge numbers of uninsured showing up at emergency rooms.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
And, rather than help employers exit the health insurance business, the schemes permanently trap all employers in it. Worse yet, they may suggest to employers that they dump their plans and simply pay the losers' insurance tax for all their workers, lest the government pass a law that compels them indefinitely maintain their very expensive current plans.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
It's time for a reality check. Worsening Medicaid's finances and letting Medicare hemorrhage further will leave no money for anything else, let alone massive government subsidies for losers' insurance.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
To finance this higher price, these plans propose direct government subsidization, as well as forcing all employers who don't provide health insurance coverage to pay a special fee per worker. Those uninsured who don't work, including many very poor people, will be required to buy a health insurance policy.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Since this population has much higher-than-average expected healthcare costs, the insurance companies will provide coverage only if they are compensated at a higher price than they would charge the general population.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
In the Massachusetts plan, attractive to a number of candidates, citizens not covered by employers must purchase health insurance, a thinly disguised open-ended subsidy to the insurance industry. The uninsured get stuck in what is best described as a loser's insurance pool in which participants receive third-rate insurance coverage, thanks to significant co-payments, high deductibles, exclusions and ceilings on coverage.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Those political candidates who suggest a Medicare single-payer system for all seem not to have noticed that the government's present managing of Medicare and Medicaid is exploding the government debt, contributing substantially to the fiscal gap. As pointed out earlier, there is only one single payer—it's not the government—it's the citizen, the taxpayer or the consumer; we can all identify with one of those roles.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Thirty years ago, I argued with labor leaders that their primary focus should be on capital ownership for their members rather than the pursuit of wages and benefits. Dues and pension fund management were too strong an elixir for my arguments that also included predictions of union decline. As a strong supporter of the labor movement, which has done so much for the well-being of average Americans, I am distressed by my own analysis.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
VEBA is viewed as a model for American industry. In my opinion, if this model is acted upon it will spell the death knell of what modest resurgence the American labor movement is enjoying in this election cycle.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The UAW is gambling that the cost of healthcare will not exceed the earning and the corpus of the trust. A poor gamble in view of the Caterpillar and Detroit Diesel trusts' bankruptcies.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
One would have thought the General Motors' experience would have been instructive to these presidential wannabes. The GM solution, creating a voluntary employees' beneficiary association (VEBA), a trust with a corpus funded by GM but controlled and operated by the UAW, merely puts off the day of reckoning for union members. Without VEBA, GM would likely be forced into Chapter 11, where more than likely the retirees would lose a considerable portion of their healthcare benefits.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Most healthcare plans suggested by presidential candidates address only one of our three healthcare problems—the 47 million uninsured. Tragically these "solutions" compound the problem by mandating that business either cover their employees or pay an employer tax to cover them. This is forcing a failed solution that already cripples America's competitive ability abroad.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
As the uninsured run of funds to cover their healthcare bill, more and more end up at the emergency room on Medicaid. Since 2000, Medicaid enrollments have soared by 35%! And, to close the circle, the fee-for-service reimbursement system used by Medicare and, to a lesser extent by Medicaid, has contributed significantly to the overall rise in the price of healthcare and, consequently, to the healthcare costs employers now face.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Employers that continue to offer health insurance are asking their employees to pay for ever larger shares of the premiums. Millions of U.S. workers are saying, "No, thank you" and declining coverage in their employers' plans.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The three crises are interconnected and therefore cannot be solved individually. Employers are reacting to the high cost of healthcare by eliminating their health plans. This is swelling the ranks of he uninsured. In 2000, 66% of non-elderly Americans were covered by employer-based health insurance. Today's figure is 59%.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The third healthcare crisis involves enormous healthcare obligations facing employers, many of whom are drowning in healthcare bills. General Motors, for instance, is sitting on more than a $50 billion healthcare liability for 73,000 employees and nearly 27,000 retirees that may ultimately spell its bankruptcy. How could GM have predicted that healthcare costs would have grown three times faster than inflation in 40 years?
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Fifty trillion dollars is enormous, even in an economy as large as ours. It goes well beyond anything the nation can pay, particularly if it squanders its treasure on excessive defense spending and unnecessary wars.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
These huge pending annual healthcare costs are largely responsible for the roughly $50 trillion fiscal gap separating projected future federal expenditures and receipts, where all of these amounts are valued in the present (measured in present value). This fiscal gap provides the true measure of nation's indebtedness because it puts all future obligations, implicit and explicit, on an equal footing.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Second, Medicare and Medicaid costs threaten to bankrupt the country. Today's elderly are now receiving, on average, over $15,000 per year from these programs. When all 77 million baby boomers are fully retired, the average benefit will exceed $25,000 measured in today's dollars. If benefit growth is not restrained, then the two programs' inflation-adjusted annual costs will run close to $1.5 trillion.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Our country faces three terrible and worsening healthcare crises. First, 47 million Americans, including 8 million children, have no health insurance coverage. In 1987, the uninsured totaled 32 million. Thus, in two decades we've seen almost a 50% rise in those without health insurance.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
I've never been able to forget that man's face. It made me sad and angry—angry because it was such a senseless, mindless penalty to pay on top of his grief. And I am angrier still at how commonplace this sort of outrage is in our society and how we tolerate it. We are allowing sickness to literally wreck the lives of millions of people—the average citizen and the poor alike—by putting the cost of proper care out of reach.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
When he opened the door, I was shocked. From a robust Alaskan in his mid-sixties he had turned into a despondent old man. And then he told me how his wife had contracted cancer and how he had used up all his financial resources to ease her suffering. The bank account was empty. He had mortgaged the trailer and sold the pickup truck and camper. One illness had wiped him out.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
About a year later I happened to be in the neighborhood and, hearing the plumber's wife had died recently, paid him another call.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
While we talked he raised the subject of medicine and how he was against providing free care to anyone and proved his point by announcing that he was a Republican voter. He said everybody should pay for his own health needs, observing "socialized medicine is bad stuff."
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO IN ANCHORAGE, during a political campaign, I knocked on the door of a retired plumber, a man who had worked hard all his life and who now lived in an expensive trailer with his wife. He had an automobile and a pickup truck with a camper and was obviously proud of his independence. He was enjoying the fruits of his lifelong labor.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Chapter 5
A Healthcare Security System
"For every social wrong there must be a remedy. But the remedy can be nothing less than the abolition of the wrong."
--Henry George
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
---End of Chapter 8---
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
- Offer parenting classes to inmates to help them better relate to their children and lend moral support to the caregiver of their children.
- Work with children of inmates to boost self-esteem and understanding.
- Support organizations that help offenders return to the community through training, housing, jobs, and reintegration programs.
- Abolish the death penalty and become outraged at the waste of money, lives, and human potential in our criminal justice system.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
- Treat drug addiction as the public health problem that it is.
- Create alternatives to restrictive post-release correctional control for non-serious, non-violent offenders.
- Offer release incentives to inmates for good behavior and education.
- Treat the whole prisoner (economic, social, spiritual and physical).
- Develop meaningful ways to strengthen families with incarcerated parents through regular, less restrictive visits in prison and much less costly telephone calls.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The Solutions
- Creates opportunities for direct citizen involvement through volunteer programs in prison and jails, mentoring of released offenders, family outreach, and provision for citizen oversight boards for all levels of the criminal justice system.
- Decriminalize the regulation of drugs.
- Legalize marijuana, tax it, and make it available through regulated stores.
- Eliminate mandatory minimum and three-strikes sentencing laws.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The Problems
- One of every 133 Americans was behind bars on June 30, 2006.
- With only 5% of the world's population, the United States has over 25% of the world's incarcerated people.
- The U.S. incarcerates the largest number of people in the world.
- The U.S. imprisons the most women in the world.
- As of 2004, the annual direct cost for incarceration exceeded $42 billion.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
What must we do? We need leadership that does not flinch from the realities of the problem. We need a strategy for transformational change that can eliminate the threats to the country that have arisen due to misguided thinking in our criminal justice system. The recommendations in this chapter address the transformation that needs to take place in our criminal justice system for the survival of America as a nation of opportunity for people, regardless of their race or national origin.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The only beneficiary of a tough-on-crime political posture is the prison-industrial complex. Its prime directive is more profit for its shareholders, who benefit by putting more and more people into the system. The rising costs of doing so are an unrecognized drain on our national competitiveness, especially the hidden costs of all the negative human capital created by the criminal justice system.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
"Politics as usual" fosters irrational, counterproductive responses rather than effective solutions. Many political races are characterized by accusations that the other party is soft on crime. Talking tough on crime may win elections. But being tough on crime has worsened the problem by packing our prisons with non-violent offenders.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
- Create opportunities for "boomer generation" retirees to get involved and apply their skills and experience through volunteering and mentorship to help people, their neighborhoods, and their communities to find their place in the "New America."
- Enact a federal law to give voting rights to felons who have paid their debt to society.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
- Replace enforced idleness in jails and prisons with intensive education, training, skill development, and substance abuse treatment.
- Eliminate or modify laws that create irrational barriers to employment for those with a criminal record.
- Create incentives to hire people with a criminal record, particularly those with non-violent drug-related offenses.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
A strategy to implement this philosophy could reduce the American rate of incarceration to that comparable to Canada and other democracies within a decade. This would be a domestic Marshall Plan to:
- Revitalize poor, crime-ridden communities by presenting opportunities for economic, social, and political advancement.
- Change the paradigm of the corrections system as a whole from punishment to problem solving and rehabilitation.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The guiding philosophy for change must be that the purpose of the criminal justice system is to assure public safety through changing the behavior of people who commit criminal acts and by giving offenders the opportunity to become more capable of leading productive lives in the open community through education and treatment of addictive behavior.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
It is possible to reduce our jail and prison population, now at 747 per 100,000 to levels comparable to Canada (129 per 100,000). Canada has a similarly diverse population with comparable levels of affluence and poverty. Since there are countries, such as Finland, that employ "gentle justice" and incarcerate far fewer people than Canada, we must look beyond our shores to those examples and elevate our long-term goals.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Incarceration, with some exceptions, should present educational opportunities to every inmate to the maximum of their aspirations. If that aspiration includes a college education, then we should create that opportunity, since we have already committed to pay this price by incarcerating that individual.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
The solution is indicated by the results. People who, while in prison, complete their higher education or participate in any number of programs designed to teach a work ethic and other values that can be applied in the real world when the prisoner is released, have a 3% recidivism rate. Clearly, making people more capable produces the desired results.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Our correction system must be transformed to produce people more able to become productive citizens than when they entered the system. Nationally, over two-thirds of people who get entangled in the criminal justice system re-offend and return to the system.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
We have concentrated a vast army of troubled people together with hardened criminals and potential terrorists. We are beginning to see the emerging threat of terrorist gangs, taught in our prisons, paid for by taxpayers at a cost per annum equal to a Harvard education. The greatest threat to our nation may lie within our own prisons.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Forty years ago, Karl Menninger, M.D., in his book, The Crime of Punishment, pointed to the deep flaws in our "corrections" systems. Instead of taking measures to correct the flaws identified by Menninger, state and national leaders responded to demagogic populist calls, fueled by manufactured political claims, to get tough on crime. They have created a monster that threatens not only the nation's competitiveness but our personal security.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
Locking up people for $30,000 or more per year for lengthy sentences is extremely wasteful. Moreover, it is a human, social, and moral waste that can no longer be afforded nor tolerated. Other countries that do not spend such vast resources on creating negative human capital will knock our socks off competitively unless we make the decision to end this waste.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
If this approach were taken across the country, within a decade, significant progress could be made in changing the culture of the American justice system.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
It is absolutely critical that basic needs such as housing, medical care, and work are available. A person who is denied basic needs is forced by society to operate in an extralegal environment to survive.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago
When they are released, where there are functional families, support should be made available so that the families can better receive them and be educated in ways of keeping them on the track of productivity. To support the family's efforts, probation and parole must offer positive intervention. Often, however, there are no function families; in those cases, mentoring needs to be encouraged by faith-based and other volunteer organizations.
ChannelMikeG 3 years ago