In Tompkins Square Park, Manhattan, fall 1966 or spring 1967. I don't remember whether this was a random street photograph or if I shot it for Beth Israel Hospital as part of my portrayal of the peoples and neighborhoods served by its free clinics. Minimal tech data: most likely a 50mm lens on either a Canon VT or a Pentax H1A; the film Tri-X, probably (based on the grain) developed in Microdol at 400 ASA. This jpeg is made from a scanned print that survived the fire because it was part of the working portfolio I took back to NYC in 1983. Alas the negative was stolen by a public relations freelancer in Bellingham c. 1986; if I ever see this picture or any part of it used without my permission, I will file suit immediately. Click on image to view it full frame. Photo by Loren Bliss copyrights 1967, 2011.
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YES I KNOW I promised to try to avoid the near occasion of sin that is the pointlessness of political journalism in a despotic realm of failed constitutional democracy; that I pledged also to amend my life through the practice of self-redemption by art.
But today when I ordered an amlodipine refill – one of seven prescription medications that now sustain my life – I discovered Medicare Part D had jacked up the drug's price 152 percent.
And yes, there's no doubt CMS – the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (and thus ultimately Barack the Betrayer himself) – is the perpetrator of this outrage.
Amlodipine, used to treat high blood pressure, is a generic drug the co-payment for which under the Medicare Part D Extra Help program is (theoretically) fixed at $2.50
Inquiring as to how and why the co-pay suddenly soared to $6.30, I was told an official directive from Medicare redefined a number of Extra Help generics as brand-name drugs. Amlodipine, which has been a generic since 2007, is one of the drugs so reclassified.
Thus, by imposing the resultant $3.80 price hike, the government has arbitrarily gouged out for itself an additional $3.80 payback on every such Extra Help prescription.
The obvious result is a deficit-reduction tactic that not only frees up more money for the Wall Street banksters and the Big Business tycoons, but also protects their wholly owned subsidiaries in governance – and does so by the stealthiest and most calculatedly vicious means possibly.
Calculatedly vicious?
Verily. Wantonly inflicted on the most vulnerable and most powerless people in the United States, this price increase is deadly.
Only the poorest of the poor – the most despised minority in the nation, the demographic of despair into which I was permanently exiled by the economic collapse of 2008 – qualify for Medicare Part D Extra Help.
Most Extra Help recipients are elderly women whose invaluable contributions of motherhood earned them not a penny in Social Security pensions.
Why not?
Because the ever-miserly capitalists who own the politicians deem motherhood a form of slave labor for which no payment is necessary.
Regardless of gender, a great many of us on Extra Help live frighteningly close to the edge of ruin – so close the addition of $3.80 to a co-pay can price that prescription forever out of reach.
The alternatives are often impossible: eat less on what is already a malnutrition diet; turn down the heat in an already frigid dwelling; find less expensive housing; or (of course) just give up and die outright – our deaths a Final Fulfillment of tyrannocapitalism and its New Paradigm: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for everyone else.
Thus am I forced back to active duty in the field I foolishly believed I had finally, after 55 years, managed to leave behind. Once again it seems journalism is – at least in this one aspect – identical to espionage and its cousin organized crime: an occupation from which retirement is impossible.
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Because this is a breaking story, there are many questions to be answered. But all my former sources have either vanished into post-career oblivion or – like the now-forbidden social-contract they defended – are no longer amongst the living. Hence I'll probably have no additional information until Monday at the soonest.
In the meantime here are some of the more obvious questions:
(1)-As I understand U.S. patent law, once a pharmaceutical baron's patent expires, his brand name drug becomes a generic drug – no exceptions allowed. Is my understanding wrong? Or was the law changed by some sneaky Obama-orchestrated DemocRat/GOPorker sleight-of-hand? Was this part of that back-door Chicago-type sitdown between Barack the Betrayer and the prescription drug lords? What happened?
(2)-The people with whom I spoke Saturday all said that while their knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry was limited to their immediate work assignments, none had ever heard of a long-time generic being reclassified as a brand-name drug. Neither had I. Again, is our collective understanding wrong? What is the record on this matter? More to the point, how was the change imposed?
(3)-Medicare propaganda disseminated by CMS (Medicare & You 2011, page 88), states that “Drug costs in 2011 for most people who qualify will be no more than $2.50 for each generic and $6.30 for each brand-name drug.” This raises yet another series of questions: does the reclassification of generics to brand-name drugs apply to all Medicare programs? Or is it yet another tactic in the ObamacRat war against Medicare Advantage programs – the public/private partnership favored by so many lower-income people as the only way around regular Medicare's murderously prohibitive co-pays. (Note that money taken from Medicare Advantage providers – whether genuinely care-giving nonprofit organizations like Group Health or the for-profit death-panel insurance scams – is money returned to the government, first to reduce the deficit, eventually to provide more bonuses to the banksters and tycoons: once again, tyrannocapitalism in action.)
(4)-How many generics have been reclassified as brand-name drugs? How many people are present-day recipients of Medicare Part D Extra Help? How many are afflicted by these arbitrary reclassifications?
(5)-As far as I know there are only three ways such a reclassification could have been authorized. These are: (A)-by a change in drug-patent law, the change either carefully hidden in the ObamacRats' alleged health care “reform” or quietly wormed onto some unrelated legislation since then; (B)-by arbitrary CMS edict and the law be damned (a practice that here in the toxic darkness beneath the ObamaBush is already routinely employed to nullify the Constitution); (C)-by executive order, again the law be damned.
(6)-Who are the beneficiaries of the tax increase implicit in this co-pay outrage? The government alone? Or are the prescription drug lords getting a share of the takeback too? How much does the government seize by this viciousness?
(7)- Are these co-pay increases an especially Machiavellian trial balloon? Could they be an experiment to see how many people protest and whether our protest can be censored to ineffectiveness? (Note that most protests from here below the salt are already ignored by Ruling Class Media and hence disdained by the politicians.)
These are some of the questions to which I hope to find answers. (Yes, I'd much rather be working on my memoirs, but this new drug ripoff is damn well the more important story.)
Meanwhile we live in hard and treacherous times -- by far the hardest and most relentlessly savage of my nearly 71 years -- and the term "progressive" is increasingly meaningless. Likewise the terms "friend" and "foe." As my late father learned during the struggles of the 1930s and 1940s, so have I learned in the present era: trust (save amongst those who have known each another for decades) is a luxury we cannot afford.
Indeed it seems again as a certain Lev Bronstein observed in 1905: labels mean nothing, and every gathering of three apparently like-minded activists includes at least one rat.
But this Medicare moment is also uniquely teachable, an episode in which perhaps we can all finally see one of the more hideous truths of liberty lost: that under the New Paradigm by which capitalism has forever vanquished the social contract – its replacement the emergent new ethos of limitless selfishness that has overturned the Golden Rule and thrown down the Beatitudes – our survival truly is a revolutionary act.
Under this New Paradigm of the United States reduced to capitalism's United Estates, those of us who are impoverished or elderly or disabled or some combination of the three have not only become the nation's most despised minorities; as were the Jews in Nazi Germany, we are now increasingly damned as the cause of all the nation's troubles.
In this context our defiant refusals to surrender to murder by abandonment and neglect is open resistance to the thug-minded greedmongering capitalist pigs who have herded us onto the economic equivalent of the slave-pen railroad platform and are now trying to further divide us into the barely living and the soon-to-be dead.
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DISCLOSURES:
Because we live under ever-more-unyielding patriarchy (and increasingly under its worst most viciously theocratic forms), psycholinguistic accuracy demands I refer to the prescription drug lords with exclusively male-gendered pronouns; denounce me as a hopeless romantic if you will, but I believe the female gender is sufficiently superior to the male that no self-respecting Woman could ever participate in such malevolence. As evidence I submit the Minoan matriarchy: no slums or mansions, an apparently proto-communist economy and an administrative organization so skilled it evacuated Callisté – an island of at least 25,000 people and possibly as many as 250,000 with their pets, livestock and moveable goods – all transported to safety in a fleet of ships propelled by wind and oars (the original and sadly misnamed Noah's Arc?) well in advance of what now seems likely to have been the most destructive volcanic explosion in human experience. Secretly or at least privately, a growing number of archaeologists now believe the Minoan civilization was the never-again-to-be equaled apex of human endeavor.
Because I discovered the drug-reclassification story on a Saturday, I was unable to reach the best-informed sources at Group Health Cooperative, the superb Puget-Sound-area organization of which even in dire and inescapable pauperage I remain a voting member. Nevertheless the Group Health people with whom I spoke were as helpful as they could possibly be: their characteristic responsiveness another of the many reasons I regard my enrollment, which dates from 1973, as one of the best most clearly Muse-blest decisions I ever made. Any errors in this initial report are not Group Health's; they are mine and mine alone.
LB/5-6 February 2011
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Loren:
Not long after my aunt died I received a notice from the State's medicaid office that only three prescriptions would now be covered by medicaid. My aunt was only taking six maintenance meds, so would I have had to choose which three for her to take to save her life from alzheimer's (2 pills), high blood pressure and fluid retention (2 pills), psoriasis in her scalp (1 bottle of foam), or diabetes 2 (1 pill), if she would have had to pay for them herself wihout any help from me. That really burned me up. Although it didn't affect my aunt because she was already gone, I wondered how many other people the State would have killed by this reduction in cost assistance with meds.
JK
Posted by: Joy | 06 February 2011 at 02:46 PM