Zcom_simple

Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

678691

Roger Bybee's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/rogerdbybee
Bio: I've recently been invited  to write a twice-weekly blog in In These Times, appearing Tuesdays and Thursdays (go to www.inthesetimes.com and flick the In These Times Working link at the top of... (More)

All Bybee Blogs

Mass. plan no miracle

By Roger Bybee at Jul 06, 2009


Change Text Size a- | A+

No miracle in Mass.

 

The highly-touted

Massachusetts health reform plan, which has helped to guide Democratic thinking on health care, is now encountering severe problems in meeting its goals of providing affordable, universal care.

 

The program was predicated on a strong individual mandate to purchase insurance, subsidies for the poor to cover them, and trivial fines for employers who refuse to supply health insurance.

 

But like other at least six other state-level "universal" plans that soon collapsed the

Massachusetts plan lacks effective cost controls. Thus, as insurers raised rates, the state began to experience a severe pinch on its ability to subsidize care for low-income people.

 

 

 

As a result, the

Massachusetts reform is failing to deliver on promises that are very similar to those offered by backers of the emerging Democratic plan. Dr. David Himmelstein of HarvardMedicalSchool put lined the situation to a House Health, Labor, and Pensions Subcommittee (4/23/09):

"Prevention, disease management, computers, and a health insurance exchange were supposed to make reform affordable."

 "Instead, costs have skyrocketed, rising 23% between 2005 and 2007, and the insurance exchange adds 4% for its own administrative costs on top of the already high overhead charged by private insurers. As a result, one in five Massachusetts residents went without care last year because they couldn’t afford it. Hundreds of thousands remain uninsured, and the state has drained money from safety net hospitals and clinics to kept the reform afloat"

 

067

By Green, Chris at Jul 07, 2009 00:47 AM

I worry that the inevitable failure of the Massachusetts plan on a national scale will discredit all efforts to get the free market out of health care. Right wingers will make propaganda against it, attempting to conflate it with single payer in the public's mind. That's why some Republicans keep calling Obama's proposals "socialized medicine," which is ridiculous of course.

Obama seems to be backing away from the "public option" proposal. The fact that he wants to fund the public plan with taxes on the benefits of middle class people seems to gaurantee even more so that the program would be a failure in the long run. Regressive taxation is a bad sign for social programs.

Reply this comment

Comment_reply

678691

Re:

By Bybee, Roger at Jan 22, 2010 10:30 AM

Dear Chris: Just saw your comment now!

You make several excellent points:

1) Regressive funding allows Right to gnerate resentment among whites against the poor and people of color

2) The notion of taxing benefits shows that the White House has swallowed rightist ideas about high premiums being the result of "over-use" rather than dangerous work, large numbers of women in workforce (reproductive health irequires regular visist), or living in a high-cost area ( eg., SE Wisconsin where I live is 30% above the national average.

3) IF OBamad had permitted an open public option, one private firm estimated that nearly 130 million would sign up. Obvious, the loss of so many customers was impermissuble to insurers.

 

Please stay in touch! Sorry for long delay! Best, Roger

Reply this comment

Loading_border