Kudos to Christina Applegate

Click image to play video
Christina Applegate, at 36, has dealt pro-actively with her breast cancer. Applegate's mother fought breast cancer, and Applegate tested positive for the BRCA1 breast cancer gene that made her a likely candidate for the disease. For that reason she has been tested every year since age 30. Cancer was detected a month ago in one of her breasts, but Applegate opted to have both her breasts removed in an operation known as a prophylactic double mastectomy.

Now cancer free, she credits the MRI screening with saving her life.

"My decision, after looking at all the treatment plans that were possibilities for me, the only one that seemed the most logical and the one that was going to work for me was to have a bilateral mastectomy," Applegate said. [...]

"I didn't want to go back to the doctors every four months for testing and squishing and everything. I just wanted to kind of get rid of this whole thing for me. This was the choice that I made and it was a tough one."

Though she will be undergoing breast reconstruction surgery over the next eight months, Applegate said the emotional toll has been heavy.

"Sometimes, you know, I cry. And sometimes I scream. And I get really angry. And I get really upset, you know, into wallowing in self-pity sometimes. And I think that it's all part of the healing," she said.

But Applegate is healthy and calm now, due to both her unflappible sense of humor -- "I'm going to have the best boobs in the nursing home"...

Working to turn a negative into a positive, Applegate is now raising much needed funding to give other high risk women the opportunity to have BRCA testing and life-saving MRI screening. The testing and MRI screening -- which is capable of seeing cells, can detect cancerous cells before a tumor forms -- is a costly procedure that is often not covered by insurance.

Applegate appeared on Good Morning American, speaking with Robin Roberts who is herself a cancer survivor. Click the image above to view the video on the GMA web site.

Kudos to Christina Applegate for her courage in coming forward so soon after her surgery to dispel the misinformation circulating around her very difficult, and personal decision. Best wishes on a speedy recovery.
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File Under: 'It's About Time" - Changes at Wal-Mart

It's about time that Wal-Mart addressed lack of health care coverage for its employees.

For much of the last decade, the retailing behemoth Wal-Mart Stores has been associated with stingy health care as much as low prices.

Across the country, politicians and labor groups derided the company’s health plans for their high expense and bare-bones coverage. Two states, California and Maryland, even passed laws demanding, in effect, that the company spend more on employee health benefits.

“We want this giant to behave itself,” one Maryland legislator, Anne Healey, said at the time.

The giant, it turns out, was listening. All the criticism was hurting its reputation and its ability to expand. So now, after spending two years seeking advice from everyone from Bill Clinton to executives at Starbucks, Wal-Mart is overhauling its health plans.

The company, according to data available for the first time, is offering better coverage to a greater number of workers. Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, provides insurance to 100,000 more workers than it did just three years ago — and it is now easier for many to sign up for health care at Wal-Mart than at its rival, Target, whose reputation glows in comparison.

Wal-Mart has hardly become a standard-bearer for corporate America: it still insures fewer than half its 1.4 million employees in the United States.

Better, but not good enough! How many Walton billionaires does one family need before it will begin to offer health coverage for ALL its employees?

And while we are on the subject of Wal-Mart ... what about the sex discrimination and sexual harassment claims?

Baby steps just won't cut it anymore.

Compassionate Conservatives, an Oxymoron

Bush Explains SCHIP Veto

Bush’s veto lies

In case you missed it, here is Eugene Robinson’s excellent op-ed on Bush’s veto of the SCHIP bill.

To say that George W. Bush spends money like a drunken sailor is to insult every gin-soaked patron of every dockside dive in every dubious port of call. If Bush gets his way, the cost of his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will soon reach a mind-blowing $600 billion. Despite turning a budget surplus into a huge deficit, the man still hasn’t met a tax cut he doesn’t like. And when the Republicans were in charge of Congress, Bush might as well have signed their pork-stuffed spending bills with a one-word rubber stamp: “Whatever.”

So for Bush to get religion on fiscal responsibility at this late date is, well, a joke. And for him to make his stand on a measure that would have provided health insurance to needy children is a punch line that hasn’t left many Republicans laughing.

Bush a Fiscal Conservative?

Who does Bush think he's kidding? No one should ever believe this president is fiscally responsible. He took a budget surplus and devolved it into the LARGEST DEFICIT IN US HISTORY.

He has flushed away more than half a trillion dollars in Iraq, yet he decides to draw a line in the sand when it comes to extending health care to children of 'working poor' families.

Even George Bush knows this was an embarrassing veto. How do I know that? Because all his other veto's were done with camera's flashing. This one took place in the shadows, behind closed doors -- where HE belongs.

Dan Froomkin writes:

The three previous times President Bush vetoed a bill, he did so in public.

In July 2006 and this past June, he surrounded himself with supportive anti-abortion activists who welcomed his veto of stem-cell legislation. In May, when he vetoed legislation that would have established a timeline for troop withdrawal from Iraq, he did so in a televised address that rallied his fellow Republicans.

But this morning's veto of a bipartisan bill that would have dramatically expanded children's health insurance came behind closed doors, with no fanfare or visuals.

Who, after all, would have cheered him this time?

Bush hates children

In commenting on the abysmal response of the federal government to hurricane Katrina, Kanya West said George Bush "hates Black people." Well, given what he has stated are his intentions regarding funding for children's heath insurance the same could be said -- George Bush "hates children."

The New York Times reports:

The White House said on Saturday that President Bush would veto a bipartisan plan to expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program, drafted over the last six months by senior members of the Senate Finance Committee.

The vow puts Mr. Bush at odds with the Democratic majority in Congress, with a substantial number of Republican lawmakers and with many governors of both parties, who want to expand the popular program to cover some of the nation’s eight million uninsured children.

Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said: “The president’s senior advisers will certainly recommend a veto of this proposal. And there is no question that the president would veto it.”

The program, which insured 7.4 million people at some time in the last year, is set to expire Sept. 30.

So why does the president intend to veto the bill? It can't be because we lack the money to pay for it ... we certainly have no problem finding trillions of dollars for an obscene war. Could it be that Bush is receiving some sort of kick-back from the tobacco industry, who would see increased taxes on cigarettes to help pay for the coverage? Taxing cigarettes seems like and EXCELLENT idea to me. Why not ask people to pay a luxury tax on an item they definitely don't "need."

Or, could it be that the bill failed to include kick-backs to one of the presidents OTHER favorite corporations -- the health insurance industry.

“The proposal would dramatically expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program, adding nonpoor children to the program, and more than doubling the level of spending,” Mr. Fratto said. “This will have the effect of encouraging many to drop private coverage, to go on the government-subsidized program.”

In addition, Mr. Fratto said, the Senate plan does not include any of Mr. Bush’s proposals to change the tax treatment of health insurance, in an effort to make it more affordable for millions of Americans.

God forbid that insurance companies lose even a fraction of the money they gouge from consumers every year. Anyone who believes, as the president seems to, that giving tax breaks to insurance companies will be an incentive for them to reduce the cost of health insurance is living in a dream land! Those greedy bas**** will simply pocket the money.