America's Psych/Neuro Crisis: Silence From The Medics

First Published in DelawareLiberal on 6/3/2014 by ProgressivePopulist
 
You might have noticed, if you're paying attention, that the U.S. has a major set of medical crises.  An epidemic of mass killings from clearly deranged perpetrators who've slipped through the net of the psych/neuro professionals unnoticed.  And an epidemic of broken vets returning home from the killing fields with PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). .  The response from the medical profession (using this term advisedly)?  Silence.

NAMI reports that nearly 14 million Americans live with chronic mental illness such as Schizophrenia, Bi-Polar or major depression disorders.  Millions more undiagnosed. The VA reports that nearly a million veterans using their services are diagnosed with PTSD/or TBI.  A similar number out there undiagnosed.

It is not like these poor souls are new to our society.  Decades have elapsed for sufferers of this pain to be better understood by so called medical science.  I say so called because a friend of mine graduating from medical school told me his field was largely not driven by science, but rather, medicine was an "art".  Yet they've sold it to us as a science and we're paying dearly for it.  I believe he's right.   But art or not, what have you heard from the halls of medical learning lately about either of these crises?  Nothing.  Nada.

Stone cold silence from our medical schools, institutes of neuroscience and schools of psychiatry.  No public discussion led by them as you might expect or wish.  No media blitzes with either insights on causes or remedies.  They just keep making money and stay very quiet, as if to go unnoticed.  We'll, I'm noticing and I am appalled.  The graphic here in this  blog is intended to represent these cowards, not the broken souls they fail to serve.

I'll leave the connection to gun violence to other forums.  And discussions about an obviously overwhelmed and understaffed VA to address their inability to either certify the presence of these disorders with any kind of science or provide adequate lifetime treatment.

I read about Bush's knee surgery and Cheney's new heart, but I read nothing about their deliberate abuse of power sending our young men and women off to kill, be killed and immersed in the horrors of slaughter.   I don't give a rats ass about either of them and have no expectation that we'll ever hear any expressions of remorse for their crime against these young people, the civilians in Iraq or Af/Pak or our broken society.

It is time for the Psych/Neuro practitioners to stand up, be accountable and own up to their failure. It is time for reform and leadership among their ranks to address these long neglected issues.  It is time for research funding as needed and outreach from the cloistered, insular halls of medical learning.

Texas, The Epicenter Of the Tea Party

First Published in DelawareLiberal on 5/29/2014 by ProgressivePopulist
Graphic from Madeline Kerwick, Corpus Christi, Texas
 
Always has been.  Or, at least from the day Dick Armey became chair of Citizens For A Sound Economy in 2003.  That's Dick Armey, Republican from north Texas.  CSE was a pretty nondescript political funding vehicle for the anti-tax movement when founded by the Koch brothers from nearby Kansas in 1984.  But Army gave it brainy fire and brimstone, however plain spoken.

His plain speech hid his PhD pretty well and worked great with Tea Party types. And Armey quickly worked out a pretty brainy scheme to gain better funding as the 501c4 arm of the Koch operation a year later when he created the subsidiary organization, FreedomWorks.   Koch managed the Americans For Prosperity Foundation.   Thus the early launch of the Tea Party in 2004 in a Texas where a confluence of influences he readily recognized as a favorable climate for hard right ideology existed.  And both Armey and Koch built alliances across the country as well.

A native libertarianism prevails  among white, born and bred Texans....the don't fence me in mentality.  As well as a  native and non-native racism among Texas anglos....against both black and hispanic Texans.  Rural Texas white populists  built great animus against railroads seizing their cattle land in west Texas and New York banks foreclosing on their cotton and timber land when they could no longer handle outlandish interest rates. The federal government supported both the rail and bank barons so they got a hate on for the feds too.  A laissez faire capitalism is  appreciated by both the oil industry and white transplants from places like Michigan and other rust belt states rushing to Texas to begin anew when the plants closed up there.
And then you have in the mix the conversion of previously pretty moderate southern baptists (the very people who gave Texas to Jimmy Carter in '76), who among other things, once favored abortion theologically, to a more hard edged conservatism when the right took over their church/seminary leadership.  Big churches became mega-churches preaching prosperity theology.

Add to that a Perot like populism, making money off the federal government but talking against it, just like the oil industry.

Armey began building their Koch funded/grassroots appearing movement and soon regional Texas anti-tax/government leaders emerged in places like Houston in the form of the King Street Patriots and True The Vote, whose racist agenda sold well in ex-urban and suburban Texas who resented the more ethnically diverse cities like Houston, Austin and Dallas where minorities and liberals  dominated elections and city hall.  As they refined their voter suppression tactics, they exported them with training and national organizers.
In 5  short years,  the Tea Party was introduced nationally and the the stage was set nationally for the 2010 sweep of congressional seats and statehouses, after much field testing of the Tea Party idea with school board, county, city and state legislature elections.   The defining event?  The election of our first African American President.  Was he raising taxes?  No.  Was he pushing a Black agenda? No.  He was too busy saving the collapsed economy and trying to stem massive unemployment and bring home their kid's broken bodies from stupid wars?  Yes. 

All they saw was a Black man saving their sorry asses.  This was simply somehow  too much to take.  An insult to the white people "who built this country".

Then, in 2012, the Texas Tea Party elected Ted Cruz to the U.S. Senate, the Tea Party's wet dream.  No, and it doesn't end there.  Virtually all the Texas state office and congressional candidates in the Republican party ran on harder right Tea Party planks  and they took over most of the significant Republican Party offices at state and county levels.  This includes the Harris County (Houston) Republican Party Chair seat, one of the biggest in the nation. And he is from my home precinct, where I kicked his ass for about ten years.

Have they peaked yet.  Nope.  This past Tuesday the Texas Tea Party won the nominations for their candidates for Governor, mentored by Ted Cruz, Lt. Governor and Attorney General.  Cruz is flying high in Texas and Senator Cornyn, the senior Senator is sounding just like him.   By the way, the whackiest of these, the Lt. Governor candidate, Dan Patrick is originally from Maryland and worked in Pennsylvania before migrating to Houston as a sportscaster and sports bar owner.

This Tea Party saga is far from over.  Especially in Texas.  I doubt it's over nationally anytime soon as well.  Texas is pretty good at exporting political ideas and creating national leaders.  And their gun culture.  Remember the book depository?

Teabaggers Keep Your Shitty Hands Off My VA

Reprinted from DelawareLiberal, appearing on 5/22, 2014 by ProgressivePopulist


The current uproar over wait times and probable malfeasance and maybe criminal cover ups at some VA facilities being investigated has caused a call for  privatization of the VA health system.  This demand is mostly heard from teabagger Republicans  in Congress.
Some want the VA chief's head on a platter.  Have you really looked at our private health system in the U.S.?  If you have, you'd not be calling for this absurd "solution" to current scheduling and service demand issues.
These same clowns were huge supporters of an unfunded war in Iraq and the travesty in Afghanistan which caused demand for healthcare services to increase from 400,000 to 918,000 veterans, just during President Obama's tenure as our commander in chief.  They've chosen to ignore possible funding needs at the VA just as they chose to ignore paying for Iraq.  Now it's coming back to haunt them.  Or more correctly, haunt our recent veterans and their families who deserve the best our nation has to give.
True, President Obama has succeeded in shoehorning in a 50% VA budget increase, but not without a bloody, shitstorm fight with the congressional teabagger Republicans.   I am not arguing for a one to one increase in the VA budget based on this lopsided demand growth curve.  I am arguing that budget may play a role and must be at the center of solutions discussions.
My own VA experience has not seen this scheduling problem either in Houston or Wilmington.  But, I've got pretty routine aging health issues not requiring much secondary, specialty clinical care like many vets require.  But for sure, compared to my many decades of private health care and career as a hospital marketing consultant prior to my use of the VA for the past 10 years, I can tell you I'm never going back to that three ring circus.
It was and is a circular firing squad consisting of doctors, insurance companies and hospitals.   All fighting for their piece of the profit pie at the patient's expense, literally and figuratively.
When this scandal broke, I took a look at the senior VA leadership in DC.  What I found, not surprisingly, were resume's heavy with military experience.  This is not surprising being the agency serving military veterans.  I found a couple of medical/public health resume's , but shocking to me, no resume's of  senior level leaders with hospital/medical clinic administration backgrounds.  There have been graduate level degrees granted in that field since the 1960's.
This may be a possible explanation for an absence of this type of skilled management oversight from the top and may figure heavily into future solutions to better management at the local, VA hospital/clinic level.   Budget may be a comparatively small part of the solution.
There may be hospital/clinic administration consultants somewhere in the mix at maybe even a senior level, but that is no substitute for in house management expertise and experience to drive operational accountability, particularly in the scheduling and demand management areas of health care.
These are smart and well motivated people at all levels of the VA.  I have confidence they'll sort out the problems and find the right solutions.  They may need a smart congress to help them, at least with funding.  Smart congress?  We can only hope.  And we can send new people there with a few brain cells and in November, I hope we clean up the congressional  shit hole and oust the teabaggers.  That looks to me to be heavier lifting that cleaning up the VA.
(graphic compliments Madeline Kerwick, Corpus Christi, Texas)