In some way, I can't believe what just happened. Something good, for a change. Nevermind. This is for list entertainment, that yes Berkeley is indeed a fucked up place, but in an interest way...
I wrote an e-mail and made a phone call to my city council member, not expecting to ever hear back. The subject was the public health clinic I went to this week that is due to be closed in November. The clinic provided me with potentially life saving immunizations.
Worthington actually called me back this afternoon. I explained. I've been going over the city budget and was appalled to find so little state or federal income sources for descretionary spending, i.e. locally controlled. For example, one cent of every dollar of state sales tax goes back to the city. Only 7 percent of the city budget goes to public health.
My suggestion was to contact Barbara Lee's office to see if some federal funding can be found. Lee's primary interest is women/infant care and education for low income families---at least that is what she lists on her newsletters. So there must be some emergency funding somewhere.
(Okay Babs, let's see some bucks behind that talk. I am still mad at her for failing to stand up against the Obama assault on healthcare. I wrote her a letter, after never getting a call back. I used a typewriter hoping that would get some attention. I got through to a staff person only once during the whole fiasco.
What I hate most about Berkeley politics is there are fifteen shades of gray between progressive and progressive. They fabricate them in all shapes, sizes and colors around here. The current person running for Worthington's seat is a Japanese-American lesbian featuring her partner and dog in the brochure with all the endosements from Lee down to Loni Hancock. I trust her as much as a real estate agent. Worthington meanwhile is up against Hancock for state assembly...got no idea on what that dreck means. Worthington is also gay, so I wonder what this opposition is really about. I am mad at Kriss for pushing through an idiot public transite plan with giant `green' tech buses that cause monster traffic jams at rush hour and are so large, they run half full at rush hour, and mostly empty otherwise. Now this doesn't even get into the city commission system where council members appoint the citizen oversight commissions.
Berkeley is the most politicized tiny muni government ever imagined. It's down to the voting habits of stray cats---the dogs are all incarcerated. Are the cats left enough to free the dogs? What is the transient homeless re-cyclers political agenda? Participatory democracy gone mad. Hancock and Bates are progressive slime---voting on all the UN resolutions that don't count, and ignoring all the local shit that does count... they kind of remind me of the Clintons in Haiti and Honduras.)
As I explained my call, Worthington sounded puzzled. He evidently either forgot about this public health budget item or wasn't paying attention to it when it was passed last June. But he said he would look into it. That's something, not much, but something. The test is if he sends a e-mail acknowledgement of what he found out. Checking his Health Commission appointments, he has a vacancy---what's with that? The commission meets at the North Berkeley Senior Center---so it is probably morbund, dribbling in the stale jello desert cup, while transferring all power to IG Farben...
In an amazing and typical irony, of course the state tore down the big state public health building that collected, studied, and reported health stats. This was an important state agency to keep in Berkeley, because it provided internships and other benefits to UCB's public health and education departments, along with social welfare, planning, bio-sciences, etc.
I should explain that ever since Reagan was governor, the state has been quietly dismantling the state's public health system. This dismantling has been slow, incremental and way below the media radar. There is always an excuse of some sort that is almost always just neoliberal bullshit. Reagan used electro-shock therapy as his cudgel. The mental health system needed reform, not destruction. Now the prison systems pick these folk up and house them in ten times worse conditions. Thanks Ronnie.
The current hew and cry is that illegal immigrants are stealing tax payer services. God I hope they are. They are exactly the ones (just after the homeless) who need these services most, i.e. immunization, TB testing and diagostics, HIV support, family planning, pre and post-natal check-ups and referrals, etc. Undocumented immigrants are afraid to use these state health services because most require some form of self-reporting. The intended use of the self-reporting is part of the verification system that the health data collected is an accurate reflection of the state of health of the population. Oblivously waiting police cooptation.
When you combine the health data (also records births, infant-child-adult health, death and its causes) with census data you can get a pretty good idea how the `public' is doing, which in turn reflects the state of the nation. Short form, we suck.
The other aspect to this system, I am not sure many people realize is this is the most efficient service delivery system for Medi-Cal. Public Health gets much of its re-emburstment from Medicaid via the state's MediCal system. This is a direct transfer of public dollars to public dollars.
This illustrates (I think) why the private healthcare and insurance industries want in---so they can belly up to the public trough and gorge themselves---by installing a fee for service system.
For example, the two vaccinations I got were worth about two hundred dollars and the flu shot was thirty five dollars on the private market. I looked them up. The nurse fee to give the shots is usually something added on, something like another nine to fifteen dollars via DCI-9 codes. Nevermind.
I paid seventeen dollars. Now consider the two hundred and thirty five dollars I would have paid to a private system. Somebody do the math. This isn't just a bad system, it is an insanely bad system---some thousand percent worse than you think it is.
CG