Obama and Gary Coleman

I would like to discuss a famous actor who passed away recently. RIP to Gary Coleman. He was a great actor and I shall always remember him for the time he played himself in an episode of the Simpsons and for the voice he played in the game the Curse of Monkey Island (Monkey Island 3). In the Curse of Monkey Island Coleman played the voice of a bratty lemonade sales boy who scams his customers by using a literally bottomless mug that sits on a hole in the table. The lemonade he poured after the customer paid a nickel went to the ground and the customer is scammed when they find the mug empty. The game’s hero, Guybrush Threepwood, switched the bottomless mug for a real mug and when Kenny pours the lemonade into this mug Guybrush gets to drink it. Kenny storms off in a fit as a result of this. Later, however, Kenny sees the error of his ways and runs a legitimate cannon sales business that Guybrush buys several cannons from.

In politics, I am perturbed by Barack Obama’s poor approval numbers. I do not know if it is because of the Gulf oil spill, a still-recovering economy, or lingering unpopularity of his health care reform, but many Americans in my view are too quickly forgetting how much worse things were under George W. Bush. In regards to Obama’s lingering unpopularity over health care, this is unfortunately the case because the Democrats may have won the legislative battle but by then they had long since lost the media battle with the Republicans. The Republicans by the summer of 2009 had already gotten their negative story on the health care bill to be a largely accepted belief among many Americans. Democrats fighting back failed to reverse the minds of many who had been convinced by the massive Republican misinformation. This is harming Obama’s presidency far too much despite the fact that the health care bill he signed is needed, long overdue, and contains none of the Republican negative characteristics attributed to it. As I’ve said, Obama’s health care bill is only a first step in the effort the cover all Americans for health care. Republicans really ought to show more care for the poor who cannot get adequate coverage but then that would not be a typical Republican thing to do, the party that likes to ignore the poor. What concerns me as well is that no matter how much the economy continues to improve in the United States, voters do not give him credit for the recovery and in surveys continue to treat Obama as though the United States in is deep recession. Meanwhile in Canada it is equally disheartening how large a lead the federal Conservatives have taken in the polls over the Liberals. Now is a difficult time to be a Liberal much in the same way that in the US it is a difficult time to be a Democrat. One can hope for improvements in the future.

Ujjal Dosanjh

I was just watching on the internet the interview that Vancouver South Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh did with Stephen Colbert. Everyone should see the really funny part where Colbert and Dosanjh sing the Canadian National Anthem to the tune of the American National Anthem. I also love how Dosanjh responded to Colbert’s scenario: a gun is to your head and therefore you must choose to scrap either Canadian medicare or Canadian same-sex marriage, which do you choose to eliminate? Dosanjh’s answer: neither. Dosanjh also appeared on CNN to defend Canada’s public health care system from Republican attacks during the United States’ health care debate. The CNN host did not realize that it was taxes that paid for Canadian medicare and surprisingly thought that Canadian employers were somehow involved in providing Canadian medicare before Dosanjh set him straight. The host also got a viewer caller question about whether medicare is provided in Canada to illegal immigrants. Dosanjh did not directly address the question about whether care is provided to people who are in Canada illegally but stated more generally that anyone visiting Canada from abroad who has a medical emergency will be treated immediately without upfront payment even though as non-Canadian residents they obviously would not have a health card. Dosanjh said that in such cases the government sometimes tries to collect bills for this care later. Dosanjh is great handling these interviews and I’m very glad we got him from the NDP. I think he was also a good Minister of Health during his year in Paul Martin’s cabinet.

Obama's health care overhaul

I support the passage in the United States of the recent health care overhaul. Of course I believe it doesn’t go nearly far enough. But it was hard enough to pass the bill as it was. They had to get every single Democratic Senator to vote for it. One notable Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, would not vote for a health care bill that had a public option. Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman also refused to support a public option. I fully support the public option concept and found it unfortunate that it wouldn’t have taken effect until 2013. Universal public health care is always the ideal. Republicans rail against government takeover of health care. Yet that’s a concept I support, and even the American population supports that concept to some extent. As much as Republicans claim that Americans oppose “government takeover” of health care many polls have shown a majority of Americans support the public option, something that Republicans would indeed classify as a “government takeover.” In my view individual states that have Democratic legislatures ought to pass a single payer system for their own state and go beyond the new federal law. California is attempting to do just that right now. However California has a Republican governor, famous actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has promised to veto a single payer bill. Democrats do not have the votes to override a veto. Also passing budgets and budget related items is so difficult under California’s constitution that the single payer bill would actually need voter approval in a referendum. Voter passage in a referendum is no guarantee when the anti-single payer groups would inundate the state with misinformation in an attempt to defeat a single payer system. There is also no guarantee that a single payer system could be passed into law next year. The open California governor’s race is an exact dead heat between the leading Republican and Democratic candidates at the moment and if a Republican wins, they too would surely veto a single payer bill. As for New York, although New York has a Democratic governor, this Democratic governor is badly embattled and is not running for re-election. New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo is expected to seek the Democratic nomination for governor but has yet to announce his candidacy. But even if Cuomo becomes governor, a single payer bill is unlikely to pass unless the Democrats majority in the Senate is expanded. At the moment there is a very narrow Democratic majority in the Senate in which the balance of power is held by socially conservative Democrats. With this narrow majority, it is not clear to me whether a single payer bill could pass. Sadly it also seems difficult for states to implement a single payer system with the constant thorn of budget deficits that is affecting every single jurisdiction in both Canada and the United States. Nevertheless in my view this federal health care bill in the US is only the beginning of the long fight to ensure that the under privileged have complete and total health care coverage in all of the USA.