Here is just the latest example of what it takes to get health care in America these days, a lawsuit. It is not enough to have coverage and be current on your payments to get health care, because if a person gets really sick and the treatments cost a lot of money the insurer will cut you loose. We are forced to recognize this has become standard operating procedure for the health insurance industry.  I did not see the article appear locally today, so in the spirit of spreading the good news here is the Los Angeles Times most recent example of corporate crime against people with serious illnesses.

The slaughterhouse industry took another shot to the chin today. How long can this brave Agri-biz warrior take this type of pounding?

The FDA announced the largest meat recall on record today with 143 million pounds coming off the shelves. Naturally, this announcement comes on a three day holiday weekend when not many would notice. This affords the beef industry a chance to pray for back page coverage in the papers next week, and to put out a bunch of press releases documenting their tip-top procedures, hiring practices and safety records by the time most Americans start looking for news next week. Pardon me if I've become cynical over news cycles, and that our government  can do anything about the dreadful lack of oversight that pervades industries in America, unless, of course, it is the phone companies ability to oversee what you say over their networks.

This is just the latest in a very long string of recalls over the past year involving the meat industry and its practice of having the #*!@ hit the fan and then get packaged in the can, or shrink wrap, for your mouth watering pleasure. We had the botulism incident in Georgia at a cannery in July 2007. We had another SoCal packer, The United Food Group, in June of 2007 suffer a 5.7 million pound beef recall, and with days Tyson Foods recalled another sizable  batch of  contaminated meat. We had Topps Meat get hit with a 21.7 million  pound recall that put that company in bankruptcy. The cynic in me believes the bankruptcy is more about liability culpability rather than current financial difficulties, but I could be wrong.

The amount of beef recalled today is larger than the total amount recalled from 1995 to 2000 by the FDA, which spawned a serious look (for two seconds) into the practices by the meat industry.

As I continue read over Fast Food Nation, it is no surprise that so many of these announcements  happen now. If we don't make some serious changes regarding our food supply quickly we will be getting very sick, very soon and on a very large scale.

You see the commercials, the beauty of ubiquitous lies, fill every program on the airwaves with the soothing pictures and soft trained voices of the health insurance cartel assuring Americans how much they care about your health. Gosh, it is good to be living in the USA with friends like our California health insurance leader Blue Cross, just another company in the big WellPoint Inc. portfolio of money makers, crafting policy out of getting around patient privacy and asking doctors to divulge any precondition a client/patient may have to avoid keeping the ill insured. The Los Angeles Times broke this latest story yesterday.

I've got a good friend with COPD. He was cashed out in a management reorganization several years ago, and when he began applying for health insurance after his Cobra ran out has been left high and dry with this precondition of living in an industrial world filled with various degrees of pollution that affects all mammals. Too bad for him, and many more just like him, left high and dry by conservative protectors of a rigged industry where health issues don't even register on the dollar-based scale of service in one of America's richest industries.

Please do understand we already are paying an exhorbitant price for our cost rationed care. According to  the US government website at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for the last year of collected data 2004 we spent more than 1.5 trillion dollars on health care in that year. This was nearly a four-fold increase from the 442 billion dollars we spent in 1987. According to the National Coalition on Health Care we spent 2 trillion dollars on health care in 2005. And the health insurance industry wants to make sure no sick people, or accident prone people can get insured care.

I know many on this blogosphere hate the idea of a government regulated single payer system, but it is patently obvious to anyone who still has a candle burning upstairs you cannot trust this industry with your health.

I was puzzled to read in today's Californian about the Democrat divide. I was really perplexed by Candi Easter's comments that racism might have played a part in the large majority Hillary was alotted by the Latino voters.  It also  reminded me of some bizarre statements Chris Matthews has made recently about the Romney campaign being undone by his Mormon religion ties.

The majority Hispanic vote in California for Hillary Clinton, by every measure, had to do with ties made over the years with Latino community leaders well entrenched in California. Clinton's team did the groundwork over a long period of time to lock in key union and political support for her that started as soon as she made the announcement to run.  Her obvious strength with women voters also enabled her to ward off the strength of the late Obama surge of widespread support.  I really think both Dean Florez and Nicole Parra gave good answers over the voting split, which was dominated by the older Latino generation. No surprise and certainly nothing racial. 

Chris Matthews has commented repeatedly since Super Tuesday that Romeny's poor showing in the South, where Mike Huckabee stomped both Romney and McCain, was due to his LDS religion. The real reason Romney lost is that Huckabee knows the South, and the issues they care about much better than either Romney or McCain. Huckabee also has great communication skills. The guy is smooth and reaches out to ordinary folks in a way that few can today, even with some seriously weird ideas that take many aback. Religion had nothing to do with the Romney showing in every state besides Utah, and possibly Nevada where there is also a very large Mormon population. 

Having pundits, spokespeople and headlines indicating something does not make it so. People should be more careful in brining up inaccurate non-issues that only serve older wedge and divide strategies of mistrust. Surprisingly much of the country seems to have moved on past a lot of these gender and race issues during this Presidential campaign. It is time for those in the media to do so as well.