A couple of weeks ago, some elected officials of the county and each of the incorporated cites within it got together in one place to give an annual report on how things are going. Sort of a "state of the county" address. One piece of it jumped out to me. County supervisor John Spencer warned that the county jail is nearly full. He then jumped to two conclusions. Assuming that the jail would max out and its population would continue to grow, he implied that we need more jail cells. When that building was completed just a few years ago, the county bragged that it had so much room we were renting cells to neighboring counties. Noting that the county’s population hasn’t grown all that much since then, I jumped to the conclusion that we must be locking up more people than ever.

Then I thought about our methamphetamine epidemic. The Grass Valley Union has been promoting the idea that this part of the world is knee deep in crank and suffering an unprecedented crime wave as a result. The Union and some of its readers have been suggesting that law enforcement is looking the other way while the tweakers own the streets. If so, then who are all those people cluttering our jail cells? It’s more accurate to say, of course, that some people use speed and some of those people commit crimes. The same can be said of just about any town this size. The county jail, like just about every other jail in the land, is indeed packed by people charged with drug crimes. The Union’s little campaign reveals only that locking them up doesn’t seem to help. There’s still enough of that sort of thing in the streets that the newspaper is all fired up about it.

A lot of better ideas have been around for years, but they seldom break through the stubborn insistence of the law enforcement establishment that courts and prisons are the ticket, and if that doesn’t work, more courts and more prisons ought to do it. California voters took it upon themselves a few years ago to adopt a rehab instead of jail initiative, and law enforcement continues to complain about it. If there really is such a thing as a collective drug problem, the courts don’t have a solution, but they provide a place to measure the solution. When we start locking up drug users for the other crimes they commit instead of the drug crimes, the jail population will decrease and the "drug problem" will be over.

* * *

I guess it’s time to talk a little more about health care, not because anything is changing, but because various pieces of legislation are getting various sorts of consideration in the state legislatures and in Washington, and the various candidates for president are giving the subject a modest amount of attention. It’s a topic that doesn’t come easily to those candidates. The polls say it’s high in the minds of the voters, so everyone wants to have a position on it, but it’s virtually impossible to promise the voters anything but more of the same. All the legislative plans and all the plans being promoted by the presidential candidates have one thing in common: they preserve the financial position of the corporations we used to call insurers.

Health insurance used to be something like car insurance, a large group of people sharing the costs for those few unfortunate folks who needed the service. An insurance company just collected the money and paid the bills, but that concept is disappearing in the health care biz. The insurers now are involved in providing the service, and they call themselves things like "managed care" and HMO. It’s just as though your car insurance company also owns the body shop. We used to think that a good reputation as a doctor was a license to get rich. Now the doctors are just employees of the people who have that license, and you can count on your fingers all the elected officials who have the hair to suggest that we don’t need to be giving those people all that money.

California legislator Sheila Kuehle is one of them. She floated a single payer plan last year, and it was promptly squashed by her colleagues. We’ve been saying for years on Local Views that even in a capitalist economy, there are some things that should not be sold for profit, and right under air and water on that list is health care. Nothing happens, legislatively however, because the money to be made selling health care represents far more power than any politician dares to claim. Kuehle’s bill would have effectively driven all profit oriented health care services and insurance out of California in one sweeping gesture. Right now, the people and their representatives aren’t quite ready for that revolution, but a big storm which might move the voters a little further in that direction is coming in just a few days.

We’re talking about Michael Moore’s new film, Sicko, due for release in the US next week. The film critics all went to see it in Europe, so we already know that Moore attacks the issue by showing real people who have been denied care for profit, not just the uninsured, but also people whose insurers have fought ferociously to avoid providing expensive care. This is the kind of thing which will raise the level of dialogue much more than all those statistics about rising costs and the number of uninsured. Expect Sicko to do for health care what An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming. The lobbyists for the insurers and the drug companies already are stockpiling the extra cash they’ll need to prevent the politicians from doing what the people will want more than ever, and watch your local corporate media for the attacks on Moore and his film by the industry’s PR people.

* * *