Bates has a campaign website, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, and a YouTube channel, so he can check the “modern candidate” requirements off the list.  The content of the website is at times confusing in its construction and full of typos and grammatical errors, and generally seems a notch below what one might expect from a national candidate.  But then again, if that’s the worst you can say about a campaign, we’re doing pretty well, and at least Bates is putting his views out there for examination and discussion.

On “the issues,” the theme of Bates` positions seem to be (A) fight against whatever Barack Obama and other Democrats wants to do,  and (B) try to resurrect the politics, if not the physical incarnation, of former President Ronald Reagan.  I’m almost not kidding about the resurrection part:

I look forward to the day in Heaven when I can look [Ronald Reagan] in the eye, shake his hand, and thank him for saving the United States of America from Communism and economic disaster.

That’s Bates on celebrating President’s Day, posted on his Facebook page.

Evan Bayh’s very recent announcement that he would not seek re-election brought some media attention to Bates, which Bates re-appropriated to imply that Bayh thinks President Obama’s legislative agenda is harmful:

I started telling people that Barack Obama’s agenda would not be good for America, and that because of Senator Bayh’s inability to stop President Obama’s agenda, Senator Bayh must be replaced.  At first, very few people believed me.  It now appears that even Senator Bayh believes me.

What Bayh actually said was that Obama’s legislative agenda “is the right agenda for America…My decision was not motivated by political concern.”  But that didn’t stop the local paper from quoting Bates` statements without challenging his shrewd re-framing.

Overall, Bates` behavior and language has been consistent with his statements that he’s running for office because he believes the country is headed in the wrong direction.  In my view, a candidate with that primary motivation should have a very strong “right direction” that they can present to inspire and mobilize supporters – especially if they have an artificial lack of national political experience.  So far, Bates seems to be a reactionary candidate ready to demonize anyone who disagrees with him and dive into the fist-fight, instead of someone driven by hope for a better future, the ability to collaborate and compromise, or any real faith in the political process to better the lives of all of the citizens he would serve.

(Yes, this is a possibly harsh initial conclusion drawn after viewing the Bates campaign website and a few news articles – I haven’t talked with the candidate in person, and I reserve the right to update my observations later.)

Regardless of his political positions, I hope that Mr. Bates can work on creating a campaign that’s focused on a positive vision, and communicating his own unique qualifications for making that vision a reality.  Good luck to him!

To be sure, I think the President (and any President) deserves an unusually high level of courtesy in that particular setting, and that Wilson’s actions were unusual and historically unprecedented in their dis-courteousness.  But I don’t think they represent some aberrant, isolated flare-up on the part of a single person.  Instead, I think Joe Wilson has highlighted the fact that much of the conversation about health care reform – and much of the way politics are done in Washington in general -  is driven not by respectful dialog, but instead by emotionally charged, disrespectful outbursts that come in many forms.  As unfortunate and ill-considered as his shouting was, we can at least commend him for acting from the heart, where as his peers in Congress typically reserve their uncivil comments for settings where they know they won’t be held as accountable to them, masking their failure to engage in real dialog with feigned respect and disingenuous, emotionally manipulative exchanges.

By yelling out at the President during the speech, Joe Wilson showed the true colors of the way most politicians are approaching the health care debate: interrupting, yelling, disrespecting, misrepresenting, trying to get a laugh or a jab in without ever engaging the substance of the issues at hand, and with so little concern for the people actually affected by the conversation that you’d think they weren’t actually agents of democracy, just people who play them on TV.

It’s not clear to me why we entrust such an important conversation to such ineffective, duplicitous people.  Is it clear to you?

There are some exceptions to this phenomenon: politicians, issue advocates and community organizers who are actually trying to engage the substance of the issues and work for a real solution that actually addresses real needs.  You don’t hear from those people too much – they certainly aren’t interrupting Presidential speeches or inciting hateful speech at Town Hall meetings.  They’re too busy trying to get something done, and sometimes, the broken systems and processes in place actually move aside enough for those people to succeed.  But we know that’s rare, and certainly not as exciting to talk about on cable news as death panels, abortion funding and illegal immigrants stealing your soul in the night.

In this sense, then, it might benefit us all for members of Congress to stop pretending and speak from their hearts like Joe Wilson did.  If you follow that to its natural conclusion, you know it would get pretty messy before it got any better, but perhaps it would be a step forward in creating a process that honors real dialog and integrity, instead of political convenience and artificial appearances.

I would be happy for our representatives in Washington – who often hold life and death issues in their hands – to show us their true colors on live national television every day.  Wouldn’t you?

But if we accept for a moment that people in this country will probably continue to obtain medical services via some kind of national insurance system for the foreseeable future (and coldly put aside the many millions of people without even that benefit right now), then we need to talk about the practice of insurance rescission.

Rescission is literally the process of saying, “this contract we had is no longer valid.”  In the health care system, it’s practiced as the health insurance companies telling their customers that they will not honor the contract to provide insurance, leaving the customer to fend for themselves in paying any medical bills that might be incurred.

Unfortunately, the rescinding of the contract usually happens right when an insured person needs that money the most – they have a medical condition that needs a treatment they could not otherwise pay for themselves, and in evaluating whether or not to cover it, the insurance company gets to say “sorry, you’re on your own.”  Though the companies defend the practice as important to combat fraud, they can do this based on even the tiniest mistake or apparent misrepresentation in your health insurance application paperwork (e.g. you forget to check a box somewhere, you didn’t know the proper medical terminology for something), and it turns out that they often do take advantage of any loophole they can find.  As someone involved in helping my co-workers complete their own insurance applications, this is particularly striking to me, given how complex and confusing those forms can be; I wouldn’t be surprised if every single one of us has some grounds for rescission somewhere in there.

(I’ve referring to “they” and “them” here when it comes to the health insurance companies.  While it’s tempting to think there might be one or two exceptions to the rule, I’m not yet aware of any health insurer that bucks the trend when it comes to building rescission clauses into their contracts.  Do you?)

If you want a sense of how bad this practice has gotten, listen to a recent segment produced by This American Life (it’s in “Act 3: Restrictions May Apply) where they not only have interviews with people who have been deeply wronged by the health insurance companies through rescission, but also play audio of insurance execs being confronted about how they can sleep at night doing this.

I’m not an expert on the health insurance industry, but I have some simple suggestions for how we might want to change this system (again, within the context of keeping some sort of overall national health insurance system):

1. Legally limit rescission to all but the most egregious cases of demonstrably intentional fraudulent activity. If the insurance company can prove under the standards of law that an insured customer set out to abuse the insurance system and succeeded, then they can use those grounds to extract themselves from the contract.  Otherwise, even if there was accidental misrepresentation or inaccurate information provided during the application process, the contract should be fully honored.
2. Improve the attention paid to health insurance applications before coverage is offered. If the insurance companies are going to base rescission practices on administrative typos and errors, they shouldn’t offer coverage to you in the first place until all of those materials have been audited for any possible issues that could cause problems later.  It’s just cruel to give someone the impression that they have insurance coverage when a loophole exists from the beginning that makes it essentially at the whims of the insurers.
3. If a contract is rescinded, the health care company should refund all premiums paid AND some additional corrective payment that addresses the hassle (or life-threatening delays) that someone might be facing as a result of the insurance company’s failure to meet the obligation it said it would.    If I open a savings account at a bank and they decide later that my account has to be closed because of a typo, they don’t get to keep my deposited funds or the interest my account has gained.

Despite my lack of faith in even the best intentions for a new health care system, I do hope that the current debate brings about some incremental positive changes in what we have now.  Ending the practice of rescission as we know it now would be a great step forward.

• I’ve been updating my list of local blogs and bloggers in Richmond and Wayne County, Indiana. Check out the new additions, and if you have any blogs to suggest or corrections to make, please let me know.
• My page of custom RSS feeds doesn’t have a whole lot going on these days, but one feed I’ve started actively maintaining again is a Kicks96 / 930WHON News feed. As one of the few other newsgathering entities in the area, it makes a nice complement to the custom Palladium-Item news feed (which is usually updated earlier in the day than the one they provide). Since Kicks96 doesn’t publish any RSS feed themselves (why, in this day and age, oh why?), I hope you find it useful.
• Remember that you can use ProgressiveWayneCounty.org to get easy access to a consolidated feed of local progressive bloggers and local news feeds.
• Despite not feeling Twitter, I can’t help but highlight a link Thomas Kemp posted in the comments: TwitterLocal will help you find people Twittering in your area so that you can…I don’t even know.
• And finally, in the theme of aggregating useful information into one place, check out LegiStorm, a site that makes information about Congressional reps and their staffers available all in one place, including salaries, trip records, and what other organizations they are affiliated with. For example, it notes that on a recent trip to Boston, Mike Pence (R – Indiana, 6th) had some unusually expensive hotel charges – $476 for one night. I hope he got a mint on his pillow.