WP: Bush Budget Would Cut Popular Health Programs

[sabra]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/13/AR2006021302065.html

Bush Budget Would Cut Popular Health Programs


President Bush has requested billions more to prepare for potential disasters such as a biological attack or an influenza epidemic, but his proposed budget for next year would zero out popular health projects that supporters say target more mundane, but more certain, killers.

If enacted, the 2007 budget would eliminate federal programs that support inner-city Indian health clinics, defibrillators in rural areas, an educational campaign about Alzheimer's disease, centers for traumatic brain injuries, and a nationwide registry for Lou Gehrig's disease. It would cut close to $1 billion in health care grants to states and would kill the entire budget of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Resource Center.

In a $2.8 trillion budget, the amounts involved may seem minuscule, but proponents argue that the health care projects Bush has singled out are the "ultimate homeland security," as Vinay Nadkarni put it. The spokesman for the American Heart Association said he cannot fathom why the administration has recommended eliminating a $1.5 million program that provides defibrillators to rural communities and trains local personnel on how to use the machines to restart hearts that go into cardiac arrest.

"Coronary heart disease is the number one killer in the United States," Nadkarni said. "This is actually something we can arm ourselves with."

[kurth]

1. A $7-billion windfall for the oil companies is more important

Another example of corruption and moral depravity from the Bush government and its followers.

[earthboundmisfit]

6. Yep. My first thought when I read this, too.

I have a brother diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's. Now they want to make his (and others') fight even more difficult, to fund another giveaway to the uber-rich. :grr:

[warrens]

2. This budget is DOA

[Canuckistanian]

3. I just wonder

How many people will suddenly sit up and say, "Hey, why are they doing this? This is outrageous!"

This kleptocracy is now starting to fundamentally change nearly every aspect of public life. When will the tide REALLY turn?

[DELUSIONAL]

4. eliminate , . . . "centers for traumatic brain injuries"

and in the same news cycle -- today someone posted an article about the epidemic of brain injuries to military personnel serving in Iraq. So some of the patients/clients of the centers for traumatic brain injuries won't be served?

The bushie gang can't shoot straight and blame the victim will now blame the soldiers for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

How anyone can possible think that the bushie gang is "protecting" the US is a crazy person.

Mildred Pouting interview: "My son is back home, he had half his head blown off but the surgeons did a marvelous job of putting him back together. I still support the President, he is keeping us safe from all those nasty Islamic terrorist. Thank God that we have such a strong and virile president." <sarcasm -- not real interview -- although I can see a bushie cult member mouthing similar words.>

[LynnTheDem]

8. traumatic brain injury is the #1 Iraq invasion injury for US troops.

But then, bush doesn't care enough to even bother getting body armor for all our troops, FOUR AND FIVE YEARS INTO WARS.

[Arkansas Granny]

5. Bush doesn't care what happens to most of the people in the U.S.

All he is worried about is making sure that he is an extremely rich man when he leaves office and helping his rich supporters become even richer so they can send large amounts of money to the Republican party so they can stay in power forever. The plight of the poor in this country, or around the world for that matter, means nothing to him. He has never experienced it for himself, therefore, it doesn't exist in his world.

[LynnTheDem]

7. bush CUTS MILK for US kids, bush CUTS FOOD for US elderly, bush CUTS

Medicaid for US poor, bush CUTS CUTS CUTS...inner-city Indian health clinics, defibrillators in rural areas, an educational campaign about Alzheimer's disease, centers for traumatic brain injuries, and a nationwide registry for Lou Gehrig's disease...

But bush wants his TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH to be made PERMANENT.

Are you RICH?

[Megahurtz]

9. This is just SO criminal. n/t

[newswolf56]

10. Absolutely predictable. As capitalism's ultimate achievement...

Bush is required to do everything in his power to facilitate the re-establishment of the infinite savagery that is capitalism's essence -- a savagery based on the elevation of greed from vice to virtue and the assignment of all being a value based exclusively on profitability.

In capitalism, which was forced by the Communist Revolution of 1917 to acquire a humanitarian guise lest Communism spread worldwide, and now after the collapse of the Soviet Union is merely reasserting its original malevolence, the only value of a human being (or anything else) is its pricetag: as applied to trees and nature in general, this means a tree is worthless until it is cut; as applied to human beings, this means a person's sole worth is the extent to which he or she contributes to profit and "growth" -- either as a member of the ruling class (that is, someone whose value is assured by wealth), or as a member of the working class (that is, someone who is exploited for profit).

Bush's health-service cutbacks are simply the expression of the capitalist principle of profitability applied to the question of which populations are worthwhile investments: the targets of the cutbacks -- racial minorities, the elderly, the infirm, the disabled -- are dismissed as unprofitable: that is, we cost more to maintain than the system can make by our exploitation, even at the lowest wages or the various increasingly legal forms of absolute slavery. We are therefore being methodically eliminated in the same way non-profitable workers are eliminated from a production line and non-profitable factories are shut down and/or shipped overseas.

Our elimination is indeed genocide, and it is a perfect illustration of how capitalism automatically morphs into fascism, and from fascism into ever-more-overt Nazism. Nazism is in fact the ultimate (and wholly logical) extension of capitalism.

If this sounds alien or strange to many readers, it is only because our corporate schools and corporate media have so thoroughly brainwashed us to regard capitalism as an ultimate good and socialism as an ultimate evil. The first step in successfully resisting the Bush Regime -- which as I said at the beginning truly is capitalism's crowning achievement -- is overcoming the extent to which we have been deliberately misinformed. A good starting point is to read Marx's Manifesto and to think about its assertions in the context of today's events: the concentration of wealth via outsourcing, downsizing, pension-looting, forcible wage-reduction, re-imposition of indentured servitude and various forms of barely disguised slavery, and the overall deliberate destruction (or privatization) of all social services including health care and public transport.

The great irony of Bush's election -- the intentional and carefully scripted culmination of forces set in action on November 22, 1963 -- is that it has made Marxism even more relevant now than it was a hundred years ago: especially Marxism's articulation of the ever-more-obvious historical truth of class struggle, which explains all that is being done to us by Bush, his politicians and the ruling class they serve.

[mom cat]

11. Just a guess: Does the increased funding go to buy moer

Tamiflu from Rummy?