Snapshots

Jim Hightower

DON'T DIAL 9-1-1 . . . DIAL H-M-O

Let's say you're at home one evening, sitting there in your La-Z-Boy, maybe with a cool one in your hand, when suddenly you feel a sharp pain in your chest, your left arm is tingly and sort of numb. Heart attack! Or it least it could be one. You go for the phone to get emergency help . . . but you don't call 9-1-1 . . . instead you call H-M-O.

What?! Yes, it's the latest "advance" in the wonderful world of managed health care-instead of calling 911, you've got to call your HMO, and its corporate bureaucrats will decide whether you get an EMS to come help you.

USA Today reports that Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest HMOs in the country, is the first to impose this new layer of corporate bureaucracy between you and the medical service you need-a bureaucratic step that could waste precious minutes as you explain to some Kaiser clerk sitting in a cubicle way out in Wisconsin what your symptoms are and why you think you need an ambulance pronto, PDQ, post haste, and, like, right now!

You'll be pleased to know that the HMO clerk at the other end of the phone has received a good four weeks of training for the job, so of course he or she is perfectly qualified to diagnose you from afar. If the clerk decides you need an ambulance, one is then dispatched to you. But-get this-the HMO will send an ambulance from a firm that it contracts with, even though another company's ambulance is closer to you.

Kaiser says it's doing a favor for the whole society because, according to its emergency medical services director, "there's a finite number of ambulances. We want to reserve them for those who really need them." Great. A corporation with a bottom-line incentive NOT to send an ambulance is going to be the arbiter of whether you get one. And if the HMO makes a boo-boo, leaving you dead at the other end of the phone, remember-the Republicans in congress continue to give HMOs immunity from lawsuits.

This is Jim Hightower saying . . .

Welcome to the cold world of corporatized medicine.

"Who do you call: 911 or your HMO?" by Julie Appleby.

USA Today: August 24, 1999.

 

SEN. MURRAY'S AMAZING LETTER

An astonishing letter has come into my hands, and I want to share it with you. It's a letter that Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington State, wrote to President Clinton, and it's filled with a breathtaking level of ignorance and arrogance.

Her subject is the big meeting of the World Trade Organization to be held in Seattle this November. Clinton, other heads of state, WTO officials, and corporate executives are gathering to prepare a whole new round of globaloney to shove down our throats. But some uninvited guests are going to show up, too. Churches, consumer groups, unions, farmers, citizen activists, environmentalists, and other citizens are coming to protest the WTO's anti-democratic agenda of corporate supremacy.

This upsets Sen. Murray, who tells Clinton in her letter that "The Seattle Host Organization is reporting that many companies . . . are hesitant to become active supporters because they are concerned about security and confrontations with various demonstrators." Well my my, we sure can't let the people's First Amendment rights ruffle the feathers of these distinguished corporate executives.

So she wants Clinton to do two things: First, give a national speech explaining that [quote] "The WTO is the indispensable rule making, enforcement body . . . for all countries." Hello . . . Patty . . . remember the Constitution? When did we replace our own self-government with the WTO? Second, she wants Clinton to call-in those pesky protesting groups and tell them [quote] "that you do not want disruptive and damaging actions distracting the media and the public from your important goals." Right on! We can't have just plain citizens assembling in the streets and speaking out like this was some kind of a democracy-and we certainly can't allow the people's voices to distract the media from Bill Clinton's "important goals."

This is Jim Hightower saying . . .

She's a U.S. Senator? Let's send Sen. Murray back to a high school civics class. To read her whole letter, go to my website: www.jimhightower.com.

 

THE NAFTA RIPOFF

The use of statistics has been called the art of drawing a straight line from a wrong assumption to a foregone conclusion.

Well, the Picasso of Statistics is the U.S. Commerce Department, which keeps telling us how good NAFTA is for our country. For example, we're told that our exports to Mexico are up! Never mind that our imports from Mexico are waaaay up, creating the third worst trade deficit that we have with any country in the world. But let's peek into that export number that officials are so proud of. It turns out that four out of every ten products that we ship to Mexico are not sold to the people there, but are parts sold to U.S. factories located in Mexico. We're "exporting" to ourselves. Then, General Electric and the rest use these parts in their Mexican factories to make appliances, and what not, shipping the finished product back here to sell to us. So the "export" becomes an import.

If that's too confusing, don't worry, because corporations like GE are going to simplify the process, by getting the suppliers of parts to move to Mexico, too! The Wall Street Journal reports that forty percent of the electric ranges that GE sells in the U.S. are coming from Mexico, and now a U.S. company that makes glass doors and tops for the stoves has moved there, as has a maker of burners, and regulators. U.S. Steel, which sells 100 tons of sheet metal every day to GE's Mexico factory, also has built a steel plant, just 50 yards from the GE factory.

The bottom line is that America's chief export is jobs. Thanks to NAFTA, U.S. corporations can eliminate middle-class jobs here, move the factory to Mexico, pay subsistence wages to people there, then send their stoves and other products back to the U.S. without paying a dime in tariffs, selling the products for the same high price they've always charged. The wage difference is pocketed by the corporation.

This is Jim Hightower saying . . .

What a ripoff! I say it's time to repeal NAFTA.

"Mexico builds" by Joel Millman. Wall Street Journal: August 23, 1999.

"That giant sucking sound." UTNE Reader: August 23, 1999.