Posts by Elizabeth Edwards

Elizabeth Edwards On Health Care: ‘This Is Not A Cheap Shot'
Posted by Elizabeth Edwards on April 22, 2008 at 4:11 AM.

John McCain accused me of taking a “cheap shot” on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” yesterday for noting that people with preexisting conditions, such as he and I have, would not be able to get health care under his plan –- and that he perhaps was not as sensitive to this problem as he should be since he has been in government health care his whole life.

Sen. McCain noted that he was not receiving government health care for the six years he was in captivity. That is true. But it has nothing to do with my point — which is that the problem with Sen. McCain’s health care plan is not how it affects us –- but how it affects the tens of millions of Americans with preexisting conditions who, unlike Sen. McCain and myself, do not have the resources to pay for quality health care.

That is not a cheap shot, it is a potentially life and death question for tens of million of Americans. And it is a question Sen. McCain must address.

McCain’s health care plan is centered around the idea that we’d be better off if more Americans bought health coverage on their own, rather than receiving it through a job or government program. But maybe since he has never purchased insurance in the individual market, he does not know the challenge it presents for Americans with preexisting conditions.

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Elizabeth Edwards Asks McCain: Why Are People Like Me Left Out of Your Health Care Proposal?
Posted by Elizabeth Edwards, Think Progress on April 1, 2008 at 2:05 PM.

Our guest blogger is Elizabeth Edwards, wife of former Presidential candidate John Edwards.

I freely admit that I am confused about the role of overnight funding in repurchase markets in the collapse of Bear Stearns. What I am not confused about is John McCain’s health care proposal. Apparently Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior policy advisor to McCain, thinks I do “not understand the comprehensive nature of the senator’s proposal.” The problem, Douglas, is that, despite fuzzy language and feel-good lines in the Senator’s proposal, I do understand exactly how devastating it will be to people who have the health conditions with which the Senator and I are confronted (melanoma for him, breast cancer for me) but do not have the financial resources we have. In very unconfusing language: they are left outside the clinic doors.



Senator McCain likes to start speeches with a litany of questions that, presumedly, less plain-spoken politicians would refuse to answer. Well, here are some questions he does not ask but, as that plain-spoken politician, he might want to answer:

1. Under your plan, Senator McCain, would any health insurer be required to sell you or me (or those like us with pre-existing conditions) a health insurance policy?

2. You say your plan is going to increase competition to the point that it actually lowers costs. Isn’t there competition today among insurance companies? Haven’t costs continued to go up despite that competition?

3. You say that under your plan everyone is going to pay less for health insurance. Nice words, I admit, but they are words we have heard before. You must know when American families calculate the actual cost of health care, they have to include those deductibles and co-pays and not just the cost of the insurance. Are you talking about cheaper overall or just a cheap policy that doesn’t kick in until after thousands of dollars of deductibles have been paid?

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New Jersey Becomes First State to Abolish Death Penalty In Thirty Years
Posted by Ezekiel Edwards, Drum Major Institute on December 18, 2007 at 6:46 AM.

Even as a native New Yorker, today I'm proud to say my father is a Jersey boy (sorry, Dad, for blowing your cover).

After 1,099 executions in America over the past 31 years (the second highest number in the world), and 741 in just the past decade; after 126 people on death row have been exonerated (including 15 by DNA testing); as some state governments continue trying --- in shame and in vain --- to find a "humane" way to kill people (having moved from hanging to shooting to electrocuting to poisoning); and after the United States, China, Iran, Sudan, Pakistan, and Iraq (not exactly the torch-bearing sextet for human rights) were responsible for 91% of the world's executions last year, yesterday New Jersey became only the first state to abolish the death penalty since it was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976.

Governor Corzine, who commuted the sentences of the eight men on New Jersey's death row to sentences of life without the parole the night before, ended executions in the Garden (of Eden, at least for now) State by signing the abolition bill (which last week passed the New Jersey Assembly by a vote of 44-36 and the Senate by a vote 21-16). The last states to legislatively end capital punishment were Iowa and West Virginia, 42 years ago.

New Jersey realized what many states stubbornly deny about the death penalty. It does not deter. It does not lower the crime rate. It does not bring back victims. It is violent. It is cruel. It is as irreversible for the innocent as it is for the guilty. It is expensive. It is not the only means of incapacitating someone (that is why we have prison and lifelong jail sentences). It is morally offensive to a majority of the world's countries, 133 of which are abolitionist in either law or practice. It is applied inconsistently and in a racially discriminatory manner.

A recent Connecticut study led by Yale law professor John J. Donohue III showed that minorities are disproportionately sentenced to die for their crimes, and decisions to seek the death penalty are often arbitrary. Included in the studies' findings are that (1) black defendants receive death sentences at three times the rate of white defendants in cases where the victims were white; (2) accused killers of white victims are charged and prosecuted more severely than people accused of killing minorities; and (3) minorities who kill whites receive death sentences at higher rates than minorities who kill minorities. A recent study by Ohio State University examining death row cases in 16 states also found that blacks convicted of killing whites are more likely than others convicted of murder to be sentenced to death and more likely to be executed.

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One Step Taken Towards Ending the War on Drugs, One Hundred More to Go
Posted by Ezekiel Edwards, Drum Major Institute on December 12, 2007 at 3:24 PM.

For over 20 years, federal criminal law has abided by a congressionally-created "100-to-1" ratio rule, in which possession of every gram of crack cocaine is treated as the equivalent to possession of 100 grams of powder cocaine. Under the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, any defendant accountable for five grams of crack cocaine receives the same mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison as someone accountable for 500 grams of powder cocaine; raise the weight to 50 grams of crack, and the mandatory minimum of ten years is the same as it is for 5,000 grains of powder.

To be clear (and as the Supreme Court noted yesterday), crack and powder cocaine are "two forms of the same drug." Crack is formed by dissolving powder cocaine and baking soda in boiling water, creating a solid substance that is then divided into single-dose "rocks." The drugs have the same "physiological and psychotropic effects", it is simply that those effects are more quickly and intensely obtained when crack cocaine is smoked than when powder cocaine is snorted.

Putting aside the utter failure of the drug war as a whole, the outrageous 100-to-1 sentencing disparity cannot be justified scientifically, ends up punishes the low-level street pusher more frequently, and as harshly, as the high-level drug trafficker, wastes fiscal resources, and has had a markedly disparate impact on poor people of color, who have borne the brunt of this sentencing inequality. Moreover, until recently, federal judges had been rendered discretion-less when sentencing drug offenders, unable to deviate from the mandatory (and very harsh) United States Sentencing Guidelines, even when they thought such downward departures appropriate.

The bad news is that our disastrous drug war still rages on, the inexplicably lopsided 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder still exists, and federal judges are still heavily handcuffed in their ability to hand out reasonable prison terms to drug offenders.

The good news is that the Supreme Court has loosened those handcuffs just a bit and taken very small but significant steps, including yesterday, towards recognizing the problem with the 100-to-1 ratio and the inflexibility of the Sentencing Guidelines. Two years ago, the Court ruled that mandatory sentencing guidelines violated the Sixth Amendment and thus held the Guidelines to be advisory, not mandatory, allowing judges to vary from the Guidelines' sentencing ranges.

Yesterday, the Court weighed in on the issue as it specifically applied to the 100-to-1 ratio, having to decide whether a judge's decision to sentence someone outside the Sentencing Guidelines, based specifically on the gross disparity between crack and cocaine offenses, is inherently unreasonable. More specifically, under the facts of the case before it, the Court had to decide whether the District Court's decision to sentence Derrick Kimbrough to 15 years in prison (followed by 5 years of post-release supervision) for possession with intent to distribute more than 50 grams of crack cocaine (and related charges), instead of sentencing him to between 19 and 22 1⁄2 years, as the Guidelines advised, was per se unreasonable, since the District Court based its decision on what it referred to as the "disproportionate and unjust effect that crack cocaine guidelines have in sentencing", noting that had Kimbrough possessed an equivalent amount of powder cocaine instead, his sentence range as suggested by the Guidelines would have been cut by more than half to roughly between eight and nine years.

The Supreme Court held that the District Court's rationale was not unreasonable, thus ruling that a judge can base his or her departure from the Guidelines on the unfairness of the 100-to-1 crack/powder ratio, and thereby allowing sanity to snatch a small yet significant victory from the jaws of defeat (i.e., our deranged drug policy).

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NYC Has the Most Marijuana Arrests in the World (But Don’t Worry, White People, It Won’t Be You)
Posted by Ezekiel Edwards on October 4, 2007 at 3:00 PM.

This post, written by Ezkiel Edwards, originally appeared on DMI Blog

With the NYPD facing difficult challenges such as combating terrorism and stopping the flow of illegal handguns into the city, what are the police arresting people for at a rate ten times greater than before 1997? Marijuana.

But they aren't arresting everyone who possesses marijuana; only poor people of color. When confronted with statistics demonstrating the grossly disproportionate arrest rates of African Americans, often conservatives are quick to respond that African Americans commit more crimes.

But then how would they explain the epidemic of marijuana arrests in New York City over the past ten years, a plague of over-policing that has swept up poor people of color, sending Blacks and Hispanics to jail for misdemeanor marijuana offenses at rates far greater than those of whites, even though, according to the U.S. government, whites use more marijuana per capita than Blacks and Hispanics? If you don't think such arrests ever happen, you might be surprised to learn that in the last ten years, New York City has arrested more people for marijuana than any city, not just in New York State, not just in the Northeast, not just in America, but in the entire world.

(click for larger version)

How would conservatives respond to Professor Harry Levine's testimony in May 2007 before the New York State Assembly Committees on Codes and on Corrections (regarding proposed legislation to expand the DNA databank by requiring anyone convicted of a misdemeanor marijuana offense to give a DNA sample)? For two years. Professor Levine has researched marijuana arrests and convictions in New York City. Here is some of what he found:

Between 1997 and 2006, 360,000 people were arrested and jailed for marijuana offenses in NYC , ten times more than had been arrested the decade previous. That means 100 people a day in NYC are handcuffed and thrown in jail, where they sit, for at least 24 hours, sometimes 36, sometimes 48, waiting to appear before a judge to answer for their "crime".

To figure out who is getting arrested most frequently for marijuana offenses, you might just figure out who possesses and uses marijuana most often, right? Among high school students and young adults, for instance, a higher percentage of white people use marijuana than Blacks and Hispanics.

Since the majority of those arrested in NYC are between the ages of 16 and 26, it follows that whites must be bearing the brunt of NYPD's marijuana arrest mania, right? Wrong.

In fact, 85% are Black and Latino (55% and 30%, respectively), 15% are white.

Put another way, for every 100,000 whites, 124 were arrested. For every 100,000 Hispanics, 430 were arrested. For every 100,000 Blacks, 975 were arrested. So blacks were arrested at eight times the rate of whites.

Even without the statistics, does that sound representative of the percentage of marijuana users in this city if categorized by race? Does anyone think that blacks possess marijuana at eight times the rates of whites? If so, then you haven't been into white homes across New York City, from the two-bedroom apartments on the Upper West Side to West Village lofts to parties in Chelsea to Williamsburg walk-ups to Park Slope brownstones to residences in Astoria and Jackson Heights.

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