Recently in Health Care Category

about this.

I was given some garbage political talking points by the nice young liberal male on the other end about her efforts to relieve doctors of their onerous school loan debt and to create more doctors in rural areas.

Count me as unimpressed.

HT: Hugh Hewitt

I've seen Reich taken to task before by real economists. Robert Barro of Harvard just embarrassed him on the PBS NewsHour way back on September 14, 2004. Reich has a Harvard Law degree, that's it.

But this is something to remember for a long time. Ah, those moments of clarity.

This is gross.

One in six Americans between the ages of 14 and 49 have genital herpes and close to one in two black women are infected, new figures from the CDC reveal.

Keeping in mind President Obama's latest push for a lamely warmed over Senate health care reform bill, another appropriate preview of what we can expect should health care destruction make it through Congress can be found here.

Remember Danny Williams? He's the Newfoundland and Labrador Premier who decided that the Canadian socialized health care system just wouldn't cut it for his health. Why?

In an interview with The Canadian Press, Williams said he went to Miami to have a "minimally invasive" surgery for an ailment first detected nearly a year ago, based on the advice of his doctors.

"This was my heart, my choice and my health," Williams said late Monday from his condominium in Sarasota, Fla.

What it came down to was that he wanted the best medical care possible, so, rather than deal with what he would get in Canada, he came to America.

Should we go the way of Canada and many other countries with government health care, Canadians will have no place to go for superior health care. The problem is that we Americans will have no place to go either, unless the smarter doctors move their practices out of the country and start a cash only operation.

One upside should this happen? The medical tourism business will boom as those with the means will leave the country to get the medical treatment they need.

Tanner's op-ed is very effective in the New York Post. He shows that like a Roman emperor, Obama and Pelosi's old, old, old, old idea ain't gonna work. (There was certainly something to Thomas Sowell's statement during the campaign that Barack Obama was the youngest candidate with the oldest ideas.)

What's the idea? Controlling prices. Yet, using coercion leads to more coercion...waiting lines. Price controls=rationing.

Tanner provides ample evidence from today's society that this is so in similar places like Great Britain and Canada. I think it's irrefutable.

One datum that should be shouted from the rooftops so that maybe Jeanne Shaheen can hear is this:

Or Obama could try to tackle underlying health-care costs, by repealing government regulations that add as much as much as $169 billion a year to the cost of care, according to Christopher Conover of Duke University.

Gubmit causing problems? Can't be. It must be bad big business. At least that's been the progressive line for the past seventy years.

National Audit in the UK has the sorry news: the death rate for major trauma patients is twenty percent higher for similar patients in the United States. Also, there has been no improvement in twenty years' time for such care in England.

More gubmit involved in health care creates lower quality and higher costs. Kinda like public education.

Source available approximately midway through this BBC Newspod.

I have to say the opening statements of the President's State of the Union address were on target, talking about the problems that we, as a nation and as individuals, are facing. But once he started addressing the main issue we face - the economy - he lost me.

He talked about tax cuts, but only the temporary tax cuts. The somewhat more long term cuts, the Bush tax cuts, expire next year, meaning everyone will see a tax increase once they're gone.

On the stimulus bill - blah blah blah blah blah blah. (At least that's what I heard.)

As much as I agree that jobs are an issue, I have to disagree with the president that somehow it's up to the government to stimulate them with our money. Better that government get the heck out of the way. We don't need it to take $30 billion of the repaid TARP funds and spend it again.

I agree with Obama that we need to upgrade our infrastructure to help American businesses compete in the global marketplace. But what do high-speed trains have to do with that? Better that electrical systems and broadband communications networks be built, which will do far more to support American businesses than trains.

And while the president says he "won't accept second place for America", he's been doing what he can to make sure that's where we'll end up, if not third or fourth place.

After that I started nodding off as he started mouthing the same old platitudes but in different wrappers. (Make energy less expensive by taxing the hell out of it. Punish all the banks for the actions of a few. Spend billions more on education even though study after study after study shows more money doesn't equate to better education. Destroy our health care system in order to save it. And so on and so on.)

I. GOT. BORED.

ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzz........

UPDATE 1/28/10: Going back and watching the address again, I saw that as time passed he shifted more and more blame for all our troubles on to others. He laid all the blame for the failure of health care reform and cap-and-tax squarely on the Republicans, saying they now owned the blame. Senator John Kyl rebutted that allegation today on NPR, stating the Senate Republicans were following the will of their constituents, blocking bad legislation that would do little more than cost the American people untold hundreds of billions of dollars with nothing to show for it.

Now, Americans are waking up to the truth that ObamaCare basically means that every time you are sick or injured, you will have a clerk from the Department of Motor Vehicles telling your doctor what he can and cannot do.

It's too late, Ben Stein. It's too little too late. Besides, the liberal elites have been too in love with the Community Organizer and the Democratic party. Americans need to engage in more non-violent protest. It's a conspiracy, really, between the people at the top and the bottom, squeezing those of us in the middle.

We need to act more like those crazy free-staters. Those people who open carry and refuse to give up their driver's license when surrounded by wide-stanced cops because they aren't required to?

How's that democracy thing working out for you, Minnesota? It was fun and different electing a comedian to the US Senate, wasn't it? Well, the result speaks for itself as he debates John Thune, a pretty boy from South Dakota, who happens to have a command of the facts and figures more than the writer of "Rush Limbaugh is a big, fat idiot" does. Jeanne Shaheen acts as president of the Senate, reminding (4:50 into the debate) Franken in precious fashion that he has the floor. Even she--and believe you me she's no MIT-trained engineer--understands Franken is flailing badly. It must be his rambling, slurred speech, and unfocused presentation that's the giveaway, and some colleagues do attempt to come to his aid, such as a leftist from Ohio, Sherrod Brown. (His daughter Emily, for example, according to Wikipedia, is employed by the notorious left-wing labor union brown shirts, the SEIU, who are in favor of open borders says Michelle Malkin. The pear hasn't fallen far from the tree in this case.)

The disagreement centers on the fact that although taxes for the proposed Pelosi Health Care Destroyer (PHCD) go into effect days from now, most of the benefits don't kick in for a few years. 2014 to be precise. Now there are some small potatoes that do kick in immediately along with the taxes. Here's what Franken says:

Over six trillion over the first ten years of its implementation? Read for yourself.

Considering how gubmit has traditionally grossly underestimated health care costs in its programs, starting with Medicare, I think this is more honest analysis than what comes from the bureaucracy. Michael Cannon is doing excellent work at the Cato Institute.

I received my introduction to libertarianism first by subscribing to Reason Magazine in 1986 or '87 while a cadet for two years at West Point. Then, after I left, I became a faithful listener to the Gene Burns Program on WRKO AM 680 for a few years. Gene, a silver-tongued broadcaster, had been a former candidate for the Libertarian Party on the national level before he withdrew his name.

From him I really developed a fondness for the free market, and eventually discarded my liberal political beliefs very forcefully after reading Charles Murray's Losing Ground, which another Boston-based radio broadcaster praised to the hills, the erudite late David Brudnoy of WBZ AM 1030, whom I still miss a great deal. I mean this was all before the emergence of Rush Limbaugh whom I considered an interloper for years.

(I only recently accepted him when he defended business as not the enemy that government is, after having an exasperated conversation with a good friend--and one of the few fellow liberals at West Point--who asserted that Microsoft was more powerful than the federal government. I spit out my tobacco at that one.)

Holy Moses, has Gene become a Democrat more than just nominally, as he became one in opposition to the Iraq II Attack. Here is gloats at the prospects of national health care's passage last Friday by calling various Republicans "liars" with very few if any valid examples other than Palin's "death panel" argument which I suspect is valid, as Charles Rice of the Notre Dame Law School read the whole bill in September and quotes that that is exactly what will transpire and by urging his listeners to go the this op-ed by Nicholas Kristof, showing how the arguments against the current health care proposal are eerily similar to those that were used in the 1960s against Medicare. You know, that gloriously successful program now hemorrhaging money?

Nonetheless, a fair and good point as far as it goes. But that's the problem--we are living forty-five years later and the bills are truly coming due. (And the estimated costs were wildly off the mark as Kristof noticeably omits.) If Gene had waited four days he could have added this New York Times article that Glen Beck referenced this morning.

I mean when SNL gets it on the health care bill and a former presidential candidate from the Libertarian Party doesn't, it truly is a topsy-turvy world. A mad, mad, mad world.

Gene, I've outgrown you and moved on to people like Charles Rice. You dismiss the "Birther" movement that is not without some evidence when you treated the dubious Gary Sick book as worthy of an open-minded hearing. George Bush flying in an SR-71 to negotiate the release of the Iranian hostages for his boss Ronald Reagan? That's when you started losing me, Gene.

While I'm at it, I might as well add insult to injury in regards to the the recently passed Pelosi Health Care Destruction bill.

While she has crowed her success into forcing the passage of an onerous and deceptive bill the American people don't want, at least one liberal has the courage to state exactly what Pelosi's health care reform legislation is really all about: making the American people more dependent on the US Government against their will...and not for their own good.

[John] Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. "The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment," he writes. "Let's not pretend that it isn't a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won't. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind."

Why are they doing it? Because, according to Mr. Cassidy, ObamaCare serves the twin goals of "making the United States a more equitable country" and furthering the Democrats' "political calculus." In other words, the purpose is to further redistribute income by putting health care further under government control, and in the process making the middle class more dependent on government. As the party of government, Democrats will benefit over the long run.

"Making the United States a more equitable country?" Who decides what is 'equitable'? And is equality as Obama and his minions define it really a good thing?

The answer to this last question is 'no', for Obama's equality has nothing to do with equality of opportunity and everything to do with outcome. We've seen such equality many times, both in the past and present, and it's nothing anyone should aspire to because all it really means is equality of misery.

Everyone will be equal...except of course the ruling elite. Nothing will be denied to them because, after all, they are more equal than the rest of us.

In making health care reform a misplaced priority, he and Pelosi and Reid have shown us what it is they really want to do is to make sure we are all good little proles on the hook to the 'benevolent' dictatorship that is The State. They have come to believe they know what's good for the masses better than we do, therefore they must control every aspect of our lives. Such is their arrogance. But like all statists their beliefs have one major flaw: they are no better at running our lives than they are their own. In fact, they are totally incapable of making our lives better by the means they have been pushing for all these decades. [/rant]

As more than one commenter to the Cassidy piece noted, the last thing we want to do is to be like everyone else.

We are the EXCEPTION. Who cares if the rest of the world has universal health care? The United States of America has been the exception since it was first created. What is sad is that we have idiots in our government who do not believe in American exceptionalism and think that we need to be just like the rest of the world. Did the founding fathers believe that we needed to be like Europe when we declared independence? NOOOOOOO!!! Why should we become like them now?

Look, we don't want a government run system that will give us mediocre care and only give the best care to the rich, famous, and the Washington elites. We want to be able to have choice. The healthcare legislation that the Democrats are trying to pass will not give us choice. It is designed to make private insurance obsolete and eventually put everyone on a government run system.

We already know how well such a system will run. Examples abound, both here and in other countries, showing us that they work well...if you aren't sick or hurt. Otherwise all bets are off. Do we really want a system like that?

Here's yet another story about how great ObamaCare/PelosiCare will be for the average American:


Some may say that this example and the one I posted yesterday are atypical of what occurs under Canada's socialized medical care system. But I know far too many friends north of the border that tell me it is all too typical. I've heard the same thing from friends in the UK about the NHS as well.

(H/T Instapundit)

If you want a preview of what ObamaCare/PelosiCare is going to be like, take a look at this:


The only problem we'll have is that we'll have no place to go to get the care we want, unlike our Canadian brethren do now. Hmm, maybe some of the more enterprising physicians in the US will move their practices offshore to one of the Caribbean islands in order to give the care we Americans will soon be deprived of by the oh-so-caring US Government.

(H/T Instapundit)

Gateway Pundit quotes Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn):

This 2,000-page bill goes in exactly the wrong direction: it means higher premiums, higher taxes, Medicare cuts, more debt & huge new health-care costs for state taxpayers. Instead we should start over and go step by step. Specifically, we could start with small business health care plans that would lower premiums, cover up to 1 million new small business employees, and reduce spending on Medicaid.

God help us. My children are inheriting a worse country than I did. I think I may apologize to them like Dennis Prager did to his children in the wake of the LA riots.