Sherry Chandler

A lively discussion is going on over at I See Invisible People on the subject of a Greg Palast article by the same title in Yes!

A nasty little secret of American democracy is that, in every national election, ballots cast are simply thrown in the garbage. Most are called “spoiled,” supposedly unreadable, damaged, invalid. They just don’t get counted. This “spoilage” has occurred for decades, but it reached unprecedented heights in the last two presidential elections. In the 2004 election, for example, more than three million ballots were never counted.

Almost as deep a secret is that people are doing something about it. In New Mexico, citizen activists, disgusted by systematic vote disappearance, demanded change — and got it.

In Ohio, during the 2004 Presidential election, 153,237 ballots were simply thrown away — more than the Bush “victory” margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was five times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush’s triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. The official number is bad enough — 1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, according to the federal government’s Elections Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count.

Read the whole article and then read the discussion at the I See Invisible People blog.

Here’s a post I started nearly a month ago and somehow didn’t find time to complete and post.

Is this NYTimes article as heartless and blind as it seems?

As Dr. Mark R. Chassin of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York says, “You almost always spend money to gain health.” Of course, the opposite is also true: the best way to reduce health care spending is to reduce health care itself.

Which is exactly what we’re starting to do. The growing number of families without health insurance are, in effect, families who have been kicked off the country’s health care rolls. Many will go without available treatment, will get sicker than they need to get — and will thereby save the rest of us money. They are what now passes for a solution to the health care mess.

The current situation is indeed unsustainable, a point that the conventional wisdom has right. The cost of health insurance can’t keep doubling every seven years, and wasteful spending — the brand-name drugs that are no better than generics, the treatments that haven’t been proved to extend lives or improve health — does need to be reined in.

But far too much of the discussion has been centered on this narrow idea. Somehow, going to the mall to buy clothes has come to be seen as a vaguely patriotic way to keep the economy humming, and taking out a risky mortgage is considered to be an investment in one’s future. But medical care? That’s just a cost.

It’s easy to be against high costs, and it will no doubt be hard to come up with a broad health care solution. But the way to start is by acknowledging that an affluent society should devote an ever-growing share of its resources to the health of its citizens. “We have enough of the basics in life,” Mr. Cutler, the economist and author, points out. “What we really want are the time and the quality of life to enjoy them.”

As if, for most of us in this country, affording $10,000 or so for medical care is just a matter of cutting out a few trips to the mall?

I think this is actually an argument for a national healthcare plan, the argument that our society, not our individuals, can afford to absorb the cost but don’t want to face the reality.

It is certainly a statement of what we are now doing as a society, that is, creating a healthcare class system. Is that really what we want?

A correspondent sends this:

NEW DISEASE

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a warning about a new virulent strain of Sexually Transmitted Disease. The disease is contracted through dangerous and high-risk behavior.

The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim and pronounced “gonna re-elect him.” Many victims contracted it in 2004, after having been screwed for the past four years. Cognitive characteristics of individuals infected include: anti-social personality disorders, delusions of grandeur with messianic overtones, extreme cognitive dissonance, inability to incorporate new information, pronounced xenophobia and paranoia, inability to accept responsibility for own actions, cowardice masked by misplaced bravado, uncontrolled facial smirking, ignorance of geography and history, tendencies towards evangelical theocracy, categorical all-or-nothing behavior.

Naturalists and epidemiologists are amazed at how this destructive disease originated only a few years ago from a bush found in Texas.