Go to Cleveland to Hear the Truth

This weekend, the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign is holding a National Truth Commission in Cleveland. This is the cumulation of local Truth Commissions that have been held around the country this year. These Truth Commissions are modeled after the South African Commissions that were created to help heal the nation after the abolishment of apartheed. And in fact, Winnie Mandela is scheduled to be one of the 20 commissioners who will be hearing people's testimonies of how their economic human rights have been violated.

I had always heard of Truth Commissions in international settings, but until this year, had never considered that they could and would be useful tools for healing and change in the United States. So why have a Truth Commission in the United States? According to their website, the PPEHRC says:

The poor have been disappeared from not only the welfare rolls and the workforce, but from the media and the political debates. Our stories are not told and our images are not seen. Our invisibility has allowed our situation to be ignored by our politicians, who have not placed a priority on addressing the increasing number of poor families and our worsening conditions. We know that in order to win this war and to survive, the faces of America's poor must be shown. If the general public knew our stories and saw our faces, we know that something would be done. The timing is critical. We need economic human rights to be a priority or many of us who have been abandoned by political parties in the past, simply will not make it.

Amen! Allowing and encouraging people to tell their stories, to give their testimonies, and to acknowledge to the public, and to themselves, that they have been victims of human rights abuses, is an amazingly powerful thing. The prevailing mindset in this country is that if you are poor, you have somehow brought that upon yourself. You are lazy, unmotivated, stupid, or just trying to swindle the government and the tax payers by receiving public benefits. This mindset is not prevalant only in the affluent sectors of society, but also, tragically, among poor people themselves. Its hard to not believe the hype, and to publicly admit to your own personal and financial struggles, without feeling like you are at fault, and that you are being judged accordingly. This Truth Commission is a chance for people's stories to be told, and witnessed, without the underlying message of blaming the victim. I highly encourage anyone who has the ability to go to the event, to witness people's testimonies, to share them with others, and to ACT.

It is a three day event, beginning with the Truth Commission on Saturday. Sunday is an arts & culture day which includes performances, panel discussions, and an open mic event. Monday is the Day of Action, which includes a march and rally demanding human rights and universal health care (hell yeah!).

Tuesday through Thursday is the group's annual Leadership School, with workshops being held all day Tuesday and Wednesday, and a graduation ceremony taking place on Thursday. I've seen video footage that was recorded during past year's Leadership Schools, and it looks amazing! If you have any questions, you can go to the website, or contact For more information email Cecilia Garza at or Larry Bresler.

Here is a link to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the US has never signed.
One last link, to the powerful "Faces of the Fallen" campaign website, which reminds us:

This project aims to highlight the millions of Americans who have suffered economic human rights violations in the richest country in the history of the world--those who have been laid off, denied healthcare, lived in shelters, had their children taken away, and gone without food for their families...highlighting these widespread, hidden, preventable economic human rights violations.

Big Surprise

Interesting and disturbing, though wholey unsurprising article from the Times "Investigators Find Medicare Drug Plans Often Give Incomplete and Incorrect Data".

Insurers failed to provide complete and accurate cost information more than 70 percent of the time, investigators said. For people taking large numbers of prescription drugs, the disparity between the stated cost and the actual cost was often thousands of dollars a year, more than $6,000 in one case.

The response?

Insurance counselors said many beneficiaries were unfamiliar with details of the program, so their questions were imprecise or confused.

Right! That's why they are calling you, to get answers! Well, maybe the administration who conceived of this convoluted plan will be more understanding.

The Bush administration took issue with the report and defended the work of the plans. The administration said the auditors should have asked different questions or should have phrased the questions differently. In an interview on Monday, Dr. Mark B. McClellan, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said that one question posed to insurers was “unclear and inaccurate” and that two were “not appropriate” because they required the service representatives to provide more information than the government required.

Mmmm hmmm, because seniors and others who are calling these companies for information should inherently understand in what way they should form their questions, and what phrases they should and should not use. So listen up Medicare beneficiaries!! DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT ask any "inappropriate" questions, and you'd better be accurate in your lack of knowledge. The government just won't stand for anything less.

Yes, We Patients Do Know Some Things

In today's Washington Post, there is an article written by a doctor who actually admits that his patients do know something about their own selves, maybe even in more detail than the doctor herself knows.

A friend of mine recently was denied a prescription refill for birth control pills, which she has been on for 14 years, because of her elevated blood pressure. She kept insisting to her doctor that her pressure was only elevated when she was in the doctor's office. She bought an at home blood pressure monitor, and those at home readings backed up her claim. But the doctor wouldn't believe her, and refused to budge. In this Post article , the doctor/author tells the story of a similar patient:

I treated Morton for high blood pressure with a diuretic and a pill, Diovan, that dilates arteries. But when I began raising his Diovan dose in response to high readings -- ranging from 160 to 180 systolic pressure over 100 to 110 diastolic pressure (normal is generally considered less than 130 over 85) -- he was uneasy. Concerned about the potential side effects of higher doses, including fatigue and dizziness, he began to measure the pressure himself and record the values at home. The readings he got were consistently lower, 120 to 140 over 80 to 90.

What the two sets of readings suggested was "white coat syndrome," a recognized phenomenon in which blood pressure levels are higher in a doctor's presence. These results helped me to adjust his medications more effectively. Though I didn't disregard my own readings, I did begin to figure his in. I became less likely to raise his dosage automatically in response to an elevated value obtained in my office.

Now if I could only get my doctors to believe that I don't run fevers, and never have in my life (just like my mother and grandmother), I would be golden. I even tried to do the at home readings of my temperature (I went through a rough period of having extreme hot flashes followed by bone rattling chills). But when I attempted to take my temp at home, it showed it being like 90 degrees, or something ridiculously and impossibly low. Oh well, that's beside the point. I was just pleased to see that at least there is hope that some doctors might open their minds a bit to what the patient is telling them, and not solely consider hard #s from test results.

Sigh, Will We Ever Learn? (Medical Malpractice Crisis My Ass Part III)

In today's Slate magazine, even more evidence is presented which suggests that indeed the Medical Malpractice BS that we are hearing about from the GOP, and which I have been known to be a bit upset by (Medical Malpractice Crisis My Ass I, & II) is in fact BS.

Dr. David Studdert led a team of eight researchers from Harvard Medical School and Brigham Young University who examined 1,452 medical malpractice lawsuits. They found that more than 90 percent of the claims showed evidence of medical injury, which means they weren't frivolous. In 60 percent of these cases, the injury resulted from physician wrongdoing. In a quarter of the claims, the patient died.

But the Dems have a plan. How about instead of blaming the injured patient for having the gall to have allowed their doctor to be negligent, let's take a look at where the problems lie in that negligence, then change things accordingly?

Anesthesiologists used to get hit with the most malpractice lawsuits and some of the highest insurance premiums. Then in the late 1980s, the American Society of Anesthesiologists launched a project to analyze every claim ever brought against its members and develop new ways to reduce medical error. By 2002, the specialty had one of the highest safety ratings in the profession, and its average insurance premium plummeted to its 1985 level, bucking nationwide trends.

West Siiiiiiide

I live on the West Side of town, also known as the Hilltop USA (literally, that is what the sign says as you enter the neighborhood, "welcome to the Hilltop U.S.A.). Folks on the Hilltop are really into the holidays. So when Christmas comes, most houses are decked out in full cheesy christmas regalia, complete with inflatable Santa and reindeer on the roof. I've really never seen anything like it.

Summer comes with full on backyard fireworks displays that begin around the first week that school is out. They build up and up and up until the fourth comes, and then the whole neighborhood is covered in a thick fog of firework smoke. The houses on the Hilltop are densly packed together, and date from around the 1930s, so: lots of wood. Dangerous you say? Pshaw! Illegal you say? Hasn't stopped anyone yet. And besides, the cops over here don't seem overly concerned about the law. The breaks on my boyfriend's van went out the other day, and as he was careening down the street with his head stuck out the window yelling for people to watch out, he pulled up onto the boulevard between the houses, right in front of a cop, and the guy didn't even blink. He didn't even check to see if my boyfriend was ok, or drunk, or trying to kill someone. He just sat there!



Anyways, back to the fireworks. So the 3rd of July rolls around, and a real fireworks war starts to happen between my neighbor across the street, the neighbor two doors down from them, and the house that is kitty corner to the back of my house. At first, as we were sitting inside, we were annoyed because they were SO LOUD that car alarms were going off constantly around the block. This went on for a couple of hours before I stepped outside and actually bothered to look at them. WOW! They were amazing. Full scale fireworks, like those you would see at your local park on the 4th. These people must have saved up all year long to buy these fireworks. And they dueled with them all night long. One person would set off a bunch, and then another house would respond with their display. It went on until 1:00 AM. I tried to capture some if it on my little digital camera that takes mini films, but it was hard, I ended up spinning around trying to catch all of them, but by the time I had swung around, that firework had already gone off. I never did get any video of really good ones, these are all kind of whimpy ones.